Dublin in the Rare Auld Times: 1947 is a year prominent
in Irish history for two things – one is the deepest snow
ever seen in the county of Dublin and the other is the birth
of a son to Mary and Ned Timmins (at the same time as the snow).
Right from the beginning I caused trouble. My mother wanted
to name me Edward after my father but my aunt, who was a nun
in a closed order, wanted to name me after St Martin as she
was reading a book about him at the time. As it turned out,
they both won (and lost) because my mother got her way in giving
me Edward as a first name but I’ve been called Martin
ever since! My aunt, who went into the convent in Blackrock
when it was just a little village some way out of Dublin, was
to get a shock many years later on her first outing since she
went in. In the intervening years, without her knowledge or
agreement, people had extended the city out to Blackrock and
they had also placed a golf course alongside the convent, which
was responsible for her trip. Somebody who plays golf about
as well as I do had hit a ball over the wall and hit her on
the head. When she woke up in the ambulance as it went out through
the gates, she nearly died of shock to find herself in a city
for the first time in her life. Imagine going in through a gate
seeing horse-drawn carts and an occasional car with spoked wheels
and when you come out again it’s turned into a bustling
city populated by maniac drivers! Anyway, enough of that for
now – let’s get back to the beginning.
Being the seventh in a family of ten children (I don’t
think my parents ever found out what caused it) in a two room
house meant there wasn’t much in the way of creature conforts,
at least for the next two years until we moved into a luxury
three bedroom council house with a wooden seat on the outside
toilet. I was ten before we got running water and an inside
loo. Another aunt used to come round every Saturday and give
us all a bath in a tin tub in front of the fire. She wasn’t
married, never had a boyfriend (or girlfriend) and took it out
on us with the hard carbolic soap! I remember wishing that some
of the older ones would leave home because by the time it got
to my turn the water was cold and I’m sure it made me
dirtier.
One thing we did have in abundance was music. Whatever my father
was doing he sang. He sang everything from Galway Bay to Frank
Sinatra to Caruso and later Elvis Presley and The Beatles. He
sang on his motorcycle with two kids on the petrol tanks and
two on the pillion, he sang while painting and gardening and
when me mother wasn’t telling him to shut up she sang
with him. My older sisters and one of my brothers always seemed
to have a song coming from their lips and, needless to say,
I couldn’t help but join in. There was singing in the
schoolroom and in the schoolyeard (ring a ring a rosy), the
back seats in buses were transformed into stages when more than
two people sat in them. Then along came the Clancy Brothers
and Tommy Makem, soon followed by The Dubliners, The Wolf Tones
and a few other folk groups who opened the floodgates to Irish
folk music – what a magic time to be a teenager. At that
time too, we were discovering Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan
Baez, as well as all that beautiful previously hidden Celtic
music from Ireland and Scotland. It was about that time that
I found myself in the same tech college and workplace as Sean
Keane and Paddy Moloney from The Chieftains, along with a few
other soon to be famous musos, complete with instruments in
the classrooms, but that’s another story – maybe
some other time.
In the meantime, just a couple of things that are happening
in the present day. The first Sunday in the month session at
the Old Bush Inn at Willunga kicked off to a great start and
the next one is at 1pm on Sunday 4th June. The pub puts on drink
specials and the atmosphere is great. The next Sunday session
in McLaren Vale RSL is at 1pm on 18th June because the previous
week is a holiday weekend – look forward to seeing you
all there!
P.S. I remember during my apprenticeship days
a guy lost all of his fingers in a guillotine accident. When
he met the duty surgeon at the hospital he was told he should
have brought his fingers with him and with this new-fangled
microsurgery they could be sewn back on again. “That’s
all well and good” he said, “but I couldn’t
pick them up!”
Martin Timmins
Click here to
read Part Two of Martin's Mutterings
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