THE SHINY RED HONDA
BY
Tom O’Brien.
(c) 2013 Tom O’Brien
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed by a newspaper, journal or magazine.
First printing
Published by tomtom-theatre
Chapter one
I was thirteen tall and gangly when I first pulled on long trousers. What a relief that was; I was the longest streak of misery you were ever likely to see in the short ones. It was my last year at the National school in Newtown and the Master used every opportunity to drag me around the classroom shouting “just because you wear long trousers now O’ Brien, don’t think it makes you any smarter”. I wasn’t and it didn’t, but the Master was a law unto himself so I just kept my gob shut. There were discussions about what, if any, further education I was to get. Dungarvan was out I heard my father say; it was too far away and the fares were too expensive. That only left the ‘Tech in Portlaw – and that seemed to totter from one financial crisis to the next.
We were poor I guess; no running water, no toilets, to TV, no car…you name it we didn’t have it. But then, money wasn’t as important as it is nowadays. If you had enough to live on you were doing well. If you didn’t you wouldn’t starve because the countryside was abundant in most of the things needed to survive. Even the poorest cottage had half an acre of land attached, and enough spuds, cabbage and other vegetables could be grown to keep a family from the poorhouse. Hens provided eggs every day, a pig could be fattened and killed; and if you couldn’t afford turf or coal, well, there was plenty of wood scattered about…
My father worked in the Tannery in Portlaw, a Dickensian sprawl that tried to hide itself in the dense woodlands that ringed the town. It was fronted by massive wrought iron gates and had a lodge that was occupied by a gateman called Foskin and his buck-toothed daughters. A large square, bigger than the town itself it seemed, separated it from the streets that ran away from its outer rim. With names likes Georges Street, Brown Street and William Street the English influence was clear, and the only thing that differentiated one house from another was the colour of the doors. But then, it was a company town and they were company houses.
The first time I ever visited the Tannery was in our ass and cart with my father, to collect some empty barrels he had permission to remove. He took me to see the tanning department and showed me the bench where he worked. Here, he trimmed the hides prior to tanning, standing at a wooden table all day with his friend Bobby Haughton, dragging hides from a nearby pile, chopping the bad bits off. The place stank of dead meat and the pile of skins was crawling with maggots. They could have been abattoir workers; gowned up in their long aprons and wellingtons, constantly sharpening their hooked, wooden-handled knives.
Hew was up at six every morning, breakfasted and gone by seven. The six mile journey was negotiated on his high Nellie, which had only one gear and had to be pushed uphill. He always wore bicycle clips and carried a pump and a repair kit in his lunch bag. Occasionally, when snow and ice made the road treacherous, he walked to work. A day off was unthinkable.
Portlaw had a bad reputation, like that of a loose woman. Although he worked there all his life he never socialised or mixed with the locals. He certainly never drank there. And mother would never dream of doing her weekly shopping there. People talked about Portlaw behind its back, yet on reflection it wasn’t any worse than Kilmac. Perhaps it was envy; it had the Tannery, the biggest employer in the region; it was surrounded by the magnificent estate of Curraghmore; it had the patronage of the titled gentry like the Marquis of Waterford. And of course it boasted hurling and football teams that invariably kicked the shit out of the lumbering hopefuls of Newtown, Ballydurn and the outlying areas.. Mostly though it was the ‘townie’ culture that got up the country-folks noses; it was only a few miles from the city and ‘city-ways’ had rubbed off to some extent.
Its reputation never bothered me. I did manage to secure a place at the ‘Tech there and for eighteen months cycled daily, free-wheeling the last few miles from the Five Cross Roads down into the valley that housed it. The ’Tech consisted of a couple of rooms in a large house on the edge of the Square, where Mr Timmons taught us carpentry, ( we made shoe-boxes by the dozen, learned all about dove-tail joints, and made glue from boiled cow-hooves) and a tall, willowy lady taught us the rudiments of book-keeping. Neither pastime subsequently did me much good.
We put our free time to good use, invading the forbidden territory of the Tannery, watching from behind bushes and trees, the activities going on in the distance. One large shed was stacked with bales of various-coloured rubber and was ideal for playing the games of cowboys and Indians that we favoured. This rubber (I subsequently learnt ) was the raw material that was used in the moulding of the shoe-soles that were churned out by the thousand in the rubber department. The Tannery itself produced no shoes, just soles, insoles and rolls of coloured leather.
Sometimes we sat on the banks of the river Clodagh, reading our Kit Carson and Johnny Mack Brown comics, or practised our fast draws in the crouched style favoured by our heroes. My favourite weapon was a long-barrelled Colt 44 with ivory handles and a proper revolving chamber, which I had saved for nearly a year to buy. I took to wearing it to school, tucked inside the waistband of my trousers, until the day Miley Moore took it off me and broke it demonstrating his prowess as an outlaw. Attempting to side-swipe me, he missed and clubbed a rock instead. One half of it landed in the river, never to be seen again.
There were other diversions. Portlaw girls were supposed to be fast, something we discovered to be true, for no matter how hard we chased them we never managed to catch up. Sometimes when the weather was nice the girls from the bakery sat sunning themselves on the opposite bank. We admired their muscular arms and their floury faces, for very little else was visible beneath the long white coats and the elasticised head-coverings.
Our learning curve may not have been very steep but the road home certainly was. The homeward journey was hell; the long climb back to the Five Roads couldn’t have been more tiring if it had been up the face of the Comeragh Mountains themselves. Portlaw wasn’t in a valley I had often heard my father mutter, it was at the bottom of a bloody pit.
There was also the little matter of getting safely past a particular farm. A seventh son of a seventh son lived there and all sorts of peculiar happenings went on inside. Sick animals and sick people traipsed in and out at all hours, ringworm was cured, and one woman who hadn’t said a word for twenty years suddenly started talking so much that her neighbours threatened to take her back and get the cure reversed. It was best to bless oneself and cycle quickly past.
The Five Roads was a kind of staging post, where we all recovered our breaths before going our different ways. A little whitewashed shop stood in the vee of two of the roads, where sweets and lemonade could be had over the half-door. Miley Moore called it a shebeen and said you could get bottles of Porter and poteen there too if you were that way inclined. We tried this once and the old woman who owned the shop chased us out, with her besom swinging. As we all took different routes she didn’t know which of us to follow, so she just stood in the middle of the road shaking her broom at us.
I eventually followed in my father’s footsteps. My name had been down in the Tannery for years and as soon as I was old enough, and a vacancy occurred, I was summoned. I never gave it a second thought. It was expected of me, and I suppose my father had pulled a few strings to get me in.
………………………………………..to be continued
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