Christmas
in the 1950’s was a visit from St. Vincent de Paul – that’s
if you qualified for it.
Kathleen Clifford remembers the year they didn’t and Christmas was
a half-pound of chicken ham roll and a couple of boiled spuds shared amongst
four of them. In those days it was a hand-to-mouth-existence.
Kathleen’s father was a frail man who had a permanent limp caused
by a childhood accident (he was impaled on a park railing).
This meant that choice of work was limited, but Kathleen likes to think
of him as an “entrepreneur in a small way”. He was a park
attendant, sold papers and would get up at 3 a.m. for the cattle mart
(off North Circular Road) hoping to be hired by the butcher from Ringsend.
But he only ever received a day-to-day wage and as labour was cheap he
had to take what was offered.
Kathleen’s mother and grandmother had come from the country and
rented a tenement room in Dublin for one shilling a week (that is five
pence in today’s money).
However, when Kathleen’s mother became pregnant she was thrown out
and forced to sleep in doorways. She lost her baby.
It was only later that Kathleen’s mother and father could afford
to get married and have their own place.
The luxury of their own place was a room in the notorious Bridge Street
tenements (near the Brazen Head). There was only one outside toilet, which
was always overflowing, and an outside water pump for the two hundred
or so inhabitants.
Rats thrived and outnumbered the residents. They ran under doors and over
the beds (each room had one bed for all the family to sleep in). The rats
would come up through the holes in the floor and many babies were bitten
as the rat tried to ‘lick’ off the milk from their faces.
Kathleen’s father wore the same shirt the whole week because he
had no other. On a Saturday night he’d wash and use it as a towel
(they were too poor to own a towel) then he’d wash and hang the
shirt to (hopefully) dry for Sunday.
Wine Street pawn shop was a busy place on a Monday. Good trousers would
be pledged for money and hopefully redeemed on a Friday when most people
got their weekly wage, unlike the Cliffords.
When Kathleen was six they moved to Ross Street off St. Patrick’s
Street. Here they had their own toilet and cold water which ran into a
big white sink but life was still harsh.
Kathleen remembers the yearly Christmas party for poor children at the
Beano, where the helpers seemed like beings from another planet with pearls
around their necks and powder on their faces and strange accents.
And the things they had to eat were out of this world… Kathleen
laughs and takes a pull from her cigarette. For her, there had never been
a Santa Claus.
She says: “Education was not an issue then because there was no
such thing as free secondary education. I left school at thirteen, we
needed the money and I was bored out of my skull!”
But Kathleen has always had an enquiring mind and feels that she always
knew how to read, even though there were no books in their house. There
was just a huge hunger for words.
When she was seven her father brought home some books, and she remembers
lovingly stroking the hard covers. Before her father had reclaimed them
to sell, little Kathleen had read both ‘Jamaica Inn’ by Daphne
du Maurier and ‘Great Expectations’ by Charles Dickens.
As she grew bigger she’d steal into the toilet to read and her mother,
who was illiterate, would scream:
“She’s in there with them books, there’s something wrong
with her. She’s a changeling.”
Kathleen Clifford had always been thinking of writing. Then it took off
a year ago and hasn’t stopped.
Memories keep swimming to the surface and she is torn between a realistic
story and a ‘there-there-it’s-O.K.’ type of thing.
“I wanted to express what I felt on paper. Young people might read
Dickens and like the idea of the noble savage, but there is nothing noble
about thinking where the next dinner will come from.
“I feel that I’m telling a good story for others to read.
To see that the human spirit can survive everything.
“It’s either sink or swim in the flow of negativity. Hope
springs eternal and everyone always thinks things will get better.
“It was always one day at a time then, but today no one needs to
starve. People at least have the basic needs.”
Kathleen hopes that focusing on characters who have memories will make
them more realistic and that her book will illustrate what happens to
people when they are treated in such a way.
“My central character, Annie, is the axis of such a life. She was
a prostitute who lived huddled on the back stairs of the tenements.
“Annie was a person who lived and felt, a person separate from anyone
else.”