Colbert Martin

[gentle music] I was born on the Green Park Road.

Uh, my father had been involved in the Fight for Freedom, as we like to call it, the War of Independence, and he was on the run.

Now, I had a baby sister at this time as well, so my mother found it a bit difficult to cope with the two of us.

I was offloaded on my grandmother, who lived in a two-roomed mud-walled cottage with a tin roof.

Originally, I believe it was thatch, but they'd got awfully well off and got a tin roof.

Now, why I remember the tin roof so well was, or is, that on Saturday mornings when I hadn't to go to school, I would lie in bed listening to the birds trotting across the galvanized roof.

My brother has a bungalow built on the site there now, but it was a small, whitewashed inside and outside with a hard-packed mud floor, open fireplace, and I had all the trimmings of a country existence growing up in Bray.

And she was a marvelous woman because, uh, obviously w- women of that generation had a philosophy of life which was all their own.

She told me stories of raids, I didn't, couldn't remember it, of course, raids being made on our cottage looking for my father and of British soldiers turning me over in my bed with the butt of their rifle, and this kind of thing.

But, uh, I remember marvelous people down there because we were smack in the middle of the Valley of Diamonds.

Uh, it's nice to say that because people think you're frightfully well off, you know? But it's really that if you get a ripple on the river and the sun on it, it's like a lot of sparkling diamonds, and that's all it is.

But it's a, it's a very nice place to talk about and say you were born in the Valley of Diamonds, because people automatically conjure up visions of miners working day and night extracting diamonds in the Dargle Valley.

But I have a vague recollection of, um, bonfires being lit and prisoners being released and coming home.

I can remember in Castle Street, uh, election meetings being held on a horse cab, the speaker standing on a horse cab, and they burning everything they could lay hands on, big bonfires at Old Connaught and in Castle Street.

There are things like that.

I remember also there was a lot of poverty down there, and this was the common bond.

And there was an old fisherman lived up above us, Sam Naylor, and he was guarding the river for Lord Meen, or supposed to be.

But he was extracting the salmon for his own personal use and very often we were in benefit from Sam.

Uh, another common thing there was the, the poor man's chicken, the rabbit.

We grew up on rabbits.

And if you had rabbits for dinner today and the next-door neighbor hadn't, well, you brought them in some soup and the leg of a rabbit.

And there was, uh, this too, the doors were always open.

I remember in my grandmother's cottage there was a half door originally.

Many things, we'd no running water like Joe, you know, we had the tap outside.

And in frosty weather it was my job to put a sack over the tap, the way it wouldn't freeze in order that we would have, uh, water in the morning.