Adventures of a young writer in Galway during the 1970s

Arts Week by Judy Murphy

Belfast-born poet and critic Gerald Dawe, Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at TCD, recalls life in Galway and the publication of his first book in 1978.

The flat in Abbeygate Street was up an alley between a boutique and the Roaring Twenties pub. For its day, in the early 1970s, it was quite spacious given what was generally on offer in Galway City to the slowly burgeoning population of university students, nurses, young professionals and the floating number of visitors who never left – drifters from a previous time whose lives seemed in some magnetic attraction, earthed to the city, without any visible means of financial support or sign of a day’s (or night’s) work.

Others – barmen, actors, street photographers, visitants, musicians, perpetual students, stall holders, Army cadets, ones ‘in from the country’, student medics, civil engineers, those ‘doing a B.Com.’ – all shared a life of Riley in the Cellar Bar, the Tavern, the Skeff’ and the Castle Hotel, no one more so than myself.

Supping up the summers, which did seem to stretch into late October, and covering up our heads when the drenching rains swept in off the Claddagh Basin and drifted along the canal-ways to be met with downpours drifting in along the Corrib into Newtownsmyth and the Salmon Weir Bridge, life was good.

I spent some time at this particular interface, above the Court House, in what was then the City library, reading 19th century Irish novels and memoirs, and slipping off in my mind’s eye into the streetscape down below – the small but elegant bridge, the eel nets and traps, the racing waters, and the calm canal bank, literally under the window of the reading room.

Occasionally a swan would glide by out of the ordinary ebbing light of a winter’s afternoon. The imposing Cathedral looked so imperiously out of place in this wonderland.

These few streets, approaches in to the old city, where my true first belongings and beginnings; they became my home. I grew up there, an inner landscape as much as a neighbourhood: The Four Corners, Lynch’s Castle, Market Street, Abbeygate Street, Upper and Lower, as far as Woodquay, its perfect little park, the rowing club and those magnificent railway pillars – symbols of high summer. Not a home from home, but my new found land.

There was Jimmy Cawley who sold clothes second-hand, his mighty Chaucerian face atop a Crombie coat and heavy scarf, beamed through the murky morning light; the undertaker who would recite at the drop of a hat the death scene of Dickens’ Little Nell; the humane Heaney brothers whose butcher shop kept the wolf from our door on a couple of occasions; the little shop that only two people alone could stand up in, and of course, the original Sally Long, who emerged from behind a door to the long low bar like a figure out of the mythological past.

The shops were homes as well which meant that when we all surfaced after the streets were aired. We had at least that in common – we lived together: an unpredictable mosaic of lives and histories who shared a very old part of the very old port and market town of Galway.

It could have been Genoa as far as I was concerned. The romance never ended. Nestled within the city walls sat St Nicholas Church with its solitary trees and lopsided gravestones and railings and the curiously named Bowling Green where Nora, Joyce’s girl had stayed, and on the site of a Convent (so I was told) The Connacht Tribune.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.