Literary Limerick For Those Who Have Read ‘Angela’s Ashes’, Spokane’s Sister City Has Become A Longed-For Destination

Limerick’s Windmill Street is a postman’s nightmare. Its small, two-story stucco row houses are numbered 25, 2, 41, 1, 42 … there are three No. 1’s alone.

But the house I’m looking for doesn’t seem to have a number at all. Painted pale yellow with a green door, its only distinctive feature is a stuffed Garfield the Cat stuck in the upstairs window.

It’s an ordinary house in an ordinary city, so unexceptional that no one would give it a second glance. Yet millions of people know it intimately, because it’s one of the places Frank McCourt, author of the best-selling memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” lived when he was growing up poor and desperate in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, during the 1930s and ‘40s. This is what it was like on the McCourts’ first night in this house:

Dad and Mam lay at the head of the bed, Malachy and I at the bottom, the twins wherever they could find comfort…. Then Eugene sat up, screaming, tearing at himself … when Dad leaped from the bed and turned on the gaslight we saw the fleas, leaping, jumping, fastened to our flesh. We slapped at them and slapped but they hopped from body to body, hopping, biting. We tore at the bites till they bled. We jumped from the bed, the twins crying, Mam moaning, Oh, Jesus, will we have no rest!

It’s hard to reconcile the misery depicted in McCourt’s book with Garfield in the window. But in a way, the stuffed cat says it all. The terrible days in Limerick that McCourt wrote about so eloquently are gone, and good riddance to them.

Yet it’s a measure of how moving his book is - and how much things have changed in Ireland - that people are coming back to see how it was.

Frank McCourt, with his evocative, funny-sad memoir, has done the unimaginable: He’s turned Ireland’s fourth-largest city and Spokane’s “sister city” since 1989 into a hot destination. Limerick is a working city - computers, manufacturing - without the slick trappings of tourism. Which is precisely why it’s worth visiting. It hasn’t been Disneyfied.

“Angela’s Ashes,” widely praised for luminous prose, has sold close to 2 million copies in little over a year. It’s won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was voted Book of the Year for 1997 by the American Booksellers Association.

The book is not for the squeamish. As McCourt says, it’s a wonder he survived to tell the tale. He was born in New York of immigrant parents who moved the family back to Ireland when he was 4. Big mistake.

They had lost one child in New York, and two more would die in Limerick. The father drank away his wages (when he worked at all), the mother begged for charity and the children mostly fended for themselves.

A number of villains emerge: members of the Catholic clergy, sadistic schoolmasters, callous social workers and - not the least - “the gray city of Limerick and the river that kills.”

It sounds horrible, depressing, - nothing you’d willingly read about - much less visit. But people are.

“Throngs of them,” sighs the bartender at the venerable W.J. South pub, newly famous as the favorite watering hole of Frank McCourt’s father. “Busloads of them.”

“Oh yes indeed, it’s been quite popular,” says Breda Bourke, supervisor of the Limerick tourist information office. “It started off with Americans and now we’re getting a lot of inquiries from the Germans and the Japanese.”

Liam O’Hanlon, chairman of the Limerick Tourist Trade Association, has led walking tours for years. Until recently, his routine was King John’s Castle, St. Mary’s Cathedral and other highlights of medieval Limerick.

“It was the historical things that people were interested in,” he says. “Now, suddenly they’re walking in with ‘Angela’s Ashes.’ They expect to see what Frank McCourt has written about - but what he’s written about no longer exists.”

In fact, quite a few sites from the book remain, including the Leamy National School, the People’s Park, a slew of exquisite old churches and the St. Vincent de Paul Society town house where his mother, Angela, queued up for charity. But the slums McCourt described so unflinchingly are gone, cleared away during the 1950s and ‘60s.

The Irish economy is booming, thanks in part to the recent influx of European Union funds, and Limerick is no exception.

Construction is everywhere - hotels, apartment blocks, pubs, restaurants. Blocks of once-elegant, 19th-century Georgian row houses are being lovingly restored. On a bright fall weekend, the downtown streets are jammed, the shops and restaurants packed.

On Hartstonge Street is a somewhat forbidding, Gothiclooking red-brick building with a crenellated roof. This was Leamy’s National School, home to cruel and/ or demented schoolmasters and legions of barefoot, underfed students.

The school houses offices now - a tailor shop, a brass plaque company. Inside, it’s carpeted and renovated. A man with a tape measure around his neck comes out of the tailor’s, sees us and rolls his eyes.

Have there been a lot of “Angela’s Ashes” pilgrims?

“There have.”

Has he read the book?

“I haven’t.” (Nobody in Ireland says “yes” or “no.”)

“A lot of people in Limerick are a bit sour over it,” he explains, adding, “The book’s got it all wrong. ‘Twasn’t like that. Not at all.”

Next door is the four-story, red-brick town house of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, where Frank’s mother, Angela, queued up for charity.

The society is still a source of clothing and furniture for Limerick’s poor, but “it’s much more user-friendly today,” says O’Hanlon. “You don’t find people queuing up outside anymore.”

Onward, to the People’s Park, where Frank took his small brothers to distract them from hunger. Even on a rainy day it’s inviting, with well-tended rose gardens, a fanciful Victorian drinking fountain and the greenest grass I’ve ever seen.

Down Barrington Street, past doctors’ and solicitors’ offices with lovely painted doors - Limerick has great doors - is Barrack Hill, site of another McCourt residence.

Roden Lane, where the McCourts shared a single lavatory with the rest of the block, is gone, but St. Joseph’s Church, where the young Frank received his First Communion and Confirmation, is a looming presence. That’s where Frank applied to be an altar boy, and there, visible through the white wrought-iron fence, is the door that was slammed in his face.

Perhaps Frank found more comfort in the massive, century-old Redemptorist Church on South Circular Road, a dark and beautiful refuge, with flickering votive candles, an intricate mosaic-tiled floor and eye-popping, elaborately gilded alcoves.

Farther north, on Henry Street, is the huge Franciscan Church where Frank prayed to his patron saint, Francis of Assisi. Inside, it has the lovely smell of incense and candle wax. Old women click their rosary beads as shoppers pop in, genuflect and say a quick prayer.

On a rainy fall afternoon, waves of mist roll in from the River Shannon, down the Dock Road and through the streets and lanes. It’s a perfect day to curl up with a pint in South’s pub.

South’s seems ageless with its ancient mahogany wood, marble bar, etched-glass partitions and cozy alcoves called “snugs,” but “Och, ‘tis changed,” says a guy nursing a Guinness. In McCourt’s day, he says, it was a third of the size. “There were terrible characters from the docks, before. It’s all different now.”

But it doesn’t take long to find someone who grew up with Frank McCourt.

“The lanes were full of rats,” Jerry, a South’s regular, is saying. “Full of rats, they were. We’d wait for the full moon to come out … and a gang of us would go out. I’d kill about 80 on a good night - hit ‘em with a stick. That was our entertainment.”

George, on the next stool, went to school with Frank’s brother Malachy - they had the same master, “Hoppy” O’Halloran.

“You’d be frightened for your life,” he said. “He’d run after you with a big stick. He’d bring you up and give you six slaps. Really hard, now…. Now Malachy, he was a very clever fellow….”

Times were tough, they say, but happy. “You could leave your door open,” Jerry says. “There were very good people in the lanes - very neighborly. Everyone looked after one another. They were grand people. You could always get food from someone. You could get a bun and a bit of tripe….”

“I didn’t like what Frank said about where we were living,” George says. “It’s not true. We weren’t that badly off. I wish him luck, but I don’t agree with the stuff he put in that book. But he’s got his money now.”

“Frank’s a decent enough fellow,” Jerry says. “I don’t begrudge him his success. He survived, and that’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?”

‘Tis.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO Where to stay: Limerick, 15 miles east of Shannon International Airport, has a variety of hotels and B&Bs. Jurys Hotel (Ennis Road, Limerick, telephone 011-353-61-327777), just across Sarsfield Bridge from the historic district, has several restaurants, an indoor pool, a gym and a tennis court. Rooms start at about $174 double. Its downtown counterpart, Jurys Inn (Lower Mallow Street, 011-353-61-207000), is less luxurious, but ideally located for “Angela’s Ashes” pilgrims - just blocks from Windmill Street, South’s pub and other sites. Rooms start at $75 double. Or check out nearby Adare Manor (Adare, County Limerick, 011-353-61-396566), with antique-filled rooms, riding stables, fishing, fox hunting and an 18-hole golf course. Special winter weekend rates are about $202 per person double for two nights’ bed and breakfast plus one evening meal. Where to eat: The Green Onion (3 Ellen St.) near Arthur’s Quay serves up modern Irish cuisine in a funky, artsy atmosphere. Dinner runs about $40 for two. Other restaurants worth a visit are Freddy’s (Theatre Lane, off Lower Glent-worth Street) and Quenelle’s (Lower Mallow and Henry streets), known for innovative dishes and Bewley’s Restaurant on Cruises Street, good for a quick breakfast or lunch, with sumptuous baked goods. If you drive into nearby County Clare, try the delicious seafood and brown bread at Monk’s restaurant in the fishing village of Ballyvaughan - or just have an Irish coffee by the turf fire. “Angela’s Ashes” sites: The Limerick tourist office hopes to have maps and brochures locating “Angela’s Ashes” sites available by this spring. Meanwhile, walking tours of “Ashes” sites are available from tour guide Liam O’Hanlon. Contact him at 011-353-62-301587 or through the Limerick tourist office (see below). Sites include: Leamy National School, Hartstonge and Catherine streets; St. Vincent de Paul Society, Hartstonge and Catherine streets; People’s Park, off Pery Square at Upper Mallow Street; W.J. South pub, O’Connell Street near the Crescent; Redemptorist Church, South Circular Road at Quin Street and St. Joseph’s Church, O’Connell Street at St. Joseph Street. Side trips: Limerick is an ideal base for exploring the west coast. Drive 90 minutes from Limerick and you can be at the Cliffs of Moher, with a sheer 700-foot drop to the Atlantic. Drive another half an hour and you’re in the Burren, a rocky, otherworldly landscape. Information: Irish Tourist Board, 345 Park Ave., 17th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10154, 1-800-223-6470 or 212-418-0800, www.ireland.travel.ie; or Limerick Tourist Information Center, Arthur’s Quay, Limerick, Ireland, telephone 011-353-61-317522.