Barefoot in Mullyneeny: A Boy’s Journey Towards Belonging

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He said.

And for all the years that I knew him, this was the name he called me.

I watched him at work, a shoe upside-down on the last before him, taking a handful of tacks from a box and putting them into his mouth, pushing them singly out through his lips ready to be taken in his left hand and hammered into the leather sole with his right. He worked with lightning speed.

Over the years I came to know him better. He had a reputation for being irascible and acid-tongued, but for some reason he seemed to like me and we had a sort of mutual respect. Sometimes when I went in, he would greet me with a line of poetry that he remembered from his schooldays.

‘To be or not to be: that is the question,’ he would say, and then he would always add, ‘But what the hell’s the answer?’

Sometimes he would get things slightly wrong:

‘The curlew tolls the knell of parting day,The loving herd winds slowly o’er the lea…’

But I never told him that he wasn’t quite accurate, because even though I was a schoolboy, I could see that he just loved language and the sound of words. If he liked you, he would stop work, take out his pipe, carve off a piece of plug tobacco with one of his razor-sharp knives, tease the tobacco in his hands, fill and light his pipe, spit in the fire, and talk.

‘How is it,’ he said one day, that there’s no poets nowadays?’ And then he recited for me ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’:

‘Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried…’ He rolled the ‘r’s luxuriously over his tongue as he spoke, ‘And he lay like a warrior taking his rest, with his martial cloak around him.’

Word-perfect this time, right down to the last line:

‘We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone, but we left him alone with his glory.’

He was also the local barber and on Saturday nights, in the dim light of an oil lamp, the shed would be full of men waiting to get their hair cut. His tongue was sometimes venomous about his customers.

‘Phil McCaughey came in last night,’ he said about one man who was slightly stooped and had a reputation for meanness, ‘he came in with more humps on him than a bag of turf, that boy would skin a flea for sixpence.’

Of one man who had a long sharp nose, he said, ‘He could split a hailstone with that nose of his.’

‘So what are they teaching you in college,’ he asked me one day.

I could not think of anything to say. Algebra, the Wars of the Roses, Boyle’s Law, they all seemed so irrelevant in this man’s company.

And then I thought of something I had read in an old school book of my father’s, and I told him about Diogenes, and how he used to walk around Athens with a lantern in broad daylight, and when he was asked what he was doing, he said that he was looking for an honest man.

Jimmy said nothing and I wondered if he had understood.

A few days later he said to me, ‘You can always tell the kind of a man by the footwear he leaves in,’ and he started commenting on each pair of boots or shoes, referring to them as people.

‘That man is a dirty class of a person, look at the cowdung he didn’t even bother to clean off the boots.’

‘That man’s lazy. He drags his feet. Look at the way the sole is worn.’

‘That man is a show-off. He always gets the heaviest hobnails put in his boots to show how strong he is to be fit to carry them.’

‘He is neat and tidy, clean shoes and good laces. And he’s sensible,’ said Jimmy.

He said to me one day, ‘A man should always have a good pair of shoes and a good bed, because if he’s not in one he’s in the other.’

‘And as for him!’ He took a breath. ‘Them’s the best pair of shoes in the shop, and that’s the third half-sole I put on for him, and he hasn’t paid me one red cent yet. Your man Diogenes was right, and if he was round this country he’d need a searchlight not a lantern.’

His approach to religion was one of quiet scepticism. He always went to Sunday Mass where he knelt on one knee in the porch with his cap as a cushion for his knee. He was scathing about the quality of the preaching, but what he really appreciated was a good blood-and-thunder sermon, often delivered by a missioner.

He could repeat the content of the sermon almost verbatim, and he would do so, frequently at night to his assembled court in the workshop.

‘Let me give you some idea of what eternity means,’ he would quote. ‘Imagine a huge steel ball the size of this chapel. A little wren, a bird common in every Irish townland is flying through space. Once every hundred years, its wing brushes against the surface of the huge steel ball. That impact upon the steel ball would be light, you would say. Yet I tell you my dear brethren, that if this process went on and on through time until the steel ball was worn away by the touch of the wing, eternity would ONLY BE BEGINNING.’ He ended with a dramatic crescendo which always got a cheer from the audience. And then the questions would start:

‘How could a wren live for a hundred years?’

‘How could a wren breathe in space?’

I remember after a particularly dramatic sermon in which the priest promised damnation to all in the church who would not repent, there was a discussion about the nature of heaven.

One man who was a great footballer thought that it was a place where there would be matches every day.

Another man, a well-known fiddler, thought it would be a place where you could play music and swap tunes all day long.

Yet another, keen on dancing, said that there would be dances of all descriptions without ceasing.

Jimmy spat in the fire, looked at the last speaker, and said, ‘Aye, you might be right, but from what we heard down there in the chapel, there mightn’t be enough up there from this parish to make up a six hand reel!’

One night his stove chimney caught fire and the roof was burned down before the flames could be extinguished. Some people said that it was a judgement because of the blasphemous nature of the conversation. The missioner and the parish priest came to sympathise with Jimmy.

‘Have you been attending the mission?’ said one of them.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Ah well, at least you have the grace of God about you,’ said the priest.

‘Not much good on a wet Saturday night, Father,’ said the redoubtable Jimmy.

Many a morning at half past six, Jimmy would go off on his bicycle, a wooden mallet tied to the bar, and butcher knives in his pocket to do his other job, killing pigs for the local farmers. It was rumoured that he always carried a knife with him, even to Mass on Sunday. He was much in demand because he was fast, efficient and by the standards of the time, humane. He knew exactly where to hit the pig on the head with the mallet, so that it was immediately stunned and in seconds he had stabbed it in the heart so that as one man said to me, it was hanging up by the hind leg on a hook before it knew it was dead.

If a pig was restless and moving about, he would take off his cap and throw it on the ground. The pig would immediately go over to snuffle at it and bang went the mallet and it was business as usual. The pig was then butchered and stored in a tea chest packed with salt. After three weeks, Jimmy would go back to make sure that every part of the pig was getting properly salted, and to turn it if necessary.

He told me of two brothers who were noted for their prodigious appetites. He killed a pig for them and after three weeks, went back.

‘What do you want?’ said the brothers.

‘I’ve come to turn the pig,’ he said.

‘Well you needn’t have bothered your head,’ they said, ‘for we turned the last of it on the pan this morning.’

In addition to barbering and butchering, Jimmy had another little earner. He was small but also immensely strong. He would go down to the local shop and if there was a stranger there he would bet him ten shillings that he could ‘Lift two six-and-fifties over his head’.

A six-and-fifty was an iron weight used for measuring out bags of meal or flour. It was, as the name suggests, fifty-six pounds, or four stone, or twenty-five kilos in weight, difficult to lift even one of them above your head. The stranger would invariably accept the bet, deceived by Jimmy’s small stature. Jimmy would hoist the weights easily, clink them together above his head and leave with the money. He had no sympathy for the duped victim, merely saying, ‘A fool and his money are easily parted.’

I remember being taken to a football match which has since gone down in legend in local folklore. Our local team was up against a team from the neighbouring parish. As in all local derbies there was fierce rivalry and in the preceding week the big lads at school spoke of little else. Jimmy and his brother were players on the local team.

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.