by oldborris » Tue May 11, 2004 4:17 pm
I was born, it is widely supposed. At any rate, no alternative explanation has been offered for my sudden appearance on this planet in that otherwise unmomentous year of 1925.
The place of my birth was one of those pretty whitewashed thatched-roof Irish country cottages that are so appealing to tourists and appear on so many postcards. Mine was saved from such a fate on account of having to be protected from imminent collapse by a large beam propping up one end. Hens pecked up stray bits of grain from the earth floor, and the pig food was kept in a large wooden bin which, with the lid down, and covered with tasteful bits of newspaper, doubled up as a breakfast and dinner table. In one corner was a fireplace under whose covering chimney was a wheel which activated an under-floor bellows which kept the turf fire alight when there was turf and when there was none dried cowpats supplied the deficiency.
The toilet facilities were impressive in their simplicity - full of light and warmth in the summer and of rain, snow, hail and wind in the winter situated in a rough patch of ground, called the haggard, behind the cabin. It was plentifully supplied with living, growing toilet 'paper', large double-quilted velvety dock leaves which sometimes hid bunches of nettles which one might, when in a hurry, grab together with the docks. To apply these to one's backside, however inadvertantly, was a sure sign of an early Spring.
The midwife, handing me to my mother, whispered that I was “wizened, wrinkled, bald, red-faced and had the appearance of a heavy drinker”. I distinctly heard this, tho not intended for my youthful ears [it was before the 9 o’clock watershed] and I was so shocked that I swore, there and then, that I wouldn’t touch a drop again. Naturally, I didn’t keep that promise and, naturally, you wouldn’t expect me to since I was far too young to know what I was promising. My mother was, apparently, even more shocked for, on seeing me for the first, and as it turned out, the last time, she turned over in the natal bed and died. My father, now saddled with a newborn motherless baby, if that is what I was, [there have been alternative suggestions] promptly packed me off to a Dublin orphanage, the sweetly-named Home for Little Children.
Seven years later I was rescued from the home by an elderly cousin and, at the age of 7, introduced to the delights of an Education, which I celebrated by kicking the teacher in an legitimate response to her trying to cane me for being cheeky to her, and was, inexplicably, sent home, not as the hero I knew I was, but in disgrace. Was ever a child treated so badly?. Six years later, having learned everything that there was to be learned in an Irish village school, I quitted Education, that event being celebrated by a box on the ear [the left one; it still tingles] from an irritated visiting parson to whom I had been cheeky and the injunction never to return to the village school again, an order which I was only too happy to obey.
Unencumbered at 13 with any further education I entered the World of Business [extracting nails from wooden egg boxes] and was sacked after a week as being incompetent. The truth is that after six years of learning reading, riting and rithmetic, I was too highly qualified for that job. In my next job, that of office boy to a firm of solicitors, I augmented my meagre salary of five shillings a week [25 pence in today’s money and, I think, about 16 cents in US money] by liberating books from one Dublin bookshop and selling them to another in the same street. I thought then that I was nicking them and it was only years later that I learned, to my great relief and as an enormous salve to my latent conscience, that I was, in reality, merely liberating them.
I only 'stole' the books I wanted to read before selling them and the very first book that I so liberated was the autobiography of Sean O’Casey in which he related that he had stolen his very first book from the very same bookshop – what a thrill to discover that I had, at least, that much in common with my childhood hero – and that started him on his dramatic career. It only got me as far as unsuccessful eggbox nail extraction and eventual renal failure, but what the hell! If ever you’re in Dublin and The Abbey is staging an O’Casey revival, don’t miss the iconic Shadow of a Gunman, Plough and the Stars and Juno and the Paycock altho’ you are unlikely to witness, as did the first audiences, solid Dublin citizens lining the stage to prevent a holy Irish Catholic audience from seeing an Irish actress playing the part of – who ever heard of such a thing – a prostitute!] But what else could one expect from a Protestant playwright?
The bookshop where I sold on the books was, you will be delighted to learn, the very same one to which Bob Geldorf sold his Blackrock College textbooks before each term started. Both bookshops were overshadowed by the venerable walls of the Queen Elizabeth 1 founded Trinity College where Bishop Berkeley noted that the famous tree in the quad was not there when he was not in a position to see it [I’m still trying to work that one out], where is kept the richly illustrated Book of Kells and through which I passed for the ensuing four years on a bike on my way to work. It was a great shortcut.
That way to work led eventually to England, having been virtually deported from Ireland for being cheeky to an office worker - and that was before p.c. so I must have been very, very cheeky indeed [I was!]. I had first visited England a year earlier for the Coronation of HM The Queen and returned to Ireland with pleurisy from camping all night in the rain in Hyde Park to secure a good position [just under the flower, flag and banner bedecked window of the Dorchester from which Noel Coward and a companion watched the mile-long procession which included the enormously fat Queen of Tonga [a country which had only recently rid itself of a history of cannibalism] riding in an open carriage, to the great delight of the rain-spattered populace, with her very lean Prime Minister. “Who” asked Noel’s friend “is that very lean man riding with the Queen of Tonga”. “Why” remarked Noel nonchalantly, “that is her lunch”].
Having been totally captivated by the splendour of the Coronation and having sacrificed my health on the monarchical altar, I returned a few months later accepting an offer from a sympathjetic and, I think, secretly approving, boss of a place in an English branch of the company as an alternative to being sacked as a burnt offering to the harridan who had ratted on me.
Which is why, some 44 years later I lay on a hospital bed in Charing Cross Hospital, London [which is not in Charing Cross but in Fulham Palace Road, but this posting is too short to tell you why] having my blood washed in an oversized laundry machine. I now have a four-hour thrice-weekly period in which to reflect that if I had stayed in Ireland I would be enjoying much better dialysis facilities in Dublin where I would be offered a nice cooked breakfast or lunch during dialysis and a dialysis-dedicated doctor.
But, then, what would England – and the Queen – have done without me?