The Hogans of Glenart

Recently, I watched one of my all-time favourite movies on TV -- "The Train" - John Frankenheimer's brilliant WWII story of the French Resistance's success in diverting a German train full of French art treasures away from Berlin and towards the Allied Front in 1944. I've enjoyed this movie quite a few times for two reasons. Firstly, its obvious and outstanding technical excellence but secondly, and more importantly, because it brings back particular memories of a wonderful night out with a favourite uncle in 1965.

Dublin now has only one evening paper but in the 1960s it had three -- the Evening Press and the Evening Mail competed for readers alongside the Evening Herald. In the Mail they ran a competition to encourage readers to browse the small ads. Each night they hid an address in among the pages of classified advertisements and if you spotted your own address you won £5 -- a lot of money to a fifteen-year-old in 1965. As teenage boys urgently in need of such extra pocket money, my brother Eugene and I scoured the small ads hoping to spot our address and to claim the prize. We were therefore somewhat disappointed not to find our address but that of our father's childhood home in Glenart Avenue, Blackrock. We phoned our Uncle Brendan (who still lived in the family home) and advised him of his good fortune.

We thought no more of that stroke of good luck but shortly afterwards, Brendan got in touch to invite Eugene and me to meet him in O'Connell Street. Weeknights in 1965 usually meant lots of the homework for which Synge Street CBS was famous and it was a great treat to get the bus into town in the dark. Brendan brought us to see "The Train " at the Savoy and we were enthralled. Burt Lancaster starred as Labiche -- a Parisian station-master and Resistance leader - and Paul Scofield was excellent as the German Colonel Von Waldheim.

Watching the B&W movie again as an adult, I now realise that we missed much of the subtle excellence of the plot. We loved the gruff obstructionism from "Papa Bull" -- the big, fat French train driver who crippled a locomotive by slipping a one franc piece into the fuel line. The Germans discovered his sabotage and he was executed on the spot in the rail-yard. The central plot was the Resistance plan to alter the signage at each railway station on the line out of Paris to convince the Germans that they were travelling East towards Berlin when, in fact, they were travelling North-West towards the Allies.

As schoolboys, we missed the fundamental juxtaposition of Colonel Von Waldheim's obsession with the fine art which contrasted with the much more workmanlike approach of the French drivers and engineers to the old masters.

That evening at the movies ended up with another unexpected treat -- Knickerbocker Glories at 10:30pm at Cafolla's in O'Connell Street. Our father came in to collect us and we were on a high as we each recounted our favourite moments and went over and over the best bits. For two teenage boys in 1965, Brendan provided a glimpse of the wonderful father he would later become during an evening we will always remember - watching Burt Lancaster and Paul Scofield in "The Train" and followed by all the ice cream we could eat.