I associate the late Clery & Co (1941) Ltd. with several things: adolescence, the beginning of the Northern ‘Troubles’, further knowledge of the geography of Dublin and Dubliners. It was also the last place I visited with my mother, where she treated herself to a manicure and a glass of champagne, a month or so before she passed. Clerys closed in 2015 and is to reopen as Clerys Quarter, in 2025. But it won’t be the same, of course. As L.P. Hartley put it in The Go-Between: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there

When I was about fourteen, a grandaunt of mine, a tough little nun who had lived for years in Borneo, brought me into Clerys and introduced me to a very large, severe-looking personage in a suit, in one of the back offices, on the ground floor, about a summer job. There always seemed to be a couple of these heavily-built, remote-looking men (ex-gardai?) floating around. One was labelled the ‘store detective’ and reputed  to carry a gun. The same kindly nun, who had returned to Ireland with a ‘foreign’ accent far from her midland roots, allowed me, from time to time, to borrow books from the nuns’ library in Dublin. Joyce’s Dubliners was one of those books. I read it, half-digested it, but scarcely understood the weight of such stories as Araby or The Dead. The words weren’t too fine for me; the feelings were.

            I started summer work in Clery’s, in June of that year, 1969, in the despatch office, in ‘Clerys Lane’, behind the store (in Sackville Place) where, in December 1972, two separate bombing incidents would kill a CIE bus driver and a conductor. (A few weeks later, in January 1973, another bomb in the same street would kill yet another bus driver.)  Things hadn’t ratchetted up to that level yet, in 1969, but there was still a sense that things could only get worse even though in Dublin, the rock/blues/jazz scene (with the likes of Louis Stewart) and the literary scene seemed still gloriously removed from it all. 

            I sometimes think that the netherworld of Clery’s despatch office, abutting onto Earl Place (the long laneway parallel to O’Connell Street), was a latter-day reflection of Joyce’s Dubliners (Dubliners, after all, was only published in 1914, not much more than fifty years earlier). The old gentleman in the threadbare suit who sat in the dispatch office cabin with his long Dickensian ledger calling out names and destinations of parcels to the drivers, might have been Mrs Sinico’s neurotic paramour, Mr Duffy who lived in what many in Dublin still call ‘Chapel Lizard’, in A Painful Case. There was muffled talk that the old gentleman went to important conferences, somewhere, and that he was worth a fortune. The large, red-faced man who was his second-in-command, might have been a figure from Ivy Day in the Committee Room or Old Cotter, in The Sisters. And the sharp-faced, eagle-eyed, slender man who kept the punching in clock, would have fitted well in Clay.

            That first summer in Clerys, I saw and heard many things. I learned the layout of central Dublin and its new, burgeoning suburbs. The older drivers I worked with were  full of yarns and throwaway wisdom too. For a few weeks, one of my van drivers used to stop daily at a city centre hospital, to visit a friend who had been ‘done in’ because of giving information about a cigarette heist. When my young self offered up a little sympathy for the man, my driver said curtly

            ‘Should’ve keepin’ his beak shut, in anyway.’

            On another occasion, a thin young boy from a large estate in the suburbs started work in the dispatch office. He seemed very workshy, as the older men put it, until one of the ‘middle management’ figured it out.

            ‘That poor little bollix can’t even read his own name, so he can’t.’

I had never met anyone of that age who couldn’t read before. In the early days of my schooling, in London (thanks to the then British welfare state, a bottle of milk in the morning and meat and three veg for dinner in school), such a thing was unheard of (or, at least, unseen). It was only when I came back to live in Dublin, as a young child in the early 60’s, that I saw what poor housing, poor diet and large families really meant.

            Old Clerys is no more and, I suppose, any rainy day now, they will rechristen part of Dublin as the Central Business District. But I don’t really see myself calling it the CBD any day soon.