The Chisellers

by Brendan O'Carroll

  Sean nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, indeed, that’s called the maid’s step, and that’s really what it was - a step the maid would use to stand on when reaching for items on the tallboy. We can run you up one of these to match your unit in no more than ten days.’

  The woman’s face lit up. ‘I have walked Dublin,’ she said, ‘in search of anyone who could even understand what I was talking about.’ She was obviously thrilled.

  Sean took her down to the order book where he did a little pencil sketch of the piece, gave her a rough estimate of the price and she departed, very happy, and having left a deposit with the two men. As soon as she had gone Mr Wise exclaimed, ‘Brilliant! You were absolutely brilliant, Sean. Boy, what a team we’re going to make!’

  Sean beamed, and reddened a little. ‘Yes, I thought that went well, Mr Wise.’

  ‘Well? You were fantastic! You had her eating out of your hand! Lucky you’re married, Sean, or we should be facing serious female problems in this store!’

  The two men laughed uproariously and Sean positively blushed this time. As the laughter faded, Sean sat down on his chair at the bureau and rested his elbow on a brown paper parcel. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh ... it’s, em, something for you, Sean,‘ Mr Wise replied, very off-hand.

  Sean picked up the parcel and slowly opened it to find two gleaming white shirts and a new red dicky-bow tie still in its box. He looked up slowly at his old friend. The words of thanks wouldn’t come, but really they weren’t necessary.

  Mr Wise tried to brush it off as a business thing. ‘Well, if you’re going to be the store manager you should look like the store manager, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Wise, I do agree,’ Sean said softly to his new-found team mate. ‘But if I’m the store manager, what are you going to be?’

  Mr Wise thought for just a moment, then replied, ‘I shall be the managing director!’

  The two men beamed at each other, and Sean trotted off to put on the kettle.

  Never before had such a small store had only two staff with such high-powered titles, Mark remarked that night, relating the story to Betty. For his part, Mark was enjoying his new role as factory manager. He had introduced a piece-work system in an effort to keep the output of the factory up. It worked well. Mark was also enjoying his newfound wealth, for his wage packet now contained £37 after deductions for tax and social welfare insurance payments. Of this he passed £10 on to Agnes, put £20 away in a savings account and easily managed on the £7 that was left. Life was going well for him and he would soon be making his first trip abroad to London to visit a potential new customer who had made some enquiries through Greg Smyth. He looked forward to this as it would be his first trip abroad - in fact, with the exception of his camping holiday in Blessington years ago, it would be his first trip outside Dublin! He now possessed two good suits, several white shirts and matching ties - all he needed now was a suitcase. Mark felt good.

  The one tiny little cloud blocking his sunshine was how quiet and somewhat sad Agnes had been since Frankie’s departure. But Mark could do little about this, especially since he was glad that Frankie was gone. He decided to leave the issue with his mother and hope she would come out of it herself.

  And over the next few months there was plenty to lift Agnes’s mind from thoughts of her second-eldest son overseas.

  Firstly, in that February of 1971 Agnes had to cope with the change to decimalisation. Something that used to be two shillings now became ten pence. The sixpence was gone, so to was the thrupenny bit and the half-crown. In their place came the ½p, 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, and 50p coins. One pound was now the same as 100 new pennies, where before it had been two hundred and forty old pennies. The government guideline for the exchange rate was fairly simple: one new penny was worth two old pennies. Agnes thought this was fine, up to a point, but if one new penny equalled two old pennies and one hundred new pennies equalled one new pound, where previously it had been worth two hundred and forty pence, what happened to the missing forty pennies? Agnes suspected that the government kept them!

  On top of trying to cope with decimalisation, Agnes was now trying to handle the upheaval of her new move. She’d been out a couple of times to the new house in Finglas. The journey took ages and the house seemed miles away. The bus took her past Glasnevin cemetery, even a dairy, through the tiny village of Finglas where the double-decker Number 40 bus had great difficulty in negotiating the narrow bridge that crossed the Fionnglas river from Finglas East to Finglas West where her new home was. Thankfully, once the bus reached its terminus on Barry Road, Agnes had just a one-minute walk to her new house on Wolfe Tone Grove.

  Agnes still hated the thought of leaving Dublin’s city centre. She had been born, christened, reared, confirmed, wooed, kissed and wed within a one-mile radius of James Larkin Court, and although all her furniture and personal things were carefully packed and ready for the move, Agnes knew that the memories encapsulated in that one-mile circle could not be taken out to the country. Her attitude to the move had softened just a little when that January two bombs had exploded in Dublin’s city centre, a spin-off of the Northern troubles, and two people were killed in the bombings. Agnes’s mother-hen instinct told her that the coop was now a little bit too close to danger and that her ‘chicks’ would be safer eight miles away in Finglas.

  Even so, the Browne family did not depart 92 James Larkin Court until three days after everyone else had left the street. There had been a massive party a week previously in Foleys. Mr Foley had bought drink for everyone and supplied spare ribs free of charge. This was something Foley did from time to time as a kind of grand gesture — although there was method in his madness as the salty ribs made his clients drink even more.

  Agnes sat in her usual comer, beside her the empty seat of her never-to-be-forgotten best friend Marion Monks, whose death had broken Agnes’s heart three years ago. After a few bottles of cider Agnes began to talk to the empty chair. ‘Ah Jaysus, Marion, listen to them! The music of The Jarro! Will we ever hear the likes of it again?’

  The music to which Agnes referred could not be played on any instrument, but was the cackle of voices and rhythmic banter of the inner-city folk, the symphony of unanswered questions and impossible statements, that were so much of the colour of Dublin: ‘Hey, Mr Foley. A vodka with ice — and fresh ice, none of that frozen stuff!’ This would be followed by a howl of laughter.

  ‘Where were yeh goin’ yesterday when I saw yeh, goin’ to work?’

  ‘Where was I goin? I was in a hurry.’

  ‘I was thinkin’, ‘cause when I caught up with yeh, yeh were gone!’

  These conversations would make perfect sense to the participants!

  Pierre arrived into the party at around 2am with boxes full of pizzas which were promptly scoffed by all and sundry. Pierre’s rendition of ‘Poor Auld Dicey Reilly’ in his thick French accent brought the house down. The party went on until the early hours of the morning, and strangely for a Dublin party died a quiet death. Then the hard men and women of Dublin city, not prone to great gestures of affection, merely nodded to each other and said ’Good luck’ as they parted with old neighbours, in some cases never to see them again.

  When the last bit of furniture was on the removals van outside 92 James Larkin Court and the back of the van was hammered up, Agnes sat into the front seat beside the driver with Trevor on her lap. The van shuddered to a start as the driver rammed it into first gear, and slowly made its way up the middle of the deserted James Larkin Court.

  The last resident to leave the street was young Dermot Browne. He dashed after the van as it crept up the hill and climbed aboard, clutching under his arm the steel green-painted street sign which he had unscrewed from the wall. The sign was the property of Dublin Corporation — or had once been; it now belonged to Dermot Browne. In cream Gaelic letters it simply read: ‘James Larkin Court, Dublin 1.’

  The Browne family were the last to take up residence on the newly
built street of Wolfe Tone Grove. There were forty-eight houses on the road, twenty-four each side, the even numbers on the right and the uneven numbers on the left. Agnes Browne and her children, in Number 43, were in the third last house on the left at the bottom of the street. Wolfe Tone Grove was on a slight hill, making Agnes’s end of the road slightly higher than the lower-numbered end of the road. Thus, although Agnes lived at the bottom of the road, because of the hill it eventually became known as the top of the road - only in Dublin! The terraced houses were built in blocks of six. Agnes’s block ran from Numbers 37 to 47. Agnes knew from the moment she moved in that in her block alone she would have desperate trouble with her neighbours’ names. They were, running from 37 upwards: the O‘Donnells, the O’Connells, the McDonalds, the Brownes, the Bradys, and the Dowdalls. Cathy Browne and Cathy Dowdall were both thrilled that their new houses should be separated only by one garden. If the surnames were tricky, the children’s names were too complex for Agnes to even ponder. Between the six families they had a total of forty-six children, and of these forty-six there were five Patricks, five Dermots, four Cathys, four Rorys, three Willies and three Jimmies.

  The house had three bedrooms — well, two bedrooms and a box-room. Agnes took the box-room for herself. In the smaller of the two bedrooms she installed Cathy and Trevor, and in the larger room the four boys. Downstairs was a kitchen big enough to cook in but not to eat in, and the sitting-room cum dining-room. Behind the kitchen was a bathroom on one side of the small hallway and a toilet on the other side. The front garden was large enough at thirty feet by twenty-seven feet, the width of the house. The back garden was massive. Once again the width of the house, but this time over a hundred and twenty feet long.

  Over the first few weeks all four older boys got stuck into working on the back garden with a variety of pick-axes and shovels, and over a period excavated a number of buckets, wheelbarrow-wheels and handles, and enough breeze blocks to build another home.

  Agnes had put some money by to buy some new things for the house before the move, like new sheets and pillowcases for the beds. Mark supplied the suite of furniture for the sitting-room, which he bought at cost price from Senga Furnishings. It was a nice suite in mustard leatherette, one of the latest designs from Senga Furnishings which Mark called the ‘Loretta’ suite, again using his mother’s second name. Agnes was very proud of this and never let the opportunity slip in any conversation to drop in the fact that she had a couch named after her. Agnes had purchased a bit of lino for the kitchen from ’Buddah’ at the George’s Hill Market. The gas cooker she had previously used in James Larkin Court had travelled well and now sat proudly beside the enamelled trough in the new kitchen. The largest and the most modem addition to the Browne’s collection of furniture was provided as a ‘moving in’ gift by Pierre. Standing against a bare wall in the small kitchen like a monument, sat a gleaming white new Electrolux refrigerator. Having never had a refrigerator before, the Browne family were at a loss as to what to actually keep in it. Initially all they put there was butter and milk. Over a period of time it went on to contain bread, jars of jam, and even tins of processed peas. It was three months before Agnes realised it should be plugged in!

  There was one open fire in the sitting-room and when lit this provided hot water for the entire family; Saturday bath nights now became a pleasure rather than a chore for Agnes.

  There was no early bus from Finglas into Dublin city centre. The first bus left the terminus at five past six, much too late for Agnes or Carmel Dowdall to carry out their market business. Luckily, next door to Agnes in Number 45, lived the Bradys, Carol and her husband Ned. They had seven children and, needless to say, quickly became referred to as The Brady Bunch, although they couldn’t have been more unlike The Brady Bunch had they tried, God love them! Ned was a short fat man with a bloated face and a massive head of mousey brown hair. He had tiny little pin-sized eyes beneath hugely puffy eyebrows which gave him the appearance of Barney Rubble after fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. His wife Carol - as Agnes had remarked once to Carmel Dowdall — had a face that looked like a cow licking piss off a nettle, and the children, God bless them, looked like a collection a three-year-old child would draw in a picture. Still, they were good-hearted people, who had previously lived in Sheriff Street, and the bonus for both Agnes and Carmel was that Ned was a baker. He worked in St Joseph’s bakery just off North Frederick Street. His starting time was 4.30am, and he had a car. So the two ‘girls’ would join Ned every morning on his city-bound trip, both women sitting in the back of the Volkswagen Beetle where they could still see the road ahead clearly, as little Ned’s head came just above the dashboard. Mark continued to cycle into work, downhill all the way to the city and uphill on the return journey, although this never seemed to bother him. Rory, now recovered from the beating, rode safely and soundly in and out of the city centre on the Number 40 bus.

  Dermot struck up a friendship with the eldest Brady son, Patrick, whose nickname was ‘Buster’. Physically, the two had little in common, Dermot now becoming more handsome by the day and with an athletic physique, and Buster probably two stone overweight and looking like he was going to explode at any moment. However, Buster was a very happy young fella and laughed at every one of Dermot’s jokes. Over the next year they would grow to be best friends, Dermot enjoying the role of becoming Buster’s protector and Buster idolising the very ground Dermot walked upon. The six other Brady children were all girls, and this left Buster in the same position as his father - oppressed. It also meant that he had to join the girls’ activities and, although he hated it, every Monday and Wednesday Buster was marched off to Irish dancing classes and every Saturday or Sunday he would be entered into a Feis somewhere in the city. Dermot attended a number of these competitions, where Buster never won anything, but Dermot got great fun out of seeing this little blob bounce around the stage in a kilt and cape with the other children trying to stay out of his way. Dermot once told Buster he looked like ‘a fuckin’ roundabout’, and, true to form, rather than feeling insulted, Buster laughed heartily and agreed with him.

  Buster, for his part, attended every football match Dermot played in, where Dermot always seemed to score and where Buster could hear the older men on the line exclaim every so often that Dermot was ‘beautiful on the ball’. Buster now spent more time in the Browne house than he did in his own, and Agnes suspected that it was more than just Dermot’s company he yearned for ... often she would catch him entranced as he looked at Cathy.

  Cathy Browne and Cathy Dowdall, heading towards their sixteenth birthdays, were blossoming into beautiful young girls. Boys from the adjoining roads of Casement, Barry and Mellowes, began hanging around Wolfe Tone Grove. Some boys even ventured up to Wolfe Tone Grove from as far as Ballygall Parade and McKelvey - both in East Finglas. This could be a treacherous trip, because in Finglas, as in the city centre, the tribal system soon took over and East did not see eye-to-eye with West. Still, these boys believed it was worth it in the hope of getting off with two of the beauties of Finglas West.

  For their part, the girls enjoyed the attention and, although Cathy Browne was a little bit shy, Cathy Dowdall made up for that with her ebullience and openness. In fact, one could describe her as a flirt! The girls would kiss selected boys, Cathy Dowdall more enthusiastically than Cathy Browne. The main difference between the two girls was that Cathy Dowdall was looking for a good time whereas Cathy Browne was looking for someone to love. This probably explained the shock on Cathy Browne’s face one evening as she sat on the comer of her bed digesting what Cathy Dowdall had just announced.

  ‘A feel? You’re goin’ to give him a feel?’

  ‘Yeh! A feel.’

  ‘Why?’

  “Cause - ‘cause I want to.’

  ‘Well, what if yeh get pregnant?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, yeh can’t get pregnant from a feel - can yeh?’ A little uncertainty crept in at the end.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Cathy Brown
e’s grasp of the facts of life was a bit wobbly.

  A short silence followed. Cathy Dowdall did not meet with Cathy Browne’s eyes.

  ‘Anyway, I already let him feel me diddies,’ she proceeded defiantly.

  Cathy Browne said nothing, just threw her head back and roared with laughter.

  ‘What are yeh laughin’ at? I did!’ Cathy Dowdall insisted.

  Cathy Browne stopped laughing and looked at her friend. ‘Cathy, yeh don’t have any diddies.’

  ‘Well, me nipples, then, I let him feel me nipples. It was lovely, Cathy.’

  Cathy Browne reddened a little, not really wanting to know the details of the other Cathy’s nipple escapade. Instead, she moved the conversation along.

  ‘So when? When is this feel goin’ to happen.’

  ‘Tonight, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, I hope you know what you’re doin’.‘ Cathy Browne ended her side of the conversation with a tremor in her voice.

  David Molloy was fifteen and a half years old, he would be sixteen in five months’ time. He was born in a third-storey flat in a building at Number 1, Synott Place which lay to the south of the Mater hospital. When he was just six years old the building in which he lived was condemned and his family became one of the early settlers in the new town of Finglas, which was only just beginning its sprawl. His street, Mellowes Road, was the last outpost of civilisation then, for behind his home for miles and miles ran wheat-fields, golden every summer as far as the eye could see. On their arrival in Finglas his mother enrolled him in St Fergal’s Boys’ School which he attended up until his thirteenth year. He then left and went on to secondary school in the newly built Patrician College on Dunsink Road in Finglas.

  David had always felt a little closer to God than to his friends. The move to the Patrician College brought about his introduction to the Patrician Brothers, men who had vowed celibacy and dedicated their lives to God and to the education of youth. This had a profound effect on David and after only his first year in the college he announced secretly to Brother Francis, his religious knowledge instructor, that he felt he might have a vocation. Brother Francis had been very calm and understanding with the young boy — vocations from the pupils of Patrician colleges throughout Ireland were not a rare thing, but neither were false vocations or perceived vocations. Brother Francis told David that he was very young to make such a bold decision, that he should dwell upon the thought and pray to God for guidance. He should also in the meantime live the life of a normal young boy as much as possible, and as Brother Francis put it, ‘Put your vocation to the test.’ This David Molloy had faithfully done for the last year. Little was he to know that this night, the night of his second date with a pretty girl from Wolfe Tone Grove named Cathy Dowdall, his vocation was about to undergo its greatest test yet.