The Vasectomy Doctor Read Free Page A

distribute the letters around the house. I can’t read of course but Janie Ennis in the kitchen tells me that these are for the study and these for the schoolroom upstairs. First port of call then is the study where my parents, Stephen Rynne and Alice Curtayne, are seated across from each other at a large part ner’s desk. The room is a cube, eighteen feet long, eighteen feet wide and eighteen feet high. Each has a Remington Rand typewriter in front of them and the place is alive with the clack-clack of keys on paper and the ring of the little bell three letters before the end of the line prompting the writer to return the carriage and start a new line. My father uses two fingers only while my mother flies along in a properly trained manner. The room smells of Sweet Afton smoke and buddleia. My father reading aloud the last paragraph he has written occasionally disturbs the clack-clack of the typewriters. This you might think was a rather eccentric way of writing but then eccentricity and my father were no strangers.
    The next lot are to be taken upstairs to the schoolroom. Here the governess, Kathleen McGowan, from Grange, county Sligo, holds sway. She is teaching my older siblings, Bridget, Catherine and Davoc, the rudiments of reading, writing and mathematics. I am excluded from this institute of higher education on the basis of my tender years and am relegated to the role of office boy bringing the post around the house. But my turn will come.
    There was a lot of religion around at the time and our house – Downings House, just outside Prosperous in county Kildare – was no different from any others in this respect. Grace before and after meals and bedtime prayers were standard fare. A picture of Madonna and Child hung in the big hall downstairs and others of Dante, St Paul, and The Last Supper hung upstairs in the landing. There was never a Sacred Heart for some reason. I expect that my parents thought it in bad taste. Even at three years of age I at least had a sense about the devil and angels, heaven and hell, sin and sanctifying grace.
    I was sleeping one night upstairs with Miss McGowan. (‘Miss McGowan, the head of the town, one leg up and one leg down’ we used to sing at her.) I must have told a lie or something that day because I remember the devil was under my bed and he came out and bit me in the right elbow. The devil then spirits himself across the nursery floor and goes down the wash hand basin. I lie closer to Miss McGowan. I am three years old and it’s one of my very first memories – the devil biting me in the elbow. God help us.
    The winter of early 1947 has to go down in the annals as one of the worst winters in Ireland for a few hundred years. The Monthly Weather Bulletin of March 1997 describes it like this:
    Early 1947 was very wet and stormy with flooding in many places, but it was not until 24 January that the spell of severe cold weather began. By the beginning of February there were already reports of skating on frozen ponds and the unrelenting cold continued until the middle of March. The temperature did not rise above 5 degrees C at Dublin airport between 22 January and 7 March and on most days during this period the temperature struggled to rise above freezing. In addition, a harsh easterly wind persisted for several weeks as the nor mal run of Atlantic depressions were diverted to the south of the coun try. There were between 20 and 30 days with snowfall in most places during this time and snow lay on the ground at Dublin’s Phoenix Park for all but two days between 26 January and 8 March. Even at Valentia Observatory, where there would normally be snow on around 4 days during the first three months of the year, snowfall was recorded for a total of 50 hours over 14 days during the cold spell.
    Indeed I can vouch for all of that. Our neighbour, Tom Dunn, husband of Madam Dunn, the piano teacher from Firmount, called in one day during March 1947 to discuss