The Personals

by Brian O'Connell

  When I did eventually phone the number provided, an elderly man with a slightly unusual accent answered. He told me he had put the advertisement in the Evening Echo for several weeks running. As we got chatting, Frank told me he was applying for a pension, having worked with an ‘agency’ in Europe for a long period of time. He referenced the fact that his work was ‘top secret’, and had implications for the whole of the human race.

  As you may have gathered from previous stories, you sometimes find interesting characters like Frank through the classified ads – people who perhaps (and I hope I’m not being unkind when I say this) don’t fit in easily elsewhere. It makes complete sense to me that they fit perfectly on the pages of the personals and the small ads. There’s a kinship of sorts between the lonely and the lost, the eccentric and the strait-laced in the personals.

  I meet Frank at his home. The house appeared to be under renovation, with a large tarpaulin and building blocks in the front garden and the contents inside piled high, with dust covering many surfaces. Frank had untidy hair and oversized Guinness slippers on his feet. He apologised for the condition of the house, and made a reference to building work taking place, but as he dusted down a surface for me to sit on, it became clear that there was no construction work on-going. This was how he lived – on an imitation building site, with layers of dust and rubble and crates for seats. There were small stacks of used beer mats, unfinished antique restoration furniture, and piles and piles of frayed documents and scraps of paper.

  Little light shone through the windows as the overgrown garden obscured them, creating a sort of evening dimness all day long inside the house. He spoke in half-finished sentences and was both vague and certain, distant and very present. There was nothing to sit down on in any of the rooms besides the one stool he sat on – no chair without mounds of items piled high on it, which told me that he rarely if ever had visitors.

  A few weeks before I met Frank, I had watched the film A Beautiful Mind, in which Russell Crowe plays the brilliant academic John Nash who had won a Nobel Prize. In one scene in the film, the character’s cluttered mind is outwardly manifested in the delusions he has when he fills the garden shed with scraps of paper and clutter. That scene came back to me as I stood against a large pile of dusty records and looked around Frank’s sitting room. Perhaps this is what isolation, loneliness and mental illness looks like.

  His environment was evidence that the balance between reality and fiction had not just tilted, but toppled. I couldn’t help wondering when the last time footsteps other than Frank’s had been heard on the creaky stained floorboards in his hall. So as not to make him feel uncomfortable, I decide to keep up the pretence that Frank really is waiting on builders and that all this dusty chaos is just a temporary inconvenience, as opposed to day-to-day life. ‘A good builder is harder to find than an All-Ireland medal in Mayo,’ I say, trying to lighten the mood.

  Frank wants to get down to business and go into why I’m here, so I ask him why he took out the advertisement. ‘I have had little success in connecting with the [European] authorities, partly through the language barrier and because they don’t seem to have a very good communication system,’ he explains. ‘I worked there for years and my pension has been held up in red tape. It’s been going on for almost a year.’

  I’ve decided by this point that there is unlikely to be an authority which has withheld Frank’s pension. I’m not even sure if he’s ever been to the country he keeps referencing. He repeats what he told me on the phone, that he worked for an agency, and that much of the work was confidential. I say that it’s not like private companies to try to get out of paying for pensions, and we laugh, but all the while he’s checking me out, wondering perhaps how much of his story I believe.

  One woman has responded to his advertisement and as she is a native speaker, she has offered to communicate to the particular authorities on his behalf. ‘I perceive myself now as being just a number,’ Frank tells me. The more we go into his story, the more we get to the essence of Frank and the more I come to like him. I’ve always been drawn to people on the fringes and, to be honest, I have no idea why. The drifters, the dropouts, the difficult personalities and the loners fascinate me and draw me in far more than the popular level-headed types you meet more regularly.

  Frank and I spoke for a while longer. Maybe he did have a pension issue, and maybe the builders were going to return to his house some day. But the likelihood is that Frank had slipped through the cracks, and was desperately trying to hold on to the foundations above his head where his sanity once lay.

  I passed an hour in his company and after the initial few minutes chat about the ad and the need for a letter writer, we didn’t mention it again. He skipped from topic to topic. I’m guessing that putting an ad in the paper was possibly a way of staving off loneliness, of having some kind of human contact or breaking through the silence and the solitude.

  We spoke about politics and religion, about the EU and the UK, about leaves in autumn and where birds go in spring. We talked about Dublin and Paris, about west Cork and Budapest – it was akin to speaking to the physical embodiment of a BBC Radio 4 magazine programme, just a little more detached. And then, almost without warning, Frank began walking to the front door.

  He had had enough human contact maybe, or he had shared his cluttered space for as long as he wanted to. I mumbled something about hoping he would keep me updated about whether or not the pension was sorted, and it almost seemed to be news to him that there was a pension to be sorted.

  ‘Yes, sure,’ he said, as we shook hands and he looked out of the door beyond me to see if anyone else had noticed he’d had a visitor – an actual human interaction. I walked away thinking that Frank didn’t need someone to write a letter for him, he just needed someone to talk to, someone to be human with.

  Building a Bigger Shrine

  Lost 20 July Blackpool Post Office, sum of money, my pension. If anyone hands it over, I would be grateful. Evening Echo, September 2018

  Less than a year after his death in 1232, Anthony of Padua, the son of a wealthy and noble Portuguese family, was canonised by Pope Gregory IX and became better known as St Anthony. Wikipedia tells us he is especially ‘invoked and venerated all over the world as the patron saint for the recovery of lost items and is credited with many miracles involving lost people, lost things and even lost spiritual goods’. So for almost 800 years, people have been pleading with Anthony of Padua to recover lost things: wallets, keys, minds, marriages; you name it, Anthony is the go-to saint for the hopeless. One would think then that someone with a particularly strong devotion to St Anthony should have no need to be placing ads in newspapers when they misplace something …

  Which brings us neatly to the north side of Cork city and Paul, a sixty-something retired grandfather, who has not one but two shrines to St Anthony in his home. Every week Paul collects his pension in the same post office in Blackpool in Cork. And every week he divides it the same way – €170 into one pocket for his wife and the bills, and €70 into his other pocket, which is his own spending money for the week. ‘I went to collect the pension and met a friend at the Post Office,’ he tells me. ‘We went up the escalator and then walked down the steps beside it. I put my hand in my pocket. No €170. Not there. Checked. Gone. It was sickening and very upsetting. I was gutted actually but my wife just said OK, get over it, and we moved on.’

  In the days immediately after it happened, while Paul was trying to get over his loss, he decided to put an ad in the paper, saying that he’d lost a sum of money, and to run it over a few weeks. In the two weeks before I met him, he had updated the ad to add the fact that it was his pension. His hope is that someone may have picked up the money, would see his ad, feel guilty and return it. Eh right, good luck with that, I tell him.

  While he was fairly annoyed that two-thirds of his weekly income had been lost in one go, unfortunately, it’s not the first tim
e Paul has lost money. ‘I’m very careless,’ he admits. ‘I have to get a tracksuit with a zip in the pocket. I have to. The thing about it is I was very, very disappointed and I had lost smaller amounts before out of my pocket. Why me? When you’re working, you can take on a bit of overtime or whatever and try and make it up. But you can never make up a pension.’

  Has he had many responses to the ad that has been running for a few weeks? ‘None,’ he says. ‘And to be honest, I can’t imagine anyone giving me a ring. It was last chance saloon putting that ad in.’

  Speaking of last chances, I ask Paul if he is a religious man, a weekly Mass-goer perhaps? ‘No Mass,’ he says, ‘but I pray every day. I’ve a shrine up in the kitchen. Every day I pray to St Anthony.’

  ‘Hang on! St Anthony? The lost causes guy?’ I say. ‘So, is he on a couple of weeks’ holiday or what?’

  ‘He must have gone away on holidays all right!’ says Paul, laughing, ‘But he’s back again. My wife and I are St Anthony people. My wife is a churchgoer all the time but what the priest says I don’t believe in it. I have my own religion here and I have a shrine up beside me in the bed also.’

  Paul and his wife had met almost 50 years earlier in a ballroom in Blarney. They then lost touch for two years, and reconnected and married shortly after. They have been married for 46 years and have four children and four grandchildren, with another on the way. So, with half a century of marriage behind them, I’m curious to know the secret to a long marriage.

  ‘There has to be a lot of love involved,’ he says sincerely. ‘I’m 72 and I am mad about her. I love her. She is everything to me. She’s not a pub person but is very active with various groups and whatnot. I can live on a pension. Since I retired, I never asked her for a penny for drink and I don’t drink weekdays – just maybe on a Sunday I’ll go for a few drinks.’

  The love he and his wife have sustained for nearly half a century is refreshing, and so too is the ease with which he is able to discuss his feelings for her with me. I am a total stranger he has met only an hour or so earlier, and yet here he is talking candidly about the intensity of his devotion to her. Marriage is often represented in cynical and jaded terms in popular culture, and we’re told that Irish men struggle with their emotions, particularly those of an older generation. Paul didn’t fit that narrative and also didn’t fit the stereotype of the Irish male and their discomfort at opening up about their emotions. Perhaps you reach a stage in your life when you don’t feel the need to reaffirm your maleness in the way society prescribes any more, and you realise what’s really important and how lucky you are to have such intense love. Or, as Paul succinctly puts it: ‘People think you can’t be upfront about how you feel for someone and be macho at the same time. I think that’s a load of codswallop.’

  It’s time for me to leave and Paul wants me to know it is the first time he has used the small ads. If someone happens to respond with the money, he says he will provide a reward. He tells me he’s a man who likes routine, so the loss of money really impacted on him. With that in mind, I’m wondering did he go for a few drinks the week he lost the money as he usually does? ‘No,’ he says laughing. ‘I was afraid. It came to the Sunday and she said to me, “I want you to go up there.” I am blessed with her and I can always turn to that. Even though this was a big loss for me, look what I have. I have so much more than wealth. As for the pension? I will have to get a wallet, or a zipped pocket or maybe a bra to put it in …’

  Or maybe, I tentatively suggest, a bigger shrine to St Anthony?

  Part Eight

  THIS MORTAL COIL

  Meeting a Man About a Hearse

  Horse-drawn Victorian hearse, very old. For restoration. Circa 1870. Original condition, needs slight work to restore. Might consider part exchange. Also selection of traps and carriages. €2,850. DoneDeal, July 2017

  What drew me to this ad were key words I’ve come to spot over the years that signal there’s likely to be a story behind the text. Generally, when words such as ‘restoration’ or key dates, such as the 1870s in this case, are given then you can be fairly sure this isn’t a chance find someone is trying to offload. Reading the ad, the idea that a private individual in a rural location would have a nineteenth-century horse-drawn hearse in the shed, but also the fact that he might consider a part exchange is intriguing. I mean, who wants to swap something for a Victorian hearse? I’m trying to envisage the scenario: ‘Tell you what, I’ll give you €500 cash and I’ll throw in the Punto …’

  Clearly, I had to meet the man behind it, and so one grey afternoon I found myself in a village called Boherbue on the Cork/Kerry border where Mike Fleming lives. I was at his home near a crossroads, and it soon became clear I was meeting someone who shared my fascination (bordering on obsession) with classified ads.

  Mike has a thriving commercial business, as well as some land and property, and he is the kind of man who has a wide range of interests and has built several varied collections over his lifetime. He also struck me as the type of person who, while maintaining an overall passion for historical items, could lose interest in an item quickly, and needs to move on to the next thing. The thrill of the hunt is in the chase ...

  Dotted around his property were many items of historical interest, from old labouring tools to a collection of vintage tractors and ploughs, to old bar signs, vintage cars and old bottles. There was even a museum scene depicting an Irish Famine wake in one corner of an outhouse, complete with life-size figures and a realistic-looking dead body in a bed. I mean, go figure.

  After work in the evenings, when some people are sitting down to a night of Netflix or The Late Late Show, Mike Fleming opens his laptop and scours the small ads. The inside of his sheds looks like a holding warehouse for DoneDeal, such is the variety and volume of items. As we stroll round, his depth of knowledge is impressive, but so too is the responsibility he feels as the keeper of traditions and customs and ways. As the poet once said, if we only had old Ireland back again …

  His collecting began, as with many collectors in this book, in childhood. ‘I was into old cars and old tractors from a young age,’ Mike tells me. ‘When I left school, I went into contract machinery – things like silage cutting and working with diggers and I had a real interest in machinery.

  ‘I began to realise, though, from a young age I had an eye for old stuff. It began, I think, with horse-drawn machinery and I was interested in restoring them. From there I began to get a few tractors and sometimes I would sell them. Really it was just something to do in the winter time, when contract work was slow. We had a workshop at home and there was always an old car being restored.’

  Mike says he learned about collecting the hard way. Some items he lost on, others he made a few bob with, and each time he recycled the profits into other investments and acquisitions. In the early days he developed a passion for old Mini Coopers and began restoring and selling them. Any time he had a bit of money he would buy another one. ‘I would always buy something old and after a time I moved it on again, and bought another one. That one item became two, and then that became four and then six and so on.’

  The enemy of most collectors at some stage or another is space, as their interests begin to eat into the physical environment around them while they acquire more and more things. Luckily, or unluckily perhaps, Mike’s father kept pigs at one time, and after he’d given them up there were a lot of empty sheds. ‘I saw them as places to put things,’ Mike says.

  Through his work as a contractor he was in and out of farmers’ yards and sheds a lot during his late teens and early adulthood. Where some saw a rusted old relic, good for nothing but to un-gap a ditch, Mike saw heritage and restoration potential. He picked up old horse carts and began to develop a lot of knowledge about these and early tractors. He would meet and seek out older farmers and pump them for information, asking them not only what machinery they used but what machinery their fathers and grandfathers us
ed. It all happened organically, he says, and if you had told him when starting out that he would become obsessed with these things he wouldn’t have believed it. He always kept his eyes open walking through farmers’ yards and in his early twenties he began going to car boot sales and markets. By this time his interest had moved from tractors to tools.

  ‘I began collecting a lot of small old items,’ he says. ‘I became fascinated, for example, with old ploughs and hand tools, and for a while I wanted to know and own every kind of tool the likes of the old thatcher and the shoemaker worked with. From there I collected watches as well, so bizarrely, I have a collection of them too. At one point, I then got into musical instruments and I ended up with a large collection of button accordions in particular. Don’t ask me why.’

  Aside from what he picked up around Munster, Mike also went to markets and fairs in the UK any time he was there on holiday or business. He remembers often coming home on the boat with the car boot stuffed full of old oil lamps or tools. In later years, he got involved in buying and selling property, but was often more engaged by the items left behind in the old farms and cottages he bought than he was by the house itself. There wasn’t really any money in the collecting, but he did make money on items such as vintage cars, some of which he would acquire for clients and restore to order.

  Every night, apart from scouring the ads online and in print for items to buy, he tracks values and tries to identify trends so that he might profit from buying or selling his stock.