Two Walls and a Roof

by John Michael Cahill

  In our school days, she never once had a negative view on how well we did. All she would say was, “Do your best and that’s enough”. I don’t think she was ever a great scholar herself, and because of that she was at a loss to understand or help us with homework as we got older, but we never minded. When we could, we would try to draw her into a discussion or more usually an argument, just to hear her ‘Nul-c-ar bomb’ clanger. Her humour was paramount. Even in bad times she would laugh, and she had numerous stories of her life with our father, usually referred to as ‘her Henry’. I always got great pleasure from these tales, no matter how often I heard them.

  One story she told of her courting days with my dad fits the two of them well. She and ‘her Henry’ went to Cork City for a day in a home-built car. This car was a total wreck. It had a Guinness label pasted to the windscreen as a tax disk. This was very fitting in hindsight based on the amount of money father had paid over to Guinness at Kit’s bar. As they drove down Patrick’s Street, the floor on her side literally fell out onto the street. She had to continue with her knees up on the dashboard and see a huge hole appear in the floor. I heard that the floor of the car was actually made from a metal sign advertising cigarettes: ‘John Player’ or such like. Later on the same day their back wheel flew off and passed them out as they rounded a bend on the way home. As she told us this story, it was as if she took pride in surviving this potential death trap and she would then continue with yet another story of life with Hugh Cahill.

  She was so tolerant to all our devilment. She would feign being mad at us, but we saw through it. I think it’s this freedom to express our true selves that has helped us all in later years, and the mother never denied us that freedom. In fact she encouraged it every day in her tiny little house on the main street of Buttevant.

  Two walls and a roof.

  My mother’s two walls and a roof was comprised of a ground floor, a first floor and an attic. The front of the building had an area we called the shop, though it never was a shop of any kind. This shop had a settee that was pushed up against the wall on the priest’s side of the house. In the early days I remember the priest was a very kind friendly man. He was big into the choirs and singing, and all my memories of him are very good. Father Shanahan was his name and sadly I heard he died a young man some years later. When he died we were given a cold-faced old priest called father Hennigan. I never liked him. He just seemed to me to be resentful of us as neighbours, and generally was unfriendly to us. Our shop front was about eight feet long by six feet wide and here we played marbles and darts, depending on the mood. The dart board had to be nailed to the front door, which was an old wooden affair that was rotting on the bottom due to the rain from our leaking shoot. It was the rule that when we played the darts, we had to bolt the front door or else you could quite literally get a dart in the eye as you entered. This almost happened to father more than once as he made his return from Kit’s Bar.

  Travelling on in from the shop we had a door with two glass panels leading into our so-called living room, often referred to as the kitchen. One of the panels was broken and had a pot mender holding the cracked glass in place: a remnant of our earlier fire engine incident. The living room was tiny, about five feet wide by seven feet long. It had a table pushed up against our neighbour Eily Paddy’s wall, and there was a fireplace on the priest’s side. A small window faced east and would freeze your ass off with the draft before father added on a back kitchen some years later. Beneath this window father had his throne. It was his favourite place in the whole house outside of his bed. The throne was made from an old car seat stolen from Big Kyrl’s shed down the street, and beside this chair mother had placed a tiny little table with a shelf underneath for papers and books. The window ledge behind father’s head was deep and two small curtains hung from a wire strung across the window as a decoration. These curtains, together with papers and books as well as an old valve radio with no back, were father’s defence against what he called the ‘East wind’. After a session in Kit’s he would arrive in home saying, “Jekus Boys, tis the East wind again tonight, God help us all. Sure we’re frozen with the cowld, put on the ould kettle there Belenda for a sup of tea”. Then he would have a poke at the tiny little fire that mother would be carefully hoarding all day. This usually led her to say, “Henry will you leave the fire alone, that block has to last me all night,” to which father would almost always answer with the same retort, “Boys o'boys, O'Brien has nowhere to go”. He would say this with a kind of drama which we all loved and knew he was joking. Mother would smile and put on the kettle for tea, and on a good night, a rasher as well. Then the chats would begin and we would all argue and talk for hours until it was late. Finally, as if on queue, someone would say, “And what about the Last Supper?” Then father would rise up and go out to the back kitchen and fry up another few rashers if we had them. He would arrive in with the food on a plate for us all to share between us and I clearly remember the great taste of a rasher in bread washed down with a cup of the mother’s tea. One time father fried these rashers in a cream that mother had been using to cure varicose veins. That night we all saw the bubbles on the rashers but ate them down anyway, and it was days before we found out what he had done. In his defence, father swore the cream was in a butter tub, so he was blameless, and it’s a wonder we are all still alive.

  This little living room also had the stairs going up to the first floor. It had a ninety degree bend on it as you went up, and even a small person had to bend down low or bang their head on the wall. Father always maintained that if he made that hole in the wall any bigger, the whole house would fall down.

  The first floor had two bedrooms and a further even tinier stairs went up to the attic. Originally our granduncle, Johnnie Cahill, lived in the house and later moved up to this attic. His bed was a big four poster affair and he had a beautiful writing bureau in the back corner. The front room was the place where he cooked and lived. It had a little fireplace with a stone flagstone which was solid, unlike Nannie’s cracked version.

  In his latter days he would pay me and Kyrle to get him his few groceries and empty his cinders up Nannie’s lane. Again the memory of me taking his bag of ashes up and dumping them has stayed with me always.

  He would be cooking sausages on a Saturday and often while he did this, we would smell them downstairs, then get hungry and venture upstairs so as to rob one or two from his frying pan. We knew him as ‘Old Johnnie’ and I'm sure he knew we stole his sausages, but he never complained.

  Johnnie was a beautiful hand writer and loved to write history. He was a master stonemason by trade and built part of Belfast City Hall when it was not a time to profess Catholicism. I loved talking to him and would do so for hours and hours.

  Johnnie was a wonderful handwriter and he spent many years writing the history of the Cahills. He had done so much of this that it had filled two foolscap copybooks and it was his pride and life’s achievement. I would see him writing away at his bureau and then, whenever he took a break, we would talk about what he was doing. He said he was writing the history of the Cahill clan and would give it to us one day before he died.

  One time as I sat with him I asked if these Cahills had ever done anything famous. He said that the only famous Cahill his research had ever shown up was the one at the ‘Battle of the Little Big Horn’ or ‘Custer’s last stand’. I almost fell off the bed with delight, as by then I had read many accounts about that great battle. I began to bombard him with questions: what had the Cahill man done, how did he die, was he brave, and how did Johnnie know all about this Cahill man?

  To my amazement, Johnnie told me that this Cahill person had not died at the battle. Far from it; he had survived simply because he had fought with the Indians. Now I was totally on a high. I loved the Indians and always felt they got a real bad deal, and to think that a namesake had actually fought with them was just incredible news. Johnnie was so certain of this that he burned it into my mind, and I became fascinated
with trying to know more about that battle and the famous Cahill who fought in it.

  Johnnie was true to his word, and some time before he died he came downstairs one day holding his life’s work: his completed history of the Cahill clan. By then he and mother were not getting along and he presented her with his gift saying, “Belenda, I am old now and have nothing to give to your children but their history and here it is. It’s my life’s work”. She took it and threw it up on the window sill. She had seen the Cahills at work, being married to one of them for some years and they had not impressed her, so in a moment of unpardonable temper, she threw his two foolscap copybooks into her fire, thinking that she would at least get heat from their history, because she certainly didn’t get any money from it. And so ended a treasure that I have always regretted. At the very least I would have seen in my granduncle’s beautiful handwriting the actual account of the Big Horn Cahill. I would also be able to pass onto my own children an old man’s work of over eighty years. It was a gift so priceless that it’s always been the only thing I have had difficulty in forgiving my mother for. Of course she later regretted it, but what’s done is done and today my younger brother Hugh in Australia has taken up the research into our family history together with my niece Charlotte in the Isle of Man.

  Long before we were born, Johnnie had been married to a seamstress called Lill, and they were the original owners of our two walls and a roof house. They were very happy and loved each other a great deal, but they had no children. My sister Lill was named after his wife and Johnnie took this as a great honour. To his credit, he allowed father and mother to live on in his little home rent free until he died at the great age of ninety six. He always drank Pearl Barley when he got sick and swore it cured all ills, and after living to the great age of ninety six years, something tells me that he’s right about the Pearl Barley and I should drink it myself.

  Coming up the stairs from the shop and turning left you were in the mother and father’s bedroom. It had a big holy picture on the wall, and two of the bed legs were broken and held up with books and a brick. A large part of this bed frame was made of iron and later on, in our ‘radio transmitting’ phase, we connected an earth wire to this frame to give us a better signal. We were totally unconcerned that this wire and the iron bed frame it was attached to could become fully live and potentially lethal, depending on how we plugged in our two pin plug further upstairs. Father would not even feel the shock if it became live as he seemed to be always immune to them, and we felt what the mother didn’t know would not trouble her. Literally speaking, every night that she hopped into the bed she had a fifty fifty chance of getting shocked, but we were careful not to plug it in the wrong way and she never knew. Eventually father spotted the wire coming in the back window and made us remove it.

  Father loved to read and he had a small little florescent bulb on a switch nailed to the wall above his bed. As his eyesight failed he brought this light closer and closer to his head so that in the end he was in danger of setting his hair on fire, but he didn’t care as long as he could read about Rome and Egypt and Alexander the Great.

  In the front room our sister Lill used to sleep. She also had a little fireplace in her room, but it was only lit once ever, and that was nearly the end of our father. That account became known as the ‘bullets incident’ at home and was told and retold so often that, even though it is burned in my brain, I still find it hard to believe. Father told me his version of the events often, and he would use it to say with a smile that our mother had tried to assassinate him many times, but that one time was the closest she ever got to pulling it off. He had begun a hackney business and was due to return from a run to Shannon airport with the famous horse trainer, Vincent O'Brien, who was a friend of his. He and the father knew each other very well and he was always good for a sizeable tip. This particularly freezing day father was on the way back from an early start and the trip to Shannon, and mother knew that the large tip would soon end up on Kit Roche’s bar counter if she didn’t take some kind of action to prevent it. So she decided to light a fire in the front room and have a really nice warm bed for her Henry, far from his East wind in their back room. She felt that she could save on the coal by only lighting this fire at the very last minute. The theory was that father would arrive in and she would encourage him to have ‘a rest’ in the warmer front room because she would soon be lighting the fire there, and while he was sleeping she would remove the tip from his pockets and save the money. It would all have worked out perfectly except for the little matter of some 303 bullets that, unknown to all, were then also resting in the same fireplace. The Cahills had all been enlisted in the Local Defence Forces and Big Kyrl had been the quartermaster in charge of guns and ammunition. He had an endless supply of 303 rifle bullets and so did the father. It was not uncommon for them all to do a bit of shooting, as by then Big Kyrl was a law unto himself and did whatever he liked in the town. Over time, it appears that some live 303 bullets were left on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in this tiny front room. When cleaning there, mother would throw any papers she found into the grate and, probably in the middle of a spring cleaning session, she also threw in the bullets, knowing a fire would never be lit there, or maybe she didn’t know they were live. One can argue the sanity of this forever, but I won’t be the judge of it now. God only knows how much time passed by between the cleaning spree and the day in question, but father arrived back in frozen and tired, and her plan worked perfectly. He headed for bed and a sleep. After tucking him into the bed, she lit the fire and went off down the stairs. Father’s bed lay against the wall opposite the grate, and at that point there was only a gap of about three feet between him and a most untimely death. Suddenly there was a tremendous bang, followed quickly by another one and then some more in quick succession. No doubt the whole street must have heard the shootout in Cahills house that day. To the listeners it must have seemed like the OK Corral shootout was being re-enacted in our house in Buttevant. Father began screaming and shouting while at the same time trying to burrow himself deep into the mattress, covering his head with the pillow while the bullets hit the walls all around him. The coals and the papers were blown out of the grate, and then the bed he was hiding in actually caught fire. Then from the safety of her kitchen the mother shouts up the stairs, “Henry, will I get Big Kyrl?” Father told me that he was quite sure he was going to die that day, and that he had accepted it, but all he really wanted to know was how many bullets had she thrown in the fire. We all feel that three at most was all it could have been, but father always swore there were more. He stayed under the pillows until it looked like the shootout was over, and then he beat out the fire on the blankets and made a run for the door. Running downstairs for water, he ran back up again and quenched the fires that were about to burn down the house. There was an inevitable shouting match of course, and then I think just sheer relief that he was alive. No one would believe that a tragic accident almost took place in that room that day, and I am sure that had my parents decided on some amorous activities, then one of them would surely be dead, but fortunately they didn’t and all lived to tell us the amazing tale.

  It was no secret that the ghost of Johnnie’s wife Lill was often seen in that same room. She was seen there leaning on the mantelpiece smiling down at my sister Lill. No one was ever afraid of her, but I never saw her myself. Maybe she was the angel who saved father from his ‘assassination’ and mother from a jail sentence, as what judge would believe such a story was simply a tragic accident.

  The back kitchen, as we called it, was a tiny little room about eight feet by six feet. It had a metal roof and a cardboard ceiling much the same as Nannie’s one, and just like hers it too, was a fire hazard. For all I know, father may have made both of them. For many years, the toilet was also located inside in this little back kitchen. It was a walled-off section, once again made out of hardboard and painted blue. Mother hated this toilet with a vengeance, and constantly wanted a toilet outside her cook
ing area. Eventually she did succeed, and when father was building it he swore that she made yet another assassination attempt on him. The back kitchen had a cooker and an old stone sink for washing. There was a big window above the sink facing the river and Sheahens field, as well as looking down into our little back yard. Our back yard was about thirty feet long and about ten feet wide. It was surrounded by high walls on both sides and a shed belonging to Eily Paddy sealed off the bottom of the yard. On the left side was another shed owned by the priest, and it had a big aerial pole attached to its roof. We were to put this pole to good use later, and at a young age both Kyrle and I began climbing these walls just for the fun of it. Soon we were like cats with no fear of heights at all. Every time mother saw us on high, she would be fainting with fright and go complaining to the father. His words were always the same, “Belenda, will you have sense, sure if they got up they will get down”. Then off in he would go and sit on his throne.

  After constant pleadings, rows, and threats, father eventually built on an even smaller shed and attached this to our back kitchen, extending the roof and putting in a plastic sheet to allow light onto his throne. Here he located our ‘new’ toilet and mother’s sunken bath. She had always wanted a sunken bath, the forerunner of a Jacuzzi, and after she finally got father to make it, we all discovered that it was almost impossible to get out of it once you got in because father had not added a rail to cling onto, and you literally had to roll over on your knees and crawl out onto the floor. It was such a disaster that it never got used.