I did a load of laundry then spent the day lounging in bed and reading. I'm in the middle of Tomas O'Canainn's Home to Derry, a roman a clef about a widow raising 5 children in Derry in the 1940s, focusing on a middle boy named Sean. I'm enjoying it a lot, especially Sean's dancing about with religion...thinking if he says enough prayers a Protestant girl he likes will convert to Catholicism so he can marry her...and worrying his mother will find out that's what he wants to do...
He's either 10 or 11 years old, but hasn't actually stated his age so I'm not clear as to the exact time frame. I know his father died of appendicitis when he was 4, in 1935, and that's about it. That and they live on the north end of the city, close to where the old Swilly train depot was. If so, that would make the story happening during WW2 and I don't get that sense about it. Still, it's a nicely told book with gentle details that I find fascinating. Like calling his mother "mammy." I'd seen that in comments on Facebook's Derry of the Past page. Now that site has been a fountain of information.
I think the house they live in is relatively new, because it's not listed on a 1905 Old Ordnance Survey Map I have of the city but is just barely noted on the 1946 Burrows Pointer Guide Map to Londonderry. These maps are a bit confusing. The former, for example, makes reference to a lunatic asylum just north of the city center while the later says it's a hospital. Since I'm still looking into whether or not a hospital was open on the Bogside of Derry during the Troubles (I don't think there was) it would be nice to know what was what, back then.
The main hospital for the city is Altnagelvin, which is on the Waterside and was big and modern back in the early 60s. I passed it when I did my walk from Burntollet Bridge a couple years back, and it's even bigger and better now. But I've seen reference to a clinic on the Bogside, where Brendan would be living, and I think the lunatic asylum was still in operation as late as the mid-seventies, so I'm still digging into that, because it factors into his return in 1981.
The more I know the more I know I don't know...
He's either 10 or 11 years old, but hasn't actually stated his age so I'm not clear as to the exact time frame. I know his father died of appendicitis when he was 4, in 1935, and that's about it. That and they live on the north end of the city, close to where the old Swilly train depot was. If so, that would make the story happening during WW2 and I don't get that sense about it. Still, it's a nicely told book with gentle details that I find fascinating. Like calling his mother "mammy." I'd seen that in comments on Facebook's Derry of the Past page. Now that site has been a fountain of information.
I think the house they live in is relatively new, because it's not listed on a 1905 Old Ordnance Survey Map I have of the city but is just barely noted on the 1946 Burrows Pointer Guide Map to Londonderry. These maps are a bit confusing. The former, for example, makes reference to a lunatic asylum just north of the city center while the later says it's a hospital. Since I'm still looking into whether or not a hospital was open on the Bogside of Derry during the Troubles (I don't think there was) it would be nice to know what was what, back then.
The main hospital for the city is Altnagelvin, which is on the Waterside and was big and modern back in the early 60s. I passed it when I did my walk from Burntollet Bridge a couple years back, and it's even bigger and better now. But I've seen reference to a clinic on the Bogside, where Brendan would be living, and I think the lunatic asylum was still in operation as late as the mid-seventies, so I'm still digging into that, because it factors into his return in 1981.
The more I know the more I know I don't know...
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