Simultaneously Fowler puked his grandmother’s stew all over me and my psychedelic shirt and pink suit. I was covered in vomit and not sure if I was still alive or not. There was a total panic for a short time, and it only took seconds before Hayes finally got the van slowed down, but not stopped. He was shaken but pretended it was our fault, and again speeded up as if to prove that he was not scared at all. The girl, who was by then crying and shaking uncontrollably, just got ignored. We all began to laugh our heads off except the poor victim who seemed to be in a state of shock. My suit was ruined and I was now pissed off at this disaster. Hayes said he had the answer: we would drive down to the river somewhere nearby so I could wash it off, and it would dry in the heat of the van. He was not seemingly worried that it was October and freezing cold, and neither was I if the truth be known. I just wanted rid of the stinking stew. Somehow he found some road to the river and down we went. In the moonlight we all fell out the back of the van and headed for the water. I believe Fowler actually drank some of the river water to feel better. The girl finally stopped crying. Moloney told some kind of a joke and we all laughed again. I washed my suit in the river, completely unperturbed by the girl who looked on in horror as I togged off. There, standing in my underpants, I wrung it out as best I could, then I dressed again in my pink suit which had by then turned completely black. Off we went again.
We got to the club and at the front door I got a lot of really strange looks, but we were well known there, and felt sure they would let us in. Hayes, who was feeling guilty for almost killing us, overcame his revulsion at being seen with me now in a black suit, and we all stood together. I smirked at my image, as I looked like a small priest with long hair, and a tie dye multicoloured shirt. A pink suit surely was better than that. After paying, in we went to the deafening music of the club.
The victim had disappeared, and we didn’t know where she went. Hayes said she had no stamina anyways. As the night wore on, the heat dried out my suit slowly and in patches. Pretty soon I was wearing a psychedelic suit as the red was coming back into it, and my success at getting dances became extraordinary. The lads were fuming at this, as they were reduced to looking at the band while I careered all around the hall almost like a celebrity. Where I would always fail was when the girl leaned onto my shoulder to roar some comment over the music. When this happened she would suddenly feel the water squish out from some part of my clothes, usually my shoulders. This usually meant there would be a shriek of, “Ohh uckkk,” and my girl would beat a speedy retreat saying, “I’ll see you around creep”. Then in defeat I would return to the friends, but in the end it did dry out, and later I did score with a nice innocent girl who let me take her home. The lads were so mad at this that they decided to sabotage my chances, and Hayes drove the van along beside us, taunting us all the time. The girl was not impressed and soon left after Fowler throws open the back doors and roars out loud, “Come on you old bollix, we’re heading for the Majestic”. The trip that had almost killed us had been a complete waste of time, but the night was still young and we were soon on our way back to Mallow’s famous dance hall; the Majestic Ballroom, where we arrived just as the dance was ending.
While I was having the fun with Hayes and co, Kyrle had gone working to Dublin and was having his own adventures there. He would be gone for months at a time, and as mother never had a telephone in her life, she would be relying on me to pass on any news of her second son. By then I too had started working and I was not good at the visiting. Besides, Kyrle would only phone me at work now and again, so mother might go weeks without hearing any news of him. Often six months went by without her ever actually seeing him, and this used to drive her to distraction with worry.
Kyrle thought nothing of it though, nor did I. We all knew that we were alive, and that seemed to be enough for us when you’re young. Eventually he would get lonesome and make a journey home, and it would be a cause for major rejoicing by mother. Father saw it as a reason for a different kind of celebration; an increased number of visits to Kit’s bar. I remember one time in particular when the rejoicing turned sour. It was a Friday night and Kyrle arrived in home drunk as a skunk unexpectedly. He was wearing a black, heavy top coat that was covered in mud and he looked quite the worst for wear. Mother was both delighted and disgusted with him, while father saw him as his savior and provider of many extra pints of Guinness. By a pure fluke, I happened to arrive home for a visit shortly after Kyrle and father had retired to Kit’s pub. Mother began bitterly complaining Kyrle to me saying, “Jesus Mary and Holy Saint Joseph, he looks like a tramp John, and he’s paralytic drunk as well. I think he got fired from his good job in the Post Office today”. I ignored her worries and told her that she should have sense, that he was probably always drunk on a Friday night. I was wondering about his bedraggled state of dress though, and seeing the mud caked all over his coat, I felt that he had been in a fight that he lost. The curiosity was killing me and I wormed the answer out of him later that night after he and father fell in the door singing, drunker than ever. Mother had gone to bed in disgust, followed soon by my father. Then the two of us chatted on for hours while Kyrle sobered up, as usual, as the night wore on.
Contrary to being fired, he had actually been promoted that day and decided to celebrate by coming home for the weekend by train. The problem was that he took to celebrating early on the train and got sozzled drunk, then missed getting off in Buttevant. The train was pulling out of the station when he took decisive action and jumped from it as it left Buttevant. He fell into a mud ditch and that’s what saved him from being killed. I couldn’t believe it, but it was confirmed years later when one of his friends told me that he was with him on the train, and had tried to stop him from jumping.
On the Saturday we went walking down the castle and met old friends. The day passed uneventfully. Mother had gone mad getting food on tic and made our favourite dish; chips and an egg, as well as ordering a ‘round of Galtee bacon’. This was the ultimate treat for us, reserved for very special occasions. Of course the prodigal son returning was as good as it gets. During the day she had cooked this ‘roundel’ as we called it, and had left it in her ‘fridge’ on the window sill. Mother’s fridge was made from a large stone inverted pudding bowl sitting on a saucer, where the meat would be placed inside it and left overnight to cool. On the Saturday night we again chatted for hours and hours, with Kyrle then back to ‘normal’. We discussed every possible topic and argued over quantum physics till we ran out of insults and ego running. Then about six a.m. the hunger took over and we raided the back kitchen for food, with no success. Then we both remembered ‘the fridge’ and the inevitable roundel of beautiful bacon sitting so lonely on the front window. This roundel of bacon had just one flaw: if you cut it, it always left a tell tale sign of the cut, and we knew full well that this bacon was for the ‘Sunday Surprise’ at teatime. It was like the turkey at Christmas and was almost as rare too. Kyrle felt that we should be able to cut a full circle off it and convince the mother that it had ‘shrunk’ in the night air. So we got at it and cut a ring off it, and ate it down. It was so delicious. However, we could not hide our theft, so we felt that if we cut a second thinner ring it might work better the next time. That just made it worse. Then while we were wondering what to do next, our nine year old brother Hugh arrived down the stairs to see what his heroes were up to. Here we found the perfect scapegoat. I offered him a chunk of the bacon, because by then all attempts at hiding our crime were in vain. “Here Hugh, have some bacon, tis lovely”. He froze in mid-step half-way down the stairs, realizing the setup by instinct. “Ohh no way, I’m not being blamed for ye eating that bacon. No way, ye can shag off, and I’m telling”. Then he hightailed it back up the stairs to his bed, so we ate the rest of the roundel and left some money in the fridge to soften the blow. Then, with my belly full, I went home to Nannie’s and forgot all about our crime.
Sunday came and we headed for the river, and later that evening we were walking
back down the street and saw the mother standing at the front door glaring up at us. “What’s the matter with her John; she seems as mad as can be. She’s still not mad over me drinking, is she?” We continued on down and her glaring got worse. I said, “Who knows why she’s mad, sure I blame those bloody pills; they have her driven demented. It’s either them or the moon”. We both laughed out loud and that was the wrong thing to do, as she must have thought we were laughing at her.
“Where’s the bacon? Ye ate the bacon didn’t ye? Now we have nothing for the tea, not a thing to eat”. I felt it might be time for a sortie across to the Nannie’s, but I didn’t want to leave Kyrle to face all the music on his own, so I said, “Mother we left the money for it under the bowl, I swear to God we did”. “Don’t you swear on a lie John, there was no money there, nothing”. She was still raging on as we passed her, going inside to the living room. There we saw the father looking rather sheepishly at the television without his headphones on; a sure sign that he was only feigning interest in the TV. The real culprit was the father of course. He had also gotten a hankering for the bacon that morning, but finding it gone and our money in its place, he took off across the road to Kit’s and drank the money instead. A big row then broke out, and finally Kyrle began threatening never to come home again if mother didn’t stop going on about it all. That was too much for her and she was almost ready for the tears, so we all stopped arguing. I may be wrong, but I think we fixed the problem by getting a few ‘chicken suppers’ later that night. Mother still goes on about it, and being gifted with an excellent memory, I suppose we will never be allowed to completely forget the night we raided her fridge and ate the roundel of bacon.
Kyrle went back to Dublin next day, all forgiven, and I got the blame as usual. Probably Hugh ratted on me to the mother, and for some days she was not on speaking terms with me. Her mood was noticed by Fowler and Hayes when they called for me later in the week. “Hey man, what’s up with your mother? She seems pissed off at you man”.
I did not feel like reliving the bacon incident, so I said, “Ahh sure I blame them ould pills that the quacks keep giving her, she’s never been right since she started taking them”. Then Fowler looks at me with a twinkle in his eye and says, “I think it’s the moon meself”. In those days I used to blame the moon for every kind of mad event, and knowing that he had got me, we all burst into laughter.
We four were getting a reputation as hippies, lunatics and dangerous guys to be near in those days, and mothers were always warning their daughters to avoid us at all costs. Fowler had by far the worst reputation. He had a magnetic attraction for women and got into loads of scrapes as times went by. The strange thing was that the more the mothers warned against going near us, the more women we seemed to get - well Fowler did anyway. Music was our real love, and when we liked a band, we would head off to hear them in Hayes’ dad’s van. Driving a great distance was no problem for Jerry, as he loved every minute of it, but he had no licence. Soon, being out most of the night was accepted by us all as the norm. And even after numerous adventures all over the county, I can say with complete honesty that we never harmed anybody despite all our antics, but we often nearly killed ourselves, usually because Hayes thought he could defy the laws of physics.
At a very young age, Liam Fowler was to lose his mother, his dad, his grandmother, and later his young sister Marie to leukemia. I know of no man who has suffered as much as Liam, and as if to show just how cruel life can be, he later lost his young wife as well. In spite of all of these tragedies, he has always had the most amazing personality, and is great fun to be with. He has, at long last, found happiness today with his childhood friend Betty who is Jerry Hayes’ sister. But way back then in the late sixties he had become very alone almost overnight. For us his friends, his house became our meeting place, our place of planning for the future, and the place where we ‘jammed’ with sweeping brush guitars and chair drums. We used to listen to Radio Luxembourg as it was the only station playing pop and rock music. I well remember the night that Thin Lizzy became the first Irish rock band to enter the charts. It was with their classic ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, and we went wild with delight as it happened. We used to have great jamming sessions in Fowler’s kitchen, each of us having his very own ‘instrument’. I had a sweeping brush guitar, Joe Moloney had a chair with rungs as his drum kit, Hayes had another guitar (a smaller brush modified) and was playing lead of course, while Fowler was a rock singer, complete with imitation microphone.
As the music blared, we imitated the movements of the super groups, often with sexual connotations for the benefit of the imaginary ‘groupies’ who frequented the front of our stage. We pranced around the stage, which was in Fowler’s basement kitchen, and I used to also double up as roadie, turning up and down our ‘amps’. These amps were the drawers on Fowler’s cabinet, complete with two broken knobs with pointy ends just like real amps would have. As we pranced around, and as the music intensified, Hayes would shout, “More band,” which was my cue to increase the volume on Fowler’s old radio.
None of us smoked, drank or took drugs, though I suspect we were supposed to be into all three at various times according to the do-gooders of Buttevant. We were just crazy young fellas mad into music, women and the explosion of life known as the sixties. The neighbours often complained to Fowler that we were way too loud at one a.m. in the morning, but it did no good at all. I would be instructed to turn up the amps even louder if I could manage it at all. I would do as instructed, so we just got even louder till they stopped complaining. Then I just turned down the amps again to a nominal loud level and peace was restored to the street.
Fowler’s only worldly possession when his Nan died was a television set. We used to watch a series of four short horror stories each Monday night on Radio Teilifis Eireann. Hayes and I were terrible practical jokers, and as ever we would be gearing up to scare Fowler, who was a real nervous type. We would wait for a real good scary part when he would be really into the terror and glued to the screen in a trance. Then at the appropriate moment we would leap at him simultaneously in the dark. It always brought the same reaction from him; initially total terror, then shrieking, and then roars at us to, “Get out, get out now, and don’t come back, ever”. He always calmed down after our begging for forgiveness and promises to be better in the future, which we never were.
We played all kinds of tricks over the years, but not just on Fowler. Hayes’ sisters and their friends used to walk home from the pictures in Kyrl’s hall, and as they would be coming up the long dark hill we would be waiting inside the wall with our four flash lamps at the ready. When they got really close, we would leap up in the air making the worst possible faces, which were not difficult for us, and scream at them. They would go into total shock, and then take off running and screaming like mad women as we fell around the field laughing. We did this for a while till the effect wore off, but then we decided to try the same trick on some ducks that frequented a lake near Hayes’s house. He hated these ducks as they were squeaking all night long and used to keep him awake, so one night we crept up on them in the dark, and made a run at the lake with our lights blazing, leering and shouting like mad men. The poor ducks took off in terror and for months didn’t return. Hayes was ecstatic and wanted a renewed attack when they finally began drifting back in one’s and two’s. However we declined, as there was no more fun to be had from it by then, and besides, a lot of the locals were missing the ducks.
One of the funniest things we did during those mad years was to become involved in what I believe was Buttevant’s one and only ‘streak’ event. This came about when another Buttevant lad decided he wanted to join our ‘gang’. His name was Anthony and he was a good bit younger than us. We really did not know what he could bring to our level of insanity, so we tried our best to put him off the idea. This didn’t work so we then told him that he would have to do a test in order to qualify for membership. Anthony was up for any kind of test we might give him,
and after considerable discussions we felt that if we gave him an impossible task then he could not be expected to do it; no face would be lost by anyone, Anthony included. With that agreed, the task chosen was a ‘streak’ through the town in broad daylight, and it had to be done from the bottom of the town up to Fowler’s door and inside. Surely this was an impossible task given the bad publicity streaking was having in those days. We felt sure he would never do this, especially when he might end up before the courts, but not so our Anthony. He was all for it. Still we thought he might be bluffing and planned the run with him for the following Saturday. Jerry Hayes had agreed to use his van as the base for the streak and would be located at the bottom of the town with Anthony getting ready inside it for his run. Anthony was supposed to race up the street, passing the mother’s house, and on past the Catholic Church on the way to Fowler’s door where he would fly inside to safety. I was to run alongside him taking pictures with my Polaroid as proof of the great event.
The Streak Saturday came round, and Hayes, Fowler and I arrived at Anthony’s house where he was waiting fully dressed, but wearing a very long heavy black overcoat. It was a very cold day, but somehow I felt that this coat did not seem to be for protection from the elements. He jumped into the back of the van and actually started stripping off immediately, becoming stark naked within minutes. Then he wrapped himself in the coat and waited for me to leave with my camera so as to get ahead of him for the photos. All three of us looked at each other in disbelief as Anthony crouched down in the back of the van and began visibly shivering while waiting for the proceedings to begin. We three then got scared and felt a rethink was needed because he was obviously going to do the impossible after all. A rethink was indeed needed, so we drove up the street and parked outside the mother’s house while we discussed our next plan of action. Anthony flatly refused to put his clothes back on and just waited behind us in the van while we argued back and forth about the merits or not of a streak. While this was going on, my mother came out the front door, and seeing us parked and talking, she pokes her head in through the open window. She says, “What are ye up to lads?” I think she could see naked Anthony in the back, but I’m not sure. In any case I say with a smirk, “Well, we are seriously thinking of doing a streak mother”, and at that she goes completely mad. Jerry, knowing her temper and fearing trouble, had already got the van started and was heading for the top of the town. As we drive we see the mother heading for Nannie’s, no doubt to complain me to her. All of us enter Fowler’s house skitting and laughing our heads off, and once inside we try to get warm by all four of us standing around Fowler’s one and only means of heat; a small little two-bar electric heater. I just fell about laughing as I saw Anthony open the front of his coat and take over the whole heater saying, “Lads me bollix is frozen, and when am I streaking anyway?”
Two Walls and a Roof Page 21
