MEMOIR: The Invisible Prison: Scenes from an Irish ChildhoodBy Pat Boran, Dedalus Press, 262pp. €24.99 (hbk) €13.99 (pbk)
IRISH WRITERS have often found inspiration in or around prisons, what with Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaoland Behan's Borstal Boy, among other key texts. 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. At first sight the title of the book, 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.
Boran 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. 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. 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.
For 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. I was intrigued to see that the early 1970s children's TV series HR Pufnstufwas as popular in Portlaoise as it was in the Waterford of my childhood.
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. 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. 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.
“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 . . . 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.”
The family home itself is the other presence within this memoir, and various chapters detail the view of the main street from the front window, the rambling outhouse filled to the brim by his father’s zest for collecting, the beauties of the wild garden. The history of the town intersects with the story of his family, Portlaoise being, as Boran tells us, the place where the experiment of the British empire began with the plantation of Laois under Mary Tudor and the building of a colonial fortress, Fort Protector, on a site right across the street from their home.
Despite the title of the memoir, very little sense of Portlaoise Prison impinges directly on the narrative, apart from a vividly evoked chapter on a riot in December 1972. For me the best chapter is the heartbreaking account of the failing memory of an elderly parish priest, the celebrant of early-morning Mass in the church where Boran serves as altar boy. "The mass itself was invariably long, and always felt longer at that hour of the morning, our stomachs grumbling, our attention wandering more than ever to the thought of warm milk on Sugar Smacks, fried eggs weeping into fresh white toast." However, at the end of Mass, to the horror of the congregation, the unfortunate priest would start afresh and begin saying another Mass – "and before we might stop him (as if we kids couldhave stopped him), and with all of us still in tow, little chicks in his wake, he would be heading back out again, to start again all over, the shock and horror on our faces only surpassed by the shock and horror on the faces of the prison officers and guards who in that moment had stood to cross themselves and leave, but were now utterly unable to bring themselves to do so".
This is a good-natured, funny account of a writer’s coming of age, combining personal memory with social history in a readable and sensitive narrative.
Eibhear Walshe's memoir, Cissie's Abattoir, was published by the Collins Press last month
