Authors: Alice Taylor
A
CATTLE LORRY
brought me to Bandon on a cold grey morning in March. It may not have been a very auspicious beginning to a job in a strange town, but a neighbour was bringing calves to the newly established cattle mart and gave me a lift. That morning the Bandon river was black beneath the frost-glistening bridge beside the post office. Tall houses stood shoulder to shoulder like a guard of honour over the long, narrow main street of the town.
Bandon, despite its small size, catered for so many religious denominations that one of its most outstanding features was its variety of churches, some of which presided loftily from the summits of the hills around the town. It was on the top floor of a three-storey house on the side of one of these hills that I spent my first night there. The long, narrow room under the sloping slate roof absorbed the freezing night air, and a hard bed covered with time-worn blankets offered me little protection from the cold. I spent a restless night with my knees almost frozen to my chin; by 5 a.m. I had piled the contents of my scant wardrobe on top of me, thatched with a threadbare rug which I took off the floor. First thing next morning I went out and bought two hot-water bottles.
Six girls worked in the Bandon office with a colourful supervisor in charge. She had a voice like a singing bird and though quite elderly wore enormous quantities of startlingly
bright make-up and a purple knitted cap. She was a gentle lady who tried to keep us all happy. She spent most of her day sitting at a large table, counting out telephone tickets in her sing-song voice and filing them away in a small press beside her.
There were not enough trunk lines to give instant service to the telephone subscribers at peak times, so we had to rotate calls. Sometimes a high-handed individual would demand to speak to the supervisor and insist on being put through immediately irrespective of the fact that other people had been waiting longer. The supervisor sometimes put them through if she judged it necessary. This annoyed us intensely but we could not win an argument with her; she just fluttered her eyelashes and waved her painted nails in the air like an exotic butterfly. She made grand pronouncements about priority calls and people of substance. To us they were just telephone numbers and we wanted to treat them all the same, but because she was an old native of the place, to her they were people with different needs and she treated them accordingly. She believed in personal attention.
As I was the junior in the office I was sent to post offices all over West Cork to do holiday duty, which merited very welcome extra pay. In one of these places the lady in charge made such regular pilgrimages behind the switchboard that I thought she must have part of her filing system there. There was an office cleaner in that post office who called us all “Girlie” as he was a bit confused by the ever changing number of female faces surrounding him. One night when I was working late he happened to be tidying up.
“Ever wondered, Girlie, what was in the cabinet behind the switchboard?” he asked.
“The accounts,” I said in surprise.
“All kinds of accounts, Girlie,” he answered, and unlocked the cabinet. He removed the stacks of telephone tickets and
account books to reveal a sparkling row of small whiskey bottles behind.
In another office out-manoeuvring a randy postmaster became an exercise in agility. If he happened to be coming up the stairs after you, you needed to move fast, or else kick your heels back hard to prevent his pudgy fingers catching you by the leg. When summoned into his office your aim was never to let him come between you and the door. We constantly compared notes on his strategy. Because he was the boss he had a certain advantage, but because we were younger and fitter we could always out-run him and we took great satisfaction in hearing his laboured breathing as he panted up the stairs, knowing that he could not catch us.
After a few months in Bandon two friends and I moved into a flat together. We had enquired about finding one from many people but there had seemed to be nothing available until one evening, as we were out walking along North Main Street, we looked up at a tall house across the road and noticed that the windows on the top floor were clouded with dust and cobwebs.
“I wonder would they let that out as a flat?” I said to Nellie and Eileen.
“Let’s ask,” Eileen suggested. A few minutes later a surprised middle-aged lady assured us that she had never thought about the idea, but to call back the following night and she would let us know.
Two weeks later we moved in. The house was a large, rambling three-storey building where the couple lived on their own. We had two of the three rooms on the top floor, and the bathroom, with its one cold tap, was on the floor below. The rooms were big and sparsely furnished and the floorboards creaked, which made coming in late at night a bit unnerving. But the comfort of having our own fire was wonderful. The old timber fireplace had a deep grate set high off the floor and
fronted by curved iron bars. It gave out great heat and the brass fender at the front had two little seats with soft leather tops at either end, and here you could sit and toast yourself on a cold evening after coming home from work. Between our kitchen and bedroom was another room which was let out a few weeks later to a young man who was teaching down the street. He had a girlfriend who lived on a farm outside the town and she brought him presents of fresh eggs and brown bread from which we benefited as well. On weekends when he and I were alone in the flat, we left both our bedroom doors open and held long-distance conversations across the rooms.
Gradually other parts of the house filled up with tenants. An old couple who had given their farm over to their son moved into one section. Every day the husband dressed up in his good suit and walked the streets of the town, but he had about him a dejected air. He sat sometimes in the garden where he looked like a trapped bird. My heart used to ache for that old man who had spent all his life with the soft fields beneath his feet and who had been accustomed to the open spaces of his farm.
One day as I came down the stairs I heard him whistling happily. I had never heard him whistling before so I stopped in surprise. “I’m going back to the old place,” he said to me with a smile. Apparently the son to whom he had given the farm was building a new house, so the couple were going back to their old home. The old man looked twenty years younger and there was a new light in his eyes.
We settled happily into our flat but sometimes had to tread carefully as parts of it were suffering from age and decay. One morning as I eased open the large kitchen window, the weather-beaten frame crumbled and the entire window dis-appeared before my eyes to crash onto the pavement three floors below. I stretched out through the opening in the wall in amazement and peered down. Luckily nobody had been walking past at the
time.
Though we were on the top floor we spent a lot of time in the kitchen on the ground floor with Dan and Mrs O’Brien. We were always welcome to call in for a chat, and they did little acts of kindness for us, such as bringing in our washing off the clothes-line in the garden. Dan was very interested in politics. At night his friends gathered into the kitchen and long political discussions were held while he sat in his high-backed chair, puffing his pipe and pronouncing upon the questions of the day. As each of us became eligible to vote he made sure that we were registered. When a general election came around he called the three of us into the kitchen on the night before polling day and with a sample voting card showed us the correct way to vote. But more important still from Dan’s point of view, he instructed us to give No 1, 2 and 3 to his favourite party.
We got to know the people in the houses along the street, which included two pubs and a little shop where we bought our groceries on our way home from work. One of the publicans had a few different sources of income, including an undertaking business and a milk round. One frosty morning the milk van would not start so Billy put the milk into the hearse and gave some sleepy housewives a surprise awakening to the day. He had working for him a handyman called Jack whose job it was to dig the graves. In between jobs Jack slept in an old hay loft in the backyard. Sometimes he covered himself with hay so that Billy could not find him to give him extra work. If Jack refused to answer to prolonged calling Billy got a pike and went around poking it through the hay to root Jack out. After a few close shaves with Billy’s pike Jack hit on a better plan. He crept into one of the coffins that stood waiting for a permanent tenant and slept soundly. This ruse worked on many occasions until Billy discovered his sepulchral resting place.
Some mornings we walked across town to early morning
Mass. This required careful timing as one priest was always late and extremely slow while the other was a few minutes early and got through the ceremony very fast. If you arrived to find no priest on the altar it was difficult to be sure if the slow fellow had not started or the fast fellow had finished. The speedy one brought Holy Communion regularly to an old man who was confined at home. This jolly old man used to remark that, “As soon as I hear his car stop I stick out my tongue.”
We joined the Legion of Mary which was involved with helping old people and we became very friendly with some of them. One lady called Miss Brown impressed us particularly. In her eighties, she was over six feet tall and so thin and erect that her long clothes hung straight down almost as if they were still on the hanger. She favoured knitted grey cardigans over brown blouses and long black skirts, so she moved around the house like a faded ghost. On Sundays the brown blouse was replaced by a cream satin one with a cameo brooch at the neck. She was imperious and demanding and seemed to be totally alone as she never mentioned any relatives, except “my cousin the bishop” who lived in Australia.
Her overgrown garden was more than matched by her house which was crowded with dark Victorian furniture. Her front room was congested with sideboards, foggy mirrors and sagging sofas. In dull silver frames, faces yellowed with age rested on the mantelpiece, while moth-eaten red velvet curtains kept the room in a state of permanent semi-darkness. The kitchen further back along the gloomy stone corridor was from another era. Everything appeared to have lain untouched for years; the rusty range was never lit and the cooking was done on an archaic primus which sat on top of the table and coughed out black smoke when it was not handled carefully. Beneath this enormous table a smelly, long-haired old dog growled; stubbornly refusing to make friends, it responded only to Miss Brown’s commands.
I moved around that kitchen in a state of perpetual nervous apprehension. Old newspapers were stacked on wobbly chairs and if I shifted anything out of my way enormous spiders were disturbed into action. One day as I moved warily around the kitchen a rat scuttled across the old range into a box of newspapers. I froze to the floor in terror, but the old dog sprang into action and cornered him in the box. When I recovered my wits I ran up the street to a friend who was also in the Legion, and while he prodded the box with a brush I stood on top of the table from where I could see but still be at a safe distance. Each time the rat poked his head out of the box the dog barked, I screamed, and Ted made another swipe with the brush. While all this pandemonium was taking place Miss Brown – who was fairly deaf – sat in her front room sewing buttons on one of her blouses. Finally Ted turned the box sideways and the rat made a dive for freedom, but the old dog – more by accident than design – turned him upside down and Ted finished him off with the brush. Every time I had to go into the kitchen after that I first peered cautiously in through a slit in the door.
Despite the fact that she had very few facilities to make her later years more comfortable, Miss Brown strove gall-antly to cope and behaved always with great finesse and dignity. We dared not tidy the house as she would have resented it deeply. When she suddenly became ill we took turns at preparing her meals. The key to her front door hung on a string inside the letter-box, so we just fished it out and let ourselves in.
As my friend Sheila and I left the house late one Saturday night we arranged that I would prepare the breakfast the next day and she would take care of the lunch. The following morning when I opened the front door the old dog was whining in the hallway and there was a curious stillness in the house. I ran up the stairs two at a time and pushed open the door to Miss Brown’s bedroom. She lay half in, half out of the bed. A strong
smell of vomit filled the room. I eased her back into bed and cleaned things up hastily. She was breathing heavily and I knew at once that this was more than I could handle on my own. I ran to the phone across the road to call the doctor and the priest, so shocked by what I had discovered that my hand shook as I rang the numbers and my voice came out in gasps.
When I came back to the house I could hear the old woman’s breathing as I climbed the stairs. I was so frightened by the sound that I stopped for a few moments outside the door summoning up the courage to go in. Crossing the room I stood at the bottom of the iron bed grasping the brass rail, just looking and listening. I had no idea what to do.
The doctor came first. He clattered up the stairs and breezed into the room. “How are you, old girl?” he asked her cheerily. But Miss Brown was in no state to respond to cheerful salutations. After a brief examination he cocked his eye at me and said: “A few hours at the most.” He snapped his bag shut and left.
At that point I began to think there might yet be two corpses instead of one, but soon afterwards an overweight priest lumbered up the stairs. When he had anointed the old lady he, too, headed for the door and then, as if something about the situation had struck him as strange, he asked, “Has she any relatives?”
“No,” I answered, “only a bishop in Australia.”
“He’s not much help now,” said the priest.
“And neither are you!” I thought as he pounded down the stairs and the front door banged shut behind him. I felt like somebody on a deserted island when all the boats had pulled out.