After months we actually got used to this smell, and soon I ignored it. However, when our friends came to call they would almost get sick from the smell. Some were too polite to say anything, but usually never called again. My aunt May was not so polite though, and told me straight out to get rid of ‘that stinking cat’. I was coming to the same conclusion myself, as it had pissed on my best jacket and absolutely no amount of washing would get rid of the smell. I had to just dump my best jacket in the end and I was savage, cursing both the cat and Larry’s rats. That bloody cat was no use as a ratter either, as I was still seeing the furry fellas but not telling Etta about it. The cat never once caught a rat, and I used to say she was too busy eating, sleeping, and pissing on my clothes to be out catching rats.
One beautiful evening the cat began this violent wailing for no apparent reason. It went on and on and sounded to me like she was dying. We were so innocent then that we didn’t know the cat was in heat. I was certain she had some bad pain, and as I believed brandy was good for all ills, I decided to get her some as a cure. I went across the road to the local bar which was crowded that evening. As I entered I got a lot of odd looks as I don’t drink and most people knew me then, and knew this about me too. Mrs Duignan, the owner, looked very surprised also as she asked me what I wanted. I didn’t want to be wasting my hard earned money on a useless cat, so I started to explain that I just wanted a half glass of brandy. She knew I didn’t drink too and said, “John when did you start drinking the hard stuff? I thought you don’t drink at all”. I was quick to assure her that I didn’t drink, and that this brandy was just for our cat. She exclaimed incredulously and loudly for all to hear, “You mean to tell me you’re giving brandy to your cat, are you coddin me John?” I tell her I am serious, as our cat’s in pain and brandy will cure it. Immediately all heads turn on me and I then became an instant talking point, with all the locals saying he’s so crazy he’s giving brandy to his cat. What a fool, wasting it. There were peals of laughter in the bar where everyone thought this was the funniest and stupidest thing they ever heard. I was being quizzed on all sides as to the reasons for this waste, and Mrs Duignan seemed to take ages giving me the brandy, hanging on every word that I spoke. She was having great fun at my expense. The more I recounted my reasons, the more laughter it caused. I still had no idea why they all laughed so much. When I had paid for the brandy, Mrs Duignan says to me, “Maybe the cat’s in heat John, did you ever think of that boy?” More laughter came from the patrons and some even offered to help me hold the cat down, just in case some got spilled. I was the butt of numerous jokes for weeks after that incident, and every time I went to fix Duignans’ TV, she always asked me with a smirk, “And how’s the cat now John, still an alcoholic is she?”
I returned red-faced with my bottle to Etta saying it was nothing and that the damn cat was just randy, so I opened the back window to let her out for her fun, but she wouldn’t go out. She was still screeching though with this awful moaning and after an hour of this I became convinced again that she was in pain and that the pub-goers were all wrong. It was time for action. Because it was so warm I had no shirt on when I grabbed hold of the cat. I told Etta to pour the brandy down her throat while I prized open her mouth. The cat was scratching and tearing at me when I turned her upside down on my lap, and she bit me when I tried to open her mouth. I persevered and Etta got the bottle ready. I got her mouth open again and shouted at Etta, “Now, now, pour, pour,” and she did. The brandy went into the cat and onto me. The cat’s paws suddenly shot out, with her claws becoming razors tearing my belly apart. I couldn’t hold her as she seemed to have developed super strength and she escaped. She leaped up in the air and made a drive for the open window where she jumped clean out and we never saw her again. Now with no cat, plenty of rats, and Adrian a baby, Etta activated the doomsday scenario. We would be on the move again, but this time to our new house which was being built at a snail’s pace in Avondale Park.
Before we could move in to our newly built house, we had to have the water main connected and this event was to set me off on a bad footing with the water section of the local authorities. I had been given a map which showed where the main water pipe for the whole estate was located. It was supposed to be about six feet outside our boundary wall on the road, and apparently it was my responsibility to dig to this pipe and have my house pipe brought out to it for connection by the official plumbers in the local council. I knew well that digging for this pipe by myself would be a terrible job, so I enlisted the help of my brother Hugh who was around at the time. It was a Saturday and we began digging around nine in the morning. After about four hours and four holes, all about three feet deep, we still had not seen the main pipe and we retired for the dinner almost dead from the exertion.
Etta kept asking me if I was reading the map right and this was driving me mad, as I was suspecting the map was wrong and that was our problem. At two p.m. we got at it again, this time digging between the holes in case we had ‘missed it’, and by about six in the evening we had one huge hole in the road and still no sign of the main water pipe. At that point Hugh decided he had had enough and was leaving, and in rage I took a lace at the ground with my pickaxe and suddenly we struck water. There was a huge jet of water going up about fifteen feet into the air, and we both stood awestruck gazing at it. I had inadvertently broken into the main water pipe for the whole area. People started to stop and look, and soon the hole in the road became a swimming pool full of murky brown water. If it had been a nice day we could easily have gone for a swim, but it was not. Quite quickly Hugh says to me, “We better cover this over and you’ll have to call the council and tell them you have broken the mains,” emphasizing the word ‘you’, adding, “Don’t dare mention me in any of this”. That sounded ominous and I didn’t like it at all. What did he know that I didn’t know. To stop the geyser from turning Avondale Park into New York on a hot summer’s day, we got a sheet of iron from around the back and put it over the pipe. Then we added more sheets, rocks and a tar barrel to make a barrier around the ‘swimming pool’ and hoped for the best as the water continued to pour out from under our defenses for the rest of the weekend. By Monday a lake had formed outside our house. I called the council on Monday morning and told them that I had found the water pipe and had had a little accident. “What kind of accident Mr Cahill?” “Well actually I think I burst your main pipe”. “What did you say.. you burst the mains is it? So you’re the cause of no one having water all weekend, or those who did have it were drinking mud. You’ll be paying for this….”. I said, “If you had given me a proper fucking map I’d not have burst your bloody pipe,” and hung up on them. An army of workers arrived and by dinnertime they had us connected, the hole was filled in and to their credit they never charged me a penny. My belief always was that anything outside my gate was their responsibility and so it was an accident with no one to blame, but Hugh was making sure he was not going to be tangled up in it.
Over the years that followed our move to Avondale Park, two more children would arrive in our lives; my daughter Lynda who I nicknamed early on as ‘Lyndi the scientist’, and our youngest son Kyrl named after my brother Kyrle. As the Cahills had already done before, we dropped the ‘e’ off the end of my son’s name to distinguish him from my brother Kyrle. I could not say that we were great parents; far from it, because from an early age our three children had to become totally independent in mind and body. Each of them learned how to cook and survive by themselves because I was always out working, and Etta would often have to help me as no one else would. In hindsight, this survivalist thinking has been of great benefit to them as they are all now out in the world and well able to fend for themselves. I also believe honestly that Etta was a far better mother than I was a father, and to my great regret I spent far too much time working for others as by then I was not alone working for Larry, but I was also working for pirate radio. I could easily be out half the night or on weekends when I should have been spendi
ng that time with my most precious of gifts; my children.
As the years passed us by, Etta and I would go off on vacation abroad, usually to London for a week or less. Initially Etta’s sister Helen was kind enough to take care of our children, and later still my mother and father stayed with them for the week that we were away. Then when Adrian became a teenager, we often took off leaving him to mind the other two all by himself. He did this with no bother at all and no disaster that we knew of ever happened. Helen was great and would still keep an eye on them, but he managed admirably, and despite how it might appear, I truly believe it made him a responsible adult and caused the other two to treat him with the respect an elder brother deserved. I’m very glad to say that that is how it has remained to this day.
On one of those trips we managed to get to the Costa del Sol and from there, in the company of a large group of other tourists, we took a day trip to Africa. I’ll never forget the feeling I got as our ferry crossed over the Straits of Gibraltar coming in sight of the Atlas Mountains on the African coast. We landed in Tangiers where the police took all of our passports for safe keeping and soon we began a bus tour taking us all over northern Morocco. The heat was unreal, registering 40 degrees in our air-conditioned bus, and I loved it. We had dinner in the Kasbah in a clean but very old version of a restaurant. I had a belly dancer gyrating beside me for most of the meal, which put me off it completely. Then, during the meal, a real mean-looking photographer arrived carrying all of our pictures that he had secretly taken while our guide had made us go up a stone staircase passing a window and then down the other side for no reason. I soon realized that he had been hiding inside the window and snapped us all as we passed, and it was now time for us to pay for our unwanted photos. In his broken English he started pressing us to buy as he moved down the long table we all sat at. An American lady sat by us and felt intimidated by his looks. Very few bought the photos and he was getting madder and more desperate as he came to a German couple sitting beside the American. They flatly refused his demands, and as if to teach the rest of us a lesson he held up their photo, waved it around and then tore it to ribbons in front of us all, throwing the bits up in the air. The American lady was so scared that she bought hers immediately and I bought one too because I wanted it as a souvenir. Later still we were taken to a so-called ‘shop of many floors’ with each floor specializing in rugs and leather goods as well as brass ornaments. All the time we looked, but didn’t buy. We all began to feel intimidated and the shop staff began to become worried too because we were not buyers. At about that time a large gathering of local sellers became convinced that our group must carry all the gold of China because they tried to invade the shop and get us to buy fake Rolex watches, hats and every other kind of portable junk imaginable. This annoyed the shop people so much that they threw out the locals, causing a mini riot at the front door before they slammed it shut, trapping us all inside. Our situation had become quite serious because we then had no passports and no idea where we were in the large Moslem city. We had no mobile phones either in those days, and our guide had also disappeared, leaving us to face the angry mob outside all alone. The hammering on the front doors scared the women even worse, and the shouts in Arabic from the insiders added to the increasing unease that we were all feeling. I knew that our ferry would leave on time, as we had been warned of that fact many times by the now vanished guide, and the time was passing too fast for my liking. With no more purchases likely and just before I myself was about to start panicking, the guide magically appeared from inside the shop and told us that we would have to make a run for the bus, which was parked some distance away in the middle of the square. We were warned sternly not to lose sight of him at any cost, and at that, the shop people flung open the door and the guide rushed out into the waiting throng of angry desperate locals. We followed quickly and then began a hilarious though very frightening event. Here were about fifty tourists of all ages and nationalities running through the streets of Tangier trying to avoid being robbed by the hundred or so local sellers brandishing their wares as well as their fists. It was both scary and exhilarating at the same time and I can see it all so clearly still. Etta ran along beside me, fighting off the hat and scarf sellers, while I kept refusing ‘genuine Rolex’ watches at a, “Good price for you kind sir”. There were shouts of great bargains mixed with screams of insults in Arabic when we ignored the salesmen, and a kind of mad chaos reigned as we ran along faster and faster, all the time trying to keep the guide’s fez in sight. When the bus came into sight we all redoubled our running so that it became a race to get inside the bus at all costs. We had no idea what would happen to any stragglers, but it would not be good, and none of us wanted to be left outside to the mob’s anger. When the bus took off for the boat we all left out a huge cheer of relief and the guide even took off his fez and waved it about for us, but I think myself that he was in on it all and it may well have been a staged event. As the boat returned across the Straits, I sat on the upper deck bathed in the beautiful golden sunshine from a setting African sun and thanked God for the day while Etta calmed her nerves with some foreign liqueur mixed with coffee in the bar below me. The day was not over yet though, as when we finally arrived back at Torremolinos and went out for a very late dinner, the staff of the restaurant brought out a beautiful candle and placed it on our table along with the food. Etta said, “Isn’t that the most romantic thing they just did, be sure to give them a big tip”. I was about to agree with her when the whole candle literally exploded and splattered our food with all kinds of material. It was some kind of trick candle and our dinner was ruined. I nearly got a bloody heart attack as well while the waiters fell around the place laughing their heads off, but being Irish did we complain? No of course not, I just paid the bill and left, and the next day I believe the place was closed down for good. I think we were their last customers ever. They knew it and wanted to go out with a bang, or a tourist medical emergency. It had been a day to remember and I have never forgotten it. I’m sure neither has Etta. Years later, both Lill and Eunice went on that same trip. Lill hated it while Eunice loved it. Probably Nannie’s rearing made us two impervious to the extremes of culture in that amazing place called Africa.
We went on numerous other trips to London as well, and on one of those I brought home one of the first computers ever made. It used to play a game where little alien ships were attacking you and Adrian, who was then about twelve, became so fascinated with it that I knew it was only a matter of time before he would want to programme his own game. That’s exactly what happened, ultimately setting him on his own software career and taking him to Australia too.
North Cork Local Radio.
Around nineteen eighty or so, an old classmate of Kyrle from Pad’s days walked into our shop in O’Brien Street. His name was Maurice Brosnan and he was working locally in the insurance business, and still does today as I write. Maurice and three other businessmen had decided to set up a radio station in Mallow after RTE, the national broadcaster, had done a very successful week’s broadcasting, then left the area, leaving a radio entertainment vacuum behind them.
The group had decided to call their service NCLR or North Cork Local Radio. They had the right idea but lacked the technical expertise necessary to make it all happen. I found out later that they had a small homemade transmitter and were trying to make it heard all over the town, without any luck. Then I believe Maurice remembered ‘the mad Cahills’ blotting out Buttevant’s radio service many years earlier with their own homemade transmitter, and he arrived in the shop to meet me and chat about their problems. He had been in the same class as Kyrle and I didn’t recognise him at first, but when he mentioned Pad’s schooldays, all the memories returned and we talked for a long time. In the end, Maurice told me of their predicament and asked if I would just ‘look’ at their setup. Kyrle was by then working for RTE, who hated the idea of any kind of illegal pirate radio service, primarily because they had a monopoly on the audience and did no
t want any form of competition. Obviously because of Kyrle’s position, I knew that he would not be in favour of me going anywhere near such an illegal operation, and I told this to Maurice. Being the great salesman that he is, he convinced me to ‘just have a look’ anyway and maybe advise them on what they needed to do next. In the end I agreed to look. What was the harm in that? And besides, Kyrle was ‘way up’ in Dublin and would never find out about it.
After work on a Friday night I went down the street in Mallow and was taken in to see their little makeshift studio. What I saw there astounded me because they had an old ‘disco deck’ with a cheap microphone driving the transmitter, and that was basically it. The signal was then fed along a length of television aerial cable to a copper pole mounted on a chimney out the back of the building, and that was their entire radio station. It was no wonder the signal only went about a hundred yards before fading out. I examined the operation and discovered two major flaws which I doctored easily and quickly, and in less than fifteen minutes the signal suddenly covered most of the town. Then their phone started ringing with the good news. The radio group had been so impressed with my few minutes’ work that they wanted me on board at almost any cost. As far as I was concerned I had done what they needed and I was about to leave when they asked me to come to a meeting the following morning at ten a.m.
Two Walls and a Roof Page 31
