BOOK MUSINGS by Donal Kennedy

 
When my siblings and I were young, each Christmas and Birthday our Grandmother in Cork used send us parcels of books which had survived the attention or inattention of my father and his siblings whose dates of birth ranged from 1895 to 1915. As both she and our Grandfather had been teachers there were others books. Some, such as Chats About Soldiers dated from the Jingo years of the second Anglo-Boer War, while others, such as Benson’s Flying Column were adventure stories extolling champions of Irish democracy. One set of stories had the odd title Nutcracker and Mouse King which ensured I never read it, but I believe it inspired some Russian bloke to write a Ballet. Another was called Queer Cousin Claude and its subject was a more couth version of Crocodile Dundee, staying with his sub-urbane relations in London. Anyhow we children had a very eclectic private library. My father haunted the secondhand bookstalls in Dublin and one of my mother’s brothers was a master bookbinder, as her late father had been. Besides, we had an excellent public library, which still survives, in Howth.

It was probably as well that some private citizens in Cork had their own books, for in 1920, by the Grace of God, His Britannic Majesty’s agents of civilization issued forth from Victoria Barracks to dynamite and burn the Carnegie Library and the adjacent City Hall.  Earlier that year on St Patrick’s Day His Majesty’s Irish Constabulary (not yet augmented by Britishers) occupied Howth’s Parochial Hall to suppress a children’s concert. Makes me wonder -who mentored the Taliban and ISIS?.  But that’s by the bye.

After my grandmother’s death in 1955, some of her effects came to Howth. These included albums of postcards from the reigns of Victoria and Edward Vll. In those days before emails and Ryanair telegrams, post, railways and steamships were scarcely less speedy than our own. For instance, Maud Gonne related how, in Dublin in the 1890s she got a telegram from Paris and answered it saying she’d be in Paris the following day. So she took the Mailboat from Kingstown, the train to Euston, called into her London flat for some things and then off with her to Victoria Station and thence via Dover and Calais to Paris.In June 1904 James Joyce and Nora Barnacle would exchange postcards across Dublin to make a date for the same afternoon.

One day about 1960 I was idly perusing an album when a postcard fell out. It was a beautiful colour postcard of the majestic Munster Blackwater at Fermoy and the handsome arched bridge over it, mirrored in the waters below. In the background were trees, and in the foreground a donkey beside a cart, of the kind, which, encountered unexpectedly in the London’s Shepherds Bush Road, so cheered an exiled Cork youth and his companions.The arched bridge which survives in all its beauty was built by James Joyce’s Cork grandfather, and Joyce’s spendthrift, scrounging father,John Stanislaus Joyce, was briefly a boarder in St Colman’s College there when the future Archbishop Croke was Headmaster. As books are part of this story I suppose I should remark that The Times of London said Croke had not much regard for books, particularly books of sermons.

The stamp on the Postcard showed the head of King Edward VII and the postcard was stamped “FERMOY  PM 8.45  OC27 04.”

and was addressed to –

Eibhlin Ni Cinneidigh

ag an Ard-Sgoil

i gCill-Chainnigh

KILKENNY.

(Eibhlin, then 9 years old, was my Aunt, and the Ard-Sgoil, or High School,  was run by my Grandfather, Patrick Kennedy. The writer was her God-Father)

The text read-

 Ta suill agam, a Eibhlin, go bhfuilir ag foghluim Gaedhilg anois go maith. Ma ta tu ag foghluim is gearr go mbeidh neart focal agat, agus annsin beidhir ag labhairt Gaedhilg go luath. Bhfuil moran Gaedhilg ag Caithlin agus Brian? Sgriobh chugham o ham go ham,

is mise do chara

Tomas MacDonnchada.

Dear Reader: If you don’t understand the ancient tongue of the Gael, don’t be downhearted. You might ask a friend or acquaintance to translate the piece.The worst that might happen, according to some of my learned and holy teachers, is that you might thereby risk an Occasion of Sin. On the other hand, I’m happy to relate, that Patrick Kennedy met Mary Ellen Murphy, my Grandmother, when he was asked to tutor her in French, and was to live with her in holy wedlock and sire a large family.