Smells in a memory

It’s funny how, more than five decades on, you can still 'smell' memories. Like the mix of battery electrolyte and paraffin, a most distinctive odour.

That recollection was triggered by the set of Kilcullen Drama Group's production of 'Dancing at Lughnasa'. There was a glass 'wet' battery hooked up to the radio which was a key prop in the plot. I remember similar batteries being charged on shelves in the back store of my grandfather's hardware shop, where Eurospar is now.

The process released small quantities of hydrogen as the electrolyte bubbled gently under charge. It provided a pungency to the other smell of the store, paraffin. Drums of that fuel were stored on the opposite side of the room, from which customers' containers were filled via taps.

Hydrogen, paraffin, the possibility of sparking. What a lethal potential! Safety regulations today would never allow that.

Those glass batteries reflected the fact that in the early 1950s the ESB national grid was still confined to towns. The ground-breaking Rural Electrification Scheme had only begun in 1946, and wouldn't complete its work of connecting 420,000 country households until 1979. The paraffin was still used widely for heaters and for lamps. As a child going in winter to friends’ homes not so far outside town, I remember wicks being trimmed and lamps lit at dusk, their illumination gradually growing as the night arrived.

Forward-looking and wealthy farmers had, since before the war, used battery systems in multiple cell racks to provide lighting, charged by their own small petrol engine generators. But the batteries brought in to my grandfather every week or two for charging were for a radio set which was probably the only connection with the greater world for people living a couple of miles outside town.

Our own radios at home were powered by mains electricity. There were two, one on a shelf in the small sitting room at the bottom of the stairs, the room used most of the time in winter because it was heated by an anthracite stove and easy to keep warm. The larger sitting room was used on Sundays and summer evenings, and had a more salubrious radio built in a corner cabinet where old 78rpm records could be stored for the gramophone. Among those I remember a set of speeches by Winston Churchill.

Listening to radio then was a family affair, much as it later became for television. Programmes were often a timetable for the day. When a morning 15-minute 'soap' called 'Jaqueline' on Radio Eireann came on, for instance, I knew I had just enough time to walk to school before classes started. And 'The Kennedys of Castleross' would mark my return for lunch.

On Sunday evenings, Radio Luxembourg would broadcast 'Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future', at a quarter to seven. My mother would always try and get me to leave before it ended so I wouldn’t be late for the Sunday evening Devotions. But because there were advertisements at the end of the show, I could run to the church and be there on time. People often comment that they see me today walking fast around town. I do — maybe because I used to travel so fast on my two legs to get to Devotions on time.

Din Joe's ‘Take the Floor' and the 'Living with Lynch' programmes on Radio Eireann had a particular interest for me because the presenters, Denis Fitzgibbon and Joe Lynch respectively, were regular visitors to our house as friends of my Mum and Dad. Later, in my own time at RTE through the 1980s, I would meet up with Joe fairly often, and rather less frequently in the years before his death. Always a man of great humour.

Sunday afternoons in winter were spent in the big sitting room listening to BBC programmes like 'Life with the Lyons' and 'The Navy Lark'. The BBC also contributed to my lifelong interest in space travel with 'Journey into Space', the exploits of astronaut (the word didn't exist then, though) Jet Morgan and his intrepid crew. At the end of the 1950s I was entertained for a brief couple of years by 'The Clitheroe Kid' getting up to adolescent tricks, mostly at the expense of his big sister Susan and her boyfriend Alfie.

The arrival of home-grown TV to Irish sitting rooms changed all that. But I still have strong memories of how true even today is the answer to the old question, 'which is better, radio or television?'. Radio, of course — ‘it has better pictures’.

And still, in my mind, is that heady mixture of bubbling batteries on charge and paraffin dripping from a barrel tap. Condensed and refined in my memory, it probably smells even stronger now.