Tuesday, 17 May 1955
Walked over to University Hall to see the great stained glass windows by Evie Hone. Ruth knows all about things like this and I haven’t a clue. She’s carrying a heavy handbag she made of the same material with which she reupholstered the front seat of our 1949 Ford convertible.
Ruth and our car she reupholstered
It seems as heavy as the car seat was to carry into the house. We take turns lugging it. At Trinity College we climb battered stairs in a dingy building with a striking barreled ceiling to see the famous Book of Kells. This is a scan from a postcard we bought there, The Arrest of Christ, from the late 8th century.
Ruth ventured into the imposing National Bank of Ireland to get a shiny, brand new Irish penny. (All the coins are beautifully designed. Irish pennies are supposed to bring luck.)
She’s assisted by a huge guy dressed up in a red coachman’s outfit with a top hat and a red waistcoat. Back to Wynne’s Hotel for tea with B who tells us she climbed to the top of the O’Connell monument. Ruth describes the guy in the bank who seems right out of Dickens. I’ve got mixed feelings about tea and the limp little crust-less sandwiches, though Irish bread is superior to spongy so-called American bread back home. We cab to Dublin’s Amiens Street train station with all our bags jammed into another old American-made taxi from a junk yard and catch the 5:30 PM Enterprise of the Great Northern Railway to Belfast. Arrive Belfast city limits and see people in white playing tennis and cricket from the train window. The train stops and we see a factory town but it appears much cleaner than cities in the south. Everything seems better organized. We get in a spick-and-span shiny taxi for a change, the driver in livery. The ferry we are sailing the Irish Sea is Royal Scotsman, bound for Glasgow. It’s an overnight passage and contrary to what we were led to expect, it’s a smooth journey. We have an ell-shaped cabin, with B. next door. Cooks Travel office sold us saloon-class tickets so we have a problem spending the evening with Jack, one of our friends from the Ryndam whom we discovered on board because he's in steerage. We have fish and chips and ice cream with him in his steerage-class dining room. His fellow passengers look to be very poor. Later we sneak Jack upstairs to saloon-class territory for catch up chat and some drinks.
Sonny, Mum and Dad on the Irish Sea ferry