Rory & Ita Read Free

high around, and little beds, garden beds, right around and a little grass bit in the middle. My father took care of that, and I was sorry for the grass because everything he did was very methodical.’
    The house was lit by gas. The gas mantle, made of asbestos gauze, was attached, locked to the pipe-end; each mantle had to be lit by match. The mantles werevery fragile; they crumbled if touched, even with a match. The gas provided good, uniform light. ‘But what happened every now and again was, it would suddenly start going down and there was a rush to the meter to stick the shilling in. And if you weren’t wise and had your shillings piled up you were in big trouble because you had to go searching. It was originally a penny meter which was dreadful but then they changed it to a shilling meter. The gas man used to come every month and collect the money and there used sometimes be a payback; they’d decide how much you’d used, and a lot of women were delighted when the gas man came because he would give you back a few shillings and there would often be enough for a dinner or so out of it.’
    The children weren’t allowed to use the gas upstairs. ‘It was supposed to be very dangerous but we were given candles which I always considered quite as dangerous, if not more so.’ She remembers Joe once setting fire to the curtains in the girls’ bedroom, and Máire shouting, ‘Look what you did!’ The top of the dressing table was burnt black but was later restored.
    She remembers the landlord calling for the rent. His name was Mr Pearse, a Wicklow man. He owned most of the houses on both sides of the road. ‘He was very friendly; he used to bring us sweets. Maybe if you didn’t have your rent he wouldn’t bring any, but he always had sweets in his pockets for us.’
    She liked the house. ‘I don’t know whether childhood has that effect on you or not, but I never saw anything wrong with it. I’m sure the sitting-room must have been freezing, but I never thought it freezing.’ She remembers bits of plaster falling off the walls, and her father getting dado rail to secure them. She thinks now thatthe walls were rarely papered because her father was afraid that the whole walls would come down if the old paper was stripped from them. And then there was the time the bedroom ceiling fell on her. ‘We were in bed and we heard a kind of rumbling. We were very quick actually, and we pulled the sheets up over us. There was no weight in the plaster. It all came tumbling down on us, and we looked up and all we could see was these little narrow laths, and the plaster gone – in a big hole, like. It just happened to come down over the bed. And I can’t remember how it was repaired but it was repaired very quickly, if I remember rightly.’ But she liked the house. ‘I thought it was grand. And I loved everything about that locality. I was very happy with it.’
    Her father wore a felt hat and he always wore black boots with toecaps, which he polished himself. ‘He wore brown suits with a very fine white line; you’d hardly see the line.’ When the suit became a bit shabby he’d get a new one, exactly like the old, and the old one was worn at the weekends. He always bought the suit in Kevin & Howlin, on Nassau Street. Tom Howlin was a Wexford man, an old school friend. Years later, she went with her father to buy a suit for her wedding day. ‘I remember him saying, “I want a suit for my daughter’s wedding,” and it was the very same suit as the first one I remember him in. When he went on holidays he took off his tie, he took off his collar – and he was on holidays.’
    She can’t remember her mother. ‘I can only remember her hands. I can’t remember her face. I have no memory of her attire whatsoever. I can’t remember what she wore on her feet. The only memory I have is her hands, doing things.’
    She was three months short of her fourth birthday when her mother died in March 1929. ‘I was told that we