IN 1923 MY FATHER WAS PROMOTED and transferred to Dublin. We left Tullamore sometime in April or May of that year and moved to a house in Herbert Place. The house is on a stretch of road that runs along the Grand Canal between Mount Street Bridge and Baggot Street Bridge. Most of the houses are now in flats or offices but in those days they were family homes. We lived in number 25, a five-storied house, which our father rented for £90 a year. Large as we were as a family, the house was too big for us, and we made little use of the top floor.
Before dealing with the tremendous change that the move to Dublin made to the lives of Gearóid, Brian and myself, I want to draw a portrait of my father. He was six foot high, strong and active. Although he put on some weight towards the end of his life, he was never fat. He was bald from an early age. Gardening and walking were his favourite exercises. In our view, because he had us as helpers, his methods of preparing soil were excessively laborious. When breaking new ground, or re-digging ground that had become compacted, he insisted on a procedure that the gardening books call ‘trenching’. It is simple for me to explain it, considering the number of times we were required to undertake this Herculean task! Having marked out the plot to be ‘trenched’, you make a deep trench right down to the yellow clay and you transfer the earth by wheelbarrow to the far end of the plot where you intend to finish. Next you begin to fill the trench you have just made by digging and shovelling the ground beside it, always going down to the yellow clay. In a sense you are making new trenches all the time until you reach the end of the plot and you fill the last one with the earth that was taken from the first. Manure would be added throughout the trenching exercise. I think it would have been sufficient to loosen the soil with a fork and spread manure through it. Another habit of our father’s was to take every stone, big or small, out of the ground. I have heard it argued that stones are necessary to let the air through the soil and that they should not be removed. It probably depends on whether the soil is heavy or light.
With all this activity in our gardens we always had plenty of potatoes and every vegetable that a housewife could wish for: cabbage of every kind, peas, two kinds of beans, onions, lettuce, turnips, celery, leeks, parsnips, spinach … everything except carrots, which did not grow well because of some fly or other disease. Herbert Place was the only house where we had no garden, but we had a big garden again when we moved out to Blackrock in 1927.
Strangely enough, when our father died I began to do a lot of the work he used to do around the garden as well as cutting turf in the Dublin mountains during the war – proof indeed that necessity is the mother of invention.
If we were raised with Irish, we were also raised with chess. Our father was a great chess player and all the boys of the family learned the game from an early age. This made most of us strong players in later years.
At university I joined the chess club. It was run by Jimmy, a brother of Roger McHugh. Our father was a member of the Blackrock Chess Club and the Dublin Chess Club. He played regularly in the inter-club competitions. I too played in the competitions until one day the thought struck me that it was madness to spend so much time moving little pieces of wood around a board! I gave it up and have scarcely laid a finger on a chess piece since.
However, father kept up a keen interest in the game, and went to Blackrock College once or twice a week to give lessons to the pupils. I remember coming home one night to find both the sitting-room and the dining-room full of strangers, sitting in pairs playing chess, in a dense cloud of tobacco smoke. Apparently, a visiting chess team had come to Blackrock Library, where the local host team played, to find that the room was unavailable. To remedy the situation our father had asked them to come up to our house.
Early in the thirties one of the famous chess masters, Koltanowski, came to Dublin accompanied by his wife. He must have liked Dublin and the people he met for he stayed six months. Despite his Russian-sounding name he was a Belgian and was world champion in the blindfold simultaneous competition, and as far as I know nobody has taken that title from him. As recently as 1960, if newspaper reports are accurate, he played blind (without sight of any of the boards) against 56 of the best players in San Francisco in an event staged in the Fairmount Hotel. He won 50 of the games and the remaining six were drawn. Koltanowski was in our house a few times, socially and to play chess with our father. He was also in the house of another of our friends, Oscar Quigley. Oscar was a first-class player and at the time published a chess magazine for which Koltanowski wrote a few articles. Koltanowski is supposed to have had a chess school in Sandymount during his stay in Dublin. Brian boasted that he had succeeded in beating him in a game, but I do not believe that.
In April 1925 our father was appointed a Commissioner on the Board of the Revenue Commissioners, which meant that he had attained the highest office in that department of the civil service. He was fifty years of age.
From the evidence available it is clear that our father was an able, intelligent man. He was conscientious in his work and the progress of his career as befitted the head of a family with so many children. However, he was also a man of many interests. He was fond of music and drama. When he was young he made several attempts at writing plays – the manuscripts were uncovered among his papers after he died. He also sent a novel to a London publisher but his literary agent in that city advised against accepting the offer that was made. A one-act play by his brother Fergus Ó Nualláin, entitled A Royal Alliance, was staged by the Abbey Theatre in 1920. F.J. McCormick, Barry Fitzgerald, Maureen Delaney and Kathleen Fortune were in the cast. The same brother and our father were supposed to be engaged in some literary project but I don’t think anything came of it.
Our father and mother went regularly to plays at the Abbey and Gate theatres. London productions were frequently staged in Dublin and these would be included in our parents’ schedule. We children were also taken to the theatre – we saw almost every production of An Comhar Drámíochta. We saw the first production in Dublin of Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne by Mícheál Mac Liammóir, with Mac Liammóir himself in the leading role. We went to a lot of English plays too. Fáinne an Lae, The Irish Statesman (Æ’s paper) and John O’London’s Weekly were publications to which our father subscribed.
Our house was never without a gramophone and our father was a regular buyer of records. Classical and operatic music were his favourites and our record collection reflected that. We were regular concert-goers, too – especially those given by the Army Band under Colonel Fritz Brase. On Saturdays during the season there were Celebrity Concerts in the old Queen’s Theatre and we attended many of these. You would hear the most famous musicians, world figures like Backhaus, Cortot, Heifetz, Kreisler, Horowitz, Paderewski. Father and mother were fond of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir and never missed one of their concerts. Similarly with John McCormack, who I heard on stage four or five times. There was a great deal more music to be heard in the music halls of Dublin than there is now. But, of course, we now have television.
Our father and indeed his two brothers, Peter (the Carmelite) and Gearóid (the man from Maynooth), all revelled in riddles and tricks, literary ones and others involving cards, matches and coins. Brian was the only one of us to inherit this trait from them and you would suddenly become aware of it at a wedding, at a party or simply when a group were gathered in a pub. At the most inopportune moment when speeches were about to be given, Brian’s voice could be heard inviting his immediate companions to observe a trick while coins or matches were presented in some insoluble pattern.
The three of us, the eldest of the family, each received £1 pocket money a month. Today’s teenagers would scoff at that, but that £1 was probably worth £5 by today’s standards.
There are many kinds of father and they are likely to be as different from one another as people are. There are fathers who explain things and discuss current events with their children almost from the time they attain the use of reason. I hear them at it often enough at the top of the bus! It is probably a good thing in itself and a relatively new phenomenon. It would be foolish to say that our father was like the ‘Victorian father’, that closed person having no real intercourse with his family you read about in English history and literature. On the other hand, he and we were not garrulous in voicing and discussing our opinions. It was not a question of churlishness – it was our habit or our nature.
I remember how amazed I was the first time I had tea in McManus’s house in Stillorgan. Richard McManus was one of Brian’s greatest friends but he died young in the early fifties. All through this meal there were arguments going on between the people of the house about current events, while their tea got cold and morsels of food being lifted to their mouths got suspended in mid-air! Some of the participants in these exchanges got excited or angry. I am not suggesting that there was always some kind of row at mealtimes in the McManus household. These occasions were very lively with no stop or ebb in the conversation. That was quite in contrast to the regime in our house – usually we were not particularly talkative or given to voicing opinions. If visitors were in the house our conversation might be more animated, but this would be due to their presence.
Most of the year that I was working on my first novel (Oíche i nGleann na nGealt), writing in the same room as my father, it never occurred to me to tell him what I was doing and likewise it didn’t occur to him to ask. Today, I suppose, such an occurrence would be labelled ‘lack of communication’. By the time the book was published my father was already two years dead. While it is not for me to suggest that he might have approved, it is likely that it would have been of some interest to him since he had an interest in writing himself. It might have pleased him that a son of his who had been raised with Irish had produced some literary work in that language.
He did not live to see Brian’s literary flowering. However, an interesting question does arise – did he read any of Brian’s work? I’m glad to say that a positive answer can be given to that question.
In 1934 Brian, who was at university at the time, founded a comic periodical called Blather. The fun in it was bold and outrageous and contrasts with a more moderate but similar style adopted by him in his later writing. I had little to do with the periodical except that I wrote the odd article for it. It only achieved about six issues; lack of money and the unwillingness of printers to take risks led to its demise.
If we had been asked at the time if our father knew about our having anything to do with this mocking journal, which achieved quite a wide distribution in the shops, we would have answered no – he did not and could not have known. But when we went through his papers after his death, we found he had a copy of every issue.