Two Walls and a Roof (5 page)

My Nann
ie was the driving force in my u
niverse
,
but even at a very young age my Uncle Kyrl was becoming the one I really looked up to because he had a kind of charisma that was infectious,
even to a very young boy.  F
or some reason
though,
neither Nannie nor the mother liked him, and I never understood why that was nor would they tell me either.

Strangely enough
both Kyrl and my Nannie
,
the two figures I looked up to most
, were instrumental in creating
what I believe was the most traumatic event in my life.

My earliest memory of U
ncle Kyrl, who we called
‘
Big Kyrl
’,
was that he was always out to mak
e money. He epitomised the entre
p
reneu
r
i
al spirit which I am sure I inherited from him.  I admired Kyrl immensely as he neither drank nor smoked, unlike my father who did both to excess. Kyrl always had money and believed you had to invest to accumulate. He also had a great saying which he instilled into me. That saying was this, “The
end always justifies the means”. H
e had added the word
‘always’
to emphasise his belief that no matter what you did to achieve your aim, it would be worth it in the end, and he proved this belief to me often.

One of the things I loved most about him was his futuristic thinking. He brought the first cinema to Buttevant, later turning it into Cinemascope by curving the screen around the audience. This new movie experience was the talk of the age in Buttevant, being the forerunner of the Imax of today. Later on he ran dances to entertain the people
,
and later still he taught himself music, though he was never as good at that as my dad was. He knew all there was to know about engines, and radio and electronics fascinated him. He ended his years owning a very successful monumental works, where he erected thousands of headstones all over Cork and Limerick.  Unfortunately for me though, his belief in the end always justifying the means was t
o have a traumatic effect
when I was about eight or nine years old.

I think he either bought or owned a house at the top of the town. This he had rented to a local guard, a sergeant I believe. I’m not sure of his name, so I’ll call him Ryan. Guard Ryan was married with a young family and I believe he felt settled in Kyrl
’
s house. He paid the rent regularly and all went along well for a while, until Kyrl needed to sell the house to raise money for the upcoming cinema business he was planning for Buttevant.

In those days
it was very important that one did not get on the
wrong side of the local guards
as they could make life very difficult for you, especially when you needed a dance licence or other legal permission of some kind. Kyrl was then in a bind because he had no reason to ask the guard to leave
. H
e could not legally
evict him even if he wanted to
because he had paid his rent, and more especially when his tenant was a local guard.

By then father and mother were living in their litt
le ‘two walls and a roof’ house,
and I was still being held captive by the Nannie across the road. My brother Kyrle was about seven and our sister Lill was young, but my p
arents still had plenty of room. T
here was nothing critical about their housing situation. However
,
Kyrl felt that if father and mother were prepared to exaggerate their ‘desperate housing situation’ and put it before the guard, then he might be persuaded to vacate the house so that Kyrl could ‘give it’ to his brother. This was a typical ploy of my uncle Kyrl and showed his way of thinking about life. It was cold
,
calculating and mercenary. He did not give a damn about the guard or his young family, all he cared about was selling his house and that was the end of the matter for him.  It’s quite likely that Kyrl had also promised father a considerable amount of d
rink money
to convince my mother to go along with his plan. But as I saw it, the bottom line was that he had no notion whatsoever of ever giving that house to his brother, or my mother either, he just wanted Ryan out of his house at any cost.

It appears that a row took place at home and my mother would have no part in the eviction of a husband, wife and young family, and took grave exception to being used as a pawn in Big Kyrl’s game. What’s more, I am sure that she went up the town to the house and told the guard’s wife all about it. Obviously the guard went mad
, and from that day on G
uard Ryan had it in for Kyrl. Over the following five years or so, bad blood flowed between both Kyrl and Ryan, and a deep level of distrust built up between them.

By about nineteen fifty eight or nine, the economy seemed to have deteriorated and no one had any money, not even Nannie with her regular pension. She too seemed to be in desperation most of the time. Uncle Michael used to mend shoes and hated every minute of it, but at least he earned some money from this work. I can clearly see him now, sitting at his little bench in the front of Nannie
’
s house, flaking away at an old shoe balanced on his wooden last, and smoking his fag at the same time. I see too
,
on a shelf behind him
,
the little red Pears Encyclopedia that I read so often and
where I
got my first taste for America.

At that time
it was customary for the people to bring their shoes in for repair during the week, and collect them again on a Friday night
. A
t least that’s how it worked for those with a wage or with money. For those other customers who did not call on the Friday night, probably because they had no money, I would be
dispatched
by the Nan on Saturday to deliver their shoes to them.

My Nan would go out of her way to warn me sternly not to give up the shoes with
out the money. “John, tell them
‘
no money, no shoes
’. B
ring their shoes back no matter what they say, sure they’ll never pay if you give them the shoes
. O
ff with you now, there’s a good boy, … and put on a coat”. And off I’d go with my canvas bag
of shoes, traversing Buttevant
in all kinds of weather
, collecting the money
and battling the elements as best I could.

The hardest part of this job for me though was refusing to hand over the shoes. I used to feel terrible saying no, especially when I knew the people well, and often I did know them well because they were usually my school friend’s parents. Many a time a school friend would answer the door and be standing there talking to me when I’d have to pull back the shoes from his parents
’ outstretched hands. T
hen I’d see that sad look in their eyes before they would say
,
“See you in school Cahill”, before going back i
nside. It seemed so wrong to me
to have to say
n
o, I’m sorry, I can’t give you the shoes because my Nan
says I have to be paid first
. When this happened
,
there would be this long pause as the woman looked at me and played the dignity game
. T
hen she’d say, “Ahh sure tis all right so, tell her I’ll collect em meself later on when he’s home with the money”.  As we looked
at each other we would both kne
w that ‘himself’ was probably in the pub drinking their money, or he was over in England working.  In any case
,
she would not be calling in later. At that stage I’d leave with their shoes, and with no money. It was clear to me even at my age that no one was benefiting from such transactions, but that’s how it was, and I would be killed by the Nan if I succumbed to their stories and handed over the shoes. There was many a time when I just could not pull the shoes
back
and I’d give them up, later facing the wrath o
f the Nan and her wet dishcloth.
“Didn’t I tell you not to give them up
,
didn’t I
?
” Whack…… across the head.  Those days were the beginning of my longings to be rich. I
,
John Cahill
,
wanted to be rich, but I want
ed everyone else to be rich too. T
hen there would be no
more use of that hated word…no
,
…
just a lot of good times for us all.

Around that time, Michael became an agent for what was known then as ‘The Pools’. These pools were a kind of weekly lottery, and I believe the proceeds were used to fund some kind of national charity. It was like an early version of our Lotto today, and in desperate times, people grasped onto desperate measures, so Michael tried to become a sales agent for those pools, and he succeeded.  He worked on a commission basis which was small, but it was ‘better than a kick from a donkey’, and I know too that he had initially gathered a very large number of customers, due to his popularity in sport and politics.

Like all lotteries
,
if you had a big win on the pools, all your worries were over, but of course it cost you a shilling each week to be in with that chance and a shilling was twelve pennies, which was a lot of money then. The pool money was to be collected on a Saturday, the day Michael would be busiest on his shoe mending
.
H
e couldn’t do both jobs
,
so it was not long before a new job was added to my shoe delivering one. I was now going to become a ‘pool money collector’ as well as a shoe delivery boy.

Some pool customers were great and would happily hand over their money with a smile and a chat, but they were mo
stly the shopkeepers, or the so-
called ‘well off’ of the town.  I would give them their pool sheet
,
which showed all the winners from the previous week
’
s draw, and pocket the shilling. Others
,
however
,
would say, “Is it a
ll right if I pay you next week?
W
ill you tell Michael to put me in this week, and I’ll definitely settle it all up next week”. In practice what this meant was that they would probably try and get away with not paying again on the third week, hoping for any kind of win, before finally not answering the door on my next visit. After that happened
,
we had lost them as customers
.
I noticed that this was beginning to happen more and more often, as did my Nan.

Just like with the shoe delivering, Nannie began to exhort me to try and get the money out of them at all costs
. I
t was almost as if she believed I could do magic, and money would appear for the poor people on my visit. At the start I hated that pool
collecting job
and only did it because I had to, as I knew what it mea
nt to her. The pattern was this:
as soon as I arrived back with my shillings, she would give me the same money and send me up to May Sheehan
’
s shop for her few groceries, so I knew that the commission was actually buying the food for us all.

Each Saturday I made my sweep of the town, going up one side and then down the other, ret
urning to Nannie with my monies
and the inevitable bag of undelivered shoes
along with
sheets from the latest lost customers.

For many reasons
,
the number of pool customers would ebb and flow. Some would drop out for financial reasons
,
but after a big win more would join. It was constantly changing
,
but I felt like the Nan, that on average, we were beginning to lose more and more people every week
. P
eople simply did not have the money because times had become so hard. One wintry Saturday
,
Nannie seemed
to be particularly depressed. She was very low in herself
and had a very sad look in her eyes all morning. Before my sortie to the street, she sat me down and said gravely to me, “John you
’
r
e
getting to be a big boy now, and today I want you t
o go out and call to every door. D
on’t miss a single one
. Y
ou must try and get us some
new people to ‘join’ our pools. Y
ou must do your best to get us new customers”. I clearly remember her using the words ‘join the pools’ but somehow in my mind, I felt that they were being asked to ‘buy’ the pools. In my mind
, I was now becoming a salesman
as well as a delivery boy
,
and while I didn’t like it, I
sensed the urgency in her voice. S
omething was troubling her greatly and it felt like a big bill was due. This I did not like at all
. S
he seemed very downtrodden that day and I felt very sorry for her. So once again I set off with my bag of shoes and my pool sheets, and a few coins in my pocket for change.