Frank McCourt RIP: Angela's Ashes book and tour will live on in Limerick
THE Angela's Ashes author, Frank McCourt, passed away yesterday in New York after contracting meningitis, but the Angela's Ashes tour guide Mick O'Donnell said his "book will never die."
McCourt last visited Limerick in August 2008 to take part in the tour for the first time, but further visits to the city had been planned.
On that occasion, the rain stayed at bay as the author walked the by-ways and lanes of his childhood around Barrack Hill.
Memories flooded back, he said, as he recalled how he and his brother Malachy would pour water down the slope of the lane in icy conditions and slide down.
Michael O'Donnell was reputedly terrified when Frank agreed to go on the tour, but it didn't show on the day. "This is where Frank emptied the piss-pot outside the back door," he told the group of American tourists who paid handsomely for the trip.
His 14 American companions paid $7,800 for the pleasure of his company over the ten day tour, after it attracted major attention when advertised in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Mr McCourt noted that in a city full of change, all that has remained of his youth was the lamppost in the corner where he used to meet his friends at night. The Franciscans have gone, the Jesuits have gone and foreign nationals have moved into the city in their tens of thousands, just like McCourt who fled to America in search of a better life.
On upper Henry Street, with its many internet cafes, he had ample opportunity to witness the changing face of the city.
"We had no traffic lights in those days until they put them up at the corner of O'Connell Street and William Street. It was big entertainment to go down and watch the lights changing as we couldn't go to the Lyric cinema. Limerick 'has changed utterly' as Yeats said."
The lane along Barrack Hill has been widened, pushed back and is now complete with a row of modern, neat townhouses. "It looks like California," said the author.
The Angela's Ashes tour has now been running for over a decade - beginning two years after the memoir was published in 1996. And it is a tour that will continue to keep running, because as the tour guide Michael O'Donnell said "the book will never die."
But the author is likely to remain a presence hanging over the tour; although he admitted to being mystified at the overwhelming attention it has attracted.
"All those here today have read the book and are looking for the deeper meaning and that is why they are here. If they find a deeper meaning they will get a prize - as I have never been able to find it," he said.
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Tuesday 22 May 2012
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