Dublin Folktales (11 page)

Brian, like all youngsters of the village, was used to the journey, but on this day, he was showing more bravado than wisdom. His mother told him not to go swimming and not to cross the weir so that no harm would come to his new shoes, bought at enormous sacrifice by his mother ahead of his return to schooling come the autumn. On this day, he wore them to allow the leather to find its way around the outline of his feet; to break them in, was another way of putting it.

Brian headed straight to the river for a swim in his skimpys with the other lads. He knew he could dry off by borrowing the damp towels of the others when they were finished with them. No one need know he had been swimming at all. The group of boys stood together on the bank before the crossing was ventured. They silently observed the quiet flow of the river. Each pulled off their cheap rubber plimsolls and started off, one after the other.

Brian had knotted the laces of his expensive shoes together and wore them tied around his neck. That way, everyone could see how well-to-do he was and they could see how little it fazed him that he had to be careful of his charges. Inevitably, however, the laces came undone. The shoes fell away from their berth around his neck, one towards the deep water, the other towards the rushing white cascade. It bobbed resolutely down the wall of the weir
to the level below. Brian caught the shoe heading for the depths, but he should have caught the other one first. The shoe at the bottom of the deep water could have been dived for, and would have provided a warm afternoon’s sport for the excited youngsters. By the time Brian had caught one falling shoe and regained his balance on the slippery weir surface, the other shoe had begun a journey of its own into the unknown. It was never seen again and simply passed into a history of boyhood.

It presented a very real problem for all concerned, not least Brian who was now the possessor of a single leather shoe, when quite recently he had sported a fine pair of shoes. That the shoe was lost was bad enough. The pair was broken, never to be reconciled again. That his mother was going to be as wild as a river in flood was also a given; but the certainty that his avenging father would hear about it loomed larger in all of their minds as it was accepted that the loss of the shoe was a problem for the community of boys and not just for Brian Byrne. They held a conference on the bank of the river with their feet dangling in the cool water.

It was soon confirmed that the shoes were purchased by means of a cheque from the cheque man. This was a glorified method of money lending whereby a client was given a cheque to be spent in a range of approved establishments. The recipient then paid back the amount plus interest to a collector, each week, who called to homes on a regular round of payment gathering. The particular shop that had supplied
Brian’s new shoes was quickly established by dint of collective knowledge.

The group went there in their summer footwear, many with toes peeking through the cheap material. They halted a distance away from the shop and held a council of war. The little shop was wedged in a small space along a busy Thomas Street. An intoxicatingly strong smell of leather and dyes pervaded the shop. The premises was so old that its dark corners were lit by gas light. The shoemaker was a cordial character, but contrary at times when lounging visitors impeded his work. At such times he was less tactful. Bowing to economic reality and changes in demand, he allowed his son to begin to stock and sell ready-made shoes in the front part of the shop. He thought little of the new staples and glue-line shoes that his customers wanted to try on, rather than wait for a decent pair to be fashioned for them. But that was progress.

His son was away when Brian Byrne stood at the counter with a single new shoe. On his feet were borrowed plimsolls. Their owner sat up the street with his feet drawn up beneath him so no one would notice his feet were now bare. Brian placed the single shoe on the counter and waited for the shoemaker to ask him what he wanted. ‘My mother said can I have the other shoe,’ he said with all the conviction of a condemned man arguing his innocence.

‘What other shoe?’

‘She wanted to buy these shoes for me yesterday for school. So she brought this one home to see if it would fit me. It does, so she says she’ll take the pair. She left the cheque yesterday, she told me to tell you.’ The shoemaker told Brian to go home or he’d tell his mother on him. Brian replied that his mother had a brother home from the merchant navy and she would send him in to get the pair of shoes that was paid for by cheque. The brother was a deaf mute and there was no talking to him when he was angry, Brian added. And the cheque man would have to hear about
it as well and he would probably be cross when he heard what had happened to his good cheque. The shoemaker offered to give Brian a clout about the ears if he didn’t get out, but such was the passion Brian brought to his performance that the shoemaker began to wonder if his son had actually stocked the shoes and had given one out to see if it would fit the boy.

By now, the argument had given courage to the other boys who gathered around the shop to lend support. They did this by pretending they did not know Brian at all and they were interested and fair observers of all that went on. The shoemaker responded by offering to let the dogs out to eat them. He had no dogs, but the threat made the boys quieten down and move away from the door. That only made room for passing adults to peer in at the goings-on, for everyone in Dublin loves a good argument. In the heel of the hunt, the shoemaker could get nothing else done until he resolved the issue. ‘Give me the shoe’, he demanded. ‘What is your mother’s name and address, so I can tell the cheque man to check up on this?’ Personal ID was unheard of at this time so it was easy for Brian to give a completely bogus name and address.

Quite naturally, the shoemaker could not find the missing shoe in the shop. He looked at Brian and at his feet and, with the acute knowledge of the true shoemaker, knew the exact size that would fit the boy before him. He pulled out a pair of shoes that were somewhat of the same colour and design as the cheap shoe before him. He handed them over to Brian with a gruff order to try them on before he left the shop.

‘Both of them, and give those old runners back to that young lad sitting on his own up the street while all your gang is down here telling lies.’ An astonished Brian discovered that the shoes fitted him perfectly and that the shoemaker was not going to give him back the only shoe of the previous pair. He kept that he said for reference. Maybe
a one legged boy will make use of it he said, as Brian and the gang took themselves off towards distant home.

His mother was astonished when he returned home wearing a different pair of shoes to the ones he had left home in that morning. By now an accomplished liar, Brian patiently explained that the other pair had been pinching him. So, he went back to the shoe shop and swopped them for a more comfortable pair. Was that alright? Faced with this
fait accompli
and not wishing to probe too far into the lie, she said it was. His father, for his part, was well pleased with his son’s resolution of the issue for he had lost a good few shoes himself on that weir when he was a young man: so he said no more; sometimes it is better to let life flow on gently wherever it will, and to remain quiet, for the sake of wisdom.

Dublin would be nothing without its characters. One of the characters that cast the longest shadow across the streets of his native city was a simple man who shot dead as many people as he could manage in a day’s ride across the metropolis. Not only did he shoot some unsuspecting passers-by, but countless Dubliners began to return fire when Bang Bang Thomas Dudley opened up fire on them.

Such spontaneous gun battles would startle visitors to Dublin who were unaware that as non-combatants they were perfectly safe. It was not unusual to see large numbers of people firing imaginary guns at a poorly dressed man who was hanging from the safety pole on the open platform on the back of a city bus. For Bang Bang would open hostilities by pointing a large key at you and shouting, ‘Bang, bang. You’re dead’, in such a way that you felt you had to react in some meaningful way. It was an invitation to play a game that few could resist.

The imaginary bullets rendered you either dead or ‘roonded’, this being Dublinese for ‘wounded’. But even if you opted for death, either an instant release and fall against a wall or an adjacent shop window or a long lingering stagger about the place, you could still get back in the game by counting from one to ten, slowly, and you were ready to go again. You were either ready to continue your
daily duties, as if nothing had happened, or, if the bus had not moved too far away, you could rejoin the battle. It was a little different for the shoals of cyclists who inhabited the streets of Dublin in the 1940s and ’50s when Bang Bang was at the height of his marauding campaign. A cyclist shot at by Bang Bang was free to duck the bullet and to return fire from the bicycle now transformed into the steed of an outlaw or the unsaddled mount of a red Indian, bent on scalping the entire bus load of happy passengers. Add the pursuing cyclists to the staggering pedestrians breathing their last on the mean streets of Dublin town and you can see how one man with the mind of a child brightened the day for many Dubliners.

The 1940s and ’50s, when Bang Bang rode across the prairie of his mind, was the era of the Hollywood western. In a time before television brought images and sound to people’s homes, the main entertainment was cinema. Every parish had its local cinema, and it seemed for a while as if every street in Dublin city sported a picture palace. The Corinthian Cinema on Eden Quay, just yards from O’Connell Street, was known as ‘The Ranch’ for its consistent programming of double-bill westerns. So popular were the pictures that queues formed outside cinemas. Ticket buyers often came in midway through a film, watched the story to the end, and then sat through the next showing until ‘where I came in’ came along and they left again. To a populace used to this way of story watching, and assembling the complete narrative in their heads on the way home afterwards, a man on a bus firing shots from a four-inch brass key came as little surprise

Bang Bang’s gun was an ornate key that now sits in the city archives on Pearse Street in a glass case on a red cushion for all to see. It may not be the original key; Bang Bang told a radio interviewer many years earlier that he lost the key he had used for forty years on Meath Street before replacing it with another key. It is a key that brought a city to its knees
with laughter and enjoyment. It was the key to a city’s imagination. Bang Bang often claimed that he and that other great shooter of a gun John Wayne were born in the same year. However, Wayne was born in 1907 which made Bang Bang his elder by a year. Wayne should have taken cowboy tips from his elder.

People were sometimes startled when they would be minding their own business and a hitherto silent Bang Bang opened fire and in a loud voice told them that they were dead because they had let their guard slip as they moseyed along. Once the bus halted at a stop for disgorging or loading passengers, Bang Bang would step off the platform to allow the conductor do his job in marshalling the passengers to their seats before hitting the bell twice to tell the driver to drive on. One bell was to stop, two to go, three for emergency stop. Nothing could be simpler. Still, on some occasions the bus would pull away without the armed guard and he would have to sprint after it to hop aboard the back platform on the way to his next episode. On the occasions when he fell off the bus without quite meaning to do so, he would call out that he was alright and that the driver should keep the stagecoach going to the next town; he would catch up. He would then gallop up the street slapping his backside as if he was whipping a horse along beneath his spurs.

Traffic on most of the city junctions in those years was controlled by gardaí on point duty who used white batons to direct traffic movements. It was a particular joy for Bang Bang to engage a jaded point man in a discreet shooting match between a Garda traffic baton and a large brass key. The lawman always won. Occasionally one might pretend that he was slightly wounded by Bang Bang’s expert marksmanship, but this was only as a salute to a worthy opponent. Bang Bang was nothing if not precise about the parameters of the game. The good guys always prevailed, as they did in the movies.

Bang Bang’s name was Thomas Dudley, the son of Mary and John Dudley. He was born on 12 February 1906.
Thomas was to want for close family love most of his life. His father and siblings all died when Thomas was very young, as was the way with many impoverished families. He was sent to an orphanage in Cabra in the North of Dublin when his mother was unable to support him. His mother died in 1933, when Thomas was twenty-seven years old. Thomas Dudley lived his adult life in the Liberties area on the southside when he wasn’t roaming Dublin guarding make-believe stagecoaches from renegades, and keeping the place safe for law-abiding citizens.