ancient flags, and blatant draughts whined through the slits between rotting window frames and rattling panes. The roughly plastered walls were an evil shade of green and a temperamental coal-range stood in an alcove. A row of discoloured pewter bells hung high above the door; in our day these never responded to the relevant buttons being pushed but they emitted ghostly chimes when gales blew. A dozen iron hooks depended from the rafters – ‘The better to hang yourself on, my dear,’ observed my mother as she toured her new home. In one corner a steep ladder-stairs led through a trap-door to an attic where the servants would have slept in the Bad Old Days. An adult could stand upright only in the middle of the attic floor and this retreat soon became one of my Private Paradises.
Behind the house were several collapsing stables and, beyond a wide cobbled yard, stood Lismore’s recently opened cinema, the property of our landlord, who lived next door. It was enormous and no one could tell us what purpose it had originally served; it may have been a series of barns whose internal walls had been demolished. Mercifully our landlord did not prosper as a film-wallah and within a few years the local doctor had built a new ‘Palladium’. Then the old cinema became another of myPrivate Paradises; in semi-darkness I leapt from row to row of moth-eaten red plush seats, being pursued by imaginary cannibals and collecting swarms of real fleas. These were not found tolerable by my mother, even when identified by me as rare tropical insects picked up while exploring in New Guinea.
Beyond the cinema were our garden and orchard, half an acre of wilderness which, despite consistent neglect, provided us for many years with an abundance of loganberries, gooseberries, apples and pears. At intervals my mother would remark on the advantages of growing one’s own vegetables. Then my father would borrow some implements and might on the following Saturday be observed reclining beside a minute pile of cut brambles reading Plato’s Theaetetus or the latest Dorothy Sayers. Like myself, he lacked the urge to cultivate. Our genes have perhaps resisted change since the Age of the Gatherers.
Although our new home was very nearly a ruin we tolerated it for the next twenty-one years. My mother must have abhorred these slum-like surroundings but she refrained, as always, from complaining about the inevitable. For a rent of ten shillings a week one couldn’t, even in Lismore in the 1930s, expect very much.
The rent was so low not only because of the house’s dilapidation but because of the previous tenant’s suicide in the dining-room. This snag considerably influenced my destiny since it made it far harder to engage local maidservants, or to persuade those who came from a distance to remain in residence. It was not that any ghost operated – at least to our knowledge – but the neighbourhood vociferously believed that a suicide without a consequent haunting was against nature.
As a child I always knew there was nothing to spare for non-essentials. But I was never hungry or cold so it did not occur to me to interpret this condition as poverty. Nor did I ever long for the unobtainable, with one spectacular exception – a pony of my own. And since that desire so clearly belonged to the realm of fantasy it caused me no discontent. In Dublin I enjoyed the luxury toys of my cousins – rocking-horses, tricycles, pedal motor cars and the like – yet I never asked or even wished for such things. They belonged to another sort of person who lived in another sort of world. And it was not a world I should have cared to inhabit permanently. It had no rivers, fields, woods, moors and mountains.
When we moved to the South Mall Nora was replaced by Old Brigid, a formidable character who for the next three years – scornful of ghosts – impassively controlled the whole peculiar Murphy establishment. It cannot have been easy to contend with a
Behind the house were several collapsing stables and, beyond a wide cobbled yard, stood Lismore’s recently opened cinema, the property of our landlord, who lived next door. It was enormous and no one could tell us what purpose it had originally served; it may have been a series of barns whose internal walls had been demolished. Mercifully our landlord did not prosper as a film-wallah and within a few years the local doctor had built a new ‘Palladium’. Then the old cinema became another of myPrivate Paradises; in semi-darkness I leapt from row to row of moth-eaten red plush seats, being pursued by imaginary cannibals and collecting swarms of real fleas. These were not found tolerable by my mother, even when identified by me as rare tropical insects picked up while exploring in New Guinea.
Beyond the cinema were our garden and orchard, half an acre of wilderness which, despite consistent neglect, provided us for many years with an abundance of loganberries, gooseberries, apples and pears. At intervals my mother would remark on the advantages of growing one’s own vegetables. Then my father would borrow some implements and might on the following Saturday be observed reclining beside a minute pile of cut brambles reading Plato’s Theaetetus or the latest Dorothy Sayers. Like myself, he lacked the urge to cultivate. Our genes have perhaps resisted change since the Age of the Gatherers.
Although our new home was very nearly a ruin we tolerated it for the next twenty-one years. My mother must have abhorred these slum-like surroundings but she refrained, as always, from complaining about the inevitable. For a rent of ten shillings a week one couldn’t, even in Lismore in the 1930s, expect very much.
The rent was so low not only because of the house’s dilapidation but because of the previous tenant’s suicide in the dining-room. This snag considerably influenced my destiny since it made it far harder to engage local maidservants, or to persuade those who came from a distance to remain in residence. It was not that any ghost operated – at least to our knowledge – but the neighbourhood vociferously believed that a suicide without a consequent haunting was against nature.
As a child I always knew there was nothing to spare for non-essentials. But I was never hungry or cold so it did not occur to me to interpret this condition as poverty. Nor did I ever long for the unobtainable, with one spectacular exception – a pony of my own. And since that desire so clearly belonged to the realm of fantasy it caused me no discontent. In Dublin I enjoyed the luxury toys of my cousins – rocking-horses, tricycles, pedal motor cars and the like – yet I never asked or even wished for such things. They belonged to another sort of person who lived in another sort of world. And it was not a world I should have cared to inhabit permanently. It had no rivers, fields, woods, moors and mountains.
When we moved to the South Mall Nora was replaced by Old Brigid, a formidable character who for the next three years – scornful of ghosts – impassively controlled the whole peculiar Murphy establishment. It cannot have been easy to contend with a
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