A Bed in the Sticks Read online

  Title Page

  A BED IN THE STICKS

  by

  Lee Dunne

  Publisher Information

  Published in 2013 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  The right of Lee Dunne to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

  Copyright © 2013 Lee Dunne

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  1

  Liverpool was an alright place but, I was more than glad that it was only twelve hours to boat time. Roll on, I thought; just let me get out of here. Just let me get back to Dublin and I’ll kiss the ground the minute I set foot on it.

  I pushed the hamburger streak away from me; the stench of it alone was enough to turn my stomach; but I sipped the coffee. Hot or cold, weak or strong, coffee always went down very well.

  The café was crowded with me. Some of them fresh-eyed on their way to work, others, grey lipped with grime on their faces. Just off the night shift. Night shift! God, the very thought of it send shivers down my heart.

  The normal heavy haul of everyday life could be bad enough, but, to have to work when most people were in their bed, to have to sleep through the hours when the sun was shining, seemed to me to be the end altogether.

  We sat on long, hard, narrow benches, and not one of the men seemed to mind that the rough, wooden table surfaces needed a good scrub down with hot water and carbolic. They ate the much that was served to them and I don’t think there was a miserable face in the place apart from my own. Not that I could see my face. I just knew that if I looked half as fed up as I was feeling, I was hardly a sight for sore eyes.

  It was a noisy place. Men yelling their breakfast orders in accents familiar and strange. You got a lot of swearing and coughing, through cigarette smoke that hovered like an umbrella over the tables. Talk spinning about my ears like the wind, fierce, wild and irrational, full of colour.

  The Liverpool accent was very like my own, adenoidal. Others, Welsh, and Scottish and Irish and a few English ones that I couldn’t put a name to, talking at the same time, trying to shout each other down. Jokes, lies, soccer, dogs, rugby league, whatever that might be. Not forgetting holidays at Butlin’s, the butt of many a bad joke, as in one that didn’t make you laugh, though miscarriages, piles and the clap were fairly popular. I sipped my coffee, shaking my head, amazed at the promiscuous range of topics that were under discussion at the same time.

  ‘Hey Pat, if Ireland’s such a wonderful place, what you doing over ‘ere then?’ The Scouser had wicked eyes, but his face didn’t give a thing away.

  ‘Hey Taff, you’re the nearest. Would you grab that bacon butty and shove it down that bastard’s trote?’

  The Irishman pretended to be annoyed: ‘Did y’ever hear such cheek in all your born days...I’ll tell you one thing, boyo, if it wasn’t for the land of saints and scholars, by which I mean that Jewel in a Silver Sea called Ireland, this town would be empty except for the rats.’

  ‘Shure ‘tis maybe someday...’ The Scouser began to sing in a rich Irish brogue.

  The woman who waited on tables slammed his breakfast down in front of him. ‘Turn it up, Wilson, I ain’t got a bleedin’ music ‘all licence.’

  ‘Some bleedin’ right-comedians though,’ Scouse said as he slapped her rump. ‘Are we right tonight, Mevanwyn?’

  ‘Don’t you Mevanwn me,Tydfill, or I’ll slap a patch on your leak for you!’

  ‘Thank God, I’m away to ma bed.’

  Scouse, already eating, gave his attention to the Scot who had spoken.

  ‘Dinna forget to have a slice off the haggis afore ye go to kip, Jock. If you dinna do it, the wee wifey’ll be handin’ it to the milkman again.’

  They all ganged up on the Scot now, laughing at Scouse’s ridiculous take-off. He sat through it for a minute, his face, leather textured, stern, his eyes twinkling as he stubbed his dog-end into the saucer that served as an ashtray.

  ‘As much sense as a lad of two!’ he sighed to the man beside him, ‘What can you expect from an illegitimate Scouse?’

  ‘Ere, watch it, Thistle Head! I ain’t illegit! I’ve been reading and writin’ since I was six years old!’

  ‘Oh, lovely eyes, Jock’s missus has, did ye know that, Scouse?’

  ‘Dead right, Pat, lovely, ‘specially the two on the left!’

  ‘It’d take a wee faggot like you Scouse, to notice!’

  Scouse wasn’t listening. He was already putting someone else in his place: ‘Oh yeh! They’ll win the league alright. The bleedin’ Schoolboys League!

  This man swore and Scouse laughed, his weasel face flushed from the smoke and the heat and the force of his own amusement. He looked at least thirty but he wore an Edwardian type-suit and his hair was all brushed into a duck’s arse which was the current rage in the city.

  ‘Butlins,’ a man at the end of the huge table was saying, ‘Always go to Butlins.’

  ‘Gerron! Clickey-Click! Sixty Six, Number One, Kelly’s Eye! Holidays begin and end in Jersey, with yer cheap fags and booze, millions of birds, and all of them gasping for a length!’

  ‘We’d a bull one time was always hopin’ for a tight, Jersey!’

  ‘That was your old dad, Pat! That’s how me made such a bollix of you!’

  My mind reeled under it all and I’ve only remembered a portion of what was said. It was impossible to take it all in though I certainly tried, knowing that some day I was going to write it down.

  I can see them still, those men, happy as I was miserable, sitting there eating and having a good dirty laugh in that steam filled room, the sweat smell of old working clothes and the soiled bodies of men somehow filling the place with life. And I have to admit that I felt good for being there. Better anyway than I had been an hour earlier.

  For forty eight hours, I’d been trying to kick the homesickness, but it was still there, nagging away while it held me fast, and I was seriously miserable. I hated being like this. It was contrary to my nature, yet, so far I hadn’t been able to give it the elbow, get rid of it.

  Of course, it was stupid, and it was childish, and it was all the other things, so easy to call to mind afterwards, but in the present I was choked with myself that I couldn’t shake it off.

  Come on smart aleck!

  You can do it! You can do anything! You can’t have run out of guts. Not you! If you’re in such a hurry to get back to Dublin, there must be a good reason. Finding no answer to this, I tried as hard as I could to make myself stop and think the whole thing through but, it was no use. All I wanted to do was take a deep breath and not let go until I got off the boat back in Dublin. It was like I just didn’t want another lungful of England inside me.

  I knew all about England. It was a crocodile, a long hungry bastard that ate up the lives of men. It was a teeming, seething mass of factories and office blocks a mile wide and I bled a bit for every Irishman that had to spend his life in it. Everything about the place was wrong. Anyone could see that. I mean, I could see it and I’d only been in it three days.

  Three days. When you’re eighteen it doesn’t take you long to weigh up a place.
And you know that you know it all. What? At eighteen! Of course you do. The lot! You know it all and you can see things for what they are. You wouldn’t just make something out to be what it wasn’t just because you didn’t have the courage to face things fair and square. It’s just that I want to be in Ireland, I belong there.

  Ireland. Eire, the Free State, the Republic, Kathleen Ni Houlihan - call her what you like. Abuse her how you will. Say all the terrible, truthful things you like. It doesn’t matter. Not now, least of all on that morning in Nineteen-Fifty. To a Paddy, be he a bum or a bricklayer, whether in London, New York or Sydney, Ireland continues to be the home of your heart, even after you have turned your back on her.

  I spent the endless day wandering the streets, smiling a bit to myself every time I thought about getting on the boat. I must have noticed this and that, but hardly anything registered. I had just shut my mind off except for thinking about the boat. I wanted, so badly, to go home. I wanted to go home so badly that

  I had no interest in thinking about anything else. Ireland had me

  by the short and curly hairs and I didn’t fight her at all. She was my mistress and I wanted to give in to her.

  Finally, somewhere in that slut-warm city of Liverpool, I did switch on for a minute or two. I stopped and looked into a shop window. It was a hairdressing salon and I could see my face in the perpendicular strips of the mirror that faced the street.

  Under the rick of dark hair was the face of a youth, eighteen years old, who was tired and devoid of self-esteem, a big drinker for his age and a great merchant for a slice off the legs. As a general rule, sharp as a tack but, often stupid with it, emotional enough for five people and, at times, capable of being very stupid because of being too quick to jump the gun.

  He was too often ready to act without taking time to stop and think. And a born bullshit artist with it, moved too often and too fast, by his emotions - this thing of blaming England because he couldn’t handle being away from home - shameful, he knew, reminding him that without the few quid that had landed during the war from the Granny in Enfield, Middlesex, he and the family in their Dublin slum, would have starved for the want of a hot meal.

  Needing to spend no time in memory of World War 2, he moved on, a lonely kid, a lonely kid that didn’t like himself all that much on that Monday in Liverpool. But apart from that few minutes of introspection, all I was certain about that day was that I didn’t like myself one little bit.

  The real problem was that I had made a bad, stupid move when I took the boat out of Dublin just days earlier.

  No fella with a grain of common sense would have split the way I did. To, quite literally, run away, blindly, with only a few pounds in my pocket, my good God! It was a move made without reason being allowed as much as a peep in the window.

  Little wonder that I wad relieved that Harry Redmond was over in the States, thereby sparing himself the mortification that his star pupil had laid such an egg.

  My God! How often had Harry pumped it into me ‘always take your time. Stand back and take a drag off a butt. The fag calms you down, helps you use your loaf, working for you, as opposed to the opposite.’

  Redmond was right, of course, and I had tried hard to use the wisdom he passed on over many a pint, and in fairness, I can say that I stayed out of a lot of trouble by using that stuff that he laid on me because, basically, it was just common sense.

  He would have been very disappointed in me over the manner of my leaving home just days earlier. Not only that - he would have shaken his head in total disbelief had he heard that I had split from Dublin without as much as a change of shirt. He would have shaken his head, his eyes blank with behind his disappointment, as my excuse for this madness - that I was so upset by the row with my mother, that I was demented to some degree when I slammed out of the hated Corporation flat where I had been born, four days before Christmas in 1934.

  Ma had been rescued that time because word spread about the new baby, and five women that she had worked with in Jacobs biscuit factory some twenty years before, came to bless the new edition to the family.

  Like the Three Wise Men, the ladies came bearing gifts of - in my case - food and clothing, and then, before leaving, they had given my mother fifteen pounds. This was a lot of money to my mother, a veritable godsend, since my unfortunate father, a truly decent skin, had been unemployed since the government truly fucked things up as they masqueraded as responsible guardians of a country that they were guiding down the tubes.

  The generosity of her one-time-workmates allowed my mother to provide the best of Christmas’s that she had managed to do, down all the years that my decent skin of a father had been out of work, along with more than a hundred thousand other Dubs that bore the ludicrous title of Working Class.

  After what seemed like a tough week, a lot of people and me waited patiently for the signal that passengers could board the ship that would take us back to Dublin.

  Standing there in line, I heard, yet again, my mother’s parting dart as I left our Corporation flat on Friday afternoon. And I remembered my need for whiskey, my insulation against the guilt that I felt at storming out on her. As I stood in line, I tried to kill that final image of the woman I had worshipped all my life. I hadn’t been able to do it and had to drink whiskey on the top deck of the bus to Dun Laoghaire on that Friday, needing above all to blot out the venom in my mother’s voice when she had made her last attack to bring me to my senses: ‘I’d sooner see you dead at my feet!’

  ---------

  By the time the old mail boat had unloaded me in England for the first time, pulled away from Dun Laoghaire harbour, I was feeling no pain thanks to whiskey. I remember how I spent an aimless time hitching a lift from Holyhead in Wales where the boat docked, to the city of Liverpool. But then, even though it had never occurred to me at the time, it couldn’t have been aimless. I mean, why bother with Liverpool, if not to just get on another boat going back to Dublin.

  My legs were weary and I felt drained as I walked up the gangway of the B. & I. boat. The life force that those marvellous guys in that working men’s café in The Pool had injected into me, had long since evaporated, but the moment I set foot on the old packet I lost all the aches and pains. And as we pulled out of Liverpool, my feet stopped burning, my chest seemed to come up like a balloon, and I almost wanted to sing.

  That pier and that old cross-channel ferry boat are among the great memories of my life. And the sea, which was rough enough to make a sailor spew, was a knee-deep carpet and I was glued to the deck with relief. And I had a glow inside like you get when you stand watching a good barman pulling a pint of stout with your name on it.

  The saloon was half empty and most of the people looked so miserable that the place was like a morgue with fairy lights. Something to do with the fact that most of those who head for home on a Monday are people who have given up on England, people who, when they’ve been at sea for an hour or so, begin to wonder if they shouldn’t have stuck it out for a bit longer, if only because, however bad it was, however little they had, it was almost certainly better than what they would have at home.

  I had started to wonder myself, but I pushed the thought away and moved to the bar to get myself a bottle of Guinness.

  ‘Bobbin a bit tonight,’ the barman said as he poured the stout.

  I said it wasn’t too bad and he accepted my offer of a drink. It wasn’t that I had money to throw about or anything, but as he wasn’t busy it was likely that a drink would buy me a few minutes conversation, and I needed to talk, particularly with someone who was a total stranger.

  ‘Miserable lot of passengers you’ve got.’

  He swallowed half of his bottle of ale. ‘It’s always the same on Monday. No-hopers, we call them, losers going home, home to what! Protests over no work...madness to go back to that.’

  Something behind me attracted hi
s attention and he said quietly: ‘Don’t look for a minute, but there’s a tart just came out of the ladies, and she is some eyeful.’

  I saw the girl in the mirror behind the bar and I thought for a second that I knew her, but, in the moment, I put this down to wishful thinking. Who wouldn’t want to know her, looking the way she did.

  She had long Spanish black hair, thick to her shoulders, and though her, much-too-tight, dress made her look like an expensive tart, there was more to her than that.

  The barman managed to stop his eyes popping like Belisha beacons as she ordered a gin and Italian. She was instantly bored by the attention he was giving her, but, if he noticed this, it didn’t seem to bother him.

  He put two cherries in her drink and gave her a smile that went over her head. She stood and sipped the drink and I asked your man for another bottle of stout.

  The look he threw me suggested I was some kind of rat to be dragging him away from where he stood facing her at the bar. In the moment, she touched my elbow. ‘Have you a match, there, Dub!’

  Before I turned to light her cigarette, I remembered in a flash where we’d met before. She beat me to it, smiling as she said: ‘The Four P’s.’

  ‘I was just thinking the same,’ I said, holding a match to her cigarette.

  She inhaled and I took the Senior Service she offered.

  ‘Never expected to run into you on this tub,’ she remarked as though she had seen me the day before.

  ‘Likewise,’ I grinned, warming to the flat, matter-of-fact way she had about her. ‘How are tricks, anyway?’

  ‘Great,’ she said, her eyes coming to life. ‘Come on over and sit down.’

  She moved away and I looked at the barman, who, if he didn’t actually hate me, was giving a good impression of a fella that did.

  Before I sat down I placed her coat over her knees. ‘Hot enough in here,’ I said, and she laughed loudly, her head thrown back, and I liked her for that.