Authors: Brendan Nolan
Another man in the county of Dublin had cause to wonder at the mortality of cats. He wondered how many lives a cat really had after what happened to him on the high descent down a steep hill in the valley of the Liffey. Clem lived all his life in the valley not far from Dublin City. To get to the nearest town he had to climb up one hill, pushing his bicycle by the saddle and walking freely beside it. Once there, he freewheeled down the far side to the shops and the bookies in the nearest village.
When he was out of puff from pushing the old black Raleigh bicycle with the well sprung Brooks saddle on it up one hill, he freewheeled down the other side without bothering with brakes at all. This was no major decision to make for the bike had no brakes at all left on it. The brake block shivered and shuddered and eventually ceased to greet the rim of the wheel at all. In any case, Clem leaned into the corners mightily on the way down and took the entire width of the road when necessary to gather speed on a sharp bend. On the odd day when he slowed his descent, he leant backwards and rubbed the side of his boot on the rim of the front wheel to slow down. Such was the way he progressed and no harm ever came to him over it. He even had time to whoop at people he knew as he whizzed past them on his way downhill.
One day, a neighbour woman asked him to drown a dead cat for her. The cat was a family pet, she explained, and she did not want to throw it away herself in her grief. Clem was a little taken aback, for he had only called in to see if she knew whether the milkman was on holidays or not or had someone stolen the milk from his door early that morning.
He suspected the neighbour herself to be the milk thief, but would never say so. At one time, it was perfectly acceptable to drop animals into the river, where they floated away as a passing treat for local water rats. The woman was an old friend of his departed mother so he agreed.
You would think it would be an easy task, to peg a tied plastic bag with a dead cat inside it into the river, but no. Every time Clem approached the river bank, there was someone about, and this stayed his hand, for he did not want to be seen throwing dead cats about the place, for he too was aware of the strange confraternity that made cats the unsettling presence they are, when they take a mind to watch your every movement. He did not want to be the target of vengeful cats, lurking along the dark road at night. When he tried to dispose of the cat under the cover of darkness, there was always a constant steam of cars coming along the road with their headlights on. So, he brought the cat home and left it in the back scullery of his house in the red fertiliser plastic bag while he waited for a better time to present itself. It stayed there for a few days while he forgot about such considerations in favour of a more pressing matter, that was, the form of three racehorses that were running on Saturday in three different races.
If he placed a bet on the first, with the winnings going onto the second, and the winnings of that being placed on the third horse, and if that horse won, he would have a small fortune to vex him with the spending of it. He discussed these matters with knowledgeable men in the run up to the event. Those that mooned it with him, over a glass or two at his home, were Christian enough not to mention the pervasive smell of recent death hanging about the house. Clem eventually noticed it on the Saturday of his big betting coup, for he could not avoid it any more. It was a powerful smell and if the rats from surrounding townlands had not yet arrived to feast on the desiccated cat, it was only because they had sent invitations to their
cousins to join them and they were waiting for them to arrive to begin the festivities.
Clem was faced with a dilemma. He needed to get to town to the bookies to place the first bet as soon as possible, but it was obvious the dead cat had outstayed its welcome. It might not be safe to leave it here in his house, for a passing stranger might call the Garda to report the scent of a rotting body. Clem was not sure, but he thought there might be a rule about keeping unburied bodies on your premises for too long. He would do away with it now. No time like the present.
He pumped up the tyres of the bike to achieve more speed. He tucked his trousers into his tan socks and zipped up his good green anorak so that it would not cause counter momentum by filling with air on the descent. When he was ready, he walked out to the road with the bagged cat in one hand and his Raleigh bike in the other. Just as he was about to lob the burden into the flooded river, he saw the cat’s sorrowful owner coming down the road towards him. She thought the cat was gone long before and here it was inside a bag swinging from Clem’s hand. Clem unzipped his jacket just enough to stuff the stinking cat inside, next to his clean canary-yellow shirt, before the neighbour passed by with a sweet if sorrowful smile with her head to one side like it was burdened with sorrow on the one side.
The time was, by now, very close to the off in the first race. Clem threw caution to the wind. He threw his longest leg over the bar of the bike and away with him towards the town and the bookmakers. He remembered there was a builders’ skip on the way into town and he wondered why he hadn’t used it for disposing of his charge before this. If he kept the jacket zipped, people might think he had put on weight and was filling out the jacket more than he used. He pedalled fast and was sweating with his excess baggage and the excitement, and the exertion of rushing along to his certain fortune by the time he crested the hill. He peddled as
fast as he could between the tops of the two hills and then let her freewheel down the road on the other side. Clem knew he was faster when he allowed the machine to gather its own momentum. Besides, he needed his feet free to double as brakes if something came amiss.
It was then that a strange and disturbing thing happened. The cat made its move. Clem had just rounded the final chicane, when he felt a movement above his hips and below his perspiring chest. The three racehorses together could not have sweated as much as Clem did when he felt movement. The dead cat slid its way out of the bag onto his lap as if he were sitting down. In that moment, Clem thought the frozen blood of the cat had warmed up and it had used one of its nine lives to come back to torment him. He tried to slow down as best he could, with his shaking foot, but his foot brake missed the wheel and ploughed straight into the tumbling spokes. This pitched Clem straight over the handlebars and onto the road’s cold hard and ugly surface.
It was assumed afterwards that the cat they found under him had run out in front of Clem to be killed. But they said also that the suicidal cat had saved Clem’s life as Clem bounced on the dead cat on his descent to earth. Clem had to have sixteen stitches put into his face to draw it back together. The Raleigh bike with its Brooks saddle was wrecked. The cat was dead for the second time, though someone threw it into the skip afterwards so it might have just been sleeping or even playing a game with Clem, much as a hunting cat will play with a mouse it is about to kill.
And what of the treble wager that Clem was racing to and almost lost his life over? Well the first horse lost and the accumulator bet didn’t work out, as a result. It stopped dead there and then. No win, no second wager. Because Clem never got to the bookies, he still had his wager in his pocket when he came home from hospital. For ages afterwards he retold the story to anyone that asked him how he had acquired the scar on his face where he had been stitched.
But as the wound faded, so too did the questions, and Clem went back to normal life on his replacement bicycle. However, neighbours wondered if the fall had not affected his head in some little way. He had always been an uncomplicated man, but now neighbours said he seemed to want to stop and talk to any stray cat he met on the road. People said he seemed to be trying to explain something to the cat, but that couldn’t be right, could it? For who talks to cats in daylight anyway?
Irish budgies could have beaten German bomber pilots at their own game, according to some Dublin know-alls. While the whole world was at war in the early 1940s, Ireland, on account of it being neutral in such matters, declared itself to be having just a bit of an Emergency.
Even so, life carried on as best it could in the capital city. Lots of products were rationed and as a result life became more difficult for most people. But, it was especially difficult for the people living in the North Strand area at the close of May 1941, when German bombs came from the night sky and took away the lives of unsuspecting citizens and maimed many more. Some twenty-eight people died and ninety were injured. Three hundred houses were damaged or destroyed by the time the crashing of bombs and their shrieking aftermath ended their dreadful careering through the still small residential streets of Dublin early on that Saturday morning. More than 400 people were made homeless in a swoop that has been burnt into Dublin memory ever since. Some say the German bombs fell on Dublin as a result of bad navigation; others said it was retaliation for Dublin Fire Brigade’s assistance to Belfast when the northern city was fire-bombed in mid-April of the same year. Others said it was a dumping of bombs so the aircraft could gain height after shots were fired at the aircraft from
a Local Defence Forces unit, stationed on Ballyfermot Hill. One officer is said to have fired his pistol into the night sky as a warning to be gone, though it is unlikely that anyone heard it except himself, so he can hardly be blamed for what happened. Either way, three bombs landed on North Strand and one on Phoenix Park where it vexed the inhabitants no end, both man and beast.
Witnesses said they heard German aircraft overhead before the bombs fell to the ground and they heard anti-aircraft fire climbing above the sleeping city in a vain attempt to protect Dublin and its people from uninvited and unwanted belligerence. Some people who heard the approaching drone barely got to the front door to look up at the sky, when bombs fell and buildings came down. People ran out. The skeletal remainder of many houses collapsed around them as they did.
Eyewitness accounts said people were thrown out of bed by the blast, while others slept through it all. One man was blown through a front door, not his own, on his way home. He and the door landed at the foot of the stairs inside the surprised household. But he made his excuses and left. Others remained where they were until rescuers came to seek the dead and the wounded, and the terrified. Clanging ambulances ferried victims to the Mater and Jervis Street hospitals where next of kin went to see what had happened to their loved ones. People used whatever tools they had to dig for survivors. Some used their hands to lift fallen masonry away. Horses and carts were used to haul debris away. Dublin had few bulldozers or heavy equipment on hand for such work. Manual labour was employed to seek for victims. Later, trucks with chains and ropes were used to pull down dangerous walls while steam rollers flattened the rubble of former homes to manageable proportions.
No sooner had summer lightened the shocked streets, than suppositions began as to the cause of it all. Belfast city and its ship-building industry had been fire-bombed
in mid-April by German bombers. The fires were so bad in that city that the Dublin government was asked to send fire fighting assistance northwards to tackle the blaze. It did so, quietly and privately, for Belfast, as part of the United Kingdom, was technically a belligerent in the war. Dublin was not. Some twenty fire engines travelled from Dublin, Drogheda and Dundalk with more than seventy volunteer firemen, along with ambulances to help the victims of the April bombings. They travelled north, once more, on 4 May 1941 when more bomb attacks were made on Belfast. This, according to Dublin lore, made the German high command both nervous and angry at the prospect of the Irish Free State, as it was at the time, entering the fray, and that was why Dublin was bombed, they said. It was a warning. Hitler was frightened of us, they told anyone that would listen. And he had good reason, others said without being too specific, in case there were spies about to hear what might be the specific. Others said Dublin was mistaken for Belfast, bombs were dropped and the airmen went home to tell fibs to their boss Hermann Göring about where they had been. Reports of explosions at sea, on that night, reinforce the observation by military experts that foreign fliers jettisoned bombs off the coast before beginning a higher altitude run to Belfast.
No matter the cause, the first two bombs fell on North Circular Road and on Richmond Cottages, while a third shook the area around the Royal Canal and nearby Croke Park in the early hours of a Whit holiday weekend morning. While word spread through the wider city, tensions rose as fears grew that this bombing was a prelude to an invasion of neutral Ireland by Hitler’s Germany. After all, it had been the German battle practice, since hostilities began in Europe, to bomb a country or city from the air as prelude to a land invasion by grey columns of thundering armour and murdering men. As it happened, German armed forces invaded Russia to the east the following month with full intent.
The bombing of Dublin had little to do with it, experts said, unless their pilots had flown the wrong way and a month early. Still, and to this day, Dubliners took it all very personally. Phoenix Park, where the fourth bomb landed, sits above the city and the valley of the Liffey. At the time, household water was pumped throughout the park for use by residents from a pump house beside the Dog Pond. As luck would have it, the 250-pound bomb landed close enough to the pump house to destroy it. The force of the explosion left particles of residue floating in the atmosphere for days afterwards. A crater created beside the cricket club threw up rocks that fell back to earth through the clubhouse roof. It made the grass pitch off limits because of stones strewn across the surface, a source of annoyance to the cricketers who expected to bowl and bat there as usual.
In the years that followed the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, the club successfully claimed damages from the new German government for bomb damage to its roof. Damage to the zoo across the road came to £613 9
s
3
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in old money, before new money became old money in its turn. The Germans did not attempt a re-run of their bombing of Dublin.