Watching a disappearing life pass by

IT was a butcher's shop near the Mater Hospital. The smells of bacon and sawdust hung unmistakably above polished steel and terracotta. I worked there for two months in the cashier's office, in a tiny glass coffin which offered this callow teenager a fascinating view of a world which I hardly knew existed.

From my lookout I could observe the Mater patients hobble out on crutches to blink at freedom. I could see the railings and Victorian windows of Eccles Street where Joycean ghosts still lingered; the number 10 bus drifting by eternally with its cargo of bored afternoon shoppers.

Mornings were the busiest time of the day. Once the ten o'clock Mass ended in Berkeley Road church, the pensioners strolled in for their chops and stewing beef and black puddings and bones for the dog. They collected a little ticket from the serving butcher and then lined up before my window plucking shillings, beads, Lourdes' medals from ancient purses.

They always seemed surprised to find a mere youth ensconced in a place that rightfully belonged to one of their own - that ubiquitous matron with the perm and the pearly smile who was both counsellor and confidante to their little daily dramas.

The afternoons went on forever. Time then to see the world up close and in slow motion. Butchers' hands seemed fascinating. They were pink muppetty things that took on a life of their own as they scurried over meat trays, rattled papers, performed strange gymnastics with pieces of twine. And outside, the shabby world of the late-1960s trudged by like in an Eisenstein movie; massgoers, nurses, hospital visitors, winos with eyes like balloons, young boys huddled against the roar of Dalymount.

Sometimes there was excitement, like a cavalcade of limousines conveying State visitors to Aras an Uachtarain. But usually it was the ordinary and the familiar in whose faces one could read the history and geography of the city. This was the old northside, home turf of James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan and Austin Clarke. It was still the Joycean northside of an old middleclass, now beleaguered by the onset of bedsitland. Elderly spinsters sipped tea in the windows of the North Circular Road, contemptuously aloof from the country students partying in the basements below. But their world was whimpering to an end in great draughty drawingrooms.

Everybody seemed to wear anoraks and pitch their cheeks against the windy and wet summer evenings.

Once a dog raided the shop. I saw the criminal look on his face but it was too late. He snatched a string of sausages and scurried off into the street. His shiftiness was almost human. But really, the summer passed in a kind of dozy 1960s twilight. Certain memories flicker in the greyness. Princess Grace, passing up to the Park, seemed the most extraordinarily beautiful creature Dublin had ever seen. A Corpus Christi procession lit up the street with theatrical colour. And even Archbishop John Charles McQuaid caused a bit of a stir when he passed our window, grim and intent like a medieval divine.

But sunshine seemed to belong elsewhere, to America or Australia. One customer kept me informed daily about her son in Adelaide. She showed me his wedding photographs. I remember the blue sky in the background.

"Isn't it so lovely," she said with a sigh.

"And so very far away."

All of them had stories for the butcher's assistants, always concerning children who had gone away. They produced photos of sons in the marines and daughters in airline uniforms, bronzed and healthy faces smiling, one felt, with relief.

A WOMAN called Phyllis brought in tea and two cream cakes every morning at 11. She looked like a former Royalette, always rouged and ready to hoist her skirt flirtatiously at the assistants. She called everyone "love". Afterwards, I would connect her to Molly Bloom and the lusty and luminous excitements of a fictional Eccles Street.

There was another character whom I nicknamed "the judge". He wore a waist coat and yellow gloves and had a Shakespearean quote for every occasion. They said he wrote Letters to the Editor and true enough, when I joined the Irish Press years later there were all these elegantly eccentric missives from an address in Phibsboro.

He usually bought just one chop, meticulously picking out the tenderest one on the tray which he would then sniff and examine as if he was Sherlock Holmes. He wore his poverty like a real gentleman.

There were other characters too from that warren of little streets bordering the Basin, it was an old area inclined now to eccentricity. Single men and women still lived in boarding houses in Blessington Street and it was in one of these establishments that, appropriately, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne was filmed.

One can see Maggie Smith slipping into Betty's hairdressing saloon or pausing outside the curiosity shop to gaze at the most lugubrious of religious bric-a-brac. The centre of life seemed elsewhere, down town, out in the suburbs, in the past.

When September came I left, loaded down with parcels of meat. My ignorance of the butchering business was complete - I still didn't know a lamb cutlet from a hairy bacon. I think they sighed with relief when they saw me go. The butcher himself was a kindly man and always patient even if I never did get the knack of the cash thingamagig. This was an apparatus into which you dunked dockets and out came change. That was the theory. In practice it was another barrel of laughs altogether. On one occasion I managed to lose a £20 note. I can still see the butcher gawping at me gawping into what seemed like a black hole.

"It can't just disappear," he said, nervously touching the machine.

"But it has," I protested.

I think I did learn something in my tiny glass box about the ordinary and the familiar; about little people and humble lives. Customers had their stories to tell and they told them, plaintively and sometimes hilariously and with great relish from their terracotta stage.

We weren't much of an audience but we were all these people had. And that was enough.