Where the Sacred Heart Is

‘Hiren the wireless!’

‘No! Don’t! Lowern it!’

‘Will ye get up?!’

Reveille in the Creedon household followed the exact same pattern every school morning. The bugle boy, my dad, was first up to attend to the overnight deliveries. He unlocked the shop door at 6  a.m., dragged in the crates of milk and bundles of newspapers, and turned the ‘Open’ sign to face the world. That sign only ever faced the other way for five hours a day.

Dad would switch on the kettle and the big radio set on either side of the gold-framed Sacred Heart picture in the kitchen and let them both warm up. Then he’d pop upstairs and give my mother a shout so that she could take over when he was gone to work. In between domestic duties, Dad would serve the first few customers, usually other dads rushing for the Ford and Dunlop factories down the docks.

At precisely 7.30 a.m., five sharp pips would emanate from the extension speaker on the third-floor landing. You see, apart from the wire at the back of the kitchen radio that served as an aerial, my father, an ingenious man, had attached yet another wire to the wireless, as it was curiously called. This cable was tacked discreetly beside the lino and rubber nosing cover on the steps of the stairs. It ran all the way to the speaker on the landing windowsill on the top floor outside my sisters’ bedrooms. The speaker was housed in its own little mahogany box with fancy holes at the front to let the sound out. It looked like it belonged on a church wall, but it sat on that windowsill for decades. The knob on the side said ‘Vol’ and there were two little lines: one read ‘Min’, the other read ‘Max’. But no matter how you twiddled it, the vol was always at max. And it worked – the Creedons always had a good school attendance record. Radio Éireann, above in Dublin, was now in on the act, calling the nation to rise up with ‘O’Donnell Abú’, aptly described as ‘a rousing march’. It certainly put the heart crossways in the two dozen souls sleeping under our roof.

It was a particularly big roof as it spanned two conjoined three-storey houses, each with its own shopfront. There was a small yard behind one house and a large extension behind the other. The extension was built by ‘Johnny the Builder’ when I was a toddler, and it provided extra bedrooms and two bathrooms. All told, there were only 12 bedrooms, so at times it could be a little cramped.

There was Mam and Dad and their 12 children. Norah, Carol Ann, Constance, Geraldine, Vourneen, Don, Rosaleen, Marie-Thérèse and Eugenia were all doing just grand until numb