WHELAN IN THE YEARS
MY FATHER SAID SYLVIA HAD ‘A BEAUTIFUL CARRIAGE’. I ASKED WHERE SHE KEPT HER HORSE...
From humble beginnings in Limerick to global fame with help from Eurovision, Bill Whelan’s life story is worthy of a movie he would normally compose the score to himself... as these extracts from his beautifully-crafted new memoir The Road to Riverdance demonstrate
OUR sense of place defines us; growing up when, and particularly where I did in 1950s Limerick, profoundly affected how I perceived the world and my position in it. Our house, 18 Barrington Street, presented contrasting impressions depending on which exit you used.
From the front door, you got Limerick’s version of Harley or Wimpole Street.
Private nursing homes (mostly maternity) and medical practices implied security and care.
Doctors and dentists ran their clinics from the ground floors of their five-storey Georgian homes, lived upstairs with their families and parked their swishy cars outside. (Dr McDonnell, for example, had a massive imported American Buick.) St Michael’s Protestant church and school at the end of the street implied solid sensibility and conservative gentility.
From the back door, the picture was dramatically different. Little Barrington Street (or School House Lane) comprised a terrace of tiny two-storey cottages where cramped living conditions and poor facilities made for a more frugal kind of living; nevertheless, these homes accommodated large families.
The Tobins, directly behind our house, had so many children I never got to know them all; they were coming and going, day and night. An open sewer ran the length of the lane and emptied into a shore-hole covered with a slate slab where you would see rats foraging among the eggshells and potato skins.
Ab Sheahan, uncle to Frank and Malachy McCourt Jr, lived in one of these houses.
The McCourt family had emigrated at that stage, and Ab lived alone.
When Ab became frail, and even his customary lopsided gait deserted him, my mother sent me to his house with his lunch every day. His kitchen was dark. Sooty grime covered the walls from the open fire where he cooked. The house was lit by candles, and while I never knew what Ab’s toilet arrangements were, I knew that the house next door had none.
At the end of the lane were the Lillises, who kept chickens and geese that wandered freely around the street. Beside the Lillises was a place of particular significance: the house of Imelda Lyons and her two beautiful daughters, Sylvia and Phyllis. I never knew where their father was. England, somebody said.
Being a few years older than me, Phyllis was the subject of many boyhood fantasies.
She had long hair, a luminously beautiful face, big eyes and a full mouth. She wore red lipstick, hooped gypsy earrings and clothes that recalled Carmen or one of those exotic women from my father’s films. I once overheard my father say that her sister, Sylvia, had a ‘beautiful carriage’.
When I asked where she kept her horse, my father laughed and told me to run and play.
Occasionally, I was left in the care of Imelda, their mother, who also did some cleaning in our house. We called her Lyonzie, and I doted on her. Not only was she great fun to be with, but she took me for walks down Parnell Street, where all the pigs and bacon shops were. We’d pass the side of Matterson’s on Lady’s Lane, where through a small, barred window, we’d see pigs squealing and screeching down the narrow corridor on the way, Lyonzie told me, to becoming sausages. On the way home, Lyonzie would bring me into Naughton’s chip shop and buy me a bag of greasy sausage and chips with lashings of salt and vinegar. I devoured these with the kind of delight my mother never saw over her carefully prepared dinners. These extra-gastronomic excursions were not encouraged, but their clandestine nature brought extra relish to the taste.
‘Why aren’t you eating your dinner, Billy?’ ‘Not hungry, Ma.’
‘Hmm ... were you out with Lyonzie for a walk today?’
Silence.
In those days, goods and products were transported around the city by horse and cart. Each house on Barrington Street had a manhole with a cast iron cover concealing a cellar. The coalman arrived with his horse and dray, removed the cover and, hefting the big bags one by one onto his shoulder, emptied them down the manhole.
I loved the sharp crack as the heavy inverted sack hit the path and then the long, shivering shower of coal spilling into the chasm, 12 feet below, the sound bouncing off the curving cellar walls. To protect his coat, the coalman always put a disused bag on his shoulder first, pointless since the coat was grungier than the bag. When I got older, I was sent to the front window to count the bags, to make sure we were getting what we ordered.
We were so accustomed to horses on the streets in the 1950s I even have a foggy recollection of going to a Whelan family funeral in a growler or hansom cab. Horses were everywhere, as was evidence of their passing with its distinctive and evocative horsey smell.
Bertie Hogan drove the horse and cart for the Tinsleys and the McMahons, the timber people. He also did nixers for my parents, for example, if they wanted something like a piece of furniture moved.
Bertie was almost deaf, which meant you had to shout at him before he heard the request. Otherwise, he’d nod his head as if he understood, then ignore what you thought you’d
asked him to do. One day I was kicking a football with Mick Fraser, who lived in the tenement end of Barrington Street where five houses were let out in flats when our brave horseman Bertie passed by on his bike.
‘Hey Bertie,’ Mick roared, ‘will you be carryin’ down the horse?’ ‘I’ll be goin’ below to the yard in a while,’ says Bertie.
‘Will you give us a jant, will ya?’ bellowed Mick. ‘Ah g’wan, will ya?’ Bertie cycled off down the hill of Schoolhouse Lane and reappeared as promised, with his old brown mare pulling the big red low-loading dray behind him. As he turned into Barrington Street, he gave Mick a nod. We jumped onto the cart, and off we went, two outlaws on the streets of Laramie, with Champion the Wonder Horse trotting unevenly over the teeth-shattering cobbles, ready to fight any sheriff or redskin varmint we might encounter. We were, as the old Dublin saying goes, ‘in our Grannies’ – the place where anything is possible, and all is permitted.
There were many such opportunities in 1950s Limerick for young adventurers. The arrival of health and safety regulations changed that. Sensibly, these exploits would now be deemed hazardous, but back then, nobody seemed concerned.
My boyhood pal, Leo McDonnell, and I occasionally wandered to the railway line at Limerick station while our mothers thought we were playing in the park on Pery Square.
The romance of rail travel was magnetic, and we picked our way over the sleepers to where the massive steam engines were shunting goods-carriages and hitching up cars from the cement factory in Mungret. The trick was to place ourselves at the steam engines when they paused, hissing and belching like Bertie Hogan’s horse after climbing Barrack Hill. We’d look pleadingly at the driver and make signs with our thumbs like we’d seen hitchers do on O’Connell Avenue looking for lifts to Adare or Cork. Eventually, a driver would melt to our charms, reach down and lift us into the cabin: ‘Right lads, only a short run now. That’s all ye’re getting.’
He’d put his hand on the iron throttle and turn it to the right.
Then we’d hear the powerful whooshes of steam from underneath us as the engine moved slowly through a curtain of vaporous haze and a chorus of screeching steel and iron. Off we went, out along the shunting spur line to Rosbrien.
Sometimes the driver let us pull the chain, and the whistle’s reverb sounded around the houses of Roxboro Road. At Rosbrien, we’d reverse down a siding, pick up extra railcars, and then back to Limerick station and the shunting yard. The odd time, the driver let us put our hands on the throttle or shovel some of the oily coal into the fiery mouth of the furnace. I wondered if hell could be hotter than it was in there. Years later, when I heard Warren Zevon’s ‘Nightime in the Switching Yard’, these days were brought vividly to life. Finally, the driver would lower us back down onto the shingle around the rail track near Limerick station: ‘Now, feck off home with ye, and tell no one ye were out in Rosbrien, or I’ll be murdered.’
His secret was safe.
NOW, FECK OFF HOME AND TELL NO
ONE YE WERE HERE OR I’LL BE MURDERED
The Road to Riverdance is published by Lilliput priced €25. Bill Whelan will be in conversation with Fiachna Ó Braonáin about his book and career as part of the Dublin Book Festival on Saturday, November 12, at 7pm – for information and tickets visit the Dublin Book Festival website.