When the time came to cut his corns, he got a chair and rooted about on top of the wardrobe, which was his hidey-hole, well out of my reach, or intended to be; and after contemplating his many treasures, he took down his current razor, wrapped in oiled cloth, and a couple of other, older razors that he had either abandoned or picked up from those who had no further use for them but that could be trusted to do the rough work of corn-cutting. Then he got the wash-basin, and a jug of cold water, and a kettle of boiling water, and a bottle of corn cure, and a paper of some sort to read while his feet soaked, and a hand mirror to see the parts of his feet that were normally hard to see, and anything else that could conceivably be of use to him, and then, with Mother or myself lined up to hold the mirror, he was set for the evening. Not that I ever remember his doing it without cutting himself.
Or else it was an evening with his pipes. He was an inveterate magpie, and everything that anyone else threw away Father would pick up, in the full conviction that if you kept it for seven years it would be bound to come in useful, while the person who had discarded it would probably pay for his improvidence by dying in the workhouse. Old broken pipes were a tremendous temptation to him, and he had a large collection of bowls and stems, all of which needed only careful handling to turn them into brand-new pipes of the most expensive kind. This task would have been considerably easier if he had ever had anything like a gimlet handy, but as he rarely did, he had to make a tool. Usually, the treasure chest yielded some sort of blade, and some sort of handle, and the blade had to be heated and set in the handle, and then the handle usually burst and had to be bound with a bit of string or wax-end. Then the improvised tool had to be heated again, and the bowl or the stem burned till the two pieces could be joined. I can still remember the rancid smell of burned amber. The result was usually most peculiar – a delicate bowl joined to a colossal stem or a delicate stem to a rural bowl – but Father puffed it with great satisfaction, in the belief that he had cheated some ruffian of a tobacco merchant out of the price of a brand-new pipe.
Father was, I think, a naturally melancholy man; though he was always pleased when people called, he rarely called on anybody himself; and, like all melancholy men, he made his home his cave, and devoted a great deal of thought to its beauty and utility. Unfortunately, he was one of the most awkward men who ever handled a tool, and it is a subject I can speak on with some authority, for I have inherited his awkwardness. Along with the razors, the pipe bowls and stems and the rest, he had a peculiar hoard of tools and equipment, mostly stored on top of the wardrobe. They had been lovingly accumulated over the years in the conviction that eventually they would be bound to come in useful. Prior to tackling any major job, all this had to be unloaded on to the kitchen table, and Father put on his glasses and studied it affectionately in the way in which he studied the documents in the tin trunk, forgetting whatever he was supposed to be looking for as he recited the history of hinges, bolts, screws, wooden handles, blades, clock springs, and mysterious-looking bits of machinery that had probably fallen out of a railway engine in process of dissolution, and wondered what some of them could be used for.
Finally, having selected his equipment – the nice bit of timber that would nearly do for a shelf, and the brackets that didn’t quite match, and the screws or nails that were either a bit long or a bit too short, and the old chisel that would do for a screwdriver, and the hammer with the loose head – Father set to work. He had lined up my mother and myself as builder’s mates, to hold the plank and the hammer, the saw that needed setting, and the nails and screws. Before he had been at work for five minutes, the top of the hammer would have flown off and hit him in the face, or the saw would have cut the chair instead of the plank, or the nail that was to have provided the setting for the screw would have carried away inches of the plank with the unmerciful wallops he gave it. Father had the secret of making inanimate objects appear to possess a secret, malevolent life of their own, and sometimes it was hard to believe that his tools and materials were not really in a conspiracy against him.
His first reaction to this behaviour was chagrin that, for all his love and care, they were turning on him again, but this soon changed to blind rage and an autocratic determination to put them in their places. Hacking away great chunks of the plaster, he nailed in the brackets any old way, while Mother and I, our hearts in our mouths, stood by with anything we thought might come in handy. He swore bloody murder, exactly as he did when the studs in his shirt-front turned against him before Mass on Sunday and it became a toss-up whether, to spite them, he might not go to Mass at all; and in the same gentle voice Mother besought him to let it alone and not to be upsetting himself like that. And when it was all over, and the kitchen a wreck, he would sit down with gloomy pride to read a paper he could not concentrate on, obsessed by the image of himself as a good man and kind father on whom everybody and everything turned.
That was why, in spite of the fact that he had a cobbler’s last among his treasures, and that I was forever hacking the good boots that were bought for me with his money, he didn’t try his hand at cobbling. A man who could hardly hit a three-inch nail with a large hammer could not be expected to do much with a shoemaker’s tack. Most often it was Mother who did the cobbling, buying a patch or a pair of half-soles in town and tacking them on herself. But I seem to remember that his hoarding instinct betrayed him once when he discovered a large strip of fan-belting from a factory, made of some extraordinary material which he maintained was stronger than leather and would save us a fortune, and he did cut strips of this and nail them to his working boots, on which they looked like pieces of board. On the other hand, he liked rough tailoring, and was perfectly happy sewing a patch on to his working trousers.
But I never minded Father as a handyman the way I minded him as a barber. He always had one pair of clippers, and sometimes two, wrapped in oily rags among the other treasures, and, according to him, these clippers had saved him untold expense. Given a pencil and paper, he could even work it out, as he worked out the amount he saved by being a teetotaller. He was a great man for saving. ‘My couple of ha’pence,’ he used to call it. Mother, I suspect, never knew how much he really earned, and when he was sober he usually had a substantial sum in the locked trunk in the bedroom. When he was feeling depressed, he went upstairs by way of consulting his documents and counted it softly, but not so softly that we couldn’t hear the chink of the coins as he caressed them. He was a bit of a skinflint and disliked the improvident way Mother bought me sweets, biscuits or boys’ weeklies, not to mention toys at Christmas – a season that seemed to have been specially invented for his mortification. Father, of course, was only providing for the rainy day.
So, on a sunny afternoon, he would take down the clippers, pull off the oily rags, adjust the blades, set a chair in the back yard and, with a towel round his neck, let Mother cut his hair. There was no great difficulty about this, since all Father wanted was the equivalent of a close shave. According to him, this was excellent for the growth of the hair, and one of his ambitions was to double his savings by protecting my hair as well. I didn’t want my hair protected, though he assured me angrily that I would be bald before I was grown up at all; neither did Mother want it, and so, the moment it grew a bit too long and she saw Father casting brooding glances at it, she gave me tuppence to go to the barber. This made Father furious, for not only had she again demonstrated her fundamental improvidence, but Curtin, the barber, would have left me with what Father called ‘a most unsightly mop’. It was like the business of wanting me to wash under the tap. But no matter how carefully she watched over me, he sometimes caught me with the clippers in his hand, and I had to sit on a chair in the back yard, sobbing and sniffling, while he got to work on me and turned me into a laughing-stock for the neighbourhood. He went about it in exactly the same way that he went about cutting his corns or putting up a shelf. ‘Wisha, is it the way you want to make the child look like a convict?’ Mother would cry indignantly, an
d Father would stamp and curse and pull at a whole chunk of hair till I screamed, and then curse again and shout: ‘It’s your own fault, you little puppy, you! Why can’t you stop quiet?’
Then one evening Father would be late, and Mother and I would sit over the fire, half crazy with panic, and I would say prayers to the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin to look after him. I can never remember that my prayers had any effect. Finally, he would come in, full of fallacious good humour, and stand at the door, rubbing his palms and puckering up his lips in a sly grin. He expressed great – indeed, undue – surprise at the lateness of the hour. He had been detained talking to a man he hadn’t met for fifteen years – not since the funeral of poor Jack Murphy of the Connaught Rangers in September ’98, which he remembered distinctly because Tim O’Connor, God rest him, had been there as well, and the three of them had left the funeral together and spent the evening in a pub called Keohane’s that used to be at the corner of Windmill Road but had since been torn down. He would ramble on like that for half an hour, in loosely related clauses that gave the impression of coherence but were difficult to follow, and towards ten o’clock would decide to take a little stroll. That was the end of Father in his role as a home-loving body. Next evening he would slink upstairs to the locked trunk where he kept his savings, and then go out again. The rainy day had at last arrived. He would return in a state of noisy amiability that turned to sullenness when it failed to rouse a response. I was most often to blame for this because, in spite of Mother’s appeals to me not to answer him back, I could not bear his maudlin attentions, which made him so like my grandmother, and, like her, he was offended, and snarled that I was ‘better fed than taught’. The day after, he would not go work and at twelve or one would be at the trunk again and off for a longer carouse.
The savings usually lasted him for a week or ten days. When they were exhausted, Mother had to go to the pawnshop with his best blue suit. So that the neighbours would not see what she was doing, she would put on her long black shawl. I hated the very sight of that shawl, even though I knew that it suited her long, thin, virginal face; it meant an immediate descent in the social scale from the ‘hatties’ to the ‘shawlies’ – the poorest of the poor. I also hated the pawning of the blue suit, because it meant that Father stopped going for walks or to Mass – especially to Mass, for he would not have dreamed of worshipping God in anything less dignified than blue serge – and it meant that we had him all day about the house, his head swollen, his eyes bloodshot, sitting by the fire and shivering in the fever of alcoholism or getting up and walking to and fro, unable to read, unable to work, unable to think of anything except drink. Home was no longer a refuge for him. It had become a prison and a cage, and the only hope of escaping from it was more money. When Mother returned from the town and put the five or six shillings on the table with the pawn tickets, he sometimes turned on her with an angry ‘Lord God, was that all you got on it?’ It was not so much that he expected more as that staging a quarrel at this point meant that she would not dare to ask him for money for food or the rent or the insurance or Levin the peddler, who had sold her a suit for me.
Two days later she would be off again with one of the two clocks – her own clock from the bedroom, which did not have an alarm. After that came the clock with the alarm, which was no longer necessary as he did not go to work, and then his silver watch. ‘In God’s name, Mick Donovan, do you want to put us on the street?’ she would cry, and he would stamp and shout like a madman. He didn’t know what being put on the street meant as she, the orphan, did. Then her blue costume went, and his military medals and, lastly, his ‘ring paper’ – so called because it was printed in a series of small circles intended for the post-office date stamp – his authority for drawing his Army pension. Though the transaction was illegal, the security was excellent. Even then he would be greedily eyeing the wedding ring on her finger and whining at her to pawn this as well, ‘just for a couple of days till I steady up,’ but it was only when she was really desperate that she let this go, and it took precedence of everything else when the time came to reclaim the little bits of married life. By this time all the money coming into the house would be the ninepence or shilling she earned as a charwoman, and he would be striding like a caged tiger up and down the kitchen in the dusk, waiting for her to come in from work so that he could get this from her.
‘Come on!’ he would say with forced joviality. ‘Tuppence is all I want. Me entrance fee!’
‘And where am I to get the child’s dinner?’ she would cry in despair. ‘Or is it the way you want us to starve?’
‘Look, it’s all over now. No one is going to starve. Can’t you see I’m steadying up? Come on, woman, give us the money!’
‘Stay here, then, and I’ll go and get it for you!’
‘I don’t want you to get it for me,’ he would say, turning nasty. ‘Getting it for him’ was a later stage, which occurred only when he had completely exhausted his credit and old friends cleared out when he came red-eyed and fighting mad into the pub. With his ‘entrance fee’, as he called it, he had not only the price of a drink but the chance of cadging more, either from the barmaid, if the publican was out, or from one of his old cronies.
If he did not get the money immediately, his tone would change again and he would become whining and maudlin. As night came on and his chances of a real debauch diminished, he would grow vicious. ‘Jesus Christ, I’ll put an end to this!’ he would mutter, and take down his razor. His threats were never empty, as I well knew since the night when I was an infant and he flung the two of us out into Blarney Lane in our night clothes, and we shivered there in the roadway till some neighbours took us in and let us lie in blankets before the fire. Whenever he brandished the razor at Mother, I went into hysterics, and a couple of times I threw myself on him, beating him with my fists. That drove her into hysterics, too, because she knew that at times like that he would as soon have slashed me as her. Later, in adolescence, I developed pseudo-epileptic fits that were merely an externalization of this recurring nightmare, and though I knew they were not real, and was ashamed of myself for indulging in them at all, I could not resist them when once I had yielded to the first nervous spasm.
In those days, the house would be a horror. Only when he had money for drink would we have peace for an hour, and sometimes Mother borrowed it just to get him out of the house. When I was old enough to go to school, I would come back at three o’clock and scout round to make sure that he was not at home. If he wasn’t, I would sneak in and hastily make myself a cup of tea. If he was, I did without the tea and wandered round the rest of the afternoon, waiting till it was time to intercept Mother on her way home from work. I never went near my grandmother. From the moment Father began his drinking bout, you could feel her disapproval of Mother and me – the two heartless creatures who did not sympathize with her darling son. This, she seemed to say, all came of Father’s mistake in marrying a woman who did not know her place, a would-be lady. When I talked of him to Mother, I always called him ‘he’ or ‘him’, carefully eschewing the name of ‘Father’ which would have seemed like profanation to me. ‘You must not speak like that of your father, child,’ Mother would say severely. ‘Whatever he does, he’s still your father.’ I resented her loyalty to him. I wanted her to talk to me about him the way I knew the neighbours talked. They could not understand why she did not leave him. I realize now that to do so she would have had to take a job as housekeeper and put me into an orphanage – the one thing in the world that the orphan child could not do.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 4