I was eleven when I found out my grandfather couldn’t read. Until then, I thought he was the cleverest man in Dublin. He could fix a kettle with a butter knife, tell you which bus was coming by the sound of its engine, and name every player on the Dublin team from years before I was born. He lived in Cabra, in a small red-brick house where the kettle was always on and the television was always a little too loud.
The truth came out on a wet Saturday in Phibsborough. My mother had sent me with him to collect a prescription and a few bits from the shops. I was annoyed because I wanted to stay home and play games, but Grandad said he’d buy me chips after, so I went. At the chemist, the woman behind the counter handed him a form and asked him to check the details. He stared at it for a moment, then held it out to me and said, “You have the young eyes. Tell me what it says.”
I read it aloud, thinking nothing of it. But outside, under the dripping shop awning, I saw his face had gone red. Not angry red. Ashamed red. He folded the paper into his coat pocket like it had burned him.
On the bus home, I asked him, “Grandad, can you not read?”
He looked out the window all the way past the Mater and up toward Cabra before answering. “Not properly,” he said. “Enough to get by. Not enough to be proud of.”
I remember feeling shocked, but not in a cruel way. More like a door had opened in a room I thought I knew. He told me he had left school young after his father died. There were younger children to feed, and books didn’t put bread on the table. He learned to hide it. He memorised routes, recognised shop signs by colour, asked people to “remind” him what letters said. My grandmother had handled bills and forms. After she died, the world became full of paper.
That evening, while my mother was upstairs, I took out one of my old school copybooks and wrote the alphabet in big letters. I put it on the kitchen table beside his mug. “I can teach you,” I said.
He laughed, but there was no humour in it. “A child teaching an old man. That’ll be the day.”
“You taught me how to patch a puncture,” I said. “Same thing.”
It wasn’t the same thing. Not at first. He got frustrated. He mixed up b and d, hated silent letters, and called vowels “slippery little divils.” We started with the labels on tins in his kitchen: beans, peas, soup, tea. Then bus numbers. Then the names of roads we passed on walks near the Royal Canal. I didn’t understand then how brave it was for him to sit with me, a boy with scabby knees and no patience, and sound out words he had avoided for nearly seventy years.
Our secret lessons became a ritual. Every Tuesday and Thursday after school, I’d go to his house. He’d make toast under the grill until the edges were black, and I’d bring worksheets I copied from my classroom. Sometimes I was harsh without meaning to be. If he forgot a word we had learned the week before, I’d sigh. Once, he pushed the copybook away and said, “I’m too thick for this.”
That frightened me more than his anger would have. I had never heard my grandfather call himself thick. He was the man who carried a toolbox like a doctor carried a bag. So I closed the copybook and asked him to tell me a story about Granny instead.
He told me about meeting her outside the old Savoy Cinema, how she was wearing a blue coat and pretending not to notice him. As he spoke, I wrote down one sentence in large letters: I met Mary in a blue coat. Then I handed him the page.
“Read that,” I said.
He frowned, took his time, and read it. Slowly. “I met Mary in a blue coat.”
His eyes filled so quickly he turned away. I didn’t know what to do, so I pretended to look
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
