The Liffey Archive: An American Teenager in 1950’S Ireland

Copyright © 2012 by Bob Harley.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-3221-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3222-5 (ebk)

To Emily

and

In memory of,

Fr. Henry (the Coot) Flanagan, O.P.

Fr. A.C. (Charlie) O’Bierne, O.P.

Fr. Michael (Hux) Casey, O.P.

RIP

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Epilogue

Author’s note

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Enjoy your holiday in Ireland, you seem to have brought the good weather with you, said the burly, smiling Irish Customs officer in a welcoming Dublin accent, as he handed back our passports. It was too much good cheer to deal with after a five and a half hour overnight flight with two hours of fitful sleep.

The planes from New York to Dublin arrive before 6:00 A.M. We landed that spring morning a few years ago on a wide-bodied Aer Lingus Airbus carrying many hundreds of passengers. By 6:45 we were through baggage claim, customs and had picked up our rental car keys from one of the more than a dozen car hire desks in the huge airport. On our way to the rental car pickup point near the enormous multi-story carpark we walked past shops with names like Gucci, Fendi and Channel and a wine shop with dozens of fine vintages. The faces of the sales staff reflected their origins in eastern and central Europe as well as East Asia. When I had first arrived by air in Dublin with my parents, more than fifty years ago, the scene was quite different. Instead of world brands and the tipples of connoisseurs, it would have been possible to get a newspaper or paperback novel from the newsstand and, at limited hours, a pint of Guinness at the bar served by a barman sporting an almost impenetrable working class Dublin accent.

At fifteen, I had flown with my mom, dad and brother from Holland, where we were living because of my dad’s job. We arrived in a small two engine, propeller driven KLM plane that accommodated forty passengers. Dublin airport then was about the size of today’s airport in Bismarck, North Dakota, having been built to handle perhaps a dozen flights on a busy day. The parking lot in front of it held a few dozen cars, and was never filled. Today’s multi-building complex must accommodate not only the million passengers a year that travel to the United States, but many dozens of daily flights to Europe that connect on to Africa, Asia and Australia.

The small, two lane, winding road to Dublin had been replaced by a six-lane highway called a dual carriageway. After driving a few miles through traffic snarled by commuters and complicated by an immense new road-building project, we turned onto the M 50, a world-class motorway that rings the city on its western side. The dear dirty Dublin of my youth, had been transformed into a glittering European city, the hub of Europe’s version of Silicon Valley.

On the ring road the traffic continued to be clogged, and moved crawlingly along in peristaltic rhythm until we reached the cut-off that beckoned to Cork. We found ourselves on a European Union financed (so said the sign) motorway that was leading us in a general westerly direction. The next sign gave us the distance, in kilometers, to Naas, Newbridge and Kildare Town. As my wife, Emily, and I drove at 75, we could see the start-and-stop, commuter traffic trickling the other way into Dublin.

I turned on the radio and listened to the lead news story of the day. It was about a statement that had been made by the Prime Minister (Taoiseach). An authoritative female voice reported: Late yesterday, the Taoiseach announced that he regretted the fact that the Cardinal would not be attending the official reception for the Dutch Queen during her State Visit to Ireland. The Cardinal, through intermediaries, had made it clear that he would not be present at an event at which the Taoiseach would be accompanied by his female companion rather than by his wife, from whom he is estranged. The Taoiseach has issued a statement that the Cardinal’s presence would be missed at this significant State event. Unnamed sources close to the Taoiseach let it be known that the Cardinal’s position was particularly unfortunate given the long close relationship between the Taoiseach’s party and the Catholic Church.

Even the memory of thunderbolts, anathemas and excommunications were so far in the past as not even to be worth mentioning. The unstated fact was that the whole disagreement was being made public, with the Cardinal depicted as the one wrong-footed.

A road sign signaling the exit to Newbridge unleashed a wave of memories. Newbridge, the name of the village next to the school, and from which the school took its name of Newbridge College. Naas was the large town just east, and Kildare Town the smaller one just west. What had once been old towns one drove through on the narrow two-lane road that had wended its way west, then south from Dublin to the city of Cork on the south coast, had been reduced to exits on a motorway. We drove on to Kildare Town.

The next day, I drove alone east from Kildare Town to Newbridge on a nostalgic journey, taking the old road rather than the superhighway, motoring across the beautiful undulating dark green plain called the Curragh, its very short grass resulting from a geologic curiosity: it is the top of an underground lake. It is also where Ireland’s greatest racehorses are raised. Before entering the town proper, I passed a large new shopping center with a multistory parking garage on the right and a McDonalds on the left. The center of the town, once a village two blocks long with shops only on one side of the street, was now nearly a mile long, with shops, banks, restaurants and pubs on both sides of the street.

Newbridge used to have two choices for eating out. There was the dining room of the small hotel on the main street near the river end of the town, and the chipper, the fish and chips shop in the back street just behind the hotel. Today I saw a scattering of expensive looking restaurants, among them Thai, Indian and Chinese, as well as some more modest looking eateries. I even saw a food shop that advertised itself as specializing in Russian products. What was even more astonishing to me, I saw a number of African faces, including a black woman wrapped in a brilliantly patterned mostly green African dress and headdress escorting what were surely her own three small children. I had heard that Ireland’s new found prosperity had drawn a multi-racial and polyglot immigration, but I hadn’t expected to find such proof of it twenty-five miles west of Dublin.

I drove to the far end of the town, just before the bridge over the River Liffey and turned left. There, about a half mile down the road on the right side, sitting next to the river was the school, looking as if nothing had changed in the fifty years since I had stood there for the first time with my mother and my brother. I could see the cluster of four story buildings, surrounded by scattered, tall, hardwood trees, oaks, maples and sycamores, sitting between the river and the road, just where the river made a sharp curve to the right. They were an off-white concrety color with two towers sticking upward, a church steeple and a rectangular clock tower.

There are a lot more houses on the left side of that road than there had been, but on the right there was still that stone wall between the road and the river, with weeds sprinkled along its base.

There was that same row of low, one story attached houses on the left for the first quarter of a mile or so. They had the same white fronts and slate covered, peaked roofs, with the peaks parallel to the road. The doors and windows all still had a feel of being slightly too small as I Iooked at them from a distance. The first time I had walked up there with my mother and brother fifty years ago I had been surprised to see that the doors were only about six feet in height, with their roofs beginning only a foot and a half above that. Each of the windows had the same kind of white curtains in them. I didn’t know then, but I know now that they are public housing or, as the Irish call them Council houses.

As I stood there looking I saw five teen-age boys lounging around next to the stone wall. They were wearing sneakers, jeans and tee shirts proclaiming their loyalty to various rock groups. As I stared at them their faces and clothes began to blur before my eyes, and I started to see a different group of teen age boys, who were wearing dark suits in need of pressing, white shirts in need of washing and dark ties that had seen many wearings.

"What are you doing next summer?" Tony asked.

I gaze at Tony, as he was then; easily six feet tall, athletic, but kind of shambling, with fair hair.

My family is talking about taking a trip to Italy in August.

I see myself, Bob Harley. I’m the only American there. The Yank. At sixteen, I have reached my adult height of six feet. I have a fair, much freckled face with a head of what my mother called dirty blond hair, cropped into a crew cut. My thin healthy appearance belied my athletics-avoiding, bookish inclinations.

There ought to be a travel agency for people who don’t travel, I could hear Mac say. Mac was a gawky six foot two with a big shock of red hair. He spoke with a high-pitched timbre, as his voice had yet to change.

Standing next to him was Kevin. His brother Pearse had inevitably acquired the nickname Pee-arse, which condemned Kevin to the name Me-arse. Me-arse was about five-ten, with black hair and a ruddy complexion. He was sturdily built with an athletic air that came naturally to him, along with his prowess at the game of rugby.

It’s only fair, Me-arse replied, since there are travel agencies for people who do travel.

I went to Sligo once with a pal, said Tony. We brought a tent. Wasn’t it a good thing too, because it did nothing but rain?

Sure, isn’t that what you go to Sligo for? The rain? Mac commented.

I bought a postcard. Tony said, ignoring the interruption, it said ‘Greetings from Yeats’ Country’. I sent it to my mother, he went on. I wrote that I had been there for six days and I had yet to see a yeat.

My family never goes any place, I hear Mac complain.

N,n,n,nor d,does m,m,mine, added Pee-arse

Pee-arse never let his severe stammer prevent him from saying what he wanted to say, and if it wasn’t going to bother him, we weren’t going to let it bother us. Pee-arse, a year older than his brother Me-arse, was also a little shorter, and quit a bit stouter. His hair was the same color as his brother’s, but his complexion was darker and he had prominent black eyebrows.

I could hear Me-arse come back into the conversation. We never get to go anyplace.

Well, I did go to Sligo once, Tony repeated, insistently.

Sure, going to Sligo isn’t going anyplace, so it isn’t, complained Mac. But then my family doesn’t even go to Bray. If our travel agency charges for trips you don’t take, Mac continued in his still treble voice, they would make a lot of money off my auld ones.

Th,th,they’d m,m,m,make a f,fortune off ours, contributed Pee-arse.

You’d want to be fair, though, Bob said, you couldn’t charge the same rates for not traveling all year round. You’d have to charge less for not traveling in the summer, since that’s when most people want to travel. In January when no one wants to travel you would charge more not to travel.

There would be also higher rates not to travel to places like Greenland. Just think of the competition among all the people who don’t want to travel to Greenland. Sure, it would have to be very dear not to travel to Greenland, said Tony.

Since my parents don’t even want to travel to Bray, sure it would be dear for them not to travel to Bray, forget about Greenland, grumbled Mac.

You could advertise specials, enthused Tony. Since oodles of people want to go to Paris in the spring we could have bargains on not traveling to Paris in the spring.

That’s right, Me-arse came back into the conversation, It’s not only the location, but it’s the time of year. It will always be expensive not to go to Greenland, but in the winter, it will cost the earth.

Tony added, We’ll charge less for two people not traveling for people who prefer to travel with company. Sure if you don’t like to travel alone, it will cost you more to do it that way, if you don’t like to have company, not doing it that way should be dear, so it should.

Can you imagine what we can charge a hermit for not traveling alone to Greenland in January, Bob calculated.

Why hasn’t anyone else thought of this? asked Tony. This could be our fortune. Sure we could sell it to Cook’s or American Express.

Chapter 1

My mother made me wear a coat and tie that day. That was bad, but it got worse when I saw the spikes.

A spiked black iron fence about fifteen feet tall surrounded the cluster of buildings. I had just spent the last part of the summer in the beautiful and peaceful hilly, green and rock-strewn fields of County Sligo without ever seeing such a fence.

Do you think they make you file the spikes to keep them sharp? asked Chuck. Chuck, who was not going to be staying here in this place, but who would be leaving with my mother in just a few hours.

Why don’t you just shut up.

Bob, said my Mom, You’re not going to be seeing your brother until Christmas. Don’t talk to him that way. And you know I hate that expression.

He’s not going to have to live alone here, I thought. What is this place anyway? It doesn’t look like any school I ever saw before. This was like Dickens, Fagin and the Squeers Family.

I wasn’t talking to you like anything. I just asked a simple question. I was curious, Chuck whined.

Well, stop being curious, I demanded.

You know, added my Mom, curiosity killed the cat. This was one of those hundreds of little pieces of folk wisdom she was always coming up with that usually annoyed me, but suddenly was welcome. I was staring through the iron fence at the buildings of the school, and felt like putting him on top of those spikes.

A few minutes before, the three of us had gotten off the bus from Dublin. Just before the stop we had passed a sign in two languages, Irish and English. First Droichead Nua then Newbridge. My Mom was in her late forties, but she looked more like she was about thirty-five. She was five-foot-five and had a big head of curly red-blond hair. Her eyes were blue, her skin very fair, and her face often smiling. In my looks I took after my Mom while my brother, almost three years younger than me, was more like my father, who took after his German mother’s family. Both my brother and my Dad had brown hair and big ears. My mother said they looked like Clark Gable the movie star, but I used to tell Chuck he looked more like Frankenstein.

The bus had dropped us on the left side of the main road on the edge of the tiny town of Newbridge in County Kildare, Ireland. We walked along that road across a little river. We could see that it became what appeared to be the main business street of the town, although it didn’t look anything like Springfield Avenue back in Maplewood, New Jersey where I had lived in America.

Just across the little bridge we turned right and went up along the river. I carried the larger of my two suitcases. My brother was complainingly lugging the other. It was a Friday in early September in 1955. It was cool, overcast and felt as if it might drizzle at any moment.

We walked past a lone two-story house on the left, white and slate roofed that faced a back street that seemed to run parallel to the main street. Smoke was rising from the chimney. The house was followed by a hedgerow that bordered a field filled with grazing cattle. We continued up the road until we saw another field at the end of the cattle field that had close-cropped grass and goal posts. The posts looked different than the football goal posts I was used to in New Jersey. The cross bar was much lower. It would sure be easier for someone to kick a football over that lower bar than the ones at home. But not me, someone else.

The river took a sharp right turn away from the road, and there was that black iron fence with the spikes. A tree studded green lawn lay just behind the fence that led up to what was clearly one of the school buildings. Opposite the end of the building we saw ahead of us an open gate and a driveway leading into the grounds.

More spikes, said my brother.

I would have taken a poke at him right then and there if it wouldn’t have upset my mother so much. He and my Mom were going away soon to go back to Holland where my father’s job was, and where we had been living for the past two years. It would be me who was going to be stuck behind that fence with the spikes for a whole school year.

As we reached the gate a big herd of mooing cows came around the bend ahead of us, shuffling and swaying in our direction. They took up the whole road. My mother spoke up quickly.

They’re only cows, Bob, you’ve seen them before. They’re harmless.

It was easy for her to say that. Seeing them in fields in Sligo on the other side of stone walls was one thing but seeing them crowding down the road lumbering directly at me was another. Those huge beasts must have weighed a thousand pounds each, and I’d seen westerns where the good guy killed the bad guys by stampeding the cattle in their direction. I dashed as fast as I could through the gateway, picturing myself being crushed by one of those behemoths.

A short, slight, freckled-faced boy of about eleven with tousled red hair came into view behind the cattle. He was wielding a thin tree branch as a switch to drive the herd, and was dressed in a shabby and mud-stained navy-blue three-piece man’s suit that was much too big for him, a dirty white shirt and a mud-splattered tie. The coat reached his knees, the sleeves were rolled up and the waist of the pants was in his armpits. There was a piece of rope around his real waist securing those pants.

I felt safe inside the gate, but my heart was still pounding. I tried to imagine what it would have been like if I had seen a bunch of cows mooing through the streets as I walked to school back in Maplewood. I felt like Dorothy, not in Kansas anymore.

As we walked up a wide drive we saw in front of us a stone building with stained glass windows that must have been the side of a church. There was a fenced-in field to our left. Chuck ran over to the fence and I followed him. Something was going on in the field. On one side there was a huge bull bellowing and snorting and beating the ground with his front hooves. He was next to the stone wall that separated his field from the road the cows were being herded down running back and forth along that wall and making a great commotion. The cows, mooing and moving their bodies and swaying their heads in the direction of the wall that restrained the bull seemed quite impressed by the performance. The boy, unmoved by the scene, expertly moved the cows along by brushing their hindquarters in the rear with the switch.

Mommy, why is the bull doing that? Chuck asked.

My Mom grew up on the farm I had gone to in Sligo that summer, and had lived there until she moved to Brooklyn when she was 19. Chuck must have figured it was safer to needle her than me.

I don’t know, my mother told him.

She spoke in that way she had of saying that she wasn’t going to answer that question, or any question remotely like it. I now wanted to stay watching. Anything seemed better than going on into the school, but my mother pulled us away and we walked up the driveway. We passed the chapel and we walked into a big blacktopped quadrangle. The river was below a grassy incline ahead of us and on its other bank was a large meadow filled with more cattle. There was a large dirty-white four-story building at the far end of the quadrangle with a rectangular clock tower in the center reaching up another two stories or more. The steeple we had seen from the main road was at the back left of the chapel as we faced it and the chapel was attached on its left to another two-story ivy-covered brick building.

The blacktopped quadrangle was filled with small black and boxy, parked cars and adults and kids walking around. I knew these cars were made in England and were called Ford Prefects. They were like smaller versions of the old cars from the 30’s that I used to see at home.

Moms and dads and schoolboys and sisters and younger brothers were talking and shouting out to each other. The boys and most of the men were wearing suits and ties; even the smaller kids whose suits had short pants. There were men walking about wearing long white robes. The only time I had never seen anyone dressed like that before was in the movies, movies like Robin Hood and Ivanhoe.

I heard snatches of conversations all around me.

Ahh, that’s a bloody cod.

The two gougers scarpered…

I hadn’t copped on that he was a feckin’ savage.

I went to get me bys own but I was skint.

Will ye ever get over here ya gurrier before I flay ye.

Me brudder an his mates went swimming in de dodder an near got pinched by de gards. It was great gas.

Tink we can cop a coupla fags?

I tried puttin’ a new flex on it but still it was banjaxed.

I used to tink he was a dote, but den I was gobsmacked by…

I wondered if I had been magically set down in Bulgaria.

See, my Mom said, they’re all wearing suits and ties.

She was just putting paid to the argument we’d had that morning about what I was to wear.

Mom, asked Chuck, why are those men wearing those funny robes?

Shh! Keep your voice down. Those are their habits. They’re Dominican priests.

Couldn’t they get in the habit of wearing real clothes? I asked. If they had at least been wearing black suits with backward collars like back in New Jersey, the whole thing might have been a little less strange.

Don’t be smart. A habit is the kind of uniform a priest in a religious order wears. These priests are in the Dominican Order and those white robes are called their habits.

A guy a little older and a little shorter than me, with red hair, freckles, very thick glasses and a kind of a squint came over and said,

J’ya know where yer goin’?

No, I admitted.

Ah, yer de Yank. Go over to Enquiries, he said, pointing.

His abruptness and lack of welcome made me instantly dislike him, at the same time I was thinking: is my foreignness that obvious? I looked in the direction he was pointing. In the middle of the ivy covered building on the left was an open doorway with a sign above it that said Enquiries.

Since we weren’t going to go back to the bus to return to Dublin I thought that we might as well get the whole thing over with and I led the way. I was brought up short by the sight of a sour looking middle-aged woman in a black and white outfit standing in the foyer looking just like a maid in a mansion in some Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Chuck looked at me behind her back and rolled his eyes. He was still razzing me.

You’re very welcome, she said in a steely voice, talking through her teeth.

Her words were accompanied by a thin-lipped smile that looked as if the mere utterance was painful. She bade us follow her and took us into a room to the left just off the foyer, leading us in and inviting us to take seats, saying,

Father O’Bierne, the Headmaster, will be here shortly, leaving behind the clear implication that when he arrived he would have me carried off, boiled and eaten.

She left briskly, her heels smartly tapping the floor. We found ourselves in a very formal room with highly polished, very dark wooden paneling half-way up the wall, overstuffed chairs, a couch, and two equally highly polished ponderous looking tables, also made of some very dark wood. There was a dark red, almost black carpet that covered virtually the entire floor. The exposed floor may have started out as a lighter wood, but had been varnished so many times as to be almost as dark as the paneling. A picture of Jesus with His heart showing through His chest hung next to the couch. One end of the room had a large fireplace made of dark marble. The mantelpiece had a religious statue of a baby in elaborate robes with a crown on its head. An old clock made of similar dark wood stood on the mantelpiece.

It’s a haunted house, Chuck whispered.

Shut up! I hissed.

My Mom ignored the exchange and sat on the couch. Chuck and I sat in chairs, mine across from Mom, and Chuck’s to her right. The clock ticked and there was the hubbub of conversations just outside the window as more people arrived. There was also a constant whooshing sound coming through the windows. I heard the dong of a loud bell outside and, almost simultaneously a hollow chime from the clock on the mantelpiece.

Nothing was said for what seemed like a month.

We looked at each other, and around the room, and at each other again.

Well, it seems very nice here. My Mom said, in almost a whisper and with the same kind of tone and inflection that she used to try to convince me that I should really like the tuna fish casserole she served on Fridays because it actually tasted like chicken; if it didn’t, the company would not have been allowed to call the tuna fish Chicken of the Sea.

I didn’t respond.

Chuck whispered to me, I wonder if there is a crypt around here?

I wondered if anyone would notice or care if he were left here in my place.

Suddenly we weren’t alone. The door opened and the maid ushered in a floridly dressed woman of medium height, with brassy looking, somewhat frizzy blond hair followed by a boy trailing behind.

I’m Marigold Pimkins, and this is my son Julian! she said in a loud voice with an English accent.

She flounced down next to my mother on the couch while Julian sat on the chair just to my right. Julian looked to be a year or two younger than me, about five foot seven with a full head of very curly black hair. The woman started talking to my mother in a volume that would have been more appropriate had they been sitting on either side of a room four times the size, instead of sitting next to each other on a couch.

I didn’t know where to look.

My mother got that expression on her face that she gets when she knows her picture is being taken. It’s sort of a fixed smile that all of us in the family know is fake. She appeared to be saying, How did I get here, won’t someone rescue me?

As soon as the English woman introduced her son as Julian, she ignored him and started going on and on about how her Julian had been in a fine school in England but she had decided that he would get a better education in Ireland and blah blah blah blah. My mother looked as if she had to keep that smile on her face in spite of the fact that she