A reviewer is more welcome to an author than a critic.
There is a shading of difference in the two words. A soul-mate would be a real bonus, and Elaine Crowley has been lucky; her Cowslips and Chainies, a memoir of Dublin in the 1930s, is a masterpiece of remembrance of the city I knew as a third-level student in Dublin in the 1930s, and firmly places me in the soul-mate bracket.
Reading this book, I lived with her through every nuance and incident of her childhood in a tenement where her first memories were of her mother black-leading the grate (an experience I remember, too). The book opens thus: "A motorway is to be built on the street where I lived. The street to which I was brought home from the hospital where I was born. The house in which I lived is knocked down to the ground." It seemed a poor opening, but having started, I found it difficult to lay the book out of my hand. To remember a childhood with such accuracy, and be so authentic to the Dublin of the period, is a triumph of memory and imagination. Her great love for her father and the running battle with her mother - a down-to-earth, no nonsense woman runs throughout the telling.
I was particularly amused by her account of the time when the "perm" arrived on the scene: "hairdressers put advertisements in their windows - `Start a Perm Club. Free perms and commission!'" Her mother joined a club, "a shilling a week"; it was her only concession to anything in the fashion line. She took little Nella with her to the hairdressers. When she was unplugged, unwound, brushed and combed, the hair hung in narrow, corrugated folds. She was devastated; she could not get her hat down over it.
" `That's a show', my mother said. `It'll be grand tomorrow when it settles,' the hairdresser said."
On O'Connell Bridge a street photographer offered to take her picture. "My mother dodged past him. `The bloody cheek of them fellas taking up the pavement.' " A similar' scene is present with me every day, as I have hanging on my kitchen wall, a photo of myself and a student companion on O'Connell Bridge, taken, possibly by the same photographer, in 1932.
Elaine Crowley's father was in charge of horses in an undertaker's yard in Denzille St. There he would take his little daughter on a Sunday morning, "through William's Place, past the back entrance of the Meath Hospital, through York St., where women sat on the steps of the tenement houses, breast-feeding their babies, talking, laughing, and shouting to their bare-footed children playing in the road. Then out of the poverty-ridden street and on to the Green, where all was sunshine and women were pretty and wore beautiful clothes, and from the gratings of the Shelbourne rose smells of delicious foods. On through other streets where no women sat on the steps and the letter-boxes and knockers gleamed like gold".
There is a vivid account of the games they played and the names they called each other. Her mother often had to go to the pawn "My father's best suit and overcoat, and other garments pressed into a brown paper parcel." Pawning was no disgrace, her mother declared. What you pledged was your own. The biggest in the land had done it; kings and gentlemen had pawned their plate and jewels. Yet the daughter sensed the embarrassment and knew this was just bravado.
When they were living in a house farther out from the city, and still very hard-up, the mother pledged a sideboard to tide them over the father's illness. When the money was not available to redeem it, she consoled herself by saying: "It was only a bloody gazebo anyhow." From time to time her mother would declare that "one day, once she was on the pig's back, she would never again have to set her foot in a pawn shop". To be on the pig's back was her mother's great ambition.
Mixed with the humour is the almost unbearable pathos and tragedy caused by the ever-present scourge of tuberculosis, which took her beloved father; the accounts of visits to the Hospice for the Dying are heartbreaking.
I can readily endorse the claim on the cover of this book, that it is a classic of Irish autobiography.