Pembroke Lane
Pembroke Lane is one of those Dublin lanes that still exist for the idly curious. The kind you find yourself veering off course to explore having walked past it a million times before. It was there I met Mr O’Donnell who told me about Patrick Kavanagh and the shit rolled in newspapers.
The lane forms the back entrance escape route from the Georgian townhouse on Fitzwilliam Street in which I work. It is not to be confused with the lane of the same name that runs parallel to Waterloo Road. This one is off Pembroke Road. A few quiet garages, formerly stables, face a single cottage in which Mr O’Donnell has lived all his life. When he was a boy 120 families lived in the lane, and, as he told me, getting a place in a game of football was not easy.
Myself and Mr O’Donnell have struck up an affable and conversational acquaintance and it was during the course of a recent escape from the office that I asked him about Patrick Kavanagh, whom I knew had lived nearby on Pembroke Road.
“He was a filthy man,” he told me. “Oh he was a filthy man. Myself and another fella were given the job of cleaning out his apartment after he died. You’ve never seen the like of it. The smell was terrible. There were stuffed monkeys hanging from the ceiling covered in fleas.”
But the smell was the worst thing about the place. “He used to shit in newspapers, and roll them up and throw them in the corner of the room to use later lighting the fire. When we opened the door there was a big pyramid of these scrunched-up newspapers in the corner. The fella I was with had to go outside and he got sick with the smell.”
Mr O’Donnell then rang his boss to refuse the job. “He told us, look, I’ll get you the gear, overalls and masks. It has to be cleaned. It has to be done. And I’ll pay you what you want.”
With that an agreement was made and a skip procured. “We put the shit in sacks and one of us threw the sacks out the window to the other one who put it in the skip.”
“That was my experience of Patrick Kavanagh. A filthy man,” said Mr O’Donnell.
admin @ May 7, 2008