‘IMAGES OF MOMENTS’
Only 2 weeks after his birth in Tipperary Town on May 20, 1932, Louis McRedmond’s family moved to Upper Cork Street, Mitchelstown, where they were to remain until 1950 when they moved on to Callan, Co. Kilkenny.
Louis grew up in the house in Upper Cork Street in which renowned author William Trevor was born, because his father succeeded Bill Cox as manager of the Bank of Ireland in the town; the family moved into the bank house that had been vacated on the transfer of Mr Cox. He claimed that he took up residence in the bedroom that had been vacated by Trevor and astonishingly, both were to make major contributions to literature in Ireland in the ensuing years.
In keeping with the system at the time, Louis commenced his education at the Presentation Convent in the town, where he spent the mandatory 3 years before attending the Christian Brothers Primary and Secondary Schools. He completed his secondary education in Clongowes Wood and then went on to study history in UCD, where he was awarded an M.A. in 1954. He also qualified as a barrister the same year and practiced for a short period before joining the Irish Independent as a lead writer in 1958. His career saw him join RTE as head of information and publicity in 1973, which he retired from in 1986.
He has written widely at home and abroad on political, social and church affairs. Louis used to say the the word 'Mitchel' dominated his early life, because he was born in Mitchell Street in Tipperary Town in 1932 and arrived in Mitchelstown only a couple of weeks later.
Louis’ last trip home to
Mitchelstown was on May 23, 2008 when he performed the unveiling ceremony of the plaque that was placed on the front of the house where William Trevor was born and where Louis spent his entire childhood.
Later that evening, he gave a lecture on growing up in Mitchelstown under the title ‘Upper Cork Street - The War Years’, which we now publish (kindly submitted by Liam Cusack).
'What follows will be something of a magic lantern show, a succession of frames not necessarily, or only loosely, connected with one another. Childhood memory works like that, especially at a great distance: not a continuous narrative, not a story; just images of moments, some vividly remembered, some fading before your eyes like old photo negatives on glass which you must hurriedly retrieve before they disappear.
The only link between my images will be their location, which is Upper Cork Street, or round the corner from it, with maybe a little stroll out the road from which the child always returned to the safety of the cosy house on the side of the street.
It began with my birthday. Not the birthday I spoke of here some years ago, which was also the day of my First Communion in the month of May 1939. The birthday I'm recalling now was one year on, another sunny day, warm for the time of year. In those very hours German armies were pushing across the Ardennes in France and Belgium, French and British forces were retreating towards Dunkirk and refugees crowded the roads. But I knew nothing of these frightening events.
I just lay in the sunshine on the miniature lawn, very miniature but carefully tended, at the rear of our house, facing the gate William Trevor mentions in his essay called ‘Going Back’. There must have been flowers around, for my mother had a garden where Mr Trevor thought there had been a ‘jungle’: of course, for a threeyear-old boy, as he had been then, the thick fuchsia hedge must have seemed overpowering, impenetrable. Not that I noticed it that day, for I was immersed in my birthday present, a brightly coloured copy of Pinocchio, the picture-book of the film which Walt Disney had recently brought out but had yet to arrive at Sharp's cinema.
It's no more than a snapshot, this moment recalled: grass, warmth, an absorbing book. In its way, it can stand for the Second World War as observed from Upper Cork Street. l don't mean, of course, that, like small children, our elders or we, as we grew older, were unaware of the war. How could we be when it led the attenuated news on Radio Eireann, the sombre-voiced bulletins on the BBC, the newspaper headlines which told less than the whole story through the prism of state censorship? All these come back to me, for soon enough I would become aware that great happenings lay behind the most common answer given those days to any complaint, childish or adult: "there's a war on, y'know".
Yet, even this manifestly true assertion had little to do with slaughter on the ground or destruction falling from the air in places far from Upper Cork Street. What recognition of the war meant was the absence of white bread, the wetness of turf for the fire, the limited number of cars on the road. Indeed, although our Upper Cork Street was part of the road from Dublin to Cork - sorry, from Cork to Dublin - so few cars passed by that I and my friends used to collect registration numbers, and it was a matter of satisfaction to get one with letters other than the local ZB, IU and HI. The war also explained why, when Pinocchio finally arrived at the cinema, you could pay your way in with two jam jars instead of tuppence: glass had become scarce and the bottling companies paid for the returns.
NEUTRALITY
I find it strange though, when I think back, that even while the magnitude of what was going on began to get across to us youngsters, any local direct association with the war got little mention. There must have been fathers and older brothers working in England and some also serving in the British forces: I can think of two. Beyond doubt, there had to be others and there had to be firsthand accounts available of the Blitz and the perils of wartime England. Perhaps these were not to be talked about because too short a time had passed since the Black-and-Tans, the tumult in these parts of the Civil War, the burning of the castle and so much else in living memory for the older generation. Against that background neutrality functioned as a kind of amnesiac or anaesthetic to prevent the revisiting of divided loyalties together. Neutrality bound us together, not least in our preparations again the possibility of war coming to our fields and streets.
Many men in the town volunteered for the LDF, the Local Defence Force, or its unarmed support service, the LSF, the Local Security Force, in which my father took part. Twice a week he and other LSF men would be sent twoby-two to patrol the boreens in the dead of night, allegedly to watch out for invading parachutists. What the LSF observers were to do if they saw any parachutists was none too clear: there were no mobile phones in those days, indeed scarcely any phones at all in Mitchelstown. Still, off they went, these pairs of civilians whom we really should not make a joke of, for they genuinely gave of their time and energy – the middle of the night remember, with a working day before and after - to serve their country and the rest of us in the way they were directed to do.
These volunteer forces should not be confused with the Dad's Army of British television. Ireland had no conscription and despite a big expansion of the regular army, local defence and security included many younger men as well as older. The event of the year for all of them was St Patrick's Day or Easter Monday, I forget which. Anyhow, it was the day of the parade. We used to watch in some bemusement to see our neighbourhood grown-ups march from Lower to Upper Cork Street and back to the Square dressed as soldiers or handymen. The LSF wore what looked like blue boiler suits, while the LDF had brown uniforms before being changed to the FCA and given green serge.
There must have been music: pipers, I think, from Kilworth Camp. I’m not sure. What I do remember, though, is the parade when the senior Catholic curate, Father Cotter, was standing behind me among the watchers on the footpath. As our heroes strode smartly past I heard him say, half to himself “one old Munster would do for the lot of ye.” I had to wait until later to find out what this meant. It transpired that Father Cotter had been in the First World War as a chaplain with the Munster Fusiliers ....
We came a little closer than that, as it happened, to real warfare - or something like it. This was during the great manoeuvres of 1942 when the Southern Command of the army had to defend the river-crossing at Fermoy from the invading troops of the Eastern Command. The campaign went on for a week or more. What a time it was to be a young lad in Upper Cork Street! Armoured cars charged by, dispatch-riders vroomed on their motorbikes, an occasional artillery piece was trundled along on its gun-carriage. Troopers mounted a Lewis machinegun in our vegetable-garden beyond the William Trevor gate - yes, I had the name of the gun, that was the kind of thing you learned by talking with the soldiers.
A mock battle, however, had its limits. At least in Ireland, and perhaps only in Ireland. Come back with me to an afternoon in the middle of the manoeuvres. I am standing in Upper Cork Street, thrilled by all the clattering activity going on. A large motor-cycle with side-car comes harrumphing down fast from Fermoy direction. A side-car, I know, means an officer. The motorbike suddenly swings over, comes to a jolting halt at our front door and out of the