Opinion

Tom Collins: Shaggy dog story rises from Angela’s Ashes

Tom Collins

Tom Collins

Tom Collins is an Irish News columnist and former editor of the newspaper.

<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, &quot;Trebuchet MS&quot;; ">When we went to the market for the Sunday roast, my granny would pick her chicken and the farmer would wring its neck there and then</span>
When we went to the market for the Sunday roast, my granny would pick her chicken and the farmer would wring its neck there and then When we went to the market for the Sunday roast, my granny would pick her chicken and the farmer would wring its neck there and then

I’m not planning on dying soon, but there has been a feverish discussion at home about the fate of a pair of Staffordshire china dogs that have pride of place on the mantlepiece. They once belonged to my grandmother, and I remember them on a shelf in her kitchen in the sixties.

Granny Collins lived in a terrace cottage in Limerick city, literally a stone’s throw from the River Shannon. Cottage makes it sound idyllic, and to a child it was, though it was built, I think, of clay bricks, and it quickly crumbled after the family stopped living in it.

There was a house across the street made of red brick. They were the aristocracy of Old Clare Street, and we marvelled at the house in the way a tourist would admire a stately home.

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My dad, born in 1929, was a near contemporary of Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes. Dad was proud of his city, and he was deeply unimpressed by McCourt’s depiction of poverty in Limerick in the thirties. The McCourts, he said, were comparatively well off. (Though the word comparatively is pretty imprecise.)

I suspect the McCourts had a tough enough time. But Frank’s book was banned from our household and I would be desecrating my father’s memory if I ever opened a copy. Such is the power of books.

The yard out the back was covered over with a plastic corrugated roof, so the toilet was neither inside nor out. Once I flushed a slice of home-made wheaten bread down it. I hadn’t wanted to offend by refusing it, but I was caught when the bread was found later, floating in the pan. The shame.

There was a blue plastic film over the black and white television. In my naivety I assumed it was a colour television (which it was, in a way). There was a vinegar plant – now that’s something the hipsters might want to revive – the ‘mother’ lived in a glass bottle like some sort of alien. I imagine it died with my granny.

Tom Collins
Tom Collins Tom Collins

When we went to the market for the Sunday roast, my granny would pick her chicken and the farmer would wring its neck there and then. Plucking was a chore we don’t have to endure these days. My older cousins would frighten the younger ones by operating the hen’s feet – pulling on the tendons as they chased us down the street.

I brought embarrassment to the household one summer holiday. I was sent down to pick up some laundry from the convent at the end of the road. It was an imposing building. The cleaned clothes were dispensed by a nun behind a window that operated as a hatch. I’d been sent down with a cousin to pick up some clothes with sixpence or six shillings, I can’t remember which.

It wasn’t enough, but we were given the clothes and the nun told us how much she was still owed.

Putting the coins in my hands, my granny – a devout woman – told me jokingly, ‘tell those nuns they’re robbers’. I dutifully did, slapping the money on the sill and running away as fast as if the devil were after me; and in a sense, he was – though in a habit. The building housed a Magdalene laundry, once accepted as part of Irish life and now an indictment of it.

The treasured dogs – I haven’t forgotten about them - came home to Birmingham with my father, the eldest of four; and then to Lurgan when we turned our backs on an immigrant life in 1968. My mother thought they should be sent back to Limerick after dad died, but they stayed until she died and they travelled with me to Scotland.

The laws of primogeniture suggest they should go to my first-born son. But my daughter has staked a claim. What’s to be done? Answers on a postcard please.