Rudd Pale Green, Light Orange

Bourgeois Ireland, 1930-50
1. Auflage 1993
ISBN: 978-1-84351-418-3
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

The only child of a middle-class Methodist couple in suburban Clontarf, Niall Rudd attended High School, Dublin, 1936-9, Methodist College, Belfast, 1939-46 (its ground floor sand-bagged, its windows permanently blacked out), and completed his studies at Trinity College, Dublin, 1946-50. Suspended between several worlds-a Protestant in north Dublin; sole Southerner among Ulster-Scots in wartime Belfast; holiday-maker in Ballymoney, Wexford, where 'the emergency' and petrol-rationing preserves an idyll of repose; and member of a College transformed by the unexpected cosmopolitanism of Allied-forces veterans-the author's astringent eye informs and illuminates throughout this delightful memoir. These worlds provide the background to a number of humorous, affectionate, and satiric, pen-sketches relations, school-masters, rugby-players, academics and others who people a carefully lit canvas. This young Irish scholar and sportman's rite-of-passage from adolescence to maturity is rendered in a work of delicate scrupulosity which recreates the unhurried atmosphere of mid-century Ireland, and reflects the self-interrogation of its citizenry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rudd, Niall

Leseproben

The sound of heavy engines filled the air until the house seemed to tremble. ‘Ma’am! Ma’am! Will ye come and look at the airship!’ It was Maggie’s voice coming up from outside the back door. My mother hurried down, and I dashed after her, just in time to see the huge cigar shape moving slowly across the houses of Clontarf and out into Dublin Bay. Records show that this was the ill-fated R101 on a trial run over Ireland on the morning of Monday 18 November 1929.1 I was then two years old and five months. The house was ‘Lissadell’, No. 13, Haddon Road, half-way up on the left. Far from having ‘great windows, open to the south’, like the Gore-Booths’ residence in Sligo, our Lissadell was a red-brick semi with a bay window and a small front garden fenced in with black iron railings. The only exotic feature was a tall, sad and rather grimy palm-tree that faced you as you came through the side-passage. Behind that was a greenhouse with the remains of a grape-vine, and then a medium-sized garden with a lilac, an apple-tree and, at the end, a rowan, which I used to climb. Beyond the lane at the back was old Mr Kennedy’s field; and sometimes the owner himself was to be seen, with hat, overcoat and a long staff, walking slowly around the field behind his cows.

‘Maggie’ was Maggie Gannon from Tullamore, some sixty miles west of Dublin. She was probably in her early thirties, but as far as I was concerned she belonged simply to the category of ‘grown-up’. She had a bedroom in the back of the house, reached by a separate staircase with high uncarpeted wooden steps. On one of my rare visits I noticed a gaily coloured jug and basin. On the wall was a picture of the crucified Christ, with a large sacred heart in the bottom left-hand corner. On the dressing-table stood a bottle of holy water that I got into trouble for spilling. Once a week, on her evening off, Maggie’s friend, Greta, would call to collect her; and then they would walk briskly down the road, looking very smart in their hats and gloves and high-heeled shoes. On other evenings I would often sit on the kitchen table while Maggie blacked the range or cleaned the silver. As she worked, she sang

There’s a little brown road winding over the hill,

To a little white cot by the sea,

And a little green gate at whose trellis I’ll wait,

While two eyes of blue come smilin’ through at me …

And if ever I’m left in this world all alone,

I shall wait for my call patientlee;

And if heaven be ki-ind, I shall wake there to fi-ind

Those two eyes of blue still smilin’ through aat mee.

This seemed to fit well enough with what I could gather from the teachings of Irish Methodism; and yet I knew that in some respects Maggie was different. She had that red heart and the holy water, and we didn’t. Moreover, she went to mass and confession. What was mass? And what did you have to confess? From time to time I wondered about such questions, but something told me it would be rude to ask her. Meanwhile Maggie continued to sing, and when I was about seven I began to accompany her on a melodeon which I had been given for Christmas. It was a poor return for all this artistic co-operation when one day I locked her in the pantry and tip-toed away to shrieks of ‘Ma’am!’. Later, much worse, I accidentally discharged a ·22 rifle in the playroom above the kitchen. Luckily the bullet simply went through the carpet and embedded itself in a joist, and no one knew anything about it. If nothing worse, it might easily have brought down a chunk of plaster on Maggie’s head, and then she would have complained vehemently to ‘the Master’.

‘The Master’ was not my father, but my maternal grandfather, Mr James H. Cooke. This old gentleman, now well on in his nineties, rented Lissadell from Mr Gore-Grimes, who used to come at regular intervals, dressed in a bowler hat and decent black, to discuss the maintenance of the property. Grandpa was born in 1841 in Gorey, Co. Wexford, into a family which had lived on the same farm continuously since 1630. Like the Websters, the Foleys, the Fiddlers, and some others, the Cookes had been brought over from Newbury in Berkshire when Bishop Ram acquired land in the area of Gorey and wanted some English yeomen to work it. The original farmhouse at Ballytegan seems to have lasted to the end of the eighteenth century. All that remains of it now is a pile of stones. The present building dates from that time, but was extended and renovated in the 1940s. One piece of family history concerns the rising of 1798, in which Co. Wexford was bitterly involved. A certain Father Stafford, who was being pursued by the authorities, took refuge in Ballytegan. The Cookes hid him and then provided a white horse for his escape. Before long, the situation was reversed. As the rebels closed in, the Cookes had to vacate their home and flee to Arklow. When eventually they returned, nothing had been touched, not even a jug of cream in the dairy. Hence the family tradition that there should always be a white horse at Ballytegan.

While still a boy, James Cooke was apprenticed to a draper’s shop in West Street, Drogheda. To get there he had to walk behind a cart to Greystones, where the railway began, about twenty miles south of Dublin. Over the next ten or twelve years he must have applied himself to other things as well as his trade; for he succeeded in marrying Miss Alice Davis, the boss’s daughter, and thus entering the Victorian commercial middle class. Not all can have gone smoothly. In my time there were stories of how the Hibernian Lace Company had been formed in partnership with the rascally Mr Andrews, who later absconded with the company’s funds. But Grandpa must have recovered reasonably well. When I remember him he had long been a director of Arnotts; he had shares in the railways when they were worth having; and he had sufficient money to give his eldest daughter a house, round the corner in Victoria Road, as a wedding present.

James Cooke in his nineties was a small round jovial man with a fringe of white hair, clear blue eyes, and a set of flashing dentures. Considering that he had to have a weekly injection of insulin, he remained remarkably fit. Every Saturday he would watch rugby in Clontarf; on Sundays he attended the Methodist church at the bottom of St Lawrence Road; and on other days, when he didn’t go into town, he would wander down to a garden seat on the sea front, which had been installed there for him by the flamboyant and energetic mayor, Alfie Byrne (for cartoons, see Dublin Opinion for the 1930s and 1940s passim). There he would engage passers-by, telling them stories about Wexford life in the years of the fam-ine, and about ‘Drogheda’, which he always pronounced with three syllables to sound almost like Drockeda. Like many people with an oral rather than a literary education, he had an excellent memory, and he would tell his stories with an almost formulaic accuracy. Some had the timelessness of folk-tales, like the one which concluded, ‘He remembered the fine gold ring he’d seen on her finger as she lay in the coffin. So he said to himself “Wouldn’t it be a shame, now, for a grand bit of gold like that to lie with her in the tomb to the last trumpet, when I could be getting a few good pounds for it from Orgel the jeweller?” So he waited till dusk, and then took a lamp and went down into the vault. He had opened the coffin and was coaxing the ring off, when all of a sudden didn’t the woman herself sit up? He dropped the lamp and ran out into the street, howlin’ like a dog. And he was never seen again.’

Grandpa always wore a grey suit with a short tailcoat; a gold watch-chain hung in a loop across his tummy. In bad weather he would strap on a pair of shiny black leggings – at least when I first knew him. Later he abandoned the leggings, but he never wore shoes – always a pair of black boots, which I would remove, easing them off his swollen feet when he slumped into his armchair before the fire. Not that I was always the dutiful grandson. Once someone gave me a joke knife with a blade which retracted into the handle. Without considering the effect on a nonagenarian, I crawled silently up beside his chair, rose on my knees, and brought it down with a yell on the rounded belly. Then, with a mixture of guilt and excitement, I leaned back to watch as the old man nearly shot out of the chair.

‘Jamesie’, as he was disrespectfully called by his daughters (behind his back), was a gentle, long-suffering character; and (presumably ever since those early days in Drogheda) he had been dominated by his strong-minded wife. Alice, as she was called, died in 1936 at the age of eighty-six. Slim and straight, with her white hair gathered in a bun, she completely ignored the changing fashions, climbing onto tramcars wearing a bonnet and a long brown satin dress with a full skirt, much embroidered. My father, who lived in the house perforce, because my mother accepted the duty of nursing her parents, never much liked his mother-in-law. He once told me sotto voce, ‘The old lady can be damned cantankerous. This morning she turned poor old Jamesie out of the W.C.’ Still, my grandparents stayed together, as of course one did in those days, and in 1938 James H. duly joined his wife in St Fintan’s graveyard on the side of Howth hill, looking south across Dublin Bay. A baptismal font was placed in the church in their memory with the simple inscription, ‘They served their day and generation’.

By the mid-1930s cars were becoming quite numerous. But there was still a...