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I’ll never forget eating my first banana on a bus to Wicklow

Family Fortunes: The ‘curved yellow fruit’ that was good for hunger and for shoes

Brendan J Nangle with his mother, Eileen Nangle (nee O’Byrne), in Wicklow in the 1940s.

Brendan J Nangle
Fri Feb 1 2019 - 00:00

On visits to my grandparents in Wicklow town in the early 1940s, I enjoyed skipping across the planks of the original Parnell Bridge, the timber footbridge built in 1860. That was just before the bridge, visible in the background of this earlier photo of my mother and me, was reconstructed in 1946 under the supervision of my Uncle Joe, the county engineer.

While we usually travelled to Wicklow in my father’s Hillman Minx, I especially remember my first trip by bus. As we waited on Dublin’s Eden Quay, I felt proud, as a five-year-old, knowing we had to board a green CIÉ single decker, not a blue and yellow GNR bus for Belfast.

I watched the driver, a Wicklow man named Gus, wind the destination scroll until it showed “Wicklow”, while the conductor, climbing the ladder at the rear, loaded the passengers’ bags, cases and bicycles onto the roof. My mother and I sat where I could see the road ahead, a view better than that from the back seat of the Hillman.

Once we passed Donnybrook, we were in the countryside. As we rumbled along the winding roads, my mother named some of the quiet villages along the way – Stillorgan, Cornelscourt, Cabinteely, Shankill.

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It was the first time I had seen a banana

In Bray, I got a treat – a curved yellow fruit. It was the first time I had seen a banana. The second World War, not long over, had restricted the importation of such niceties from far afield. I enjoyed that novelty.

My mother happened to comment that, during times of hardship, some people used to use banana skins to polish their shoes. I was intrigued. Imagine a fruit that could both satisfy one’s hunger and also beautify one’s shoes. To test its shining ability, I started to rub the skin on my shoes, only to be stopped by my mother. She had already polished them for our visit to my grandad and granny, and she didn’t want her good work spoiled.

We got off in Bridge Street in Wicklow and I watched the bus reversing into its shed on South Quay, a building no longer used as a bus garage.

At my grandparents’ house, my mother discarded the banana skin. What a waste of a good shoe polisher, I thought.

I always associate the Wicklow bus with that original timber footbridge . . . and my first banana.