Two Walls and a Roof

by John Michael Cahill

  Kyrl had two passions I believe, he loved cars, and he loved touring around Canada and America with his adopted son, John Collins. Aside from his numerous money making schemes, the buying of a car was the chief occupier of his mind when he was not abroad with John Collins. As he got older he would change his car each year, and for months he would be studying all the parameters such as engine size, colour, and internal attachments, and in this my own son Kyrl is a carbon copy. But the test drive was always the biggest event for him, and he would want to be fully satisfied before he parted with his cash. After he did make the purchase he would arrive on to my father and give him the test drive as well, though it was always Kyrl who did the driving. One time he had bought a very fancy modern car complete with radio and electric windows as well as an electric cigarette lighter. Father was taken off for the inevitable spin and as they drove along Kyrl demonstrated all the new gadgets in the car. It was a sunny day and Kyrl demonstrated the electric windows by winding them down. Father was amazed at this and soon began to relax in the comfortable new seats and so they chatted as they drove along. After some miles he became fully at ease with his domineering older brother, and asked Kyrl if it was all right to smoke in his new machine. He got the ok from Kyrl, and so he gets out his fags and reaches inside his pocket for the matches. Kyrl says, “What are you doing Hugh, you don’t need matches anymore, just watch this, use the lighter. It will pop out when it’s ready and you can light up then”. At that Kyrl activates the lighter and in a short while it pops out. Kyrl says “It’s ready now Hugh light up” My father can’t believe what he is seeing and says “Jekus boys Kyrl that’s a great yoke”. Then he lights his fag and before Kyrl can stop him he throws the lighter right out the open window. Kyrl shouts “Noo Hugh” but its too late, the little round device has gone in over some ditch never to be seen again and after about two hours of embarrassed searching they give up on it all. Kyrl drove father home in silence, and next day he changed the car, because he was so disgusted with what happened. My father got no more test runs after that either.

  When I began researching this book I asked a great friend of Kyrls to tell me about the real Kyrle Cahill because he just fascinated me. I wanted to know the side of him that he showed to no one, or so I believed. The man I spoke to was Michael O’Callaghan a great local musician and Kyrl’s best friend. I felt if anyone could describe my extraordinary uncle, Michael could. As it turned out there was no secret side to the man. He just lived a charismatic life and adventures seemed to follow him, but unlike my dad they were always good adventures. Michael did tell me of a day he would never forget though. Kyrl owned a stone quarry near a town called Doneraile about five miles from Buttevant. When he needed stone for his monumental works, he would organize about eight locals as helpers and head for the quarry to do a bit of rock blasting. My great uncle Johnnie who was a lot older than Kyrl and who was our master stone mason, was the so called expert on the blasting. Johnnie had concocted a kind of drill that would bore a small hole vertically into the cliff face then he would add the gunpowder charge and tamp all this powder down with a wooden pole. Later he added the fuse and all going well there would be a fine blast and a slice of rough stone would fall from the cliff face, later becoming someone’s headstone. This normally worked well enough until the day when Johnnie forgot the tamping pole. Kyrl was insisting as usual that the day would not be wasted and a blast had to take place. I believe he convinced Johnnie to use an iron crowbar and gingerly tamp the charge while the whole crew looked on in amazement. The iron bar hit flint and the whole ground blew up, throwing Johnnie into the air, sending the bar into orbit, and landing the rest of them onto their asses on the ground, shaken but unharmed. Undaunted by this near death experience, Kyrl convinced Johnnie to do it all again after a tea and Guinness break, and this time they were rewarded with a good haul of rock for the headstones. Kyrls mode of rock transporting was to get his crew to load all this stone into a flatbed truck that he had built from scratch and this they did.

  Michael O’Callaghan was a young boy of about sixteen then, and he was the newest member of Kyrl’s crew. He was constantly asking Kyrl to let him drive and to teach him the skills associated with it and that day he got his wish. With the truck well overloaded with stone, tools, and the eight men, they headed back for Buttevant. The journey was uneventful except for the odd time when the steering wheel would come loose and the truck would head for the ditch. Then Kyrl would say ”Mickey will you stick to the road and leave the fields to the horses” and go back to chatting about the days events as Michael struggled with the dodgy steering wheel.

  Just outside Buttevant, the Doneraile road falls very steeply into the town, and arrives at a junction on the main street which is actually the main Cork Limerick road. As the truck came over the hill and began to descend, it got faster and faster despite Michael frantically pumping of the brakes. The brakes had failed, and while this came as no surprise to Kyrl, because he knew the truck was of Cahill construction, it became a great shock to the sixteen year old child who was then beginning to really panic. They were rapidly gaining momentum as Michael prepared for the inevitable crash into another vehicle, or if that didn’t happen, they would go straight through the wall of Saddler’s, shop. In either case the stopping was going to end badly and he began shouting and screaming at Kyrl to do something. Kyrl just told him to “Cop himself on and relax, this is a driving lesson”. By then they were fast approaching a small bridge over the Awbeg River and fortunately there was a narrow gap in the wall between the road and the river. Michael said that he was terrified at that stage and quite sure that he was going to die, especially when he saw some of the men jumping out of the truck and rolling around on the road.

  Cool as a breeze, and at the critical moment, Kyrl grabbed the wheel and jerked it sharply to the right sending them all through the gap, and into the river with a huge splash. Michael said he was shaking uncontrollably and must have been as white as a sheet as he saw the last of the men pick each other up out of the river. Then Kyrl said “Are we staying here all day Mickey, back her out will you for Gods sake”.

  He did finally get the truck out of the river and they all retired to the pub except Kyrl and Michael who retired home and made tea. It was almost a typical day in their mad lives and once again Kyrls mantra of the end always justifying the means had paid off. Sadly both of them have since gone to their Eternal Rest and I would lay odds that during the Olympic Games they were watching Heavenly TV. In keeping with his mantra Kyrl would be insisting to Michael that performance enhancing drugs were perfectly necessary, and Michael would be playing the Irish National Anthem as our great athletes proved that they at least, didn’t need them.

  Father told me of yet another one of Kyrl’s moneymaking schemes with that same truck. The Buttevant hurling team was playing in some very important final in Liscarroll, and the whole town wanted to go to it. It was during a time of petrol shortages and public transport was non existent then. It was going to be impossible to get to the match so Kyrl decided to turn his flatbed truck into a kind of bus, and take a load of supporters to the game. He added a temporary railing to the side of the truck, and he also added steps making it easier to board it. All was ready and on the day of the match he started selling places on his truck-bus. To get even more punters on board and so as to make even more money, he insisted that they all had to stand for the entire journey, a distance of about seven miles. This did not go down well, and there were those who actually complained very bitterly, but he didn’t care a bit saying, “Take it or leave it, and pay up or shut up, your delaying us all”. With no choice, and a line of already drunken supporters waiting to board, the complainers boarded and soon filled the truck to bursting point. Kyrl sat in and started his truck-bus, and off they went to the match. In order to save his petrol, father told me that Kyrl seems to have taken some kind of a short cut along the back roads of Cork, and as they came close to the village, they went up over a very steep hill and beg
an to career down the other side, at an ever increasing speed. The supporters who were well into the singing and shouting by then noticed this too, and all their singing stopped suddenly when the truck-bus almost turned over on a sharp bend. Kyrl noticed this too as the brakes were having no effect, and he quickly realized that unsurprisingly, the brakes in his truck had failed yet again. But not alone had the brakes failed, so had the steering, as the wheel had come off in his hands when he struggled to guide them around the sharp bend. Father said that they must have been going about fifty miles an hour at the time. Kyrl then tried to use the gears to slow them down, but that too failed and he could not get the engine into a lower gear either, because in his panic he broke the gear stick off as well. The supporters were now panicking and clinging onto the railings and each other for dear life. With all control lost the truck tore on down the road and went right through an old iron gate and tearing away part of the ditch. Then it began crossing a field still at great speed. It finally hit a tree with such force that it toppled over, and threw all of his passengers out onto the grass in every direction amid screams, curses, and puke.

  No one was seriously hurt though, and they all limped off to the match. Kyrl spent the intervening time righting his truck, and after the game was over he was once again waiting with his hand out for the ‘return fare’. He tried to convince them all that their ticket had always been one way, and now they had to pay him again for the return journey. The situation got very nasty because his truck-bus had almost killed them, and they angrily pointed that fact out to him. Still he was insistent, and in the end I believe he just drove off and left them all on the road to find their own way back, and that would be typical of Kyrl. There were a lot of bad feelings towards him for a long time after that, but they needed him and he knew it, and all was forgiven but not forgotten in time.

  Kyrl, like my dad, is buried in a cemetery which is on the road to that same village of Liscarroll. His unofficially adopted son and my cousin John K. Collins and his wife Agnes, erected a most beautiful headstone in his memory and it bears this inscription.

  We are the story tellers. We are the music makers, and we are the Dreamers of dreams.

  I know of no more fitting words to describe my amazing uncle Kyrl, the man we all knew as Big Kyrl.

  The road to Charleville

  I was about seventeen by the time we decided enough was enough with Pad, and Kyrle refused to go back to Pad’s. We still had not finished our schooling, so Kyrle and I would have to go on to Charleville Tech to do our Leaving Cert, finish formal schooling and then hopefully get a job. That was the usual plan in those days. We had no chance of a university degree unless we got a scholarship, and even though Kyrle had the brains for it, Pad had torpedoed his chances early on.

  Uncle Michael knew the head master in Charleville Tech, a man called Dan Fleming. He had been a famous rugby player and was also very high up in the GAA. The school was already over-booked, but Dan decided that he would take us in and the few others who had also left Pad’s school that year.

  Charleville is nine long miles north of Buttevant, with a devil of a hill at the mid-way point. We were going to have to cycle to school each day and back. In today’s days of busses and cars transporting the children to school, it seems now inconceivable that our parents would let us off into the dark on winter mornings and return in the dusk after school, but that’s how it was in nineteen sixty seven or eight. I know that neither I nor Kyrle had any kind of lights on the bikes, as the batteries were far too expensive and we simply could not afford them.

  Four of us used to do that trip each day and we were all as tough as nails. We took our lunch in the schoolbag, ate it at dinner time, and headed back home at four in the evening without further food. I believe we used to cycle the nine miles in just under two hours. It was always faster coming home because of the big hill then in our favour.

  The school was mixed with a big age range in it. It was a critical time in our development and we were brought into close proximity with girls or ‘bitches’ as Joe Hurley always called them. Up until then we would have had the odd foray down to the castle in Buttevant, but it bore no comparison at all to the number of girls, and the type of girls available in the Tech. I felt this was just great. What’s more, we were all older than most of the class, except for the senior girls secretarial class, and because of Pad’s teaching, we seemed to be geniuses knowing ten times more than our fellow students. Pad had got something right at least.

  One guy asked me what Latin was when I was describing our previous schooldays, such was the level of education we then found ourselves in. Soon the girls picked up on this so-called standard of genius, and we began to become a kind of magnet for them: mini celebrities in fact. I think at almost eighteen I would have been the oldest in the class except for one guy who had failed his exams so many times that his parents may as well have abandoned him. He was a farmer’s son and almost bald because diesel fuel had fallen on his head when he was younger and it never grew back. He was big and burly, and after the diesel spill all he had left on his head was a wild tuft of discoloured hair which stuck out in all directions, but mostly from his left side with the right side being almost bald. He really did look like a Yeti and I christened him that privately. For some reason he took to me as his only friend and I liked him a lot, but I just can’t remember his name which is a pity. This friendship resulted in a rather ‘odd couple’ moving together through that school. A four-eyed Magoo-like genius and a Yeti figure tagging along beside him, hunched over like Quasi Modo and hanging on every word the Magoo-like figure spoke. I’m sure we were the butt of many a joke as we moved among the throng, and Kyrle avoided us completely out of sheer embarrassment.

  Looking back on those days, I know now that our class was a bunch of misfits, failures and delinquents in every sense of the word, and in Pad’s view, a new pack of ‘donkeys’ had joined the student fraternity in Charleville. We were all ‘strange’ in some way or other and Dan had no classroom for us, so he made one out of the foyer in the school entrance. When you came in the front door, there we all sat in our temporary classroom, and no matter what business you had in the school, you went right through our class. It was so funny to see us all fold our chairs during lunch break and stack them away, and then when lunch was over, we had to redo the whole seats again and sit for the next class. There seemed to be some kind of store where we kept the seats and this was always a good spot for a bit of fun with the ‘bitches’. That’s all I can say on that matter.

  Dan Fleming seemed to like us from the very start. He was a great teacher and while he shouted and roared a lot, you always got the impression it was only an act on his part. Our first test of his acting came when, after some weeks of being late for school, he called the four of us into his office which was in the small corridor behind our makeshift classroom. We marched in full of confidence and bravado, and I being the ringleader walked in first. He was sitting at his desk writing. I was just about to sit down when he shouts up at me, “Cahill who told you to sit down”. I was a bit taken aback by this and I say, “No one sir”. “Correct, so keep standing”. He then tells us that he is sick and tired of watching us arrive in at any time of the mornings and it’s going to stop. “It’s to stop, or there will be hell to pay. Get it in yer heads, it’s to stop. Now be off out of me sight and don’t be late tomorrow”.

  We left sniggering, and already I had decided he was just bluffing as I don’t think I ever saw a stick or anyone use a stick in that school so far. Besides, I was feeling like a man by then having survived Pad, and could now take on the world sure that I had no more Pads to deal with.

  Next morning we were late again. Dan comes out of his office right into our classroom and as we are opening the bags he says, “What did I tell ye yesterday?” glaring directly at me. I say it was the wind sir, the North wind held us back. Dan looks out and says, “Tis a sunny day. Are you trying to cod me Cahill?” I say, “The wind came up and went down; that’s
what winds do,” my cheek being obvious to all. He made a drive for me and I thought I was back in Pad’s school, but he stopped short saying, “Ye are all on yer last warning”. On the way home we decided that we better get up earlier and not tempt fate and Dan, so for the next few weeks we are on time and things settled back to normal. We would still miss the odd day but always got away with it until much later in the year when it was biting cold and every extra second in bed counted greatly.

  This particular morning we were seriously late, by about half an hour or so. Dan is waiting in the yard for us to arrive. It had frosted real bad and I was frozen, as were the lads. I used to wear an old leather jacket with just a jumper and shirt, never a vest, as I always believed the body can correct for extremes of temperature. Dan is standing glaring at us all as we come flying in the gate. He says, “Put yer bikes in the shed and come out here to the yard”. I thought, ‘he’s up to something for sure and I don’t like the sound of it at all’. We trail back out and by then the sun is shining brightly. “Take off yer clothes, ye can leave yer trousers on ... for now”. What could this be, I thought, as he yells his words at us with apparent anger. “I said take off yer clothes”. The frost is turning his words into smoke and I don’t get what he’s up to. We all look at each other and he draws a kick at my arse and misses; I believe deliberately so. We start to strip off. I get to my shirt and he shouts, “Take it off Cahill,” so I do. Kyrle has an old vest with holes in it, and he really does look like a street urchin. Maybe Pad, who used to call him that, had a point after all. Dan shouts at him, “You too, take that strainer off”. The other two boys were now down to bare skin also and all of us began shivering with the cold. He says, “Stand there like men, I’ll be back”. I thought this was going to be like Mutiny on the Bounty and he’s gone for the whip or the cat o’nine tails to flog us all. Pretty soon we see heads appearing at the school windows: senior girls’ heads and tall boys ‘heads; teachers’ heads and even the caretaker Bill came out to watch. This was serious I thought. Kyrle is looking at me and the shed and I thought he was going to make a burst for his bike, not wanting a repeat of Pad’s days, but Dan comes out without a whip.