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Search      Gerry Adams   Ken Bruen   Paul Charles   Walter Macken   Manchán Magan   John Maher   Sam Millar   Alice Taylor Desmond Ellis   Bockety   Format: Paperback original   Category: Memoir   ISBN: 0 86322 364 8   Publication Date: Available   Description This is the sparkling story of a young boy born in 1944 who grew up on the banks of the Grand Canal on Dublin’s Portobello Road, but it is also everyone’s story of the joys and pitfalls of growing up, told with a delightful and infectious humour. Desmond, an awkward boy, romps through his childhood like a bockety* bicycle that won’t quite go where it is steered. His playground is the Grand Canal, where in the company of his more or less bockety friends he goes crashing through the reeds with fishing nets.in search of pinkeens. At home he washes off the inevitable grime of play in a tin tub by the fire, and the toilet is a draughty shed in the yard. If the front door ever did happen to get locked, the key hung down on a string inside where the whole world could reach through the letterbox for it. Bockety is a sparkling tale of a time of few cars and many bicycles; of a boy who hid behind the door and listened and tried to make sense of it all while the magnificent mams smoked and talked after polishing the granite doorsteps until they sparkled like silver in the sunlight. In those days, a trip on the crossbar of his dad’s bike as far as Seapoint or Redrock was as good as a journey to Spain today. Gratification was to be had in Cleeve’s toffee and Nancy Balls and gobstoppers. And there was the terrible confusion of girls... It’s a heartwarming story about another world and a time long gone... but not forgotten. *rickety, unstable, lopsided, crooked Author Desmond Ellis was born in Dublin in 1944, and at four years of age started school in Gavan Duffy’s, Earlsfort Terrace; from there, at the age of seven, he went to the Christian Brothers on Synge Street. Later he went to Mount Street Technical School, studied commercial art at night in Rathmines College and joined the Abbey Theatre School of Acting. In 1972, he set off for Cananda, where he briefly worked as a paste-up artist for a school book publisher, before taking up acting; he has been an actor in Canada ever since. His children’s book, The Undergardeners was recently published in Canada.