Don't Wake Me at Doyles A Memoir

by Murphy, Maura

• ISBN13: 9780312337926
• ISBN10: 0312337922
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-02-07
• Publisher: Griffin

Summary

Maura Murphy's memoir of life in Ireland and beyond resonates with the people, places, and struggles of an almost forgotten generation. Born Â"chronically ugly and cross as a briarÂ" into a poor, rural homestead in 1920s Ireland, Maura faced adversity from birth. She grew up in the bogs of the Irish countryside and left school at fourteen for Dublin, working in service there until her marriage to a hard-working but hard-drinking womanizer. Poverty stricken and hoping to find a better life for her five young children, she left Ireland with her family for 1950s Birmingham, England. But life doesn't always change when places do, and Maura's fear that she'd be Â"wakedÂ" at Doyles bar upon her death is funny but dead serious. Her voice is feisty and fearless, and she needed to be all those things to survive an extraordinary series of privations and abuses. And now, seventy-six and having survived her childhood, recovered from cancer, and left her marriage of fifty years, Maura has finally recorded the story of her life. A fearlessly honest writer, Maura invites us into her world, through her destructive marriage, and the birth of her nine children, and toward a life-or-death choice that would change her forever. Told with biting wit,Don't Wake Me at Doylesis a personal story of one woman's endurance, and the remarkable memoir of an ordinary woman's extraordinary life.

Author Biography

Maura Murphy was born in Clongmore, Country Offaly, in 1928. She left Ballybryan National School when she was fourteen with “no qualifications and even fewer prospects,” working as a domestic servant in various houses in Dublin until she met and married John Murphy, a soldier stationed at Portobello Barracks. The couple moved to Birmingham, England, in 1959 where they reared nine children. Maura now lives in Birmingham, England, in the West Midlands.

Table of Contents

Family Tree	viii
Glossary	x
Flying Along the Tar Road	1	(8)
The Notorious Birth of Mary McNamee	9	(26)
The `Cottage Crowd'	35	(18)
Tullamore General	53	(8)
A Domestic Life	61	(23)
Garda Tom	84	(17)
The Big Smoke	101	(25)
`A Perfect Gentleman'	126	(26)
Johnny and the Rat-trap Cheese	152	(20)
Miss Popularity 1999	172	(14)
Picturesque Poverty	186	(23)
Rats in Garr	209	(23)
Don't Wake Me at Doyles	232	(11)
Bailiffs at Bevington Road	243	(30)
`Flying in the Face of God'	273	(23)
Home and Alone	296	(12)
Sick with Delight	308	(25)
`Poor Auld Johnnie'	333	(25)
Will I Survive?	358	(15)
The Easter Rowing	373	(23)
Rhode to Recovery	396	(8)
Postscript	404	(1)
Acknowledgements	405

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