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Through Rose-Tinted Specs
Memories of Balbriggan in the 50's
Copyright 2005
By Roger Turner

Part 9

The Walking Piggy Bank Arrives

I would be waiting for the bus from Dublin in eager anticipation, for my best source of income would soon be stepping off, in the guise of Nan and Stevie Calow, my maternal grandparents.
Nan Calow was always good for a few shillings at the best of time, but in Balbriggan she was generosity personified.
I know we all think kindly about our grandparents, but Nan and Stevie were something special, and not only to me. I know of nobody who would say a bad word about either of them. They were a kind and loving couple who, to my knowledge, never had a cross word. Back in their home in Sheffield they would sit and hold hands, even in old age.
When I look back, I was very fortunate to have them to myself for so long.
Stevie was born in 1891 and, like his father; (Willy with the Whiskers) became a chimney sweep. So by the mid 50s he was due to retire, but carried on working well into his 70s, and only retired then because his old bike refused to start one cold wet morning. (I got the job of going round to his customers on me bike to tell them he wasn't coming, for not many people had phones back then).
I don't know if you have ever tried to sweep a chimney, but it is far for easy. I often went on the back of his motor bike in the holidays to help him.
No, he didn't send me climbing up the chimney like they did in years gone by! All the same, it was dammed hard work pushing them rods higher and higher up the flue. But Stevie always did it with consummate ease.
When I was 11 in 1959 and went to the big school, just up the road was a pub frequented by Stevie, who would call in at lunchtime, when in the area, for a couple (or more) of pints to slacken the dust. Now I soon cottoned on to this and would pop round the back to where he hid his motorbike and wait for him to come out.

'Hello Stevie,' I would call, just so he knew I had seen him.
Out of his pocket would come a very dirty half crown, which he would force onto me. 'Now, you won't tell yer Nan, now will you?'
As if! He was always good for a half-crown, was Stevie.
Another way of tapping him for a few bob was when he returned home after work and would count his takings in the kitchen. He had this fiddle going and would slip a ten shilling note in his pocket for tomorrows beer money. If I saw him do it, a two shilling piece would be forced upon my person, Not to tell me Nan. Dirty money didn't worry me.
Now I tell you all this, because it shows how generous they both were.

In the early fifties, Nan and Stevie Calow always stopped with Auntie Eileen, in the downstairs front room. Mother would move in with Auntie Eileen in one of the upstairs bedrooms and we kids slept in the other all in one bed (girls at one end and boys at the other end). Gese, can't girls talk. Never shut up chatting, did they! But it was worth the inconvenience of sleeping with girls for we all got spoilt rotten by Nan and Stevie Calow.
Usually they came over for the first two weeks in August, for at the end of August the works back in Sheffield would close down and Stevie would be busy cleaning out factory flues and boiler chimneys.
We would do mostly the same things with Nan and Stevie as we had done the week before: play on the sands, go for walks, picnics etc. with the added advantage of Nans purse. If the handle came off your bucket, or the spade snapped in half, or the football suddenly sprung a leak, the purse snapped open and a new item was bought.

I had my own little fiddle whilst Nan and Stevie were staying with us. Stevie loved to read the English newspaper, (Daily Express) but they never arrived much before dinnertime, so it was me that got volunteered to fetch it from, er... now what was it called. It was in the square near the library, oh what was the shop called? That's another one for my Guardian Angel. What would I do without her? What was that? Kitty Whites? Of course it was. Why didn't I think of that? Thank you, guardian angel.
Anyway, Nan would give me the money to fetch it, plus a couple of pennies to buy some sweets. Upon my return, Stevie would also pay me for the paper and press on me a couple of coppers for my trouble. Crafty little sod I was. It was like eating a Swiss Roll from both ends at the same time. Mind you, they both knew I was twisting them and when I owned up years later we all had a good laugh about it. I suppose it was their way of making me learn the value of money and that I had to work for it.
Stevie and Nan Calow were always good fun when the rain came. Nan would teach us card games, whilst Stevie would sit us down and invent stories that could keep us kids amused for hours on end. I suppose that's where I get my storytelling from, for he could tell you a story about anything you liked, and he could even remember the story years later. He was also a prolific poet and would pen a poem at the drop of a hat. And good humorous poems too, not like this rubbish I write.

Every year from the mid 50s until his death in the late 70s, Nan and Stevie would buy me a Giles book for Christmas. Now for those of you who do not know, Giles was a cartoonist in the Daily Express and famous for his eccentric family. A family like we all know.

Anyway, Nan would buy the Giles annual in October and nag Stevie to write me a poem in it. Each day she would nag and each day he would put it off until tomorrow. Eventually, at ten pm on Christmas Eve, after several doses of his medicine, Stevie would pick up the pen and write something witty like this one from 1964...

This is to give notice, that, young Ebenezer Pegg,
Got married to a lady who has got a wooden leg.
Although she has a wooden leg, no trouble he attaches,
He's satisfied because he's got, somewhere to strike his matches.

What a man was Stevie.

Now I have said that they stayed in the downstairs front room when they came over, but that was not always the case. After Uncle Raymond came out of hospital babies suddenly started to appear, and there was no room at the inn. So Nan and Stevie were forced to stay in other places.
For a few summers they stayed further down Craoibhin Park with the Yates family, in their downstairs front room. That is how I came to have a soft spot for Angela Yates. Ahhhhh
As the 50s slipped into the 60s, Auntie Eileen's house started to fill up with children and our full summers were coming to an end.
Mother made the decision to take me somewhere else for my holiday and it didn't go down well at all with me.
I then hatched a plot to persuade Nan and Stevie, who were not going to forgo their annual trip to Balbriggan, to take me along with them. I seem to think that happened three or four summers on the trot.

At least twice, we stayed with Mr and Mrs McArdle at Tankerville.
In those days, it was as far north as you could go in Balbriggan before you got into open countryside. In fact Tankerville itself was surrounded by fields.
The McArdles were market gardeners, and to me were wonderful people. They grew flowers and salad vegetables like tomatoes, and I would help them pick and pack the fruit and flowers. I can clearly remember Mr McArdle taking me with him to a wholesaler in Dublin with a van full of tomatoes and cucumbers early one morning.
I can't remember exactly where it was, but I can clearly remember that is was down a back street with market stalls down each side and loads of butchers and other food-type shops.
My dad tells me that some people thought Mr McArdle a wee bit odd, but I got on great with him and I learnt a lot that I put into practice years later when I became a fresh food buyer with the supermarket company I worked for.
Mrs McArdle was a very homely sort of woman and made us most welcome in their home. And what a home it was too. Far bigger than any house I had ever stopped in. She fed us so well I didn't want to leave. As well as three cooked meals a day, she also put on a supper tray and she introduced me to digestive biscuits coated in thick Irish butter. Oh, I can still taste em now... I don't believe it, I'm back to talking about food again. But food was important to a little lad back then, and the food we had was wholesome, fresh and tasted good.
Nowadays, I pay over the odds for fresh organic food, and grow my own organic veg in the garden. I was once accused of being a crank, wanting organic all the time, but if it was good enough for my mother and Nan to feed to me, then... No, I'm off on a rant again! Let me get back to the matter in hand.

I can clearly remember one year staying with the family of a young Garda in a house opposite, er, that shop where I bought me mouth organs from. Come on guardian angel, where are you when I need you? Anyway, you know where I mean. I seem to remember the house was next to the post office on Dublin Street. A thin house, up a couple of steps, if my memory serves me right, and I stayed in a little room above the front door. I think I must have been about 14 at the time.
Being near the canal this house was ideal, but alas the weeds were choking the water so fishing was not easy and I ended up in the neck end near Clonard Street. I think that was the year that I almost caught a huge trout that basked most days down near the sluice gate. I hooked it but the crafty thing went off at supersonic speed towards the weeds. I played that fish for maybe an hour until it finally tired and just as I was about to get it out my line brushed against the wall and... SNAP! The line broke. That's fishing for you.

But yet again digress. Let us go back to the mid-fifties and Craoibhin Park.
Stevie was quite content to sit reading, for after 11 months of hard work he just wanted to rest. Chilling out I understand the buzz word is nowadays.
Nan Calow, on the other hand, joined in the gossip with Mother and Auntie Eileen.
Because Nan and Stevie had been coming over since the twenties and thirties they also had made many friends, and it was their duty to visit them all. Mind you, many were now quite old, and every year their numbers dwindled alarmingly.
Often Nan would go visiting with Mother and Auntie Eileen, leaving Stevie in charge. Usually that meant us taking a walk down to the front strand, by way of the library, and calling for some sweets on the way. Stevie would then find a bench and sit to read his book while we played on the sands. Yes, I know, we've been here before, but we all loved playing on the sands and Stevie liked to let us. After a while we would be taken to Corcoran's for the usual Ice-cream Soda. I could do the same thing every day.
While we were in Corcoran's, Stevie would tell us he was going for some medicine and that he would be back in a few minutes for us, and left enough money for a top up. He would come back about twenty minutes later licking his lips. He was fond of his medicine, was Stevie.
In the years when I came over with Nan and Steve, they would take me in to Dempseys for a lunchtime drink. Stevie would have a pint of the black stuff and Nan a schooner of sweet sherry (twice). I had a bottle of pop but would take a sip of Guinness whenever the barman was looking the other way. I am not now or have ever been a big drinker, but from an early age, Stevie would give me a little glass and fill it with pale ale when he had one. His thinking was that if I had a wee tipple occasionally then it wouldn't hurt me and I would grow up to respect the drink. Well, it worked a treat. I have seen so many lives ruined through over indulgence with the drink that I am glad he taught me to drink sensibly. Thank you Stevie.

Throughout his life, Stevie has been a keen amateur photographer, and many of the pictures I have submitted to www.balbriggan.net come from his collection. So it will come as no surprise to you that he bought me my first camera and taught me how to take nice pictures. Well, at least he tried to teach me, and I was ok with my little Kodak Brownie, for all you did was to look through the viewfinder, and snap. Simple. But then, I suppose I would have been about ten or eleven, he bought me one with f numbers, aperture setting, and a load of other complicated gubbings that little old me found totally incomprehensible. It was a nice camera and did take great pictures, but it was far too complicated for me, so I passed it on me dad, and went back to me little Brownie.
Stevie still used a strange contraption that folded flat, with collapsible bellows, if that's the right term, to adjust the focus. Damned complicated it looked too. But he took some great snaps with it and either took the film into Mr Crilly for printing, or took it back to Sheffield and processed the film himself.

Back then, black and white was the norm, for what colour film there was was very expensive, and not too good. The biggest breakthrough came when colour slides came out. Gratispool, (now where did that name come from?) were one company that did 'em. Trouble was you either bought a projector to show them on a sheet pinned to the wall, or a special little viewer that you held up to the light. Somewhere I have boxes and boxes of slides of Balbriggan, but haven't a clue where.
So what has made me go off on a tangent like this and talk about photos? Well, during the winter months, Nan and Steve would get out their photo album quite regularly and reminisce about the good times they had in Balbriggan over the years. To listen to them you would think they were both Irish.

Every year they went over they would bring back loads of seashells which Nan would glue to the wooden window boxes.

Nan also had a passion for Irish pictures. Any sort of pictures that reminded her of Ireland would do. To satisfy this passion, a trip to Dublin was the order of the day and we would climb aboard the half nine bus to Dublin on a shopping trip.
Nan's idea of a shopping trip was not my mothers, so often I would go with them whilst mother stayed behind. To be quite honest, I think my mother was glad of the rest for I think little Roger Turner could be quite a handful at times, and her health was never too good at the best of times.
When she was a child my mother had rheumatic fever which left her with a hole in her heart. Yet, despite this, she never stopped looking after us. So to get rid of me for a few hours must have seemed like heaven to her, for she could sit and put her feet up in the garden.
I have already told you that Nan loved anything Irish, well Dublin in the 50s was just up her street and soon she had us trailing round gift shops. But it was not only gift shops she visited, for her other passion was for auction houses.
If my little grey cells are working correctly, just off O'Connell Street, next to the river, was her favourite auction house. A right cheap and dusty sort of place, where the auctioneer gabbled away in his own personal language, totally incomprehensible to me: 'whollgimetenshiilins, doinhertenshillin,.. atenshillinnote... ninebobthenthelot... thankyoulady ninensix...' on and on it went until the gavel hit the block and the next lot came up for auction.

Nan loved it and always came away with some rubbish or other. I know most of it was rubbish for I have it all now. Odd pieces of pottery, paintings, books, you name it and provided it was Irish and bargain Nan's hand would join in the bidding war. The best things she ever bought, in my opinion were from a Shop and consisted of 4 cushion covers depicting Irish scenes. Back in Sheffield she had them mounted as pictures under glass and hung on her walls. I have two of them, one depicting Blarney Castle and the other, a fine view looking up O'Connell Street from the bridge at Nelson's Pillar. Now that sort of dates it.

If I could become a time traveller, then I would take my Digital MP3 recorder to Balbriggan when Nan and Steve were there in the late 50s and record their memories and those of their friend. At the moment I am recording my dad's memories, and I suppose what I am doing by writing all this rubbish is recording my own memories.
To be continued...