Such is the measure of my mother’s optimism that instead of giving up like our father would have done, she determined that she would give each of us a memory so great, so grand, so awesome, that we would be able to conjure up this picture even in the darkness of blindness. She would show us a huge ship and the sheer size of it would stick in our minds. The emigrant ship Innisfallon was moored in Cork Harbour and this would be our picture. We trailed along in the mist, and after what seemed like forever, we got to the ship. It really was huge: black-bodied, grey and white. I saw the windows of rooms, portholes, and men working along its decks. The gangplank rested on the quayside and I wondered what Huck Finn would have thought of this ship. Was it as big as the paddle steamers on the Mississippi, and was it ever going to the sail that great river? I also saw a cone attached to a mooring rope, and spent a long time trying to figure out its purpose. Mother tried to describe the ship and the oceans with her limited knowledge, but her heart was not in it and she sat with a far away look in her eyes.
We played on the coils of rope, the crates, and the open quayside. Lill sat with mother on one of the small crates and she seemed to be able to comfort my mother when she cried on and off. Soon a man came by and saw us and mother’s upset state. I think she must have told him her troubles. This stranger consoled her, probably thinking suicide was on her mind, though it was not, and after he left she seemed a little relieved. By then the hunger was getting the better of us all, so we headed back to Patrick Street and the shops.
I believe there was a small café located right on the corner of the river on Patrick’s Bridge. Its name escapes me now. We traipsed in there, tired, excited, and hungry, but not so our mother though. It’s as clear as day to me still, as I see how my mother just stared at the small menu for a long time. I remember that we all had chips, and I suppose an egg with bread and butter. Mother had a little pot of tea, just that and nothing else. That was our first bit of food since breakfast and she still did not eat. It struck me as very odd too that she was not eating, and the far away look in her eyes had returned. Like all good mothers, she gave the food to her flock and went hungry herself, all the while being lost in the thoughts of her terrible news. I, being the eldest and about twelve, sensed that things were very wrong somehow. I know too that we eventually went to Woolworths after pestering her continually, but I don’t think we bought a single thing there. Home on the bus in the dark and into Nannie’s we all went. We sat around the table eating bread and jam while they talked.
The closeness of their heads and the low murmuring confirmed, to me at least, that there was a serious problem with the day. Nannie would every so often exclaim out loud, “Have sense will you Belenda, he’s wrong, he’s totally wrong I tell you, God help us all”. Her way of dealing with this problem was to get angry at the news, and I think I have actually inherited that trait from her today. Soon they all left and I went to bed, still reading with my candle.
Somehow we all got glasses, though Kyrle threw his away early on, and thank God none of us ever went blind. On the contrary, some forty two years later, Kyrle, while working as a vision supervisor during the millennium celebrations for Ireland’s national television service, RTE, had the great honour of transmitting the first pictures of the dawn of the new era from Newgrange. When the first rays of the new sun shone straight into that Megalythic tomb, the pictures that millions of people were seeing all over the world were the ones created by my brother Kyrle. He was seeing those images first, then beautifying them before they went out to the rest of the world. To Kyrle it was just another job. To me it was an occasion of immense pride, knowing my brother was doing this work. Watching too that same day was Lill, then a specialist nurse and top of her profession in the Isle of Man. She too took great pride in her brother’s achievement, and mother no doubt waited for the credits to roll and his name to appear. When it did appear, she knew her so-called ‘blind’ son had made that unique broadcast happen, and surely she thought that cold-faced old eye doctor got it very wrong. I know I did.
Becoming a young salesman.
My Nannie was the driving force in my universe, but even at a very young age my Uncle Kyrl was becoming the one I really looked up to because he had a kind of charisma that was infectious, even to a very young boy. For some reason though, neither Nannie nor the mother liked him, and I never understood why that was nor would they tell me either.
Strangely enough both Kyrl and my Nannie, the two figures I looked up to most, were instrumental in creating what I believe was the most traumatic event in my life.
My earliest memory of Uncle Kyrl, who we called ‘Big Kyrl’, was that he was always out to make money. He epitomised the entrepreneurial spirit which I am sure I inherited from him. I admired Kyrl immensely as he neither drank nor smoked, unlike my father who did both to excess. Kyrl always had money and believed you had to invest to accumulate. He also had a great saying which he instilled into me. That saying was this, “The end always justifies the means”. He had added the word ‘always’ to emphasise his belief that no matter what you did to achieve your aim, it would be worth it in the end, and he proved this belief to me often.
One of the things I loved most about him was his futuristic thinking. He brought the first cinema to Buttevant, later turning it into Cinemascope by curving the screen around the audience. This new movie experience was the talk of the age in Buttevant, being the forerunner of the Imax of today. Later on he ran dances to entertain the people, and later still he taught himself music, though he was never as good at that as my dad was. He knew all there was to know about engines, and radio and electronics fascinated him. He ended his years owning a very successful monumental works, where he erected thousands of headstones all over Cork and Limerick. Unfortunately for me though, his belief in the end always justifying the means was to have a traumatic effect when I was about eight or nine years old.
I think he either bought or owned a house at the top of the town. This he had rented to a local guard, a sergeant I believe. I’m not sure of his name, so I’ll call him Ryan. Guard Ryan was married with a young family and I believe he felt settled in Kyrl’s house. He paid the rent regularly and all went along well for a while, until Kyrl needed to sell the house to raise money for the upcoming cinema business he was planning for Buttevant.
In those days it was very important that one did not get on the wrong side of the local guards as they could make life very difficult for you, especially when you needed a dance licence or other legal permission of some kind. Kyrl was then in a bind because he had no reason to ask the guard to leave. He could not legally evict him even if he wanted to because he had paid his rent, and more especially when his tenant was a local guard.
By then father and mother were living in their little ‘two walls and a roof’ house, and I was still being held captive by the Nannie across the road. My brother Kyrle was about seven and our sister Lill was young, but my parents still had plenty of room. There was nothing critical about their housing situation. However, Kyrl felt that if father and mother were prepared to exaggerate their ‘desperate housing situation’ and put it before the guard, then he might be persuaded to vacate the house so that Kyrl could ‘give it’ to his brother. This was a typical ploy of my uncle Kyrl and showed his way of thinking about life. It was cold, calculating and mercenary. He did not give a damn about the guard or his young family, all he cared about was selling his house and that was the end of the matter for him. It’s quite likely that Kyrl had also promised father a considerable amount of drink money to convince my mother to go along with his plan. But as I saw it, the bottom line was that he had no notion whatsoever of ever giving that house to his brother, or my mother either, he just wanted Ryan out of his house at any cost.
It appears that a row took place at home and my mother would have no part in the eviction of a husband, wife and young family, and took grave exception to being used as a pawn in Big Kyrl’s game. What’s more, I am sure that she went up the town to the house an
d told the guard’s wife all about it. Obviously the guard went mad, and from that day on Guard Ryan had it in for Kyrl. Over the following five years or so, bad blood flowed between both Kyrl and Ryan, and a deep level of distrust built up between them.
By about nineteen fifty eight or nine, the economy seemed to have deteriorated and no one had any money, not even Nannie with her regular pension. She too seemed to be in desperation most of the time. Uncle Michael used to mend shoes and hated every minute of it, but at least he earned some money from this work. I can clearly see him now, sitting at his little bench in the front of Nannie’s house, flaking away at an old shoe balanced on his wooden last, and smoking his fag at the same time. I see too, on a shelf behind him, the little red Pears Encyclopedia that I read so often and where I got my first taste for America.
At that time it was customary for the people to bring their shoes in for repair during the week, and collect them again on a Friday night. At least that’s how it worked for those with a wage or with money. For those other customers who did not call on the Friday night, probably because they had no money, I would be dispatched by the Nan on Saturday to deliver their shoes to them.
My Nan would go out of her way to warn me sternly not to give up the shoes without the money. “John, tell them ‘no money, no shoes’. Bring their shoes back no matter what they say, sure they’ll never pay if you give them the shoes. Off with you now, there’s a good boy, … and put on a coat”. And off I’d go with my canvas bag of shoes, traversing Buttevant in all kinds of weather, collecting the money and battling the elements as best I could.
The hardest part of this job for me though was refusing to hand over the shoes. I used to feel terrible saying no, especially when I knew the people well, and often I did know them well because they were usually my school friend’s parents. Many a time a school friend would answer the door and be standing there talking to me when I’d have to pull back the shoes from his parents’ outstretched hands. Then I’d see that sad look in their eyes before they would say, “See you in school Cahill”, before going back inside. It seemed so wrong to me to have to say no, I’m sorry, I can’t give you the shoes because my Nan says I have to be paid first. When this happened, there would be this long pause as the woman looked at me and played the dignity game. Then she’d say, “Ahh sure tis all right so, tell her I’ll collect em meself later on when he’s home with the money”. As we looked at each other we would both knew that ‘himself’ was probably in the pub drinking their money, or he was over in England working. In any case, she would not be calling in later. At that stage I’d leave with their shoes, and with no money. It was clear to me even at my age that no one was benefiting from such transactions, but that’s how it was, and I would be killed by the Nan if I succumbed to their stories and handed over the shoes. There was many a time when I just could not pull the shoes back and I’d give them up, later facing the wrath of the Nan and her wet dishcloth. “Didn’t I tell you not to give them up, didn’t I?” Whack…… across the head. Those days were the beginning of my longings to be rich. I, John Cahill, wanted to be rich, but I wanted everyone else to be rich too. Then there would be no more use of that hated word…no,… just a lot of good times for us all.
Around that time, Michael became an agent for what was known then as ‘The Pools’. These pools were a kind of weekly lottery, and I believe the proceeds were used to fund some kind of national charity. It was like an early version of our Lotto today, and in desperate times, people grasped onto desperate measures, so Michael tried to become a sales agent for those pools, and he succeeded. He worked on a commission basis which was small, but it was ‘better than a kick from a donkey’, and I know too that he had initially gathered a very large number of customers, due to his popularity in sport and politics.
Like all lotteries, if you had a big win on the pools, all your worries were over, but of course it cost you a shilling each week to be in with that chance and a shilling was twelve pennies, which was a lot of money then. The pool money was to be collected on a Saturday, the day Michael would be busiest on his shoe mending. He couldn’t do both jobs, so it was not long before a new job was added to my shoe delivering one. I was now going to become a ‘pool money collector’ as well as a shoe delivery boy.
Some pool customers were great and would happily hand over their money with a smile and a chat, but they were mostly the shopkeepers, or the so-called ‘well off’ of the town. I would give them their pool sheet, which showed all the winners from the previous week’s draw, and pocket the shilling. Others, however, would say, “Is it all right if I pay you next week? Will you tell Michael to put me in this week, and I’ll definitely settle it all up next week”. In practice what this meant was that they would probably try and get away with not paying again on the third week, hoping for any kind of win, before finally not answering the door on my next visit. After that happened, we had lost them as customers. I noticed that this was beginning to happen more and more often, as did my Nan.
Just like with the shoe delivering, Nannie began to exhort me to try and get the money out of them at all costs. It was almost as if she believed I could do magic, and money would appear for the poor people on my visit. At the start I hated that pool collecting job and only did it because I had to, as I knew what it meant to her. The pattern was this: as soon as I arrived back with my shillings, she would give me the same money and send me up to May Sheehan’s shop for her few groceries, so I knew that the commission was actually buying the food for us all.
Each Saturday I made my sweep of the town, going up one side and then down the other, returning to Nannie with my monies and the inevitable bag of undelivered shoes along with sheets from the latest lost customers.
For many reasons, the number of pool customers would ebb and flow. Some would drop out for financial reasons, but after a big win more would join. It was constantly changing, but I felt like the Nan, that on average, we were beginning to lose more and more people every week. People simply did not have the money because times had become so hard. One wintry Saturday, Nannie seemed to be particularly depressed. She was very low in herself and had a very sad look in her eyes all morning. Before my sortie to the street, she sat me down and said gravely to me, “John you’re getting to be a big boy now, and today I want you to go out and call to every door. Don’t miss a single one. You must try and get us some new people to ‘join’ our pools. You must do your best to get us new customers”. I clearly remember her using the words ‘join the pools’ but somehow in my mind, I felt that they were being asked to ‘buy’ the pools. In my mind, I was now becoming a salesman as well as a delivery boy, and while I didn’t like it, I sensed the urgency in her voice. Something was troubling her greatly and it felt like a big bill was due. This I did not like at all. She seemed very downtrodden that day and I felt very sorry for her. So once again I set off with my bag of shoes and my pool sheets, and a few coins in my pocket for change.
After calling to a lot of houses and getting many refusals, I would have the odd success and I’d make a sale, and feel great about that. Soon I began to realize that ‘selling’ was not so bad after all. In fact I began to feel that it was quite alright to be told ‘no’ a lot of the time, as long as now and again you got told yes as well. Besides that, it seemed to be a far nicer job than pulling shoes back from my friends’ parents’ outstretched hands.
I collected and sold, and moved slowly along up the street, going from house to house and shop to shop, and all the time heading for the top of the town. By then it had begun to mist and turned cold and windy. My sheets were getting wet and I still had more than half the town to do. I wanted to go home, but the thought of the Nan’s sad face kept me going. I had got us some new customers and felt I could get a lot more if I tried, so on I went.
My tactics for selling were simple. I’d have a pool sheet in one hand and a handful of coins clearly visible in the other. That way it looked like many people were actually buying my pools, and what’s more,
it seemed to be working for me. With my shoe bag slung over my shoulder and my pool sheets and coins showing, I looked like a regular little mobile shop. With each new sale I grew happier and more confident in myself, and on I went. Despite the miserable weather, I began to feel really great, thinking that if one half of the town had given me this many customers, then surely the other half would do the same, and that would be brilliant indeed. I began to imagine Nannie’s face lighting up, all happy and smiling again when I arrived home, ‘loaded’ down with new pool money.
I passed the Convent of Mercy. No point in going in there as they never had us mend their shoes, and they didn’t need to gamble for their dinners either. Then I arrived at the Mill Lane, and there in the leeway of the high wall I took shelter from the biting north wind and the rain. I was almost at the halfway point and it was time for a review of my progress. I counted out my money and adjusted my pool sheets for the final assault on the top of the town. I can’t recall just how much money I had collected, but I know that at that moment I was very happy about it all, so on I went determined to be a success at this pool selling business, and to hell with the shoe delivering.
A few no’s later and I got to what I think was a grey door, and there I knocked. No one answered, so I knocked again, this time a bit louder as I could hear loud voices coming from inside and a child seemed to be crying as well, so the people were at home. Whether it was from the shouting or the child crying, I don’t know which, but as I knocked again, a strong feeling of unease came over me and I felt it would be better if no one answered the door.
Then suddenly the door was flung open and the doorway was filled with this huge frame of a man. He towered above me. He was big, heavyset, and unfriendly, with a large red head on him. He glared down at me and spoke gruffly. “Yes… yes, what do you want”. I held out my pool sheet and said, “Would you like to buy a pool…, I’m selling a new lot today sir”.
Two Walls and a Roof Page 4
