Leighlin Road: A Memoir

By Martin Duffy

This memoir tells the story of the first twenty-one years of my life, growing up and coming of age in the working class Dublin Corporation housing estate of Crumlin.
 
Although humorous when telling my tale, the book also includes stories of abuse, death and loss. The chapters unfold from my unlikely birth – the youngest of fifteen children – to Crumlin life, the death of my brother Paddy in a London road accident and the abuse I suffered through a 'Christian' Brother at school. From a little boy priest in Blackrock College and then as an apprentice projectionist in the Kenilworth Cinema and a year as clapper/loader in Ardmore Studios. The story goes on through my difficult teenage years of alienation from my father and his death at the age of seventy, a month before my 21st birthday and a few months before my marrying my pregnant 18-year-old girlfriend. That marked the end of my life in 147, Leighlin Road and the start of my life as a married man and father-to-be.
 
This book will be of interest to anyone of a Dublin/Irish heritage who will understand my journey. Back in my day emigration, particularly to England, was part of Irish life and that is reflected in my story. 
 
I am an experienced storyteller and now I am finally telling my own story of the years that formed the man I am today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781803139975

Martin Duffy

Martin Duffy is an award-winning Irish director, writer, film editor and script consultant living in Berlin. His films have been for young audiences and his best-known work is THE BOY FROM MERCURY. His writing ranges from family and social history to comedy and animation.

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Copyright © 2022 Martin Duffy

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1803139 975

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For my Children:

Bernard, Steven and Ellen

Contents

Introduction

A very brief history of Crumlin

147

A Bounceable Baby Boy

Mam

Dad

Brothers and Sisters

Life on Leighlin

School

Being Me

Early Adventures

Brothers-in-law

Christmas

Paddy

Soldier of Christ and Bore of Cork

‘Brother’ Magill

My Little Man

Blackrock College

Growing Up

Kenilworth Cinema

Ardmore Film Studios

Losing my Father

Marian

Fourteen Weeks in 1973

Leaving Leighlin

Saying Goodbye

Introduction

This is my love song to my parents. The birth of this book was as big a surprise to me as was my birth to them. It took Covid, the collapse of script commissions, travel restrictions and a wave of depression to finally get me to write about the formative years of my life and the Crumlin world I grew up in and left behind many decades ago.

My film ‘The Boy from Mercury’ was my attempt at conveying my childhood, and indeed my difficult relationship with my father who died before I could make amends with him for my teenage arrogance.

In this book I want to do something that is long overdue for me: I want to celebrate Crumlin. If anyone out there has written such a celebration, I can’t find it. But that doesn’t matter anyway. My story is my own, my lens on it all is my own. My centre of gravity was 147, Leighlin Road. I seek absolution by revisiting that house and making peace with my father.

There is some over-lapping in what I write now and other work of mine: borrowing from such family histories as ‘Barney and Molly’, ‘Not Yet’ and ‘Derek and Ethel’. I extract some direct experiences from them to include at times. But I have refashioned them and I think the tone of this book is personal and (mostly) leaning more toward the witty side. I have always strongly believed in ‘giving testament’ and have taken great joy in telling family stories and helping people tell their stories. Too often, I have seen people die without leaving their stories to be passed on. While I do not believe in God or an afterlife, I most certainly believe we can live on through the love and memories of others.

I start this book with a brief history of what began as the village of Crumlin, an innocent bystander transformed into the Dublin Corporation estate, just to lay out the playing field. Then I go back into my childhood and those days of growing up in 147, Leighlin Road, Crumlin, Dublin 12. It is strange for me that only now, heading for seventy, I feel compelled to write about those days. I suppose I am aware that I should accept there is less ahead of me on this road than there is behind me. I don’t suffer often with depression, but my main wish these days is for a swift and maybe even painless death. A few of my siblings were granted that merciful exit route.

A story my family is always amused by is that an article about MMA champion Conor McGregor, written for some US magazine, said that he was born in ‘The Projects’ of Crumlin and his mother moved away with him when he was a child as she found the place ‘too rough’.

And it was indeed rough. But it was also free in a way that no longer exists. When I think of my childhood I think of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Years ago I wrote a teen novel, ‘Mothership’, and started it with a Mark Twain quote: ‘Sometimes we’d have the whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water and maybe a spark – which was a candle in a cabin window – and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two – on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft.’

My childhood and youth had a freedom that I fear is now gone from our society. I am not sure exactly how we lost what we lost along the way. I hope it was all for the best.

I offer all my memories. From schoolyard fights and child abusers in Roman collars to whoolies in the kitchen and playing ‘spin the bottle’ with Kay Sheridan.

Somewhere in my brain there is a memory that maybe by now is a memory of a memory: I am no more than one or two. I am in my cot in the front bedroom, having been put down for a nap. I wake up and probably call to be released but no one comes. Then I figure out how to climb over the rail of the cot and leave the room and go down the precipice of the stairs and arrive in the living room to the amazement of my mother and whoever else was there. That happened. I know it did. There are things I no longer directly remember but I know about myself. Such as my enormous birth weight and that when I was a kid my hair was so fair people thought I was albino. As my brother Kevin said often, I was always odd.

Writing this book has helped me embrace my lost childhood. Some years ago, here in Berlin, I was sent for a CAT scan due to concern about my thyroid and when I was going through the process the doctor came to me and asked if I had recently been in an accident. I had not. The CAT scan shows that part of my brain is simply blank and dead. In my heart I think that came about through the combination of my brother Paddy’s death and then the year of abuse at the hands of ‘Brother’ Magill. On a lighter side, it could also be from the time that I was walking away from the house on the way to school, waving back fondly to my Mam who was standing at the door, and I walked straight into a lamppost, knocking myself out. Or the time I was playing outside the house and somehow hit my chest or head off the kerb and staggered to the door before passing out. My sister Maureen’s husband, Austin, resuscitated me. Whatever it was: a chunk of my brain is simply dead meat. They say the brain is extremely elastic and finds different paths. It has been joyful for me to start into a topic/chapter of this book and then find another memory sparked and another and another. Parts of my brain are waking up to make their last celebratory round before the whole thing is over.

A note on structure: while there is some chronology to the chapters, within those chapters I sometimes bounce around from my childhood to my late teens. But aiming always to stay within my Leighlin Road years. So at times this book may feel like a series of essays about my Leighlin Road life, rather than a chronological memoir. Trust me: it all forms a reasonable structure in the end. I hope you will not be an unsatisfied reader.

During Covid times, I have not been able to go back to Dublin, and so this book came about: going back to my childhood and youth in my mind and scouring that landscape to bring it to life. I was often amazed at memories and details that rose to the surface as I did the work. I would think I had reached the limit of memories, then another would come along and occupy me for my writing day – of rarely more than three hours. Writing this book has helped me a lot and granted me some kind of inner coherence as I head toward the seventieth year of an often incoherent life. My grandchildren were always in the back of my mind as I wrote – particularly, I must admit, my grandson Ian: thirteen years old at the time of my writing this. By the time I was his age, some of the darkest shadows of my life had passed over me. He is blessed with wonderful parents, Steve and Michelle, and by being spared the darkness. Then again, he might be amazed at just how free and independent kids his age were in my day. But I don’t expect him to read this book before he reaches thirty.

I ask anyone out there, family and friends and fellow humans, to stop at some point along life’s journey and write a memoir. We all die, but the story can live on. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I do believe the concept that as long as we live on in someone’s heart we get some stretch of life beyond the bodies that fail us all. So maybe this is an act of selfishness. I want to live on in hearts and memories. So I offer this book as my celebration. I will be long gone but these memories will abide.

In the process of writing this book I keep trying to push the curtain of memory loss further and further back. I have clear personal memories of events from about the age of seven onwards. Before that, it gets difficult. Even surviving photos of me from earlier do not trigger much in my brain cells. I know, from family lore, that I was often left in my pram in the front garden – the dog Tiny tied to it for my protection – for many hours on end and could cry myself out with no one to come to my rescue. I know I grew up the bottom of the pecking order. Fat albino kid, last of my line. But my parents – Mam in particular – had great love and patience for the stodgy, oddball late arrival in their family.

Thank you for having and reading this book. I promise there will be an audio version read by me to go with it!

Also, please visit www.leighlinroad.com. I have set up the website for free additional links relating to the book.

One

A very brief history of Crumlin

Two canals (Royal on the northside and Grand on the southside) basically defined the shape of Dublin city in its old days. Cupped by these canals was the way its people wanted to be, aside from those higher classes who abandoned the city in the mid 19th century.

Unlike my hometown of now some twenty years, Berlin, inner city life in Dublin created a failed and cruel life. Although Dublin had actually boomed around the time of the famine, with so many desperate people either fleeing to it for work or through it for new hope in another land, there was little other than artisan cottages to properly house them. A few decades before the Famine, however, those nice people in the British Government got sick and tired of the persistent Irish rebellions and set up the Act of Union that closed down any centralized form of local Irish government. This had the consequence of draining the British landowners of Irish land of their interest in Dublin. They moved out to suburbs further afield, from Ranelagh to Dun Laoghaire, or to their homes in England, and this left behind their elegant homes or townhouses in the city centre. These buildings quickly sank into tenements. What might have been a pleasant drawing room on the second floor of a three-storey house became the home of a family of God-knows-how-many.

In Brabazon Street, where my parents lived with their young children, the house that had been built for one family of means was a warren for I think ten families with one toilet in the yard, one source of running water also in the yard, no electricity and not even a front door to the building as it was simpler if people could walk in and out to their own separate worlds up the three or four floors. It was a luxury to have two rooms: Mam and Dad had a large room divided by a curtain plus a small room. When they first moved in, with I believe two children, they were sharing this with my Dad’s father and two younger brothers.

Hygiene was a constant challenge, although stories told to me for ‘Barney and Molly’ say there was a huge commitment to keeping the houses clean. Stories from other sources of research tell of filth and excrement in the stairways of these tenements. As I learned through my co-writing of the book ‘The Viceregal Microbe’, Dublin’s tenements were plagued with tuberculosis and the city had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe. The slum clearance, therefore, put major emphasis on fresh air and open space. In Crumlin, most roads had a green, and there were several parks such as the grand Bangor Circle. For all the fond memories that have been retold about the strong sense of community in the tenements, the price for surviving that life was high for all who endured it.

So the move to Crumlin meant for my family, and for all those lifted by this wave of Government’s social awareness, a transformation. My late sister Betty recalled that when the family moved to Crumlin it felt for her as if she had moved up a class. There used to be an expression: ‘to have your own door’. And in Crumlin that’s what the Duffys finally had.

There had been very little building of public housing to move Dublin’s tenement dwellers out of their unhygienic homes (Marino was one early building project, but was aimed more toward the lower middle class) until the Irish Government, at the start of the 1930s, put down their guns and battles long enough to actually look at the social welfare of its citizens. They set out on a vast, daunting project. The lead architect was a man named Herbert Simms who, having been in charge of the slum clearance project from 1932, committed suicide in 1948, aged fifty, leaving a note saying he was overworked and overwhelmed.

Crumlin, directly to the south of the Grand Canal, became one of the two major Dublin Corporation enterprises aimed at emptying the city’s tenements. Cabra was the one to the North of the Royal Canal. Roughly 6,000 houses were built in Crumlin. Most of the roads were named after Irish Catholic dioceses (Kells, Clogher, Bangor, Leighlin etc).

The quiet little village of Crumlin was transformed from a quaint rural area with centuries of history and tradition to the concrete sprawl of homes in which families bred like Catholics. Six children would be considered a small family. Twenty children would not be unusual. Indeed, a future criticism of the house design was that it was based on the British model for such social housing – and we Irish had a Catholic habit of making far more babies than the Brits.

The enterprise, which went on in Crumlin for almost a decade, was extraordinary. Think of it. Electricity, gas, sewage systems and your own toilet, your own hot water boiler system. Also the schools, churches, amenities, public transport. It was unprecedented. My eldest brother, Luke, told me that as a kid in Brabazon Street he had to go to a local shop to get re-loaded batteries for the radio. Mam did all her cooking at the fireplace. In Crumlin there was electricity at the flick of a switch and a gas supply for the cooker. Your own running water and bath! Goodbye 19th Century, and welcome to 20th Century living conditions.

When the move was made in 1941, Crumlin was, for our family, the new frontier. Awesome. My sister Maureen told me she remembered, as a young girl, the trips back and forth with wheelcart from Brabazon Street to Leighlin Road and a new life. And yet the concept was not always popular with those who had to make the move. The Behans lived relatively near us (in a bigger, much envied, corner house) and Brendan hated it, saying of Crumlin ‘out there they eat their young’.

Mam and Dad and their children, however, embraced their new world enthusiastically.

My parents had, in effect, two families. My mother gave birth to nine children in the years when she and my father lived in inner-city Dublin. Mainly in a tenement building on Brabazon Street in an area of The Liberties known as The Coombe.

Then, in 1941, my parents and their children (seven had survived childhood) moved to the wonderland that was the Dublin Corporation suburb of Crumlin on the south side of the city. A two-bedroom terraced house with its own front and back garden.

There, my parents had another six children. I was the youngest. Some kind of accidental afterthought, I always imagine, born a full five years after Mam and Dad had ceased producing almost a child a year to contribute to Catholic Ireland.

Two

147

I don’t know the exact proportions of the houses, but I would guess the two floors were each not more than 400 square feet. If you go for a stroll there nowadays you will see that the front gardens have been replaced with car park spaces and are little more than the width and length of a car while the path to the front door is not much wider than the front door it led to. Entering the house you were faced by the stairs up to the two bedrooms. The door immediately on the left led into the living room which had a fireplace with a chimney breast that led to a smaller fireplace in the bedroom upstairs. To the right at the back of the living room was a door to the space under the stairs. This was called ‘the coal house’. Out of the living room was another door to a small space, with bath, that we called ‘the scullery’. You walked out the back door to the right of this and there was the toilet, facing the long back garden. This generous stretch of space was intended to make the families as self-supporting as possible. My father, the son of a gardener, put this to great use.

As Crumlin had been grabbed from what had been countryside, it still held some wildlife: even in my childhood I would often see hedgehogs in the back garden. Cats were considered too self-interested for working class people, but there were a lot of feral cats around. I once came across a litter of tiny newborn kittens in the back garden. They were there for a few days and then suddenly gone. I have no idea whether the mother took them somewhere else or if I had mentioned seeing them and some other family action was