Rory & Ita

  * Rory: ‘He also delivered milk to Ita’s home, in Terenure. She didn’t like him either.’

  * Today, the Dragon Inn.

  * Rory’s brother Jackie tells a different story: the hole was drilled in the font when fifteen Catholic horses were blinded after drinking the Protestant water.

  * State-funded primary school. Tallaght’s school was on Greenhills Road.

  * Today, St Basil’s Training Centre, also on Greenhills Road.

  * Standish James O’Grady (1846–1928): a major figure in the Irish literary revival, he popularised history and the sagas: History of Ireland: Heroic Period (1878–81); Early Bardic Literature of Ireland (1879); The Bog of Stars (1893); The Flight of the Eagle (1897).

  * His Aunt Lil burned the books during the Emergency (elsewhere known as World War Two), when there was no coal, and turf supplies were low. ‘Dr Madden got burned and Charles Darwin got burned and the Kanakas got burned. Anything she could burn, she burned. A philistine.’

  * Rory: ‘The business died gradually, in the early 30s; hard times. Debts weren’t paid or followed up, and my mother wouldn’t chase anybody.’

  * Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) arrived in Ireland in 1649, massacred the populations of Drogheda and Wexford, oversaw the Protestant settlement of eastern land and the transportation, west, of the Catholic chiefs who had rebelled – divine retribution against the ‘barbarous wretches’; he spent only nine months in the country but is fondly remembered.

  * A chocolate manufacturer, established in 1924, by Henry Gallagher, on what was known as the New Lane, then the Urney Road and, more recently, Belgard Road. It was the first factory to be built in Tallaght.

  † Dublin.

  * A sports shop in Dublin; today, on Suffolk Street.

  † Named after Thomas Davis (1814–45): born in County Cork; co-founded the Nation (1842); a leader of the Young Irelanders (1842–5); author of ‘A Nation Once Again’, and other popular songs.

  * Nel Tarleton (1906–56): born in Liverpool; British Featherweight Champion, 1930–45.

  Chapter Five – Ita

  ‘I had no idea where we were going. We went on a train and we were met at the station by this strange man; I didn’t know who he was. He turned out to be my Uncle Watt. We were taken out to a pony and trap and we sat in, with our cases. It was raining and there was a tarpaulin put over us all, and off we went – the first time I was ever in a pony and trap. Daddy, Máire, Joe, myself and Miss Dunne. And we arrived down at the main road. It was cement, and the pony and trap was lovely and smooth, and I loved that – I was really sleepy, I remember. And I remember the noise of the hooves. And then we turned up a laneway and it was rough and we were hopping along, and I’d doze off and I’d be hopped awake again. But I remember arriving at the house. It was dark, so I couldn’t see what it looked like, and there was another strange man, Uncle John, and a strange woman who was my Aunt Bessie. I didn’t know who they were; I’d never heard their names mentioned before. But we were brought into the sitting-room,* and the fire was lighting and the wet things were taken off. And I remember sitting on Uncle John’s lap. I didn’t know who he was, but he was very nice. Very quiet, very little to say, but he rubbed my hands and heated them. And then I remember going to bed.’

  She had just arrived at Coolnaboy, her father’s childhood home, a mile from Oilgate, about eight miles south of Enniscorthy, in County Wexford. She was, she thinks, four years old. Watt and John were her father’s younger brothers and Bessie was his sister.

  ‘At the top of the stairs, there was a little room, and lying in this room was a very old lady, and she turned out to be my father’s aunt, Mary Kate. I had no idea what was wrong with her, but she never got out of the bed, and every time we went down to Oilgate we had to get her peppermints. Years later, I asked what had been wrong with Mary Kate – she was dead by then – and I was told that, really, there was nothing wrong with her. She just went up to bed one day and she didn’t get up again. She took to the bed. I suppose it was a form of depression. My cousin, Maeve Brennan, told me that when she was a child and she’d lived in Coolnaboy because her father was on the run, herself and her sister used to go up the stairs and they’d torment Mary Kate. She’d pick up her stick and she’d say, “Ah, ha, if I get you,” and they’d say, “But you can’t, sure you can’t?”

  ‘Another memory I have, and I was very young – all the water from the house was drawn from a well, and the well was just past the back door. It never dried and it had beautiful water. In the summer, little flies used to dart across the top of the water. They fascinated me, and I was kneeling at the edge of the well one day and I was trying to catch them and I toppled in. The water was whirling around my head – my head, my shoulders, and a funny sound in my ears. And the girl from the next farm, Eileen Parker, grabbed me. As I was toppling in. She was only about three years older than me but she grabbed me and pulled me out. She had an apron on and I can still remember my foot catching in the apron. She was trying to pull me and my foot was caught and impeding her but she still managed to lug me out. Miss Dunne came running and I was dried off and put to bed and there was a great fuss, but Eileen saved me that day.’

  At the time of her first visit, Watt (Walter) Bolger, Bessie (Elizabeth) Bolger and Mary Kate Whitty lived in Coolnaboy. ‘Uncle John was living in Pouldearg,* a farm, down in a place called Balnaslaney, right beside the Slaney River. It had been my father’s mother’s original home.’

  Watt was her father’s youngest brother. He had ownership of the farm because ‘my father was looked upon as the smart boy of the family; he was extremely bright. Very often, the smart boy was picked to be a priest. So, my father was sent to St Peter’s College in Wexford, to become a priest. That was him fixed up, as far as his mother was concerned. And Uncle John was given his mother’s farm, at Pouldearg. It was the richer farm, way ahead of Coolnaboy. So, then there was only one boy left and that was how Watt fell into possession of Coolnaboy.

  ‘Aunt Bessie was what was termed “doing a line” with Mike Parker, of Kilmuckridge.† And Mike Parker had two old – I think they were cousins, the Miss Byrnes, and they had a house and farm in Kilmuckridge. Mike* was actually a pig buyer for Buttle’s, Buttle’s Barley-fed Bacon, a very big business in Enniscorthy, and he lived with the Miss Byrnes and took care of the farm for them. And Uncle Watt was doing a line with Katie Doyle, who lived in Coolamain.† She was a good deal younger than Watt. But nobody could move, because each move depended on the demise of the two Miss Byrnes. Watt couldn’t marry Katie and bring her in, and, sure, she wouldn’t have wanted to move in, with Bessie there.

  ‘Now, I was too young to know what was happening but, when I was ten, everybody moved. The Miss Byrnes had died. And Mike had the farm. So, Bessie and Mike got married and Bessie moved to Kilmuckridge. ‡ Máire was the bridesmaid, and Daddy was the best man. And less than a year later, Watt got married and Katie moved in, and that was the best thing that ever happened to Coolnaboy.

  ‘It had always been very quiet, and Katie brought great life to the place. She had eight children and I’m sure there was never as much life and love and laughter in the place, because the grandmother had had the name of being a very severe and strict woman. Katie was wonderful; I used to love going down to her, in the summer. Everything about the place, I loved. I was made one of the family, immediately. You felt that you were the person there, whereas, back home, you were, kind of, just someone who was in the house. But in Coolnaboy you were always treasured and taken care of and chatted to and talked to and considered as good as anyone else. And there was great freedom – the fields. I loved all the farm work.

  ‘It’s a very special place. It’s a very large, long house, with a thatched roof. There was a small hall, as in most farmhouses in Wexford, and, to the left, there was this huge kitchen. And there was a big open fire; you could look up the chimney and nearly see the sky. And the usual fixtures of an open fire, big, black cooking pots and kettles. The fire was always l
it. It had bellows and you’d turn the handle – it was like a big wheel – and the pipes were under the grate, and the air flamed the fire. I don’t remember it ever going out; they used to bank it down at night – slack at the back of the fire, very fine coal, and it smouldered away.

  ‘Every night, they used to say the Rosary. But there were crickets in the fire and they chirped and chirped there – I could never see them during the day. There was an oil lamp on the wall. It was over the table, so if you wanted to read, you had to go and sit under the lamp. But we’d be at the Rosary and, the next thing, one of these crickets would make a beeline for the lamp, and there’d be a great bang and the cricket would nearly explode; sometimes he’d be dead but sometimes just stunned and he’d run back home. And Joe and I got into the habit of counting the explosions and saying, “There’s another one gone.” And I remember one night, we were saying the Rosary, and this big beetle was crossing the floor. Joe had a plain pin. It’s funny, because my father used to have a plain pin stuck in his lapel, and this was for cleaning his teeth, like a toothpick. And Joe had a pin that night, maybe copying my father, and he stuck the pin in the beetle. The pin went down on the creature and it started to go around and around, trapped by the pin. It ran away when it got free.

  ‘Through the left, from the kitchen, there was a small dining-room and, beside that, there was another room which had no window. It was very dark but there was an oil-fired stove in there, and my aunt used to bake on it. She’d make griddle bread, done on the fire, and scones and tarts. And then you went down a few steps, to the dairy. The dairy had the churns and the separator, which always fascinated me. You put milk in one end, and you turned the handle and the skim milk came out one spout and the cream came out another. It was fascinating; I just couldn’t understand how it worked. The separating was done every morning, and the cream was put into pots. And then, once a week, the cream was churned and butter was made. Bessie had a name for being a great butter maker. She had a set of customers and I used to deliver for her. One lady in particular – I used to have to go along the bog road to deliver the butter to her. She was very old. She always gave me biscuits; she’d have these two-penny packets of Jacob’s biscuits, and she’d give me a penny. But she had a beard that fascinated me, and a bit of a moustache.

  ‘There was the yard and then there were outhouses, to the left and right. There was a barn and a very big milking shed. In the barn – one thing I remember from my very first visit there – they had a greyhound called Coolnaboy Lass. They had pups in there as well. There was a shed to the right, with a cart and the trap. And straight across the yard, before you got to the haggard, there was a pigsty. To the left of the house, there was a small gate into the garden – the kitchen garden. There were nice flowers there but it was mostly vegetables, and a big monkey-puzzle tree. They told me that Daddy had planted that when he was a young boy. They had apple trees too, “Lady Fingers” and “Beauty of Bath”. The apples were never quite ripe when I was there but that didn’t put me off.

  ‘I used to go roaming over the farm. And, of course, it never rained – I can’t remember it raining. One particular day, Katie was making jam – I think it was blackcurrant – and she let me scrape the pot, and I scraped and scraped and ate and ate, and I was sick after it, and tucked up in bed. It was all one year merging into another year and, as I said, it never rained and everything seemed marvellous. I’d go across the fields to Parkers’. They had different names on the fields and the Park, as I remember it, was the name of the field I crossed to get to Parkers’. There was a field called the Haggard Field. There was another one, nearer Oilgate, called the Racecourse, and at the back of the house there was one called the Bog Field. There was a bog hole at the end of it; they had fish in that – roach. My father used to go there with Joe. They both had fishing rods. Mere females were never allowed to go fishing, but I wasn’t particularly interested, anyway. I remember, a cow got stuck, near the bog hole. There were a lot of men around, trying to pull the cow out. There was one extremely fat boy, fifteen or sixteen years of age, and he got to the front of the rope, pulling and pulling. Then the cow slipped a bit and the rope went forward. And I remember someone saying, “Don’t let Pat fall in or we’ll have twice the job getting him out.” It raised a laugh, and it didn’t seem to bother Pat.

  ‘And I’d sit with Mrs Parker. She’d make scones and no one ever made scones the way she made them. She used to use currants, which was unusual, and she rolled them out flat, cut them in squares and they were cooked on the griddle pan. And I used to sit in the corner and read the religious papers, Far East, the Madonna, and little religious magazines. Work would be going on all around me but, again, I was accepted as part of it.

  ‘I hated the thought of going back home again in September. I remember once, I was brought up to Oilgate by Katie, to catch the bus for home. And the bus was full; there was only room for one and I think there were two or three others there. I was ever so polite and let the girl before me get on the bus. I was delighted; I had to go back to Coolnaboy for another day. And Katie remembered that day, up to the very end; she spoke about that day, when she brought me back to Coolnaboy, and how delighted I was.’

  * Ita: ‘I knew later that the sitting-room was very seldom used, but it was used for special occasions and this was obviously a special occasion.’

  * The Red Hole.

  † Also in County Wexford, on the coast, about twelve miles north-east of Oilgate.

  * Ita: ‘Mike won an All-Ireland hurling medal, in 1912, and Wexford didn’t win it again for years after that. The ball that was used that day, the sloightir, was put into a little case. It was like a religious object. If there was a function on, part of the attraction would be that ball. Then somebody stole it. It was done as a joke but, at the time, Mike didn’t realise that. And he was heartbroken, he was absolutely shattered at the loss of that ball. Because he was so proud of it.’

  † Near Oilgate.

  ‡ Ita: ‘I remember Aunt Bessie saying that she was never interested in men, which I found hard to believe. She was a particularly good-looking woman; she was lovely, tall – what they used to call in Wexford “a fine girl”. They had no time for the little ones; I was a dead loss. If she wasn’t interested in men, they were surely interested in her. But she said she wasn’t interested, and it was only in later years that she met Mike. But my cousin, Maeve Brennan, said, “My eye;” she’d been going with Mike for years, just waiting for the opportunity to get married. But the sad part of it is that, by that time, she was too old to have a family.’

  Chapter Six – Rory

  ‘My mother set off with my Aunt Lil for the Eucharistic Congress, in her high-heeled shoes, most elegant, and she came home with her shoes in her hand; she couldn’t walk any further. I wasn’t allowed go because I wasn’t old enough. But Sergeant Nyhan just up the road had a wireless. He turned it on and opened the window, and that was how I heard John McCormack.* It was marvellous. I had never heard the wireless before. McCormack was one of the very few singers we ever heard. Very few people had a gramophone, and the result was that when you heard music, it was local, almost accidental, a passing band. So, to hear that voice coming out, it was like a miracle; it was such a beautiful voice.’

  The Eucharistic Congress was held in Dublin in June 1932, to celebrate the 1,500th anniversary of Saint Patrick’s return to Ireland. ‘It was decided to have this great display of faith, a coming together, after ten years of statehood, a big celebration of what was the Catholic Church and Ireland. There were men’s nights, and women’s nights, and the children’s. It lasted the best part of a week but it seemed to go on for ever. There were banners put across the street, all the way down the town. Some of them were supposed to have been blessed by the Pope and one of them, I remember, said “Cod Save The Pope”. There was an old tramp called Jack the Rant. He had a stoop. He famously tried to straighten up, to read the banners, and toppled over backwards in the middle of the street. There was bu
nting everywhere. But we had special bunting put up on our house, and my mother got butter boxes. They were square boxes, about eighteen inches square, and the same height, and they were very useful. You could buy the butter boxes and they made stools, seats, presses. My mother and my aunt painted them green, and shrubs were put into them, to decorate the place, outside the door.’

  His father was a member of Fianna Fáil.* ‘He had a song that he sang quite often, almost like a mantra, particularly at election times. De Valera bowled them over, As they marched along Mount Street, De Valera bowled them over, And the Sherwood Foresters were no more. De Valera bowled them over, De Valera and his gallant little band, De Valera bowled them over, And he was transported to a foreign land. I worked in the 1932 election. I was only nine. Seán McEntee and Miss Pearse† were the candidates for Fianna Fáil. I addressed envelopes and I made paste, for the posters. The Guards‡ had a very low opinion of Fianna Fáil, as being dissident, little better than the IRA. When some of the posters were torn down, the Guards just wouldn’t see it happening. So a complaint was made to Seán McEntee, and I was very young but I still remember this [imitating McEntee’s accent]: “Let ye get a sack and some bottles and jam jars and a loan of a hammer from the blacksmith over opposite.” In other words, you put the bottles in a sack, broke them into smithereens and you mixed them in with the paste. I broke the bottles – I was involved in politics from an early age. And the first time anybody tried to tear the posters down, they got the fingers cut off them. The paste was so good that, years later, in the 50s, I went out to visit my mother, and I saw a 1932 election poster, faded but still there, under the arch of a bridge.’

  Fianna Fáil won the election and McEntee and Miss Pearse were elected. ‘There was a torchlight procession. You got a stick, and you nailed a B.B. Toffees* can to it. Then you got two sods of turf and put them into the can, and poured in paraffin. When you lit it, you had a good torch; it burned fiercely and for a good long time. Anybody who had a horse marched it through Tallaght that night, the riders dressed in the Thomas Davis jerseys, green and an orange sash – very patriotic jerseys. I don’t know where the Fine Gael† people were. They certainly didn’t arrive to object. Some of them may even have marched.