My Cork: a lost paradise of Datsun Sunnys and winding streets

When I was six years old my family left Douglas, in Cork, and moved to Kildare, where my dad was stationed with the Army. We were very close to our Cork grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. It felt like banishment.

“How’s Dublin?” my cousins would ask.

“Kildare isn’t Dublin,” I’d say. But I knew that, for them, it was Dublin, Dublin being the most convenient word they knew for “not Cork”. “Dublin” = “Here be dragons.”

Cork became, for me, a lost paradise of ghost signs and Datsun Sunnys and winding streets and roads with steps and shaky bridges.

In my 20s I was in a band and frequently played gigs at Nancy Spain’s, the Lobby Bar, Sir Henry’s or Fred Zeppelins (a tiny venue about the size of your sitting room; it’s still there). In those days I’d stay with my cousin John, drink in the Old Oak or the Brogue, eat fried chicken in Hillbilly’s on Grand Parade, and be as incurious about my roots as only a twentysomething can be.

“I used to be from Cork,” I once announced from the stage of Nancy Spain’s. “You’re always from Cork, boy,” shouted an indignant voice from the audience. It was my Uncle John.

I am no longer incurious about Cork. A couple of weeks ago I had a personal and historical tour of the city from my mother, Joan, her brother, John, and her sister Phil.

The night before, in my aunt’s house in Glanmire – “Thackeray called Glanmire the prettiest village in Ireland,” my mother tells me, every time we pass through – they, and my aunt’s husband, Don, gave me an overview of the city. They have all been teachers. Two of them still are. They’re all very good at explaining things.

Building site living

On Sunday morning we pile into my uncle’s car and drive, first, out to Douglas, where I grew up in a then-unfinished housing estate called Maryborough. We sit in the car and look at the estate.

“There was an old [abandoned] dumper truck there you liked sitting in,” says my mother. “You wanted to be a builder . . . unsurprisingly,” she adds. “We were living on a building site.”

We also pass Ballinlough School, where I went and where Ms Quill, a woman of great judgment, told my mother “he has a great head on him”. My uncle looks at me sceptically at this revelation.

After passing some of the oldest houses in the city on Dean Street, and its oldest bar, the Gateway (frequented by the dukes of Marlborough and Wellington), we wander around the battlements of the newly refurbished 17th-century Elizabeth Fort and look out across the houses and churches stacked on the hills.

My mother’s family, the Cotters, moved here from Coolmountain, in west Co Cork, in 1962. They moved because they could no longer make a living on their small farm. “We were peasant farmers, really,” says my mother. Life was tough there. If pressed, she and her siblings will do a west Cork version of Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen.

“I suppose you remember when you first saw white bread,” I once said as a joke. “Yes!” said my mother. “We were amazed.”

In one of the few old pictures they have you can see four children who could have come from a previous century. The girls wore huge bows in their hair.

“We were about 20 years out of date when we came to the city,” says my aunt. “We were like the Beverly Hillbillies,” says my mother. They were teased by the preteen sophisticates of South Pres, the school founded by Nano Nagle, Cork’s renowned educationalist.

The school looks forbiddingly Victorian. "I used to walk around all these little streets at lunchtime because I didn't have any friends," says my mother, which breaks my heart a bit. We wander around the winding streets to St Finbarr's Church, where she would go into to pray. "It has Hogan's The Dead Christ," she says, referring to the sculpture.

We come to the Red Abbey, the oldest remaining structure in Cork. The tower dates from the 14th century and is made of old red sandstone, hence the name. “There’s a seam of old red sandstone running near the city,” says my uncle.

There’s some talk about old Cork slang: Norries are northsiders. Someone who is “the bees knees” is, in Cork, “the berries”. And people who feel they are “the berries” probably come from Montenotte, where, incidentally, “the people are all dotty”.

Montenotte was once the home of the merchant princes, the families that profited from Cork's position as a premiere harbour in the 19th century. The city's motto was Statio bene fida carinis ("A safe harbour for ships"), and Cork has survived fire (the burning of the city during the War of Independence) and flood. The latter recurring tragedy is unsurprising, given that "Corcaigh means marsh," says my aunt.

Cork was still an important harbour when they were young. They remember collecting and eating the bits of chocolate that fell from crates on Water Street. “We called it chocolate crumb,” says my aunt.

We head back towards Grand Parade and then to the Imperial Hotel, on the South Mall, for sandwiches. On the way we pick up my 13-year-old cousin Josh. There’s a plaque there from 1845, when the American former slave Frederick Douglass was honoured by the people of Cork. The South Mall was very well-to-do. “All the rugby players had jobs on the South Mall,” says my uncle.

They talk about St Patrick’s Street, or Pana, as it was to them.

“You’re named after it,” says my uncle.

“You’re not,” says my mother.

“She was going to call your sister Oliver Plunkett Street,” says my aunt.

There was nothing better, they say, than “walking Pana”. They talk about the rival department stores – Roche’s, Cash’s and the Munster Arcade. They recall the Leahy brothers, street musicians who played banjo and violin at the arcade.

Camelot in Cork

In 1963 my mother watched President John F Kennedy’s cavalcade from upstairs in Egan’s Jewellers on Patrick Street. There she helped make the lining of the silver casket the lord mayor presented him, she says. “I was 13.”

For much of the 20th century Cork's fortunes were tied to two businesses, Dunlop and Ford, both now gone. My uncle once worked for Ford, which came to the city in the 1930s and left in the 1980s. Everyone wanted Ford packing crates. "You could use them for anything," says my mother. "People built sheds out of them."

Some Cork people went to work for Ford in Dagenham; when they returned, flush with cash, they were called the Dagenham Yanks. Yank was, then, a generic term for a rich show-off.

We drive up towards the Shandon Bells. On the way they talk about Bishop Cornelius Lucey, the city’s theocrat, and his plan to build “a rosary of churches” around the periphery.

At Shandon we park by the beautiful Firkin Crane theatre and the old Butter Exchange. “Cork was the biggest exporter of butter in the empire,” says my aunt. A sign proclaims it the Shandon Cultural Quarter. “Everywhere is ‘a quarter’ now,” says my uncle.

We walk into the grounds of St Anne’s, which contains the bells and is also tinged with red sandstone. Therein, my mother tells me, are the statues of two children who once stood on the gates of the Green Coat Hospital School. “Everyone called them Bob and Joan,” says my aunt.

Out the back of St Anne’s a gate leads to the beautiful, cloistered Skiddy’s Almshouse, built in 1719.

“Now, wouldn’t you love to live there, Phil?” says my mother to her sister. “I would,” she says.

We walk around the little streets. We see the house in which Jack Lynch was born. It’s now an official artists’ residence.

“Cork was always the rebel county,” says my uncle. They start talking about the royal pretender Perkin Warbeck, who sought refuge in Cork in 1492 and was supposedly crowned in Christchurch.

We get back in the car and drive up by Cork City Gaol and on towards Sunday’s Well, where the posh people who didn’t live in Montenotte lived, overlooking the town.

We arrive up at the “Shaky Bridge”, a pedestrian suspension bridge built over the Lee to Fitzgerald Park by the wealthy Daly family. “Cork nicknames have a bit of a pattern to them,” says my aunt.

As well as Shaky Bridge there’s Snotty Bridge (the old railway bridge at Pouladuff). This was so-called, my mother explains, because it was a limestone bridge, and stalactites would form on it.

The Shaky Bridge is still pretty shaky. “Jump, Daddy,” a toddler instructs. The daddy jumps. The bridge shakes. The toddler laughs.

The fading light is beautiful. “Someone must be praying for us,” says my uncle, who rarely darkens the door of a church.

We wind our way back up to Montenotte, where the merchant princes once overlooked Cork Harbour. Rich people like living up high.

There, at the end of Lovers’ Walk, where Robert Emmet apparently strolled with his lover Sara Curran, is the Honan Home gate lodge, where my mother, aunt and uncle first lived when they came to the city. It’s now derelict, its windows boarded over.

“It was smaller than where we were living” before, says my uncle. “But I remember being amazed at the fact we had running water.”

“We ran wild here, really,” says my mother. “There was an old donkey, and we used to ride him all over the place.”

“I climbed nearly to the top of that once,” says my uncle, pointing to the huge pylon behind the house. “I can see it from Páirc Uí Chaoimh, and when I see it I always remember climbing it and think, Jesus Christ.”

The nuns who ran the Honan Home as an old folk’s residence eventually restricted these wild children to certain parts of the grounds.

A lot of time has passed. They were poor people living among rich people. Since then they’ve jumped a class, had children, known illness and lost their parents and their sister. One of them even moved away from Cork.

We stand on the road, by more red sandstone walls, listening to finches and looking across the city. My mother remembers when she and my grandmother first came here, to talk to the mother superior about where they would be living and the job her father would have running the nuns’ farm.

“She was so happy,” says my mother. “There was a little chapel there. I remember her kneeling and praying with tears in her eyes. She always wanted to be a city person, really.

“And then we walked up to Mrs Curtin’s shop and bought some biscuits for lunch.”