Rory & Ita Read online

  The house was lit by gas. The gas mantle, made of asbestos gauze, was attached, locked to the pipe-end; each mantle had to be lit by match. The mantles were very fragile; they crumbled if touched, even with a match. The gas provided good, uniform light. ‘But what happened every now and again was, it would suddenly start going down and there was a rush to the meter to stick the shilling in. And if you weren’t wise and had your shillings piled up you were in big trouble because you had to go searching. It was originally a penny meter which was dreadful but then they changed it to a shilling meter. The gas man used to come every month and collect the money and there used sometimes be a payback; they’d decide how much you’d used, and a lot of women were delighted when the gas man came because he would give you back a few shillings and there would often be enough for a dinner or so out of it.’

  The children weren’t allowed to use the gas upstairs. ‘It was supposed to be very dangerous but we were given candles which I always considered quite as dangerous, if not more so.’ She remembers Joe once setting fire to the curtains in the girls’ bedroom, and Máire shouting, ‘Look what you did!’ The top of the dressing table was burnt black but was later restored.

  She remembers the landlord calling for the rent. His name was Mr Pearse, a Wicklow man. He owned most of the houses on both sides of the road. ‘He was very friendly; he used to bring us sweets. Maybe if you didn’t have your rent he wouldn’t bring any, but he always had sweets in his pockets for us.’

  She liked the house. ‘I don’t know whether childhood has that effect on you or not, but I never saw anything wrong with it. I’m sure the sitting-room must have been freezing, but I never thought it freezing.’ She remembers bits of plaster falling off the walls, and her father getting dado rail to secure them. She thinks now that the walls were rarely papered because her father was afraid that the whole walls would come down if the old paper was stripped from them. And then there was the time the bedroom ceiling fell on her. ‘We were in bed and we heard a kind of rumbling. We were very quick actually, and we pulled the sheets up over us. There was no weight in the plaster. It all came tumbling down on us, and we looked up and all we could see was these little narrow laths, and the plaster gone – in a big hole, like. It just happened to come down over the bed. And I can’t remember how it was repaired but it was repaired very quickly, if I remember rightly.’ But she liked the house. ‘I thought it was grand. And I loved everything about that locality. I was very happy with it.’

  Her father wore a felt hat and he always wore black boots with toecaps, which he polished himself. ‘He wore brown suits with a very fine white line; you’d hardly see the line.’ When the suit became a bit shabby he’d get a new one, exactly like the old, and the old one was worn at the weekends. He always bought the suit in Kevin & Howlin, on Nassau Street. Tom Howlin was a Wexford man, an old school friend. Years later, she went with her father to buy a suit for her wedding day. ‘I remember him saying, “I want a suit for my daughter’s wedding,” and it was the very same suit as the first one I remember him in. When he went on holidays he took off his tie, he took off his collar – and he was on holidays.’

  She can’t remember her mother. ‘I can only remember her hands. I can’t remember her face. I have no memory of her attire whatsoever. I can’t remember what she wore on her feet. The only memory I have is her hands, doing things.’

  She was three months short of her fourth birthday when her mother died in March 1929. ‘I was told that we all had some kind of a flu, and she stayed up to look after us, and she got pneumonia and she died. I remember being carried in to see her and I remember her hands were white and I remember saying, “Mammy has new gloves.”’

  She remembers the priest coming to the house, with two altar boys. ‘I was in the cot, in my bedroom, and, whatever way the coffin was fixed, I could see it through the door. And I thought it was wonderful, the priest coming up the stairs – he had a kind of regalia on him, and these two little boys ringing bells and going into her room. I thought it was a holiday. The priest and the two little boys and the bells ringing, and then off they went.’

  She watched from her parents’ bedroom window. ‘I must have been still sick because I was taken out of the cot and I can remember the horses had black plumes, and there was a hearse and my father had a black hard hat. Neighbours were there, I can remember that. I can’t remember relations but I remember my father had a black armband and a black tie, and all the blinds were pulled on the road. The men walked off behind the hearse, only the men.

  ‘I never realised she was dead. I remember being told that she was coming back, which was terrible but I suppose it was done to shut me up; I was told she was coming back. I’m still waiting.’

  A hand.

  Her hand,

  Winding a handle and putting a needle in place.

  Only a hand.

  I can not recall a body or face.

  Later, I knew that the handle was part of a gramophone.

  Newly arrived

  And she still alive.

  Later still,

  When lonely and blue

  I handled that handle,

  Remembering she had handled it too.*

  * Ita: ‘He didn’t go home until she died. She wasn’t dead when I was born – I think I can claim that – but I have a very vague memory of my father going off with a suitcase, a small suitcase, and being told that my grandmother was either dying or dead. I was very small at the time. That’s my only memory of her; I never met her.’

  * The father of Maeve Brennan, author of The Springs of Affection, The Rose Garden, The Long-Winded Lady and The Visitor.

  * From Allegiance (1950) by Robert Brennan.

  † Gaelic Athletic Association. Jim Bolger reported on gaelic football and hurling.

  * From You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II by Jeff Kisseloff: ‘All of this later helped me in the army, because I learned how to get dressed putting on my socks and shoes fast on the cold floor. Congoleum, which I learned later was not a bad word for floor covering, to me was one of the worst words for poor people. If you had congoleum floors, that was terrible … To this day I don’t like to walk barefoot except on my own rug at home’ (Lee Silver).

  * China (from ‘Delft’).

  * By Ita Doyle.

  Chapter Two – Rory

  ‘My first memory is of the stone floor. Stone slabs. And I remember soldiers marching past the house, on the cobblestones, through Terenure, on the way back down, I presume, to the barracks in Rathmines. Soldiers marching, with their leggings and boots, and dragging cannon, guns with mules, and the noise and the screeching and the roars of the men. I can remember that; it was quite a thing. And another memory is of my Grandfather Mullally eating griddle cake in our house in Terenure, and drinking his tea out of a saucer.’

  He was born in the Rotunda, the maternity hospital on Parnell Square, just north of Dublin’s centre, on the 8th of December, 1923. ‘My mother was very upset shortly after I was born. The midwife and nurses came down to find out what was wrong with her and she said, “Nobody brought me any whiskey.” Now, my mother was a non-drinker but she had this notion in her head, listening to all the women talking, that when somebody’s child was born they brought her in a glass of whiskey. So she was waiting for the glass of whiskey and it never came and that, naturally, upset her. Being deprived.’

  He was a big baby; he weighed 15 pounds. And he was called Roderick Timothy. ‘My mother could arrange everything and she had decided that I was going to be a girl and she was going to call me Bridget, after her mother. And when I was born and I was a boy she got a bit of a shock and she had no name for me. The usual thing then was to have three days before your christening, so my Aunt Bridge and my father arrived in a cab to bring me off to the Pro-Cathedral, and my father said to my mother, “What are we going to call him?” She said, “I don’t know. Call him what you like. Call him Patrick, after your father.” So he says, “T
hat’s alright,” a quiet man. So on the way up O’Connell Street, clip-clopping in the cab, my Aunt Bridge said, “You’re not going to name the child Patrick after that impudent oul’ get;” she said to my father, about his father. And he said, “What are we going to call him?” So, they had a general argument, and then one of them realised it was the first anniversary of the execution of Rory O’Connor,* so I was named Roderick, after Roderick, or Rory, O’Connor, and Timothy, after my father. And that was it.’ From then on, he was called Rory, although his birth cert records just his surname and the fact that he was male. He was the first of nine children. After him came Breda (1924), Aileen (1926), Nancy (1929), Jackie (1931), Patsy (1936), Rosaleen (1937), her twin, Frederick, who died a few days after the birth, and Angela (1943).

  His father was Timothy (Tim) Doyle. He was born in 1893. One of eleven children, he grew up in a cottage in Templeogue, a village in south County Dublin, in an area known as the Strand, along a stretch of the Dodder River.* Tim’s father, Pat Doyle, was a farm worker and ‘was known as a good ploughman’. His father, Tim’s grandfather, was a blacksmith; he ran Doyle’s forge, in Firhouse. Tim’s mother, Helena Thornton, was born in 1852.† Her mother came from Galway. Helena was fostered to Mrs Bridget (Biddie) Conlon, a shopkeeper and small farmer, in Balrothery, near Tallaght, and this was where she eventually met Pat, Tim’s father.

  When he was born, Tim was thirty. He drove the Dublin–Blessington steam tram, from Terenure to Poulaphouca, in Wicklow. The Dublin–Blessington line was closed in 1932, and after that Tim had various jobs, usually in running and maintaining boilers. He eventually became a general factotum at Baldonnell Aerodrome, and worked there until he retired in the late 50s.

  He was a member of the IRA until 1922, with his brother, Johnny, in a company based around Rathfarnham. He was involved in the burning down of the Custom House in May 1921. ‘My father was one of the men detailed to go down to the cellars, armed with pick-axes to stave in the barrels of lovely whiskey and brandy maturing down there. He was picked because he didn’t drink. They then lit wood and paper torches and threw them into the sea of alcohol and got up the stairs as quick as they could. When they got outside the Custom House, the British troops had arrived and my father told me that he ran down the quays faster than any Olympic runner, with bullets hopping around him.’ Five men were killed and seventy captured that day, so the raid was considered by many to have been a tactical disaster, but ‘my father got a medal for burning down the Custom House and they had, in fact, broken the back of the British establishment in Ireland. All their records were gone and they couldn’t conduct the civil administration of the country. The Dublin Trades Council was delighted; all their members were employed in the rebuilding. Many businessmen and strong farmers were very pleased and forgot to pay their taxes. They were outraged when, several years later, the tax inspectors of the new Free State government sent them bills of arrears. The British were gone but the tax inspectors were Irish and transferred to the new administration with their memories intact.’

  There was a British Army aerodrome in Tallaght, where the Urney chocolate factory was later built, and, if his tram was empty and other conditions were favourable, Rory’s father would climb on to the roof of the tram: ‘He had a big long rod and every now and again, when no one was looking, he would pull down the telegraph wire and cause considerable annoyance. He was a very observant man. If anything moved, he’d know what was happening. He was a one-man intelligence unit between Terenure and Tallaght.’ He stopped fighting at the start of the Civil War. ‘He couldn’t face up to fighting the men he’d been with; he just couldn’t do it.’ Later, he joined up when De Valera founded Fianna Fáil in 1926, ‘but he was still close to the Republican fellows who were causing the trouble’. Some of his old comrades were executed, first by the new Free State Government, later by De Valera’s Government. He had contact with Gerry Boland, a minister in De Valera’s government – Boland had been a carpenter in Crooksling Sanatorium, on Tim’s tram-route – and he was able to trace the whereabouts of arrested men and then inform their families. ‘I remember a woman coming to our door, to my mother, and she said, “Will you tell your husband thanks very much to Mr Boland. They took Tommy the other night and I know where he is now. He’s down in the Curragh* and I know he’s alive.”’

  His mother was Catherine (Katie) Mullally. She was born in January 1900, in Tallaght, a village seven miles south-west of Dublin city. She was one of ten children. Her father was a coal merchant. Earlier, he and his brother had been hauliers for the numerous paper mills along the Dodder River. He knows little about the family’s origins. The 1901 Census lists the Mullallys as resident in Tallaght, but he doesn’t know if they came from there or if they were ‘outlanders, or runners into the district’. There was a suggestion – ‘remarks passed, but nothing positive’ – that the whole family came from Kill, in County Kildare. ‘My grandfather spoke with a different accent to the locals. He called a door a “duer,” and the floor was the “fluer”.’ Katie’s mother’s name was Whitty, and her mother, still alive in 1901, gave her place of birth as County Wicklow. He doesn’t know where Katie’s mother was born: ‘Nobody asked the question.’ Although Katie was one of the younger children, ‘she ended being the dominant organiser of the family and she organised my grandfather’s coal business and that sort of thing, and did a good job. If anybody in the family was in trouble or wanted a hand-out, they came to Katie, and she obliged.’

  He doesn’t know how his parents met, but Tim’s tram went right past Katie’s house; ‘he passed up and down through Tallaght every day.’ They were married in 1922. It was a quiet wedding. Tim’s brother, Johnny, had recently died. Another of his brothers, Christy, had joined the new Free State Army. ‘Like many another Irishman, he needed a job. Christy was a little man. A nice softly spoken man. But he was the toughest character. They called him Christy the Grocer – I don’t know why. He joined the British Army, the Connaught Rangers, and he served in Mesopotamia and Salonika. As a matter of fact, he was a first-class sniper. He told me once, he sat up in a tree, just outside Salonika, watching for a Turkish sniper. He told me, “I got him.” When he came home on furlough, my grandmother made him hide my father’s and my Uncle Johnny’s guns under his bed and, once, when the house was being raided by the RIC* and the British Army, Christy gave them a tongue lashing – “Can a soldier not have a bit of rest without you bastards tormenting me?” – and they left the house unsearched. He then joined the Free State Army when it was first organised, and was involved in the artillery bombardment of the Four Courts,’ which led to Rory O’Connor’s arrest and eventual execution – and to Rory’s name a year later. ‘At the same time, his brother, Johnny, was about to suffer critical and fatal wounds in Moran’s Hotel, just across the city, fighting with the anti-Treaty forces.’ So, it was a very quiet wedding. The wedding breakfast was at Katie’s sister, Bridge’s house, the gate lodge of Rose Hall, in Templeogue.

  His first home was a house† in Tallaght, close to the water pump at the top of the town. ‘My grandfather took that house and put half his family into it.’ The first year of his life was spent there. But the first home he remembers was a whitewashed cottage, no longer standing,* on Terenure Road North, where the entrance to The Star newspaper offices is today. The landlord was Mr Nolan, the local coal merchant, who lived in a large house further up the road. He doesn’t remember much about the house. ‘My only real memory is of one large room.’ It was the kitchen/living-room. He remembers the stone floor but ‘I can’t remember the furniture in the room. The furniture was very basic in those days. People just didn’t have the money to buy furniture.’ He remembers the stairs: ‘I can still see these stone stairs.’ And he knows that the bedroom he shared with his sister Breda was right over the next-door neighbour’s house. The neighbour was Mr Mannering, old Har (Harry) Mannering, a taxi driver, and ‘you could hear him snorting and shuffling down below’. Of the bedroom, he remembers ‘just a big
bed, with two of us in it’. He remembers pouring the contents of a jar of Virol over Breda. Virol was ‘a thing like a softish toffee, a food for building kids up. For some reason or another we were in the bed and we had the Virol and I poured it over Breda’s head. That caused a bit of consternation.’

  There was a small yard at the back of the house, with the toilet, a dry closet – a bucket and seat. ‘Dry closets – we thought they were wet but they weren’t.’ There was no bathroom in the house. ‘There was a kind of zinc bath that was taken down to wash the kids. When we got older, there was a stand and a basin on top of it. And that was it. As you got older, you went off to a more private place and wash-stand, to wash yourself down. But that was later. Washing was easily done – you licked your finger and then rubbed your face.’

  There was no gramophone in the house but there was music. He remembers his mother singing ‘The Faithful Sailor Boy’. And his father sang. I dream as the hammer strikes the anvil, and I dream as the sparks fly on the floor, and my bright-eyed turtle dove, she the only girl I loved, as I stood outside the good old smithy door. ‘My father had a stock of music hall songs – And they pointed to the spot, in the graveyard’s gentle plot, where my Mary sleeps in sunny Tennessee. And one of his favourites was [sings] Jim O’Shea was castaway upon an Indian isle, The neighbours there they liked his style, they liked his Irish smile, They made him lord and master and general of them all, And called him Nabob Mumbo Jumbo Ginigo Jay O’Shea. Across the sea came Rose McGee to wed her Nabob pal, In emerald gems he decked her arms and when he kissed her hand, He took her to his hareem where he had wives galore. She started shedding a tear, He said you have no fear, I’m keeping these wives for ornament, my dear. So she had rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, Elephants to ride upon and shamrock Irish-grown, Come all the way from Ireland on each Saint Patrick’s Day, To Mrs Nabob Mumbo Jumbo Ginigo Jay O’Shea. And he played the melodeon. He played all the old dance music and he was very popular, any party on.’