From Fatima to Finglas

Fatima

 They took the flat with no windows, Flat 1A Fatima mansions

They’d had enough of Griffith Barracks,

My Da a small boy then got sick while he was there,

Ground floor, three bedrooms, galley kitchen, bric a brac furniture hand me downs,

And the wedding present dresser.

Grandad got a job in the Shelbourne from there he’d bring home food, while friends would quip

“the Malones are up in Fatima slapping each other with steaks”

Dad went to the Ferrini youth club in Rialto that brought him on a trip to Blackpool

and Manchester to a football match.

Six days b&b,

Two matches and a show, Nine pounds for the six days,

Fifty pence back a day and one pound the last day, Louis Tussauds, and a comedy show,

Back home, the inner city was their playground, scurrying through “the back of the pipes”,

or scutting on the backs of Guinness trucks, life lessons in games of mowl,

and sunny swims in the canal,

Nana worried about trouble in the flats, and caught one son in a robbed car,

the flats were then in disrepair,

with the news Dad cried about his “beloved Fatima”

Finglas

They took the council house in Finglas in 1973, 26 Cloonlara Crescent,

four bedrooms, a sitting room, the kitchen, separate washroom and toilet for large families,

A garden filled with fresh soil,

Mixed matched hand me down furniture still,

vast fields of green,

It was the “countryside” to them,

Dad travelled by bus and was late to school everyday He got a note from the principle

“Michael Malone is to be excused on late arrival because of poor bus connections”

Nanas house was a place to gather, chips made in a pot of oil,

turnover bread, apple cake,

Nana in the shade Grandad in the sun,

Grandad would come home, after his nightshift at Dublin bus, or a few pints in the Metro,

Wearing his limousine cap, and he’d smell like hacks cough sweets,

with bon-bons in a brown paper bag in his pockets,

Grandad shirtless, tanned walking the dogs Shep, Zippie, Sam down the Tolka everyday until he couldn’t walk anymore,

when Nana passed Grandad sick in the makeshift bed in the sitting room asked to be dress so he could sit at the front door,

he turned to me and my cousin, and said to us your Nana is gone,

he sat at the door looking out to the crescent for hours,

I felt like he was thinking of all the years they had spent there, happy.

Farewell, Cloonlara Crescent,

to the only constant home I knew, the house that I aspire to,

what a home should be, not the pebbledash,

nor the gaudy carpet,

or the laminate cabinetry,

but the time spent there with loved ones O, to have a little house.

By Michelle Malone & Michael Malone