Читать книгу Driving with Daisy - Tom Nestor - Страница 5

During the time of the Second World War and for some years after that, food was scarce. At that time we only went to the town of Rath when we needed new clothing or when some broken piece of farm machinery had to be fixed. Everything else we bought in Tommy Hanley’s shop in Creeves. It was a couple of miles away, about half the distance to Rath. A person could buy most things there: groceries, hardware, animal feed, twine, coal. ‘Almost everything from a needle to an anchor,’ his trade slogan read. It was written in a brass plate beside the entrance door. If he didn’t have something, he would order it down from Dublin or out from Limerick. It made the item sound very rare and important.

Dublin was so far away it might as well have been in another country. Limerick was a city that made our rural village sound like a backwater.

When we needed something from Hanley’s our neighbour Pat the Dog would fetch it. We called him Pat the Dog because that was a saying of his. Instead of saying ‘cool down’ when someone got upset and angry, he would say, ‘pat the dog’. He cycled home from work on a Friday night like a laden camel. There was an oilskin bag hanging from each side of the handlebars. There was a larger one dangling from the bar. The carrier was so full that it was falling over the side. I can see him battling against the wind and the bike wobbling as he came up the hill by Mick Smith’s cottage.

When the war ended, word reached us about the wonderful things that had reached the shops in Rath. My older sisters, wiser and more in tune with the outside world, had heard that there were oranges and bananas arriving in Dublin. It was only a matter of time before they found their way to our neck of the woods. But wonderful as these fruits were, they were nothing compared to chocolate. It melted on the tongue and gave a pleasure that was hard to describe. Listening to them, I saw Rath as a kind of caravan stop where traders brought magical gifts from a land of spices on the far side of the world.

When I was eleven and we had a little more money to spend, I became the messenger boy. Every Saturday morning I set out for Rath. It was five and a half miles away and I did most of the journey on foot. There was only one bicycle in our house, which my eldest brother had wrecked. The pedals were worn down. There were no brakes. The front wheel was more square than round and the handlebars had been twisted out of shape.

In the beginning, I looked forward to those trips. I set off with an oilskin message bag and my mother’s message list pinned to the lining of my jacket. I saw myself as a kind of pioneer. I was heading into unknown territory, not knowing what adventures I might find on the way. I would meet buffalo and coyotes, silver fox and grizzly bear. Perhaps the Indians would be raiding out of the forests in the Massey estate.

Paddy White, who worked on Colonel Cripps’s stud farm, was responsible for putting those kind of ideas into my head. He let me read the Western books that the Colonel loaned to him. My mind was a whirl of sounds and smells, of mesas, prairie and heather. I believed those stories. I thought the cowboy was as natural a part of America as the farmer was of mine. I thought all Indians were savages and that all white pioneers were perfect Christians. Like the white missionaries who went from Ireland to Africa, they spoke the true word of God against the evil works of the devil.

After a few Saturdays my journey became known. Children kept watch for me behind windows and half-closed doors. I was a God-sent messenger who went to Rath every Saturday, along a route that no one had travelled much before, except the Marshall.

McMahon’s first name was Jim but he was called Marshall after Napoleon’s military hero. Once a week, with a full cart, he came out from the boglands around his home and sold peat from door to door in Rath. As he journeyed to the town, people came out of their houses, not to buy his turf but to ask him to do messages for them. He obliged and they wanted more. They blamed him for the poor quality of the goods he brought, queried the change and were angry with him if he forgot. So he stopped serving. He sat up there in the high seat that jutted out from the creel of turf. He greeted everyone he passed with the civil salute and a shake of his head. Every time they asked him, he had the same answer: ‘Don’t do no messages for no one no more.’

I would have loved to give the Marshall’s answer to Mrs Mack. Hers was the first house I passed on my way and she was waiting from the moment I came on to the road at the end of our lane. She had a tongue like a rasp and a war in her mind about the unfairness of the world she had been cast into. Poor as she made herself out to be, she would have the price of half-a-dozen lamb chops, which we could never afford then. I got the money for the meat wrapped up in one piece of paper. As I tried to walk away she grabbed me by the shoulder and gave me another piece. The second roll of paper had more money and a list of horse names. I was to go to the clerk in the bookmaker’s shop and have him transfer them onto a betting slip. If I wasn’t allowed near the counter, she told me, I was to wait until some adult I knew and could trust came along and would place the bet for me. Innocent as I was and afraid of her tongue, I accepted it. She knew exactly what her winnings would be if either of the wagers came good.

I dealt with Mrs Mack by taking another route across the fields. It brought me out at White’s Cross, a hundred yards beyond her house. Beyond the cross I would come upon the Harolds, father and son. For years they had lived without a woman in the house and each had almost become a copy of the other. Jimmy was thirty years younger than his father, and the only difference I could see was that one face looked older. They spoke the same words in the same accent.

Both were very shy and would choose to avoid people as far as possible. My father said that they owned one pipe. Most of the talk that passed between them was an argument about its use. Years later, when the father had passed on, I came across Jimmy one day cutting thistles in a field. He was singing and I was amazed as I listened. Not only could Jimmy sing very well, but the song he was singing was as much out of place as if he were singing an operatic aria.

‘I have heard the mavis singing her love song to the morn,

I have seen the dew drop clinging to the rose just newly born.’

As he sang I wondered how something beautiful could suddenly appear in the most unlikely place. The moment Jimmy realised I was there, the singing stopped in a sudden gasp, and a little pale shadow of shyness crept over his sun-tanned face. They were a twin puzzle, father and son. They showed nothing of themselves to their neighbours, no clues to discover what their world was like. We knew nothing about their personalities.

Once, my cousin Con and I were sneaking along by the hedgerow, with Con’s new air gun. We were looking for a magpie that had stolen eggs from a nearby nest. At the far side of the hedge, the elder Harold was loading hay onto a cart. It was a humid evening and the midges were swarming in waves in the shelter of the hedge. We poked the air gun through the hedge and fired at the fleshy part of the horse’s hindquarter. The elder Harold took little notice when the horse reacted to the first pellet. But when we had fired some more and the horse was plunging between the shafts, the old man thumped his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He took off his hat and bent to beat off the invisible horseflies. He searched under the neck collar for something that might be biting the horse’s flesh. He stood with his hands on his hips, disbelief all over his face. His calm fifteen-year-old horse was behaving like a stabled stallion on a diet of oats. Then he took off his hat, crossed himself and said a prayer.

Everyone who passed the Harold house was noticed. There was a high wall in front and the passer-by would only be visible for a few moments. But they never missed the shadow of somebody going by the gate. When I looked back, I would surprise the son or the father peeping round. The face alone would be visible and it would duck out of sight when I looked.

A hundred yards from the Harold house there was a quarry. In the heel of one Sunday evening when I was nearing my ninth birthday, I chased in there hunting a rabbit. I was alone except for the dogs. There was a ledge jutting out from the rock. Underneath the ledge lay a man and woman. They were making love. The man I knew well. He was a neighbour, with a wife and several children. I knew that the woman lying with the man was not his wife. I stood there in shock until then the man lifted his head and looked at me. He mouthed a couple of swear words and made a rude sign with his fingers.

I whistled up the dogs but lost all interest in the hunt. It wasn’t finding the couple in the lovemaking act that shocked me. Neither was it the fact that I knew the man to be a regular churchgoer and a friend of the priest. What bothered me was that I knew then the truth of something I’d had my doubts about. The mystery of birth was explained. The stories about storks that left baby parcels on doorsteps were all fairytales. I had my suspicions all along. I had grown up surrounded by animals and had watched their goings on. I knew where young animals came from. It was all plain now, the man and the woman, the cow and the bull. There was no mystery, no magic.

I was into a loping canter by the time I reached Ned Wall’s house, because I was afraid. The thatched house was hidden by a hedge and a huge lilac. Both had grown out of control and were spreading along the north gable. It was like a cottage from an English rural landscape painting. Some years ago, a splinter had entered Ned’s eye as he was chopping firewood. He had neglected it and the sore had turned to poison.

One summer’s evening, when we mowed the meadow opposite Ned Wall’s house, my uncle Lara sent me in for a drink of water. Ned Wall was sitting in the gloom at the fireside and smoke was floating around the room. Everywhere was smoked: the walls, the chair backs, the small windowpanes. The chimney-breast had turned brown and wrinkled like old paper. But it was the sight of Ned Wall in his backless chair by the fire that set my heart racing and filled my nights with devils and monsters. His hands and the good side of his face were smoked like the side of bacon that hung on our kitchen wall. Around him the smoke spun, and out from the smog this terrible face turned to look at me. One side of it had rotted away.