AS FAR AS I KNOW, Brian did no creative writing until he was in his last year in Blackrock College. Even then the extent of his output was a few short poems. I myself began to write, if it is correct to use such a sophisticated word for it, when we were still living in Tullamore. I would walk into the town to buy notebooks as I believed that my work needed to be set formally in book form as distinct from loose pages. I used to fill these notebooks with novels, which no doubt were pure rubbish.

One of the ‘novels’ went to a great friend of my mother – a Mrs Mary Gallagher, who was a widow living in Strabane at the time. Mary Gallagher was very involved in the nationalist movement and as a consequence her house was raided by the police. The house was ransacked from top to bottom in the hope of finding treasonable documents. The police found nothing of that kind but they did come across this ‘book’ of mine. They did not understand it, good, bad or indifferent! Not surprisingly, they thought that they had stumbled upon something important. Subsequent intense questioning of Mrs Gallagher could elicit no satisfactory answers!

Although Brian was not writing at that time it’s likely he was reading avidly. By then I had read everything in the house. The collection of books my father had was not very large but it was broad and varied. The Public Library system had not yet been established nor was there any talk of such a venture. People who wished to have books had to buy them, and there were no cheap paperback editions. My father was a regular buyer of books – I remember, while living in Inchicore in 1916, him arriving home with a copy of the first edition of O’Corcora’s A Munster Twilight.

Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad were two authors that my father liked particularly, and he bought all of their books. I cannot recall the other authors that appealed to him, but he had most of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, even those that you seldom see, such as Across the Plains, The Silverado Squatters and, of course, books like The Wrong Box which Stevenson wrote in cooperation with Lloyd Osbourne. When I was very young I was given Treasure Island as a birthday present. What a pity reading Stevenson went out of fashion – he was a great writer and no doubt he will be rediscovered.

Strange to say we had no Dickens except for The Pickwick Papers, although we had all his works at a later date in Dublin. Among other novelists and writers whose work was in the house were the Brontë sisters, Trollope (Autobiography), George Eliot, Defoe, George A. Birmingham (The Northern Iron), George Meredith, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, Arnold Bennett, James Stephens, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables – one of the most difficult books to read. There were many other less well-known authors whose names I have forgotten. Among the books other than novels were all the plays of Shakespeare (the Windsor Shakespeare), collections of poems of the principal poets in English, The Faerie Queene (Book I), the essays of Dryden, and Hazlitt’s essays. We had Mangan and Ferguson among the Anglo-Irish poets; The Literary History of Ireland by Douglas Hyde; and that work which is symptomatic of that period – the six volumes of D’Alton’s History of Ireland in their green covers. The Life of Gladstone by Morley and The Origin of Species were in the house. I tried to read and understand Darwin’s book but failed. There were many Greek and Latin books including all Cicero’s letters Ad Atticium.

We had few Irish books in Tullamore as they simply were not available. Although Pádraic Ó Conaire began to write as early as 1906, the majority of his best books, including Seacht mBua an Éirí Amach, did not appear until 1918. The collection of Irish books that we did have in Tullamore included a good anthology by Flanagan, Tóraiocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne), and the poems of Dháibhí Uí Bhruadair. There were others such as Seachrán Chairn tSiail, Brisleach Mhór Mhaighe Muirtheimhne, Amhráin Ghrá Chúige Chonnacht and a handful of others – none of which would inspire a person to write. Had Brian been prompted to write in those days it is likely that it would have been in English. My attempts were also in English for the simple reason that the books which inspired or provoked me to write were all written in English. Proof that even a native speaker like Seosamh Mac Grianna was forced to adopt the language of the majority comes from his own words:

After Mass on Sunday we usually went to a convent in Tullamore where the nuns ran a small library. The selection of books included the novels of Sabatini and Stacpoole, George Birmingham’s Spanish Gold, Conan Doyle and many more of that kind. We took a few books home each week, so we were never short of reading matter – but it was always in English.

If Brian was not interested in writing during our time in Tullamore, he was preoccupied with another form of composition – making films. In those days the ‘silent’ films were captivating the public at large. I do not remember where the picture house in Tullamore was located – it was just an ordi nary hall adapted, using heavy blinds on its windows. There was a show in this picture house once a week and the three of us, Gearóid, Brian and I, would walk into town to the show whenever we were allowed. It is hardly surprising that the ‘pictures’ excited and provoked us – we wanted to have films of our own, at home! Had we had a magic lantern we might have been satisfied. However, there was no prospect of acquiring such equipment because as children we did not have pocket money. In the end we succeeded in founding our own ‘film industry’, and industry it certainly was, considering all the toil, work and tears that were needed to keep it going!

It started when we found a large lens somewhere in the house. We knew that if you place a lamp behind the lens and put a slide or film the right distance from it, it will project an image onto a screen. So we had the equipment for projecting pictures. But first, all these elements – lens, lamp and a frame to carry the film – had to be contained in a box. This did not present any great difficulty. Being ambitious, we wanted to show ‘films’ of our own creation: paper strips, one and a quarter inches in depth (the size that suited the lens), that would have pictures drawn on them with ink. These pictures would be telling a story which would be accompanied by a commentary explaining what the characters were saying, as in real films. Ideally, there would be sufficient pictures to keep the ‘film’ going for a quarter of an hour.

Difficulties beset any enterprise and have to be met with all kinds of solutions. Paper is not transparent no matter how heavily it is inked, especially when the only source of light is an oil lamp! Those were some of the great problems that beset the film industry in ‘The Beeches’, Cappencur, in the year 1922.

Hollywood experienced similar difficulties with the density of the film material in the early years. As a consequence Hollywood did not really progress until the new film material, which has been in use ever since, was invented.

Whatever solutions Hollywood achieved in improving film quality it can hardly have been as simple and inexpensive as our own invention. I do not remember which of us tumbled to it, but all you had to do was let a tiny drop of paraffin down onto the paper. The paraffin spread evenly all over the paper and left it almost as transparent as film or slide, without affecting the blackness of the ink images. Of course, there was always a very unpleasant smell from the paraffin-soaked paper, but that didn’t cost you a thought if you were a real cinema enthusiast!

God be with the foolishness of youth. Brian and I spent whole days bent over tables drawing pictures on strips of paper. He would make one film, I another. Once that had been done, the picture house, which was in the garage, had to be set up – with chairs brought out from the house and posters advertising the show put up. After all that, you had to try to persuade the grown-ups to come and see the show! I regret to admit that this was no easy task – they were reluctant to interrupt whatever they were doing and worse still some were very slow to pay at the door!

When I think now of all that wasted time, the childishness, I wonder at our naïvety. On second thoughts it may be that it was a better way of passing the time than learning about drugs – a real danger for twelve-year-old children today.