Looking Under Stones

by Joe O'Toole

  By their nature Dingle people are iconoclastic; clergy were respected for themselves and not simply because they were men of the cloth. They had to measure up, and if they were completely out of line then their writ ran out. Canon Lyne had always been held in high regard and was well liked, but nearing the end of his time in Dingle he became overenthusiastic and therefore ineffective. The world moved on and left him behind.

  The 1960s brought a political awareness, especially among the young generation. John F Kennedy’s presidency of the USA was an international turning point for Irish self-esteem. He was one of us: ‘From the White Cottage to the White House’, as the postcards of his family home in Wexford were keen to point out. People travelled from Dingle to Dublin and Limerick to wave at him in that summer of 1963. I was in the shop on a dreary November evening later in the year, tediously polishing Granny Smith apples and displaying Jaffa oranges in the way that Teresa insisted, when Pat Neligan came running in with the news: ‘President Kennedy has been shot.’ It was incredible and it was devastating. We kept the radio tuned in for any scrap of news and heard of Dallas for the first time in our lives. He was in the hospital. But there was no hope. Then came the confirmed report: President John F Kennedy has died. Teresa cried. Undoubtedly we felt a sense of loss. All Ireland did.

  During the 1960s, Dingle began to attract a more cosmopolitan clientele; it became more and more touristy and the business community began to respond. In no time at all there was a public toilet.

  The next major event occurred when Greaneys opened a chip shop in the Holyground. This was like being on holidays. Soon the bag of chips on the way home was part of every night out, whether you were hungry or not. It was all happening in the Holyground – O’Connor’s shop installed a jukebox. Now we were truly international. Joy was unconfined. We would crowd into the shop and sit in a line on a stool that ran along the wall opposite the counter, and soak in the music. It cost sixpence per single. Even if no sound had come out of it at all, it was still a wonder to see, through the glass of the jukebox, the silent mechanism glide along the line of singles, the mechanical arm reach in and extract the precise selection, then rotate it horizontally and transport it back to the centre for placing on the revolving turntable. It was magic!

  As for the music – cringe! We thought we were sophisticated, but we had no taste at all.

  There was some soft country rock, but as this was just before The Stones and The Beatles had hit the headlines, we were confined mainly to Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.

  Lyney used to throw shapes when Elvis kicked in; Thomas always fancied himself as a bit of a rocker. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Painful as it is to confess, it has to be admitted that there would always be strict silence, some closed eyes, a bit of gentle body swaying and full attention for Jim Reeves as he crooned his way through his maudlin standards. Some I can still remember. In fact, how could you forget lyrics such as:

  ‘Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,

  Let’s pretend that we’re together all alone …’

  Sometimes we might buy an ice cream cone or a mineral. For us, us that was as near as it ever got to American drugstore culture.

  As teenagers, the international news that interested us was not the Cuban Crisis or Vietnam, although I still have a vivid recollection of the image of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, taking off his shoe and pounding the podium with the heel while addressing the United Nations. What really got our attention, when the Pathe newsreels came on before the ‘Big Picture’ in the cinema was the footage of Teddy Boys in Liverpool, the Rockers on Brighton beach or the Mods in Carnaby Street.

  The Teddy Boys made a major impact on us. Somebody said that they came from an area of Liverpool called Dingle, where Billy Fury was born, and that they were originally called Dingleboys. Whether that is true or not, they were trouble, and they were definitely not the role models that would have been chosen by our parents. Nonetheless, or maybe because of that, they were our spiritual leaders. They established the fashion trends. By then, clothes and hairstyle had become important statements of self. It was important to adopt an identity, but the crucial choice of which look to go with – Mod or Rocker – was difficult to make. I was, as ever, mixed up. I favoured the music of the Rockers but the clothes of the Mods.

  The crew-cut hairstyle was all the rage. It began as a tight, shaven look, not unlike the standard American GI crop, but then grew somewhat. The ideal, the Holy Grail of crew-cuts, was to have it growing straight up from your head and be trimmed absolutely and perfectly flat as a plateau on top. Every possible trick was tried to get it right. Somebody even suggested that a light electric shock applied to the hair ends was guaranteed to galvanise recalcitrant hairs into military erectness. That was a thought too far. Personally, I could have made a fair shot at it were it not for a ‘cow’s lick’ of hair, slightly north of my right eyebrow, which stubbornly refused to respond to any encouragement and invariably hung flaccidly and limply to the side when all the rest was at vertical attention. When I mentioned at home that I might get a crew-cut, Teresa was so horrified that I thought better of it.

  At the start of that summer, Teresa and Myko took me aside and advised me to make the most of it; the next school term would begin my Inter. Cert. year, and I was warned that after September it would be ‘heads down’ for serious study for the exams.

  It was a great summer. I went to Dublin on my own to stay with Aunty Phyl in her flat in Haddington Road. It was a different world and I was having a ball. Rock ’n’ roll was pre-Beatles but was really livening up. Chubby Checker and Sam Cooke had the world ‘Twisting the Night Away’; even older people were trying it. Rock films were a new genre. I went to see Play it Cool in one of the O’Connell Street cinemas. It had Billy Fury, Helen Shapiro and Bobby Vee; it was brilliant. We had been talking about it in Beenbawn and I had promised to let them all know about it, so I sent a postcard back to Lyney and a few of the girls with my very first film review. It was that important.

  I took the big decision during that holiday. Phyl had taken me to the Metropole to see State Fair with Pat Boone playing the lead role. His hit record ‘Speedy Gonzalez’ was a regular on the jukebox in Dingle, so it was good to see him in the flesh, so to speak.

  It seemed that everyone my age in Dublin had a crew-cut. Everyone, that is, except me. So, on the basis that it’s better to be dead than out of fashion, I went into a barber’s on Baggot Street and asked him for a crew-cut.

  ‘Another one of them,’ was all he said.

  He cut it tight at the sides and flat as a pancake on the top, and then brushed it back. Despite the confusion around the cow’s lick, it wasn’t half bad. Aunty Phyl was taken aback.

  ‘What did you do to your hair, Joseph?’ There was an unmistakeable edge to the question.

  But I was singularly pleased with the outcome and headed home for Dingle feeling fierce proud of myself. I was the bee’s knees and the height of fashion. I was soon disabused of my cockiness – Teresa was disgusted. ‘It’s no style at all,’ she said dismissively, one of those rare occasions when she managed to deflate me.

  Keeping up with the changing hairstyles was a huge challenge. After the rigidity of the crew-cut came the fashion for longer hair, shaped into that extraordinary style at the back known as a ‘duck’s arse’. To get the V-shaped DA you first had to rub plenty of Brylcreem into the sides and back of the head. Then you combed the hair from both sides simultaneously, with a comb in each hand, starting above the ears, then backwards and downwards until the combs met precisely and centrally at the back of the poll, thus forming the perfect and greasily gleaming ‘duck’s arse’.

  Narrow-legged trousers were all the rage, ‘drainpipes’ they were called. Nobody would be seen dead in anything wider than seven inches. It was almost a science; tailors were given strict instructions – ‘legs of maximum circumference of fourteen inches’ – so that when pressed, the width was the magic seven. Tight black
jeans were the real business. The only problem with them was that they could not, under any circumstances, be allowed to look new. In fact, very few items got as much abuse as a new, unworn pair of jeans. They would be washed three or four times before being worn. Some people even took to having hot baths while wearing the new jeans in order to age them, and to achieve the essential skintight shape.

  The shoes that were the required accessory to the drainpipes and the hair-do were called ‘winklepickers’. They were low-slung and came to a most unnatural point at the toe. According to fishermen, they were so pointed that you could pick the periwinkles out of their shells with them, hence the name.

  The auld fellas on the bridge in Dingle were earthier in their suggested use of the new footwear: ‘Jesus Christ, you could try a hen with those shoes.’ We ignored the comments. We were in fashion and that was what mattered, never mind that no normal foot could ever be comfortable in them. We didn’t complain about the budding corns and calluses. The shoes were the nearest thing in torture to Chinese foot-binding, and must in later years have created mighty business for a whole generation of chiropodists. Apart from the pain factor, they were also no good in the wet; kicking ball was impossible with them and, despite the name, they could not pick a periwinkle out of his shell. They were perfectly useless. But we went mad for them – the narrower, the more pointed and uncomfortable, the better. Victims of fashion? You bet we were. And it happens again and again and again, because every generation of teenagers does exactly the same with the fashion fads of the day.

  Summer in Dublin was my freedom from jobs, the shop and my parents. The next year I stayed for a while with Myko’s first cousin, Max Webster and his wife, Phil; it was the first of a number of holidays there. They made me one of the family. Max and Phil were a married couple in their twenties, with three children under five. They lived in Garda Terrace, just inside the North Circular Road gate to the Phoenix Park. All my memories of my times there are happy ones. There was fun, banter and adventure. The number 10 bus terminus was just outside the gate, and a bus departed every few minutes, so access to the city was simple and convenient.

  Garda Terrace was adjacent to the Garda Depot in the Phoenix Park and was occupied by families of gardaí based in the Depot. As in Dingle, everyone knew everyone and they looked out for each other. It was a supportive and cooperative community of people. At that time the Depot was still the training school for gardaí.

  Phil was determined to get me fixed up with a girl. That was her project for the summer and she worked hard at it.

  ‘We have just the girl for you here next week, Joseph: Joan O’Brien, the right age, curves in all the right places, and a lovely girl. She’s Tim’s youngest sister, and sure she’s from Kerry as well. You can’t go wrong!’

  Tim O’Brien was their neighbour and friend. Of course I was interested. Wouldn’t any sixteen-year-old? But by the time we finally met, under the microscope of Phil and her friends, the embarrassment was total. Oh, she was definitely a looker, but I cannot remember if we even spoke. Whatever was expected of me I didn’t deliver. Not that that stopped Phil with her matchmaking.

  ‘Wouldn’t you ask her for a date?’

  Max, a real softie like my father – they even looked alike – sensed my mortification and would chuckle, ‘Don’t mind her, Joseph. Do things your own way.’ Thanks, Max.

  Max and Tim were members of the Garda Driving Corps and had just been assigned a minister between them. They had the big ministerial car at home every night. What the minister never knew was that on a few occasions Max put it through its paces for me, up around the back of the park near the Ordnance Survey. It was mighty. It could accelerate to sixty miles per hour while still in second gear; you would be jammed into your seat by the G-force. I’ll never forget that car – a big, black Mercedes, registration BZI 306.

  That year, Max’s younger brother, Joe, was home on holidays from England. He had a scooter: a Heinkel, a real Mods job. I couldn’t keep my eyes or my hands off it. Joe was great; he explained all the features of the bike to me.

  ‘Do you want to start it?’

  Did I what!

  It was a great feeling, sitting on that machine and feeling the power quiver through it as I revved the engine. I told Joe of my experience with the Quickly Mopeds in Foxy’s, and maybe I talked it up more than a bit! The parking area in Garda Terrace was confined and safe and at the time it was empty.

  ‘Here,’ said Joe. ‘Drive it across the car park.’

  This was heaven itself. I kicked the bike into gear and released the clutch with my left hand. It jumped, stalled and stopped.

  ‘No, no. Release the clutch slowly and gently.’

  I did and I was travelling. Joe ran along beside me.

  ‘Squeeze in the clutch again and change her into second gear.’

  Never one to leave well enough alone, and with the wide open spaces of the Phoenix Park beckoning, it was only a matter of minutes before Joe suggested I take her on a decent run up the Park. I was doing fine for the first hundred yards, then just at the Depot, I had to make a left turning around by the railings opposite the Zoo. Of course, I leaned over as you would on a bicycle. But scooters are not for banking. The footguard scraped the ground, the scooter spun out of control across the road, and suddenly the side of a truck loomed up in front of me. I was helpless, terror-struck.

  By good fortune, I hit the ground towards the rear of the truck, just avoiding the wheels. I remember the truck driver slamming the vehicle to a halt and jumping out. The poor man was white with shock. Joe, who had witnessed the whole thing from the entrance to Garda Terrace, came running over. I was okay, only a few scratches, but felt really embarrassed at my own stupidity. The driver was so relieved to find I was not injured that he made nothing of my dangerous driving and went off about his business.

  Poor Joe did not escape so lightly. Max, once he had got over the shock of what nearly happened, tore him apart. Told him he was irresponsible and senseless and more. There was I, witnessing all this and knowing that I was completely responsible, but Max wouldn’t even listen to me.

  Yes, they were the best of times, a happy household, full of fun. There was always something to do and I was included in everything. But it was less than a year before Max and Phil experienced the very worst of times. It was something that all parents dread. That they would never forget as long as they lived. Max was leaving for work one June morning. He hopped into the ministerial Merc, started up, checked that the way was clear of children playing outside and then reversed. He had not seen, and couldn’t have seen, their baby daughter, Bernadette, their pride and joy, because she had crawled behind the car. He thought she was inside, but she was just at that age, sixteen months, when babies are impossible to watch. When he felt the car strike something, he knew the worst. It was too late for help. Nothing could bring her back. Little Bernadette was dead.

  My father, Myko, had been transferred to Dublin some months earlier. He was in the Depot a few hundred yards away and he was with Max and Phil within minutes. It was awful. What could you say or do? The wake and funeral were terribly sad. I remember it as my first encounter with tragedy at close family level, and it left an indelible mark.

  Max’s boss was the Minister for Justice. He was an important man, but as soon as he heard of the accident he dropped all other business to come and comfort Max and Phil. He arrived into Garda Terrace. While the rest of us were trying to come to terms with the horror of what had happened, he took personal charge of many of the arrangements. Myko asked Phil to think about the burial plot.

  ‘Leenane and nowhere else,’ Phil said. ‘I want her with the family and where people will know her.’

  There was no phone in the house. It was the minister who made the phone calls; he contacted Leenane and the key people who needed to be notified. He was with them all that night, talking to the family members. Not doing much, but simply being there and sharing their pain. The following day, as Myko was lifting Be
rnadette in her tiny white coffin into the back of Jim Fitzgerald’s estate car, because nobody wanted a hearse, the Minister was still there, comforting and supporting them. Then he got into his car and followed the saddest cortège to lovely Leenane.

  I had never met that minister before, though I had seen his name prominently in the news. He had a reputation. For the following thirty years he was rarely out of the news or out of trouble. The political icon of his age. Always the subject of extreme views, his political career was a rollercoaster ride of peaks and troughs. Many times in later years I was among his harshest critics, even if I often also appreciated his positive contributions. Like so many political careers, his ended disastrously and he finished in a flood of vilification.

  Through all those years, however, my view has been leavened by and filtered through that first impression of pure humanity that was Charlie Haughey during the tragedy of little Bernadette.

  BEHIND THE COUNTER

  ‘Joseph, mind the shop!’

  The shop was the centre and the bane of my life. It was impossible to escape it. Never a chance of sneaking out to play without the risk of being collared to do duty behind the counter. In many ways I grew up behind that counter.