More memories of Lindsay Road

More memories of Lindsay Road. Miss Laura Ferguson, who left in (I think) 1972 - she presented us all with the gift of a paperback book. I got "Tales of Science Fiction" which I still enjoy. When I was in 3rd Class I came first in the annual exams. I continued to come first right through primary and secondary (small classes, of course), which was probably most unfair on my sister. I remember getting a book voucher for something like 2/6 and having to go into Hodges Figgis to choose my prize - a book of ghost stories, including Oscar Wilde's Canterville Ghost. Miss Fullerton, Mrs McEvoy. I remember I used to prefer to write "poetry" than prose essays, but once wrote a silly story that had me and (I think) my class mates (but not the teacher) in stitches. I would love to have it now and see whether it was funny or just nonsense. I remember that our Irish reading book included religious stories, and what a revelation it was to me that the Bible could be told in Irish. I remember that Revd Mr Moran, the manager, died, and he was replaced by Revd Alan Martin, who had a long and distinguished ministry in Abbey Presbyterian, and was chaplain at Trinity when I went there many years later. Mr Martin introduced us to the story in Mark's Passion of the young man who escapes the soldiers by fleeing naked. We also had religion classes from Revd Cecil Faull of St George's, tall and loud, whose daughter Nicola was a dark beauty - or so it seemed to me. For a while we had an elocution teacher, whom I think was called Mr Moynihan. He taught us about dipthongs, worked on our Dublin accents, and organised plays that we made up ourselves. He held a sort of sale or auction one day, don't know why, and I ended up with a 45 rpm record of an old Eurovision entry, Ceol an Ghra. I remember learning "All Kinds of Everything" when the young Dana won; not to mention Edelweiss as Gaeilge. We had Irish dancing too, which I loved. Came in useful too, for we would occasionally go to ceili evenings in Abbey, when great fun was had with The Walls of Limerick or The Waves of Tory.

Perhaps it comes with being twins, or with being shy, but I think we were not great at socialising. I remember the excitement of going to a BIRTHDAY PARTY! Nowadays kids seem to be at parties every week; not so for us. A new Scottish family, David and Catherine Shevill, had come to the school, and we were all invited. I vaguely remember that the food was "different", and that we all got a special present of a bright shiny new halfpenny, penny and two-penny piece. Decimalisation had arrived; the old 1/2 d with its pig, the 1d with its chicken, the bunny on the 3d, the greyhound on the 6d, the horse on the half-crown, were no more.

Another exotic was the presence of a foreign boy, coffee-skinned, large, who wore a yellow jumper and so acquired the nickname "Hanna Banana". He would spend Irish time writing out his Arabic work-book.

It was a good school, and I was happy there. Then I became a chorister in St Patrick's, and we were both moved from Lindsay Road to complete 6th class in the Cathedral Choir School, in preparation for entry to the Grammar School. Our new school was no more than 10 minutes walk from Sweeney's Terrace.

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.

Of vicars choral

It was by accident I came upon the name of Faithful Tadpole. According to Barra Boydell, in his history of music at Christ Church Cathedral Dublin, Faithful and his brother John, sons of John senior, had been choristers in Christ Church in 1639. They had also, with their father, been paid by St Anne's Guild (the last chantry to survive the Reformation) to sing at service in St Audoen's church. During the Commonwealth the cathedral and its music ceased to function; John senior survived as parish clerk in St John the Evangelist's Church. At the Restoration in 1661 the choir was re-established. John senior was countertenor vicar choral, Faithful and John junior, bass vicar choral and stipendiary, respectively. Both brothers took Holy Orders, and as was customary at the time, both served in the choirs of the two Dublin cathedrals. Faithful rose to the illustrious rank of Succentor of St Patrick's, and he and John died in December 1669. They were buried within a few days of each other in the graveyard of St John's, near Christ Church, where the Civic Offices now stand. Tradition says this was also the burial place of Molly Malone, she of "Cockles and Mussels" fame.

I find a certain fellow-feeling with Faithful. I too grew up in this part of Dublin. My late father had attended St John's parish school, I presume in the late 1930s - 40s, when he lived in Castle Street. I entered the strange world of the Dublin cathedrals when our parish clergyman in St Luke's, The Coombe, The Revd Jerram Burrows, encouraged me to audition as a chorister of St Patrick's. I was nearly 11 years old (very late for a boy chorister) when Sydney Greig accepted me, and I was admitted a chorister on St Michael and All Angels' Day, 29th September 1974. It was the beginning of a long association, very formative for my later life.

Jerram Burrows came of a notable clerical family. He was tall and thin, with a very educated, clear, rather harsh voice. He had been headmaster of Cork Grammar School (now Ashton Comprehensive); returning to Dublin in semi-retirement he was in charge of St Luke's (which was closed in 1975), and also Succentor of St Patrick's. Traditionally that office had a connection with the cathedral schools; and Jerram loved to teach. I remember him as the one who gave me my first pay-packet as a chorister; 5 pence, the weekly stipend for a beginner, neatly enclosed in a little brown envelope. I also remember one Matins, when I had had a fit of giggling during the psalm; after service he reprimanded me and asked to know what had been so funny. I didn't feel I could tell him. The previous evening my mother and I had watched "The Agony and the Ecstasy" on the television - the film about Michaelangelo - in it the Pope had worn a very long cloak that covered his horse's rear-quarters, and my mother had speculated as to the likely outcome... The thought returned during Matins, but I didn't feel I could let my mother down.

Mr Burrows was a kindly man. His shape and reserve earned him the general nickname of "Poker". In our house, my aunt named him "The Lodger", after one Christmas season when he was very often at our table, in the course of some pastoral work with which my father was assisting him. He was married to Rachel, a very flamboyant, plump, actress; who scandalised everyone by never coming to church; when their grandchildren would come to stay at the Rectory on the South Circular Road, my sister and I might be asked to keep them company.

I remember too that he taught me how to pronounce the list of territories in the Epistle for Whitsunday - to this day I think of him when I hear "Parthians, Medes and Elamites". He was never afraid to discipline, he had a natural authority. When he discovered that I might be thinking of ordination, he tried to teach me ancient Greek, until he discovered that I didn't know any Latin.

He was well in his nineties when he died, having written my mother a letter of condolence on the death of my father in 1999, courteous to the last. It was a matter of great pride to me when, in 2007, I was installed as Succentor of St Patrick's, successor both to George Henry Jerram Burrows and to the Reverend Faithful Tadpole.