‘Tallaght was just a village, with County Council cottages down one side of the street and the walls of the Dominican College on the other. The cottages had been built at the turn of the century, and they’re beautifully built, granite, with Tudor fronts. And up the middle of the street were the tracks for the steam tram.’ His father drove the tram down the middle of Main Street, until the line closed on the 31st of December, 1932. The Battle of Ypres was only a sham, Compared to the rush for the Blessington tram. ‘There were a number of old chaps, tramps, who lived together in an old cottage. Nobody knew who they were; they weren’t related to anybody. One of them was known as Straw Legs. He was an old man and he had a habit, when he had a few drinks on him, of lying across the tramline, outside the pub. And people would see him and drag him off the line. But this particular night he got himself further up the road. There was no street lighting at the time, and the stream engine came and ran over him, and that was the end of him. We were woken by my father, shouting in the window, “I have to go up to the barracks.” He had to make a statement because he’d run over Straw Legs.
‘As you went up the street, going south, you came to the Green, and the pump. That was where the people at what we called “the top of the town” got their water. At the Green the road divided. One road went left, towards Old Bawn, and the other went right, towards the Blessington Road. As you turned right, there was a pub on the corner, O’Neill’s.*And beside that pub was our house.’
On the opposite side of the road were the forge, the harness maker’s, and Miss Martin’s post office. ‘And then, further along, there were cottages on the left, and the Garda barracks. And then you came to the Protestant church and graveyard, St Maelruain’s. The graveyard was always part of village life. We attended practically every funeral, as something to do. But one part of the graveyard, just near the church, was where some of the older landowners were buried. One of the Foxes, of Whitestown, is buried there, and on the headstone were chiselled the words, “Fell Asleep”. And we took this literally. Every time we passed, we’d run like hell in case Johnny Fox got up out of the grave to catch us. There was a baptismal font near the gates, an ancient font. The Cromwellians took the font and made a horse’s trough out of it, which was a terrible sacrilege, and then knocked a hole in it so it would never hold water again. * We firmly believed that if you looked in one of the windows of the Protestant church you were likely to see the devil looking back out at you. I believed it. I was a grown man – in fact, it was just a few years ago – before I saw the inside of that church.’
The Dominican College dominated the village. ‘It was a noviciate. There’s a church there, a rather beautiful small church, and the noviciate was built, like a triangle, around it, and all the Dominicans for the missions and for the Irish Province would have trained there. It had originally been a monastery, going back to the ninth century. But it was all lost with the Reformation. Tallaght eventually became an outpost against the native Irish, the O’Byrnes and the O’Tooles. So, the Protestant Archbishop’s summer palace was built there, on the spot of the original monastery. It was then sold to a Major Palmer, who sold it on to a man called Lentaigne, and Lentaigne sold it to the Dominicans, in the 1850s. The famous Father Tom Burke built the noviciate and church; he was renowned as a great preacher.
‘Now, that was the church we attended. It wasn’t our parish church but we went there every Sunday, and every time there was Benediction. The monks sang the order of prayer, from matins in the morning, through vespers in the evening, to compline at night. We attended the Rosary, anything that was going.’ The parish church was in Rathfarnham, about five miles away, but ‘I never went to Rathfarnham, except for my Communion, my Confirmation and my sisters’ weddings.
‘Down the street from the College, towards Dublin, there was another pub, the Fox’s Covert. The Foxes and the McClashins owned it, a Mrs McClashin – she was originally a Miss Fox. They also owned the Oaks, the Templeogue Inn – the Morgue – and the pub which, by then, was called John Clarke’s, in Jobstown. All part of the Foxes’ domain – and one day they were evicted. I saw them evicted. It was the only eviction I ever saw. All the artefacts, furniture and all, it was all on the side of the road. I saw amazing things that I never knew existed, like stuffed birds in glass domes. There was just the mother and the two sons and the general servant who worked for them and lived with them, and they all moved down to the doctor’s residence, where Mrs McClashin’s sister was married to Dr Lydon, the local doctor.
‘Dr Lydon was the dispensary doctor and he had been in the British Army during the War and he’d picked up strange habits, like drinking excessively. Medicine wasn’t practised as an exact science in those days; if you went to him with something, you got a blue bottle or a green bottle. But, invariably, old Lydon was jarred. Katie Coombes was his factotum; cleaning the place was, in fact, her job. But she gradually took upon herself the role of dispenser, and when you went to the doctor, she’d say, “What do you want the doctor for?” and you had to describe your symptoms to her. “Oh,” she says, “the doctor gives a blue bottle for that.” There was no getting past Katie Coombes.
‘Seán Dempsey lived with his family in Tallaght, on the Greenhills Road. He was a good-looking, curly-headed young man and he was a good player of the uillean pipes. He toured Europe in the 30s, and played in Germany. The story goes that Herr Hitler – he was always Herr Hitler – wanted to hear Dempsey play. When he arrived in the presence of Hitler, everybody had to stand around while the great leader sat and waited for the music. Seán explained that he had to sit while playing the pipes and, according to Seán, Hitler ordered a stormtrooper to get down on his hands and knees and Dempsey sat on his back and played Carolan’s Concerto. Seán was one of the numerous victims of the dreaded TB that I knew. There was also Mary Manning, the teacher’s daughter, Teddy Corcoran, a Jordan boy, and neighbours, Jimmy, Mick and Kathleen Mullally, and others I can’t bring to mind. I had over eighty first cousins but none of my clan caught the disease.’
He went to the local national school.* ‘There was an old one, with diamond windows, boys on one side of the building and girls on the other. But, in 1932, a new school was opened.* It was built on the ruins of the old Tallaght Courthouse that had been burnt down by the local heroes during the War of Independence. And we moved into that school, boys on one side again, girls on the other, but each had two rooms, one each for infants and seniors.
‘The master’s name was Mr Manning, who lived in one of the County Council cottages in the village. Half the day you sat and half the day you stood; there wasn’t room for us all. Mr Manning had six classes to teach, from First Class to Sixth, all in the one room, all in the one day. And he did rather well, considering. When you were standing you read your book or recited and you wished your turn would come to sit down – there was no particular hardship about it; that was just how it was.’
Many of the children came to school without shoes. ‘Half of them, at least, were in their bare feet, even in wintertime. I once took off my shoes and carried them. And I came home in my bare feet and got a walloping from my mother.’
There were maps on the classroom walls. ‘A map of Ireland, a map of Europe, and a map of the world. I don’t remember a crucifix. I’m sure there was one but I don’t remember it. The desks were wooden, two of them side by side, with inkwells. The ink was made up by some of the older boys; they’d mix the ink in a great big stone bottle. We used to put bits of carbide into the inkwell; carbide was the fuel for bicycle lamps and such. You put a piece in and it reacted; it would start fizzing and fill the place with gas. It was a horrible smell.’ The desks weren’t assigned to the pupils. ‘I never carved my name on a desk. I was never in a desk long enough to be able to do it.’ But he was in the school long enough to earn a nickname. ‘I was the Professor, because I read the school books. I was good at school, good without killing myself. It was a badge of erudition – Professor.
‘The toilets were at the very
back of the yard. Just a long row; they called them privies. Little compartments – no doors. Just a long flat piece of wood with holes cut into it; everything went down into this pit. So, occasionally, some of the lads would stick their heads and shoulders down and look, and they saw the sights – the board went right into the girls’ section. And, now and again, one of them slipped and fell into the pit and had to be dragged out. Consternation and hullabaloo, and a couple of the bigger fellows – always the bigger fellows – were given the job, and they lugged the lad out, up the road, up the middle of the town, to the pump. And one of them would hold him by the scruff of the neck and the other started working the handle of the pump, and they’d drown him until he was reasonably clean and he didn’t smell too bad. But he was screeching and roaring, and then they brought him home. They knocked on the door and the mother opened the door, and they said, “There you are. Mick fell into the lavo.” And then they skipped it, because – it’s an extraordinary thing – but when you bring a fellow home drunk, out of Christian charity, you’re likely to be blamed for getting him drunk, and it was the same with this; they brought him home covered in you-know-what and they’d be blamed for it.
‘Mr Manning handed out the punishments for blaggardism and bowsieism, or for gross neglect of lessons, or for being stupid – or, not so much being stupid, as stupid enough not to do the work, particularly when he knew you could. You put your hand out and he used a kind of pointer, like one of the rungs on the back of a chair – but never excessively.
‘I remember reading a story about a drummer boy, by Standish O’Grady.* There was a secret attack planned on the Irish chiefs in the Wicklow Mountains and the drummer boy felt a kinship with the rebels and alerted the neighbourhood. It has stuck in my mind ever since. I think it was called The Bog of Stars.’
The girls’ section of the old school became the public library, ‘a great boon to Tallaght. There was a huge lot of Zane Grey – Riders of the Purple Sage – and lots of other cowboy stories. Max Brand was another one. I read anything I could get my hands on. I read copies of the Century Magazine that were lying around the place, at home. Bound copies. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, George du Maurier – they were all in that magazine. I still hanker after it. I read The Ascent of Man; it was in the house. And Dr Madden’s two-volume history of the 1798 Rebellion. And I read another marvellous book that had found its way into the house, The Sexual Mores of the Kanakas of Melanesia and Micronesia; I was dead safe reading it because neither my father nor my mother would have known what sexual mores were, let alone be interested in the Kanakas. The book gave graphic descriptions of their sexual behaviour and what they got up to. I was about ten or eleven when I read it.’
The books arrived by an unusual route. ‘The O’Neills, who owned the pub next door, had an older brother, William O’Neill, and he opened a big shop nearly opposite our house. But William lost his reason; he just got more and more peculiar and, eventually, he had to be put away – it was the horrors of drink. And Mrs O’Neill just wound up the business. Now, my mother bought a piano from her and, in the transaction, Mrs O’Neill says, “Sure, you might as well take these things as well” – a big, big bundle of books. And that’s how they came into the house.*
‘At the back of the school was a place called the Courtyard, where the County Council had their depot. A mysterious place, I never went down there. But then, when the family coal business went,* there was a mare and a cart left over, and they were leased to the County Council. My cousin, Hugh Kelly, drove it; he did work for the County Council, and I was given the job of taking the mare away up to the commons of Tallaght, about a mile up the road, and to let her into the field for the night. And then, the next morning – quite a nice job – I’d go up and collect the mare. It got to the stage where I was able to trot her along the road beside the bicycle.
‘And, then, further along the path from the school was Cunninghams’. The Cunninghams had a triangular-shaped piece of land at the junction of Greenhills Road and the road to Terenure, and a house with a galvanised roof. On the way home, a couple of the lads would get a handful of stones and throw them up on the roof, because they always got a reaction. Thomas Cunningham would come running out, swearing imprecations after them, and what he wouldn’t do to them. And this one particular day, I learned a great big lesson. I hadn’t thrown stones, so I stood my ground. And Thomas Cunningham ran out and gave me a kick up the backside. So, from that I learned: in future, right or wrong, run.
‘The Cunninghams were wheelwrights but they were originally descendants of a Cromwellian grant.* They got this land, but ended up in poverty and died out. Beside them was Poyntons’, who had a substantial farm called Bankcroft. There was a castle there, the remains. These were all lots of land that came out of Cromwellian grants. There were practically no native Irish with farming land in the area, very, very few.
‘Most of the local women and some of the men worked in Urney’s factory,* and a handful would have gone into town† to work – they’d be, say, the sergeant’s children or the doctor’s children, into the Civil Service or into professions or trades. As for the rest, some went working for the farmers, but that was the last resort. And there would have been a handful who worked for the County Council, three or four permanent men, and the rest would get occasional work; they’d be taken on to tar the road and that kind of thing, a few weeks’ work – it was almost like Famine work. The older fellows, late teens, early twenties, unemployed, they’d be hanging around the Green, maybe whistling at the girls going up to the factory or coming back down for their lunches. But in the evening time, they’d collect a few dogs and go off chasing rabbits. And, invariably, there’d be a knock on the door and, “Mrs Doyle, would you like a couple of rabbits?” and she would. No money passed hands but the price for the rabbits would be a packet of Woodbines, and they were set up for the evening. They were local footballers, and some of them would have been IRA lads, but they had no work. They disappeared, lots of them, when the War broke out. They went to England, never heard of again in lots of cases. There was a well known Tallaght footballer, Jackie Doyle, a cousin of mine on my mother’s side. He was a fair-haired, tallish lad; his nickname was Lackery. Anyway, Lackery drifted off to England during the Emergency, and was eventually forgotten.’
* * *
Playing with marbles was popular, especially in springtime. Hoops, using bicycle wheels, were also popular. He remembers playing handball ‘with a real handball with an Elvery’s* elephant on it’. There was no handball alley in Tallaght, so they played against the College wall. ‘Nobody played tennis, except a few people who were better connected.’ He never played soccer. ‘Soccer was for Dublin gougers and gurriers. Shelbourne, James’s Gate, the Bray Unknowns – I didn’t know the structure of the soccer world at all, until I went to work in Dublin. Gaelic football was the game. The local club was Thomas Davis’s.† I was never what you’d call a first choice. I could never get it into my mind that it was important enough to die for. My two brothers, Jackie and Patsy, won county championship medals.’
His close friends were Noel Mullally, his cousin, Seán Poynton, Francis Colleran, Joe Kelly, J.J. Hughes. ‘Right across from our house were Doyle’s Fields – no relation – but we could walk into the fields, through the gates, and then we took off. We roamed, up as far as Killinarden, through all sorts of marvellous fields and ditches. We’d even eat young turnips out of the ground. We went miles and miles, and we discovered all sorts of things. Once, we came across some ditches and it only came to me in later life, thinking about the structure of them, that they must have been part of the outer defences of the Dublin Pale, a part that hadn’t been ploughed away, a big double ditch and, then, further ditches. We used to run up and down these things and they were quite substantial earthworks.
‘There were slight divisions between the fellows going to school. It was the top of the town against the bottom of the town, that kind of rivalry. And then there was the rivalry between the town of Tall
aght and Colbert’s Fort – it’s up the back of the Urney factory. There were the Finnegans; Billy Finnegan – Duck Egg – was a dangerous customer to get mixed up with; there were the Redmonds, Joe Stynes, and Paddy Brady, a big bruiser of a fellow.’
He wore white on his First Holy Communion Day, in 1930. ‘It was a very fine, cashmere-type, woollen jumper, with white short trousers and white shoes. My mother was also keen on sailor suits. It caused me terrible grief; I had to wear the sailor suit to school. I was much resented by the lads, all cocked up in style like that, and I was beaten up. My mother would say, “Don’t you have anything to do with those fellows,” but I had to go to school with them. So, the result was, my father took me down to a boxing club, down in Terenure somewhere, where I was taught how to box. Shortly after I’d acquired some skills, a row over the sailor suit blew up again and I had a fight in the schoolyard, and I knocked the mallarkey out of Paddy Brady from Colbert’s Fort. I had all the skill now, like Nel Tarleton,* the boxer, straight left and a right cross, hopping around. In any case, I hit him enough to sicken him. And, after that, I was accepted, no more persecution, one of the lads.’
* Today, the Tallaght Centre for the Unemployed.