Two Walls and a Roof

by John Michael Cahill

  Castletownroche was also the scene for another more serious drama though. His band was playing in Fermoy and it had been raining for days. The Awbeg River was in full flood and it passes through the little town. On the night of his gig, part of the bridge was after falling into the river and they screeched to a halt just before crossing it. The band members objected to crossing it, not wanting to drown in the flood, an understandable fear and a bit of a row developed with Kyrl calling them all “A pack of ould women”. The compromise was reached when father decided to drive across the bridge by himself first, and if he was not swept away then they would trust the bridge and walk across it later. This took guts I believe and father was terrified, but he used to say to me “John the show must go on, no matter what”. I think Kyrl had also indoctrinated my dad with his mantra of the end justifying the means. In any case father crossed it and so did his band but they came home by some other route. That bridge is only yards from where he burned his station wagon car. I often cross it myself today, and I always think of my dear old dad, every single time.

  As we grew up I noticed that father would always try to find enough money for a pint or two by doing some handyman job. Mostly he succeeded, but not always. On one occasion he was asked to fix a Hoover vacuum cleaner. He knew nothing about them at all but the motor had stopped working and he did know about motors. Mother told me that he worked on it all day, such was his drive for a pint. Eventually he got it going after much poking, soldering and cleaning. The father seemed to have got a brainwave during the job as to how to double his money.

  He decided to offer to clean Nannie’s chimney using the repaired vacuum cleaner. She was good for a 'fiver' at least, and he knew that she was always afraid of a chimney fire.

  He arrived at Nannie’s house and started to describe just how dangerous the chimney was looking, and he put the wind up her so much that she was petrified of a conflagration and almost begged him to do something about it. Quick as a flash he arrived back in with his new chimney cleaning device and soon he began to stick pipes and hoses into the chimney breast, then turned on the machine. His head was buried in her chimney as he poked and sucked the soot with the hose. The noise was so loud that he could hear nothing and he was impervious to the drama being playing out just behind him.

  Nannie had been sitting on her couch just behind his ‘Hoover’ when he started up the motor. By then she was getting feeble and moved slowly. Father had forgotten to put the cover properly on to the machine, which accounted for the noise, but he had not fitted a bag to it either. He had never seen a Hoover in his life and the customer had removed the original bag before she gave it to him for repair. Within seconds a whirl wind of black soot and dust covered Nannie. She looked like a black person from darkest Africa. He kept poking the hose up into the chimney and she kept being coated in soot, all the time roaring for him to stop and trying to pull herself off the couch to escape. But he couldn’t hear her over the noise and soon she was totally encased in soot. Poor Nannie just couldn’t get up fast from her couch due to her age, and every time she roared at my father, even more soot went down her throat, choking her as well as coating her.

  After a desperate struggle she managed to rise up and took off out of the kitchen to the front door, gasping for air. Then from the safety of the kitchen door she kept shouting in at him to, “Get out, get out will you”. He still didn’t hear a word she said so she started throwing books at him. Still he kept going till the machine mysteriously stopped working. When finally father came out of the chimney, he realized the disaster he had caused and one look at Nannie’s face meant no fiver was coming. He gathered his machine and left for home, all the time Nannie was tongue lashing him heavily for his utter stupidity and deafness. But to make matters worse, the soot had so clogged up the motor that it had burned it out completely. By then it hadn’t been a good day at all, and he retired to his bed cursing and swearing at his ill luck for ever having had any dealings with the Mahonys.

  His immunity to electrocution was proven many times. On one occasion mother had asked him to hang up a curtain line over the East Wind window. Father’s answer to every problem was a six inch nail, so he got two of them and his little hammer and got to work. These were driven into the wall and a wire line was strung between them. He went to bed after that exertion saying he had done enough for one day. Then when mother proceeded to put up the curtains, she got a massive shock from the wire line but couldn’t believe it, and so she went back to try it again. More violent shocks followed, so she went upstairs and told her Henry that she was getting ‘electrocuted’ from the curtains. He told her to cop herself on. “You’re never happy. It’s impossible to get shocks from curtains, now let me sleep will you”, and back he went to sleep.

  Sometime later she again tried with the same result, and even then she was beginning to question her sanity, especially when the father tested the line with his wrist, which was his version of testing for a live wire. Of course he felt nothing and pronounced it all to be safe, then he hung up the curtains convincing the mother that she was as usual imagining things, or simply going insane as he suspected, and that it was she who was driving him to the drink. Months later the mother asked Kyrle to test the wire line and when he did, unsurprisingly enough, he found the line to be fully ‘live’. The father had driven a nail into the live wire buried in the wall beneath the numerous layers of wallpaper. Then he attached the wire line to the nail, and during his hand test felt nothing as usual.

  Nothing was ever ‘earthed’ in our house either, as we never had an earth rod buried in the yard due to its high cost and father’s belief that the earth concept was just trouble in the making. We had the earth wires always connected up to the sockets so it looked safe, but they ended up going nowhere. Father always said earths were not needed and only blew fuses, that they were nothing but trouble, and that it was impossible to get electrocuted. He believed we were all like him (genetically immune) except for the mother, who was a Mahony after all, which explained why she got the shocks and we did not.

  Father was never a gambler. In fact I think none of us ever were, but my brother Hugh told me of the one time when father would most definitely have made a killing on the horses, but he drank the bet instead.

  It was just after the war around 1948 and I believe petrol was still being rationed at the time. My father had a hackney business and as such he had a supply of petrol coupons which he sold to the great horse trainer Vincent O’Brien at face value: an unheard of act at the time. This was the same Vincent O’Brien that father had taken to Shannon on the day of my mother’s assassinated attempt on him with her bullets incident. As a result of father’s kindness at helping out such a great man, Vincent seems to have given him a guaranteed winning tip for a horse called Cottage Rake, who was unheard of at the time and was a huge long shot. Father told his good friend Arthur O’Lowery of the tip and drank his bet before ever putting it on the horse. The horse won the Cheltenham Gold Cup, and from what I can gather, half of Buttevant also won huge amounts of money including Arthur on the race. Father used to say wryly that his best friend built a house on his tip while he drank my mother’s money in Arthur’s pub, such was his bad luck.

  One of my fondest memories of my dad was us being together on the night of the first Moon Landing. Space travel had always fascinated me. I suppose it came from my candle flying days or readings about it over the years. But I will never forget that day when the whole world was watching television, except for my mother and the Nannie. Mother had no interest in it at all, and Nannie denied the whole thing, saying it was a con job by the Americans to fool the Russians, her belief turning into a well documented conspiracy theory some years later. However, myself and the father were glued to his small screen under the stairs for the whole event. We sat transfixed as the black and white images flashed before us. When those magical words, “The Eagle has landed”, came over the speaker we both shook hands and father said, “Tis a great day to be alive, John, and neve
r forget it. Boys O’Boys the Americans have done it”. I said, “Yes, yes they have,” and I got so excited that I ran out into the main street looking up at the moon and began shouting, “They are up there, the Americans are up there. Horray for the USA”. A bowsie from Kit’s looked on at me and shouted something at me, but I don’t know what it was and cared less as I stared up at the moon. I just jumped up and down on the road. Father came out to the door and then both of us looked up at the moon in awe. I felt an amazing closeness that day to my dad, and longed to see America. Standing at our door I told him so. I said, “Da, one day I will see America”. I was nineteen years of age and it would take me just under thirty years to realize that dream. My father just smiled as I spoke, but it was a doubting smile. I think he felt such a great country was beyond the reach of us Cahills.

  My father was diagnosed with cancer and when I asked him what the doctors had said, his exact words were, “John, tis all up, I’m going to die soon. Look after your mother”. I felt a terrible sadness creep over me right then. All my many criticisms of him were gone, and all I could think of was, ‘I’m losing my dad faster than I ever imagined I would’.

  Father’s last days were very hard for him and our mother, as well as for all of us. Mother found it terribly hard to see her Henry suffering and wasting away before her eyes. Fortunately, even though abroad, my sisters all helped out and came home to visit him at various times. He was adamant that he wanted to die in his own bed, in his own ‘two walls and a roof’ and mother respected that wish. He gave her a few frights when she thought he was going, and on one such time (a Sunday actually) she rang me in a big panic telling me he was finished and to get home quickly. Within five minutes she was back on again saying he was okay, the panic was over. That night I went home to see him. He was sitting up in his bed reading the paper as if there wasn’t a thing wrong with him. I castigated him for scaring us to death in a nice jovial way, and then he pulled me aside and said, “John, I’ll be gone by Wednesday,” and he was. It was an extraordinary statement and has remained with me since in mystery. That same night he asked me to buy him a bottle of Lucozade, a non-alcoholic drink, which I did. On taking a big slug from the bottle he announced to my surprise, “Jekus Boys that’s real good stuff, John”. I told him rather insensitively that if he had reached that conclusion forty years earlier, we would all have been far better off, but he just smiled and didn’t reply. There was no need to state the obvious at that late stage of his life.

  That same night my daughter Lynda, who was a very young girl, began filming my father talking to me. We all knew, especially him, what we were doing. We were trying to preserve him after he had gone. We did the small talk and skirted around his passing and it got too sad for Lynda who broke down into tears. I have that tape of my father, just hours from his death, making funny faces at my child so as to make her stop crying, such was his good side. That tape is beyond price and now and again I see my dad at his very best.

  After some very hard months of bitter but resigned suffering, my poor father died, heavily dosed with morphine. My sister Tishie and brother Hugh couldn’t make it. They rang him at the final moments. Tishie was snow bound in an airport in Scotland, and Hugh was holed up in a friend’s house in Australia crying his eyes out. Father seemed to be waiting for Tishie to arrive at his bed any minute. She had made every effort to do it, but the weather had snowed in the airports and she was not going to make it and told him so on her last phone call. When father realized that his Tish could not be there, but that she was safe, he quietly slipped away from us all in body but not in spirit. I truly believe that as long as his stories are told, as long as we speak of him, as long as we laugh at his jokes and his life, he will remain with us till we ourselves are gone too.

  I will always thank most sincerely the Marymount Hospice Movement in Cork, especially the nurses, for their most wonderful kindness to my father and to the many thousands of others afflicted by the terrible ailment of cancer. It’s no accident that many years later, both me and my son Kyrl, would be indirectly responsible for raising almost two million euros for cancer treatment in the hospitals of Cork, Marymount among them. I feel privileged to be part of the 96FM radio team who have made all this happen and I know that my dad is very proud of us all for doing this work because I can feel it.

  In a moment of weakness, I had earlier promised Hugh that at the funeral Mass I’d read out a fax from him on the altar, thinking I’d modify his words and shorten it when he sent it to me. When it did arrive, it was so beautifully written that I secretly cried while reading it, and at the church I completely broke down on the altar in front of the very large crowd of people attending the service. I struggled and stammered along, tears flowing down my face, and I felt so ashamed for my stuttering, especially in front of people from my home town. It was so terribly hard to do that I almost gave up on the reading, but somehow I continued on to the very last words. Hugh’s fax had described in a beautiful poem what his father had meant to him. It showed a love that was palpable, it showed his sayings, his use of the words ‘Jekus Boys’ and his humour. It was written by a son too far away to come home, but with a memory that described his dad in a way that showed how much he was loved.

  A simple promise made by me on a phone call to Hugh had turned out to be the most difficult task I had ever to perform in my life. The task, though terrible for me personally, was eased by the wonderful Buttevant congregation, who gave me a standing ovation when I finally finished. Father’s many friends knew him as Hughie Cahill: a musician and a handy man, perhaps a man who drank too much, but one who did not have a bad bone in his body, and they showed me their respect for my dad that night.

  His funeral had a great turnout on a terribly cold and dangerous night. Friends of ours came from miles around to pay their last respects to a great musician and well loved friend. He had thousands of faults and certainly was not the ideal role model for a father, but yet when he was good, he was very good and we all loved him in our own way. Father was a very religious man, and I spent many a day arguing the existence of God with him. Now that he’s gone, I am quite sure he got a warm welcome when he finally met up with his own version of his Deity. I’m equally certain that he is smiling at us all right now, and probably saying, “Jekus Boys tis a terrible summer, and O’Brien still has nowhere to go even in Heaven. Sure I’ll put on the ould kettle and make a drop of tea”. He sends me double rainbows when I think of him, and I have had the most awesome proof that he is still around, but that’s for another day.

  Pad Keely’s school days.

  I think I was about twelve when there was yet another row between Nannie and the local Canon, the same one from our altar boy days. In some kind of protest she withdrew me and Kyrle from the Buttevant National School, which was run by the clergy. We were then sent off to the local secondary school known as the Sacred Heart College. It was run by a friend of Michael’s and at that time you had to pay a fee to be taught in a secondary school; the equivalent of an American High School today. I have no idea how Nannie planned to pay this fee for the two of us, but when her temper was high she never looked at the consequences of her actions. Almost overnight we began our second level schooling in the College at the bottom of the town. It was right across the road from the old British Army Barracks which had earlier been burned by the IRA. In our time it had been converted into a local hurling field, and there we played hurling during our days in the Sacred Heart College.

  The school had just two rooms, one which actually had bars on the windows and still does today. The main room had two classes in it for a time, with two teachers and two classes of boys sitting back to back without any partition between them. This meant that each teacher could hear what the other teacher did, and also notice how the boys were answering. In hindsight, this had to have been an impossible situation for both teachers and students. Later the headmaster, Pad Keely, a long time friend of Michael’s, had made another small classroom out of a room in his house, which
connected to his kitchen. His house was in effect the actual school, as he was using rooms that were part of his home as classrooms. I know that it was an ingenious act on his part to allow for a fourth classroom to magically appear, by making yet another tiny room into a classroom for fifth year students. The only students in this ‘new’ classroom when I was there were myself, his son Brian, and his daughter Molly. It was so cosy that I often felt like one of the family. I am sure now that, just like us all today, Pad too was only trying to make ends meet and being able to tell the Department of Education that he had four classes must have added to his grant from them, if he even got one.

  There were swords on the wall of the main room, which we played with now and again, and a very long blackboard on the western wall. This room also had a kind of podium next to the window where Pad would stand and read the paper or keep notes. It was also where he kept his bamboo stick for punishment. Living today in a time of political correctness and public exposure to the sadistic treatment meted out to innocent victims, especially those run by religious orders, it’s very important for me to point out here and now that we the students were never victims of sadistic acts by Pad or his staff. Neither Pad Keely, nor any of the other teachers he had in his employment ever acted sadistically towards us. I can say that in all truth, but they were often at times incredibly cruel and violent. Pad especially believed in literally beating the knowledge into our heads by brute force if necessary. His wife, known to us as Ma, also taught there, and she too was well capable of meeting out strong punishment by the use of the same bamboo. This stick was about two foot long, shiny and with knots along its length. It hurt like hell when you had a strong man or woman behind it, and they were swinging it down with full force. Today I wonder what frame of mind one has to be in when you are choosing a bamboo stick for the specific purpose of inflicting pain on another human being, especially a young one. How do you find such a stick, and what are you thinking? Is it long enough, is it strong enough, how many knots per inch etc? It’s no wonder that we have a fucked up society, and the only surprise to me now is that we are not even worse than we are. I started in a school where the Catholic nuns beat us; then later on I went to a National School where we were also beaten by most, but not all of the teachers. One man I absolutely loved as a teacher in our National School was a man called Martin Kearney. In all of my days at that National School I never once saw Martin raise a hand to anyone, and what’s more important, he managed to teach me more than all the others combined. Now that has to say something. So on reaching Pad Keely's college we were well used to being beaten, but not so hard and not so often.