Two Walls and a Roof (14 page)

The plan was that he would push the block out behind him as he was
nearing the main road and the g
illie would stop due to friction.

We got the block from Hurley’s wall, with Joe protesting as usual, and we tied a strong string to both
the block and the back of the g
illie
. A
ll was then ready for the great push off.

I
’
ll never forg
et that day, it was so exciting;
it was like launching a rocket. I so wanted to be part of the speed that at the last minute and without telling Kyrle
I planned to jump on behind him
and sail down the lane with him
,
then use my foot as
a brake if the block failed. T
hat was the plan at least
, but i
t didn’t quite work out like that though. By then, Kyrle is all tensed up and keeps telling me to
, “C
ome on, come on, push me off will you”, so I do. I gave him a huge push off, but I jumped on board as well. A huge cheer went up from the crowd as we both sped down the lane. Almost immediately I tumbled right off the back of the ‘chariot’ because it was going so fast, and there was too little room because of the block. Kyrle was really speeding up and as I picked myself up I saw this amazing sight. Here he was frantically trying to shove off the block as he
’
s chased by a load of lads all cheering and waving a
t him. The whole crowd was
running p
ast me and it all felt so great, b
ut Kyrle was panicking
,
trying de
sperately to push off the block. W
hen he did
,
it suddenly snapped the string before it could do any good.  I saw him fly straight across the road with his hair flying back and no doubt a panicked look on his face. He crashed straight into Hutchins
’
wall. As the ram hit the wall, he actually catapulted up into the air, hitting the plate glass window and
collapsing back on top of the g
illie, which was by then totally wrecked. I was running across the road and by the time I got to him I was f
urious. He had mangled the new g
illie before I even had a spin on i
t and I kept on shouting at him, “
Why didn’t you steer for the lane, the lane
?
I’d have steered for the lane”. As I saw it, he could easily have turned slightly to the right and gone on down Hutchins
’
lane where I felt he might be able to slow it down using his leg as a brake. Of course I was not the one travelling at twenty miles an hour, then heading for the main road, so it was easy to be critical.

Poor Kyrle was dazed:
probably concussed. He had this blank look in his eyes and he didn’t argue back as I was shouting at him, and that was very unusual. I think I must have
realize
d then that he was hurt somehow, and helped him home. I think someone stole the chariot that day, as we never used it again and I have no memory of ever bringing it back to base either. It’s a likely bet that Mack or Hurley used it for ‘parts’
but I don’t remember any more g
illies being built after that famous one. Kyrle recovered and still laughs at his escape even today.

My father was a small man
of
just over 5”5’. In my mind
he
always seemed to be poor and I never saw him have a wad of money in his life, yet before he was married he was fast becoming wealthy and would be considered a yuppie by today’s standards.  His real love was for music
. H
e was self taught and many is the time he recounted his long hours spent in the attic
practicing
on a piano accordion bought from
a local man called Herman Weed
l
e
in Mallow. In later years he learned the saxophone and I have been told many times that he was a real expert on that wonderful instrument
. E
very time I hear a  sax solo I think of my dad.

I was told too
that everyone liked my dad, and I never met anyone in my life that had a bad word to say about him.  His personality was very gentle, and
he
was full of old sayings, stories of his youth, and later still accounts of his mad life.  He had a very broad mind and could be seen to discuss almost every subject ad infinitum. It was very rare that he lied about anything, and the only time he did tell lies was to cover his tracks with our mother when he had been spending money he should have been handing up to her.  He was especially interesting in the days before television, when we would spend many hours discussing electronics, space and all kinds of science subjects as well as the Roman Empire and Alexander the Great
’
s feats. He seemed to know everything
.
I loved talking to him, except when he was drunk. Then all he did was repeat over and over again the same old stuff we talked about ten minutes earlier. When he was like this I would listen away to his repeats and pretend it was all great news, but secretly I longed for his sober discussions. I can honestly say too that my dad never raised a hand to me or to any of my brothers and sisters. He would get a mad look on him if he drank whiskey and change his personality, but if he got too mad, mother would threaten him with the poker and say
,
“I
’
ll guzzle you if you don’t stop this carryon”. This rarely happened anyw
ay because whiskey was too dear
and went down his gullet too fast, unlike a Guinness which he could make last all night when needed.

My father seemed to have no ego at all and
,
after marriage, no drive for fortune or fame either. In a cri
sis he always took the easy non-
confrontational route and perhaps that’s why he had no enemies, because he was never a threat to anyone
. A
ll he ever wanted to do was play his music. His life was hard but very interesting and he seemed to me to be more of a friend than a father.  My earliest memory of him is of me being a very young child and both of us sl
eeping together in the same bed
in the front room where my mother almost shot him in her bullets incident.  On that occasion I remember him holding me and asking me if I was warm enough,
which I wasn’t. I was
feeling strange, as by then Nannie had me conditioned into believing that it was she who should be holding me.

He was a man too fond of his drink
.
I never understood if he drank from desperation or just as a cop out, but in truth it was probably a combination of both, beginning with Nannie stealing me from him and my mother.  He always had a listening ear though, and he would give an apparently ‘all knowing’
opinion on how something worked.
I always listened with great pleasure to his infinite knowledge
,
especially of electronics.

I think Lill was his first favourite followed closely by Tishie
,
who ended up being his number one, but Hugh always secretly loved him the most I feel. It’s impossible to ever know what my siblings thought as we grew up, and all I really know for sure is how I felt at the time
,
and most of the time I was not happy with how he drank. Eunice and the father had a somewhat stormy relationship I felt, as like me she had no time at all for the bottle, and yet he loved her like us all and he told me so on many an occasion.

My father was a jack of many trades but he was primarily a musician, later a painter, a hackney driver, and finally a general driver and handyman.  There are times when I try to remember something good that we all did as a family
,
but I can’t remember one thing. Even though he had a hackney car, he never took us once to the seaside.  We never went as a family anywhere together. I never remember him and my mother go
ing out together for an evening
as a husband and wife, certainly not in the early days. I do remember one terrible incident though, an incident that remained with me since childhood. It happened at a time when Big Ky
rl had decided to start up his c
inema hall in Buttevant. Advertising boards did not exist then and Big Kyrl
,
in keeping with his mantra
,
saw nothing wrong with turning our mother
’
s little house into one large advertising display for his upcoming films
. H
e wanted to put his huge movie advertising posters up on our front window. Naturally mother absolutely refused to allow this, and as father had been promised money for a few pints of Guinness, he insisted on putting the first poster up, so up it went, and from then on, any passer-by on the street would be immediately transported to Monument Valley an
d the Wild West or
Humphrey
Bogart’s
Casablanca. It took up the entire front window and our front room suddenly beca
me as dark as night. O
ur two walls and a roof had then been reduced to a billboard. When this happened I was a very young boy of about six.  I saw my mother go wild and her temper boiled over. In a fit of rage she climbed up onto the window shelf to tear it down
,
and to my horror and to my father’s eternal shame
,
he got a bucket of cold water and I saw him throw it up at her. She slipped and fell back
,
tearing the poster to bits as she fell onto the old couch. To this day that single act made no sense at all to me
. W
hy had he thrown water up at my mother? It made no sense. He was not as strong physically as she was, and his nature was gentle, but the need for alcohol overcame all on that day, and I suppose this bucket of water was his only method of retaliation. It was a shameful thing to do and I have never been able to forget it. I got so upset that I ran across the street to my Nannie
’
s house and ran upstairs to my room crying. It was my earliest experience of domestic violence, but was by no means my last.   Sometimes there was the usual shouting and roaring between mother and father and the occasional threatening of a guzzling by the mother, but for the most part I was sheltered from it by living in Nannie
’
s house, and many homes were far more violent than ours. There were times too in Nannie
’
s house where violence happened as well. On one such occasion Michael couldn’t take any more of Nannie
’
s ravings and he threw a kettle of boiling tea a
t her. It spattered her and did
no more damage, but it shocked both him and me so much that I think it never happened again.

Father’s great love for music bubbled over and it was inevitable that he would form a dance band known as the Hugh Cahill Orchestra.  This was a ‘big band’ in the style of the Glenn Miller Orchestra and he played the same kind of music as well. His band was a huge success. Father played from one end of the country to the other
,
but he seems to have avoided the cities, concentrating on rural Ireland for his livelihood.

I know that his only lean times were during Lent, when the Catholic Church in their infinite wisdom felt that Ireland’s population should have no entertainment and dances were ‘forbidden’. It did not seem to worry them how the musicians might feed their families at that religious time, but that was how it was in those days. Then pop music appeared on the scene.

I vaguely remember the pop music era beginning and the father’s band feeling the pinch at the time. It must be difficult for anyone to accept your time has passed, but when it’s your livelihood that’s also passing, then it’s all the more terrible. My mother was no help either
, and if anything she was totall
y destructive as regards the band.  She didn’t like the idea of the band boys arriving in late at night and then dumping their instruments into the front room of her home, but this was a normal event for a band.  They were out all night, slept all-day and rose up at 4 p.m. for a new day
’s gigs, but unless you understoo
d this you could be driven mad
because no normal housewife routine fits that pattern of living.

Mother almost takes pleasure in describing how destructive she was to her husband’s livelihood.  One day she was rolling up her blinds on the
‘
Wild West window
’
when she stepped back into a drum kit and wrote off the base dr
um. I
t was so damaged it could not be repaired and father had to buy a new one.

She next wrote off his piano accordion on another day with her crazy form of matches
that we christened
‘string lighters’. At the fire grate she lit up a stringy bit of paper so as to light her ‘fag’. Then she threw this paper back into the fire, except that it didn’t go back into the fire, instead it landed on father
’
s accordion which he had been airing near the grate. It fell on top of the ivory keyboard and up went more of his living in a blaze
. T
here was absolutely no repairing of that instrument either.

On yet another occasion
she decided to clean his saxophone
,
and not having any idea about instruments, she threw all the black pads for the keys into the fire, thinking these w
ere dirty things. F
ather was not much better for letting his instrument become so filthy
. T
hat cost a fortune to repair
,
but at least he didn’t have to buy a new saxophone.

He was booked to play for a very
important Hunt Ball in Bandon town, and on the day of the ball, she burnt a hole
right through both legs of
his only black striped trousers
, by leaving the iron on it too long
. 
Father then had to go and borrow a black pant’s from Kyrl, who was at least a foot taller, and roll up the extra length inside the legs. It might well have been a Hunt Ball, but fathers pants now looked more like
jodhpur’s
, and one could believe he was taking his gig far too serious. It certainly was not the fashion for the Leader of the Band.
She tells that story with an almost evil pride and smiles as she does so. I think she must have hated his dance band
despite it being their livelihood
.

The father was quite a humorous man too.  He was not a joke teller but enjoyed a good story. His lifetime friend was a man called Arthur O’Lowery.  Arthur was a brilliant mechanic and he and the father were drinking buddies.  Father told a story of a time when Arthur and he were testing a motor bike that Arthur had just repaired. They went for a spin down the Charleville road at high speed and the bike seemed to drive just fine, so they retired to Herlihy
’
s pub where they got 'langers' drunk. Later on and by then totally blotto, they mounted up for the return journey to Buttevant. After a few attempts to get the bike started, it spluttered into life and once again they took off at high speed, heading home to Buttevant. As they neared the town something happened to the bike. Father used to say it was the petrol pipe came loose
,
but in any case the bike actually caught fire, and a flame soon shot out from under my father
’
s legs. He had to stic
k his legs out like a butterfly’
s wings so the fire wouldn’t burn him. The bike had now b
ecome a rocket as Arthur sped
up to burn off the fuel
,
fearing an explosion. Father was roaring at Arthur to stop, but Arthur was just roaring drunk, and had already decided to keep going. They tore straight through the town with hair and flames flying behind them, and headed on for Mallow.  At Ballybeg there is a small lake just in off the road and it was here that Arthur took serious action and drove their bike straight into the lake. They fell off into the water, but the fire went out without the expected explosion. To me, that was one of the funniest things my dad ever told me. I could see the two of them racing through the town with a flame going out from behind th
em, both sozzled drunk,
panic stricken, and heading for Mallow. It’s like a thing you’d see in the movies, except it was almost the norm for those two mad men. The whole town was talking about it and Nannie said to mother
,
“Didn’t I tell you that fire is following them Cahills
. N
o matter, sure they are all useless anyways”
.