BACK HOME: Tom Humphries has fled back with his family to Dublin's Marino, and admits the only mistake he made in life was leaving. Now he shares in the common sense of local sympathy and compassion for those not from the area
Before all the mush about Heimat and Proustian guff about how the smell of biscuits being baked transports us to temps perdu, it would be useful to take a quick gallop through the geopolitics of Dublin's 31 bus route in the mid-to-late 1970s. A time when we had music on the upper deck. And smoking.
A young man hopping on at Joey's in Fairview was as vulnerable as an injun in Tombstone, Arizona. He could first expect to encounter trouble just one stop up the road when a whooping posse of the harridans from Marino Tech would storm the vehicle, slapping young fellas upside the head just for fun. Their reign of biffing terror would be brief. Three stops up the road the posh saps from Mount Temple would be boarding. Those kids were afraid of us but we were in awe of them.
Boys and girls speaking to each other! Children who would one day be U2! Some of them were prods! They were just too exotic to beat up. They didn't even have acne.
We'd gape at them slackjawed, till we got to Killester. Then we'd snap out of it quickly. The Killester Tech mob would rampage through the bus as if every journey was Raid on Entebbe. Boys with sticky-out ears had the most to fear. They would have those ears flicked and twisted and pierced. Lads with big backsides were also targets. They would have their upholstery punctured by compasses and bruised by Doc Martens. Even those of us who sat and stared impassively out the window weren't safe.
When the Killester Tech gang would pile off the bus several stops later, we survivors would set about desperately separating ourselves from the bus seats to which we had been tied with the densely knotted strings from our anorak hoods. Always it was a race against time to free yourself before it was your stop.
The lesson was clear. It was better to live in Marino. To be from Marino was to have come first in the lottery of life. Better to stay there and centre your existence there. People from Marino often pointed this out. It is said Marino people are clannish. Not really, they are merely drawn together by a common sense of sympathy and compassion for those not from Marino.
I went to school there and live there now. The only mistakes I've made in life have been leaving. I know of course what the deal is. If my children and my children's children and all those blighted generations who come after them for the next 1,000 years live in Marino, they will still be blow-ins, but that's what you get when you fall in love with an island that is planted in the middle of the city.
And it is an island. Its coastlines are Griffith Avenue, Fairview Strand, the Malahide Road and Philipsburgh Avenue. There are little outcroppings along the way, but that's basically it.
Built in the 1920s as one of the first planned housing estates in Europe, Marino is a broadly symmetrical collection of greens, circles and cul-de-sacs where the houses all look in on each other and where kids can still grow up "playing out" all day, every day.
Marino has always been an idea. A good one, as well. Before they built the houses, Lord Charlemont, a liberal, a nationalist and a big old softy, made a large demesne here but left it unwalled and open to the public. The other lords scoffed but Charlemont stuck with it.
After it became an innovative housing estate, Marino produced some of the most remarkable sportspeople this country has seen and my old school, St Joseph's of Fairview, not only produced two taoisigh both with fancy smancy middle initials (John A. Costello and Charles J. Haughey), but sent more graduates to tribunals of inquiry than any other educational establishment in town.
Little wonder Marino people are so hard to impress. Joyce lived here for a long time but nobody talks about it much and we don't dress up like fools on Bloomsday and chunter up and down Windsor Avenue. Bram Stoker is vaguely commemorated, but he got a movie deal and deserves it. Marino has its own lovely waltz and its own architectural wonder but the smell of fish from Wright's is much more evocative of the place than either.
I grew up in the dormitory suburb of Raheny, in the part of Raheny that borders Kilbarrack. Everything was fine, and as for "playing out", generally we held our own in the stone fights with the young rascals from the corporation estate behind us.
Life there was bland and listless though and had none of the glamour of Marino. No warrens of back lanes. No shops which would sell you the street credibility of a loose Major and a redtop match for a penny. No snooker halls. No legendary GAA stars.
Marino and Fairview were so far ahead in terms of sophistication that it was even rumoured that there was a prostitute living on Cadogan Road.
The greater family retained ancestral homes in East Wall, Seville Place and Inchicore but I always knew I would end up living in Marino. The way New Yorkers are cockier and more confident than Mid-Westerners, well so in that way are Marino people different to the rest of the city. I told myself, just as the philosopher Sinatra had noted earlier, that if I could make it there, I could make it anywhere.
Well almost. I always knew that those of us not born to Marino were condemned to a lifetime of harmlessness. Well, I knew from early September, 1975, and my first day in secondary school. Going to Joey's was a new slate. I was going there to play football, and hurling and to be widely respected.
I remember on my first day arriving fashionably late in a Wrangler jacket that might as well have had the words "c'mon, if you think you're hard enough" stitched on to the breast. I wandered across the yard, as directed, and into Brother McNally's English class. He inquired who I was and wondered what I thought I was doing rambling in at that hour. While he was waiting for an answer, he turned his back to open the high window with one of those long poles which every classroom had. I stood there trying to convey to his bald spot that he was dealing with one tough hombre, an hombre who was asphyxiating his genitals in tight, denim drainpipes at that very moment.
I threw a little shape and gave his bald spot a look which said, "You talking to me? Hey, I said, are you talkin' to me?"
"Well?" he said, still fiddling with the window.
There was a keen air of nervous anticipation in the class now. Unfortunately by arriving late I had missed Brother McNally's introductory comments regarding the short leather strap with which he was miraculously able to keep discipline. I took the wide-eyed gaze of my new classmates as encouragement.
I gave the Brother's back another hard look. A little narrowing of the eyes this time.
"C'mon punk make my day."
The window slid open. All the eyes went from me to Brother McNally. I didn't yet know that Christian Brothers had powers whereby they could raise a boy on to his tippytoes merely by twisting the boy's ear like a radio knob and then lifting. I was just about to find this out when a Raheny voice piped up from above an unfortunate collar and tie.
"Brudder. It's only Humpy."
In the uproar that followed even Brother McNally could scarce forebear to smile. It was two or three minutes before the class could settle back to basic parsing. Humpy!
Myself and the collar and tie began playing football and hurling for St Vincent's of Marino the next week. For 10 years or so we were picked at number 14 and 15 on straggly teams and our names were never called out individually. Just "14 and 15, the two Raheny fellas". It sounded as if "Raheny" was interchangeable with "Martian". I loved it though. I yearned to be a resident alien. If you could have got a Green Card to live and work in Marino I would have bribed congressmen to get one. If I could have lived there illegally, I would have. I was fascinated. In love. A Marino wannabe. If Humpy could make it there . . .
Most of the watershedmoments of my young life happened in Marino. First application of six strokes of a leather to each hand (those Brothers). First kiss (not those Brothers, before you ask.) First disco. First cigarette. First drink. First of lots of things that aren't your business. And first sense of place.
Marino is decorated by two large circular greens. Broadly speaking, each one is called The Circle. For purposes of distinguishing between them there are various other names. Joey's Circle. The Big Circle. The Upper Circle. The Roundy Circle (not really). If I've been away for a while on a work trip, I look for the distinctive pattern of Marino's layout as the plane banks over Dublin. When I spot those familiar circles, I know there'll be no more in-flight meals before we land.
Occasionally in school we would be brought to The Circle to train. Although there were no goalposts on The Circle, this seemed a thousand times more glamorous than running around in Fairview Park. When things got desperate we would go to the little pitch behind Scoil Mhuire, on Griffith Avenue. The Brothers kept a few cows there and kids who hurled or kicked ball in the field developed neat sidesteps from avoiding what the brothers called "the pats" and what we students called "the bleedin' cowshite".
On the days when one felt obliged to mitch from school, Marino was the best place to hang out. In an unfortunate early experiment with mitching I decided to take the air along the seafront at Clontarf and, filled with a sense of well-being and contentment, found myself waving at a busload of schoolgirls who had their faces pressed to the back window. My sister, the supergrass, was among them.
After that, it was safest to be a fugitive in Marino. There were laneways in which a young gent could smoke and meet other fugitives and there were snooker halls in which he might put down an hour or two if it was raining outside. Mainly, it was a good place to be while you wondered what was going on in school.
When school finished and life became a succession of damp flats, failed enterprises and hangovers, I always imagined that if I ever settled anywhere it would be in Marino. So when the time came, we never looked for a house anywhere else. We moved into Marino Green just after our first daughter was born and lived there till long after our second was demonising the area. I swear, there isn't a better spot in the world to be a kid.
We went mad once, years later, and moved to Balbriggan by mistake. Terrifyingly, we could see cows from our window and when the wind was blowing the right way we could hear ranchers in Co Meath laughing. The people in the local shop used to make sympathetic remarks about farmers and occasionally you'd hear kids talking about going to town when they would mean that they were going to Drogheda.
We fled back to Marino, where old neighbours met us sympathetically and apologised for not having slapped us around the face till we came to our senses.
One of the requirements for a permit to live in Marino is that you speak glowingly about The Casino without ever having been near it. I hereby recommend The Casino to you. I've heard it's nice. It is said The Casino was so expensive to build it made a huge dent in Lord Charlemont's estate for the rest of his life. Having made the mistake of leaving Marino after so many happy years and then moving back to within a couple of hundred yards some time later, I know exactly how he felt.
Still, old Charlemont must have consoled himself with the best things about Marino life. The frequency of the 123 bus to town, the cheering sight of every kid in the area having a hurley welded to his or her hand, the reassuring sounds of people talking and arguing loudly on the streets after closing time, the sentinel trees on Griffith Avenue, the austerity of the O'Brien Institute, the palpable sense of community, the complete lack of pretension mixed with the knowledge that Paris is known around here as The Marino of the East. Plus all the charitable thoughts offered up for those of you who can't live here.