Carefree Childhood Years

Growing up was fairly idyllic (in retrospect?). From the age of about 4 until aged 14 or 15 we were in Bettystown by the sea, about 30 miles north of Dublin, for the month of August.

From about the age of 10 or so, I played tennis most summer days both in Bettystown and at a local tennis club in Dublin.

I was also packed off, sometimes with Dermot, to mother’s place in Collon, County Louth, or to father’s place in County Limerick for two to three weeks at a time in the summer. I think these sojourns were probably designed to get us out from underfoot due to the the arrival of new siblings (Colm in May, Kevin in July and Miriam in August).

Limerick was a favourite destination. There was a ruined 16th-century castle attached to the O’Connor cottage which was a great play area for Dermot and me. Although the castle ruins still stand, the family cottage is long gone.

I also found there an 18th-century flintlock pistol hidden in the castle wall which I took back to Dublin and buried in the back garden. Some years later I dug it up, but only the metal barrel was left. The wooden stock had disintegrated. Boo. The ruin was called Clonshire Castle and I believe it can be Googled.

Another fun pursuit in Limerick was saving the hay. This involved people from around the vicinity coming to help build the mown hay into haycocks. Then a horse-drawn contraption came into the field, lowered a platform, the haycock was hauled onto it, it was raised, and the horse then set off, back to the farmyard. We also used to take the milk—after milking was finished—to the creamery in the nearby village of Adare in the mornings, by horse and cart!

My mother, a primary school teacher, would have been among the earliest teachers produced by the new state after Ireland’s independence was gained in 1922. Incidentally, she won first place in Ireland for a country-wide scholarship to higher education. In any event, she decided I would be educated through the Irish language. Schools which taught all the subjects in Irish were rare.

For primary school (‘52-‘58) I attended Scoil Colmcille in the center of Dublin city. For the first few years Daddy must have taken me by car. For the last few years I went solo, by bus. The only memory I have of the place was the daily fear of running afoul of a sadistic teacher (all laymen.) A bamboo cane was used liberally on the outstretched hands of the kids for incomplete lessons. I don’t believe there was ever misbehavior. None of the kids were my friends outside of school because none came from around the area where we lived. However, one of my classmates there, Michael Lillis, attracted some fame in later years when he was the Irish Government’s brains behind the successful negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland.

Near us there was a boy, Cyril Ryan, in a house whose garden jutted onto ours. We interacted a bit, but never really became friends. Also, three houses down from us, there was a boy, John, who was slightly older. Same story: We interacted, but never became friends. I think this all had something to do with us being scholastically oriented which was evidently a little unusual for the time and place. Certainly we had homework every evening. Also, as my brothers came along we had enough of us to play Cowboys and Indians in the back garden! But by 7 pm each evening we were washed and clustered around the radio in the dining room listening to a programme called Dan Dare. He was a space captain and his effect on us was as realistic as if Orson Welles was broadcasting The War of the Worlds. During my primary school years we had no phone and no TV, so we had no awareness of the outside world. Our lives revolved around home and school.

A central figure in our household was Mary Cassidy, a nanny who helped run the house while my mother was working as a school teacher. Mary was a true working-class Dubliner. She had very little education but had a heart of gold. She bathed us when we were little, saw that we were dressed, helped prepare meals and kept the house tidy. She must have been employed in the house for about 20 years and we continued to see her on and off after she moved on to factory jobs when Mammy retired.

One spinoff of my mother’s training to be a teacher was that she had other women friends who had a similar education. The kids in these families were judged to be very smart and inevitably our progress tended to be discreetly compared to theirs. One family had a string of boys who went to my high school. The one in my class always came first academically. He is an economist at the University of Chicago Business School. Another family lived a few streets away from us. For a brief period, I used to go and play with them. For whatever reason, they were into making pipe bombs… and very successful they were. Their daughter married one of those smart kids who subsequently became a senior ambassador in the Irish Foreign Service. The parents from this family were occasional bridge card players with my mom and dad in our house. The regular players tended to include a priest and another man who was an Irish language speaker. The bridge games were played once a week in the dining room, in front of the fireplace. When I was about 9 or so, a family bought a shop down the road one block from us. They had a son named Oliver and we hung out more or less continuously. Again, Oliver wasn’t school-minded, but he was good company, and we probably remained friends until I went overseas. Curiously enough, I googled him for this piece, and I found a death notice for his older sister, a nun, who passed in 2014. He was alive then, and apparently the father of two kids and maybe he might even have been a grandfather!

The end of Primary School years saw me, at my mother’s urging, sit an exam for a scholarship for a boarding high school down the country. There was no way I was going to be exiled, so I came a creditable third—when there were just two scholarships! After that, I sat an entrance exam to a Dublin high school and that’s where I spent the next five years.