BRIAN WAS TWELVE YEARS OF AGE when he was first sent to school. I was thirteen and a half and my older brother fifteen. Why we were not sent to school earlier is not clear. It may have been due to our not living in one place for more than two or three years, until we finally settled in Dublin in 1923. Róisín, who was younger than Brian, Gearóid or myself, was sent to school while we lived in Tullamore; we were not. It has been suggested that our father feared that school, as it was then, would weaken our Irish, but I find that hard to believe. While we never spoke anything but Irish amongst ourselves, we had as much English as any other children. This was due to the fact that my mother’s family spoke only English and it was seldom that one or another of them was not visiting us. Aunt Teresa, who had no Irish, slept in our house every night because of the ghost, and hardly a day passed when we were not in their house in the Main Street or in one of the shops – places where only English was spoken.
Since we were attending no school and our father was away from home a lot of the time, a difficulty arose about being taught catechism so that we could be confirmed. One of the McDevitt family, who had a draper’s shop in Abercorn Square, came to the rescue. Sometimes he would come to our house and instruct us or we would go to the McDevitt family home near the top of Ballycolman Lane.
It was in the Melmont church at the top of Ballycolman Lane that we received communion and were confirmed. I remember being quite anxious that morning. I had been told that it was part of the ceremony for the bishop to give a blow to each child as a sign of something or other in the Christian life. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that I was expecting a knock-out blow, but I did anticipate a hard blow, especially if I failed to produce prompt answers to the bishop’s questions. I was mightily relieved when I saw that the bishop was only giving a pat on the cheek to the boys in front of me.
During the Strabane years, efforts were made to have us taught at home. A girl called O’Boyle was our first teacher. After that we had a school-teacher named Collins. My memory of him is his reading J.P. Craig’s version of Clann Lir, which was in Ulster Irish. After Mr Collins stopped coming, our father tried teaching us by post, writing from wherever in Ireland his business had taken him, setting out lessons to be done. It is likely that we did not do these lessons or did them so badly that the experiment was abandoned.
Whatever teaching or lack of it we were given at home in Strabane or later in Tullamore, one thing is certain – it had no adverse effect on us. During the day we were free to do as we pleased. Nor does this freedom appear to have done us any harm. It is a subject that has never been properly examined – assuming that parents had a plentiful supply of books covering a wide range of subjects and the children were seen to be reading, then maybe it would be better to keep them from school until they were in their teens.
On the other hand, had we been at school when young we would have been socializing with children of our own age. As matters stood no encouragement was given to mix with the children of the neighbourhood, though we were not expressly forbidden to do so. Instead, we became so numerous as a family – there were twelve of us eventually – that we had sufficient company amongst ourselves. In the end it is likely a bad thing to grow up without socializing widely with other children.
I remember one occasion when we were playing football in the road with the children who lived at the bottom of Ballycolman Lane. We used a paper ball, which was made by rolling a lot of pieces of paper and pressing them very tightly together and tying the bundle with twine. Nowadays, when even the poorest travelling people would have a proper ball, people find it very hard to understand how scarce basic items were in the 1920s. Nor would they recognize the great variety of goods that have become available because of the progress in manufacturing and the invention of new materials such as plastic.
The house in Ballycolman Lane was a strange house, quite apart from having a resident ghost. There was a passage that gave access from the front of the house to the back. A door in the middle of this passage led into a laundry. This room was fully equipped for washing, with an abundant supply of water and outlets in the concrete floor for drainage. Above the laundry there was another room, which had stone steps leading to it from the outside, totally separate from the rest of the house. This room was used as a store-room and it was here that we spent a lot of our time.
We were smoking brown-paper cigarettes then and it was essential to be in a secure place where our mother could not come upon us suddenly. There were hundreds of Gaelic League booklets belonging to our father stored in this room. He had used and distributed them in the Irish classes he had taught in Strabane prior to his marriage. These yellow-covered booklets (Tá na Francaigh ar Muir, a play by Cú Uladh, Prátaí Mhíchel Thaidhg, etc.) were tied in bundles with wrapping paper and twine. One day I noticed the wrapping paper and it struck me that it might make good cigarette paper. It was soft, dark grey, half-rotten paper with mildew on it and it tore very easily. I should explain that an essential quality demanded of brown paper for cigarette-making is that it should smoulder away without going out or having to be continually drawn to keep it alight. Test results proved excellent – this dark grey paper lit up at once, burned strongly and gave out thick, light grey smoke. Indeed, it was too good in some ways for it was difficult to extinguish quickly whenever grown-ups came near our loft. If the least spark remained, it would rekindle, until all the paper glowed red again.
We smoked this paper for as long as it lasted. There must have been a terrible smell from the smoke but to us it was a fragrant aroma. In comparison to ordinary brown paper, it seemed to us akin to Turkish tobacco! We were devastated when the last of it was smoked. We searched the house from top to bottom looking for more of it but never found such tasty paper as the Gaelic League used for wrapping their booklets. Maybe it is just as well – God knows what cancer or other terrible disease would have afflicted anyone who kept smoking it.
At that time we had a sharp eye for brown paper. When a parcel was being unwrapped in the house, we would be looking at the brown paper, assessing its suitability for making cigarettes. There was no better judge of brown paper in Ireland at that time than I, even if I say so myself. I would know at a glance whether it would light up well and continue burning – that insight is with me still! Brown paper, for example, that has a shiny finish is the very worst for cigarettes. There is no use even trying it – it won’t light up and the devil himself couldn’t keep it going.