MO’C: I was thirteen. And like that, I mean to say a lot of people myself we left school for one reason like to try and go out and get a job, to try and support our families because I was the third eldest in my family so they were people that were out working and bringing home a few bob, you know made a huge difference to the house and my two elder sisters were working before, you know. But I remember we got this. ‘twas like that when you thought about it, ‘twas who you know like even back then like, my two friends were working out in Blarney Woollen Mills so we got the job in Blarney Woollen Mills anyway. There’s em so ‘twas on pounds ten a week, one pounds ten.
H.K: What did ye do there?
MO’C: I worked and we made stockings in the hosiery department. Stockings. Woolly stockings now, not that time, we made woolly stockings that time, they made yarn as well then over in the other place. But I was in the place where they made the stockings but ‘twas one pounds ten, I remember if you worked on Saturday morning, half eight, to I think it was twelve o’clock you got three and six for that then. Serious money now like but the big attraction of the whole thing right, the big attraction was right you got a free pass for the bus, from the Sunbeam.
H.K: Oh a special bus.
MO’C: You get the Blarney bus. They gave you the pass, they gave you the pass with the bus to go out to Blarney. So we were out there, out there for a good few months anyway and this fellow, this fellow [phrase unintelligible] they’re looking for somebody up in laundries, up in the Mallow Road, so I had to go for the interview wherever anyway, I got the job anyway three pounds fifteen shillings a week, I was like a millionaire. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it the amount of money I had but eh stayed up there then for awhile and I went to England. I was in England. I worked in England.
JCK: Well now, there was a substantial population in a very, very small area. Because of small houses, up a laneway, you could have thirty, forty or fifty houses. So with big families in small houses, you had a sizeable population and taking up very little area. Now, the people that lived there -- you had a variety. The variety in the sense you had poor people, but you had people who would be considered very well off. And the reason for it was -- as an example, Corbett’s Lane. If you walked up Corbett’s Lane, the first four houses would be small houses with ordinary people, working class people, in them. When you came to the fifth house, it would be a two-story farmhouse with a big black gate, tarred gate, above it, and a big yard at the back of the house. Now, at the back of that house, the people who lived in that house had cattle and sheep. Now, you could -- you could have the same thing in another couple of houses and then a big double storey house, and you could continue up the lane at both sides with that situation. So you had poor, and people who would be considered fairly well off for the times, all living in the one lane. Now at the top of the lane, my grandmother, Polly Kelleher, lived, my father’s mother, and across the way from their house was two tripe houses, Welsh’s and Reilly’s, and around the corner, you had another tripe house, Dylan’s. So you had three tripe, drisheen places at the top of Corbett’s lane, at the junction of Corbett’s -- top of Corbett’s Lane and Kearney’s Lane. And at one -- at one o’clock in the day the hooter would go in those places and a lot of women would come out with their rubber aprons and their clogs for their dinner break, and they all lived in the laneways around. So you had plenty -- you had a lot of work going on in those places because you -- as well as tripe and drisheen houses you had slaughter-houses. And to go back to those days, we weren’t far from the countryside, so you could understand that a lot of the men that lived in the area were butchers, and predominantly the butchers came from the north side of the city rather than the south side, because of the area that they were, you had the slaughter-houses. Now, as well as that then, you had families who, their father reared them, and they earned their wages by being cattle-drovers. They’d go up -- the men’d go up Fairhill at two or three o’clock in the morning, round up cattle belonging to the farmers and hunt the cattle from there down to Midleton, or to Carrigaline, or out to Macroom for the fairs at seven o’clock. As a matter of fact, there was one fair held every Saturday morning right over off Anglesea Street, across from the Garda Station, in that little square there across from the Garda Station. Every Saturday morning you had a fair there, and there’d be sheep and pigs on sale there. And those two pubs, one -- the two of them are there but one is idle at the moment -- and eh twas -- they were farmers’ pubs.