by Joe O'Toole
The net effect of Teresa’s discussion with Gannon was that I, innocent of the reason behind it, was pressurised and chaperoned through my studies until I sat the Primary Certificate examination. I did better than I could ever have expected. Teresa had made her point and, yes, Gannon did have to present me with that fountain pen. It was then I found out that it was simply the nib, and not the whole pen, that was gold. Teresa was vindicated, but in fairness, Gannon was probably right; I was never going to do well the way I had been approaching my work. Maybe Gannon was smart enough to know that his comment to Teresa would be the catalyst.
But, when all was said and done, I was glad to finish primary level and looked forward to going upstairs to secondary school.
At the beginning of my own teaching career, corporal punishment was still the norm and I used it. We were actually shown how to administer it in a safe and, at that time, acceptable manner. In hindsight, it was unnecessary. No matter how humanely it was administered, it must have had the effect of dehumanising and perhaps brutalising children. More sinisterly, it also taught children that violence was the way to correct unacceptable behaviour. No doubt I held the view, as a young teacher, that I was better than the Blackies or Gannons because in my case corporal punishment was only ever used as a last resort. That is no more than a Jesuitical distinction. It was wrong. I was wrong. Violence breeds violence, and it is certainly something that I regret. By the time I had spent a number of years teaching, I had heard too often the protestations of older teachers who maintained that the past pupils who had received most corporal punishment were the ones quickest to buy them a drink in later life. It did not make sense. It could even be argued that in those cases buying a jar for the former teacher was a conditioned response, hearkening back to the classroom days when the pupil was required to curry favour from some brutes.
‘Beat them up when they’re young and they’ll buy you drink when they’re old.’ Somehow I don’t think that would be the formula of the good teacher!
Between Blackie and Gannon in third and fourth classes we had Brother Spollins. It may be hard to believe, but I was a teacher, with responsibility for a class of my own, before I realised that this man had been abusing pupils for years. Ignorance is no protection for innocence against the wiles of a child abuser in a position of authority. My sense of anger in recalling this man’s abuse was overpowering and frustrating. Eventually, I made enquiries to establish if he was still teaching. I traced him to a school in the midlands and found that he was about to retire. I rang a teacher in the school, who had been in college at the same time as myself, and told him the story. On the basis that Spollins was about to retire, we left it at that. Maybe we were wrong.
From the 1850s the Christian Brothers had been educating the children of West Kerry and they gave generations an opportunity that they would otherwise never have had. Their outstanding work has too often been unfairly eclipsed by the terrible behaviour of a tiny number of their Order. It should never be used to diminish the immense contribution made by the rest of them to the development of modern Ireland. In Dingle there were many families whose children would never have been educated without the Brothers. Their legacy is one of pride, even if it has been tainted by those who abused their positions. Part of the problem, I believe, was that the whole system of recruitment and training of the Brothers was highly questionable. Taking young people, some only eleven years of a, away from their homes and into a novitiate to become members of a religious Order, before they ever had the experience of growing up and maturing, was unnatural. It was bound to have consequences for their personal development.
After they and I had left Dingle, I never met Blackie or Spollins again. Brother Gannon I came across twice. In the year when I graduated from teacher training college, he was principal of a large primary school in a Leinster town. He had a number of vacancies in his school and called personally to the college to look up some potential candidates from among his most favoured past pupils. I received no call from him; as far as I know, he met all the others and quickly offered jobs to three of them. Whether it was that he did not think me good enough, did not remember me, or just considered me to be a potential dissident in his school, I will never know. It would have afforded me considerable satisfaction to have had the opportunity to refuse him; maybe he had figured that out.
A decade and a half later, I was in Dingle with my own children; we had rented a house on the Mall for a few weeks. Joan answered a knock on the door while I was out. It was Brother Gannon, who was himself on holidays and had heard we were in the locality. He would come back to see me. By the time he came back, I was well prepared.
‘Dia’s Muire dhuit, Joe. Conas tá’ann tú?’
But I was having none of his friendliness, and had no intention of inviting him inside the house. ‘Táim-se fine, thank you,’ I said politely but unsmilingly. ‘What do you want?’
He got the message and we had parted in seconds.
I suppose it would have been easier to welcome him in and to indulge in a nostalgic pretence of the good old days. It is true that I was much less illused than most of the others. My memories are mainly of what I saw rather than what I personally endured. I also recognise that, as a pupil, I could be awkward and irritating, and I have some sympathy for any teacher put in charge of me. However, I am firmly of the view that in his application of corporal punishment – to which I did not have a principled objection at the time – Gannon had clearly crossed the line between use and abuse. In those days we expected teachers to use the stick; it wasn’t its use per se that caused the resentment, but the unfairness and the cruelty with which it was administered. Physical punishment of pupils for their inability to learn was unconscionable, and those images from my schooldays of nice guys being hammered by Gannon rose up and made me angry all over again. I felt that a welcome from me would have been a betrayal of my former classmates and that it might reinforce and give retrospective approval to his cruelty. Perhaps my actions were inhospitable and cruel in themselves, but there was nothing else I could comfortably and honestly do.
FOXY JOHN
‘You look a bit better, Uncle John. Did the doctor say anything about your improving?’
This was a lie, and it was also a stupid question to put to someone as acquainted with dying and as experienced in undertaking as my uncle Foxy. Wasn’t he the one who had shown me how to line and prepare a coffin? How many funerals did we attend together? Hadn’t Pádraig Lynch, the sacristan, let us into the church mortuary in the dead of night to replace a broken coffin handle so that it wouldn’t break under the strain of the ropes lowering it into the grave the next day. Lying there on the bed in the front room, above the shop on Main Street, big man though he was, Foxy John looked shrunken and worn out. The disease was winning, and he knew it. There was no point any more in asking about the latest blood count.
He turned towards me with his wry smile and his trademark grimacing squint, born out of short-sightedness.
‘Boyeen, I’ve discharged all my responsibilities. My accoutrements are packed and I’m ready to go.’
My best attempt at a response was a pretty inane remark about how the Moriartys tended to make a bit of a drama about dying. He gave a tired chuckle. We said very little more after that. We shook hands.
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said.
I couldn’t face going in to Hanora. As I went out, I saw Foxy’s nephew, Donal, in the bar pulling a pint. I just shook my head at him.
Going down Main Street to the christening party of Seán, the child of my cousin Fergus Flaherty and his wife, Angela, there were tears in my eyes. Inevitably, my mind was filled with all the familiar clichés around births and deaths. One coming and one going. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and all the rest.
How to say goodbye to Uncle John without mentioning death, though we both knew he was near the end, had occupied my mind throughout the journey down to Dingle on what was certain to be the last time I would see him alive. Softie
that he was, despite his reputation as a hard-nosed businessman, he had made it easy on me.
Foxy John died a short time after that. It’s a strange thing about the Moriartys, they never mind too much about dying, but they hate growing old. My mother, Teresa, takes the concealment of her age to extraordinary lengths. I have never known her to celebrate her birthday and she quite simply refuses to discuss her age, so much so that none of us knows either her age or the date of her birth.
Foxy’s was the type of business to be found in most Irish towns of the period. To the left, inside the door, was the public bar, with a hardware counter to the right. His sister-in-law, Betty, was in charge here and highly efficient she was. But the real action was behind in the yard. Here, there was a long store for furniture, mainly beds and wardrobes, but also some dressing tables and chairs. Wallpaper and paints were housed in another area, along with a selection of lamps and lampshades. The coffins were kept above the furniture store, in a suitably dark and quiet area that would give you the shivers every time you walked into it. Across the yard was the holding area for the bicycles and mopeds, and down at the very end a workshop where Florrie carried out repairs and Paddy made the gates. It was a thriving business, strategically situated with its front entrance on Main Street and the back gate on Green Street. It was not huge in area, but every square foot paid its way. It is impossible to categorise Foxy’s business – whatever people needed, he sold.
So, in addition to the above, he also sold ropes to the fishermen and seed and plants to the farmers. He had a genuine liking for and interest in his customers, and was very loyal to them in his way.
Foxy John had shown me the tricks of the trade; had taught me about money and business and how to deal with people. There were constant words of advice: ‘Always mind the customers and value their custom. Remember who’s putting the clothes on your back.’
From him I learned the importance of a hickory handle on a hatchet or hammer, the difference between a poor quality mattress and the Quality Odearest product that he stocked, and why his cabbage plants and seed were so superior to all others in West Kerry that you’d have to wonder about anyone who purchased anywhere else! He showed me how to pull a perfect pint, taught me to tap a barrel, and let me in on the finer points of the undertaker’s trade. And he had a gentle way of communicating his disappointment when I made a mistake. It was a marvellous technique of correcting without blaming so that your confidence remained intact.
I remember a woman coming in to buy an electric kettle. At the time we didn’t sell electric kettles in Foxy’s and I was about to send her further afield when he intervened.
‘We’re just out of them at the moment, Ma’am. I heard there’s new ones on the market and we are changing brands so we can have the most up to date. Only the best. Could you call in on Saturday? I’ll have one for you then.’
This was said in his most sharing, confidential voice – a real Sergeant Bilko job. The woman had hardly pulled the door of the shop behind her before he was on the phone to Kelleher’s, ordering a dozen of the newest and best electric kettles. Not only did the satisfied customer have her kettle on Saturday, but she was able to tell her neighbours that she had one of the latest models, purchased in Foxy’s.
‘Never send a customer to another shop. They might get in the habit of going there. If we don’t have it, order it, or say we’re out of them, but don’t send them to the opposition.’
Foxy was full of devilment too, and every day there was a bit of fun. Toos’s mother was wanting a pickaxe handle for her husband. Foxy had only the one left and it had a bit of a bend in it. It was unusable really, but he couldn’t resist a sale and didn’t want her going to Latchford’s for it.
‘These are the brand new hickory handles from America.’
‘But there’s a bend in that one, Foxy.’
‘Yes, they have a curve in them for extra strength,’ said he, making a virtue of necessity and knowing well that Toos’s father would be raging as soon as he saw it. And Foxy would get a lecture on being a typical townie who had never swung a pickaxe in his life. Had he any idea of the impossibility of using one without a straight handle? Did he know one end of it from the other?
And that was exactly what happened a few days later. Foxy listened benignly and started pulling a pint. As the complainant was running out of steam, Foxy landed a fine creamy pint in front of him. He had figured out that once the woman had taken the bent handle the sale was made, and by the time they came to return it he would have new ones in stock and would simply present a perfect replacement. No harm done and a sale kept.
‘Why don’t you drink that and not be giving out? I suppose I’ll have to give you one of the new ones just in, even though they are more costly. That’s no bad deal for you: a free pint, a new handle – I won’t ask for the other one back – and not a shilling in it for me.’
End of argument. You couldn’t fight with him, and the customers knew it.
Of all the aspects of Foxy’s business, buying and selling wool was the trickiest and most challenging. It was commodities broking at a time when that expression would have meant nothing to any of us. Sheep were important to the local farmers. Most of them had very small holdings, but they had commonage rights on the hills and that was where the sheep were kept. They would be brought down regularly during the course of the year for dipping, lambing and then, a bit later on, for shearing. The wool money was vital to the family finances; they depended on it. The farmers kept an eye on fluctuations in wool prices and, naturally enough, they tried to time the shearing and selling to get the best possible price. Foxy would purchase the wool from the farmers and store it over a period of a few months, until his wool-store was full. This required a sizeable outlay of money for the purchase, and no return until it was sold. Market fluctuations made it a very high-risk business and you had to suffer abuse from small farmers who complained if they heard that we were giving a higher price this week than we had given them the previous month.
‘Jack Tomás told me you’re paying one and six a pound for wool. One and four pence was all you gave me!’
Jack Tomás was a great friend of Foxy’s, but a great man to stir it up as well.
‘It’s just that the market price has gone up,’ explained Foxy.
‘Market price, my arse. I’ll go to Joe Curran’s the next time.’
‘Away with you, boy, if you can do any better.’
Foxy would hate saying that, but he would never give them the satisfaction of thinking that he was depending on them. Anyway, he had a full year to win them back. Eventually he settled on a strategy. No money would be paid out until Foxy had reached an agreement with the buyers at the woollen mills on the price at which he could sell it on. So, no matter when the wool was bought, no cash changed hands until the end of the season – although there might be a bit of an advance for valued customers. Everyone was happy with this arrangement. They each got the same. True communism! More importantly, Foxy’s margin was secured against the market.
All of this high finance stuff made very little difference to me; I was at the dirty end of the wool operation. My job was to check the wool from the seller before we bought it. Goods Inwards, that was me. Now, let me advise you here to immediately forget all those images of nice, fluffy wool that you may have acquired from various advertisements. Ditto with sparkling white little lambs gambolling about in their pristine fleeces. Wool is filthy. It is smelly and oily. As well as ‘ordinary dirt’, it is full of sheepshit, briars, thorns and the dreaded bloodsucking sciortáins (ticks). Every time you drove a hand into the wool you could expect a briar around the arm, a thorn under your fingernail, or the squish of the soft marbles of sheep shit. Nor would it be uncommon to find a few small stones in the middle of things.
‘Jesus, how would they get in there?’ you might ask innocently.
The seller would shake his head at the mystery of it all and mutter, ‘It must be that young fellow helping me. He’s useless. I’ll ki
ck his arse when I go home.’
By pointing out the attempted deceit without an accusation, you had won a small victory. You were in control.
So after a day of it – dragging, searching, feeling and sorting the wool – you ended up oily, dirty, scratched and with a few sciortáins sucking blood from the most private and sensitive parts of the anatomy. You couldn’t even ask your mother to help pick them off! By the time I was in my mid-teens I hated the sight of wool.
Another tricky part of my job was to explain to farmers why the wool had to be sorted into fleece and loose scraps, telling them that the loose stuff made a lower price. The fleece had to be free from tears and nips that reduced its value. It had to be a complete and unbroken piece. Of course, they knew this very well, but every year they argued. It was psychological warfare and you lived or died by your gut. The biggest danger was the farmer in a hurry.
‘I have no time, boyeen. Just throw that up on the scales and see what I’m owed.’
If you fell for this one you would be no relation of Foxy John’s. The greater the hurry of the seller, the more you could be sure that there would be a problem. So, no matter what the professed hurry, you had to open up the bags to sort it and check it.
Then came the weighing. Counterweights on the balance were slid across until the arm of the scale balanced precisely. Too much counterweight and the arm banged against the bottom of the gauge; too little and it rattled the top. The weigh platform of the scales had been extended to take the large wool packs, so there was a big area to watch. While you were trying to get a precise reading, you had to make sure that the seller was not casually resting a knee against the scale.
If you suspected trickery, the drill was to say something like, ‘We’ll just stand back from it a minute, to make sure it is steady on the scales and that we are not doing you out of money.’
Storing the wool was also critical. The air had to circulate through it; otherwise it would begin to overheat dangerously.