The Market Yard: Memories of a Childhood in Sligo

By Gus McHugh

This is a heart-warming and inspiring tale of a boy growing up in a west of Ireland town as World War II raged in Europe. While his family falls on hard times, the little boy is swept up with more important events such as playing with the Temple Street Gang in the Pig Market, surviving Sligo's answer to Sing Sing prison (the local school), or being chased by a stag around the environs of Lough Gill. Interwoven into these colourful depictions of everyday life are details of historical events such as Blue Shirt riots, attacks by the Irregulars, arrests of prisoners of war and the impact of the "Emergency" on this Irish family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447536031

Book preview

Gus McHugh

The Market Yard

First published 2008 by Lulu

Copyright © JPA McHugh 2008

ISBN 978-1-4092-3111-0

eISBN: 978-1-44753-603-1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means,

without permission in writing from JPA McHugh.

Dedicated to the memory of my parents, Patsy and Kathleen,

who reared my siblings and myself to the best of their ability at

a time of momentous change and financial hardship.

Acknowledgements

This book was written at the behest and insistence of my children Elaine, Niall and Susan. They had a full and detailed knowledge of their mother’s background and upbringing, but had few stories of my young years occasioned by my absence working late and returning home after they had gone to bed.

I would particularly like to thank Susan, without whose help and encouragement I would never have taken the time to assemble my thoughts in such a cohesive and disciplined way. I would also like to thank Sean, my very talented son-in-law, for the design of the cover and the technical assistance in publishing it, Liz Ryan who provided editorial advice and Claudia Carroll for her enthusiasm and support. I must also thank my wife Gerry whose patience must have been stretched to near breaking point on several occasions.

I have confined my narrative to my first twenty-one years, concluding with my departure from Sligo to take up a challenging position in Dublin.

If the humour holds me, and I have the encouragement and the energy, I may yet put pen to paper to cover the next half-century.

Preface

In August 2002 my sisters, Monica and Cepta, who had emigrated to Canada almost half a century before that, returned to Ireland for a visit. Cepta's husband Paul and her daughter Amanda came with her. Cepta was particularly anxious that Amanda should see our family roots, the place where we all came from, and, if possible meet her mother's childhood friends. Paul, whose mother was from County Cork, was Australian born and was anxious to see the country his mother came from.

I, having departed Sligo for what I perceived to be the greener fields of Dublin some fifty odd years before, was living in Dublin. The clans gathered in my Dublin home, and arrangements were quickly made to visit the West of Ireland.

In order to show off as much of the West as time would permit, we travelled first to Galway where Amanda had expressed a desire to see the sun go down in Galway Bay, which she did, then north through Connemara, and along the coastal route through Mayo to Sligo, staying in Sligo town and visiting the graveyard in Bundoran, where our parents lay.

All through this two-week trip, I regaled the visitors with tales relating to the countryside that we travelled through, from the dry wall lace stone fields of Connacht to the drumlins and fairy forts of Sligo, presided over by Queen Maeve in her regal cairn atop Knocknarae, surrounded by the greatest aggregate of prehistoric megalithic tombs in Europe.

The area is conducive of tales and stories of the distant past, of fairies and leprechauns, of long past battles of enchanted armies now consigned to myth and fable, of loves lost and found, of territorial conquest and heroes and giants, of spells and magic, and this was the place I grew up in.

Accordingly, I was able to sprinkle my narrative to my guests with a liberal scatter of myth and fact, which kept Amanda enthralled throughout the journey, and was to have a positive influence on her future in the following months. On Amanda's return to college in Canada, it transpired that she was required to submit a story based on the experience of her parents or elder relations, where possible incorporating a paranormal occurrence. She immediately thought of the stories I had told during her visit several months earlier, and her mind focused on a particular story relating to a Christmas goose I was sent to collect from a Mrs Parks in Strandhill. She quickly e-mailed me asking for a repeat of the anecdote, which of course I did, and the outcome was that she won first prize at her college for the legend.

1

The Trouble with Having Three Driving Licences

My father, Patrick (known as Patsy) McHugh was born in the last year of the nineteenth century in the village of Dowra in County Leitrim, the eldest of eight children. His father’s name was Patrick, and his mother’s maiden name was Bridget Cullen. I never knew what my grandfather’s occupation was.

After relocating to Kinlough, the family eventually settled in Bundoran, a seaside town in south County Donegal, in 1901. They rented premises in a central location on the west side of the main street and set up a shop selling souvenirs and items of interest to summer visitors, and provided accommodation and meals.

My Dad told many stories of his childhood years in and around Bundoran. One I particularly enjoyed was when he was about ten years old, he and his classmates got to bragging about their prowess in the ‘long jump’, at which point my Dad stated he had several times jumped the river running at the back of the convent. Right, say his pals, to Dad’s dismay, let’s all go down now to see this great feat. Well, they all troop to the river and the section to be jumped is agreed. Dad backs off twenty feet, pauses, takes a deep breath, starts a full run at speed, reaches the edge, takes off, and lands slap bang in the middle of the river, up to his waist in water! Dad told this story so often I guess he never really got over the embarrassment.

I never knew my Dad to be athletic in any way, although he had a gold medal from the GAA for Gaelic football. Unconfirmed rumour had it that he played for Donegal in a final in Croke Park, but I never got to the bottom of that. He also told of a time when the sea around Bundoran and Ballyshannon – I guess you would say Donegal Bay – retreated on the ebb tide about four miles, leaving the sands exposed, revealing several wrecks of boats and ships that had sunk over the years. He recounted how he and his pals ventured out one evening, before the tide turned, to what he described as ‘the wreck of a Spanish galleon¹ ’. He indeed had a collection of copper coins which he ‘salvaged’ from the wreck, and which I used to play with as a young lad. As I recall, these coins were similar in size to the pennies then in use but so disfigured with the action of the sea that they had no discernible pattern, so it was quite possible they were from a local boat rather than a Spanish galleon. Years later I checked with local people, and they did recall an occasion when the tide retreated as described by my Dad! This being so, there must have been a tidal surge the other side of the ocean to compensate.²

Dad joined the local Bundoran tin whistle band, although not much else is known about this. Nevertheless, he always kept a tin whistle in his ‘private box’ but only very occasionally took it out to play a tune.

In due course, the time came when he finished school and set out to find a job. Bundoran was not a very big town and I suppose he had to take whatever came his way, which was an apprenticeship in Conlon’s Bakery. His pay was two shillings and six pence a week, so his first week’s pay was a single half-crown coin, worth 2 & 6 (probably the equivalent of fifteen cents in today’s currency). On receiving his first week’s pay, wanting to impress his mother, and feeling a single coin was a bit mean, he changed the half crown coin for thirty pennies (in those days there were twelve pence in a shilling) and dashed home to his mother saying, Mam, look how much I earned for you! and tossed the whole thirty pence on to her lap. No doubt his mother was very pleased!

Dad was, of course, the youngest and latest entrant in Conlon’s bakery and, as such, had to deal with all the menial tasks such as cleaning all the baker’s benches and sweeping up the spillage several times a day. He always warned us never to eat chester cakes – sometimes called ‘gur cakes’, as he said they were made from a bottom and top layer of pastry with the centre made up of the floor sweepings, which included a considerable cross section of insect life. This was a penalty on us at the time as, in our childish opinion, chester cakes offered the best value of all the pastry range. He also told the story that one day a very irate lady arrived at the bakery demanding to see Mr Conlon. When Mr Conlon arrived, she proceeded to upbraid him, pointing out a dead cockroach embedded in the remains of a loaf, which she claimed to have purchased from the bakery, and threatening all sorts of unpleasant action. Calm as you will, Mr Conlon took the offending loaf, plucked the cockroach out, popped it into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it saying, You are mistaken, madam, that was only a large sultana. Later, he explained to his staff that his quick action to destroy the evidence probably saved the bakery, as quite apart from any damages at law, if the story was given any credence, it would destroy the bakery’s reputation.

Dad continued for some years at Conlon’s bakery, learning the arts and skills of baking, at which he was very good. Later in life, he would cook all the Christmas fare, cakes, pudding, desserts, deal with the turkey and goose – in this he was partial to giblet soup and other strange concoctions which the rest of us would not look at. Nevertheless, he was a fine cook, and when he took control of the kitchen, we were all assured of a fine meal. Mam, of course, was a good cook, but Dad had that professional touch.

When he was around twenty years old – we cannot be sure of the exact age – he met up with John Gilbride a native of Kinlough, who had started a motor garage business at Bridge Street, Sligo. Perhaps the families were known to each other, having come from Kinlough. Anyway, Dad took a job at the garage as an apprentice mechanic and moved to Sligo.

Although Sligo was only twenty-two miles from Bundoran, this was a big move for a young lad from a small seaside town. However, he adapted well to the changed pattern in his life, getting digs with his fellow workers in Gilbrides, and getting his head down to the serious business of learning what made motor-car engines go and how to repair them.

He did have a hobby, and that was radio, or ‘wireless’ as it was known then. He was particularly proud of his five-valve PYE dry battery set. Wireless sets in those days were judged as to their reception power by the number of valves, and ‘a five-valver’ was considered a top-of-the-line model. I remember it well. It was housed in a polished mahogany case, with a ‘sunrise over the sea’ cut-out design on the front, and a small hinged door to the side giving access to the controls and with a carrying handle on top. The set had a built-in aerial and was powered by a 110-volt main dry battery, a 9-volt dry grid battery, and a 6-volt wet (acid filled) battery. The wet battery had to be re-charged every week, so it was usual to have a spare, one in use whilst the other was on charge. Mains powered sets were not very satisfactory at that time in that they picked up a lot of ‘mains hum’.

It was about this time my mother, Kathleen Clancy, joined the firm of John Gilbride as an office clerk, looking after the books of account together with all the usual office chores and duties. Although she had no formal training in these disciplines, she had a natural understanding of mathematics and accounts that stood to her in her work. I suppose it could be said all her children inherited the same easy familiarity with figures, and indeed found it difficult to understand why others could not grasp the essential logic and beauty of figures.

Mam was the youngest daughter in a family of five, two boys and three girls. They were born and reared in a street just off Albert Line in Sligo town, which was subsequently renamed Pearse Road. The original home has long since been demolished to make way for newer and better buildings. Mam’s father drove a horse drawn bread van for Alexander MacArthur, the largest bakery in Sligo. He married Annie Gillen from Easkey direction, whose brother emigrated to America and reputedly made a fortune in the Californian gold rush. We never heard from this wealthy relative, except to say that the more his wealth grew the more we didn’t hear from him.

In due course and with the passage of time, Patsy McHugh and Kathleen Clancy, working in the same company, and seeing each other five and a half days every week, got together and taking matters further, decided to get married, which they did around 1927. They set up home in a flat in Teeling Street, immediately to the right of the Court House in Sligo.

At this time, Dad had progressed through his apprenticeship to a fully qualified mechanic, and having a somewhat extrovert and pleasant personality, was offered and accepted the position as sales manager.

Unlike today, when motorcar salesmen are salesmen and nothing else, in Dad’s day, as the motorcar was new to Ireland and very few people could afford one, the salesman had to teach the prospective customer to drive, impart a rudimentary knowledge of the engine and how to get it going when failure occurred. In those days very few motorcars had self-starters, so drivers had to master the difficult art of the starting handle, which, if improperly used, could result in a broken wrist.

Dad was apparently very good at the selling business, so much so, that his reputation and customer base spread far beyond Sligo town, north as far as Letterkenny, south as far as Roscommon, east as far as Mullingar and all roads in between. Having regards to the then condition of the roads, this area was effectively much larger than it is today. There was the matter of the Civil War, which was raging throughout the early twenties. Whereas in the Sligo/Bundoran area, my Dad had no problem, knowing most of the protagonists, it was another matter altogether to be stopped outside the local area. For this reason, Dad carried three driving licences – one from the British, one from the Republicans and one from the Free Staters³ . It required nimble finger-work to produce the correct license when stopped, usually at night. (There was a bit of an overlap here, in that the Free State did not technically come into being until the British forces had vacated the twenty-six counties – the area now known as the Republic of Ireland.)

Dad tells of one occasion around the time of the changeover, while he was staying in Bundoran, a neighbour called to say his mother was very ill, in fact dying. He asked Dad to drive him to the family house which was near Lorgydonnell, a town-land area under the north side of Truskmore Mountain and total bandit country, where two of the militant factions prowled, seeking each other and anyone else they could find on whom to impose their will. Into this drove my Dad with his passenger to be stopped by a patrol of ‘irregulars’ demanding identification and the purpose of the travel. Unfortunately, Dad and his passenger had fortified themselves copiously, compliments of Arthur Guinness, prior to commencing the trip and so produced the wrong driver’s licence. Well, that was a very wrong move. The irregulars hauled the two out of the motorcar and discussed shooting them on the spot, in the belief that they were spies or informers. Another section felt they should be beaten up prior to execution, so they were tied up and gagged, and the beating commenced with kicks and thumps with butts of rifles. When the two of them were well battered, bloody and unconscious they were dumped in the ditch, the motorcar set alight and burned out. Fortunately, the irregulars felt that was enough or that they were dead and so departed the scene. This incident occurred about two o’clock on a very wet morning. The ditch began to fill with water, which luckily brought them to their senses and they were able to wriggle up on to the road where they were discovered by a farmer a few hours later and taken to the house where the neighbour’s mother lay sick. As this was a sparsely populated area and the motor-car destroyed, it took them two days to recover and another day to make it back to Bundoran, where both families had given them up for lost or worse.

As a footnote to this incident, the neighbour’s sick mother fully recovered.

¹ A Spanish fleet of 130 ships set out to invade England in 1588. They engaged with the English at Gravelines and had to retreat north where they tried to return to Spain by way of the Atlantic. Stormy weather resulted in the loss of 24 ships off the coast of Ireland.

² http://cgrg.geog.uvic.ca/abstracts/RuffmanTsunamisThe.html talks of two sea surges: one in May 1914 on the beach near Cape North in Canada, and the other on September 9, 1911 on the west side of Cape Breton Island and in the Bay of Chaleur on the western side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

³ Free Staters were supporters of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which created the Irish Free State under British dominion and without the six counties of Northern Ireland. Republicans opposed the treaty, resulting in a civil war which started in June, 1922 and lasted until May, 1923.

2

The Temple Street Gang

I was born on April 24th 1929, in a flat beside the Court House in Teeling Street, Sligo, and, from what I can ascertain, was the pride and joy of my parents – not that they told me when I was old enough to understand and appreciate what they were saying, but from things like the large-sized photo of me about one year old, wearing a frilly dress, framed and hanging in a prominent place. I guess they thought I was something special. Well, I thought I was special anyway. Shortly after I arrived we moved to No. 1, Cleveragh, a small single story house in ‘Sleepy Valley’ on the road to Cairns and Lough Gill. It was in this house that my brothers, Raymond and Leo, were born.

My first recollection ever concerns my brother Raymond. Perhaps it was imagination since I was only two years old, but I can recall his cot in a green painted room, and his pram, and the distinctive smell of his pram. It was an oilcloth smell from the waterproof covering of the hood and the inner supports, since of course there was no plastic at that time. When the pram was wheeled outside on a sunny day, the smell got stronger. In a strange way I loved that smell. Perhaps it was a bit addictive, in the way one becomes addicted to the smell of petrol. Next, I remember a fuss in the house, later to understand Raymond picked up a chill and died, and that was that. Raymond was six months old.

About that time I also have the distinct recollection of sitting on Dad’s shoulders at the bottom of Harmony Hill looking over Grattan Street at an IOC (Irish Omnibus Company) bus coming towards us, while at the same time a column of ‘Blue Shirts⁴ ’ marched up O’Connell Street and turned into Grattan Street. They met outside the old National Bank where the Blue Shirts surrounded the bus and commenced to break the windows with sticks and stones and then began to rock the bus harder and harder until finally they turned the bus over on its side. At this point, Dad apparently thought the developing riot was not where either he or I should be, so we retreated home. Ireland was not a very safe place to be in those years, with such factions clawing for power.

My next recollection, and this is quite clear, was Dad arriving home with a toy pedal car for me, and a tricycle for Leo. That toy car was my pride and joy, until after a few days Leo got fed up with the tricycle, threw it aside and screamed for my car. He screamed and screamed and screamed. This is where the story gets sad. As I was the eldest, parental authority ruled that I should surrender the car to my younger brother, and take the tricycle instead, and this is what happened. I never liked that tricycle, and every time I made even to touch the car he screamed again and again. It took me some time to realise that the eldest always has to surrender his possessions and place in the queue to the younger, at least that was the way in our house, and my brother took full advantage of it. The way I was blamed for all the sibling squabbles, you would think my brother was a saint and I the devil incarnate. Perhaps my parents did not share that view, but that’s the way it seemed. This was my first understanding of how things worked, and it left me with a life long ‘protective sympathy’ for all first-born, male or female. They always get the wrong end of the stick.

Next door, at No. 2 Cleveragh, lived the Travers family, and small as I was, I struck up a friendship with their son, Jim. The Travers ran a little sweets and groceries shop out of their front room, and perhaps it was the close proximity of the sweets that encouraged the friendship. Jim was a lightly built and delicate child, and I remained friends with him throughout primary school. The last I heard of Jim was when I met him years later, a big strong well-built man, home on leave from a tour of duty in Korea with the US Marines.

Ireland in the early 1930s was not a very prosperous country. We had come through the Act of Union 1801, which had the effect of shutting off capital investment so that virtually no construction, especially housing, took place. Employment was at a standstill. We had come through the dreadful famine of 1845 to ‘49 which, with emigration, reduced our population from a high of eight million to a 1930 census of three and a half million. If that wasn’t enough, we then had the Great War 1914 to ‘18, the Irish Rebellion of 1916, the subsequent War of Independence, followed by the Civil War between the Republicans and the Irish Free Staters, all of which contributed to impoverish the country. Nevertheless, life goes on and the new emerging Irish State began to harness its industry, which at that time was nearly all agrarian.

My Dad was doing well in motorcar sales, and this was reflected in an increase in salary, so we moved to a larger house, No. 20 Temple Street. This was a well-built terrace type house of perhaps fifteen hundred square foot, an entrance hall, front sitting room, kitchen on the ground floor with a large pantry or scullery connected to the kitchen by a short passageway, and here the cold-water sink was situated. The sink itself was worth mentioning. It was made of cast iron, with a crack along the bottom that was repaired in a very amateurish way, showing a row of bolts along the bottom. There was always a pool of water at the base, which refused to obey the force of gravity and flow out the drain. The kitchen contained a cast-iron solid fuel cooker, or range as we called it, of the type which was fuelled from the top via two rings which were removed and replaced using the poker. To this day I can hear the metallic clanging noise they made. There was also a gas cooker in the scullery. On the first floor there were two bedrooms with fireplaces and two more on the second floor with none. We always referred to these second floor bedrooms as the attics. There was no bathroom or toilet facility inside the house. The toilet was located in a lean-to compartment outside in the enclosed yard next to the coal shed. It consisted of an enclosed box with a bum sized hole cut in the centre, a high level flushing cistern with chain pull, and a large nail in the wall on which was hung the toilet roll. I can tell you it was not at all comfortable to do one’s business out there on a cold winter’s night. There was, of course, an ample supply of potties for us as kids and more elaborate china chamber pots for the grown-ups.

Lighting was by gas throughout the house, but gaslight gave a very unpleasant greeny-white light. The mantle, which gave off the light, was so delicate that the slightest touch and it was broken. We used it only in the kitchen, supplemented with a double-wick oil lamp with a reflector and a long globe, which gave off a more kindly light. The globe and reflector had to be polished each night before use, and the lamp filled with paraffin oil. For the rest of the house we used oil lamps. The Shannon Scheme⁵ had just come on stream in 1932, but electricity had not yet reached Sligo.

Temple Street was a most unusual street in that the north side was Temple Street, whilst the other side of the same street was called St. Patrick’s Terrace. I know of no other street anywhere with two names for the same thoroughfare. I can faintly recall St. Patrick’s Terrace being built, so that must have been about 1932 or ‘33.

There was another very interesting aspect to Temple Street, and that was my aunt, uncle and cousins lived at number thirteen. More about them later.

At an early age, I was packed off to the Mercy Nuns at the Line School, so called because it was situated on Albert Line. I never knew the correct name – I don’t think anyone did. The Mercy Nuns ran a large convent at Abbeyquarter, which also housed a large girls school, a laundry, a bakery for their own use, and a girls’ orphanage. The