Nuala O'Faolain on Money

I recently started reading Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain, a fascinating memoir that was recently reissued after the author’s death. It’s quite an intense and candid book, and I’m really enjoying it. And of course, I couldn’t help noting a few passages where the author talks about money.

On her first job after leaving high school at the age of 17:

I had a job…working as a clerk in the hire-purchase office of a furniture shop in Grafton Street. Hire-purchase was for the very poor, then. I saw… how bitter it was for them to be still paying out for things they’d got long ago. Money was dominating me, too. I was living at home but I was giving up half my wages to Mammy. From leaving school on, how to earn enough money to keep myself was my biggest single problem for years and years.

Somehow I don’t think Americans today have that same sense of shame about having things now and paying for them later.

Later she talks about an interview she gave in which she described herself and other students at University College Dublin as “poor.” A reviewer takes her to task, noting that her father was a well-known journalist and saying “nobody who went to UCD in those bleak years [the late 1950s] was poor. They were only playing at poverty.” Nuala admits that this was, in a way, true, as she wasn’t as desperate as many unemployed Irish people were at the time, when things were so bad emigration could be the only option. “But,” she says, “I was hurt, all the same.” Her father seems to have squandered what money he did have, and her mother seems to have drunk away the rest during her twice-daily sessions at the local pub. Nuala and her eight siblings were all neglected, living in a filthy house where they had only scraps of sheets to tuck under their chins as they slept under piles of old coats.
Children don’t necessaril y benefit from their parents’ financial resources– but sometimes it isn’t about the money anyway. Nuala tells the story of another Dublin journalist her age who was truly poor:

His mother was a maid in a hotel. The children would wait in the alleyway at the back of the hotel at night until she found out what bedroom was empty and smuggled them in. I envied him. I envy him that his mother took such care of them.

It makes me think of my own niece and nephew, and hope that the things they’ll remember about their childhood will be more about the love and attention they got from their family than all the toys they had…
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