Two Walls and a Roof (31 page)

During those learning years I had many close calls, getting almost electrocuted at least twice, but the closest one was completely outside my control. I was always guaran
teed a spin home on a Wednesday
from the father’s best friend, Arthur O’Lowery.  Arthur was a lunatic driver too, and he was always in a rush home, especially during his dinner hour. He was a mechanic in the local garage, and would take different cars and vans home to Buttevant so as to test drive them.  On this particular day he had a small van with a split back door and he was taking me and a local girl home.  The girl was already seated as Arthur slowed down to pick me up. He did not stop though, but slowed to a crawl
.
I ran along behind him
,
pulling op
en the back door and jumping in. Th
en Arthur
,
thinking I was inside, pressed his boot to the floor and accelerated off at high speed.  I couldn’t hold on, and fell out the back door straight between the wheels of an oncoming truck, which fortunately was not being driven by Arthur’s brother. It screeched to a halt with onlookers almost f
a
inting in shock. As I quickly got u
p from beneath the number plate,
the driver
, by then as white as a ghost,
kept apologising and asking me if I was alright. I assured him that I was, but that I had now lost my spin home as Arthur was half way to Buttevant by then figuring I would be ok. I think the truck driver was so relieved
that he had not killed me,
he took me home that day, probably thanking God for the rest of th
e day as well. To me
it was not even worth mentioning to Nannie, but I can still see the front of the truck
’
s number plate.

As the years passed by I became really good at this television work, simply because I loved every second of it. My aim was always to get the mother out from under the stress of her TV rental payments, and the fear of its repossession.  Eventually I made her a television set from scrapped bits I had gotten from Larry.  This was a hybrid set. It was a concoction of lots of bits from various models of TVs.  It had a Philips chassis, a Sobell transformer, and mainly a Pye body. It was so unusual that I could not get a back cover to fit it at all, so it was highly dangerous as well. Initially it sat on a wooden box on her kitchen floor
,
taking up precious space, but the father was over the moon, now owning his own set.  The mother was afraid of her life of getting electrocuted, and she kept on at the father t
o ‘sink it’ in under the stairs
where it would take up less space, and would be safer.  I di
dn’t want him to do this at all for two good reasons:
one was that I u
sed to steal the valves from it
for my own growing private fixing jobs, and the second and more serious one was that the Sobell transformers were famous for going on fire for no reason, and I didn’t want the house to burn down and confirm Nannie
’
s belief ‘that fire follows them Cahills’.  I couldn’t tell mother my fears though, as she would immediately get rid of my concoction, and
father would be devastated. S
he got her way
and for a long time
I used to ha
ve nightmares, seeing her house
and all in it going go up in smoke. These dreams got so bad that eventually I made her a better set, and the terrors stopped.  At the sta
rt it was a real mystery to her
how her TV set was even more unreliable than the rental ones, but she used to get consolation from the fact that her son John had made it for her
,
and she told everyone that too.  The truth was that it was extremely reliable, but I was increasing my ‘private customer’ base, and stealing an ever increasing number of valves weekly. I’d sneak in and whip out a valve, and later mother would call me and say
,
“John, the old TV is gone off again
. A
ny chance you’d fix it for us
?
” I know the father was not fooled by any of this, but he never let on.  For a long time I managed to avoid being spotted, but in the end she caught me doing the robbing and the game was up. All she did then was laugh, proud that her son was becoming a business man as well as an engineer, but I never stole another valve from her after that.

Like every town in Ireland in those days, there were always some really hard luck cases around. Poverty was the norm for the vast majority of the people, but some were far worse off than others, even us.  I have a vivid memory of one of these poor people. She was a young woman of about twenty five or so, and I feel that there had been some awful trouble in her life before she arrived in Buttevant.  This woman lived up at the top of our lane in an area known as New Street
. I think she was called Mrs
Flint or some such name. I don’t think she was ever married and she just seemed to have arrived in the town overnight
,
or at least that’s my recollection of it. It looked like she had no family, was totally alone in the world, and no one seemed to care about her.

I’m quite sure that she barely scraped by, living from day to day, e
eking out a miserable existence
in a town of little charity and no social welfare either. She had no income that I knew of, but I think initially she used to do a bit of house cleaning when she could get it. This continued until the moralistic hypocrites of the town saw to it
that this work dried up
, because they believed
she had ‘callers’;
gentlemen of loose morals who provided her with some extra source of income, though I’d be loathe to believe it was true.  I remember her as the most gentle of souls, so meek and quiet. She wore an old coat, sometimes a small shawl, and always she had a dark silky scarf tied round her head.
For some reason, I have always felt that kind of a look signified dire poverty
to me
, I don’t know why that is but it’s always a picture of misery in my mind.
She constantly bor
e a look of sadness on her face
and she seemed to be lonely all her life, having few friends, but my
mother was one of those few at least
.

Despite the
moralistic
rumours, we never spoke ill of her at home, as neither the mother nor
my
father would have a bad word said against her. The mother seemed to have taken a liking to her
from the beginning
and to be honest so did my father. He was always a man who felt sorry for the less well off in our society, being a classic example of those people himself, and mother just saw her as
yet
another
poor
struggling woman
,
a bit like herself
in those hard days. Mrs Flint was often talked about in Buttevant
. I’m sure in those times
its people were typical of those of any other small town in Ireland, no better or worse,
with
gossip
being
a
kind of
relief for those who have little, and Mrs F
lint’s ‘profession’ was juicy news
. 
While playing handball with Hurley I often saw
her coming down the lane with her little canvas bag, her old tweed coat and that haunted sad look
in her eyes
. Hurley would cat call and I would tell him to shut up
,
and once we almost came to blows over his insults to her
.  Even then as a so-
called tough teenager, that sad
look
she bore
always affected me
, b
ut some years later I was to see it at close range in an incident
that was
organised by my mother.

This event came about in a strange way, and it is one of the few
deed
s I did in my life which gave me a really great feel
ing inside. I don’t know why, but
I always seemed to have had a soft spot for this poor woman subconsciously, even though we never once spoke in a conversation.  If she was passing
by
we might just say hello, or give a nod to eac
h other as she shuffled down the ballalley
lane.  One day while visiting
my
mother, she asked me if I would do her a great favour and have a look at the old television set that Mrs. Flint had been given by the St. Vincent de Paul. She said that it had been broken for about a year, and there was no way she could ever afford to get it fixed.  O
f course I agreed to look at it
and soon arrived
up
at
Mrs.
Flint
’
s little house at the top of the lane. Her house
which could be more accurately described as a hovel
had a rusty tin roof
with a small door and
two
small
windows
. O
ne of them had a broken pane of glass
in it and the frame was rotting
. She had covered the hole
in the glass
with an old bit of cardboard and it stuck through the frame unevenly. The other window had an old lace curtain strung across it with two large holes in the lace, but at least it had glass and gave light into her tiny
little
bedroom. From the outside
,
her home looked like a picture of misery and belonged to the era of Charles Dickens
and I did not like what was facing me at all
.

I knocked at the door, which was a half door if I remember correctly, and when it opened in, she seemed very surprised to see me. I said I was
there to look at her television
because my mother had asked me to, and before she could protest I was inside in a flash.  I didn’t want to make a big issue of this job as I knew she had no way of paying for it, and so I had planned to pretend to b
e in a rush and fix it fast, then
leave before she knew what had happened.  Almost immediately sh
e said that she couldn’t pay me. I dismissed it as
nothing of importance, saying my mother was looking after any payment needed.  She was still protesting
saying she didn’t want my mother to be out of pocket either.  But ignoring her
protests
I whipped off th
e back of the old set, telling
her that I loved fixing things
,
and that it was she who was doing me the favour by allowing me have a go at such an old set. This was not going to be a fast fix however, as there was not even a spark of light coming from inside her television
set
.

My words seemed to pacify her, and as I exam
ined the set
she went off tidying and I got a chance to covertly look around at h
er house. She had a small table
which was very clean, being covered with a cheap oil cloth. She had two old chairs and some kind of wooden cabinet, not too unlike my mother’s one in our back kitchen
,
and that was it. I
was embarrassed at this poverty
as she was obviously way worse off than we had ever been. She seemed to sense my embarrassment as an awkward quietness descended upon us. Then
,
as if to break the ice, she offered me a cup of tea. I said I’d be delighted
,
and as she moved around I glanced across into her bedroom.  It seemed to have had no door to
it, and it felt dingy and cold
looking. There were some old coats thrown on the bed and no blankets at all that I could see. An old bulb that was covered in cobwebs hung from the rafters
,
and I'm sure it had not shown light for years. Overall her little place did look tidy but was very
,
very cold. This co
ldness pervaded the whole house. I
felt
the
damp clinging to my bones, and I shivered both inside and out.

I wondered how she bore such misery day after day, and what she did with her time. From my dimming memory, there seemed to have been a spark of
a
fire coming from some kind of fireplace near the television set. This fireplace was really just a group of old concrete blocks forming a grate
,
and a black chimney. The spark must have been only a small spark as the coldness was beginning to get to me
,
and I never suffer from
the
cold
but I couldn’t shake it off
.

Her old television was even worse than the worst of crocks. Over the years I had seen all kinds of junky TV sets, but this was the worst I had ever seen. All its fuses were blown and it had soot all over it
inside as well as outside
, no doubt from its proximity to the spark of fire, the smoke, and the slab of stone it sat on.  I couldn’t fix it a
t all, and this was annoying me
as each time I got one part going a new problem soon arose in a different part. She said in her gentle voice
,
“Your tea is ready
,
” never calling me by my name, but perhaps she didn’t even know it.

I sat at her little table and I wondered how I was going to tell her that I had failed. This failure was a big shock to me personally, as I had never faile
d to get a television set going
up until then. Yet it was never going to be right and I knew it. The irony was that she need
ed a television set for company
far more than anyone I knew, and she could least afford one. 

She poure
d the tea from a very black pot
which was battered with age. I watched the weak tea fall into a clean
,
white
,
chipped cup that had a flower painted on the side of it. A half empty milk bottle supplied us with milk and she began to pour her own te
a into an even more chipped cup;
the guest had been given the best china. Why I remember these little details has always puzzled me, yet I do. I looked around for a sugar bowl as I liked sugar
, and
realizing what I wanted,
she
said
,
“I'm sorry, I don’t have any sugar tonight
. D
o you take it”?
I lied and said I hated it,
that it was real bad for you as it was poisoning half the country, and we were all better off without it. She gave me a knowing smile and sat down opposite me. I just could not tell her that her TV was never going to be right, so I said I’d have to take it away if she allowed me to, as it was very ‘sick’
,
and I tried to make a joke out of
it. She didn’t laugh though.
I suppose
she was wondering
what else could go wrong for her, but again she asked me about the cost, saying she didn’t wa
nt my mother to be paying her bills
. She added the words, “Times are very hard these day
s, you know”. I nodded in agreement, finished my tea and told her n
ot to worry about the money. T
hen
I left with her box of junk.

My mother was very upset when I told her that I could not fix Mrs Flint
’
s television, as she believed that if I was able to make her a set, then surely I could fix anything.
I tried to explain but it did no good.
Then she said
,
“John, you’ll do something for her for sure, wont you
? Y
ou must, and I know you will
. S
ure she’s worse off than ourselves, God help us”.

I did do something for her
. F
irst thing I did was to dump the bloody set. I told Larry I needed to build yet another television set, and as usual he didn’t give a hang what I did, even though I was using his parts,
his time, and I was his workman. I
t was as if he knew I needed to do this and actually offered to help me if needed.  It took me a full week, but I made yet another TV set. It had a small ‘Sobell’ body and mostly ‘Sobell’ parts inside it, but it was again a hybrid as usual, made from many different makes and models and bits and pieces. I figured that if the ‘Sobell’ transformer went on fire, it was already sitting in her fireplace, and at worst it would give her heat while it burned, as she sure had no possessions to worry about.

L
ooking back on it now, in today’s days of mass production and high technology
,
it was a great achievement, but came easy to me then, as according to the mother, “Sure he’s gifted”. But I attributed it to my methods of ‘doctoring’ developed in her attic some years earlier.

On a bleak Saturday night I arrived back at Mrs. Flint’s door. She welcomed me in, seemingly very happy to see me. Then I placed my new box of magic on her 'stone' table and turned it on. As it warmed up, I plugged in her dodgy looking aerial. The picture came on but it looked terrible. It was barely visible
,
flickering and rolling, but
she got so excited saying, “Great, great, oh tis great
and so bright too”. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, as the picture was almost lost in the snow on the screen and no one could possibly watch it.  Her aerial was useless, so I got some cable from the car and made my own version of a ‘cats ears aerial’
. T
hen she really did have a good pictu
re. Mrs Flint became speechless -
literally. It was as if she had never seen a real picture before in her life
,
and probably she hadn’t with that useless aerial.  She seemed over the moon with happiness, shaking and rocking back and forth in her old chair saying
,
“Oh my, oh my, it
’
s so clear, so clear, thank you, thank you, thank you so much”.
She said these words without taking her eyes off the screen, the poor woman was actually hypnotized.