Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 5

Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 5

When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers’ shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets...
Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 4

Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 4

We came then near the river. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts. It was noon when we reached the...
Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 3

Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 3

That night I slept badly. In the morning I was first-comer to the bridge as I lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank. It was a mild sunny morning in the first...
Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 2

Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 2

“This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up! ‘Hardly had the day’…. Go on! What day? ‘Hardly had the day dawned’…. Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?” Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone...
Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 1

Dubliners – AN ENCOUNTER – 1

It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother Leo,...
Dubliners – THE SISTERS – 7

Dubliners – THE SISTERS – 7

She laid a finger against her nose and frowned: then she continued: “But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and...