It Happens Between Stops

by Mattie Lennon

  INTRODUCTION

  by Lawrence Block

  SPONSORS

  THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

  Pat Cavanagh

  You could not help noticing Mary. She was tall and tanned with long blonde hair and beautiful green eyes. She would crack her fingers in class one at a time - or all at once - if she was bored. When she laughed or smiled (which she did often) it was impossible to be cross with her, no matter how much this disrupted the class. She would ask permission to speak, and without waiting for a reply, would launch into an impassioned appeal to save the starving children in Africa, defend the environment, or shut down the nuclear reactor at Sellafield. By the time she was finished, maybe five minutes later, she would have the entire class spellbound. You could be sure no more class work would be done for the rest of the day as Mary and her class mates organised themselves for the coming campaign. There was very little I could do – I realised I had a truly remarkable personality in my class.

  About three months ago, we were doing music. I had asked the children to bring along some of their favourite music. Mary’s father had been a singer in a band when he was young. She had grown up in a house full of music, as he still played part time. While the others brought in the latest top ten hits, she brought in music by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Mozart and Beethoven, as well as many other well-known singers and musicians from the 1960s and 1970s. She explained the subtleties and the wonders of a whole range of music from Abba to ZZ Top, using examples that she copied on to a CD. I know quite a lot about music from that period, but I have to admit I was awestruck by the depth and breadth of knowledge of a girl who was not even born when all this music was happening. I worried slightly as to what she had up her sleeve for her classmates.

  She decided that the school needed a school band, and that her classmates were going to be the band members. Now, our school is in a very disadvantaged area of the city, so asking parents for funding was out of the question. Mary had thought of that, and within two minutes had started the class writing letters (she dictated, the class wrote) to a hundred local and national businesses seeking sponsorship. The letter was very clever. We would like your help in training our school band; do you have staff who would be willing to spare their time and energy to teach us how to play music; could you help us to acquire working second-hand guitars, drums, a keyboard and so on; we are not looking for cash. Each letter was written by hand. The letters were delivered by hand all over the city that evening by a small army of her classmates on their bikes.

  The results were astonishing! Dozens of people, including many well-known faces in the music business wanted to become involved. Every Saturday morning the school hall rocked as the students practiced music and singing under the guidance of skilled and talented people who once were famous in their own times. Word spread, and one day they were invited to appear on national television.

  Mary didn’t tell anyone about the pain until she collapsed in class. The ambulance seemed to take ages to arrive. She forced her big smile for a paramedic who told her that his son had changed from local thug to guitar player extraordinaire thanks to her influence. Mary had just finished telling us about avoiding antisocial behaviour, but had not been her usual self while speaking. An hour later, during a break, I phoned the emergency department and was told she had had a cardiac arrest in the ambulance but had been resuscitated by the ambulance staff. A police car had collected her parents and they were with her. The outlook was not good.

  I can’t remember the rest of that day or the days that followed. Sure, class continued without interruptions and without periodic cracking of fingers. But things were very quiet until just before class broke up for a midterm break. The headmaster called me aside and told me that Mary had had another cardiac arrest and was not expected to survive. She was unconscious. When I told the class that Mary was very ill, they decided there and then they would sing and play for her. We all trooped down to the music hall, collected the instruments, and then marched to the hospital. The school band squeezed into the hospital’s tiny chapel, and Mary, wired to various machines, was then wheeled in. She seemed to be asleep, but somehow she managed her big smile when the music started.

  Now, I’m not a religious person, but I’ll swear to my dying day a miracle happened that afternoon. Gradually the colour came back to her face. Her hands and then her feet moved with the music. She tried to sing along. Her parents didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Two days later, she was sitting up and chatting to everyone around. The doctor told her he would fix the bad blood vessel to her heart by sliding a tiny instrument up one of the veins in her leg under local anaesthetic. She could watch the x-ray if she wanted. Three weeks later, she was back in school, cracking her fingers, disrupting the class with impromptu speeches, and flashing her smiles. Yes, there is something about Mary.

  BRUTAL OR BEAUTIFUL?

  Mark Bolger

  Boxing as a sport seems to have gotten a beating over recent years. Now I ask myself is this due to the fact that diet and training methods have improved drastically, leading to the idea that the fighters are getting more of a punishment during the bouts? Which in turn is leading to this public outcry to tighten up the rules to protect the contestants. Or is it that it has received such notoriety both good and bad that it has ended up in the attention view of compulsive critics. Now my first impulse would be to re-direct their attention to the obvious, and that would be that boxing is no more dangerous than most other sports. Footballers receive career ending injuries, race car drivers risk their lives every day in the pursuit of their sport, skiing, deep-sea diving ... etc. Every sport has had victims of so called freak accidents that could be called up as an argument to show the dangers of a sport, I’ve even heard of a tiddly-winks champion who lost an eye due to a rogue tiddly. Having listened to all this bad press I feel it is my place to show a little truth of the noble sport of pugilism. To begin this task I think a bit of history would be the best starting point.

  Boxing or Pugilism has been recorded dating back as far as 4000BC in Egypt recently revealed in Hieroglyphic evidence. The spread of boxing followed the expansion of Egyptian civilization through the Mediterranean and the Middle East reaching ancient Greece by as early as 1500BC. By 686BC boxing had been refined and perfected enough to be included in the Olympic Games. However, the sport bore little resemblance to what is now known as boxing. Matches were held outdoors, with spectators forming the boundaries. The fight continued without pause until one participant was unable to continue. Evidence is also around to show boxing present throughout the ages right up to the Roman Empire, then with the rise of Christianity and the decline of the Roman Empire pugilism as entertainment apparently ceased to exist for some centuries.

  Jack Broughton recognized by some as the father of boxing, is credited with taking the first steps leading to boxing’s acceptance as a respectable athletic endeavour in today’s ‘civilised’ society by introducing “mufflers,” the forerunners of modern gloves, to protect one’s hands and the opponent’s face. Broughton devised the sport’s first set of rules in 1743, and those rules, with only minor changes, governed boxing until they were replaced by the more detailed London Prize Ring rules in 1838.

  Though the London Prize Ring rules did much to help boxing, the brawling that distinguished old-time pugilism continued to alienate most of England’s upper class, and it became apparent that still more revisions were necessary to attract a better class of patron. John Graham Chambers of the Amateur Athletic Club devised a new set of rules in 1867, which emphasized boxing technique and skill. Chambers sought the patronage of John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who lent his name to the new guidelines. The Queensberry rules differed fr
om the London rules in four major respects: contestants wore padded gloves; a round consisted of three minutes of fighting followed by a minute of rest; wrestling was illegal, and any fighter who went down had to get up unaided within 10 seconds, if he could not do so, he was declared knocked out, and the fight was over.

  Professionals, who considered them unmanly, first scorned the new rules and championship bouts continued to be fought under London Prize Ring rules. But many young pugilists preferred the Queensberry guidelines and this aided the rise, which led to their universal use today.

  I personally think that one of the reasons for its apparent distaste is that by the early 20th century, boxing had become a shortcut to riches and social acceptance for those near the foot of the economic ladder. Now, even given it’s noble upbringing and obvious place in the annals of history and sport it is still derided as a sport second only to hare coursing and fox hunting (which ironically is supported by the upper classes that seem to find boxing so objectionable). The people who should be boxing’s champions (excuse the pun) are those intimately involved in the sport, not those who look on in distaste convincing themselves that by changing the sport their misplaced altruism is in fact helping prevent the injury of those in the ring.

  As a former boxer I feel it is my place to don the mantle and try to show what makes a boxer want to box. The history of boxing speaks for itself and its popularity throughout the ages cannot be reasoned by something as simple as men wanting to hit each other. It’s true that the main entrants to the sport are those who may not have a lot, come from bad neighbourhoods or poor backgrounds, but these people are the ones who hold the need to succeed and see that success in the physical arena is more achievable to them than academia or the business world, simply because of the lack of opportunity their social standing allows them. The attraction to the sport first begins with a young boy needing some outlet to establish his identity. A young boy saying ‘I’m a boxer’ and probably for the first time in his life give himself a label which proves to him that he is not just a statistic and is actually somebody of worth, it also gives him an outlet for the frustration of working class life. These reasons supersede the fear of getting hit, which is what separates those that will from those that won’t. Then as training progresses and the realisation that there is more to this sport than just trying to hit and avoid being hit by your opponent. The knowledge of your coach becomes more and more impressive to you as he lays down yet another philosophy on why you should bob then instead of weaving, or follow through when your preservation instincts are telling you to go on the defensive. The day finally comes when you recognize during yet another sparring session that you have stopped over-thinking and everything has become fluid, punch and counter punch, sequence and shuffle, bob and weave, instead of thinking of what you are doing you find yourself thinking of what your opponent is doing. Watching for his weak spots, spotting openings that you can use, watching the muscles in his shoulders slightly quiver and know with what seems like telepathic ability that a blow is coming your way, ducking and dodging to return the favour with your own flurry of blows. It’s when these tactics come into play that you are startled with the realisation that you can now, with all confidence, call yourself a Boxer. With this realisation comes a responsibility that you need to do justice to your newly acquired title, and you know that you can only do this through fine-tuning your skill. A fusion of mind, body and soul you try to improve your stamina while widening your ability to deal with what you know you will face in competition, all the while keeping the mind set of dedication and perseverance. This whole exercise leading to the one goal of confidently facing a stranger across 24 feet of canvas. Two gladiators pitting their skill against one another.

  They day of competition comes and you begin to wonder have you done enough to prepare, you could do with another couple of weeks just to give you the edge, what if he has trained more. Shaking your head you banish these confidence-shattering thoughts you begin reciting a litany of self-help phrases. ‘I can do this. I can do this.’ ‘Power and speed. Power and speed.’ This internal mantra drowning out the voice of coach as he goes through his own pre-fight speech. The excitement of the moment begins manifesting itself in your inability to sit still, pacing, bouncing and grunting all punctuated by sporadic bursts of hyper-tensive shadow boxing. A head popping into the dressing room announces that your fight is up next causing the butterflies that you had been so diligently trying to quell, quadruple in intensity. The coach grabs you and sits you on the bench checking your hands once more and telling you how great you are, how fast and how strong. It has the desired effect, the moment is now upon you, you feel the tension drain from you, replaced by resolve, no point in fighting the inevitable now ‘Power and speed. Power and speed.’ Strange moments in your training flit through your mind, skipping, working the speedball, and wiping the sweat off your face. Concentrate, you tell yourself.

  The cheers and catcalls of the crowd are only brushing the edges of your focus; all you can see is the ring that you are being led towards. Climbing in you remember how you told yourself to behave, you put on your best intimidating look while also trying to look bored, confident and unscared at the same time, hoping you are pulling it off. The ring MC introduces you and you raise your arms in acknowledgement, and then turn your back when the same is done for your opponent. He’s beneath your notice.

  Where is the time going? Ding - ding. Here goes, everything on autopilot, he’s dropping his guard on my left, he’s open on my right when he jabs, he telescopes the haymakers, oh Christ caught me that was a good right, get back, recover, right here goes. Ding – ding. Is that two minutes already, what was I worried about, I’m enjoying this. Coach is talking; listen to him, ok got it. Ding – ding. Here we go again, ‘Power and speed. Power and speed.’

  Ding – ding... Ding – ding... Ding – ding...

  It’s over, wow. Looking out, the ref holds my hand as he waits to give the result. I see for what seems to be the first time the crowd in the hall, a couple of hundred people have just watched me fight, bemused I look around to see if I can see my Mum and Dad, maybe I can gauge how well I done from their faces. But before I can spot them half the crowd jumps up and everybody is applauding. I look to my left and only then see that it is my hand being held up by the ref. I’ve won, oh God I’ve won. I jump up and punch the air only to be caught by coach who holds me up there while I raise my arms in victory. The crowds are still cheering; I can now spot my parents the look on their faces is all I could have hoped for. The next few minutes are a blur as I’m ushered back to the dressing room; the unreality of it broken by claps on the back and loudly voiced congratulations. Could anything feel as good as this?

  I’m a Boxer and I’m proud.

  A BEWLEY'S BOY

  Jimmy Curran

  The closing of the doors on Bewley’s runs shivers down me, as if a member of my family was passing away.

  As a young boy in the 50s I grew up living on the very premises in Fleet St/Westmoreland St in Dublin. My father was the caretaker so living on the top floor meant we had a three bedroom flat, as they were called in those days. As a bonus we had a playground on the roof which was flat and totally fenced in overlooking the city.

  As children my two brothers and I had many advantages over other children, for example we could sit and look out our window at the Easter and Saint Patrick’s day parades, to the envy of many children standing below in the streets.

  My father started work each day at 05.30AM, lighting very big boilers down in the basement; these boilers were fuelled by coke, a type of coal not to be confused with the drink.

  It had to be shovelled into the boilers by hand; these boilers supplied heat and hot water to the building.

  He then would let the bakers and confectionary workers in as they arrived at 06:00am.

  The building in Fleet St /Westmoreland St was a mass of underground passageways leading from one street to the next. It consisted of the kitchens and coal roo
m, where the coal was delivered through a hole in the street above. There was an electrician’s and plumbers work shop.

  As a child playing through these passage-ways was a magical world to be in, in the simple times of the 50s and 60s. I awoke every morning to the sound of two gigantic dough mixers in the bake- house mixing for the fresh bread to supply the Bewley’s shops.

  The sweet factory was a schoolboy’s dream. Everything was made by hand by very skilled workers who prided themselves in their work. At the end of each day employees could purchase cakes, and bread at a third of the price. I can remember the cherry buns, almond buns, coffee cakes, walnut cakes.

  These are most beautiful memories that will never leave my mind.

  I remember Mr. Victor and Mr. Alfred Bewley, always referred to as Mr. Victor or Mr. Alfred.

  Mr. Victor would often travel to Kenya to visit coffee farms and purchase supplies for the following year. On his arrival he would show slides of his trip to the staff in the café in Westmoreland St. I can remember going to see these slides in the days when there was very little television around, so it was a great thrill to be given this night out from Mr. Victor.

  I was often very proud to see my dad standing in the window in Westmoreland St. roasting the same coffee I had seen on the slides with Mr Victor. I was brought to the Bewley farm in Ballydowd on the back of my dad’s motor bike to see the Jersey herd, whose milk was used in the cafes and bakery. The café was often used to make many films, I recall one Sunday afternoon a film crew being in there for the whole day filming. I can’t remember the film but the main star was Peter Finch.

  As it had been a very busy day for everyone on the set, my father decided to ask Peter Finch to have a drink with him in his local “The Palace Bar” in Fleet St. Unknown to my mother my dad had overstayed his time with his new acquaintance. There were ten flights of stairs 13 steps in each so as people made their way they could be heard making their way up or down. The footsteps were soon to be heard, they were almost at the top when my father’s voice rang out “wait till see who I have with me”. My mother I think was saying in her mind wait till you see what I have for you.