Rob Doyle

Rob Doyle is a writer based in Crumlin whose debut novel Here Are The Young Men has just been published.

In this essay he takes a nostalgic trip on what used to be the Number 77 Dublin Bus route (now the 27).

The 77 left the city centre, “passed down the Crumlin Road, veered around at Walkinstown to head up the Greenhills Road, skirted Kilnamanagh, stopped off at the Square in Tallaght, and finally vanished into the darklands of Jobstown…”

Rob writes:

In interviews, the novelist John Banville has said he was always so certain he would leave whichever parochial Wexford town he grew up in at the soonest possible moment, he never even bothered to learn the names of the streets. I grew up in the house on Kildare Road, Crumlin, where now, at the age of thirty-one, I find myself temporarily living once again – a convenient Dublin base while I promote my recently published début novel.

There are streets a stone’s throw from this room whose names I never learned – I can see one of them as I glance out the window. Since first moving out of the family home eight years ago, I have lived in many cities: I could probably still draw an accurately labelled map of the area around Grove Street, San Francisco, or Hackney and Stoke Newington, or even Alcamo, the Sicilian town where I wrote a worthless novel while trying to bestir teenage language students from their lethargy. I could name the streets in those places, but not in Crumlin.

As a teenager, most of the time I spent in Crumlin, I spent getting out of it – in every sense. One way of getting out of Crumlin was to take the 77 bus, which left the city centre, passed down the Crumlin Road, veered around at Walkinstown to head up the Greenhills Road, skirted Kilnamanagh, stopped off at the Square in Tallaght, and finally vanished into the darklands of Jobstown – a forbidding place to those of us who are huddled down here in the city’s more proximate suburbs. In those years, and later when I was a college student, none of my friends lived in Crumlin.

Most of them lived in Tallaght or Kilnamanagh, the large suburbs that represent the physical limits of Dublin’s westward sprawl, bordered by the Dublin Mountains and the forests that line their feet. I used to play in bands in Kilnamanagh and Tallaght. Often, I used to say I was playing in bands, but really did little more than sit around with a guitar while drinking, smoking hash, and grandiloquently holding forth on the crisis facing Western civilisation.

The 77 bus route no longer exists: it is now called the 27. I don’t know why they changed the number. Perhaps it was a rebranding: the 77 was a notorious route, with junkies shooting up or smoking gear upstairs, routine Saturday-night violence, and an enduring atmosphere of tension and aggression. It was on that bus that I once saw a hulking, crew-cut man from the suburban underclass punch a beautiful young Eastern European woman in the face. It happened on the top deck in broad daylight.

The man then encouraged his son, who was about four or five, to spit in the woman’s face. The top deck was almost full – everyone saw it happen. An old man in the seat in front of the victim tried to maintain an expression of stony dignity as the outrage took place behind him. Afterwards, we were collectively too ashamed to even try and comfort the girl as she wept.Continue reading →