Dermot wasn’t the best footballer in the world and nor was his dad, Darragh, with his massive shock of white hair. Darragh would join us after he had finished work and was a bit of a character. He would charge around like mad kicking the ball for half an hour and then retire, absolutely bollocksed. I never hung around with Dermot, but by the time I went to UCD a few years later he was doing lunchtime sketch shows in the Arts building theatre to over a hundred people and trying to get on to TV. He was very funny; I never knew he had it in him.
In my pre-teen years, various friends came round to my house all the time and my parents always made them welcome. On Wednesday afternoons, when we were off school, we’d pull out both leaves of the dining-room table and play table football: the great Subbuteo.
We would take Subbuteo massively seriously. We had quite a primitive version and the players didn’t have 3D facial features or even arms or legs, they were just lumps of plastic on a round base, but that didn’t bother us. We were very strict on flicking the pieces only, no scooping. If we scored a goal, we’d run around the room: our celebrations were even more pathetic than the Premier League players today.
My dad sat in his chair, smoked his pipe and read the paper while we played. On the table next to him was a peculiar contraption: a crude, slightly rusty guillotine that he used to cut thin slices of plug tobacco. Barney would ground the slices with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the palm of his left, scoop them into the pipe and puff away happily. The whole process used to fascinate Jerry and Mel.
My father loved horse racing and would spend his Saturdays in front of the telly egging on every Irish horse, Irish-owned horse, Irish-trained horse or Irish jockey. I had no interest at all in this, although it didn’t stop me jumping out of my skin when my dad suddenly started shouting as they headed into the home straight.
My dad was very much a homebody. He never really went out, except on Friday nights for a pint with his friend Jack Walsh in Byrne’s of Galloping Green in Leopardstown. Other than that, he didn’t really drink, and I remember when President Kennedy came to Ireland, a few months before he was assassinated in Dallas, my dad was invited to the big reception in Dublin Castle and took some persuading to go and take my mother. It was certainly the only time I ever saw him in a tuxedo.
Of my brothers and sister, I hung out the most with Gerard, who was the nearest to me in age. We shared a bedroom and plenty of adventures and we remain close to this day. I was close to Miriam as well but how many boys hang out with their four-year-older sister? She was also heavily into ballet: she’d come pirouetting into the room on tiptoes, and I’d raise my eyes to heaven and go back to whatever I was doing.
John and Peter had both left home by the time I hit my teens. They had moved to London, which seemed impossibly glamorous to me. In fact, whenever I read about Carnaby Street and swinging London, I felt like my brothers gave me a link to that exotic, tantalising world just across the water, even though I had never been there myself.
One major tradition in my family was the big annual summer holiday. In those days, ordinary families didn’t vanish off to the Algarve or Tuscany, and we always went to exactly the same place: Bettystown in County Meath, about thirty miles from Dublin and five miles from my father’s home town of Drogheda. We would go for about a month, to give him time to catch up with his family, and I loved it.
We’d rent a house right next to the sea with a grassy bank that led straight down to the beach. It would be a proper old-fashioned summerhouse, with wooden walls like a chalet, and we would play on the beach all day long, even if the weather was lousy which, of course, it often was. When the tide was out it was a long way to the sea, the water was bitterly cold, and the totter back up the beach to the house felt like torture.
Movies were always big news in our house. My father would take me to the Stella Cinema in Mount Merrion – which, sadly, is now a furniture shop – and the Ormonde in Stillorgan, which, I’m glad to say, is still open today. The Stella was a grand old-fashioned picture house, with two ornate kiosks to buy your tickets and your sweets, and beautiful sweeping staircases up to the balcony that we hardly ever sat in. I used to love seeing the usherettes walking through the cinema selling ice cream from their trays.
The movies were always screened either Mondays to Wednesdays or Thursdays to Saturdays, with a different bill on Sundays. Normally, there were double-feature screenings and my dad took me to a lot of Westerns. Saturdays would often be comedies, including some really, really bad ones interspersed with Pathé News.
As I got older, I would sometimes go to evening showings that began at 7.30, with friends from school. Sometimes we would be too young to see the films without a grown-up with us, so we would have to wait outside and ask an adult if we could go in with them. They would usually say yes because they knew us from around Mount Merrion, and they weren’t X-rated movies – they just finished at 11 p.m., and unaccompanied kids had to be out of the cinema by then. There would be about ten of us, and once we got in we would make a beeline for the front row.
I have so many memories of wide-eyed nights in the Stella. I saw Wait Until Dark, the famous movie with Audrey Hepburn as a blind girl. Friends who had seen it already told me it had a really terrifying scene. At one stage Alan Arkin, playing a villain, killed one of his own guys by ramming a car into him. I thought, ‘Was that it? Big deal!’ I relaxed – and a few minutes later, Audrey went to close a fridge and a man leapt out of it at her. Mother of Jesus! Thinking of that scene still gives me goose bumps to this day!
I was an avid moviegoer as a kid. Any trailer that I ever saw, I longed to see the film. I was an absolute sucker. I remember when I was slightly older, Jerry Coyle and I went to the Ormonde to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which had a real effect on me. Even at the tender age of 15, I thought Maggie Smith was brilliant.
Maybe I was always going to host a movie show, because as a kid I would write reviews of every film I saw in a little book that I made from pieces of brown paper stapled together. I would carefully write out the title, the director and names of the stars and then give it a critique and a mark out of ten. I am not sure my critical faculties were too honed back then; the only film I ever gave ten out of ten to was a totally obscure war film called Tobruk, starring Rock Hudson.
I read quite a lot as a kid – my mother made sure of that, and our house was full of books and literature. I was big into Enid Blyton with her Famous Five and Secret Seven and their mad adventures that always ended with farmers’ wives giving them sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer. Her Island of Adventure and Castle of Adventure stories were the best. I was also fond of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books – but when it came to reading, my major obsession was comics.
It started with the Beano and Dandy, with all the characters I can still picture now: the Bash Street Kids getting slippered by the teacher, Little Plum with his feather coming out of his head-band, Dennis the Menace knocking lumps out of Walter the Softie. In one story I particularly remember, Dennis came out of school with a book marked ‘Sums’; Walter’s was called ‘Harder Sums’. My sister Miriam got the Bunty and Judy, and when she got too old for them, I started buying them instead. I didn’t care that they were aimed at girls: the stories in them were just as good, especially the Four Marys, Lorna Doone with her magic dancing shoes, or the unfortunate heroine who would have her saddle loosened by horrid, wicked types who schemed to thwart her chances of winning the local gymkhana.
In my teenage years I took a bit of a step up with the comics, and – yes, I know this is sad – I can still remember the sequence that used to define my week. It was the Hornet on a Tuesday, the Hotspur on Thursday and the Victor on Friday. That was the big one: Friday afternoon, home from school, reading the Victor and eating fish and chips with the weekend ahead was definitely a major highlight of
