All aboard for a colourful journey by moonlight

Tallaght in the 1980s was a mucky and a lonely place for Eileen Casey, despite the camaraderie on the night bus home from Dunnes, she writes

Looking back over my nearly 30 years in Tallaght, I often feel like an old pecking hen searching for a soft entry into hard ground. Despite the good people I've encountered here - and there have been many - most of my experiences are tinged with loss or regret. Anger, too. It wasn't just that there were so few facilities here back then - the cart but no horse, so to speak. For me, it was the lack of variation in the physical and imaginative landscape that really tore at the heart. Newly-marrieds who found that their three-bedroomed semi-detached Utopias became very monotonous day in, day out. Playing at "babby houses" my mother called it in my case, because I married young.

Reality is a rude awakener. There were times I wanted the sky to drop down and suffocate me. Sometimes it almost did but then it turned into a huge black net, dragging me back up again, gasping for air. The bit of ground I open here in my story concerns the beginning of l986.

Despite all my determination to move on, as it were, I was still working as a night packer in Dunnes Stores, Kilnamanagh, having started four years earlier.

We worked when the store closed and for that reason the money was good. I just couldn't give it up. So there I was, another freezing cold night in January waiting in the store car park for the company bus. The bus would come on the very late nights when we worked from 9pm until 1am. By the time we did our shopping, a perk of the job, it was well going on for 2am. Smokers lit up, myself included. Not that we were that deprived of our fix. We'd often nip upstairs during the night and for peace sake, I suppose, the manager turned a blind eye. Even though our uniforms must have stunk of them. Nicotine and sweat, what an aroma.

Some of us wore no tights because they'd just get laddered off the pallets or the sharp corners of the shelves. Our legs were numb by the time the bus came, its warm light a flicker of amber sweeping the glass frontage of the supermarket like a big searchlight. It reminded me often of those prisoner-of-war films.

The moon rode alongside us as we journeyed down the Greenhills Road, past rooftops skimmed with ice, pitch-black open spaces. The vast expanses of Fettercairn and Jobstown seemed to stretch as far as infinity. Killinarden, Balrothery, Firhouse, Aylesbury and Old Bawn were also on the driver's map, a roll-call of housing estates gouged out of wild fields. In a field still wedded to nature, the dark shape of a fox stalked for small skittering prey in the shivering grasses.

By then we had relaxed into laughter, glad to be away from huge palettes of washing powder and heavy litre-bottles of Coke. Acres and acres of cat food and dog food, beans and peas. In between the layers on the palettes there were large sheets of cardboard and someone had got the bright idea of lining their attic floor with them. We all followed suit. My two sons were young at the time and in the mornings I would turn on the electric oven while I got them dressed. The back boilers in the houses were not adequate and neither was the insulation.

But it wasn't just the cold. Loneliness and an overwhelming sense of isolation often ambushed me. I was lonely because I had no family at all living in Dublin. There were no bus rides for me to Drimnagh, Crumlin or the inner city to visit kinsfolk. No gossip or tribal intrigue to warm my heart.

I was the culchie in the night-pack deck of cards, born in the middle of the bog. Birr, Co Offaly to be more precise, a heritage town complete with its own castle where my uncle had worked as a gardener when I was a child. That meant that I sometimes played in the castle gardens with my brothers. I'm the youngest of six children, my two brothers separating my three sisters from me in age, and so it was with the boys I played. Games were a bit more boisterous as a result.

Although it was the middle of January, a few straggles of tinsel could be glimpsed here and there through chinks in curtains. The seasonal comfort zone was well and truly over, however, and instead of talking about presents and nights out, conversation on the bus had reverted to credit unions and saving.

Mortgages were crippling in those early days. In my case, the wives living either side of us were going out to work right from the beginning. They had cars and no children, the reverse of our situation.

They were able to go to the mountains on a Sunday and survey the housing estates like Gullivers looking down on Lilliput. Although my husband worked, the mortgage was so high that it nearly took a week's wages.

It was a few years further up the line before we could afford to run a car, but on our first trip into the mountains it was stolen and vandalised, a memory I can't recall to this day without bitterness.

As well as discussing our debts, on the bus ride home on that particular night I was getting an awful slagging. The week before, on January 16th, two armed men in polo necks and balaclavas had broken into the store. I was upstairs having a quick cigarette with my pal and working partner when one of them burst in, checking it out, and growled at us to lock ourselves in.

We did, needless to say, glad we had our fags with us. We smoked our brains out while thousands was being lifted from the safe. Talk about Rome burning while Nero fiddled. I was being slagged because when two detectives came to question us I had made "a bleedin' production out of it", as my pal said. I'd joined a writers' group, St Colmcille's, not long before the incident and I suppose my imaginative juices were in full flow. I managed to make the whole episode sound like a very bad version of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

If a house was in darkness, the women near the bus door rushed to give a helping hand with shopping boxes. Then the bus took off again, to the accompaniment of barking dogs. Tallaght in the 1980s was full of dogs. Roaming at will. There were lots of other things I didn't like to see. Travellers on the bypass made me fret to see their mess. On balance, the street where I was brought up had settled Travellers and their house was one of the cleanest I've ever seen.

Tallaght in the 1980s meant muck everywhere. Green shoots tried to push through stones, a forced birth. Builders' sites were everywhere. Plastic flapped in the wild winds gusting down the Dublin Mountains where Oisín is reputed to have returned from Tír na nÓg. My own youth seemed to have been snatched. Journeying on that night bus seemed a fair distance from the snooker halls of Rathmines where myself and my husband-to-be used to hang out until all hours listening to Abba. Fernando was the hit the year we met.

It had happened so quickly. Marriage in l977, my son's arrival 11 months later, and then moving to our new home. We had little in the way of savings or material goods. I had been a typist with CIÉ, coming to Dublin at the age of 18. I was only 20 when I married, but I wouldn't have swapped my lovely husband for anything. He had come to Dublin from Killarney at a young age. He was born and reared near Muckross House at the foot of Torc Mountain. His father had been a forestry worker with the Muckross Estate.

Nine years after getting married, I had two sons and a job on the night-pack. Things were looking up money-wise, but I was still lonely and a bit low. Despite all the camaraderie on that night bus ride home, I was very much aware that it would be a while before I saw my mother again.

She had come up from Birr after Christmas and stayed with us for a whole week. She had brought all the news from the town with her, leaving no stone unturned in the line of what was happening. She liked a bet on the horses though, and all that was suspended while she was here. I knew she was getting restless when she said she had to be home to pay the briquette man: that was her code and I understood. When she went, a light went with her, flickering around the corner of my road, then disappearing as surely as the tail-light of the bus that dropped me to my door.

My mother, above anyone, was especially pleased when I started to send out stories, poems and articles for publication and then seeing them in print. The very first piece I had published was in the Irish Catholic newspaper and was about the May altars I made as a young girl. It was a memory piece also about my mother. Sadly, she has now passed away but her light continues to shine in my writing as she still features there.

I entered literary competitions also and she'd speak to me in racing terms about them. Did I have a win, was I up or down the field or placed? It's a pity she didn't see my work short-listed for the Sunday Tribune Hennessy Awards in 2004 and also in 2005. She had often backed a winner in the Hennessy Gold Cup. I worked on the night-pack until l989 and two years later my second family came along in the shape of my beautiful daughter. She was followed by an equally beautiful sister five years later.

Giving up cigarettes and booze was a goal I didn't achieve until a good many years later. The angels that guide me towards the good things in my life never gave up on me, even when I turned my back and wouldn't listen. They guided me to St Colmcille's Writers' Group, one of the most rewarding things that have ever happened to me. Marie, Pauline, Mary, Maeve and Geraldine not only remain the dear friends that I met in that group, but are also very gifted ladies.

When I first began my writing journey I was able to revisit places and characters I had known in my youth. Also, when I entered literary competitions and did well, I was able to go about the country, and that gave me great enjoyment. Once, on a trip to Tullamore, to hear Maeve Binchy speak, a friend of mine remarked that a change seemed to come over me once we got down the country, that I seemed more at ease, more at home. I've never quite been able to call Tallaght New Town home.

It's a word that doesn't sit lightly on my heart. I don't think that will ever change. However, the Tallaght of today is a lot more vibrant than the place I came to as a young bride. My children are here and I have good friends. What more can I wish for?