![]() and here too, as he must almost immediately have seen, was his wife-to-be, my mother, fragile after two deaths in that house, quiet-spoken but clear, striving towards a future she wanted and deserved, determined to set out again, to start over, at the heart of that hardware paradise its dedicated software – without which it was all just lifeless junk.” ![]() “Thinking of it now, the huge old house and adjoining shop and sheds – all of them full to bursting with ancient implements – my father must have felt himself to be entering a dream world, a castle magazine, armoury and apothecary’s store combined. She calls up a local dealer to value the house and contents, and the man sent out to make the evaluation is the man she will marry. Boran recounts how his parents met, in 1955, when his mother found herself in charge of the large rambling house and hardware business on the main street after the sudden death of an aunt and uncle. His family and neighbours emerge here with a clear sense of individual character, but his father – hardware expert, shopkeeper, pilgrimage organiser and travel agent – is perhaps the strongest presence in the book, along with his patient, loving mother. HR Pufnstufwas as popular in Portlaoise as it was in the Waterford of my childhood. I was intrigued to see that the early 1970s children's TV series He describes a busy, contented childhood, and his tone throughout is deft as he moves easily through childhood and adolescence, with adulthood and a writing life somewhere up ahead for the young protagonist.įor those of us born in the 1960s he evokes familiar rites of passage, such as the glamour of the first family trip to Butlins, the widespread popularity of Bruce Lee and the dizzy excitement for young children when the first set of traffic lights was introduced to a rural town. Each successive chapter is kept to a minimum of three pages or so and concentrates on a particular memory from his childhood, cumulatively giving the reader a sense of daily life in Portlaoise undergoing profound economic and social changes during this period. ![]() The Invisible Prison, might suggest something repressive or even claustrophobic, but Boran's memories are handled with a lightness of touch in this lively and good-humoured account of growing up in the centre of a small Irish town.īoran is best known for his poetry, and his familiarity and ease with the poetic form inform his writing in this work, both in terms of the careful, even scrupulous prose and also in terms of the structuring of his memoir. In his gentle and affectionate memoir of growing up in the Midlands in the 1960s and 1970s Pat Boran draws on the image of the nearby prison and uses it as a counterpoint in writing about his family home on Main Street, Portlaoise. IRISH WRITERS have often found inspiration in or around prisons, what with Wilde'sīorstal Boy, among other key texts. MEMOIR: The Invisible Prison: Scenes from an Irish ChildhoodBy Pat Boran, Dedalus Press, 262pp. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |