The Question and The Answer
2
THE TOWN
I have two maps of the town, one of then and one of now. No resemblance,
except for the centre. Even that has changed somewhat. On the perimeter,
total change. What once were green fields is now suburbia. It was a town
of about 5000 people. Now almost three times bigger. In physical size even
larger. Have all country towns grown like that? Some. Most, I’d say,
not.
How many “real” Ennis people are there as opposed to “
blow-ins”? At one time we were all “blow-ins”. Is it important
whether you are or are not? This magical place called Dublin is comprised
of “blow-ins” from time immemorial. So what’s the difference
between Dublin and Ennis in that respect? None.
Lets start at the centre. O’Connell Square, with its Statue to the
Liberator on its column. It seems pretty much the same. One or two changes
of occupancy of buildings; what used to be a public house, now a guesthouse
for American tourists. The First National Building Society. In those days
there was no such thing. If there was it would be up in that faraway place.
People didn’t own their houses. They rented them. If they owned them,
they had money. They were kind of few and far between. If not they were
in a position to borrow from the banks. Not many were in that position.
The only changes that I could see last time home, in O’Connell Street,
were changes in the ownership of shops. New names, names I never knew. Smarter
establishments. What’s this though? The cinema has gone. It’s
now an entrance to a Supermarket at the rear.
The Gaiety Cinema. House of Hollywood celluloid dreams. Every Sunday
night my friend and I went religiously to the nine-to-eleven show. We tendered
our half crowns to the grey-haired, bespectacled Miss Boland, cashier and
proprieteress. Seated regally in her glass box, she was of another world.
The cinema had this curious perfumed odour.
We gave our tickets to the portly moustachioed Major Domo, Mr. Fitzgerald,
and climbed the carpeted stairs to the balcony. In our plush seats we lounged,
smoking, and gazed longingly at those unattainable Convent girls. Every
Sunday night, the music from behind the curtained screen, was “Musettes
Song” from “La Boheme”. The Orchestra with its sobbing, throbbing
violins soared. We were in our seventh heaven.
The house lights dimmed. The curtains parted. The music died away to
a whisper. The melody lingers on. Sad and bittersweet. Part of growing up.
The eternal ache of youth.
Well, now it is an entrance to a Supermarket. There were no such things
as Supermarkets then. Even up in the faraway place. Not even in the land
of celluloid dreams. Further up the street the Town Hall with its fleapit
cinema is gone. No self-respecting person went there. The side entrance
to the Hotel bar is still there. Many stories were told about that side
door. The Hotel is bigger and grander. The extension was the year after
the Dream came true. The Pro Cathedral is there, naturally. That, the Bishop,
and the Diocesan College gave the town some of its reasons for pretensions.
At the top of the street, Darcy’s combined Public House and Bus Station
are gone.
O’Connell Square, the hub of the town has four streets radiating
off it. O’Connell Street, I dealt with, Abbey Street, Parnell Street,
and Bank Place. All other streets are on the periphery. Not an awful lot
you’d say. Right, but that was our world.
Abbey Street. Pretty much the same. New names. Smarter shops. The Queens
hotel is still there, modernised with a big extension. Carmody’s hotel
opposite is gone. Carmody’s. Where Parnell spoke from an upstairs window
to Land leaguers. Where Joyce’s Leopold Blooms father committed suicide.
It was fittingly enough demolished, after an upstairs room collapsed, whilst
a fine arts auction was being held there. A friend of mine woke up to find
a dead body lying across him.
Past the two Hotels, towards the Abbey, Desmond Lynam of BBC fame was
born. Yes, some famous people had associations with Ennis. Parallel to Francis
Street is the river Fergus. In those days the rear of the shops backing
on to the river had unsightly corrugated metal sheds. To day we have trendy
shops, a river walk, leading up to Bank Place, and a car park. Progress.
Past the Abbey and over the Club Bridge. The Country Club, another relic
of our garrison days. Turn right, parallel with the river, and you come
to Steele’s rock in the river. Tom Steele the famous essayist of Spectator
fame, used to sit on the rock and moon across at Miss Howard in the house
opposite. (Or was it Miss Howard?) Never mind: I did say we had associations
with famous people. So why shouldn’t we have pretensions? We’ll
only go as far as the Court House.
The Courthouse. Petty Sessions (whatever that means) and Criminal Trials
were held there. It all added to our pretension. After the Courthouse you
were approaching the outskirts on the Galway Side.
The Courthouse. Built in Ennis by mistake, through mislaid plans in the
Board of Works. It should have been built in some City in India, Lahore
I think. It makes a good story. The two cannons outside were supposed to
have come from the Crimean War. Shades of our garrison past. Further out
you had the new Hospital, built in my time. Beyond that, the Mental Hospital-Victorian.
Close to the new Hospital we now have a roadhouse type of Hotel.
Let’s go down Parnell Street. The narrowest Street in the town,
and that’s saying something for Ennis. “You could shake hands
across the street”, does not quite apply. Almost. No change except
smarter shops with new names. The same narrow one-way lanes lead into the
markets (Market Square). In those days Saturday was market day. It still
is. The country people came in with their produce and sold it to the towns-people.
They still do. Booths were erected by people with queer sounding accents.
They sold gee-gaws, patent medicines and cleaning agents. It’s the
cleaning agent seller I remember most clearly. Whilst not a cockney accent,
certainly English. His cleaning agent would clean anything. To demonstrate
he would get the sweat stained cap of a red-faced shy country lad. Pour
the agent on, and with a brush clean the peak so that it looked almost new.
He advocated it to get the nicotine stains off your teeth. This he didn’t
demonstrate. The booths to day are more sophisticated. The accents are the
same. Today they sell Korean Hi-Fi equipment and such necessities for living
in the town in this present age.
Bank Place and Bindon Street. Heirlooms to our garrison past. Bank Place
had only one shop. The largest in the town, an Emporium. Or so it seemed
then. Naturally you had Banks. Three in all. The Bank of Ireland, Munster
and Leinster Bank, and the National Bank. More fodder for pretensions. I’ll
leave you guess who dealt with which Bank in those days.
The General Post Office, as it was grandly called, was across the Bridge.
The Postmaster was a friend of my mothers. He was from Donegal. She was
from Derry. The Bridge. The old one had to be demolished. The new one was
successfully tendered for by a returned Irish Yank. For two years we endured
a catwalk across the river, whilst the rest of the works was boarded off.
He went broke. It was finished by a local contractor.
From the new Bridge we spent hours looking down on to the clear waters
of the river Fergus, at the trout swimming to and fro. In those days, the
waters were clear and there were trout in the river. One summer this gigantic
trout arrived below the Bridge. It swam up the river to beyond the Post
Office field. All the fishermen of the town fished for him from that field.
Nobody could catch him. Not even the Kearns, the redoubtable fishing family.
One day my brother Vincent, fourteen, tried his luck. My father was a
keen fisherman and taught him all the skills. He tried to do the same for
me. I was never meant to be a fisherman. With his usual luck he hooked the
monster. He had no net. Desperately he played it up and down the river.
He wondered how to land it. Suddenly he saw young Ruarai, the Postmasters
youngest son, ten years of age. He shouted “Ruarai, help me”.
He explained carefully to him not to catch the catgut trace but to get his
fingers under its gills. Ruarai grabbed the catgut. It snapped and away
went the prize. Vincent danced up and down in rage. Young Ruarai looked
coolly at him. “Och Vincent, what’s the matter with you? Sure
‘twas only a hawpenny hook!” Young Ruarai became a solicitor.
Opposite the General Post Office was a row of early Victorian houses
with steps up to the front door. Mr Dowling, the dentist, with his horrific
treadle drills, lived in one of them. The Dowlings had a daughter, Mary,
who rode a pony and looked down on us. Worse. Their housekeeper Miss Miller
lived at road level and had an orphaned niece with her. Her niece, Kitty,
seven years old, blonde with glasses, declared to all and sundry that she
was going to marry me. If I were bold, my Mother or Father threatened to
send for Kitty Miller. It worked. Let’s hurry past that terrible terrace
of terror, to the corner that leads to Bindon Street.
The Church of Ireland was on that corner. The Canon lived in Bindon Street.
He was a good friend of my mothers. Their common interest was books. We
had been taught that even to look into a Protestant Church was a mortal
sin. I was nine. Reasoning, that if the Canon was a friend of my mothers,
then a peep couldn’t hurt. One summer’s day I peeped in, I didn’t
see enough. Curiosity killed the cat. I went in. Totally disappointing.
My expectations of seeing the unspeakable weren’t realised. It looked
just like any old church. No Stations of the Cross nor Statues though. I
never confessed. Have I been damned all this time? Am I still damned?
Bindon Street the last bastion of a Garrison town. Bindon; a good old
Irish name. There used to be someone called Bindon-Fitzi-Blood-Smyth. How
Irish can you get? In those days though, you had a fair mixture living in
it. In fact, the first lending library was housed in the upstairs rooms
of one house. The rest were let in flats to Bank clerks. In another was
the practice and family home of a firm of Solicitors. They were friends
of my Father. I was supposed to join the firm. , After leaving school, in
order to train to be one. That’s another story.
The Canon, my Mothers friend, lived in one of the end houses. He lost
both sons in the R.A.F. during the war. Both fair haired Trinity students.
I remember one of them. He was star tennis player in the County Club, and
drove a two-seater open M. G. There were other people, but the photograph’s
blurred at the edges. Opposite, at the end of the street, was the Infirmary.
That was the Hospital before the New Hospital was built. It dated from Victorian
times. To the left down the hill was the Terrace I was born and reared in.
Saint Anthony’s Terrace. A terrace of four houses built at the turn
of the century. My Father rented no. 1, for the princely sum of £20
per annum. Fixed rent. He rented it from a family of seed merchants in Dublin.
Four bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, single storey extension
with lavatory and pantry. No bathroom. Baths were taken in a zinc tub in
the kitchen on Saturday nights. I was in the house recently. It was modernised
of course. Double-glazing, central heating, bathroom and all that is taken
for granted in these days.
I was appalled and mystified. How in the name of God did we all fit in
it? Mother, Father, originally three Sons (one died), four Daughters and
a live-in maid. As a youngster I always thought it a fairly large house.
Some of us out while the others were in and vice versa? But we were all
there together for meals. Also my brother and I always had friends in to
play cards or whatnot. It must have been one of the miracles of its age.
Nobody else in the terrace had that problem. But there again, that’s
another story.
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