Nimble Fingers (or Pins and Needles)

NB: a little tour of the area I grew up in, Stillorgan. Those who haven't the time or interest to read the whole post might still enjoy the highlighted links, below:

Nimble Fingers. That's the name of the little emporium that my grandmother used to regularly misname Pins and Needles, although it wasn't a haberdashery. It sells marbles, wooden doll's houses, models, poster paints, kites, a range of little plastic animals, dinosaurs, etc.... basically the same stuff it's been peddling since a handful of Airfix or Timpo figures could set my heart pit-a-pat.

The place is a time-warp. Almost everything around it had changed beyond recognition since we first moved into the area in the early 1960s, a couple of years before they built The Stillorgan Bowl in the fields right next to the shop (see the linked image below), followed by Ireland's first shopping centre. Building the latter meant demolishing rows of cottages and houses with other local businesses; in fact the guts of what had been a village (as Joyce notes in Portrait of The Artist) for who knows how long, centuries probably.

I decided to enter the shop because I'd been thinking about it recently. Also, I had just made a digital copy of a framed photo I'd noticed hanging in the shoe repair shop in the centre, an aerial shot of the area in question, that shows the Stilloragn Bowl being built. Although the caption mentions the shopping centre, I don't see any evidence of construction; the corner with the old houses and cottages is still very much in place.

So are other dinky pieces of my past, such as the old Ormonde Cinema in the parking lot on the far lower right. Next to this, on the corner of the T-junction, is Boland's Pub with its then unroofed Gents urinal (following the curve of the corner pavement) flushed, reliably enough, by the weather's plumbing.

Both pub and cinema are still there but utterly altered. Boland's was a proper country pub, with the properly shabby lounge decisively separated from the bar, and the outdoor jacks I mentioned. The cinema disappeared, as far as I recall, for quite a few years, to be resurrected as a multiplex at the rear of a kind of mini-mall. I often go to movies there now, but the pub, which has gone through many revamps, is a dismal place without any trace of its former character.

Boland's is/was at the top of a little hill, and the row of slated cottages going downhill (to the right at the junction) is still there, essentially all that remains of the original village. At the bottom of the hill, top right, you can see the old OK (later ESSO) Garage, which has been boarded up for the last few years. I remember going there on errands with a a petrol can for the oil heater in the kitchen, which reminds me of what may be the earliest TV ad I saw, for ESSO Blue.

Strange to think that this twisting country road was the main artery south, to Foxrock, Bray, Kilmac, Wexford 'and other far-flung towns.' Stranger to look over the wall opposite the pub, into the lush green, ramshackle fields I used take short cuts through, to the house where I was raised in Stillorgan Grove, a couple of hundred yards beyond the top right corner. The Stillorgan Bowl (now Leisureplex) is another building which has survived, though the fields around it were rolled up decades ago and replaced by a wide, busy crossroads, islanding, then marooning, a peculiar little cluster of failing enterprises whose early incarnation was a big ugly restaurant called The Swiss Chalet, followed by Blake's. One of the most recent was the Chinese restaurant, Pings, which followed the fortunes of the rest and has been boarded up for years.

I have tried to write about the area and its shape-shiftings in a little sequence, below:


A POCKET HISTORY OF STILLORGAN

The little village of Stillorgan was the parting of the ways. –– James Joyce

1. Centre

Bogged in its acres of cars, the flagship Shopping Centre
was never one thing or the other. A half-century later
it still stands, in place of the cottages’ older ways
of parting, its faux-cobbled-square set off by a bronze
beetle-backed Fiddler of Dooney, his three dancing girls
holding hands in a circle, hair blown
in different directions, styled by a cubist breeze.


2. Pool

Widening the main road, they lopped
the curving entrance to ours ––
the water pump and horse trough
where no horse I ever saw
stooped to the coppery water

and that wilted-yellow gatehouse,
backed into high grass and bramble,
that once guarded the gates
to Saint John of God’s (whose grounds
also had to give ground);

walls, battlements, ramparts
ropy with ivy were footholds
for us to clamber and spy
the odd figure (inmate? gardener?)
walking the kempt lawns.

Climbing over, we’d drop
onto a layer of pine needles,
and keeping within the trees, poke
at a disused swimming pool –– leaf-choked
and frog-spawning –– even then

waiting for the road to widen.


3. Crossroads

Take Leisureplex and The Swiss Chalet (now Ping’s)
from that gone-to-seed hill, lost corner
of some Lord’s estate, where

among other things, piebald horses grazed beside
horse-drawn wagons green
as rolls of Plasticine.

Let the cottages rise at the old corners: Boland’s Pub ––
leatherette lounge and outdoor jacks: a curved wall
rinsed by whatever falls ––

Set down the schoolboy on his way home from the toyshop
that kept its name to this day, Nimble Fingers,
pockets bulging with cowboys and Indians.

He pauses to consider a short cut, steps over
what remains of the granite boundary.
Another boy stands in his way.

The unwashed commanding face, clear as war-paint,
lets me know I’m trespassing, ‘deffo’.
When I retreat he’ll follow

onto the pavement, down to the eternal
OK Garage, where it will seem natural
to halt. He won’t need to ask

for me to empty my pockets, hand over my tribute:
a lesson in long division, the neat
actualities of ‘turf’.

After which I’ll mock-saunter, then hurry home, chastened
but lightened in more ways than one, with a keener sense
of re-entering my own province.


4. Field Notes

Long acre of waist-high nettles, rolling stretch
where I ran with an impotent kite ––

*
bounded by tall black bars tapered like javelins
gates big enough for a hay-cart
padlocked shut

*
only two gardens backed into it then
houseboats
moored in a generous harbour

*
on the longest side ¬the fence
ran ahead like a vertical track dipping here and there
where it leaned in and out

*
so memory carries a stick
to rattle along as the eye clicks and clicks

*
shadowing you on dark winter evenings
a flag of fortified night

*
to have this bald remnant of unbuilt land
everyday green zone spread
generously in the grey

*
flipped our local scale
to something broader: stage-space, a landscape painting
with a way in

*
here where bars had been bent
just enough for a head to slot through
a sideways body to follow
into the shade of a bristling lime, one of the few
inside trees

*
where I set between its roots a bottle
containing paper and pencils, a rolled note
jutting from the mouth (my bubble
of expectation ––
inviting whoever found it
to leave their own words or drawing

*

–– burst when back I came
to the smashed glass, snapped pencils, paper-flakes

*

muttering under bramble
stream ran across like a gutter

*

but for a bridged gap
near the blackbird’s grave where the field
spilled into other fields

*

to the right a tin-roofed cow-shed
leant on Saint John of God’s high asylum wall
catching its breath

*

running running running

*

all the way to that neat
compound of monks’ roofs (Saint Augustine’s), trees
shelving green sunlight

hard above them the obelisk tall as a church spire ––

the dismantled estate the deer park
the great house where The Dean once ––

still ticks the horizon:
metronome

for stopped time.

*
a wrong turn, shy kiss that set her crying and closed down
what was left of our friendship

short-cut that lengthened into a stoned giggling dark
mined with cow-pats

fragrant strummed summer evenings, hay-bales, blind-man’s buff, spin-
the-bottle, our borough

of well-seasoned ignorance (of who owned the farm, of when
the cows came and went, of wedged
harvest or hay moons)

*
peeled off, leaving waterlogged mud, the lime tree
felled, a primed vacancy

*

cut and dealt into stacks
of narrow up-market houses
three-point-turn cul-de-sacs

*

–– trying and trying and trying that extension of quiet air