Dublin Made Me E-Book

C.S. Andrews

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2001

Beschreibung

Dublin Made Me, the first of C.S. ('Todd') Andrews' two celebrated volumes of autobiography, describes in loving detail the pre-independence Dublin in which the author grew up and provides a vivid participant's account of the War of Independence and the Civil War. Born in 1901, Andrews lived with his family in Summerhill until 1910, when they moved to the distant suburb of Terenure. Andrews' account of the two Dublins of his youth – the bustle, intimacy and poverty of the north side, and the bucolic pleasures of Terenure- is an unsentimental urban pastoral, sensuous and immediate. He describes his schooling with the nuns in Dominick Street, with Patrick Pearse for an unhappy year in St Enda's, and then with the Christian Brothers in Synge Street. And he gives a rich, detailed account of his apprenticeship in Irish republicanism, from his pre-1916 experiences as a youthful 'camp-follower of the Volunteers' to his active service in Dublin in the War of Independence and his dangerous days as adjutant to Liam Lynch, chief of the anti-Treaty forces during the Civil War. Andrews writes dispassionately of internment and hunger-strikes, and of the bitter divide between the pro-and anti-Treaty sides, once comrades-in-arms. Dublin Made Me is a unique account of an ordinary childhood transformed by war and revolution. Together with its sequel, Man of No Property, it provides an unmatched first-person chronicle of the making of twentieth-century Ireland.

Leseprobe

IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER AND FATHER

I disclaim all fertile meadows, all tilled land

The evil that grows from it and the good,

But the Dublin of old statues, this arrogant city,

Stirs proudly and secretly in my blood.

From ‘Dublin Made Me’ by Donagh MacDonagh

DublinMadeMe

C. S. ANDREWS

THE LILLIPUT PRESS DUBLIN

Contents

Title Page

Foreword by David Andrews

Preface and Acknowledgments

CHILDHOOD

BOYHOOD

EARLY MANHOOD

Volunteers to Truce

The IRA Split

The Civil War

Epilogue

Index

Copyright

Foreword

In September 2000 it was my honour to give the Liam Lynch oration in Fermoy, Co. Cork. General Lynch was a War of Independence and Republican Civil War General who was shot at the age of twenty-nine. My father, at the conclusion of the War of Independence, was just twenty-three. He was born in 1901. In DublinMadeMe he sets out in proud detail his involvement with Liam Lynch, for whom he acted as Adjutant.

As a family, we were very proud of our father but did not realize until early adulthood his immense contribution to the foundation of the twenty-six-county Republic and his subsequent involvement in many historic landmarks along the way of his career up to his retirement. He was over seventy when he wrote his two books, DublinMadeMe and ManofNoProperty. It is difficult to chose between the two, but I did always feel an affection for his first book. It was closer to my childhood – and young manhood – perception of my father than his later book. Its spirit touches me more.

In our very early years the names of Aiken, Lemass and de Valera were part of our lives. Frank Aiken was a frequent visitor to our home. Eamon de Valera and Sean T. O’Kelly were also visitors to Dundrum. The place was sometimes like an anteroom to a Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis!

My mother, Mary Coyle, had a spell in Kilmainham during the Civil War for her troubles and was a very good foil for my father. As Todd was tough-minded, Mary was gentle. It was a good balance and it worked. If not a liberal, she was very liberated in her views.

Both DublinMadeMe and ManofNoProperty were produced from memory, with the enormous help of my stepmother, Joyce Duffy. Our family owes her much. My father’s memory was assisted by input from a very few close associates. It was some achievement. It is a pity that more of his generation didn’t add their voices to the airwaves and their memories to paper.

Todd Andrews in his professional life may have been perceived as a hard man – and indeed he may have been such – but his integrity and honesty shone through his various careers: Bord na Mona, Coras Iompair Éireann and Radio Telefis Éireann. His real monument is Bord na Mona. Many jobs were created and many homes built in the midlands on the back of harvesting of turf and the making of peat briquettes. Mr Aiken and Mr Lemass were the visionaries on turf, but without my father the project would not have happened. His enthusiasm, energy and leadership were the real essence of the success of the development of our bogs.

Never a glad-hander, he despised subterfuge and graft. His door was always open to an old comrade from whichever side of the split. His regard for Michael Collins was genuine and deep and it was this respect that left his heart, if not his mind, open to the other side from the Civil War tragedy.

This book will remain forever a good and relevant record of my father and his times, and of his great contemporaries.

DAVID ANDREWS, TD

PrefaceandAcknowledgments

This is an account of my childhood, boyhood and early manhood as recollected by me in my seventies.

It has been written largely, though not wholly, from memory. I am aware of the fallibility of memory. I am particularly aware of that phenomenon of memory known to psychologists as paramnesia, where events as they really occurred are distorted, telescoped, transposed or otherwise confused. Hence I disclaim any intention of writing a historical account of these years, even of the public events from 1917 until 1923 in which I played a most minor of minor roles.

Writing in my old age of the happenings of my early years I am conscious that my reactions to these happenings were based mainly on emotionalism and enthusiasm. I rarely thought; I felt. But I am not too critical of what I felt or did. Most of my feelings seem to me in my maturity to have been justified by events.

Despite the tribulations which affected the nation over the years, especially in the years of my youth, I reckon myself lucky to have been one of that fortunate generation which lived to see Irishmen in control of the greater part of the country.

I wish to thank my wife, Joyce, for her encouragement to me to persist with this book when so often I felt like abandoning it. She typed my manuscript, inserting verbs which I had omitted and limiting my colloquialisms.

I am particularly indebted to my old friend and former colleague C.B. Murphy for having devoted so much time and energy to reading the typescript and for making so many suggestions, principally aimed at eliminating the repetitiousness which, in writing and conversation, afflicts old age. I am most grateful to him.

I am grateful, too, to Dr Brian Inglis for his kindness to me when I was writing the book.

I wish to acknowledge to Mr Alf MacLochlainn, Director of the National Library, for the help he so readily gave me whenever I requested it.

Childhood

In 1901 – the year I was born – Queen Victoria died to be succeeded by Edward VII, called ‘the Peacemaker’. The Boer War was still in progress although no one realized that it was a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand presaging the destruction of the British Empire.

Ireland was at peace. The Nationalist Parliamentary Party under the leadership of John Redmond was slowly beginning to recover from the blight of the Parnell split. Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin, was a voice crying in the wilderness of national apathy. He had not yet written TheResurrectionofHungary. The injection of national spirit from the Gaelic League and the Irish Literary Revival had, as yet, little effect in restoring national pride.

Dublin still retained the beautiful buildings, monuments, parks, streets and squares which it had inherited from the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. But it had lost the consciousness of a separate identity which, despite their intense loyalty to the Crown, had been characteristic of the Anglo-Irish.

Dublin was a British city and accepted itself as one. Its way of life, its standard of values, its customs were identical with those of, say, Birmingham or Manchester except to the extent that they were modified by one great difference: religion. In Dublin at the turn of the century the population was divided into two classes: the rulers and the ruled. The rulers were mainly Protestants, the Catholics the ruled. The Catholics at whatever income level they had attained were second-class citizens.

From childhood I was aware that there were two separate and immiscible kinds of citizens: the Catholics, of whom I was one, and the Protestants, who were as remote and different from us as if they had been blacks and we whites. We were not acquainted with Protestants but we knew that they were there – a hostile element in the community, vaguely menacing us with such horrors as Mrs Smylie’s homes for orphans where children might be brought and turned into Protestants. We Catholics varied socially among ourselves but we all had the common bond, whatever our economic condition, of being second-class citizens.

At the top of the Catholic heap – in terms of worldly goods and social status – were the medical specialists, fashionable dentists, barristers, solicitors, wholesale tea and wine merchants, owners of large drapery stores and a very few owners or directors of large business firms. These were the Catholic upper middle class; they were the Castle Catholics (the Castle being the seat of Government). Their accents were undistinguishable from those of the Dublin Protestants, who held the flattering belief that they spoke the best English in the world. The Castle Catholics played golf, rugby, cricket, tennis, hockey and croquet and dressed as these games required. They lived cheek by jowl with the Protestants on Mountjoy Square, Fitzwilliam Square and Merrion Square or in Foxrock, Dalkey or Kingstown. They owned carriages and were among the first to own motor cars. The Church’s ban on Catholics attending Trinity College did not prevent them from sending their brighter children there. They entertained one another and any Protestant who would accept their invitations. They had dinner in the evening, and dressed for it. They had many servants: butlers, housekeepers, cooks, housemaids, tweenies, nannies and coachmen. They sent their sons to the English Catholic public schools at Ampleforth, Stonyhurst and Downside or, as a compromise, to Clongowes which was the top Jesuit school in Ireland. Their daughters went to school to the Sacred Heart Nuns at Mount Anville and were ‘finished’ at Vienna and Dusseldorf. For their spiritual needs, they preferred the urbane ministrations of the Jesuits to the cruder rituals of the parochial clergy or the unsophisticated pieties of the Franciscans. An invitation to a garden party at the Viceregal Lodge or to a reception at Dublin Castle was the realization of their social ambitions. From time to time they received knighthoods or judgeships, but even such hallmarks of gentility did not equate them with the top Protestants, who regarded them as Uncle Toms. The Castle Catholics had annual holidays at Brighton or Bournemouth. In politics they supported the union with Britain. To most of their fellow Catholics they were John Mitchel’s ‘genteel dastards’ and were detribalized.

In the social scale below the Castle Catholics were the Catholic middle middle class. They were the general medical practitioners, less successful solicitors, grocers, publicans, butchers, tobacconists who did not live over their shops (when they moved from over their shops they ascended in the social scale), as well as corn merchants, civil servants, journalists, coal merchants and bank managers. In politics these people were Nationalist and from them came the municipal politicians, chiefly from among the publicans. They sent their children to be educated by the Jesuits at Belvedere College, to the Holy Ghost Fathers in St Mary’s or the Marist Catholic University School and their daughters to the Sacred Heart Convent in Leeson Street or to Loreto Convent on the Green. They would usually have three maid servants, referred to as the cook, the maid and the nurse. They had dinner in the middle of the day and entertained themselves at musical evenings where the guests brought their music and sang ‘The Heart Bowed Down’ or ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. They took holidays in Bray or Skerries. They played rugby, cricket and tennis, but not golf or croquet. Their social lives were conducted on the assumption that, if their businesses prospered, their children at least would rise into the circle of Castle Catholics even if they themselves never could. They could hope to be made Justices of the Peace. The letters J.P. after their names was unquestionable evidence of respectability; to be accepted as ‘respectable’ was the aspiration of all Catholics. They were strong and ostentatious supporters of the Church. They said the family rosary and went to Mass and Communion as a family unit. Their simple creed was faith and fatherland, priests and people, grace and gear. They provided the social milieu for the priests of the parish, whom they entertained generously. They left money in their wills for Masses, gave themselves grand funerals and erected fine monuments to their families in Glasnevin Cemetery. Their lapidary inscriptions clearly were not on oath. Their attitude to death and survival had in it something of the beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptians.

Lower down in the scale were the shopkeepers and publicans who lived over their shops, as well as clerks, shop assistants, lower-grade civil servants, and skilled tradesmen. They ate mid-day dinner, wore nightshirts rather than pyjamas and slept on feather beds. They took no holidays and seldom entertained. They swam in the Clontarf and Merrion Baths. Their children played soccer football and cricket on vacant lots, frequently with makeshift equipment. Their principal recreation was following Bohemians or Shelbourne soccer teams, with occasional visits to the Queen’s Theatre to see melodrama or to the Empire Theatre for variety shows. Golf, tennis and croquet they regarded as effeminate games and rugby as the preserve of Protestants and Castle Catholics. Gaelic football and hurling they regarded as fit only for country ‘goms’. They sent their sons to Christian Brothers’ Schools and, if they could afford it, they sent their daughters to the Dominican Nuns. They had no capital resources. They rented their shops and houses. If those in business prospered they might accumulate some money, move from over their shops and with luck acquire middle-middle-class status. If they were merely employees, the limit of their expectations was to own their house at death. Their hopes for the economic improvement of the family lay in providing a good education for their children, leading to a good job. The idea of sending their sons to the University never occurred to them.

A ‘good job’ meant a secure job, because insecurity was the bugbear of their lives. The Christian Brothers provided the necessary education and fostered the necessary ambition. For some reason, this section of the Dublin Catholic community never formed close links with the clergy – possibly a hangover from the anti-clericalism of the Parnellite days. Priests visited them only when they were sent for to administer the sacraments to the sick or the dying. They seemed to act on the Gaelic proverb: ‘Don’t be too close to or too distant from the clergy.’ These were the lower middle classes.

At the bottom of the heap were the have-nots of the city, consisting of labourers, dockers, coal heavers, shop attendants, messenger boys and domestic servants. Even those who had regular work were seldom far above the poverty line and very many were below it. There was no security of employment and great numbers of them had no work at all. They sent their children to the National Schools for as short a time as possible, and a great many emerged from these schools illiterate and remained so. Their housing conditions were as bad as the worst in Western Europe. They had scarcely any amusements outside the pubs or an occasional soccer match at Dalymount Park or Shelbourne Park. In summer they walked to the strands at Dalymount, the Shelly Banks, Sandymount and Merrion to bathe and sometimes went to Howth by tram or train on Sundays. Sometimes they went to the Phoenix Park to hear the band playing in the ‘Hollow’. They could not afford the price of entrance to the Zoo. They supplied the rank and file of the Dublin Fusiliers, known in the British Army as ‘the Dubs’, and kept Artane Industrial School supplied with pupils. They had no interest in and took no part in politics. Their main concern was to provide food and lodging for their children; they frequently failed to do either. Among them trachoma and rickets were endemic. They were religious on Sundays, and no matter how small their possessions there was always a statue of the Blessed Virgin, the Sacred Heart and perhaps the Infant of Prague on the mantelpiece. They accepted their misery as the will of God and in the certainty that their fortitude would be rewarded in the next life. They had abandoned hope in the here and now until Larkin, the great labour leader and agitator, emerged to proclaim the dignity of the working man. This was the working class, and there were among them subsects of destitution terminating in the ‘lumpen proletariat’ whose sign manual was rags.

Unlike the English or any other European class structure, the class structure of the Dublin Catholics was not based on birth. Few families were more than a couple of generations removed from peasant origins; even the rich Castle Catholics had country cousins and brothers tilling the soil and uncles and aunts milking the cows and feeding the hens. At any level, Dublin in the first decade of the century was probably the most pathetic and apathetic city in Europe. The slums kept on increasing and the poor got poorer and more degraded.

The effects, in cynicism and bitterness, of the Parnell split when the Catholic community was torn asunder had not wholly died and whatever little excitement the Boer War had provided diminished as the war drew to a close. The politicians had transferred their interest to the ‘floor of the house’ at Westminster and had succumbed to its absorptive qualities. Dublin became a very secondary place in which to seek power or prestige. The mass of the Catholics were as yet untouched by the Gaelic League or Sinn Féin; the voice of D.P. Moran, editor of the famous weekly nationalist paper TheLeader with its cry of ‘Irish Ireland’, was only beginning to be heard. There was no significant social consciousness in the community. The time had yet to come when the Lord Mayor of Dublin would say to a St Vincent de Paul Conference, ‘Someone has said “the poor always you have with you” but we know better.’ The better-off people at the top and in the middle of the heap regarded their prosperity as an outward sign of inward grace and were totally preoccupied with holding on to what they had.

I was born into the lower middle class of the Catholic population in number 42 Summerhill, in the Parish of St Mary, of which the Pro-Cathedral was the parish church. My mother had been born in the same house twenty-eight years earlier and my father in a house on George’s Quay, across the river. There were only two children in our family: myself and a brother who was five years younger. Summerhill was a street of decaying Georgian houses, dating from the 1780s. It must have been a beautiful thoroughfare at the time of the Union with Britain in 1801. The ground on which it was built was elevated and from the top windows of the house there was a fine view of the city over to Ballsbridge and Killiney. Immediately below the house was Joyce’s famous ‘Night-town’, known locally as ‘Monto’ or ‘the digs’. It was the red-light quarter, except that there were no red lights.

Number 42 was a typical Georgian house of five storeys. The basement held the kitchens and pantries and tiny rooms where the maids slept. The ‘area’, on the same level, had a cellar under the footpath containing a coal store. The coal was delivered through a hole in the footpath which was normally covered with a heavy cast-iron lid flush with the pavement. There were stables at the back. On the ground floor was a back and front parlour and return room, and on the first floor a back and front drawing room. Above the drawing-rooms were two bedrooms known as the ‘two-pair back’ and the ‘two-pair front’ and at the very top were another two rooms known as the ‘top-back’ and the ‘top-front’.

At this time Summerhill was quickly sinking into slums but the houses on either side of us were still occupied by families living over their shops. On the one side was a publican family named Byrne and on the other side was a grocer named Kavanagh. There were no children in either family and I saw little of them. In our house the return room had been made into a bathroom, although there was only a cold tap fitted to the bath. Hot water had to be brought up in pots from the kitchen. There was only one indoor lavatory, called the water closet, which served the whole house. Children were washed in a bath tub in the kitchen. Buildings such as this had once housed the legendary spacious life of Georgian Dublin, but that day had long since passed when I was born.

My grandfather, Christopher Moran, had been an Inspector in the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He married late in life and he and my grandmother rented number 42 Summerhill, where he died soon after his retirement, leaving four young children. My mother, Mary known always as Polly, then aged fifteen, was the eldest and there were three younger boys, Christy, Paddy and Simon. Faced with the prospect of bringing up a young family, my grandmother turned the front parlour into a dairy shop. The extensive yard and stables became a dairy yard where she kept cows, a horse and a delivery gig and a couple of pigs to dispose of the swill. My grandmother’s own people had been dairymen in Ballsbridge, so she knew the business well. My uncles, young as they were, started a milk round and milked and looked after the cows and churned the butter. They supplemented the milk supply by purchase at the lairage of Messrs Cuddy at the North Wall. In summer they rented pasturage for the cows at Raheny.

My grandmother was the moving force behind everything that happened in Summerhill. In appearance she was frail and slightly stooped, with wisps of greying hair about her face. She had prominent blue eyes which always seemed to be looking into the distance and gave her a worried and very sad expression. She had plenty to worry and to be sad about. She rarely smiled but was never angry.

She also took in lodgers, but the lodgers were all uncles or cousins or aunts from Wicklow or Wexford or, from time to time, nieces and nephews from Longford where her only sister had married and produced a large family. She kept up intimate contacts with her relations and those of her husband. She believed in the principle and the practical merits of the extended family, the old Irish idea of the deirbhfhine.

My father, Christopher Andrews, was a neighbour’s child, and he and his brother, Matthew, spent much of their boyhood and young manhood in Summerhill. They were motherless and their father, who was a house builder in a small way, was a violent, tyrannical man; his sons escaped from the harshness of their own home to the warmth and affection of Mrs Moran, my mother’s mother. In due course my father, Christopher, the older of the two Andrews boys, married Polly Moran. Later, the younger boy, Mattie, moved in as a lodger. In practice, the marriage and Mattie’s arrival meant only that there were two additional members of the Moran family and the routine of number 42 Summerhill remained undisturbed. The young married couple used the two-pair front – one enormous room – for their bedroom; for reading or sometimes entertaining their friends they used the drawing room which was also shared by any other member of the family who felt like using it. My parents and Uncle Mattie had their meals with the rest of the family in the kitchen. I shared my parents’ room until I was five, when my brother was born and I was moved up to the top back room.

In retrospect, life in Summerhill remains in my mind as something like a scaled-down version of Zoë Oldenburg’s account of daily life in the castle of an impoverished mediaeval baron. There was the same kind of comings and goings, of something constantly happening, of shortage of money, of the rough talk of men, of women sewing and stitching and cooking, of abundant food and continuous meals, of laughing and shouting and quarrelling, of horses, cattle, dogs and cats. Life was abundant and improvident.

When my father married into the family, the star lodger was a character known as ‘ould O’Brien’. He was a retired and wealthy publican and a bachelor. He was a first cousin of my grandmother and was a pillar of the Church. He left most of his money for Masses and the rest to his nephews and nieces, disappointing the expectations of my mother and my grandmother. My mother was supposed to be a great favourite of his but he left her nothing; the beneficiaries of the will, being decent Wexford people named Culleton, clubbed together and gave my mother a few hundred pounds. Several times later this money saved 42 Summerhill from disaster and the bailiffs. In addition to ‘ould O’Brien’ and an old aunt, Aunt Anne Moran, there were always nephews and nieces and cousins staying in the house for longer or shorter periods.

Just before I was born ‘ould O’Brien’ had died, well into his nineties, but Aunt Anne Moran was still there, as indeed she was when I had grown up. She was a first cousin of my grandfather Moran and her brother was Bishop of Dunedin in New Zealand. This latter connection gave her a special status in the household. She was a gloomy old lady and everyone had to keep quiet while she was around. This was seldom enough, as she had her meals in her room which was the back parlour. For the rest of the tribe the kitchen was the heart of the house. It was a very big kitchen with a great raised open fire, an oven and a wide hob. There were pot hooks and hangers and there was always a kettle on the boil. Tea was as readily avail-able as water. There was a screen in the kitchen on which were pasted cut-out illustrations from magazines depicting scenes from sporting life, mainly racing and boxing. My Uncle Simon had the instincts of a Corinthian and eventually made a moderately successful career as a professional punter. He was understood to be ‘delicate’, although in fact he was not, but he had not been required to go to school or to exert himself around the dairy.

On the kitchen walls was a graduated set of pewter dish covers, ranging from one large enough to cover a turkey to tiny ones for savouries. The small ones were never used because there never were any savouries. The meals were cooked before our eyes and there was always ‘lashins and lavins’. There was plenty of variety because all the country cousins brought us chickens and geese and at Easter there were eggs galore: hen eggs, duck eggs, goose eggs and turkey eggs.

At Christmas, the whole house was decorated with masses of holly and preparations began weeks in advance on the making of the pudding. It was a very big pudding and always made in a great black shining crock. My grandmother presided over the grating of the bread, the cleaning and stoning of the fruit, the chopping up of candied peel and the pouring of the stout. The pudding had to be mixed for days and everyone in the house took a turn in mixing – for luck. The pudding was cooked in a cloth and when it was finished had a thick skin coating. There was ham and spiced beef, turkey and goose for Christmas dinner. The turkey was stuffed with bread crumbs and sage and the goose was stuffed with potatoes. The turkey was roasted on a spit in front of the kitchen fire while the pudding was boiling on top of the fire and the goose cooking in the oven. The spit was set into a tall concave pewter-like stand and everyone helped to turn the spit and baste the turkey. The dairy boys and the servants ate in the kitchen when the family had finished and shared the same food.

The dairy boys and girls all seemed to be good-humoured in their work and acted like typical Dublin characters. When years afterwards my mother saw ThePloughandtheStars she said that Fluther Good had worked in ‘42’, as we always called it. Being, until I was nearly five years old, an only child, they made a pet of me in the dairy, letting me sit on the horse or feed the cows and pigs. The dairy boys made great play with the maid servants amid much giggling and tittering. I once found one of them with his hand up a girl’s skirt and it was not until he warned me not to mention what I had seen that I wondered what it was all about. If he had said nothing, I would not have noticed or remembered the incident. It was my first introduction to sex.

The servant girls, and there were always two or three around the place, were paid almost nothing because there was nothing to pay with, but they were well fed and could have food for their families.

It was around the yard that I acquired my first lessons in the use of the four-or even five-letter words, all of which I picked up without conscious effort, together with that commonest of Dublin swear words ‘Jaysus’. Like the Catechism, all the swearing was meaningless to me but I never forgot it. Brendan Behan, who was born many years later a few streets away, realized the full potential of the unchanging local argot as an art form and exploited it to shock or amuse the bourgeoisie. I too knew the argot well and in later years on many a boring and formal occasion I wished I had the nerve to follow my inclinations and do the same as Behan.

My grandmother was not a Dublin woman by birth. Her parents had originally been small farmers on the estate of the famous eighteenth-century buck, ‘Buck’ Whaley, near Wicklow. The family was evicted from their holding and it was said that her sister, Kate, had been born on the roadside as the family moved up to Dublin. They settled for a while in a basement in Harry Street, off Grafton Street, and started buying milk and re-selling it from door to door.

When they went to Ballsbridge their fortunes seem to have improved somewhat, because my grandmother and her sister had an education and a refinement of manner and speech and a vocabulary not usually found in people of their circumstance. They got something more than a primary education at the local Sisters of Charity and later attended an institution known as Paddy Mack’s Academy. It was run in a private house in Sandymount and, according to the family legend, the kitchen was the girls’ and the front parlour the boys’ classroom. Just before she married, my grandmother had intended to enter a convent but changed her mind, or her mind was changed for her by family pressure. I think she must always have had an unusually strong vocation and tried to live it out in the world. She was far too otherworldly to bring up a family successfully without a husband:

Despite her frail appearance, my grandmother had limitless physical energy. She rose every morning at 5.30 and went to six o’clock Mass at the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street. She worked unceasingly until bedtime, organizing meals, supervising the scalding of the crocks and churns for the butter-making, keeping accounts. Monday was washday and the washing was done in great pots and tubs, with everyone lending a hand at stirring the clothes and spreading them out on the line in the yard. Any spare moment she had was devoted to making patchwork quilts. Every bed in the house had one. She plucked fowl and kept the feathers for pillows and mattresses. She was the family doctor, with remedies for all ailments: Friars’ Balsam, Zambuk for cuts, horehound and honey for sore throats, Elliman’s Embrocation for sprains, bread and oatmeal poultices for boils and swellings, quinine for colds and camphorated oil and mustard baths after wettings, syrup of squills and senna tea for constipation, or Epsom salts in severe cases, and beef tea and calf’s-foot jelly for convalescence.

When I was a child, every mother of young children lived in constant dread and sometimes real terror of illness. If a child showed any sign of sickness, there were horrible imaginings of death from meningitis, pneumonia, lockjaw (tetanus), hydrophobia (rabies), scarlet fever and, above all, diphtheria. A sore throat threw the whole house into a panic that the child would be sent to the dreaded fever hospital in Cork Street. There was every reason for parental terror, because the mortality rate for children in the city was very high. In young manhood there was an equally well-founded fear of ‘consumption’ which, in addition to being deadly, was regarded as a rather shameful disease. Consumptives were concealed from the neighbours as much as possible, the concealment adding to the dangers of infection in the home.

My grandmother did not esteem doctors. Nutritious food (all food she described as ‘most nutritious’) in abundance, and prayer and miraculous medals and scapulars and holy water were for her the basic safeguards for good health. Indeed, doctors no less than priests counted very little in the day-to-day life of the family. We were not unusually healthy, but unless the illness appeared to be obviously fatal, my grandmother’s prescription together with the continuous family nursing was usually sufficient. Even if the illness was clearly terminal, the family rather than the doctor consoled and comforted the dying patient, making death less difficult to accept. Death itself brought the family closer and was not regarded as the end in any ultimate sense. The corpse was treated with as much respect and ceremony as if it were living.

If it is possible for one human being to possess the theological virtues of faith, hope, charity, and the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude, my grandmother possessed them. Outstandingly, she possessed charity, faith and fortitude. The loss of her husband and the death after prolonged illness of one of her sons, together with the many family disappointments which she had to endure, were borne without complaint and accepted as the will of God. To her the will of God was not an empty phrase, but the dominant reality to which she submitted in the certainty that she would be fully rewarded in the next life for her patient endurance of the vicissitudes and tribulations of this one. She lived until she was eighty-six and in her seventies she survived a bad bout of pneumonia, then usually a fatal complaint for old people. When she was convalescing she told me how disappointed she was at her recovery. She said that she thought Almighty God was at last going to call her to her eternal reward; but she supposed ‘He had his own designs and we had to be patient’.

The only books I ever saw her reading were her missal and the ImitationofChrist. She lived out the advice of Thomas à Kempis by placing such complete trust in God that she had no need for the comfort of men. One of her favourite sayings was from the Imitation: ‘Would to God that we might spend a single day really well’. She knew her Scriptures well and had many favourite quotations from them: ‘Every idle word that men shall speak they shall give an account of them.’ Not that there was any shortage of idle words in Summerhill. Another was ‘Wide is the gate and broad the way that leadeth to destruction.’ This was applied as a mild rebuke to some of the alcoholic excesses which were only too common in Summerhill. But her great virtue was charity. She was kind to everyone. My father and his brother, as young and motherless neighbours, were given the run of the house and were mothered and virtually reared by my grandmother. The Longford nephews and nieces and the Wicklow and Tullow cousins were always made more than welcome and there was neither fuss nor restraint on their comings and goings. She was uncensorious and for her they had no defects, only foibles. They loved coming to stay in Summerhill where living was so relaxed compared with the rigid and narrow life of the country where respectability was everything and people were constantly under the surveillance of their neighbours.

Except for going to the Chapel, my grandmother seldom left the house. (We always spoke of the ‘chapel’, never the ‘church’, however grand the edifice.) The use of the phrase ‘going to church’ would immediately identify the speaker as a Protestant, or at least as a Castle Catholic. My grandmother did, however, take me on my first visit to the zoo and she had great difficulty in keeping me out of the bear pit. I was only four years old at the time but I remember getting off the tram at Parkgate Street and seeing the soldiers in their red coats outside the Soldiers’ Home.

Considering that I rarely met and never mingled with Protestants and only saw them when they paraded on Sunday mornings in great style to Findlaters’ Church – the Presbyterian Church in Rutland Square – it is strange that from earliest childhood I seem to have been aware of their presence and influence in the community. I certainly did not get any of this feeling from my grandmother. She was incapable of expressing unkind feelings about anyone. There was only one Protestant couple living in Summerhill. They lived in the front and back parlour of one of the houses and the husband, who was a self-employed engraver, had his workshop in the basement. They were not very well off, but they were far above the poverty line; the Protestant charities saw to that. There were many poor Protestants in Dublin but never destitute Protestants.

I KNOW very few details about my father’s parents or grandparents but I know that my grandfather Andrews came from a small farming family at Ardcath, a village near Garristown on the Dublin-Meath border. In that locality, and indeed all over north Dublin and south Meath, Andrews is a common name. As soon as I could ride a bicycle, my father took me once or twice a year to see a Mrs Rath who had once kept house for John Andrews, my grandfather, and my father and his brother. We used to cycle up to Adamstown on Saturday, stay the night with Mrs Rath, and go to Mass in Garristown, and then we always paid a visit to the cemetery in Ardcath, where there are many Andrews gravestones. Christopher was the predominant Christian name among them. My father pointed out to me two tombstones close together in the corner of the ruined church at Ardcath. They both belonged, he told me, to our particular branch of the family. The datings on them brought the family back to the turn of the seventeenth century. The Andrews were certainly a long time in the area.

A friend of mine doing mediaeval research came across the following entry in the Irish Cartuleries of Llanthony:

Place: Ardcath. Date c. 1194–1210.

Name: Willelmus Andreas.

Grant of Osbertus de Butterley – 9 acres arable land lying between the land held by Willelmus Andreas and Ricardus Reffus.

Butterly, too, is still a common name in North Dublin.

My father, two brothers and a sister were born in number 16 George’s Quay, near Butt Bridge. The sister and one of the brothers died young. When the mother died, my grandfather moved across the Liffey to Empress Place, where he carried on a small business as a building contractor. He died a few months after I was born and, as far as I could learn, was not deeply regretted by his sons. Apparently he was a very rough and harsh man. He once hit and hurt my father and was never forgiven for it. When he died, my grandfather left a number of houses which he had built and owned in Clontarf, but they were mortgaged to the bank and the only thing my father seems to have inherited was a ‘Garde de vin’.

It was to escape from the harshness of Empress Place, which was around the corner from Summerhill, that my father as a young man sought refuge with Grandmother Moran. All his life he was devoted to her and she to him. He made up to her for so many of the disappointments of her own family. They had an unusually close relationship for a son-in-law and mother-in-law. When he moved to Terenure he visited her every Monday of his life bringing some small gift of fruit or cakes.

Uncle Mattie Andrews was like Esau, red and hairy. He was a bachelor and a man of regular and limited habits. Although a draughtsman by training (he was trained at Harland and Wolff’s in Belfast), he worked as a timekeeper in T. & C. Martin’s where he had the reputation of never being late or sick for the thirty years he was there. The Martins were different from the usual run of Dublin employers of their time. They took a personal interest in their employees, and when eventually Uncle Mattie fell ill and was unable to work for two years before he died, they continued to pay his wages.

Mattie was a gruff, rough man, who never spoke much and when he did, shouted. His only hobby was drinking, pursued exclusively at weekends. He paid my grandmother for his lodgings every Friday evening and between Friday and Monday he spent all that was left on drink. From Monday to Friday he was penniless and drinkless. His only exercise was to walk every morning to Martin’s at the North Wall and back again in the evening. He always went up to his room after his evening meal and I don’t know what he did there because, like Aunt Anne in the back parlour, he liked his privacy.

My father had been indentured to the auctioneering business for a five-year period of apprenticeship at Mr Bentley’s of Capel Street. Mr Bentley was what was known as a divisional auctioneer. His patent from the Lord Lieutenant authorized him to sell unredeemed pledges from pawnbrokers. There were only two others who had this authority: the City Swordbearer and the City Macebearer. These offices were sinecures and the holders farmed them out to working auctioneers. All pawnbrokers had to sell unredeemed pledges by virtue of these authorizations.

When Mr Bentley died my father applied to the Lord Lieutenant for the patent but, not being a Protestant, he had no chance of getting it; it was given to a Protestant fellow-worker in the office. For a time, my father continued to work for Bentley’s successor. In his will, Bentley left my father a legacy of £100 in recognition of his services. It was this small capital which enabled my father to leave Summerhill which, despite his affection for my grandmother, he found distasteful because of the drinking, disorder and general fecklessness there.

I was eight and a half years old when we left Summerhill and those early years left a lasting impression on me. It gave me a basis on which was built an awareness of the problems of poverty and the harsh constraints of working-class life in Dublin. It also gave me a deep attachment to the very stones of the city. I have travelled abroad a good deal and, invariably, after a few weeks’ absence from Dublin, I begin to hanker after it, and when, on returning from abroad, I reach College Green, I always get a sense of security and a feeling of being surrounded by friendly neighbours. All my life, it has been a pleasure for me to walk through the city – particularly on Sunday mornings.

I have only a few bad memories of my childhood in Summerhill. There often seemed to be a money crisis, particularly about the quarterly rent payments. Although I never met him, I knew the rent collector’s name was Mr Fenton. His coming on gale days always produced an argument between my mother and my Uncle Christy, who often spent the money reserved for the rent on something else. He would want her to dip into her little legacy, and this she always did after a feeble resistance. I understood the argument well enough to know that, if the rent was not paid, we might possibly be evicted and, young as I was, I knew what that meant. The dread of eviction was in the very bones of every Irish Catholic child from the famine days and indeed evictions were the common lot of the tenement dwellers around Summerhill. In Britain Street, Gardiner Street, Rutland Street or Cumberland Street on any day you were almost certain to see an eviction taking place, with all the household goods piled pitifully on the pavement and women and children crying amidst their sticks of furniture, their pots and pans and their mattresses. The bailiffs looked as miserable as the people they were evicting.

Despite the difficulties of raising the rent, there was seldom a Sunday evening in Summerhill that my uncles had not an impromptu party – men only – playing cards, poker or twenty-five, singing and, of course, drinking. I was always sent to bed on these occasions, but this did not prevent me hearing the snatches of songs from operas and ‘come-all-ye’s’, or seeing on a Monday morning the drawing room with empty stout bottles and whiskey glasses and spittoons full to overflowing and smelling the stale smell of beer and tobacco smoke. Spitting seemed to be a necessary adjunct to smoking and a full spittoon was a particularly unpleasant sight. Sometimes drinking or card parties were held in the kitchen and now and again an unfortunate ‘whiskey priest’, who appeared to be a crony of my Uncle Christy, would be seen with a glass in his hand, his back to the fire, singing ‘On Carrig Donn, the heath is brown’. To me priests were very remote beings and to see one at close quarters behaving in such an unbecoming manner left me with a permanent memory of the incident, song and all.

The front drawing-room, where the parties were held, was a big room with two tall windows. It was a well-lighted room and had a great marble mantelpiece with two brass candelabra on the mantel shelf and over it a tall gilt mirror reaching nearly to the ceiling. On each side of the mirror were gas brackets with ornamental globes over the gas mantels. A brass fender, a brass coal bucket and long brass fire irons brightened the room when, on special occasions, they were polished and the fire surround was blackleaded. There were heavy red velour curtains on the windows hung from wooden rails with wooden rings. They were very easy to swing to and fro and provided part of my childish amusement. There was an upright Collard and Collard piano with a swivelling piano stool in one corner of the room; in another a black horsehair-stuffed sofa, and at either side of the fireplace were horsehair armchairs to match the sofa. The carpet was flowered and rather worn but the outstanding feature of the room, from a child’s point of view, was a lionskin hearth rug with its maned head and yellow eyes and wide-open snarling mouth. Odd chairs, a glass chandelier and a what-not full of china, ivory ornaments and bric-à-brac, a heavy mahogany sideboard covered with odd pieces of electro-plate and what might or might not have been silver salvers and trays completed the furnishing of the room.

My parents kept aloof from my uncles’ parties and the noisy but generally light-hearted life in Summerhill. My mother looked on the life there with patient detachment and found her satisfaction in my father, myself and my brother and in an absorbing interest in clothes and a milder interest in music.

My mother was a tall woman with a Gibson-girl figure, of which I think she was very proud. She was not beautiful or even good-looking and her skin was far from perfect. There was no remedy to be found in cosmetics then. To use rouge or lipstick would have been regarded as the practice of a whore. But she had a great mass of light brown hair. I remember the colour because when I was old enough to be sent on messages I used to go to Clery’s store in O’Connell Street to buy her the light brown fringe nets which she always wore. She had beautiful hands and knew it, because she was always careful of them. She never went out in the street with ungloved hands (she would regard it as not respectable to be seen without gloves) and she had a great many pairs of gloves which she kept in a special drawer under tissue paper as well as glove stretchers which I used as toys. She had eyes that varied from light to very dark blue. When they were very light and fixed on you, you knew she was annoyed. It was the only sign she ever gave of anger. She never raised her voice for any reason and her usual mode of speech was as monosyllabic as was possible to convey her meaning. When she wanted to express disapproval or disgust, the inevitable exclamation was ‘sicken you’.

My mother approached everyone and everything with a not-so-gentle scepticism and she had little belief in the goodness of humanity. She had a disconcerting capacity to perceive people’s foibles, and I never found it worthwhile telling her a lie as she could always spot it immediately. She had a macabre sense of humour, and all the funeral rites and customs associated with death were to her a constant source of amused and sceptical comment. Her favourite speculation was as to the destiny of the late departed and how he would appear at the judgement seat to answer for some weakness she might have observed in him. She had none of the charity of her mother and even less of her mother’s spirituality. Her religious practices were the minimum necessary to retain her membership of the Church. She was not interested in politics and barely read the papers which, in our house, was difficult to avoid doing. She never read books. Her only reading was fashion magazines, of which she bought many. She had exceptional taste in clothes and a talent for making her own and wearing them with style.

In summer my mother went up town in ‘full fig’. As a child, I was unable to understand the expression, as I knew a fig was something you ate like a date. She had a feather boa which I enjoyed running through my fingers, but it was the muff and fur ties which she wore in winter that I most loved to touch. It was a big red muff lined with blue satin and, in addition to the pleasure I got from rubbing my face against it, the muff gave out the lovely smell of the scent which she always carried in a small bottle encased in a gold filigree cover.

My mother had no jewellery of any value, which is perhaps why she was not very interested in jewellery, but she had a collection of lockets and brooches, gold chains, cameos and a particularly beautiful half-hunter lady’s watch which is now being worn by her great-granddaughter.

She was meticulous in regard to the cleanliness of the house. She had a good sense of decoration. She liked music and played the piano fairly well and played it often. She still played at eighty years of age. At moments of crisis in the family she used say she got ‘sick in the stomach’ but never sick enough to be unable to cope. Her predominant passion was the welfare of myself and my brother, and on our comfort and convenience she concentrated the major efforts of her life. For our benefit she willingly deprived herself and my father of holidays, amusements or any possible luxury. She had never been further from Dublin than Wicklow and Tullow. Despite her closeness to her Longford aunts and cousins, she never got that far abroad. After her marriage she never left Dublin at all. She had one close woman friend, a milliner named Julia Forde, who visited her regularly, but for the rest, cousins and relatives were the only people she welcomed uncritically. I never saw any affectionate exchanges between her and my father; yet they were always together and she attended on him, as she did on us children, hand and foot. I never saw her show any emotion except once, when she realized that my father was about to die.

In Summerhill my mother would from time to time have a few friends in to a party, but it was a very different type of entertainment from the conviviality of my uncles. The day before the party was taken up with making cakes; my mother was an excellent pastry cook. The drawing-room was polished, which was no small task because of all the bits and pieces. I was allowed to join the party for a while before bedtime, but was always glad enough to leave as nobody paid any attention to me, being mostly preoccupied with whatever song they were about to sing: ‘The moon hath raised’, the ‘Soldiers’ Chorus’ or, for the comics, ‘At Trinity Church I met my doom’. My mother played the accompaniment for all the numbers.

The parties were always very genteel, with the best china out and no drinking or smoking and no spittoon. They broke up well in time for the last tram home. My mother had very high notions of gentility. Before her father died, when still only a child, she had been sent to the famous Academy of dancing and deportment in North Great George’s Street, run by a well-known ‘character’, Professor Maginni. Even by the standards of the time, Maginni was both egregious and ludicrous. Every afternoon he strolled up O’Connell Street in silk hat, morning coat, lavender waistcoat, striped trousers, silver-topped malacca cane and gold watch-chain. Added to this was his special way of walking. He slid along the pavements and all his body seemed to be in motion and in different directions, except his head. Any lady, and she had to be a lady or at least look like a lady, who caught his eye earned a wonderful salute, with the hat swept off and a bow from the waist. Professor Maginni was a great subject of Dublin ‘jeers’, and his eccentricities made him easy prey for popular derision. He was a ‘fantastic’ if ever there was one. In her pursuit of gentility, I expect my mother was an example of the common people of Ireland pulling themselves out of the gutter. I once asked her why she had not got any training which would enable her to earn an independent living and she told me that her father held the view that three brothers should be well able to support one sister.

Dublin has always given itself a reputation for wit. In fact the wit, as practised in Dublin, was and is essentially no better than ‘jeering’ and has its basis in envy and a desire to denigrate.

’Twas Irish humour wet and dry

Threw quicklime in Parnell’s eye.

Anyone who stands out from the crowd in the matter of behaviour, dress, interests and, above all, achievement, is fair game for the jeer. Visiting literary journalists are taken to McDaid’s, Davy Byrne’s or Neary’s and, with perception heightened by alcohol, they hear what they want to hear and the myth of Dublin wit is perpetuated. O’Casey‘s ‘Young Covey’ on ‘Uncle Peter’, Joyce’s Citizen on Bloom and George Moore on Edward Martyn and Yeats are good examples of the genre. I have lived all my life in Dublin and I have heard only two examples of genuine verbal wit, both from a well-known Dublin character. It is said that, asked by his wife how they should celebrate their wedding anniversary, he suggested two minutes’ silence; and it is to the same character that the description of the Gate and Abbey Theatres as ‘Sodom and Begorrah’ is attributed.

From time to time my Uncle Christy took me on his milk round, which extended out to Glasnevin. As far as the north side of the city went, he could have acted as a very successful courier if there had been any tourists in those days. From these trips I got to know the architectural landmarks of the north city. He was very proud of the buildings, particularly St George’s Church and the Rotunda Hospital, which he described as the best maternity hospital in the world. I don’t think his information as to the origin and style of the buildings was very accurate but it was sufficiently relevant to make a child feel that Dublin was a great city and that Mountjoy Square and Rutland Square were the loveliest squares and O’Connell Street was the widest street in the world – a claim frequently made in those days. I seem to have been born, too, with the belief that the Phoenix Park was the largest park in the world. It was from Uncle Christy that I got the information that Irish horses were the best in the world and that our soldiers, i.e. the Dublin Fusiliers, had won the Boer War. We always raised our caps passing Catholic churches, but when we passed Protestant churches, my uncle would invariably make some offensive remark about Protestants. The Black Church was particularly frightening to me for no other reason than that its stonework had turned black with city grime, suggesting the abode of the devil.

Gypsies, as distinct from tinkers, were to be found around the city and my uncle told me that they stole children, although why this was done was never explained; they seemed to have plenty of their own. The Parnell Monument was being built at the time and for the first time I heard his name and that of Kitty O’Shea and about some ill the English had done to him. A poorly dressed old man passed the time of day with my uncle and I was told, as if it was a great secret, that the man was ‘Skin the Goat’, the jarvey who drove the murderers when the Chief Secretary for Ireland and Burke, the Under-Secretary, were stabbed to death in Phoenix Park. I got a confused picture of Carey the Informer, Joe Brady, and a knife. ‘Skin the Goat’, whose real name was Fitzharris, lived in lower Rutland Street and whenever he passed, people nudged one another and said ‘there’s Skin the Goat’. I don’t think he was ostracized, but people were not too anxious to be seen talking to him. Despite all the hysterical public denunciation of the Park murders, the common people of Dublin hated the memory of Carey the Informer, who betrayed the conspirators, and had a not so sneaking admiration for Joe Brady, the youngest of the conspirators. My tribal prejudices were being created and the tribal folklore absorbed.

On these trips too, I picked up some of the more respectable slang of the city. At every street corner, where public houses were nearly always located, there was a group of idlers – idlers because there was no work available – who were known as corner boys. When they got drunk or quarrelled, they were called ‘bowises’. Every street had its groups of ragamuffins who never let anyone pass without making some jeering remark. ‘Eh, mister, where did you get the hat.’ My uncle referred to them as ‘towrags’ or ‘little gets’.

One day my Uncle Paddy was persuaded to take me to a relative in Drumcondra who was an amateur photographer. He had offered my mother to do a portrait of me. I did not want to go but nevertheless I was sent, whining and protesting all the way to Drumcondra bridge where I made my final stand, throwing myself on the ground in a violent tantrum. Trying to mollify such a brat in public must have been a very humiliating experience for Uncle Paddy. In a final effort to placate me, he offered me the only coin in his pocket, and probably the only coin he had in the world, which happened to be half a crown. I took the coin and threw it into the canal shouting that I did not want his ‘white money’. Fifteen pints or fifteen half whiskeys was what half a crown meant to my uncle. He must have had great restraint not to throw me in after the half crown. Nor did he drag me home to face an indignant mother but eventually persuaded me to go on and have the photograph taken. I have it still: a portrait of a surly, bad-tempered child. The story became part of the family folklore and I am sure my uncle recovered some of the lost pints and half-ones as he told the tale because he was a good storyteller.

Any Dubliner will be familiar with the expression ‘We always kept ourselves to ourselves’, meaning that the family is a cut above the neighbours and does not mix with them. In the first decade of the century every family that my parents were acquainted with seemed to have adopted that attitude; as a result I had no youngsters