Barefoot in Mullyneeny: A Boy’s Journey Towards Belonging

The received wisdom was that Jimmy was ‘a handy footballer but as wicked as a wasp’ and that his brother, the goalkeeper, was ‘quiet but dangerous when riz’.

A huge crowd from both factions was in attendance. They welcomed their heroes on to the field with wild and raucous tribal yells. Sure enough, after several minor scuffles, a full scale melee developed, the chief protagonists being the goalkeeper and a fearsome character from the opposing team who rejoiced in the nickname ‘Stand Up’ because this was his usual exhortation to his opponents when he knocked them down. I was too small to see exactly what happened but to my horror I saw Jimmy, my hero, running away. It was many years later that he told me the true story. Here are his words:

‘Often times in a fight, men would come in from behind and it wasn’t a fair contest. I could see this was going to happen here. I ran across to where I had left my clothes behind the whins when I was togging out, and got the butcher’s knife. I tore back and straight into the middle of the pushing and shoving and I said, ‘Take a look at that,’ and showed them the knifeblade close under their noses. ‘Stand in a ring,’ I said, and I walked round it with the knife in my hand. ‘The first man that interferes I’ll gut him like a stuck pig, I said.

‘The fight started. I knew our lad had a great left, and he hit him in what they call the solar plexus. Stand Up gasped and bent over and the red fellow (his brother) clinked him on the jaw and he went down. And that was that.’

‘Would you have used the knife?’ I asked.

‘I would,’ he said. ‘Every man deserves fair play.’

I thought of the poet who said, ‘Homer wrote The Odyssey about such a local row.’

The years went by and I noticed him getting slower, but his speech became even more picturesque. He would respond in a different way each time to the question, ‘How are you?’

‘So how are you, Jimmy?’

‘Keepin’ the best side out like the broken bowl on the dresser.’

‘If I felt any better I’d have to see a doctor.’

‘Still on the green side of the sod.’

‘I’ll shortly be making a load for four.’

‘Movin’ up in the queue.’

‘Between the two big ones.’

‘What two big ones?’

‘Birth and death.’

And there I thought I had the key. These half-jocular poetic answers were his attempts to soften the terror of approaching death, a way of coping with a sense of a world beyond the grave.

I moved away to live in the town and it was some years before I saw him again. I had heard that he was going blind. He was sitting in the dim workshop, smoking his pipe. No leather, no shoes, no fire, alone.

‘Hello, Jimmy,’ I said. ‘Do you know me?’

‘I do,’ he said, ‘You have your father’s voice.’

When I visited him in hospital, I walked past his bed at first. The nurses had cleaned up his smoke-blackened face, and I did not recognise this small pale frail little man, so vulnerable lying there. Was this the man who had hoisted a hundredweight so joyously over his head all those years ago? He opened his eyes and I could see that he knew me.

‘Bryan O’Linn,’ he said, and made an attempt to smile, ‘How’s Diogenes?’

‘How are you, Jimmy?’ I asked.

‘It’s a diggin’ job,’ he said.

The priest was generous at the funeral. ‘He was a philosopher,’ he said, ‘an observer,’ he said, ‘he had a great love of language and he had the ability to use it—a fact which some people found out to their cost. His workshop was a vernacular university of life, here was a man who in another time could have been a great professor.’ And he finished with lines that I had often heard Jimmy declaim from his roadside lectern:

Here he lies where he longed to beHome is the sailor, home from the seaAnd the hunter home from the hill

And I thought, Jimmy, you know now what the hell’s the answer.

Jolly Nice (#ulink_78ca4182-c7dc-5321-b0a6-181102902f00)

My uncle married a rich English widow who became my godmother. She was a lovely woman and regularly sent me books which I read voraciously. They had titles like The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s, Maitland Major and Minor and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. I became immersed in a world where boys talked about ‘rugger’ and ‘the first eleven’, and where if you were a ‘cad’ or a ‘bounder’ you were liable to get a sound thrashing in the boxing ring of the gym, where all fights were conducted with scrupulous fair play, with each boy having a second in his corner.

This ill-prepared me for life in a small village school in the Forties, and when I once had the misfortune to say that something was ‘jolly nice’, I was tormented unmercifully. There was one boy called Farrell about my own age who was noted as a great fighter. He was wiry, bony, and had fists as hard as stones. He was champion at Hardy Knuckles, and every time he fought, his opponent would be left cut and bleeding from fists that moved like lightning.

‘Out of my way,’ he would say when he came into school, and I would meekly obey, moving across the long desk to make room for him. I lived in mortal fear of him.

And then the bigger lads decided that it was my turn to fight him. I knew I was doomed when the first message arrived.

‘Farrell says you’re afraid,’ they said.

‘Tell him I’m not,’ I said, lying.

‘He says he can beat you with one hand behind his back.’

‘Tell him he can try,’ I said.

The fight was arranged for after school at the priest’s gate, the one place where we would not be seen. I spent the night before in fear and dread, knowing I was in for a hammering. In vain I tried to cheer myself up by thinking what Maitland Major of the Lower Sixth would have done with his straight left.

Now I knew that various rituals were observed before a fight. A big fellow always held his arm out horizontally between the adversaries, saying, ‘Best man spit over that arm,’ then lowered it and the contest began. I decided that my only chance lay in surprise. No sooner was the arm lowered than, hysterical with fear, I hit him a ferocious haymaker on the right cheekbone.

‘A splendid left hook, delivered correctly with the knuckle part of the glove,’ said Ponsonby of the Upper Third.’

‘A fierce box on the jaw,’ said my schoolmates.

And that was it. It was all over. He ducked his head and grabbed me round the waist and I realized with a fierce joy that he was afraid. I thumped him on the back, and he refused to lift his head. We were pulled apart and I was declared the winner and while I was accepting the plaudits, Farrell hit me on the nose and the blood spurted out. But this was declared a ‘false box’ and he was chased away in ignominy. I went home covered in blood and glory.

Next day I said, ‘Out of my way, Farrell,’ and he moved. It was a six over the grandstand, it was the winning try at Twickers. And the feeling was indeed ‘Jolly nice’.

I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls (#ulink_455fad56-8990-52bd-baec-3f2be521e380)

It was always an adventure going to fetch the weekly can of buttermilk, taking the shortcut by the fields, crossing the footstick over the river, avoiding the neighbour’s bull and eventually reaching the house. In truth it was little more than a hovel. The roof had fallen in at one end. Hens walked freely to and fro on the concrete floor. A calf nudged me gently in the back as I walked in the halfdoor.

The woman of the house always wore a man’s hat from which protruded wisps of dirty grey hair. Her face had that grimy coal-miner’s look from living in a smokefilled atmosphere, but her churn was always spotlessly clean and when she gave me the buttermilk, she did it with an air of refinement and accepted the fourpence graciously. I gradually picked up snippets of information about her. She had been reared with nothing but the best, a piano in the house, carpets on the floor, music and elocution lessons and she had been the belle of the countryside, quite beautiful, dressed always in the latest fashion. On Sunday people would stop to look at her going to Mass in her pony and trap. Then her parents died and her brother started drinking himself to death and the farm to bankruptcy. There were rumours of a broken love affair, and gradually things had deteriorated into their present state.

One St Stephen’s Day as I approached the house for the can of buttermilk I heard her singing. I stood near the dung-hill and listened. In a sweet quavering voice she was singing, ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’. It was as startling as a cough in a graveyard.

I went up to the half-door and looked in. In her hessian bag apron she was standing with her back to me in the middle of the floor and she was singing to the empty hearth. She had her arms stretched out in front of her as if she were singing to her lover on the stage. I moved back a few steps and coughed to let her know I was there. The singing stopped and I went up to the door and knocked. She took the can from me without a word. The black of her face was wet and smudged where she had wiped it with her bag apron. I never told anyone about it and she never mentioned it to me.

The years went by. The buttermilk was fetched by younger brothers and sisters and I went away to college, but I was told she always asked about me. I intended visiting her, but with the carelessness of youth, I never did, and the next time I saw her was when I attended her wake. She had died in her sleep. Someone had whitewashed the bare walls of the room where she was laid out. It smelt of damp and lack of use. An old harmonium stood in the corner. The sun shone through the overgrown whitethorn hedge outside the small window and a tracery of shadows moved caressingly to and fro over the ruined face that had once turned all heads on a Sunday morning.

Her funeral was a wretched affair. Nobody stood to watch her make her last journey to the chapel. A neighbour and myself helped to carry the coffin. He had also dug the grave. The service in the graveyard was hurried and everyone left quickly but I stayed to help him fill in the sticky clay. I felt it was the least I could do.