Rory & Ita (29 page)

‘W
e walked up the road and opened the door and Breda, my sister, was waiting for us. She’d been sent out by my mother, with a big bag of food, all sorts of groceries. And she had the fire lighting; it was very pleasant – that was our first image.

‘We’d no curtains. There was nothing on the kitchen floor. The walls were bare. We were thinking about things, learning over the weeks, what we had to do. I knew nothing about how a household was run. At home, I’d just walked in and out, and saw nothing. I think I had a hammer, some kind of an old saw, and a shovel for the fireplace. Somebody had thought to put a couple of light bulbs into the bag from Tallaght; I’d never have thought of that. But we just felt excited – here we were.

‘The next day, I got the saw and I cut down a young sally tree in the ditch at the edge of Kilbarrack Lane. I dug a hole in the back garden with the fire shovel, planted the sally tree and attached a rope between it and the downpipe of the house. I knew a house had to have a clothesline. Ita was in business; she now had a clothesline.

‘We had a jungle out the back. It was just grass growing and growing, and bits of concrete and brick around the place. I bought a fork and a spade and I proceeded to dig the garden
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and, in doing that, got to know the
next-door neighbours. How to dig, what to plant – all very important matters, and discussed over the garden fence. During that first week, I was taking my ease in the garden – I’d nothing else to do – when I noticed the clothes flapping on the line. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. It was an hilarious moment in my life, when I realised that I’d never seen women’s underwear on a clothesline at home.

‘One of the first things we discovered, as autumn changed to winter, was that there were some awful draughts, as the house dried out, from under the skirting boards. So we spent the first winter in dressing gowns, in front of the fire. Then we discovered that packing wet newspaper under the skirting boards was very effective, and stopped the draughts. We also discovered draught excluders, for the doors, and other little domestic things like that. And we discovered that the easiest way to keep warm was to go to bed early, with the radio. On Sundays, we listened to Radio Luxemburg; it was very entertaining. The programmes were paid for by the various religious persuasions, in America, and a preacher would make a sermon – “You are saved!” and then they’d sing a hymn –
Old Pharaoh thought it was all a joke/And he went out without his cloak/And if he did he sure got soaked/My! Didn’t it rain!
It was marvellous.
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And, now and again, Helena or Harry Arnold from next door would drop a copy of the
News of the World
in the bedroom
window. Harry knew someone who worked on the boat to England, and one of the most exciting things was that you could get your hands on the
News of the World
. It was banned here. All the misdemeanours of the vicars and scoutmasters – it was bad enough then too.

‘And then there was the wallpapering; that was a job. While I’d seen it happen, I’d never actually hung a sheet of wallpaper before. There was the measuring, cutting, pasting, folding, and then sticking it to the wall. The wet paper often ended up around my neck. We got an allowance for wallpaper, from the builder; if you wanted fancy stuff you paid the difference. We picked the best wallpaper for the sitting-room, the room we ended up using least of all. A kitchen table, a sweeping brush, and dozens of items we took for granted in other people’s houses; we built up the home as we went along.

‘On the day after we arrived, or the next day, we were going for a walk, and I met a man I knew from the School of Art, Harry Burton, a very good artist. He was living down the road, with the Mays, and he introduced us to Ena and Barney. Their next-door neighbours were Leo and Sheila Mulvaney. Then we discovered that we had Scottish people on the other side of us, the Winks, and they had a young boy and a little girl.’
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Gradually, when children came along, we got to know who the other people along the road were, and in the houses behind us. And the Mays started to organise a few parties. Ena was a pretty, dark-haired woman and was very convivial. We were invited, and great fun was had by
everybody. And then others, including ourselves, threw a party – numerous bottles of stout, a bottle of whiskey, probably a bottle of gin, some tonic; that made a party in those days. Sandwiches and suchlike. You’d be broke for six months afterwards. There’d be singing and dancing. Harry Burton played his banjolele and also did a wonderful monologue on the piano. Ena and Barney knew quite a number of artistic, theatrical people. Her cousin was a well-known soprano, Louise Studley. We had Tom Round,
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the Welsh tenor, who was singing in concerts in Dublin; he came to one of the parties. And a few dancers; we had Des Domigan, who taught ballet. He put on a show – but half the people at the party didn’t appreciate men carrying on like that. He was dressed up in tights, and all the rest. We were too innocent to realise that he was leaning towards the left wing, or however you want to describe it. We had Joe Lynch,
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and Eamon Keane
^‡
– he was a highly talented man. He was inclined to get overcome with alcohol, and he’d be carted off and put behind the sofa, to sleep it off till the next morning. Listening to Harry playing the banjolele, I thought I’d like a banjo; I don’t know why. I knew nothing about music, except that I could play musical instruments by ear, like my father and my brothers. So I bought a banjo in McNeal’s, in Capel Street, and I took the banjo home and I fiddled around with it, got a book on how to play it, and got great enjoyment out
of it. My cousin, Vi, gave me a banjo that had belonged to her husband, Billy; he’d bought it many years before, in the 1920s, when the banjo bands broke out all over the musical world. I also bought a guitar afterwards. But I did like playing that banjo; I love banjo music.
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‘The nearest pub was in Baldoyle, or away up in Raheny. So, to go out and get a drink, as I’d been accustomed to do in my single days, I’d have to go to a considerable amount of trouble. And I discovered that I couldn’t just go in and ask for a bottle of stout; you’d be met with “What are you having?” and you were immediately into a round. So I came to a decision, and kept to it for the twenty-five years or more that I couldn’t afford to go out drinking: I just stopped going to pubs. The money was needed at home. I never had a local. It was no inconvenience; I didn’t want to go.

‘Life was different; the whole thing was totally different. I was living in a house with a huge amount of space, with just one other person, having been used to hordes of people all around me. I had a bed that I knew was my own, the same bed every night – that was a change. Ita’s sister, Máire, and her husband, Jimmy, gave us the wireless as a wedding present. It was the quality of the sound, and the programmes; I could never hear them properly at home, either because everybody was talking or it would get on my mother’s nerves and she’d switch it off, just like that, in the middle of a programme. So, now we had uninterrupted radio; that was great, such a wide selection of song and music.

‘I hadn’t the slightest idea about the rhythms of women. But I was informed that there was a baby on the way. I didn’t say, “How did that happen?” but I had only a vague idea; this was real life and not schoolyard theory. It didn’t occur to me that this was an unusual occurrence; I just took it for granted. We just accepted: “That’s that; here we are.” We expected that something like this would happen. We didn’t discuss it. We were going to have a baby – that was it. But it was good news. We went off to Dr Chapman, in Sutton, to ensure that Ita was medically alright. And then Aideen was born; that was the extraordinary part – there was no intermediate period. Suddenly, we had to buy a pram.’

‘The house was in the City of Dublin but across the road was County Dublin. We went out the gate, and we were in a field that dropped down to the ditch, a great big ditch that flooded every time there was a shower of rain. And then the road was about forty or fifty yards from the house. Our houses were built in a straight line, anticipating the new road. And Kilbarrack Lane meandered. Jack Flood’s farm was across the road. The field got muddier with use, for twelve months or more. But we didn’t look on it as hardship. I got my bicycle out, past the mucky part, got up on it and went to work. I cycled in for the best part of the year. But when it came to the winter, I realised that, while the force of the wind coming down from the mountains above Tallaght would sometimes bring you to a standstill, it was nothing like the wind that came off the sea, when you were trying to cycle the seven miles into Dublin. So I took the train, and trotted up Talbot Street, into Middle Abbey Street, and that was fine. I was still on the day shift, and I did
Saturday night work, for the Sunday paper – at least four hours’ double time, and call money. The whole lot made up a handsome sum.

‘In 1952, we got into an industrial relationship problem – we went on strike, in other words. And we stayed out for about seven weeks. All we had was the £5 a week strike pay. In all that, the mortgage had to be paid, and we had to live. And again, my mother came to the rescue with a bag of groceries, every week, including two ounces of tobacco.
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It helped us through. To give you an idea of what was at stake: we refused an offer of twelve-and-six a week rise and settled, after seven weeks, for fifteen shillings a week.
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I was in favour of the strike, because I’d never been on strike before, and I never really knew anyone who had been. Everybody has a strike in them, or should. Because you learn a lot. I learned, shortly and very clearly, the difference between strong opinions and real principle, between what was desirable and what was available. A lot of the people who were shouting loudest for a strike all disappeared and got jobs – knew where to get jobs in England – and the rest of us were just busy looking at ourselves, because there was no picketing; it wasn’t necessary. It cured me of my uncritical militancy, although I’ve always been a member of a trade union, and I helped organise one as well.

‘I saw an ad in the paper, just after the strike, for a temporary whole-time teacher in the School of Printing, in Bolton Street. I said, “I’d like that,” and Ita was in agreement. The logical step from being a tradesman was to be a foreman. I didn’t think I’d like that kind of job. But to be a teacher was something I wanted. I didn’t see it in blue-collar, white-collar terms. It never crossed my mind. Those terms weren’t used; they came across from America, I suppose, but we didn’t have them then. You always went to work in Dublin with a collar and tie; you set out respectably dressed. But teaching was a step up, and something I felt I could do. It would, eventually, be a better job, and an advance on working as a compositor, although I had difficulty with the money. I got less at first; I went from about £13 a week, down to £10. But we decided to take the hit. It took me a few years to catch up. But it wasn’t for the money I became a teacher; I just liked the job. I never regretted it.

‘But it was hard-going, financially. If Ita managed to have the price of a threepenny bar of Cadbury’s at the end of the week, she thought she was in absolute luxury. And there were bills that came along – the rates bill, which shook us; we’d never had to face that before. There was a particularly loud-mouthed rate collector, the lowest form of human being, a slob. He’d come to the door and abuse you if you were a bit late.
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Because he was on commission. And ground rent
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was £15 a
year; that was nearly two weeks’ wages. I paid it and begrudged it. And the income tax never went away.

‘I was the only man in Ireland qualified for the job, so I got it by default. There was no one else. Most of my fellow apprentices never bothered to do the technical examination. I did. So I started as a temporary whole-time teacher, not permanent, not pensionable, but I took my chances. And then, I was caught up in a bit of difficulty. I had to do an Irish test. And the man who was examining me was Dr P. Ó’Súilleabháin, from the Department of Education. He was known as
An Dochtúir.
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He was a dreadful bloody bully. When it came to the oral test, I wasn’t doing too well, and he said, “What is this at all? Sure, any of the labouring men down in Connemara can speak Irish.” So I said, “Why don’t you get them to teach printing?” At that, he hit the table a belt of his fist, nearly broke it, and I was thrown out. And I got a notification that I wasn’t being re-appointed. So I went in the next day anyway, I just took it upon myself to go in, and I met Donal O’Dwyer, the Head of the College and a gentleman, and he said, “Mr Doyle, I thought you might have got some bad news.” So I said, “The only really bad news would be if I couldn’t get another job, and I’d have no difficulty there. I just want to see about this teaching post.” I was fairly certain that if I went back to the
Independent
they’d give me the job again; I wasn’t too worried about that, but I preferred being a teacher. So he asked me into his office, and the head of the printing school, Bill Fitzpatrick, was there, very annoyed at the idea that I wasn’t being re-appointed. He was also annoyed about the difficulty he’d have in
getting a new teacher. The school was specialist, unique, and there was no pool of teachers. So, they got on to the CEO, the Chief Executive Officer, at the headquarters of the Dublin Vocational Education Committee, the VEC, and he said I wouldn’t be re-appointed. So, I said, “OK,” and went down to the union headquarters, the Dublin Typographical Society, where the Secretary was Billy Whelan, who also happened to be a member of the Dublin Vocational Education Committee. So, Billy says, “I’ll see to that.” And he phoned the CEO. He said, “Martin, we have a problem here. One of my men is being flung out.” So the CEO, said that these were the rules and regulations. And Billy said, “The way it is, Martin, if you don’t like my man who is going to do the teaching, you’re not going to have any apprentices.” So, the CEO said, “What do you mean?” And Billy said, “The apprentices are sent to the school by their employers to learn printing, not fuckin’ Irish. My man is fully qualified to teach printing, and if that man isn’t reinstated, you won’t have any apprentices next Monday. So, make your mind up, Martin.” So, the CEO said, “Leave it to me,” and he came back in about half an hour and said that the Department of Education had decided that I should be temporarily re-appointed for another year. So, I was back again and, in the meantime,
An Dochtúir
retired and a decent man named O’Flanagan became the chief inspector. He came to the school, and I had done some translation of the printing terms into Irish, and he asked me a few questions in Irish, and I answered him in Irish. And then I was required to give a small demonstration of teaching in front of the class. And before O’Flanagan came in, I told the class that this was a demonstration on how the Irish language could be used for teaching
printing: “So, when I ask you a question in Irish, just answer it in Irish.” One of the lads said, “Suppose if I answer with another question?” And I said, “If you do, I’ll break your fuckin’ neck;” it shocked both myself and the class. So, he didn’t ask a question, and O’Flanagan said,
“Tá go maith;
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very good,” and gave me
An Ceird Teastais,
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permission to teach in the vocational services, guaranteeing that I could teach through the medium of Irish. So, I was then made permanent and pensionable. I’d already been teaching for three years.’