Growing Up in Dublin

Book excerpt: The author reflects on his childhood and adolescence in Dublin, glimpsing occasionally into his many places of exile. Told in twenty-six stand-alone stories, illustrated with photos and cartoons. As World War II ends, his mother dies, leaving his dad with four young children. Postwar years are tough on Dubliners: socks are darned repeatedly; clothes are worn until they rip. Bowl haircuts like The Three Stooges are in style. But every Christmas there are toys. He and his pals walk out over the sand flats in Dublin Bay, taste the raw smell of the sea, and feel gritty sand stuffed between their toes. He has happy summers on a farm in County Mayo: raking hay, footing turf, chatting with colorful characters, but gets into trouble with his catapult. Goes hunting rabbits at dawn, smearing footsteps through the drenching dew. Proustian flashbacks evoke the country kitchen: the smell of turf smoke; praties boiling in a fat-bellied pot; a black kettle "singing peace" on the hob. His farmer uncle teaches lasting lessons in work ethics. School is mixed: indiscipline, indifference, animosity, mediocrity; biffs to the hand with the strap, lashes to the psyche with the tongue, the teacher openly calling one an eejit. Discovers Yeats's "terrible beauty"--in the classrooms where Pearse sat, before he was shot for his part in creating it. A Christian Brother inspires him in time to slip across the stile into the field of higher education. Rock 'n Roll upsets parents, grips teenagers; James Dean rebels, Buddy Holly thrills; their impossibly young deaths bewilder the young. Things change; some find no satisfaction. Pirate radios force staid national programs to embrace pop. The Beatles win all sides over in the tumultuous 1960s. He gets hooked on the suave contours and savage crags in the Wicklow Wilderness. At twenty-two he takes the emigrant boat, returns to Dublin for University, leaves again, pays tribute now to the city that mothered him.