We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

by Tom Phelan

  At that time, the Italian boxer Primo Carnera was still remembered as a heavyweight champion, and when Paddy Connors saw me tying on my plimsolls he shouted, “Put them up, Carnera! Look at Carnera’s muscles, lads!”

  My biceps were like knots on white thread. All the other boys gave a cheer, but there was jeer in it.

  The club had no punching bags or workout accoutrements of a boxing gym. I ran with the other boxers around the perimeter of the room several times. When the warmup was over, we queued up for our first assessment by the trainers.

  “Keep your head down and your gloves up,” the trainer commanded, and I tried to take the stance of a champion. When he asked me to punch an imaginary face and shuffle at the same time, the trainer quickly saw I had not the makings of a champion. Paddy Connors was instructed to hit me in the midriff to see how well I would hold up to a punch. I doubled over in pain, squeezing tears back into their ducts.

  I was relegated to holding up my gloved hands to the smaller boxers so they could practice their punches. The first one hit so hard that my own glove banged into my face. My nose bled.

  Meanwhile, Paddy Connors quickly established himself as the best fighter in his weight group.

  Excitement soared in the club one night when Father Flood announced he had arranged a boxing match between Mountmellick and a team in Kilkenny. The trainers had already chosen the members for our team, and everyone who belonged to the club would be brought by car to the match. In those days, Kilkenny was as distant from Mountmellick as Hong Kong is now.

  When the day of the match arrived I set out alone for the Town Hall. Dad intercepted me at the wicket door and told me to bring my boxing outfit; in case some member of the team couldn’t go, I would be able to replace him. Immediately Paddy Connors loomed in my imagination. He would crucify me if he found out I had brought my togs “just in case.”

  Dad was unable to hear my pleas not to make me bring my gear, and so holding a brown paper bag, I arrived at the Town Hall. About twenty boys reeking of nervous excitement milled around on the footpath as they waited for the cars to arrive. There was jostling and pushing and name-calling. Some of the boys pretended to be world champions and danced around with their fists up, their heads down, throwing punches into the air and snorting like young bulls meeting a receptive cow.

  Paddy Connors stood in front of me.

  “What’s in the bag, Carnera?” Silence descended on the sidewalk.

  “Nothing.” I moved the bag behind my thigh.

  “I never saw nothing. Let me look.”

  “No.”

  “I want to look at nothing.”

  A boy standing behind me snatched the bag from my fingers and threw it over my head into Paddy Connors’s arms. Connors took out my shorts and dyed vest and plimsolls.

  “Look!” He raised the trophies over his head. “Look! Carnera thinks he’s going to be the champion tonight, but he can’t fight his way out of a paper bag.” Then he threw my clothes up into the air, shouted, “Carnera is the champion!”

  The rest of the boys took up the chant and each time I bent down to pick up my gear someone dashed in and kicked it away. My plimsolls were thrown up onto a second-floor windowsill. The vest and the shorts ended up under Connors’s feet. When I tried to push him off them, he knocked me down.

  Connors was the only member of our team to win his bout with Kilkenny that night. I had silently hoped his opponent would flatten him, knock him unconscious, kill him.

  The boxing match lasted so long that it was two in the morning when we got back to the Town Hall in Mountmellick. Dad had been waiting since midnight to bring me home. As we traveled along the Canal Line, me on the bar of his bike, I tearfully told him about the troubles the brown bag had caused.

  “Would you like to give up the boxing, Tom?” Dad asked.

  That night Dad was Saint George on a high bike.

  23

  TYRANNY OF THE IRISH WEATHER

  The weather exercised a tyranny over Dad’s farming life, creating alternating periods of crisis and calm, and sometimes days of frantic intensity. The daily condition of the soil was ever present in my mind from the moment I could worry; if I was not working the soil firsthand, I was immersed in it by way of Dad’s moods, which reflected the wetness or dryness, the workability or unworkability of our fields. But even during the occasional weeks of continuous sunshine, Dad’s mood never soared, never became playful. No matter how warm the sun, no matter how dry the soil, in his mind there were always heavy-bellied rain clouds lurking behind Slieve Bloom, waiting to rise up and turn the earth into a quagmire.

  For Dad, sunshine was not a gift; it was paid for many times over by months of slogging in boot-sucking clay. Staying one step ahead of the bills demanded constant and sometimes superhuman effort in whatever weather God sent. The hard work ruled out everything that was not necessary to the immediate task at hand. For Dad, the incessant labor dispelled all illusions, all dreams of an easier life. The only time his imagination took flight was when he wished aloud for specific misfortunes to befall his perceived enemies, chief of whom was Prime Minister Eamon de Valera. “That bastard!”

  There was no escape from the soil, from a land prone to holding water. The soil became sloppy after even a passing shower, so its cultivation required immediate and Herculean efforts once the sun and wind had done their part.

  Whenever Dad heard his children fantasizing aloud—“Wouldn’t it be great to live in Arizona, where the sun shines all day?”—he collapsed their card houses with a cold breath of reality. Only work considerations counted; the spiritual and intellectual did not. Keeping one step ahead of the always offensive enemy ruled out idealism. All that mattered was creating tactics to get some fieldwork done on days when all four seasons seemed to repeat themselves in quick succession. This required a mind-set so ironbound that it was dangerous even to talk within Dad’s hearing when he was working. What made his life all the more hellish was the Church’s admonishment to accept the will of God, when he knew that the God who sent down all this misery from heaven was a mean and rotten bastard.

  He was often gaunt with fatigue, and when he was under the pressure of weather-created anxiety, he sometimes slipped over the edge into extreme impatience. And sometimes he slipped over the precipice into a blind rage. He ruptured several relationships when he flared over a minor detail, like being charged a halfpenny too much for a gallon of paraffin oil. Whenever his anger began to leak out onto his children, it was Mam, by touch or look or word, who calmed him down. But Mam was not there to save me when the searing lava of his anger erupted onto me when I was seven.

  The bad weather in the autumn of 1947 brought the farmers of Ireland to their knees as they strove to save their crops. Men and women and children spent long, slogging days carrying scythed cereal out of flooded fields, one sheaf at a time. Acres of potatoes rotted in the liquid clay. Mud and muck oozed into boots and crept up clothing to crotches and armpits. Despair hung in the low-slung clouds. The workers’ fatigue doomed many fields of crops to abandonment. And all the while during those months of struggle, the turf that had been cut in the spring was being battered back into bog by the unceasing rain. There was no chance that our winter’s fuel could be saved. Timber would have to be cut out of hedges, drawn home by way of horse-and-cart to be sawed and chopped. “Spare the sticks” would be the cautionary cry until autumn of the following year.

  In our turf shed in October 1947 was a small pile of the previous year’s turf that would last another month if it was used sparingly. When turf is stored, a wall of sods is built on the face of the pile to keep the turf tidy and reduce wastage. Our remaining supply that autumn stood only about a foot high, three feet deep, and five feet long, and so the preciousness of every tiny piece of the dwindling turf had been repeatedly drilled into us.

  One Saturday afternoon Dad sloshed into the kitchen for a mug of tea. Everything about him was wet. We knew, as children can know, that this was not a time to play
or laugh out loud. When Dad told my brother Eddie to put on his coat and cap and bring in a basket of turf, I volunteered to help so that I might escape the thorny atmosphere. I quickly dressed for the rain and ran out to the turf shed, where I decided to surprise my brother by jumping up on the clamp of turf and dancing a hornpipe. But it wasn’t Eddie who came. It was Dad.

  I still remember the beating he gave me, the whacking with the hard hands. I can still recall the feeling of utter rejection, of being thrown out of the shed and Dad’s life into the heavy rain. I can still see myself in the farmyard in the rain, dancing in terror.

  In our kitchen, a narrow and shallow alcove beside the big hob was where the floor brush was stored. For many years after the beating the alcove was called “Tom’s Corner” because I made it my niche. When I sat on the floor and squeezed myself in, no one could get at me. When I pulled my knees up to my chest I was out of everyone’s way. I was invisible. Into this cave I retreated to repair my hurt feelings, and there I discovered that hurt feelings, like physical bruises, need time to heal.

  A long time ago, I stopped crying for the small boy I was then, but I still weep for Dad having to endure forever the remembrance of what he had done to me. I rue the fact that neither he nor I developed the communication skills that would have allowed us to talk about the incident, to hear each other’s words of forgiveness.

  Now, as an old man, much older than Dad was on that painful afternoon, I remember him as a man who loved his wife and his children, who at times was driven over the edge while trying desperately to provide for them.

  24

  DE VALERA AND DAD’S TURNIPS

  I was ten years old when Eamon de Valera came to Mountmellick on a Saturday evening to stump for the Fianna Fáil candidates running for office in the Laois/Offaly constituency. Our parish priest, Father McCluskey, had been influential in arranging the great man’s visit. Supposedly McCluskey had spent time in prison with de Valera after the Black and Tans discovered a revolver hidden in the priest’s house.

  In 1951, Dev, as most people called him, was still somewhat of a mythical figure. Even those who did not agree with his politics were worshipful of the rebel who had evaded the firing squad in Dublin after the rising of 1916 and who had later escaped from an English prison.

  Weeks in advance, Mountmellick’s streets were swept. Celebratory bunting crisscrossed the welcome route. Tricolors fluttering from telephone and electric poles were yeast to the excitement.

  Dev’s visit was as anticipated in some quarters as the second coming of Brian Boru. Plans were made to attend no matter what the cost. People would spill out onto the highways and byways and cycle for miles; they would come in their ass-carts and horse-carts; they would arrive packed together in the backs of lorries; they would tumble out of overfull cars, limp and hobble to the Square to see and hear and cheer their hero.

  I asked Dad if I could go to see Dev, but he wouldn’t allow it. I pleaded with him, said I would be the only boy in the National School who would not be there. But Dad was unbending. During the week before the big day I tried to change Dad’s mind so many times that he finally shouted, “If you mention Dev one more time I’ll give you a good clout!”

  There was a backstory to Dad’s adamancy.

  When Dev became prime minister in 1932, he announced that he was stopping payments on a substantial debt owed to England. Dev might as well have shot his own country in the two feet, as well as in the head and the heart. A six-year economic war with London began. Exports to the Old Mother were stopped, and many Irish farmers were caught with their farms stocked with beef that now had no buyer. Dad had to sell off cattle for about one-twentieth of the normal market price. From then on, any time Dev’s name was spoken in Dad’s presence it was met with a snort of derision, followed by “Bastard!”

  And so, on the evening Dev came to town, I was driving our pony while Dad guided the turnip seeder along the top of the newly opened drills in Jer Dunne’s field. The pony did not need any directing until we reached the end of each drill; then she had to be turned around and steered into the next furrow. Any horseman as good as Dad would have been embarrassed to be seen needing assistance handling a single draught animal, but there was a high hedge between the field and the Commons Road.

  In the sky there was not the tiniest cloud, and the sun was still high above Slieve Bloom even as eight o’clock rang out in the church tower a mile away. The sound of the walkers, the bikers, the donkey-and-carters, and the horse-and-carters on the road beside the field had stopped long ago. As the pony and Dad and I trudged in silence up and down the clay, I fought to keep myself from asking one last time to be allowed to go to the town. I was afraid Dad would shout out the shaming words he used when he believed I wasn’t pulling my weight on the farm: “How do you think the food is put on the table, the clothes on your back, the boots on your feet? You must think everything falls out of the sky.” And finally the words that always cut me to the liver: “You’re nothing but lazy!”

  As the tolls of the eight o’clock bell faded into the countryside, an amplified voice sounded out like the voice of a corncrake: it was here, it was there, it was an echo, it was everywhere. Then we heard an enormous roar that went on and on. I looked at Dad but he was absorbed in steering the seed barrow. A voice in the amplifier tried to be heard over the cheering. The voice stopped and waited for silence, then tried again. The cheering faded. Then Dev’s voice filled the world.

  I was overcome by the absolute necessity to be in the place where everyone else was, to be able to say in school on Monday morning that I had been there, that I had seen the great hero. There were tears in my eyes as I begged, “Please, Dad, can I go?”

  “Whoa!” Dad shouted at the pony and brought her to a stop.

  For a moment my heart soared.

  Then Dad spoke. “Look at me, Tom. Look at me! De Valera won’t sow our turnips. Now drive on.”

  25

  EARLY MORNING CATTLE DRIVE

  The livestock fair in Portarlington was held on the first Friday of every month. Dad sometimes opted to sell his cattle in that fair instead of the one in Mountmellick because it attracted buyers from farther afield. But Portarlington was six miles from home, and getting livestock there on foot and hoof was a small-time military operation, even if we only brought a few animals.

  The journey began at six in the morning. Dad commanded from the front while standing in the pony’s cart, pulled by the complacent Black. The handlebars and front wheel of a bike hung over the backboard, and a bundle of hay covered the rest. My brother Eddie and I were two horseless cowboys, while Ned Hyland walked behind, swishing an ashplant to keep the cattle moving. Ned had begun working with Dad after Uncle Paulie was sent into exile because of his fondness for the drink.

  Ned had arrived in our farmyard on his bike at a quarter to six while Dad was hitching the pony to the cart. “We’re leaving in a few minutes,” he said to Ned, a hint of reprimand in his voice.

  “Fifteen,” Ned said.

  “You have to eat your breakfast.”

  “I’ll be ready at six. Isn’t that the time you said we’re leaving?” I liked the way Ned could stand up to Dad.

  Ned was eighteen when he began working on our farm. He was a big brother to all of us, a tall and quiet man who became highly embarrassed one day when, after missing a rat with the tines of a pitchfork, he blurted out, “Hure!” in Mam’s presence. For my brother and me, Ned was an unsuspecting educator. As we toiled with him in the fields he told us the entire plot of the last picture he had seen, and he introduced us to town life and the funny nicknames some people had, like Mickey Pigshite and Turkey Toes and Yaller Mick. He told us the gossip that our parents believed was beyond our years, like when a neighbor murdered her brother and a dead infant was found buried on their farm. And he made us laugh about the funny things Dad said when there were no children around: “Where’s the pitchfork?” Ned asked. “Up me arse,” Dad replied.

  As six o’cloc
k was striking in the church tower, Ned emerged from our kitchen after his breakfast of boiled egg, Mam’s brown bread, and mugs of tea. I followed Eddie out onto Laragh Lane, both of us armed with ashplants to steer our three cattle toward the town. Then Dad drove the pony-and-cart through the tall galvanized gate; the lowing bullocks came next, with Ned driving them on from behind. Before we got to the Back of Fitzes field, I heard Mam closing the farmyard gates, and that sound locked the cattle out into a world far away from the familiarity and comfort of the farm and the other animals. They were in terra incognita, wandering from one side of the lane to the other; stopping and stretching their necks to allow for morose and wailing moos. When they passed low hedges they gaped across the top of the bushes as if contemplating a leap to freedom.

  When Dad pointed and shouted from his crow’s nest, Eddie ran forward past the animals to keep them out of Missus Fitz’s front yard and flower garden. When we eventually came to the end of the lane, the cattle were driven sharply to the right onto the Borness Road toward Portarlington. In the slanting morning sun the animals examined every weakness in the hedges as if looking for relief from the hard surface of the road. What high heels are to a woman’s feet, a macadamed road is to an ungulate because it has to use its hoof tip to bear all of its weight; in soft ground the toes sink in and the weight is dispersed throughout the foot.

  Side roads and open gates also offered the cattle escape routes. From the pony’s cart Dad called out when he saw an opening ahead, and Eddie and I took turns running forward past the cattle to stand guard. When the animals had slouched by, we fell in with Ned walking behind them.

  At last, we passed the cemetery and drove the cattle up the railway bridge at the edge of Portarlington. As we crested the bridge, a church bell rang out nine o’clock.