by William King
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
My Bonnie lies over the sea …
‘Garryowen you bastard, get off me,’ she wriggles out of his clumsy embrace.
‘Don’t be like that. Wan, wan oul kiss, the best-lookin’ girl in London. Bring back my Bonnie to me.’ One of his wellingtons strikes the table and knocks over my book and my glass of Tizer. A throaty roar goes up from the men who are standing nearby. ‘Go on, Garryowen, you boyo, you’re a glutton for your mutton.’ While still trying to canoodle Bonnie, Garryowen half-turns to them: ‘No mutton here, boy. This is spring lamb.’ The reply draws another guffaw from the gang of drinkers.
Bonnie finally succeeds in pushing him away, and wipes his spittle from her face. Garryowen gives up, and, breathing heavily, peers at me.
‘Who’s he?’ he asks her. He has to steady himself with one hand on the table. A rolled-up copy of The Limerick Leader falls from his back pocket. ‘Sure he’s wouldn’t be able for a mare like you, Bonnie.’ His drunken gaze tumbles towards my book, now lying on the sawdust. ‘Books. I can’t stand anyone readin’ fucken books. Thinkin’ he’s fucken better than the rest of us. When I was your age, boy, I was ridin’ women.’ He moves closer. His face is dark and his deep-set eyes are mad with drink and aggression.
‘He’s M.J.’s brother,’ says Bonnie, smoothing down her dress at the hips.
‘M.J.’s brother?’ He gapes at me; his body slackens.
‘Tommy,’ she adds. ‘He’s here for the summer. Going to college to be an engineer, and he’ll be your boss some day, so be nice to him.’ She touches my elbow.
‘I didn’t know, boy, I didn’t know.’ His tone is now subdued. ‘Put it there, put it there. If you’re half the man your brother is, you’ll take over London.’
I shake his hand, as coarse as sandpaper.
‘I’ll have to get you a drink, Tommy boy. What’ll you have?’
‘A glass so.’
‘Yerra a pint.’
Bonnie intervenes: ‘No, a glass will do fine. Do you want to make him as drunk as yourself?’
On his way back from the counter, Garryowen knocks into the men who had been urging him to have a go at Bonnie. ‘Ignorant bastards from Connemara,’ he says, putting the glass of Watneys, and a gin and tonic on the table. Then he slumps into the seat beside us.
‘What’s up with you tonight, Garryowen?’ Bonnie asks.
He ignores her and rakes the bar with peevish eyes. ‘Man is only a unit of production.’ Placing a hand on her knee, he leans over. ‘Do you know who said that, Tommy?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You don’t? What are they teachin’ you in that college, boybawn?’ He sits back. ‘Karl Marx, that’s who said it. And do you know what? He was fucken right.’
His eye catches a yellowed picture of the leaders of the 1916 Rising to the right of us. ‘God rest you, Connolly.’ He raises his glass to the picture. ‘You were the best of them. The rest were only oul poets.’ In a mocking tone, he quotes the Proclamation: cherishing all the children of the nation equally. ‘Look,’ he says, picking up his sodden newspaper from the floor and wiping off the sawdust with his sleeve. ‘Look.’ He straightens out the front page, showing a picture of President de Valera, beneath it a banner headline: ‘Bronze Statue to the President Unveiled in Clare.’
‘An oul fraud, if ever there was one.’
‘What did the poor man ever do to you?’ Bonnie asks.
‘What did he never do for me?’ He sweeps his hand over the room. ‘Does Dev or his crowd give a curse about any of us poor bastards here in John Bull?’
‘Didn’t he give you the dole?’ She nudges me.
‘Dole my arse,’ Garryowen says. ‘Thirty bob a week. Any Irishman worth talkin’ about, girl, wouldn’t stick his paw out for the dole. Townies maybe. A countryman would work at the shovel till he drops.’
To make his point, he stretches across her: ‘Tommy, they can say all they like about M.J. Galvin or the Murphys or Pateen Lowry; God knows where we’d end up without them. If you’re fair, they’ll treat you all right.’ Then, satisfied with his speech, he lapses into silence. On the table, Dev’s picture lies soaking in beer and Tizer. Garryowen’s head sinks into his chest, and he begins to snore, but a shout from the card table causes him to jerk, and like a mongrel dog frightened out of his sleep by lice, he opens his eyes. ‘What?’ He stares at us for a moment and calms down again, picks my book off the floor, wiping the cover with his calloused hand. ‘Stay at the books, boy.’ A fringe of dried ale clings to his chapped lips. ‘I had no chance, even though I was better than the fella that was put on for the scholarship – no pull, you see. He’s now a schoolmaster; I’m here in Kilburn.’ Dark cavities show when he laughs.
‘Doyle, you’re a great-lookin’ mare,’ he says and struggles to his feet. ‘I’d go all the way with you. The full fifteen rounds.’
One of the men near us shouts: ‘Give us “Dan McGrew”.’
Garryowen sways, and, without taking his eyes off Bonnie, declares in a loud voice: ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew.’
The men guffaw and call for attention: ‘Go on, Garryowen. Go on, boy.’
‘A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon ….’
Someone slaps the counter. Sandra shouts that she’ll call the police. The men cheer.
‘You never lost it, Garryowen.’
‘He’d be quare without it.’
‘Shut up, let ye.’
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, – And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.
He reaches out to Bonnie and this time she suffers his clumsy attempts to kiss her. The men drown him out with their cheering when he tries a second verse. Grinning, he gives up: ‘Ignorant fuckers like you give our country a bad name.’ He puts the pint glass to his lips, drains it and slouches off to the bar. Bonnie watches him go, a look of pity on her face: ‘It’s true for him. I believe he was at the top of his class at school. Brains to burn.’
We talk for a while beneath James Connolly and the ‘oul poets’. By now she has forgotten her anger at M.J., and I want to share with her my impressions since I’ve arrived: maybe get a balance or knock into shape the whole crazy picture, but it will have to wait. I am growing jaded and have no wish to revisit scenes of brutality. But I do mention the notebook.
‘Happens here all the time. You’d better wise up, kid – as they say in the pictures. That’s how money is made. Those officials turn a blind eye. M.J. Galvin puts them up in Killarney; M.J. Galvin becomes a millionaire.’
The din is getting louder. The globes along the counter show clouds of cigarette smoke piled up beneath the ceiling. I pick up my book, fan the pages and do a stretching act of tiredness. Bonnie gets the message. ‘If you want anyone to tuck you in ….’ She gives me a roguish glance and stands up, smoothing down her frock. ‘Joke,’ she adds, and laughs. ‘Don’t look so shocked. Only a bit of gas.’
She is picking up her purse when the door opens and Horse Muldoon’s large head appears above his cronies. For a moment the noise falls away; the fiddler puts down his bow, the card-playing comes to a halt. Even Sandra stops. Horse struts to the far end of the bar where he stands with his back to the wall, and takes a roll of notes from his trouser pocket. ‘Right,’ he shouts. ‘Cable-pull out at Maida Vale in the morning. I’m lookin’ for two dozen skins. Good men, not slackers or hobos.’
A few of them leave their pints and rush to him, and, like yearlings at a fair, each gets the cattle dealer’s once-over. He peels off a few notes from the roll, hands them to some, others he tells to fuck off, that he’s seen too many of their kind. ‘I’m lookin’ for men, not fellas draggin’ their arses after them.’ Then, with one of his henchmen pushing a way ahead, he storms out again.
‘The sub,’ says Bonnie. We are both standing as if to get a better view of a set piec
e on a stage. ‘They’ll get a few quid now so they’ll have to be on the lorry in the morning, and for the next few days. But if Horse doesn’t like them, he’ll kick their arses by midday and they’ll have to make their own way back from Maida Vale.’
8
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, arriving in good time before most of the lorries at the pick-up point, I go into one of the cafés on Cricklewood Broadway, and find a place at the end of a long table. A swarthy man with an apron around his waist shouts at me from behind a stainless steel counter. ‘The same, Paddy?’
‘The same?’
He is getting impatient. ‘Double eggs, sausages and bacon, Paddy,’ he spells it out as if I’m a dunce.
‘Yes. That’ll do fine. Thank you.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he jeers. A broad grin spreads across his glistening face and he shouts into the cooking area behind him. ‘Double everything for posh Paddy.’ The cook, a black man, wipes sweat off his forehead, shows a set of white teeth, and explodes into a squeaky laugh, shaking his head and repeating ‘Posh Paddy’ to himself as he throws more sausages on a huge grill.
In the crowded café, the warm air is mixed with cooking smells, cigarette smoke and the occasional wave of sweat when the men throw coins on the table and amble out. The mood bears no resemblance to the previous night in The Highway. They are now like monks vowed to silence: the only sound comes from the scrape of a knife and fork, the rustle of a newspaper. Someone is stirring his tea, the spoon glancing loudly off the inside of the mug. The swarthy man is calling out for ‘another double eggs, bacon and sausage over here, mate’.
Some have pushed away their plates and are rolling cigarettes or have their heads buried in the Daily Mirror. On the wall, Marilyn Monroe is cooling off over an air vent, her white dress billowing up to her elbows.
After a while the heavy sound of Galvin lorries on the road outside breaks the silence; Horse Muldoon is shouting, ‘Stop playing with your goolies and get into the fucken truck.’ He starts blowing on a whistle. Newspapers are stuffed into back pockets, cigarettes are thrown on the flagstones and stamped on. A quick sign of the cross – a bookie’s tick-tack – and they stamp out the door, chewing as they go. I finish my breakfast and follow them to the lorries.
Unlike the previous day, the sky has clouded over and drops of rain are sprinkling the footpath. A ragged figure with a matted beard stands with his hand out; as he trundles along, methylated spirits, jutting out of his torn gabardine, sloshes around in a bottle. ‘A few coppers for a bite to ate, boy,’ he growls. I give him a threepenny bit. ‘God save you, boybawn,’ he says hoarsely after squinting at the coin. ‘Blessins ’a God on you, boy.’
Jody is standing by the driver’s door of a Transit while a crew, with much loud talk and shuffling of boots and good-humoured jostling, are climbing into the back. I sit in beside him.
On the way through streets of red brick, I notice the hated sign on the lace curtains: ‘No dogs. No blacks. No Irish,’ and try to make light of it. ‘We’re like the Jews. Downtrodden.’
‘The same old story. Give a dog a bad name.’ He switches on the wipers. ‘They piss in the beds – then we’re all tarred with the same brush.’
At Camden Town, like every other morning, the men are crowding around the lorries now parked ahead of us. One man has the trace of dried blood on his shirt-front. Jody pulls up in front of Corkindale’s Select Victuallers: pork, bacon, and sausages slantwise at each side of the signboard; at the centre, a laughing pig is jumping over a wooden fence.
With a rumpled tie loose around his neck, Kilrush has hopped off a truck and is counting the crew. A lanky youth rushes up to him: ‘Any chance of the start, Murty?’
Kilrush looks down at his shoes: ‘Is it fucken tennis you’re goin’ to play? Go home, boy, and get a pair of boots, and I’ll see you here tomorrow.’
‘Murty, I’ll work hard.’
‘Look, lad, I’ll give you a root up the hole, if you don’t get out of my way.’
Kilrush’s bald head moves among the men; he picks out the strongest and those who have boots or wellingtons, then shouts to a driver across the road: ‘Five more skins and we’re away.’
His hands deep in his pockets, a youth mooches around the road with three or four others until he notices a Batchelors peas can on the footpath, and, like a footballer lining up for a free kick, he takes aim. The empty can soars into the air and just misses a man who is drawing out a striped awning with a long pole. The man stops and glares across: ‘Ey, Paddy, kick your rubbish somewhere else.’
‘Ah, fuck off and mind your own business.’
‘This is my business, Paddy, and this is my country.’
The youth makes to cross the road, but the others grab him.
‘Bloody Paddies,’ the man mutters to himself and disappears into his shop; the awning remains lopsided over the window and the signs on the wooden frame: Price’s candles, Goddar’s soap. Brushes, kettles, pots and pans.
‘Lads,’ comes a shout from somewhere behind the vans: ‘Green Murphy is lookin’ for a few skins for a job in Putney.’
Like runaway horses, dodging and weaving between cars, they thump on bonnets, and charge down the road towards Mornington Crescent; the rasp of their boots and their shouts are at war with the angry hooting of motorists.
Jody returns: ‘Let’s go in God’s name.’ He checks the side mirror and joins the convoy. The men at the back stamp and thump and whistle whenever we pass an attractive-looking woman. Jody raps on the back window of the cab: ‘You lads, save your strength – we’ve houses to build.’
About halfway down the Kentish Town Road, Jody slows down and stops where a fellow in a bedraggled check shirt and blue jeans is resting against the front of a hardware shop. ‘A student in Dublin,’ Jody explains. ‘Trying to put himself through the university. Good worker.’
The men tease him as he gets into the back. ‘Deano, I’d say the dickey was lookin’ up at you this mornin’ with a red eye.’
‘Was that the barmaid from the Tara you had at the Galtymore? Headlights like a Morris Oxford.’
‘Yeah, and what none of you bastards will never know is that the gearbox is even better,’ says Deano.
They laugh coarsely and make room for him on one of the stools. ‘You’ll never be a vet if you get on her every Sunday night.’
I look through the back window and see a lazy smile on Deano’s sensitive face.
M.J. is anxious that I take out a driver’s licence. Back in Ireland, I had driven the Ford Prefect, but this is London and now I’d be driving a pick-up or a Transit. After a few runs to Stevenage, Milton Keynes and Hitchin, however, one Sunday when the traffic is light, I am able to find my way with little bother. So every morning I collect a crew outside the Galtymore or on Kilburn High Road near the Schweppes factory and take them as far away as Leighton Buzzard or Bury St Edmunds. During the day if the carpenters are out of nails or other bits and pieces, I do a run to the suppliers. Sometimes, when the men have drunk too much and a lump of their wages has made its way into the till at The Highway, I drive them to their digs. Before long, I could do the journeys blindfolded: Camden, Willesden, and occasionally as far as the Seven Sisters Road.
I get to know the men in all their moods: at six in the morning when they are trying to shake off a hangover, and late at night when they rehash their wild plans to go home – this summer, next year. ‘Pocketfuls of green, boy. I’ll be back in Tournafulla, get myself a tidy bit of land, my own fireside by next Christmas.’
‘And a mare.’
‘Oh, a mare.’
They are always going back; always building castles in the air, and they know it. When the drink puts them in bad form, they curse Dev and ‘them hoors of politicians who are only all talk’. Now, when I can’t remember where I put my breviary or glasses, those men, some of them – more youths than men – come back to me whole and entire. Leitrim Joe, Sputnik, and Hill of Howth – the last given the name because he used t
o boast of a second cousin once removed who was a parish priest there.
Keeping the mixer going and filling the hod for Deano and the others becomes my daily chore when I’m not called to go to Carling’s Builders’ Suppliers. Whenever the list is long, Deano travels with me to load the pick-up. We form an easy friendship; on the way to the suppliers, he tells me how he got his name. At a break one day he was idling with the shovel across his shoulders like James Dean with the shotgun in Giant. ‘Jaysus, lads,’ says a Dublin plasterer who had been to the film a few years before in the Metropole, ‘would you look, James fucken Dean.’
‘So that’s how Paddy Conway became Deano,’ he tells me with a grin.
After returning in the pick-up one day, we sit on a load of sand with two mugs of tea. Now and again a whiff of cooked meat carries from the dying embers of the brazier where the tea-boy is cleaning out frying pans. I scan our section of twelve houses; we are well ahead of the roofers, so the bricklayers playing a game of cards in the hut can afford a breather until the next storm when Kilrush will appear around a corner blowing a whistle and shoving his hand inside his trousers to scratch himself. Garryowen has disappeared across the railway line to The King George.
We cast away the dregs of our tea and lie back on the sand. Pigeons coo high up in the rich foliage of the chestnuts along the old boundary wall of the Alcott farm that will soon become Alcott Village. Our broken conversation is played out at a lazy rhythm. Deano is calculating the amount of money he will make as a veterinary surgeon in the scheme to eradicate tuberculosis in cattle.
‘Is your father a vet?’ I ask, working the warm sand into my body’s shape. He laughs, and the newspaper he is using as a sunshade falls from his face. ‘My father, oh, he is, all right. A vet of the village pub, The Hole in the Wall. Never did a stroke in his life, but that’s for your ears only.’