Clondalkin Memories

(A note before I get going: I've always liked titles in the form of "X Memories" or "Y Memories", so just writing a blog post under the title "Clondalkin Memories" gives me great pleasure.)

As I've said in previous blog posts, my sense of geography is catastrophic. I've been a Dubliner all my life but I've managed to be in Dublin while not being of Dublin. After five decades in the capital city, I have less knowledge of Dublin than many recent immigrants. It's ridiculous.

So many Dublin places have been nothing but names to me, all my life. I never really knew anything about Clondalkin and I still don't, aside from what I'm going to write here. I know it's name in Irish is Cluain Dolcáin but I don't know what that means. Nevertheless I lived in Clondalkin for two periods of my life, both of them fairly brief.

I had a colleague and friend who lived there. I would socialize with him. Through this socializing, I met a friend of his who lived in the area and had a room to rent, so I took it. Later on, I actually lived in his own house while he was living abroad.

The first thing that struck me about Clondalkin was how far away it seemed. It's only thirteen miles from UCD, where I've always worked, but the bus journey always seemed epic. In fact, I was often a bit late for work during my first spell in Clondalkin, even when I took the first bus.

The bus journey towards Clondalkin also seemed long, but it had another property which is, in fact, the thing I most associate with Clondalkin. It seemed serious. The further you moved from Dublin city centre to Clondalkin, the more serious and business-like the buildings became. They were bigger, squarer, dustier and more worn-looking (even when they seemed only a few decades old). Many were made of brick. They seemed more masculine. They weren't promising a good time, like the pubs and shops in the city centre, or making any cultural claims, like the various historic buildings also in the city centre. There were there to work, and everything about them seemed solid and hefty. It was pleasing in one way, but somewhat austere. To think of it now, it's a bit of a "Yorkshire" vibe.

There was an actual quarry near the house where I was staying for my second period in Clondalkin, and also a large building (with a huge yard) that had a plaster model of a tap (or faucet) extruding from its front wall. Obviously a plumbing firm or something like that. The whole building, and the plaster tap, were pleasantly grubby and run-down.

Now I think about it, I have to distinguish between different sorts of building the bus would pass on its way to and through Clondalkin. There were certainly warehouses and offices, but there were also more inviting buildings: chippers, restaurants, and pubs. I was especially interested in the pubs, since I thought they had a distinctive "coach-house" look to me; long, inn-like pubs with hanging signs outside and gilt lettering above the door. I remember noticing this and wondering whether anyone would agree with me, whether this was something in objective reality or just something I was imagining.

One restaurant in Clondalkin is called Boss Hogg's. (I've just discovered it's still in business). As you may know, Boss Hogg was the rather cartoonish antagonist of the Dukes of Hazzard show from the eighties, which I never saw in my childhood but discovered much later. Funnily enough, Boss Hogg did have a tavern in the TV show, but it was called The Boar's Nest. So it seemed rather perverse to call a restaurant Boss Hogg's.

The shopfront of Boss Hogg's looked quite faded and timeworn, and that brings me to a strange thing about Dublin suburbs, and my reaction to them. Each one is linked, in my mind, to a particular period in pop culture. (I mean International pop culture, since Ireland doesn't really have a pop culture of its own.) I've been vaguely aware of this for decades, but only realized it fully when writing this blog post. Somehow, the aura of a particular period's pop culture seems to hang over each Dublin suburb, perhaps linked to whenever it had the most young people in recent times. The Dukes of Hazzard was an eighties show so, in a strange way, Clondalkin seems like an eighties suburb to me. 

But let me get back to the distinction between different sorts of building on the journey to Clondalkin. On the one hand, there were the pubs that looked like coach-houses and the vaguely Victorian-looking office buildings. On the other, there were modern, sleek, glass-fronted corporate buildings that were lit up at night. Some of these were pretty big and formidable-looking. One of them (a showroom for Suzuki or Honda or something) announced its name on a huge red glowing sign. The sight of it always made me feel like I was coming into Mordor.

Everything in Clondalkin seemed bigger and further away and potentially hostile, at least at night. There was a strong sense of foreignness, of being at odds in one's environment.

During my first residence in Clondalkin, I went to an all-night party in the house where I was staying, one that left a fairly big impression on me. There were only about ten of us there (including my landlady and my colleague), but it was animated. There was a lot of drinking.

One of the guests at the pary was a born-again Christian. The very first thing he started talking to me about (even before any-getting to know you pleasantries) was a telephone table for which, in his view, our hostess had paid a scandalous price. He could get it much cheaper elsewhere, he said. I was later told that this was his passion-- finding bargains. That and predicting the Last Days, which (as he told me) were imminent. I think he said it would happen within ten years, certainly more than twenty.

As the evening wore on, the conversation turned to religion. I can remember one woman, who had attained the further reaches of intoxiation, saying slowly and repeatedly: "I think it's all a load of b********"."

My friend and colleague was challenged as to his own beliefs. I'll always remember his response. (He, too, was comprehensively drunk.) He raised his arms in the air and said, with a huge grin on his face: "I believe Jesus Christ is my saviour."

I was surprised as I'd known this guy for many years and I didn't expect he had the faintest tinge of religious belief. The way he made his proclamation was strangely impressive. As drunk as he was, as ironically as he spoke, there seemed to be a core of conviction in his words-- or, at least, a lingering loyalty to Christianity.

The name of Jesus Christ is extraordinarily powerful. Even invoked in jest, or something close to jest, it seems to change the whole atmosphere of a place or situation.

I stayed in the house that nght. As I was leaving early the next morning, I heard my name being called and looked up. The born again Christian was waving goodbye to me from an upstairs window.

I took a bus from Clondalkin to Dublin city centre. I can remember looking at a playing field along the way, and specifically at the goal-posts. (As with most goal-posts in Ireland, they were of the GAA variey, which resemble rugby goal-posts.) For some reason, staring at those goal-posts, I realized that belief in God had become a possibility for me. It had been much on my mind recently, but I couldn't see my way out of agnosticism. Suddenly, I could. It would be hard, or impossible, to explain why. It was as though innumerable reasoning processes had been going on under the surface of my mind, and suddenly belief got the upper hand. (This was just one moment on my long journey from agnosticism to faith.)

Perhaps I should have left that story for the end of the post. Here are some less dramatic stories from my time in Clondalkin.

Once I got lost on the Red Cow roundabout (or junction, or interchange). It's named after a nearby hotel/tavern. I've actually just realized now that the current Red Cow is named after the original Red Cow, which was a pub. Apparently Brendan Behan used to say that everybody who lived beyond the Red Cow was a culchie (i.e., a hick). Of course Dublin has greatly expanded since then.

One day, for whatever reason, I got off my bus at an earlier stop than usual and found myself ensnared in the Red Cow roundabout, and the area around it. (It wasn't all concrete roads and bridges I was navigating-- at one point I found myself trapped in a series of connected back garden, and had to climb over a wall.) It took me at least an hour and felt ridiculous, like I was a suburban Robinson Crusoe. It all added to the sense I constantly harboured, that Clondalkin was an environment always ready to turn hostile at one wrong turn. (The time I got lost in Corkagh Park desk night also added to this.)

The first time I lived in Clondalkin, I was sharing a house with my landlady. The second time, I was (initially) alone in the house. I honestly think the first night I spent alone in that house was the first night I spend alone in any house, hard as that might be to believe.

It was a very spooky experience. I had heard of a house "settling" before-- the process by which woods and other materials contract as the temperature falls, causing all kinds of noises. But I had no idea how dramatic this could be. It really did sound like somebody was in the house with me, moving about. My imagination was going wild as I went to sleep that night.

By the time of my second stay in Clondalkin, I was a practicing Catholic. While I was there, I went to a little church called Knockmitten, which looked more like a school building than a church (and perhaps it had been). I have become fascinated by the name, over the years, as the place-name Knockmitten only seems to apply to the church itself.

At this time, I was building myself up in my mind as a Knight Crusader for the One True Faith, and Knockmitten church seemed disconcertingly genteel to me. Didn't these people know there was a culture war on? Apparently not. It had a very "tea and biscuits" atmosphere, like a rural church where the whole community goes to Mass on a Sunday, and nobody pays very much attention to the homily. (There are a few churches like this in Dublin. The Margaret Ball Chapel in Santry is another.)

The priest in Knockmitten during my time there was a short, bald, elderly guy who smiled a lot. The homily that stands out in my memory is one where he named John XXIII as his favourite Pope. I can't remember the reasons he advanced, but I really got the impression this priest was nostalgic for the glory days of Vatican II. I was fascinated by this preference. It was hard to believe anyone could prefer John XXIII to John-Paul II, for instance. Even at the height of my militancy, I felt a certain envy (even admiration) towards anyone who could cling to a sunny nineteen-sixties spirituality in the twenty-first century.

Clondalkin also had a Mormon temple, on which I frequently gazed with great interest as I passed. On another occasion, as I was leaving the house, I heard a lot of African voices in an upstairs room of a neighbouring house, singing something about being washed in the blood of Jesus.

Clondalkin's most famous feature in the roundtower. I only ever saw it from a distance. For some reason I always assumed it was a modern replica of a roundhose. But no, it's a genuine historical roundhouse.

This blog post has described my Clondalkin. Please forgive its length. How well does it fit the real Clondalkin? That's a form of question I'm increasingly asking myself these days-- not only of places, but of every sort of experience.