the shoe shop and swopped them for a more comfortable pair. Was that alright? Faced with this fait accompli and not wishing to probe too far into the lie, she said it was. His father, for his part, was well pleased with his son’s resolution of the issue for he had lost a good few shoes himself on that weir when he was a young man: so he said no more; sometimes it is better to let life flow on gently wherever it will, and to remain quiet, for the sake of wisdom.
15
B ANG B ANG
Dublin would be nothing without its characters. One of the characters that cast the longest shadow across the streets of his native city was a simple man who shot dead as many people as he could manage in a day’s ride across the metropolis. Not only did he shoot some unsuspecting passers-by, but countless Dubliners began to return fire when Bang Bang Thomas Dudley opened up fire on them.
Such spontaneous gun battles would startle visitors to Dublin who were unaware that as non-combatants they were perfectly safe. It was not unusual to see large numbers of people firing imaginary guns at a poorly dressed man who was hanging from the safety pole on the open platform on the back of a city bus. For Bang Bang would open hostilities by pointing a large key at you and shouting, ‘Bang, bang. You’re dead’, in such a way that you felt you had to react in some meaningful way. It was an invitation to play a game that few could resist.
The imaginary bullets rendered you either dead or ‘roonded’, this being Dublinese for ‘wounded’. But even if you opted for death, either an instant release and fall against a wall or an adjacent shop window or a long lingering stagger about the place, you could still get back in the game by counting from one to ten, slowly, and you were ready to go again. You were either ready to continue yourdaily duties, as if nothing had happened, or, if the bus had not moved too far away, you could rejoin the battle. It was a little different for the shoals of cyclists who inhabited the streets of Dublin in the 1940s and ’50s when Bang Bang was at the height of his marauding campaign. A cyclist shot at by Bang Bang was free to duck the bullet and to return fire from the bicycle now transformed into the steed of an outlaw or the unsaddled mount of a red Indian, bent on scalping the entire bus load of happy passengers. Add the pursuing cyclists to the staggering pedestrians breathing their last on the mean streets of Dublin town and you can see how one man with the mind of a child brightened the day for many Dubliners.
The 1940s and ’50s, when Bang Bang rode across the prairie of his mind, was the era of the Hollywood western. In a time before television brought images and sound to people’s homes, the main entertainment was cinema. Every parish had its local cinema, and it seemed for a while as if every street in Dublin city sported a picture palace. The Corinthian Cinema on Eden Quay, just yards from O’Connell Street, was known as ‘The Ranch’ for its consistent programming of double-bill westerns. So popular were the pictures that queues formed outside cinemas. Ticket buyers often came in midway through a film, watched the story to the end, and then sat through the next showing until ‘where I came in’ came along and they left again. To a populace used to this way of story watching, and assembling the complete narrative in their heads on the way home afterwards, a man on a bus firing shots from a four-inch brass key came as little surprise
Bang Bang’s gun was an ornate key that now sits in the city archives on Pearse Street in a glass case on a red cushion for all to see. It may not be the original key; Bang Bang told a radio interviewer many years earlier that he lost the key he had used for forty years on Meath Street before replacing it with another key. It is a key that brought a city to its kneeswith laughter and enjoyment. It was the key to a city’s imagination. Bang Bang often claimed that he and that
15
B ANG B ANG
Dublin would be nothing without its characters. One of the characters that cast the longest shadow across the streets of his native city was a simple man who shot dead as many people as he could manage in a day’s ride across the metropolis. Not only did he shoot some unsuspecting passers-by, but countless Dubliners began to return fire when Bang Bang Thomas Dudley opened up fire on them.
Such spontaneous gun battles would startle visitors to Dublin who were unaware that as non-combatants they were perfectly safe. It was not unusual to see large numbers of people firing imaginary guns at a poorly dressed man who was hanging from the safety pole on the open platform on the back of a city bus. For Bang Bang would open hostilities by pointing a large key at you and shouting, ‘Bang, bang. You’re dead’, in such a way that you felt you had to react in some meaningful way. It was an invitation to play a game that few could resist.
The imaginary bullets rendered you either dead or ‘roonded’, this being Dublinese for ‘wounded’. But even if you opted for death, either an instant release and fall against a wall or an adjacent shop window or a long lingering stagger about the place, you could still get back in the game by counting from one to ten, slowly, and you were ready to go again. You were either ready to continue yourdaily duties, as if nothing had happened, or, if the bus had not moved too far away, you could rejoin the battle. It was a little different for the shoals of cyclists who inhabited the streets of Dublin in the 1940s and ’50s when Bang Bang was at the height of his marauding campaign. A cyclist shot at by Bang Bang was free to duck the bullet and to return fire from the bicycle now transformed into the steed of an outlaw or the unsaddled mount of a red Indian, bent on scalping the entire bus load of happy passengers. Add the pursuing cyclists to the staggering pedestrians breathing their last on the mean streets of Dublin town and you can see how one man with the mind of a child brightened the day for many Dubliners.
The 1940s and ’50s, when Bang Bang rode across the prairie of his mind, was the era of the Hollywood western. In a time before television brought images and sound to people’s homes, the main entertainment was cinema. Every parish had its local cinema, and it seemed for a while as if every street in Dublin city sported a picture palace. The Corinthian Cinema on Eden Quay, just yards from O’Connell Street, was known as ‘The Ranch’ for its consistent programming of double-bill westerns. So popular were the pictures that queues formed outside cinemas. Ticket buyers often came in midway through a film, watched the story to the end, and then sat through the next showing until ‘where I came in’ came along and they left again. To a populace used to this way of story watching, and assembling the complete narrative in their heads on the way home afterwards, a man on a bus firing shots from a four-inch brass key came as little surprise
Bang Bang’s gun was an ornate key that now sits in the city archives on Pearse Street in a glass case on a red cushion for all to see. It may not be the original key; Bang Bang told a radio interviewer many years earlier that he lost the key he had used for forty years on Meath Street before replacing it with another key. It is a key that brought a city to its kneeswith laughter and enjoyment. It was the key to a city’s imagination. Bang Bang often claimed that he and that
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