Two Walls and a Roof (9 page)

The Bishop
blessed Nannie and
heard her Confession, and after this
was
all
done, he assured her
that the Gates of Heaven were already opened for her
,
and that all
of
her Sins were
now
forgiven
. Poor
Nannie was so impressed with his
Blessing that she asked
him
what did she need to
do to be sure she was saved
and qui
ck as a flash the Bishop says “
Yerra give me and the Lord a tenner
, sure you have nothing to worry about
,
your going straight to the Lord whenever he calls you
, and sure that wont be for years
”. Nannie
was beaming and
f
elt that ten pounds was a
very
small price to pay for Eternal Salvation
,
so she paid him
in cash.  T
hey
all
left just in time for the last bus
to
Mallow
.

Before the Bishop
got on the bus,
he
again
thanked mother and gave her his
most
personal
and powerful
Blessing for free
. He said he was doing this
because of her kindness as a Good
Shepherdess
. Mother was delighted and
swore she felt the power
of his blessing
, but
then she
thought no more of it
and went in and challenged her Henry, who thought he had escaped
.

The Bishop arrived in Mallow and
over the next few days he
said Masses, and
heard Confessions
as well,
and generally did what celebrity Bishops do
, he became the talk of the town
. He collected
money
and prayed and so did his cohort
,
the Nun
and this continued for some days I believe. In the mean
time, mother was working in Kit’
s bar and a farmer that she knew well came in for a drink. They
began
chatting and he told her that his wife was not well
,
and if only
s
he could have been there when the Bishop was in town
,
he migh
t have been able to make her
better. Mother then got an inspiration
al idea
for
making
a few bob
,
and told the farmer that she
herself
had been given a
most
‘
Special Blessing
’
by his Holiness the Bishop
,
and that she was sure she still carried the power of it on her forehead. The farmer asked how that might help his wife
,
and my mother said that if he paid her a half crown
,
which was about a quarter of a pound
,
that she would rub a
news
paper on her head and the power would go into
it
,
and he could
then
rub it on his wife to make her
get
better.
I call it her
‘
theory of transference
’
.
The farmer agreed and they went over home and she made him
some
tea
. Then she
rubbed her head with a bit of
the Cork Examiner
tearing off a corner of it
and giving
it to the farmer. He paid and left
,
and two days later he assured
my mother of the
great i
mprovement i
n his wife. He said that he
had told his wife
all about
my
mother’s
story
,
and
that
after hearing it
she got
immediately
better the moment the paper touched her
skin
. Mother was delighted
at that news
. A few days later
,
the Bishop and h
is cohort were
arrested in Mallow as confidence tricksters. I fell around the place laughing when I heard
about
this
, as mother
kept
on
trying to assure me that she could still feel the power
,
‘
now and again
’
. What an amazing instrum
ent our mind is and Science has often shown
the power of the placebo, but I would have to que
stion how a piece of The Cork Examiner
could carry anything other than news.

She always ha
d a ‘fag’. N
o matter what happened
,
she had a ‘fag’ at hand or a part of a one
,
known to her as a
‘
butt
’
. She had this crazy habit of lighting it with a big string of paper, which she would stick in the fire in the kitchen. She would tear off the paper
,
roll it into a kind of string
,
light the fag
,
then throw it back into the fire. She set
the chimney on fire many times
(
to the father
’
s horror
)
by doin
g this, and she also burnt his a
ccordion by the same method. But what I remember most about her string lighters was her insane gas incident.

She had a gas cooker in later years and as usual it was a fire hazard, but my mother herself
was worse than any hazard. N
umerous times we all saw her light the gas cooker with her string lighter. Her method was insane. She would first turn the gas full on in the oven, then go into the kitchen and light up her paper, then calmly open the oven door and stick in the lighting paper. There would be a bit of a small explosion
,
but the oven would light and all would be well. This continued for years and years, and we all gave out to her for doing it. It made no difference, she just continued as usual until the day when a knock came to the door. She had turned on the gas as usual and hearing the knock, out she went to the door and forgot abo
ut the gas being turned on full. A
fter a considerable chat at the door, she
realize
d that she had forgotten to light the oven. By then our back kitchen was a potential bomb. Unthinki
ng, she lit up her string paper
and opened the oven door to a massive flash and explosion. A large burst of flame shot out and she fell back on her ass. It blew off all the hair on her fringe but no other personal damage was done, but I bel
ieve the oven door blew off
as did a bit of the wall. The only reason she escaped at all was because our back kitchen was more akin to a sieve than an airtight room, and most of the gas had already escaped.  Even though she got a really good fright
,
she soon returned to her pyromania and it remained so until she rose to an electric cooker.

I’m sure the love every mother feels for her children is almost universal, and when you have money
,
worldly goods and security
,
it’s easy to give your flock a good time. But when you have nothing, when you don’t know where your next meal will come from, when there is no social welfare worth mentioning, then the true test of a mother
’
s love begins.

Even though my Nannie did help my mother, it always seemed to me to be a begrudging help, never really given with love or compassion at another’s misfortune. This made it all the worse for the mother when she had to ask for a few shillings from the Nan. Today as I write this account
,
I only now begin to
realize
the stress my mother endured and never once complained. I can only imagine how she must
have felt daily
for years and years. Life was very cruel to such a woman, but still she never gave up on us
,
her children. She lived for the day when we would be able to fend for ourselves, which of course did eventually come. Looking back on her many gifts to us now, I realized that one of her greatest ones was encouragement. She was always willing to encourage us
,
even if she didn’t understand a bit about what we were doing. One of her best saying
s for me was, “
John do all that you can when you are young, because when you
’
r
e
old, all you will have are your memories”. I think it’s the best advice a parent can give to a child, and even though she preached it, she never allowed herself to do much.

My mother never hit me or beat me once in her whole life, nor do I remember her hitting any of us even though I used to drive her crazy while arguing and fighting with Kyrle. She often threw me out and would say
‘
get back over to Nannie
’
s
’
, so as to keep the peace, but she had a way of getting you to do what she wanted without violence
,
and I loved that in her
. M
y father was the very same.

In our school days, she never once had a negative view on how well we did
. A
ll she would say was, “Do your best and that’s enough”
.
I don’t think she was ever a great scholar herself, and because of that she was at a loss to understand or help us with homework as we got older, but we never minded
. W
hen we could
,
we would try to draw her into a discussion or more usually an argument, just to hear her ‘Nul
-
c
-
ar bomb’ clanger. Her humour was paramount
. E
ven in bad times she would laugh, and she had numerous stories of her life with our father, usually referred to as
‘
her Henry
’
. I always got great pleasure from these tales, no matter how often I heard them.

One story she told of her courting days with
my dad
fits the two of them well. She and
‘her Henr
y
’
went to Cork City for a day in a home
-
built car. This car was a total wreck. It had a Guinness label pasted to the windscreen as a tax disk. This was very fitting in hindsight based on the amount of money father had paid over to Guinness at Kit
’
s bar.  As they drove down Patrick’s Street
,
the floor on her side literally fell out onto the street. She had to continue with her knees up on the dashboard and see a huge hole appear in the floor. I heard that the floor of the car was
actually made from a metal sign advertising cigarettes:
‘John Player’ or s
uch like. Later on the same day
their back wheel flew off and passed them out as they rounded a bend on the way home. As she told us this story, it was as if she took pride in surviving this potential death trap and she would then continue with yet another story of life with Hugh Cahill.

She was s
o tolerant to all our devilment. S
he would feign being mad at us
, but we saw through it.
I think it
’
s this free
dom to express our true selves
that has helped us all in later years, and the mother never denied us that freedom
. I
n fact she encouraged it eve
ry day in her tiny little house
on the main street of Buttevant.

My mother
’
s two walls and a roof was comprised of a ground floor, a first floor and an attic. The front of the building had an area we called the shop, though it never was a shop of any kind. This shop had a settee that was pushed up against the wall on the priest’s side of the house. In the early days I remember the prie
st was a very kind friendly man.
He was big into the choirs and singing
,
and all my memories of him are very good. Father Shanahan was his name and sadly I heard he died a young man some years later. When he died
we were given a cold-
faced old priest called father Hennigan. I never liked him. He just seemed to me to be resentful of us as neighbours, and generally was unfriendly to us. Ou
r shop front was about eight fee
t long by six feet wide and here we played marbles and darts
,
depending on the mood. The dart board had to be nailed to the front door
,
wh
ich was an old wooden affair that
was rotting on the bottom due to the rain from our leaking shoot. It was the rule that when we played the darts
,
we had to bolt the front door or else you could quite literally get a
dart in the eye as you entered. T
his almost ha
ppened to father more than once
as he made his return from Kit
’
s Bar.

Travelling on in from the shop we had a door with two glass panels leading into our so
-
called living room
,
often referred to as the kitchen. One of the panels was broken and had a pot mender holding the cracked glass in place
:
a remnant of our earlier fire engine incident. The living room was tiny, about five feet wide by seven feet long. It had a table pushed up against our neighbour Eily Paddy
’
s wall, and there was a fireplace on the priest’s side. A small window faced east and would freeze your ass off with the draft before father added on a back kitchen some years later. Beneath this window father had his throne. It was his favourite place in the whole house outside of his bed. The throne was made from an old car seat stolen from Big Kyrl
’
s shed down the street, and beside this chair mother had placed a tiny little table with a shelf underneath for papers and books. The window ledge behind father
’s head
was deep and two small curtains hung from a wire strung across the window as a decoration. These curtains
,
together with papers and books as well as an old valve radio with no back, were father
’
s defence against what he called the ‘East
w
ind’
.
After a session in Kit
’
s he would arrive in home saying, “Jekus Boys, tis the East
w
ind again tonight, God help us all
. S
ure we’re frozen with the cowld, put on the ould kettle there Belenda for a sup of tea”. Then he would have a poke at the tiny little fire that mother would be carefully hoarding all day. This usually led her to say
,
“Henry will you leave the fire alone, that block has to last me all night
,” t
o which father would almost always answer with the same retor
t, “Boys o'boys, O'Brien has no
where to go”
.
He would say this with a kind of drama which we all loved and knew he was joking. Mother would smile and put on the kettle for tea
,
and on a good night
,
a rasher as well. Then the chats would begin and we would all argue and talk for hours until it was late. Finally
,
as if on queue
,
someone would say
,
“And what about the Last Supper
?
”
T
hen father would rise up and go out to the back kitchen and fry  up another few rashers if we had them. He would arrive in with the food on a plate for us all to share between us and I clearly remember the great taste of a rasher in bread washed down with a cup of the mother’s tea. One time father fried these rashers in a cream that mother had been using to cure varicose veins. That night we all saw the bubbles on the rashers but ate them down anyway, and it was days before we found out what he had done. In his defence, father swore the cream was in a butter tub, so he was blameless, and it’s a wonder we are all still alive.

This little living room also had the sta
irs going up to the first floor. I
t had a ninety degree bend on it as you went up, and even a small person had to bend down low or bang their head on the wall. Father always maintained that if he made that hole in the wall any bigger, the whole house would fall down.

The first floor had two bedrooms and a further even tinier stairs went up to the attic. Originally our granduncle
,
Johnnie Cahill
,
lived in the house and later moved up to this attic. His bed was a big four poster affair and he had a beautiful writing bureau in the back corner. The front room was the place where he cooked and lived. It had a little fireplace with a stone flagstone which was solid
,
unlike Nannie
’
s cracked version.

In his latter days he would pay me and Kyrle to get him his few groceries and empty his cinders up Nannie
’
s lane
. A
gain the memory of me taking his bag of ashes up and dumping them has stayed with me always.

He would be cooking sausages on a Saturday and often while he did this, we would smell them downstairs, then get hungry and venture upstairs so as to rob one or two from his frying pan. We knew him as ‘Old Johnnie’ and I'm sure he knew we stole his sausages
,
but he never complained.

Johnnie was a beautiful hand writer and loved to write h
istory. He was a master s
tonemason by trade and built part of Belfast City Hall when it was not a time to profess Catholicism. I loved ta
l
king to him and would do so for hours and hours.

Johnnie was a wonderful hand
writer and he spent many years writing th
e history of the Cahill
s. He had done so much of this that it had filled two foolscap copybooks and it was his pride and life’s achievement. I would see him writing away at his bureau and then
,
whenever he took a break
,
we would talk about what he was doing. He said he was writing the history of the Cahill clan and would give it to us one day before he died.

One time as I sat with him I asked if these Cahills had ever done anything famous. He said that the only famous Cahill his research had ever shown up was the one at the ‘Battle of the Little Big Horn’ or
‘
Custer
’
s last stand
’
. I almost fell off the bed with delight, as by then I had read many accounts about that great battle. I bega
n to bombard him with questions:
what had the Cahill man done, how did he die, was he brave, and how did Johnnie
know all about this Cahill man?

To my amazement
,
Johnnie told me that this Cahill pe
rson had not died at the battle. Far from it;
he had survived simply because he had fought with the Indians. Now I was totally on a high. I loved the Indians and always felt they got a real bad deal, and to think that a namesake had actually fought with them was just incredible news. Johnnie was so certain of this that he burned it into my mind, and I became fascinated with trying
to know more about that battle
and the famous Cahill who fought in it.

Johnnie was true to his word
,
and some time before he died he came downstairs
one day holding his life’s work:
his completed history of the Cahill clan. By then he and mother were not getting along and he presented her with his gift saying, “Belenda, I am old now and have nothing to give to your children but their history and here it is
. I
t
’
s my life
’
s work”. She took it and threw it up on the window sill. She had seen the Cahills at work
,
being married to one of them for some years and they had not impressed her, so in a moment of unpardonable
temper, she threw his two fools
cap copybooks into her fire, thinking that she would at least get heat from their history, because she certainly didn’t get any money from it. And so ended a treasure that I have always regretted. At the very least I would have seen in my granduncle
’
s beautiful handwriting the actual account of the Big Horn Cahill. I would also be able to pass onto my own children an old man
’
s work of over eighty years. It was a gift so priceless that it
’
s always been the only thing I have had difficulty in forgiving my mother
for
. Of course she later regretted it, but what’s done is done and today my younger brother Hugh in Australia h
as taken up the research into our family history
together with my niec
e Charlotte in the Isle of Man
.

Long before we were born, Johnnie had been married to a seamstress called Lill, and they were the original owners of our two walls and a roof house. They were very happy and loved each other a great deal, but they had no children. My sister Lill was named after his wife and Johnnie took this as a great honour
. T
o his credit
,
he allowed father and mother to live on in his little home rent free until he died at the great age of ninety six. He always drank Pearl Barley when he got sick and swore it cured all ills
,
and after living to the great age of ninety six years,
something
tells me that he’s right about the Pearl Barley and I should drink it myself.

Coming up the stairs from the shop and turning left you were in the mother and father
’
s bedroom. It had a big holy picture on the wall
,
and two of the bed legs were broken and held up with books and a brick. A large part of this bed frame was made of iron and later on
,
in our ‘radio transmitting’ phase
,
we connected an earth wire to this frame to give us a better signal. We were totally unconcerned that this wire and the iron bed frame it was attached to could become fully live and potentially lethal, depending on how we plugged in our two pin plug further upstairs. Father would not even feel the shock if it became live as he see
med to be always immune to them,
and we felt what the mother didn’t know would not trouble her. Literally speaking
,
every night that
she hopped into the bed
she had a fifty fifty chance of getting shocked, but we were careful not to plug it in the wrong way and she never knew. Eventually father spotted the wire coming in the back window and made us remove it.

Father loved to read and he had a small little florescent bulb on a switch nailed to the wall above his bed. As his eyesight failed he brought this light closer and closer to his head so that in the end he was in danger of setting his hair on fire, but he didn’t care as long as he could read about Rome and Egypt and Alexander the Great.

In the front room our sister Lill used to sleep. She also had a little fireplace in her room
,
but it was only lit once ever, and that was nearly the end of our father. That account became known as the ‘bullets incident’ at home and was told and retold so often that, even though it is burned in my brain, I still find it hard to believe.  Father told me his version of the events often, and he would use it to say with a smile that our mother had tried to assassinate him many times, but that one time was the closest she ever got to pulling it off. He had begun a hackney business and was due to return from a run to Shannon airport with the famous horse trainer
,
Vincent O'Brien
,
who was a friend of his. He and the father knew each other very well and he was always good for a sizeable tip.
This particularly freezing day
father was on t
he way back from an early start
and the trip to Shannon, and mother knew that the large tip would soon end up on
Kit Roche’s bar counter
if she didn’t take some kind of action to prevent it. So she decided to light a fire in the front room and have a really nice warm bed for her Henry, far from his East wind in their back room. She felt that she could save on the coal by only lighting this fire at the very last minute.  The theory
was that father would arrive in
and she would encourage him to have ‘a rest’ in the warmer front room because she would soon be lighting the fire there, and while he was sleeping she would remove the tip from his pockets and save the money.
 
It would all have worked out perfectly except for the li
ttle matter of some 303 bullets
that
,
unknown to all
,
were then also resting in
the same fireplace. The Cahill
s had all been enlisted in the Local Defence Forces and Big Kyrl had been the quartermaster in charge of guns and ammunition. He had an endl
ess supply of 303 rifle bullets
and so did the father. It was not uncommon for them all to do a bit of shooting
,
as by then Big Kyrl was a law unto himse
lf
and did whatever he liked in the town. Over time, it appears that some live 303 bullets were left on the
mantelpiece
above the fireplace
in this tiny front room. When cleaning there, mother would throw any papers she found into the grate and
,
probably in the middle of a spring cleaning session
,
she also threw in the bullets, knowing a fire would never be lit there, or maybe she didn’t know they were live. One c
an argue the sanity of this for
ever, but I won’t be the judge of it now. God only knows how much time passed by between the cleaning spree and the day in question, bu
t father arrived back in frozen
and tired
,
and her plan worked perfectly
. H
e headed for bed and a sleep. After tucking him into the bed, she lit the fire and went off down the stairs. Father
’
s bed lay against the wall opposi
te the grate, and at that point
there was only a gap of about three feet between him and a most untimely death. Suddenly there was a tremendous bang, followed quickly by another one and then some more in quick succession. No doubt the whole street must have heard the shootout in Cahills house that day. To the listeners it must have seemed like the
OK Corral shootout was being re-
enacted in our house in Buttevant. Father began screaming and shouting
while
at the same time trying to burrow himself deep into the mattress
,
co
vering his head with the pillow
while the bullets hit the walls all around him. The coals and the papers were blown out of the grate
,
and then the bed he was hiding in actually caught fire. Then from the safety of her kitchen the mother shouts up the stairs, “Henry
,
will I get Big Kyrl
?
” Father told me that he was quite sure he was going to die that day, and that he had accepted it, but all he really wanted to know was how many bullets had she thrown in the fire. We all feel that three at most was all it could have been, but father always swore there were more. He stayed under the pillows until it looked like the shootout was over, and then he beat out the fire on the blankets and made a run for the door. Runn
ing down
stairs for water
,
he ran back up again and quenched the fires that were about to burn down the house. There was an inevitable shouting match of course, and then I think just sheer relief that he was alive.  No one would believe that a tragic accident almost took place in that room that day, and I am sure that had my parents decided on some amorous activities, then one of them would surely be dead, but fortunately they didn’t and all lived to tell us the amazing tale.