Early Days on the North Side

My twin sister and I were born a week before Christmas in 1963. We were a month premature, so we stayed in the Rotunda for some time. I was a puny little thing of 3lb something; although apparently I was "a very hungry baby" and soon became plump. There is a black and white picture of the pair of us, me blond and chubby, sister dark and petite. Apparently I once bit her.

My father named her "Catherine Doris", Doris for my mother, Catherine because he fancied it - I'm not sure she does. My mother named me "David William" - William for her late father, David because it was Christmas, and "Once in Royal David's city" was in her head. It could have been worse, I suppose.

We lived in a self-contained flat in 5, Berkeley Street, Dublin 7, just down from the Mater Hospital. There was the two of us, our parents, and Granny Smith, my mother's mother. Granny had one of the bedrooms, the rest of us shared the other. We had bunk-beds; I was on top, and at least twice managed to fall from the bed in the middle of the night. I don't remember much of the flat; a square table with a table-cloth; some rather square dining chairs; and of course the small bathroom which we contrived to flood with water one afternoon. "They were very quiet," said my mother, "I knew they were up to no good".

My father worked as a clerk in Huet Bros of Strand Street, dealing in motorcycle bits. He was out all day; when he came home he would play with us, having a great ability to make teddy bears come to life. Mine was a little yellow bear, Baby Ted; his stuffing was coming out through a hole in his neck, and his nose had been bitten off and replaced in satin stitch. He was later joined by a bigger bear, Bluey, and a very little animal, Fluffy. My sister had a pink rabbit, Pinky, and a doll called Doris. Sometimes Dad would take us to the paper-shop on the corner of Nelson Street to get comics.

Mother and Granny ran the house. They were both English; very evident in the case of Granny, not really in the case of Mother, who was essentially a Liberties girl. They never had a washing-machine, or a dish-washer, or an electric iron; we had the old-fashioned irons heated on the stove, and old-fashioned stone hot water jars which burned the feet. Granny was always at work; Sunlight soap for washing clothes; Andrews' Liver Salts for her "bilious attacks"; and a very good way with a steak and kidney pie. Or perhaps a milk pudding, done in the oven, so that we could squabble about who got to scrape the crunchy bits off the enamel dish.

Granny was a "bad traveller". Trams had been bearable, but buses and cars were impossible - sick everytime. When she had made the sea journey over from England in the late 1920s, it had nearly finished her off. So she walked everywhere, and so did we, or at the least were pushed in our twin pushchair. So we became acquainted with our neighbourhood; Mr Hand's shop in Blessington Street, where we were sometimes sent on messages; Mountjoy Motorcycles across the road from us (it was in later years that I discovered that the Barretts were our landlords, when Ernie was a parishioner of mine in Santry). Then there was the Duck Pond, the Blessington Street Basin, which we used to cut through to Blackquire Bridge, where our aunt had been to school. That was on the way up to Cross Guns Bridge on the canal. We often visited the Botanic Gardens - there was some film footage taken by English cousin Roger of us learning to walk in the Gardens. Sometimes we would be lucky enough to get an ice-cream outside the park gate; but as far as we were concerned, Dublin stopped there. Finglas and Ballymun we had never heard of, much less visited. On other occasions we would get the bus (no 10 or 14) along the North Circular Road, past the cattle market, to the Phoenix Park to visit the zoo. It was a rather different place then, the enclosures were smaller and more tatty. One time we were allowed to hold a baby lion cub, but he was very bony - we weren't used to cats or dogs.

One place that we didn't enter on our travels was St Joseph's Church on Berkeley Road, because we were protestant. It remained an unknown quantity; and I remember once dreaming of finding myself in a Catholic church, with processions coming from all directions, and not knowing which way to turn. Our local church was St Augustine's by Mountjoy Jail (long since demolished and turned into a Cash-and-Carry). On the morning of our christening we arrived at St Augustine's to discover that the service was to be in the main parish church, St George's. Hasty dash along the North Circular. Revd (Canon?) Kerr was the Rector, and I believe it was a Girls' Brigade Parade Service, who were delighted by the adorable twins... I think the next time I was in St George's was when it was closed, because the family decided to return to my mother's home parish of St Luke's The Coombe. Revd CAB Williams was the Evangelical rector, who used to visit us with tubes of Smarties on our birthday. He died not so long ago, nearly 100 years old.

It was quite a long way from Berkeley Street to the Coombe, and I'm not sure how often we travelled it. I do remember we went south every Friday to shop in Francis Street, where there was a dairy that sold farmhouse butter, cut as you waited from an enormous block. (Margarine was regarded as an abomination, a sign not so much of poverty as degradation.) It was the area in which my mother had grown up, and I think she was relieved when we eventually left Berkeley Street to live in Sweeney's Terrace in the Tenters, just round the corner from St Luke's.

We lived on the North side for long enough for us to start school there, in Lindsay Road in Glasnevin. It was a Presbyterian establishment, three teachers. Our first teacher was Miss Reid. She seemed very old and a bit cross. It was our first experience of school, no nursery schools or play schools then. I presume like many Irish schools of the 1960s, it was in transition from a past of ink-wells, Gaelic script, and open fire heating, to new ideas of marla (plasticine), coloured sticks and counters for learning numbers, and flannel-boards for doing Irish comhra. The pictures became adhesive with bits of sandpaper stuck to their backs with a paste that came in a plastic tub with a spatula on the lid; it smelled of almonds (I thought) - most appetising.

Miss Reid could play the piano, and she taught us to sing hymns. I remember learning "Guide me, O thou great Jehovah" and "Jesus shall reign"; hardly kids' hymns, but great tunes, and still favourites of mine. Irish phrases were quite normal in school, and discipline still employed the bamboo cane. When I met up with Miss Reid in later life, she was a bit upset that my most vivid memory was of being beaten for persistent refusal to sit still. But it was a memory, not a resentment. I really enjoyed school, there was so much to learn.

When we moved to the south side, when we were about seven or eight, Miss Reid used to collect us and bring us to school and back. She lived in Kenilworth Square, and drove a black Morris Minor. She was trying to give up cigarettes, so there was always a Wrigley's chewing gum available. We had no car at home, so this was very exciting; and I retain pleasant memories of the smell of the car, and the dashboard with its little lights - much less elaborate than cars today - and occasionally playing with the horn and getting into trouble. One time, driving through Doyle's Corner, I ventured to ask what was in the lorry ahead of us; "Some people would say manure," says she, "but it's really shit". When she retired, we had to travel over on the 19 bus from Leonard's Corner; or (once in a bus strike) walk to school up Church Street and Phibsborough Road.