The Early Years of Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen by Ciaran O Nuallain Lilliput Press 110pp, £6.99
When Brian O'Nolan and two of his four brothers were attending Blackrock College as day students in 1927, nationalistic fervour was very much in the air, and in this memoir Ciaran O Nuallain tells the tale of his younger Brian's strong objections, aired at a college debate, to the fact that the college blazers were made in Leeds. But that wasn't enough for the 16-year-old Brian. Accompanied by his friend Oscar Quigley, he entered the college grounds at dead of night and painted the slogan "Don't Buy British Blazers" in two-foot-high letters on the gable end of the handball alley. The college authorities quickly removed this scandalous exhortation - "the first prose sentence that Brian ever published".
Ciaran O Nuallain's book was first published in Irish in 1973 under the title Oige an Dearthar. A journalist and founder of the Irish-language paper Inniu, Ciaran died ten years later. This translation is a rather pedestrian account of a remarkable family life spent between Scotland, Strabane, Tullamore and Dublin, yet it is essential reading for anyone interested in the background and youth of the most talented comic writer this country has ever produced. The peripatetic family existence resulted from the Da's work as a Customs and Excise officer. Both parents, Michael O Nuallain and Agnes Gormley, came from Omagh, but met and married in Strabane, where Brian was born in 1911. There are no recollections of the move to Glasgow, but on return the family settled in Dublin, in Inchicore, which was then open country. There were exciting trips for the children (though the two daughters get no mention) to the Sackville Cinema in O'Connell Street, and there was more excitement in watching young Irish Volunteers march past their house. Then came the move back to Strabane, to the "haunted" house, long summer days by the river, and the pleasures of home-made cigarettes made with the soft brown paper covers of Gaelic Leagues booklets used by the Da in teaching Irish. The next home was "The Beeches" at Cappencur, two miles outside Tullamore, where the childhood idyll continued - despite the Black and Tan lorries flashing past. Cars were just beginning to become commonplace (the O'Nuallains had now acquired an Overland) and on Sunday mornings, the pot-holed dirt road was packed with Mass-goers travelling by means of bicycle, donkey and cart, pony and trap.
What comes across is a busy, bustling, stimulating family life. As for intellectual pursuits, the as-yet-unschooled O'Nuallain boys were reading widely, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Thomas Hardy. Their Irish was good, but few books in Irish were available. Ciaran and Brian also got into the film business - drawing stories on paper and projecting the images on to a screen in their garage.
Finally came the move to Dublin: in 1923, the family rented a five-storey house, 25 Herbert Place, for £90 a year. With the Da appointed to the Board of the Revenue Commissioners, middleclass Dublin life was fulfilling, with numerous trips to theatre and concert-hall. Brian, now twelve, and his two older brothers all went to school for the first time (no explanation is given for such late enrolment, other than the Da's wandering lifestyle). They all joined the fourth class in Synge Street CBS. School came as a shock, and the "greenhorns" came in for some bullying. Ciaran tells how he finally had to take a physical stand, but his younger brother Brian had no need to employ his fists: "He had a characteristic gift that enabled him to come out of such encounters without violence." The memoir draws to a close with a lively account of Brian's subsequent days at UCD, telling of his brilliantly comical contributions to the Literary and Historical Society, where he narrowly lost the auditorship battle to Vivion de Valera, yet won a medal for impromptu debate. We learn that Brian subsequently harboured ambitions to own a provincial newspaper, and can only wonder what he would have made of it.
In 1934, when he was twenty-three, Brian O'Nuallain founded a humorous monthly magazine, Blather, which purported to be "the only paper exclusively devoted to clay-pigeon shooting in Ireland". Only six issues were published, but even the first hinted at the style that would develop elsewhere: "Blather is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men . . . as proud as bantams and as vain as peacocks . . . a sardonic laugh escapes us . . . a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?"