A Fool to Myself (fragment from a work in progress)

'The official autobiography of Eddie "Red" Woodward'*

Chapter 1 - Out of my Pram

O Boyle, beauteous Boyle, where thy hills all gang green
And thy braes 'ere were beauteous as well,
In thought I amend to the cross there and bend
My two knees and my head down to pray.

("O Boyle, Beauteous Boyle" Herb Shapiro)

I wish I could start my story with a song like that but alas! I wasn't born in Boyle. I was born in Dublin, dirty and dear (especially now that the euro's here). My first memory is of biting the fat finger of some nosy oulwan poking me in my pram. Little did I know then that I would spend the happiest years of my life poking nosy oulwans myself.

To say we were dirt-poor would be an insult to dirt. My mother scrubbed the skid-marked and soggy underpants of priests for the whole arsediocese of Dublin, so our one room home on the third floor of a tenement in Gardiner Street always smelled of shit and religion.

[Red, put something in here about the following: gaslight, fanlights, pyramids of horse dung-balls [ooh Ambassador, you do spoil us! Red], clipclop, cobblestones, ten for a penny the plums, good afternoon, your humble servant, mangles, privies, paraffin lamps, complete absence of television, more fun with a cardboard box than with a gameboy, widows, twenty-child families, velvet tablecloths, vote for De Valera, Larry Gogan etc. Feargal]

* With Feargal Mooney