Rory & Ita - Couverture rigide

Chapter One – Ita

‘The first thing I remember is the gramophone arriving. I know I must have been less than three, because my mother was still alive. It was a lovely thing. I can still smell the wood of it. It was dark wood, with a press below the turntable for the records. Slats behind the turntable, six or eight of them, each the width of my hand, opened when a handle was turned, and released the sound. It was good sound. It was beautiful. I can still remember it, and the little needles and the little box, the dog of His Master’s Voice on the lid. And the needle had to be fitted in. I was able to do it myself later, and the handle turned and away we went.

‘The first record we had was John McCormack, and he sang “Macushla”. And there was McCormack sing-ing “Adeste Fidelis”, and that used to be played every Christmas. And there was “The Old Refrain”, which is still in my mind, played by Fritz Kreisler. And a song that started, “Where are the boys of the Old Brigade?” I can remember marching around the room listening to it. And there was a record of somebody reading The Selfish Giant. I can remember one line: “In one corner of the garden it was always winter.”’

She remembers hands holding grease-proof paper, and lowering the paper on to the surface of a pot of soup, and the paper being lifted and bringing a film of fat with it. She remembers a tiny wooden swing, with a little wooden girl swinging on it. She remembers a stuffed dog, a black and white terrier, called Dog, and a brown teddy bear. She remembers a doll with a bald china head. She remembers pale green notepaper with serrated edges.

‘I was born on the 20th of June,1925. I think I was born at home, in 25 Brighton Gardens, Terenure, which is one of the two houses I have lived in, that house and the house I live in now.There were an awful lot of home births at that time and I feel that I was probably born there.’ She knows nothing about the birth. ‘Not a thing. I just came. I was named Ita Bridget. I have no idea where the Ita came from but Bridget, I gather, was my mother’s mother. I was the third child. The first, Mary Johanna (Máire), was three years older than me and the second, John Joseph ( Joe), was a year older.’

She was Ita Bridget Bolger. Her father was James ( Jim) Bolger, of Coolnaboy, Oilgate, in County Wexford. He was born in 1890. He grew up on a farm and was sent to St Peter’s College, in Wexford town, to become a priest. The eldest of five children, his father had died when he was very young.‘His mother, my grandmother, was a tough old dame and if you were meant to be a priest, you became a priest, when all this money had been spent on you.’ But he had other ideas. He left St Peter’s when he was seventeen and didn’t go home. Armed with a reference, he went to Enniscorthy: ‘I beg to say that James Bolger has received a very good education in St Peter’s College, has always shown great aptitude, and is a very good boy. I am quite sure he is thoroughly fitted for the position he seeks in the Echo Office.’ He got the job, at the Enniscorthy Echo, the local newspaper.

‘He got caught up in the nationalist movement and he was found sleeping in a bed with guns under it. Now, they weren’t his guns but he wouldn’t tell whose they were, so he was banished from Enniscorthy.’ This happened just after the outbreak of the War, in 1914. What the police found in the house of Larry DeLacey, where Jim Bolger lodged, were homemade grenades – cocoa tins filled with gelignite and scraps of iron – as well as yards of fuse and hundreds of detonators.They also found stacks of Roger Casement’s pamphlet Ireland, Germany and the Freedom of the Seas, which had been secretly printed at the Echo offices. He was arrested, along with Jack Hegarty, another lodger, and taken to Arbour Hill barracks, in Dublin. A defence fund was quickly organised, and a campaign to have the men tried by jury. Here is the account by Robert Brennan, Jim Bolger’s brother-in-law:

. . . after two trials in which Tim Healy and Charlie Wyse Power appeared for the defence, the two were acquitted on all charges of treason, sedition, creating disaffection etc. They had been charged, amongst other things, with knowing that the seditious literature and the explosives were in the house and with not informing the authorities. The jury found they were not guilty, though neither of the two men could get in or out of bed without climbing over stacks of the literature, and they could hardly move anywhere in the house without knocking over one of the pernicious cocoa tins. DeLacey’s old housekeeper, shown the yards of fuse, said of course she had seen it. She had cut yards off a length of it to tie the little dog to the bed-post.

Tim Healy was largely responsible for the acquittal. He made it appear that Hegarty was being persecuted, not for his political activities, but for his religion. His plea was based on the fact that one of the witnesses for the prosecution, who testified that pro-German notices were in Hegarty’s handwriting, was a Belfast man who had himself, as he was forced to admit in crossexamination, preached in the streets of Cork with a Sankey and Moody band. Hegarty, said Tim, had been hounded out of his employment and out of his native city by the bigots who had come down from Belfast to insult the people of Cork by preaching against their religion.

Barred from Enniscorthy, Jim Bolger ‘lived in New Ross for some years but he was able to send his writings back to Enniscorthy, so he was still working for the Echo.’ From New Ross, he moved to Dublin. He followed Robert Brennan, to work on the Irish Bulletin,a Sinn Féin propaganda sheet which was produced daily and delivered by hand to the Dublin newspapers and to all the foreign correspondents in the city. Production and distribution of the Bulletin were difficult but the authorities in Dublin Castle never managed to stop a single issue. It was published every day, from November 1919until the Treaty was ratified two years later. ‘He never fought, as such. He was more an intellectual than a fighter.’

On the inception of the new State, Jim Bolger became a civil servant, at the Department of External Affairs. ‘He never lost the idea of what he had fought for, but he wasn’t a diehard.’ His first task was to sit outside a room with a gun while the new Minister, Gavin Duffy, was inside the room. By the time she was born, three years later, he was sitting at a desk, in the Accounts section of External Affairs, and studying accountancy at night, at the College of Commerce, in Rathmines. He was also a freelance journalist, calling himself The Recorder, writing GAA † match reports for the Irish Independent. He also wrote for Ireland’s Own, ‘about ordinary life and things that go on. One article I found was about cutting the front grass. He also wrote a series of articles about the Young Irelanders for the Independent.

‘My mother’s name was Ellen O’Brien. She was born, I think, in1895, in the townland of Ballydonegan, near Ferns, in County Wexford. She is a bit of a mystery to me. My father never spoke of her. Maybe it upset him too much, or maybe he thought it would upset us.’

She doesn’t know how her parents met, or where. They were married in1921, in Liverpool. What a Sinn Féin activist was doing in Liverpool during the War of Independence, she doesn’t know. ‘He never spoke about being out of the country. He was a terribly secretive man, you know. His right hand did not know what his left hand was doing and that is the truth of it.’

Home was 25 Brighton Gardens, in Terenure, a suburb three miles south of Dublin’s centre. It was one in a terrace of small redbrick houses.‘There were thousands of them around the place.’ The front door was painted brown, with two stained-glass windows and a brass knocker, letter box and, later, when the electricity had been installed, a brass bell.

Immediately inside, there was a hallstand. It was tall, with a mirror set into its backing. It had hooks, for coats, high on its sides, and a shelf, for gloves; there was also a rack for umbrellas, and a tin pot at its base, to catch the water. There was brown lino in the hall.There were two prints, The Laughing Cavalier on one side, and The Toast on the other. Both had been acquired in exchange for cigarette coupons. ‘I always loved them.’ There were also two pictures in the front room, but she hated these ones. The first was called First Love. ‘There was a man in robes that you’d usually see on a Roman, and a lady with her eyes cast down, and he had his hand on her arm and they were leaning on a kind of a marble pillar, and that was First Love. There was no picture of the row they must have had, but Reconciliation showed them actually smiling at each other, so I presume they must have had one. But I always hated them.They were eventually stolen when my father moved to a newer house. There were a few other things taken too but I was so pleased with whoever took those horrible pictures; I always thought how welcome they were to them.

‘The room at the front of the house was very seldom used. Christmas Day and very odd days in between. Some people called this room the parlour and others even called it the Jewman’s room; people never used it but if the moneylender came looking for his money he was brought in there. But we always called it the sitting- room.There was a suite in the sitting-room, a sofa and two chairs, upholstered in brown leather, and very cold on the behind. There was a black marble fireplace, with colourful tiles running down both sides.There was a humidor on the mantelpiece, an ornate wooden bo...

From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling novelist -- his first ever non-fiction book: a poignant, illuminating journey through a century of modern Ireland as told through the eyes of his parents.

Ita Doyle: “In all my life I have lived in two houses, had two jobs, and one husband. I’m a very interesting person.”

Rory and Ita tells -- largely in their own words -- the story of Roddy Doyle’s parents’ lives from their first memories to the present. Born in 1923 and 1925 respectively, they met at a New Year’s Eve dance in 1947 and married in 1951. Marvellous talkers, with excellent memories, they draw upon their own family experiences (Ita’s mother died when she was three -- “the only memory I have is of her hands, doing things”; Rory was the oldest of nine children, five of them girls); and recall every detail of their Dublin childhoods -- the people (aunts, cousins, shopkeepers, friends, teachers), the politics (both came from Republican families), Ita’s idyllic times in the Wexford countryside, and Rory’s apprenticeship as a printer.

When Roddy’s parents put down a deposit of two hundred pounds for a house in rural Kilbarrack, on the edge of Dublin, Rory was working as a compositor at the Irish Independent. By the time the first of their four children was born, he had become a teacher at the School of Printing in Dublin. Then, their home began to change (“Kilbarrack wasn’t a rural place any more”) along with the rest of the country, as the intensely Catholic society of their youth was transformed into the vibrant, complex Ireland of today.

Rory and Ita’s captivating accounts of the last century, combined with Roddy Doyle’s legendary skill in illuminating ordinary experience, make a story of tremendous warmth and humanity.

This magnificent book is not only a biography of, but also a love letter to Roddy’s parents, Rory and Ita.