Two Walls and a Roof

by John Michael Cahill

  After I recovered my nerves a bit, I noticed that while the ceiling was burning it was only doing so in one corner. It looked far worse than it was and I felt there was no more need for a total panic. The flames were slowly spreading outwards from the corner and some lighting papers and cardboards were falling onto the table below. It was a cardboard ceiling that Nannie had painted years earlier and so it was always a good candidate for a fire. While I’m getting into my pants and taking all this in, Nannie ran back up the stairs once again. Then, having ‘saved’ me she decided to have one last go at saving her ‘useless’ son Michael. I took that opportunity to make sure that my case of altar clothes, which was on the table, was fully opened and I moved them directly under the falling lighting papers. If anything was going to burn for me, it had to be the altar clothes. From the many lighting bits of paper and card that were falling, I felt sure that the hated altar clothes would soon catch fire, and that would be the end of my Mass going days. Then with no panic at all, I got an old plastic pan that we used to wash our dishes in, and ran out into the street to the nearby water pump. I was almost stark naked except for my pants, which was still only on at half mast, but that didn’t deter me. I filled up the pan shouting to everyone passing, “Help! Help! Fire inside the house, fire, fire, help, help us!”

  No one took a blind bit of notice. I ran back inside and threw the whole pan of water straight up at the ceiling, hoping that none of it fell back down on my own personal little fire below in the case. Out I ran again and filled the pan a second time, with more calling for help, with exactly the same result. No one even looked inside the door, let alone offered to help us. Once more I lashed the water back up at the ceiling. A quick check confirmed that all my altar gear was happily smoldering away and the ceiling fire looked like it was going out, so no more need for water. The fire finally did die out completely, and Nannie arrived back down followed this time by Michael in his night shirt. He was rubbing his eyes from the smoke and looked like a figure from poorest India as he stood on the stairs surveying the damage through the smoke. The Nan saw my altar clothes were well on fire by then and began to beat at the flames with her wet dish cloth. Then Michael says, “Good man Chicken, you did a great job there I see. Looks like there was a bit of a fire after all”. The Nan glared at him with her black face as she beat out the fire in my old case, but thankfully not fast enough to save my clothes. Then she turned and really lashed into Michael, shouting and roaring like never before. She said that it was his burning the briquettes that had caused this fire. She screamed that she had specifically told him not to burn the briquettes, and that he was useless, that she had always known he was useless, and that a child had to save us and the house from the ‘Fires of Hell’.

  As it so happened, this time she was actually right. Michael had been writing late into the night as usual, and because it was a particularly bad winter, Nannie had lit the fire in the middle floor parlor, a very rare thing indeed. During the night Michael got cold, and when adding fuel to the fire, a smoldering briquette must have slipped down through one of the many holes in the flagstone. This briquette then set the cardboard ceiling below alight. Everyone knew that the fireplace in the middle room was dangerous, and that’s why she never lit a fire there, but that year the Nan had splurged out because of the sheer cold in the kitchen. I know for certain that before going to bed she had warned Michael not to be adding coal or briquettes to the fire in the night, but as usual he ignored her. We could easily have all burned to death that night but for the Nan’s early rising for my hated Mass service.

  After it all settled down, I was delighted at my calmness and heroism and felt surely I deserved a day off from school for saving us all. However, the Nan would have none of it, and she said to me, “Off you go now John, and tell no one about this fire. Tis bad enough that we both know he’s a fool, (pointing at Michael) without the whole town knowing it as well. You saved us from the fires of Hell while he’s stuck inside the bed. Now run along to school there’s a good boy”. No arguing did any good. She was adamant I was going to school, so I did. The only consolation I had from that whole affair was that I knew my Mass going days were over. No way could she afford to buy me more altar clothes, so there might be a God after all, though I still had my doubts.

  The lost train set.

  May Sheehan was a small, frail little woman who owned a grocery shop across the road from our house. She sold the newspapers, groceries and butter. The butter had to be delivered from the creamery and would not keep well - fridges being an unheard of machine in those days, so she didn’t carry a large stock of it, and relied on the odd delivery from a local who might be passing the creamery. This was not an ideal arrangement and she often ran out, so she needed a delivery boy. Almost every few days, she needed a new supply and I was to become that delivery boy. I don’t know how I actually got the job, but when I was about twelve years old, I began working for May collecting her butter. The deal was six pence a load and a load was about ten pounds I suppose, maybe more. I do know that I used an old shiny biscuit tin to carry this butter from the creamery to her shop. She paid me faithfully every trip and it was great having real money of my own to spend as I liked. A sixpenny bit was made of silver and had a shiny dog on its face, and it felt so good in my pocket. With such an amount of money, I could easily buy lots of slab toffee and even a bar of chocolate if I was to go really mad. Each time she paid me, I would be over the moon with happiness and I often bought a slab of toffee for both Kyrle and Lill as a surprise from my wealth.

  The biscuit tin weighed quite a bit, but the creamery was only down at the bottom of the town, so my journey was not too long and I used to rest my tin on strategic window sills on the way up to her shop. It only took me about twenty minutes, and for that I earned a full six pence every few days. Things were surely looking up for me at last.

  I do remember one day passing Peggy Corbett’s drapery shop just some weeks before Christmas and seeing, to my utter amazement, a beautiful train set in a box in her shop window. I stood transfixed, staring in at this amazing sight. I had dreamed of having a train set for a very long time, hoping for one at Christmas some day, but never telling anyone of my dreams because this would be a really expensive toy. And I didn’t want to add more stress to my Nan, knowing Santa did not exist for us Cahills. But there it was. It was very unusual to see toys in Peggy’s window as it was a drapery shop, and she never had toys in it, but that year she seems to have decided to try a new line of business to make money.

  Peggy Corbett always seemed to me to be a tall gentle woman, always soft spoken and never gruff or ugly to me, or to anyone else either. She had never married and lived up the street with her parents. And what’s more, she never seemed to age at all. She sold cloth, wool, some children’s clothes and Communion outfits, and of course she was also the Nannie’s primary bank. I think because of my many borrowings for Nannie, Peggy got to know me well, and I’m sure she liked me, and I liked her too.

  After staring in at the train set for a long time I became determined that I would have it one way or another, and so in I went to Peggy. I enquired about the train set, how much it would cost, and did she have many for sale. I had a lot of questions that day.

  She said that the price of the train set was seven shillings and six pence, an almost gigantic sum then, and she only had the one train set. When one considers that before the May Sheehan job I was only getting the odd penny now and again, it would have been totally impossible to buy that train set ever, as seven and six was 90 pennies. But, by then I was ‘working’ and I made up my mind that I would have that train set by Christmas. As a rough guess, I worked it out at about fifteen butter trips and I felt sure it could be done, and with time to spare. I asked Peggy if I could take the train set by paying her in small amounts and she asked me how small. “Sixpences”, I say. Peggy seemed to know my heart was set on it and said, “I’ll tell you what John, you save up your money and I will put the train set away for you til
l it’s paid for, how about that?” I asked her, what if some rich person sees it and buys it before I can get all the money, and to her amazing credit she said, “No John, I’ll put it away for you in the back of the shop till you have all the money”. As I'm nodding agreement I'm already playing with it in my mind. When I'm leaving her shop she reached into the window and removed my prize; the train set was safe. Now my money collecting would begin in earnest.

  I went across to the Nan’s and got a jam jar, then washed it all out clean and dry. Next I cut a slot in the lid to take the money, and so as to avoid temptation from the slab, I rolled loads of sticky tape around both the lid and the jar. Not even I could easily rob my jar now. I then got a small notebook, put a date on it, and set to thinking what I would do next. If memory serves me right, I already had some coins from my last butter job and they were the beginnings of my jar. The amount was noted in my book and the jar was then hidden under the floor boards under my bed. I knew full well that there might be others besides me who would be tempted to rob my jar, so it had to be kept safe from those hands too.

  I worked it out that if I deposited every single sixpence based on the previous jobs, then I would have enough for the train set by Christmas week, and there was always the other money I might get from Michael, or Big Kyrl, my other uncle. Gracie’s egg collecting might add a few coppers too, and all in all, I was sure I would make it happen for my train set. I began to imagine just where I would set it up on Nannie’s table upstairs. I could move my toy soldiers around, and if anything, it would add to my playing with them. In my mind I played with the engine and disconnected the carriages, I added brick bridges, some of my little soldier men could fit in the goods wagon, and it could be used to transport my toy tanks as well. This was going to be great, just great. I also felt that secrecy was my best friend, so I told no one of my deal with Peggy, not even Kyrle, who I could also see playing with the train set later on.

  I collected and collected, and the coins in my jar grew. Each deposit was a reason to celebrate and look at my jar. My notebook kept record of the odd extra coins that I got outside of my ‘regular job’, and I was quite ahead coming up to the Christmas period. Then the weather changed. It became bitterly cold. Times were particularly bad that year for us all as well and I could feel the tension rising as both Nannie and my mother got into their close talking huddled mode more often than usual. I knew from old that this always spelled trouble. It was as if by talking low while huddled together in Nannie’s kitchen, they could somehow shield us from the bad news that was coming. I hardened myself to their situation and would not even contemplate a single thought of helping out with my little stash. I felt sure that they didn’t even know I had one, so it was quite safe and so was my train set. Of course that was a great mistake. Parents nearly always know what their children are at, especially so in those days. It was easy too to see me carrying the butter tin every few days, and I was not buying sweets any more either, so I had to be stashing the money someplace.

  During another of Nannie’s borrowing sessions to Peggy, Peggy came right out and asked me if I was still collecting away for the train set, and I proudly pulled my notebook from my pocket and showed her the amount collected so far. I was almost there, and with time to spare too. Peggy seemed genuinely surprised and delighted for me, but probably she could not reconcile me and my stash with my Nannie’s borrowing note. I asked for a look at the box and she brought it out from the back. There it was in my hands. It was too beautiful for words. It had a jet black engine, a green goods wagon saying ‘P and T’ on the side of it, a coal wagon with some plastic coal inside it, as well as the passenger carriages. To my surprise I noticed too that it also had an engine driver and a fireman with a small shovel inside the box. These were details I hadn’t noticed on the window. I almost asked her for it there and then, but I was still a bit short and I was way too shy anyway. I believe now that had I asked Peggy that day, she would have trusted me with the balance and given me my box, but I didn’t. I took the borrowed pound over to Nannie’s and headed up to May Sheehan’s for my tin box and that day’s butter load.

  Unfortunately, Peggy’s latest pound didn’t go far enough and that day it began to snow heavily as well. Mother had some trick with her little fireplace where she would wet papers and stick them into the back of the grate with cinders. This pushed the few new lumps of coal to the front of the grate and reduced the coals needed to keep the fire alive. She always tried to have a block of wood to the back too, but that was not always possible in those hard times. I don’t know to this day how she managed to keep a fire going like she used to. It was sheer ingenuity on her part. Fortunately for her, our little living room was tiny and easy to heat, but of course the rest of the house was always like an icebox. Nannie on the other hand had an old black range which would burn anything, and she did so as well. Once it got hot, the cast iron stayed hot all day, so after she used her paraffin oil to get it going, we were set with kettles and pots boiling away all day long, but just as in mother’s house, you also froze in Nannie’s if you left the kitchen.

  As the weather worsened, the mother’s supply of coal ran out, and Nannie was just barely ahead with her bit of coal. They shared what they had for as long as they could, and it seems to me that my other grandmother, Gracie, was not willing to help in any way, or they were too proud to ask her. In any case, it would have been up to the father to do the actual asking, and he was not going to do that because he spent most of his time in his bed. In those terrible days, while my mother and Nannie bore the full brunt of our misery, my father found it easier to opt out from it all and go up the street to his mother’s where he got fed. I never understood this mentality, but he was my dad and of course I forgave him for it all in the end.

  Since birth I seem to have been gifted with very good hearing and this has stood to me well over the years. By that Christmas I had been given my own room, the ‘haunted’ one, and this was located just above Nannie’s kitchen. The day came when I could clearly hear from my room upstairs my poor mother begging Nannie to ask me for the money from my jar. I became enraged immediately. Nannie was saying, “I can’t ask him, I just can’t. You ask him, I won’t”. I remember lying on the bed, dreading the next words I would hear… “John, John, can you come downstairs for a minute… please”. It was the Nan and she was saying please, and Nannie never said please to anyone. This was surely going to be very bad indeed and I knew what was coming.

  From my bedroom I roared back down, “Yer not getting my jar, it’s for my train set. I’m not giving it up to ye…. Go away, leave me alone”. I was wild with rage, but beginning to have my first doubts that the train set would be mine by Christmas.

  “Please come down John, just for a minute so we can talk”. It’s the Nan again, this time she’s pleading and using the ‘please’ word again.

  In dread, I go down the stairs and there they are, sitting in their huddled way beside the old black range. Both my mother and the Nan are looking genuinely distraught. As I crossed the floor, mother looked down at her hands where she looked so very poor to me, wearing the scarf around her head that I hated. Nannie had this awful pleading face on her. This was far from the face of the proud woman she let on to be, and I hated what I saw before me in her as well.

  “John, tis very cold. It’s even snowing outside now and your mother here has no coal for the fire. The lads are all cold across the road and things are very bad,” says the Nan. Across the road was her way of referring to ‘two walls and a roof’. I try to lie and angrily tell them, “It’s spent, all gone, tis all gone I tell ye. I have no money, only my old jam jar”. Nannie ignores my lie and mother still has her head down in her hands not able to look up at me, and she seemed to be sobbing. Nannie presses me, “Look John, tis only till I get the pension on Friday, and then I’ll pay you back, I promise you I will. Then you can still get your train set”. Now she was actually lying to me….making me a promise I knew she could not, or would not keep. But my
angry protesting was no use, and I did not believe her when she said she would pay me back either. I knew damn well that she had not even paid Peggy for her last pound yet, and there was only one pension left before the Christmas, so how could I get the train set before then. Still more pleading went on from the Nan, and in the end I could take it no longer and I just gave in. By then my poor mother was openly sobbing softly and looked even more miserable than before.

  I honestly believe that something broke inside of me at that very moment, on that awful day, and I went back upstairs and got my jar half full of money. I began crying bitterly as I handed it over to her. Then this so-called tough woman, my Nan, was also openly crying as she gently took the jar from me, and by then it was all over. She opened my jar with the bread knife and then, trying to ease my pain, she gave me back a shilling saying, “Start again John won’t you, you’re a great boy”. I ran upstairs, throwing my jar and the shilling inside it onto the bed. I cried for a very long time until I literally ran out of tears and finally gave up feeling sorry for myself. I knew then that no matter what work I did, I would not have my train set by Christmas, or probably ever have it, and resigned myself to its loss.

  Next day I went across to Peggy. I put on a real brave face on it all, but deep inside me I felt so ashamed and so poor as I told her these words, “I want to say that I won’t be buying the train set. I have changed my mind on it. Sell it if you like”. I secretly hoped for a miracle where she might say ‘I’ll keep it for you till later.’ She stared at me in disbelief, “What are you saying John?” I then tell her vehemently that I’m not buying it and to sell it to some rich boy. She went in to get it, as if to convince me to change my mind, but I can’t stay there to see it, and began to leave while trying not to cry. As I left for Nannie’s, I just had to glance back and saw her placing my train set back in the window. By the next day it was gone, and so were my dreams.