by William King
Just as the cook is calling out in a Cockney accent: ‘Right-eeo, food’s up,’ Jody returns in the Vauxhall with the man in the well-pressed flannels. The men fling down their pickaxes and shovels and stretch their backs, the spool comes to a halt and farther up the jackhammer goes silent. The dust settles. They gather round the load of timber shuttering and sit on the planks with plates of chops, sausages and roasted potatoes. One of them glances in my direction: ‘What are you doin’ on your own? Will you have a bite with us?’
‘Right. I will so.’ Even though Jody has mentioned that we might go to a café later on, I’m afraid a refusal would cause offence, so I’m handed a tin enamel plate and eat the sausages and chops. I remain at the edge of their small talk.
‘Great weather for saving hay,’ says one of the carpenters, as he shields his eyes from the sun.
‘Ah fuck you and your hay,’ comes the reply. ‘All the farmers’ sons can think about is savin’ fucken hay.’
‘Shag off and throw us over the loaf of bread,’ says the farmer’s son, settling himself on the load of timber.
The food has a calming effect. Some stretch out on the mound of earth, their peaked caps shading their eyes; others play cards on the wooden planks. Thoughts of Gaelic football and hurling matches in New Eltham, and women at the Galtymore give them a moment’s release from drudgery, and Horse, and pulling cable. ‘Bridie Gallagher and her band are coming to the Glocca Mora. You might get your bit, Nealie,’ says a man to a lad beside him with a pimply face and spiky hair. ‘Sure that young fella thinks ’tis for stirrin’ his tay,’ says another, rolling a cigarette between his callused hands. Nealie blushes and shows crooked teeth when he grins. They are only beginning to laze when the ganger blows a whistle and orders them into the fucken trenches, and is it fucken Butlin’s they think they’re in?
I help the cook to tidy up the plates. His silence gives me a chance to sort out the strange world of which I may one day be a part: the savage look on Horse’s face, the suppressed tears and the put-on swagger of the lad he had brutalized, the indifference of the others.
Jody returns. ‘Come over a minute, Tommy,’ he calls from the open door of the van. ‘You may as well get to know the ropes.’
He lays a map on the driver’s seat. ‘You see here.’ A stout finger runs along the paper, creased where it’s been folded. ‘This is the stretch of ducting and cable-laying for the Electricity Board.’ He looks up and down the road and back to the map. ‘This is Albert Grove, and we go around that corner up there.’ He points towards a cloud of dust and smoke raised by the jackhammer. ‘Down Nelson Avenue – about a half-mile of cabling. I had to convince that latchico from the borough council that there’s hard rock for half that distance.’ He looks at me and grins: ‘Hard rock, more money. Are you with me? Three or four times the price for clay. No flies on Paddy.’
I force a laugh.
‘He has to be looked after though.’ He folds the map. ‘That’s how things are done around here. A few quid today and M.J. will put him and the family up in a good hotel in Killarney later on. It pays. He’s mad for fishing, and thinks the Irish are great gas.’
‘I’d say so.’
‘A jungle, Tommy. Jungles have their own laws. The strongest always survive. D’you follow me?’
‘I do.’
He winds a piece of string around the notebook and puts it back by the steering column. ‘Now let me see. I’ve to go over to a site in Hitchin. You may as well come along. We’ll be back to pick up the lads in the evening.’ He switches the motor into life and Johnny and The Hurricanes fill the cab with ‘Crossfire’.
On the way to Hitchin, Jody has a string of stories about grafting. It’s the way things are done. If we don’t do it, we’ll be left behind. There’s the haulage guy in Watling – a Mayo man – who makes his money out of selling the same load of sand or gravel three or four times in the one day.
‘How?’
‘I’ll tell you how. It’s simple. The lorry driver pulls into the site: “I have your sand, sign here.” The usual. He doesn’t unload, just drives around and out the other gap. An hour later he’s back with the same load. Of course, your man at the gate has to be looked after.’
‘Of course.’
At Hitchin, Jody pulls up at a gap in a whitethorn hedge: deep wheel tracks rock-hard on the passageway leading to the site – a field of over a hundred acres. Inside, the field is littered with scaffolding, mounds of topsoil, wheelbarrows, planks and loose bricks thrown alongside heaps of sand.
‘A thousand houses to go up there,’ Jody says. ‘Wimpey got the job, but he subcontracted, so M.J. Galvin has two hundred and fifty.’
We get out of the van. Ahead of us are rows and rows of houses, at different stages of development, some only beginning, others at wall plate, and others with fresh timber beams ready for the roofers. Carpenters are hammering into struts and rafters. I wait while Jody disappears into the site office: a tunnel-shaped hut in the shelter of a row of sycamores. Two men are shovelling sand into a mixer. Another man slashes a bag of cement in two with his trowel – he grimaces and turns away while a cloud of dust rises into the air.
Down farther where the houses are more advanced, a man is mounting a ladder with a full hod of mortar on his shoulder; above him, two bricklayers are tapping bricks into line with the handle of their trowel. Jody appears at the door of the hut and beckons to me. ‘Come in and meet this gangster,’ he shouts. ‘He’d make the Kray brothers look like the Legion of Mary.’
In the hut, a man with a few strands of hair stretched across his crown is barking about fucken sand being late, and what is he to do if it doesn’t turn up in an hour.
‘This young man is looking for the start,’ Jody says.
‘Better put him in Horse’s crew then.’
‘No,’ he chuckles. ‘I think he’s had enough of Horse for one day.’
The sand arrives. The lorry driver stands at the door, and draws a pencil from behind his ear: ‘Sign here, Pat,’ he says to the site manager, who scrawls on the docket.
‘What the fuck kept ye?’ the site manager asks.
‘I had another delivery to a site in Dunstable, hadn’t I, mate.’
‘Well, don’t be late tomorrow.’
A dog-eared photo of the Cork hurling team is pinned to the wall. Beside it, stretching her plaid shirt and blue jeans to their limit, Jane Russell reclines on a bale of hay. And nearby is a group taken in front of the Lourdes Basilica; circled by a red biro is the site manager’s glistening head.
The driver walks heavily down the ramp to his lorry. The site manager impales the docket on a spiked stack. ‘That’s the second time the fucker was late this week.’
‘We won’t need him much longer.’ Jody rests his backside on the table that serves as a desk, ‘The boss is buying a sand pit out in the West Country.’
‘A whole pit?’
‘He’ll need it when the Heathrow job comes through.’
‘A lot of shillings there,’ says the site manager, and turns to me. ‘This brother of yours will have his own bank soon.’
6
UNLESS HE IS WORKING LATE or trouble has cropped up at a site, M.J. drops into The Highway a few times a week to count the takings, around the time when Sandra the barmaid has finally succeeded in clearing the pub and is washing glasses by one of the amber globes. Most Friday nights I drive with him to Chiswick.
One night I help him take the bags of coin to the upstairs safe of The Highway, and in a silence broken only by the occasional shout from the street below, we arrange the notes in bundles for the bank. All the while, a succession of images is becoming a jumble in my brain: gangers shouting abuse and sacking lads who have failed to reach the chalk mark, sheaves of bank notes falling out of notebooks, and fishing holidays in Killarney. And despite my admiration for my brother, and indeed my indebtedness to him, I am now seeing the foul underbelly of his success.
While he is filling in a lodgement slip, I leav
e the table and saunter to one of the windows. Groups of men are still hanging around the street, washed clean after a downpour. Some are staggering, one makes a feeble attempt to snatch at women passing by, but they escape his clutches and, shrieking with excitement, click along in their high heels. A raucous version of ‘Kevin Barry’ reaches us:
Lads like Barry are no cowards
From the foe they will not fly
Lads like Barry will free Ireland
For her sake they’ll live and die.
When he is finished, the singer looks up and down the street and shouts at the top of his voice: ‘Up the Republic! Up the fucken Republic!’ He flicks a cigarette butt on the pavement and slouches out of sight.
M.J. turns the key in the safe, tests the handle and rises from his knees. ‘How did you get on today?’
‘Alright. But that Muldoon ….’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s a savage.’
The smile fades and, as I’ve noticed, when his hackles are raised, he runs his hand through his wavy hair.
‘Explain yourself.’
I describe Muldoon’s cruelty. ‘And the young fellow was only joking. No harm meant.’
‘A brute. Is he now? Tomásheen, you know fuck all about what goes on here. Muldoon is a good foreman. And good foremen are hard to find. Fellas I can rely on.’
‘For kicking lads up the backside.’
He is now glaring at me. ‘Look, you need eyes in the back of your poll if you want to make it over here.’ He strides across to the window. ‘Come over here a minute, Tommy. Come over here and I’ll show you something. Look down there.’
The street is now bare apart from a man who is shadowboxing in front of a plate-glass window, and whose shirt is hanging loose over the waistband of his trousers. ‘I didn’t take the boat to join up with them eejits holding up the street corner and singing “Kevin Barry”.’
He goes back to the table and starts flicking through the lodgement book: ‘I looked around, boy, and saw where money was to be made, and I needed men like Muldoon.’
‘Right.’
He keeps checking a bundle of dockets, and after a while, without raising his head, offers an olive branch: ‘Any chance you’d have a look at these figures? And you might go to the bank on Monday morning with Sandra if you’re around.’
‘Sure.’
And from then on I try to impose commonsense on my private debate – this is life in a rough-and-tumble world. We’re in a jungle, Tommy; jungles have their own laws. I’ve been sheltered too long in a boarding school.
One Friday evening, M.J. grants himself a half-hour’s breathing space after supper; we chat about Ardglass for the first time. He had received a phone call from Con, one of the twins in Chicago. ‘They’re in real estate.’ He does an American take-off. ‘Bill is going out with a lassie from Lixnaw.’ While he is speaking, I have the feeling he could have been talking about uncles, or older cousins, so wide does the gap seem between me and my brothers and sisters.
‘Do you remember when they left?’
‘Barely.’ The scene comes back misty around the edges. I hear hushed voices in the bedroom; a lighted candle in a sconce is moving about in the darkness. My head is being tousled; someone is whispering ‘Come on, Con. Leave the child sleep – the train won’t wait.’ There’s a bar of Urney’s chocolate on the pillow when I awake in the morning. They all seemed to leave like that: Mossie soon after M.J., Eily to Leeds to be a nurse, and Eddie to the depot. Of nine children, only one – Gerry – remains in Ardglass. Then parcels stamped with the Stars and Stripes arrive from Chicago: American bobby socks for the girls; showy jackets with ‘The Bears’ on the back for Gerry and me. Very soon they are calling me ‘Yank’ in the playground. Pauline refuses to wear the socks, and gets another thrashing with a sally rod one morning before she goes to school. ‘But Mammy,’ she cries, ‘they’re laughing at me.’
‘Notions of yourself, you have. Is that it? You’ll wear them, and be glad to have them. The Cruelty Man, that’s who I’ll send for.’
The Cruelty Man was her most fearsome weapon to scare the living daylights out of us. The Cruelty Man had been called to a neighbour’s cottage and three children had been taken off to a home, and were never seen again. On our way from school, especially in winter, we used to huddle together until we were well clear of the cottage.
‘Mammy, don’t send for The Cruelty Man. I’ll wear them.’
‘My name is mud with the mother because of Mossie,’ M.J. is now saying.
‘She doesn’t talk much about that,’ I hedge, keeping my gaze on the framed photos on his sideboard: a black-and-white one of my father thatching the roof of the old house; Mossie in his First Communion suit, a rosary beads around his joined hands. And beside them on the polished surface, my father’s pocket watch. But in my head I hear her recriminations: ‘Himself and his money and his building.’
I was in the study hall when the Rector called me to his room: ‘I’m sorry to bring you bad news. It’s about your poor brother, Maurice.’
M.J. reads my thoughts. ‘Mossie, God rest him. Too hot-tempered. And I warned him to stay clear of that gang he hung around with.’ He pushes away his plate and rests his head in his hands. When he looks up, his eyes are red. ‘How did you get on in Leeds?’ he asks.
‘Fine. Very strict rules. Suits Eily fine, you know the way she always had her copybooks neat and tidy. So, no complaint.’
‘The sums always right for the Master.’
‘But Pauline says she may as well be back in the nunnery.’
‘How is she?’
‘Looks much happier. Likes being a nurse, but she’s giving out yards about the mother and how she pushed her into that convent.’
‘She did too.’ He starts drumming his fingers on the table’s edge, tapping into a shared family wound: the shouting in the kitchen that wakes me one morning during the summer holidays: ‘I won’t have a wretch like you bring disgrace on us.’
‘But Mammy.’
‘I’ll give you “Mammy”. ’
Then the scurrying and the slapping and Pauline crying: ‘It was nothing, Mammy; he only asked me to go home with him after the dance.’
‘Dance, is it? Up in Relihan’s shed you were, you wretch, and don’t tell me lies. I’m here slaving, and the young fellas of the parish after you like dogs.’
‘Ah, leave her; she’s only young.’ My father’s plea is puny against the sound of the beating.
‘Shut your mouth, and go out and do a bit of work for a change. My brothers would have a day’s work done by now.’ More smacking and crying for mercy then, and when I go down to the kitchen, Pauline is sobbing in a corner, her beautiful face covered in red blotches. Then the following summer, when she has done her Leaving Certificate, we go with her in a hired car to a convent outside Limerick; my father sits in front beside the driver, my mother says the rosary, and Pauline keeps her face turned towards the window, weeping quietly into her handkerchief.
‘They live in the nurses’ home – a huge redbrick,’ I tell him. ‘On their day off, they have to be in at ten, nine in the winter. The matron interviewed me in her office, and wagged her finger: “Young man, even if you are their brother, don’t imagine that you can come and march into this hospital whenever you like, as if you were the Lord Mayor.”’
‘Poor Pauline.’ Smirking, M.J. stretches and then yawns. ‘What’s she going to do at all?’
‘She’ll be fine. By all accounts, she’s very popular with the young doctors, whatever the matron thinks.’
‘That’s our Pauline.’ He laughs. ‘Is Gerry making any shape?’
‘Yes. He’s doing OK. Has the milking machine now.’
‘Them heifers I bought him, I believe he sold them off at the January fair.’
‘He’s going to a farm school in the creamery, every Friday night.’ I am painting the best picture of Gerry, to whom our mother had given the few rushy fields M.J. desperately wanted.<
br />
‘And the Summerhill House crowd?’
‘David is in the university, going to be a doctor. And Bernard is an agricultural instructor. Richard is at home.’
He chuckles. ‘D’you remember what the mother used to say? “Only for their oul grandfather finding some mine out in Montana,’ tis far away from grandeur they’d be. All the Healys ever had was two goats and a donkey on the side of a hungry hill.”’
Back from America, Matty Healy’s father had greased the palm of the landlord, who rented out and eventually sold him Summerhill House and three hundred acres of the best land in the parish.
‘Every St Stephen’s Day, we used to watch at the big gate.’ M.J. is staring into the past. ‘Mossie, the twins and myself. You’d hear the horses stamping on the cobblestones up at the house, all shiny in brass and buckles, and the maids with pinafores rushing around with a tray of glasses.’
He returns to the Healys after Vera has cleared the table. ‘And her ladyship, Miss Grace, as oul Matty made the servants call her – is she a nurse yet?’ He picks his teeth with a match.
‘I met Miss Grace on the Green Road before I came over. Jodhpurs, riding cap – the lot. She was taking Scarteen for a trot before the County Show. She’s coming to London for some course when she finishes at St Vincent’s Hospital. Queen Alexandra School of Nursing, I think, she said.’
The picking stops. He is now waiting for every word that comes from my lips. Then, like someone coming out of a daydream, he places his hands on the table, raises himself, and begins to gather up maps and drawing plans.
‘Old Matty, the bastard,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t give Eddie time off the morning I left. “Cows have to be milked, no matter who’s going to England.” A month later Eddie told him he could shove his cows up his hole; he had passed the exam for the guards anyway.’ He takes the plans to the hallstand and bounds up the stairs, leaving me in the slipstream of the winter’s morning he had departed for England.