clearclassicsblog 5
A very well-read elderly homeless man I helped to find accommodation when I was working in Dublin Simon Community in the 1980s told me quite seriously he was getting some money from the Sick and Indignant (sic) Roomkeepers’ Society. (It is really called The Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers’ Society). And, indeed, he, like a lot of Dubliners of his age and circumstances, spent a lot of his waking hours in a state of righteous (and completely justified), good-humoured indignation. His version was, therefore, a perfectly reasonable name for this charitable organization.
Dubliners’ imaginative and colourful use of language has been celebrated from Sean O’Casey onwards and has been worked to great comic effect by comedians like Jimmy O’Dea, Maureen Potter and Brendan Grace. The first Teilifis Eireann family drama, Tolka Row, which aired in the 1960s, might seem to be part of this culture of comedy but it isn’t, really. The Gate Theatre plays on which this drama was based were written by Maura Laverty, and the first of these plays, Liffey Lane , was adapted from her banned novel Lift Up Your Gates (1946). Two other books focusing on the working class and poor of Dublin’s inner city also came out in 1946, William Hand’s Fair City and Olivia Robertson’s St Malachy’s Court. Hand’s book comprises two novellas, and Robertson’s is a series of sketches based on her experiences as a playground supervisor in a new development of Dublin Corporation flats. ( An earlier fictional treatment of the tenements was Dr Robert Collis’s play, Marrowbone Lane, performed at the Gate Theatre in 1939. I haven’t got around to this play yet, but look forward to doing so. Dr Collis was a public health and welfare hero in his time.)
I haven’t been able to find any information about William Hand, but I will keep looking. When his book came out one critic took issue with his use of words like ‘anent’ and the ironic, detached/ mocking tone of his narrative: ‘our hero’, ‘the young rebel’ , and sure enough, these flourishes spoil the tone slightly. Fair City consists of two novellas, and the first, ‘Fair City’ is about Tommy, a foster-child of the Brannigans, a closely-knit tenement-dwelling family. They are good to him, although Michael, around the same age as him, bullies him in minor ways. Still, Tommy has a loyal friend, Stouty Sullivan, and is well-liked in the neighbourhood. There is rich detail about everyday life in Dublin – the canal is the ‘dog and cat cemetery’, nurses in hospital outpatients’ departments are rough to the point of brutality, and girls take the lead in early-teen courtship: ‘You’ll soon have to bring me to the pictures,’ Tommy is commanded by his girlfriend. The second novella, ‘The Tomboy’ is about Mary Kelly, a young teenage girl who is more than a match for the boys she hangs around with, but is particularly devoted to Johnser Nolan, who can’t walk and is brought around in a kind of converted pram. There are fewer ironic auctorial asides, and this is the more satisfactory of the two stories.The wealth is in the detail- the children love to go to the Natural History Museum, where they go crazy pulling at the exhibits and have to be thrown out, and boys aren’t let into the evening show at the pictures unless they’re wearing long pants (an early form of film classification I suppose). When the threat of a reformatory looms, the boys have horrific ideas about what goes on there (‘They strip you naked and bate you’), but a friendly night-watchman disabuses them of these notions, which we now know to have been true of some institutions anyway.
Olivia Robertson, novelist, Theosophist and artist, was from a landed family in Carlow. The people she writes about in St Malachy’s Court, in light-hearted vein with some pathos, are well-housed in bright new Corporation flats,compared to the tenement-dwellers in nearby Napper Tandy Street, yet they retain many of the values and customs of the tenements they came from, and many are still grievously poor. Robertson is mainly affectionate and understanding, though critical (as were all her female contemporary writers regardless of provenance or politics) of the glamour of working-class females of all ages. But, she observes, for the poor, life is so hard that luxuries are necessities. She is amazed at the tolerance of the flat-dwellers for people who are violently odd, the ‘harmless Heffernans’ for example, and shocked – as is the reader -at the woman who pawns her son’s boots so that he will be a more successful beggar. While some of her descriptions seem exaggerated for comic or pathetic effect, her account of a dinner-house rings true; accustomed as she is to middle -class children toying with their food, the ‘mechanical wolfing’ of the hungry children startles her. These ‘penny dinners’ were set up by nuns and brothers in the 1940s, to supplement the nutrition of the poor. Pregnant women were given priority, and in St Malachy’s Court, to say that a married woman is ‘back on the dinners’ is to imply that she is expecting again. Hand also mentions a dinner -house run by nuns, as a place where Tommy ends up by accident, and where his dog causes havoc. The Brannigans do not need to go there; in fact, they have more than one room and eat quite well, because Mr Brannigan has a trade. Some tenement-dwellers were more comfortably–off than others, a nuance that slips by some historians (but not Kevin Kearns, see below). A shortage of accommodation rather than dire poverty kept some families in ‘two-pair backs’ and other slightly better habitations. The excellent Dublin Tenement Museum on Henrietta St shows how awful a tenement dwelling could be, but also showcases the more comfortable two-room residences where there was regular income, fresh air through big windows and some privacy.
However, in Maura Laverty’s Lift Up Your Gates, Chrissie and her brother Lar and her mother live in the worst kind of tenement, the one-room variety, and they take their dinners home in an enamel jug from Sr Martha’s dinner-house. Chrissie lives on (fictional) Liffey Lane, and she delivers newspapers to the better-housed artisans and middle-class inhabitants of gentrified mews living nearby, whose stories are woven into the novel. Laverty herself, as a young mother and a journalist, lived in this kind of neighbourhood in the south inner city, and Chrissie is based upon a girl she knew there. The story is told through Chrissie’s eyes, as part of her world, and it is an uncomfortable and dangerous one, where babies’ deaths are commonplace and neighbourly kindness can turn to spite in an instant. Some mild anti-clericalism aside, religion is treated positively; Sr Martha with her cleanliness, order and kindliness is a beacon of hope for Chrissie, and the industrial school (run by Christian Brothers) to which Chrissie’s young cousin, Kevin, is sent, is depicted as a happy ending for him. Laverty claimed that this book was banned because of her exposure of slum conditions; the other two books were not banned. Laverty, however, went a bit further than the other two. Her story of the rat being breastfed inadvertently by the half-sleeping mother was part of the lore of Dublin’s inner city, and can also be found in Kevin Kearns’ history. (Like all such stories, it may or may not have happened, but it underlines strikingly the vulnerability of tenement living, where even mothers’ milk was not safe.) Laverty’s novel also refers quite explicitly to the lack of privacy, which leads to a child glimpsing her parents making love. Maybe it was this detail that was deemed too strong for the Irish reading public.
All three of these books contain valuable information for the social historian. Chrissie, at fourteen and unskilled, can only look forward to 10 shillings a week at the rag-picking, but Sr Martha promises her 12/6 a week and her meals (very important) as a helper in the penny-dinners, unheard-of comfort for Chrissie and her family. A young woman in Robertson’s book earns £1 a week in a suspender factory. Hand comments that Josie, Mary Kelly’s 18-year-old sister, earns ‘ “good money for a girl” ’ (the quotation marks in the original indicating a critical comment on unequal pay) in a factory. The phenomenon of children-minding-children appears in all three books; Chrissie more or less rears her little cousin Kevin and is utterly desolate when he is sent away, Mary Kelly and her friends matter-of-factly take responsibility for bringing a crowd of younger children on a picnic to the posh Herbert Park, and Robertson is shocked to see a 12-year-old girl skipping with a rope, while a two-week-old baby, tied on to her in a shawl, bobs up and down with every movement.
Sheila Pim, a perceptive commentator and one I will be returning to, commented in a 1947 novel that Dublin people took a ‘melancholy pride’ in their slums being the worst in Europe. There is no such pride in any of these three books, but there is an abundance of respect for the people who preserve humanity, heart and humour in terrible living conditions.
William Hand, Fair City (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds 1946).
Olivia Robertson, St Malachy’s Court (London: Peter Davies 1946)
Maura Laverty, Lift Up Your Gates (London: Longmans, Green 1946).
Sheila Pim, The Flowering Shamrock (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1947).
Kevin C.Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life: an oral history (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994)
ABOUT CLEAR CLASSICS
I’m Caitriona Clear and I’ve been addicted to reading all my life. I am never, and have never been, without a book of some sort to read. This blog is about well-loved and long-cherished books, and there is a particular emphasis on books published before 1960. But from time to time I’ll mention, below, more recently-published books I’ve enjoyed. I read so many – crime fiction, historical fiction, some best-sellers (but rarely prize-winners) that I couldn’t list them all, but I’ll recommend the odd one.
Clear Classic Books 
Leave a comment