An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘A smart boy’s’ was the job I needed, because, when it became clear that I would never be a priest, Mother’s only ambition was for me to become a clerk – someone who would wear a white collar and be called ‘Mister’. Knowing no better myself, but always willing – up to a point – always visiting the Carnegie Library or the advertisement board in front of the Cork Examiner office, and answering advertisements for a smart boy, I went to the Technical School and the School of Commerce at night to learn whatever I could learn there in the way of arithmetic, book-keeping and shorthand typewriting. Of book-keeping, all I ever could remember was a saying quoted approvingly on the first page of our textbook – written, of course, by the headmaster himself – which ran: ‘In business, there is no such thing as an out-and-out free gift’; and of typewriting, a fascinating example of punctuation that began: ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’, which I promptly got by heart. Perhaps they stuck so firmly in my mind because they represented the two irreconcilables that I was being asked to reconcile in myself.

  In the pursuit of what I regarded as serious education, I also worked hard at a Self-Educator I had picked up, God knows where. From Canon Sheehan’s novels I had deduced that German was the real language of culture and that the greatest of cultured persons was Goethe, so I read right through Goethe in English and studied German out of the Self-Educator so as to be able to read him in the original. I was impressed by the fact that one of the pretty songs Mother had taught me as a child – ‘Three Students Went Merrily over the Rhine’ – turned up in a German anthology as a real poem by a real German poet, so I learned the German words and sang them instead. I also made a valiant attempt to learn Greek, which struck me as a very important cultural medium indeed, being much more difficult than Latin, but as I had never learned the rudiments of grammar in any language I never got far with Greek.

  I got my first job through my confessor, a gentle old priest who regarded me as a very saintly boy, and regularly asked me to pray for his intention. If innocence and sanctity are related, he was probably not so far wrong about me because once I confessed to ‘bad thoughts’, meaning, I suppose, murdering my grandmother, but Father O’Regan interpreted it differently, and there ensued an agonizing few minutes in which he asked me questions I didn’t understand, and I gave him answers that he didn’t understand, and I suspect that when I left the confession box, the poor man was as shaken as I was.

  The job was in a pious wholesale drapery business where every member of the staff had apparently been recommended by his confessor, and I hated my immediate boss, a small, smug, greasy little shopman with a waxed black moustache who tried hard to teach me that whenever he called ‘O’Donovan!’ I was instantly to drop whatever I was doing and rush to him, crying smartly ‘Yessir!’ I never minded dropping what I was doing, which was usually folding shirts as if I were laying out a corpse – the two arms neatly across the breast – and I had no objection to calling anybody ‘Sir’, but it was several seconds before my armour of daydreaming was penetrated by a voice from outside and ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’ gave place to the stern beauty of ‘In business, there is no such thing as an out-and-out free gift’, and it was several seconds more before I realized that it was the voice to which I must reply ‘Yessir!’ so at the end of a fortnight I stopped folding shirts and saying ‘Yessir!’ and went home to put in some more work at Greek. Then I tried a spell in a chemist’s shop that was looking for a smart boy, but I soon discovered that I was only needed to deliver messages and that no amount of smartness would ever make a chemist of me. I still have a vivid recollection of the end of this job. I was still a small boy, and I was looking up at a tall counter, and leaning on the counter and looking down at me through his glasses was a tall, thin Dublinman, just back from a visit to the pub next door. He was telling me in a thick Dublin accent that I had no notion of the sort of people I was working for, and begging me earnestly, for Christ’s sweet sake and my own good, to get to hell out of it, quick. I got to hell out of it quick all right.

  There was an even briefer spell at a job printer’s, because while he was showing me the ropes, the printer asked was I any good at spelling, and I replied airily: ‘Oh, that’s my forte!’ Now, that was exactly the sort of language we used on the heights, and I wasn’t conscious of doing anything wrong in using it, but that evening the man who recommended me to the printer met me and repeated the story of my reply with a great deal of laughter, and I realized that, as usual, I had made a fool of myself. It was part of the abnormal sensitiveness induced by daydreaming, and I was so mortified that I never went back. I was sorry for that, because I really was quite good at spelling, and I still feel I should have made an excellent compositor.

  Instead, this only became an additional weight in the load of guilt I always carried. It seemed that I could never persevere with anything, school or work, and just as I had always been impressed by the view of other small boys that I was mad, I was beginning to be impressed by their parents’ view that I was a good-for-nothing who would never be anything but a burden on his father and mother. God knows, Father had impressed it on me often enough.

  I went to the railway as a messenger boy because I despaired of ever becoming anything better, and besides, though the hours – eight to seven – were hard, the pay – a pound a week – was excellent, and with money like that coming in I could buy a lot of books and get a lot of education. It was with real confidence that at last the future had something in store for me that I left the house one morning at half-past seven and went down Summerhill and the tunnel steps to go to the Goods Office on the quay. Upstairs in the long office where the invoice clerks worked under the eye of the Chief Clerk, I met the other junior tracers, Sheehy, Cremin and Clery, and the two senior tracers. Our job was to assist the invoice and claims clerks, bringing in dockets from the storage shed and inquiring in the storage shed for missing goods – hence our title.

  All transport companies have colossal claims for missing goods, many of which are not really missing at all but lying about forgotten. Whiskey and tobacco were easy to trace because they had to be loaded into sealed wagons before some old railway policeman who recorded them and the number of the wagon in his little red book. But no one took much responsibility for other articles, and it depended on the memory of the checkers whether or not you could discover what had happened to them. An efficient, friendly checker like Bob St Leger of the Dublin Bay or Leahy of the Fermoy Bay could often remember a particular consignment and, if he were in good humour, could fish it out from the corner where it had lain for weeks, covered by a heap of fresh merchandise. This was a triumph, and you marked your memorandum or wire with some code word like ‘Stag’, meaning that the thing was at last on its way. But, more often, nobody remembered anything at all, and then you wrote something else, like ‘Bison’, which meant ‘Certainly forwarded please say if since received’, to which Goold’s Cross or Farranfore retorted ‘Moose’, meaning that it wasn’t, and then you had to go to the storage shed and search through scores of tall dusty wire files to discover the original docket and the name of the checker or porter who had signed the receipt for it.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that this was only going to be another version of school, a place where I would be always useless, frightened or hurt. The other messengers were railwaymen’s sons and understood the work as though they had been born to it. Sheehy was thin, with high cheekbones and an impudent smile; Cremin was round-faced, cherry-cheeked and complacent, and shot about the office and the store almost without raising his feet. Young Sheehy sneered at me all the time, but young Cremin only sneered at me part of the time because he was usually so busy with his own jobs that he hadn’t time for anyone else’s, but a couple of times when I found myself with some job I could not do, he looked at me for a while with pity and contempt and then took it from me and did it himself. ‘See?’ he would crow. ‘Dead easy!’ Cremin was really what the advertisements meant when they asked for a smart b
oy. Years later I found myself in the same hut in an internment camp with him, and though our positions had changed somewhat by that time, and I was a teacher, he was still the same smart boy, mixing with nobody in particular though amiable with everybody, briskly hammering rings out of shilling pieces or weaving macramé handbags – a cheerful, noisy, little universe of self-satisfaction. Yet the moment I fell ill, he nursed me with the same amused exasperation with which he had found dockets for me on the railway, cluck-clucking with an amused smile at my inability to do anything for myself.

  My boss was obviously a man who had also at one time been a smart boy and owed his promotion to it. He had a neat, swift hand, and I imitated his elegant signature as I imitated Corkery’s articulation, in a hopeless attempt at becoming a smart boy myself. He had a fat, pale face, a button of a nose with a pince-nez attached that was for ever dropping off and being retrieved just in time; he dressed excellently and swept through the office and the storage shed with an air of efficiency that must long since have secured his promotion to the job of stationmaster in Borrisokane or Goold’s Cross. I fancy he was really clever and not unkind, but as the days went by he became more and more infuriated by my slowness and stupidity; and, having readjusted his pince-nez sternly, he would shout abuse at me till the whole office was listening and the other messengers sniggering, and I slunk away, stupider than ever, muttering aspirations to the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin to assist me in whatever impossible task I was being asked to perform. It was one of the senior tracers who, in mockery of my love of Irish and the gilt ring I wore in my coat, nicknamed me ‘The Native’, but it was the boss who perpetuated it. It was characteristic of Ireland at the time that the mere fact that you spoke Irish could make you be regarded as a freak.

  The other clerk for whom I had to do odd jobs was a very different type. He was small, fair-haired, red-cheeked and untidy, and drifted about the office with his hands in his trousers pockets, wearing an incredible expression of sweetness and wonder as though he were imitating some saint and martyr he had heard of in church. Either he would put his arm about my waist and draw me close to him, calling me ‘Child’, and beg me in a low, quavering voice to assist him – that is if I could spare him a couple of minutes – or else he would call ‘Boy!’ in a faraway tone, and look at me as though wondering who I was, and rush after me, tearing paper from my hand and scolding and nagging till my nerves were on edge. Then he would sit on his high stool, his fat hands clasped between his thighs, staring incredulously after me.

  Not that I didn’t do my best. God knows I did. One of my jobs was to answer the telephone, and I did it with such intensity that I could never hear a word the other person said, and so developed a hatred of telephones that has lasted to this day. If there is anything unnaturally stupid or compromising a man can say, I am always guaranteed to say it on the telephone. Sometimes, when I was alone in the Goods Office I listened miserably to some message, too ashamed to admit that I hadn’t understood it. Sometimes I summoned up courage and said that I couldn’t hear, and then the person at the other end always got furious – a fatal thing to do with me as it drives me completely distracted – and asked if there was no one on the Great Southern and Western Railway who was not stone deaf. Having it put to me like that, I could only reply that there was but he was out at lunch. And whatever stupid thing I said always got back to the boss.

  The trouble was that I could not believe in the telephone or the messages that came by it. I could not believe that the missing goods I was supposed to trace had ever existed, or if they had, that their loss meant anything to anybody. Being a naturally kind-hearted boy, if I had believed it I would have found them whatever it cost me. All I could believe in was words, and I clung to them frantically. I would read some word like ‘unsophisticated’ and at once I would want to know what the Irish equivalent was. In those days I didn’t even ask to be a writer; a much simpler form of transmutation would have satisfied me. All I wanted was to translate, to feel the unfamiliar become familiar, the familiar take on all the mystery of some dark foreign face I had just glimpsed on the quays.

  I hated the storeroom where the dockets were kept, and when I worked there with Sheehy, Cremin or Clery, I realized that they found six dockets in the time it took me to find one. I had poor sight, and often failed to see a docket properly, particularly as it was usually written in the semi-literate scrawl of carters or porters; and even when I should have seen it, my mind was on something else, and when it was not, it was harassed by panic, shyness and ignorance. Bad as the storage shed was, noisy, evil-smelling and dark except where it was pitted with pale electric lights, I preferred it to the office because a couple of the men were kind and did not lose their tempers with me. But even here I was at a disadvantage. Sheehy and Cremin, being railwaymen’s sons, were protected by their fathers’ presence from anything worse than good-natured ragging, but I was anybody’s butt, and was for ever being pawed by two of the men. One, a foul-mouthed ruffian with streaming white hair, didn’t seem to mind when I edged away from him, but the other – a younger man with a thin, handsome, cruel face – resented it and hated me. I was always being mystified by the abrupt changes in his manner, for at one moment he would be smooth-spoken, dignified and considerate, and at the next his delicate complexion would grow brilliant red, and in a low, monotonous voice he would spew out abuse and filth at me, and I never could see why. It didn’t even need my timid attempts to dodge his brutal goosing and pawing; anything did it, a word, or a tone of voice, or simply nothing at all that I could observe. But how little there was that I could observe!

  There was, for instance, the matter of ‘1 Bale Foreskins’ which appeared on a docket and was invoiced to Kingsbridge by some bored young invoice clerk. Kingsbridge, equally full of bored young men, solemnly replied, reporting that the bale of foreskins had not been received and asking that it should be traced. It was my duty to trace it, and I did so with my usual earnestness, inquiring of every checker and porter in the neighbourhood of the Dublin bay if perhaps a bale of foreskins might not still be lying round somewhere. They listened to me with great attention and asked what I thought it looked like, and I explained that I didn’t know, but that it was probably like any other bale of pelts. They assured me that there were no pelts lying round anywhere, and when I had looked for myself I marked the memorandum ‘Stag’ or ‘Falcon’ or whatever the code word was. But then the wires began to fly, and I had to visit the storage shed again to make another search and find the docket in the files. To me the docket looked like any other docket, though later I realized that the names of consignor and consignee would have revealed to any smart boy that it was all a practical joke. But, in fact, so far as I was concerned the docket was no more unreal than any other docket, and the bale of foreskins than any other bale, and these than the pawing of the workmen. They were all just a vast phantasmagoria which I had to pretend to believe in to draw my weekly pay, but I never did believe in it, and when I left the building at seven o’clock it faded like clouds in the sky. At the same time I envied people who did believe in it, like young Cremin, and I pitied myself when I saw him, storming through the shed, from one lamp-lit bay to the next, his bundle of documents in his hand, exchanging noisy greetings with the porters, dodging checkers who tried to grab him, and yelling back laughing insults at them – at home with everybody but most of all with himself. In that whole huge organization there wasn’t a soul with whom I felt at home, and so I had no self to be at home with; the only self I knew being then in wait for me until seven o’clock in the passenger station at the other side of the tracks, rather as I waited for Father outside a public house.

  There was one checker I liked, and though he always nodded gravely to me and was helpful on the very few occasions when I needed his help, he never became involved with me. I think he realized with the force of revelation that I didn’t believe in dockets and bales of pelts, and was doomed to trouble and that this trouble would fall on anyone who had anything
to do with me. He shuffled through the storage shed with his head buried in his shoulders and a little to one side as though he hoped no one would notice him, his short-sighted blue eyes narrowed into slits. His secret was that he didn’t believe in these things either. At the same time the feeling of his own peril gave him a certain guilty feeling of responsibility to me because I was clearly so much more imperilled than he was, and occasionally he stopped to talk to me and shuffled inch by inch out of the way into some corner where we could not be observed. Then, looking furtively over a bale of goods to make sure that no one was listening, he would tell me in a whisper that the country was priest-ridden. I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I knew he meant that I had his sympathy. I was for the lions, and family conditions compelled him to burn a pinch of incense now and again, but he and I both knew there was no such God as Jupiter. One day, with a display of caution that would have done credit to an international conspirator, he pulled me aside, opened his blue jacket with the silver buttons, and took out a book which he thrust on me.