The Vasectomy Doctor (5 page)

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta:
ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me. Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea:
quare me repulisti, et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus.

I am an altar boy dressed in white surplice and black soutane. I can speak Latin and my hair is blond. This is where I had my first taste of alcohol and very nice it was too I must say. Nothing like a good swig of altar wine on a winter's morning to give you a bit of a gee up. Drinking is an occupational hazard among altar boys. There may be other hazards too that I mercifully avoided but I have yet to meet an ex-altar boy who didn't have the odd swig of altar wine from time to time. It was one of the very few perks the job carried.

Little Mrs Dempsey is in the sacristy boiling up two big brown eggs on a good turf fire for himself. Fr Mahon is an unhappy little man. He lives alone and may even be celibate, which could account for his briary disposition. In those days we all believed that priests were in fact celibate. If you looked crooked at him he'd ate the headahya. Everyone, altar boys and congregation alike, is afraid of him. Fully-grown men take flight out the church door one Sunday morning with Fr Mahon in hot pursuit. He had already asked them twice to come up into the pews and by God he was going to fix them good. Men have been standing at the back of the church in Prosperous for 180 years but Fr Mahon was going to put a stop to such irreverence. He seemed to have absolutely no concept of the natural formation of an audience. Some people are only happy if they are right up in the front, others, perhaps slightly claustrophobic, prefer to stand at the back near the door. That is the natural behaviour of an audience or congregation but Fr Mahon is too insensitive to see it that way.

‘Ave, ave, ave Maria. Ave, ave, ave Maria.' Mrs McCarthy and her troop of asthmatics are doing their best to defuse the situation.

Fr Mahon kept Springer dogs and shot pheasants over them. He never invited anyone to go with him which must have meant that half the birds raised could not have been shot at since nobody, not even a celibate priest, can be on both sides of a ditch at the same time. Rough shooting pheasants around Prosperous always requires two people, one to each side of the ditch, shooting on one's own is a waste of time. But of course while the rest of us mortals could only shoot on lands where we had permission, Fr Mahon could shoot where he liked.

A man used to go to Mass there in those days called Luke Curley. Poor Luke suffered from the most awful epileptic seizures. So bad and so frequent were these attacks that men were afraid to be near him at Mass in case he'd have one and they would have to look after him. He died as a result of the same epilepsy in the end. He had been on horseback when a seizure struck him. In those days this condition was treated with phenobarbitone but you could only push that so far before the side effect of doziness would make the treatment worse than the disease. Had he lived a little longer newer treatments would have been available that were much more effective and safe.

In that church in Prosperous at the time the women all wore hats or scarves on their heads and sat or kneeled on the right-hand side of the church as you look up at the altar. All the men bared their heads and stayed over on the left. This convention was non-negotiable and adhered to with a grim rigidity. It mattered not in the least that you may have been lovers, husband and wife, mother and son, father and daughter. Rules are rules and it was women to the right, men to the left and that was that.

Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. The bells of the Angelus are calling to pray. In sweet tones announcing the Sacred Ave.

CHAPTER 3

Now with national school in Prosperous safely behind me I am about to be shipped off to Ring College down in Waterford for a full year's boarding there. The year is 1951 and I am nine years of age and a bit young I think to be wrenched from the security of family life. As with everything else in the Ireland of this time, things have not been going particularly well at home on the farming front. Men have been let go and the money is tight. On the national front things are even worse with thousands of Irish people emigrating to the UK each month. We do not know it then but this is the start of a whole new wave of emigration, the time of the vanishing Irish.

There is a well-known Waterford lilt that translates like this:

I was a day in Waterford

There was wine and punch on the table

There was the full of the house of women there

And myself drinking their health.

Having been in Ring College for one full month everyone was expected to switch to speaking Irish exclusively. Being caught speaking English after October was an offence that was taken very seri
ously indeed. It used to be an expelling offence in the school's earlier
days but the fact of the matter was that when I was there times were hard all over Ireland and the owner of Ring, An Fear Mór, was finding it difficult enough to fill the school. Certainly he could hardly afford to go expelling people found speaking English or he would soon be losing revenue. My memory of it is that the ‘speak Irish only' rule was as much honoured in the breach as in the observance. Certainly in the classrooms only Irish was spoken. But outside on the playing pitch or in the handball alleys it was a mixture – Irish out loud and English under your breath.

An Fear Mór was indeed aptly named. He looked a tall gangrenous and rather gaunt figure to me, a nine-year-old looking up at him. In some ways there was a de Valera-like cut to him. But for all his height he was a gentle man and known to be a patient teacher. He devoted his life to the promotion of the Irish language and the founding of his own Irish college.

Whenever I think of Ring College I feel cold and hungry. The food was sparse and inadequate. Breakfast was a small bowl of porridge with skimmed milk and sugar. It had a funny kind of old taste to it that I can't quite describe. This was followed by bread and butter and jam. Only on Sundays did we get a ‘fry' consisting of one bit of black pudding, a sausage and a hard-fried egg. During the week we lined up mid-mornings at a window where we were each handed a slice of buttered bread. Many of us would take this back into the classroom and toast it on the potbellied stove using a ruler as a toasting fork. All of us in that class had burned rulers and nobody seemed to have seen fit to outlaw this rather dangerous culinary activity.

Lunches and evening meals were not much better. Burned vegetable soup was a great favourite. I can still smell it. ‘Cheffy's Vomit' we used to call it. But as the man was not able to rustle up a bit of soup without making a mess of it you can imagine what his other efforts at high cuisine were like. Meals were presided over by Mícheál O'Donal who sat up at a raised table, a leather strap sticking out of his back pocket. This strap was used on the hands of any young offenders although in truth corporal punishment was not a big feature in the college at that time. Every Wednesday we were released into free Ireland and marched in line up to ‘the store' a mile away where we were allowed to spend one shilling each. A slab of Cleeve's toffee was how a lot of us used up our budget because it would last you for most of the day. You had to find a fairly heavy stone to break off a bit from a slab of Cleeve's.

We slept in long dormitories with lockers at the end of the beds. You had to keep your locker very tidy and polish your shoes regularly. The boy in the bed next to me composed a song in Irish to be
sung to the same air as ‘Carricdone'. The first line went: ‘Tá an gruaig
ag fás ar mo Mícheál.' ‘The hair is growing on my Michael'; an event in his young life that he clearly thought was worth capturing in song. What came after this first line I am not at all sure but I suspect that he may well have run out of inspiration at this point. What a pity. Nor can I say what turn this young bard's life took when he graduated from Ring College. For all I know he may well have become a lyricist of the punk rock industry for clearly he showed great early promise in this particular genre.

Looking back on it now I have to say that my year in Ring was not a particularly happy one. I was too young to be away from home and having to learn everything through Irish had its own unique disadvantages. In fact the whole thing put me back for a full year because when I presented myself to the brothers in Naas having come out of Ring, I was put back into fourth class because I could not do long division. My age would have rightly had me in fifth class. So in effect I had lost a whole year. You might say so what's the big deal? All I can say is that it did affect me. At the end of the day this meant that I was nineteen doing my leaving certificate whereas everyone else was seventeen or eighteen and I never really felt good about that.

I did learn something in Ring College though. I learned the rudi
ments of tin-whistle playing and an appreciation for Irish singing and these were to be a considerable advantage to me in later life and indeed right up to this day.

* * *

For the most part I cycled the seven miles into the Christian Brother's moat school in Naas and back again each day. And while this may have been tough at the time, I believe it has served me well since in that I have always been blessed with a level of fitness and energy that in truth I do very little to deserve. You would not get a ten-year-old boy today to cycle fourteen miles a day and, even if you could, it would be most unsafe for him to attempt it. But back in 1952 the roads around here were all but empty. You could go all the way from Downings House along the canal to the moat school in Naas and not see four cars during ‘rush hour'. Sometimes I could get in behind a tractor pulling a load of turf or hay and you would get kind of sucked along and that was great. If it was raining I had this cape that went over the body and over the handlebars and I wore a water-proof hat on my head and really there was no big deal about any of this. I have no memory of ever being cold on that long bicycle journey.

My first great setback on entering that school was being put back into fourth class as I have already mentioned. After that everything was fine really. The Irish Christian Brother's Schools, founded by Edmund Rice during the first decade of the nineteenth century, had a reputation of being very rough and liberal with their corporal punishment. I say ‘had' because Christian Brothers are now practi
cally extinct. Unfortunately all we ever seem to hear about the Chris
tian Brothers these days is when yet another of its elderly community, white-haired, stooped and wearing civilian clothes, is dragged in front of the courts to face yet more charges of a paedophilic nature. This is an absolutely catastrophic end to the teaching order because it tends to completely overshadow the memory of the many good and decent men who joined the brothers over the past 200 years. There have been very few new recruits in Ireland to the brothers in the past five years. They are in effect almost finished, almost extinct.

The brothers had, as I say, a reputation for being somewhat brutal but I saw none of that in Naas during my time there. I had Brother Joyce, Mr McCarthy, known to the boys as Stalky, and Brother Tynan, and I have to say that each of these men in their turn was a good teacher who treated us all with respect.

During my three years in the CBS in Naas my two sisters, Bridget and Catherine, were away in Dominican College, Wicklow while my brother, Davoc, was a few classes ahead of me in CBS Naas and later was away in agricultural college in Gormanstown. So for much of this time I had the place at home more or less to myself, which suited me fine. Both my parents were of course always writing. My mother was working on a book to be titled
Irish Saints for Boys and Girls
while my father was working on his second book titled
All Ireland.

All Ireland,
first published in 1956, was a major undertaking and is a beautifully written and illustrated guidebook to all of Ireland. But that's the problem. If the book has any faults it is that it is too delightfully written to be just a guidebook while not being insipid enough to be a complete guide of all Ireland, if you can follow. My father can't seem to sacrifice any literary art for the merely practical and we end up with a book perhaps better suited to the bedside table than the glove compartment of the car. But does that matter? Dip into his book anywhere and you will see what I mean:

Having tried making territory in every shape and form, the weary world brings its experimenting to a conclusion in county Cork. Gougane Barra is a deep tarn held in a cup of crusty mountains: on the open side the infant river Lee frolics out of its rock-ribbed, mountainous nursery.

* * *

It was around this time too that Davoc and I tried our hands at the hard labour that footing turf really is. During the summer of 1955 Bord na Móna, up the road from us here, was paying very good money on a piecework basis. We were trying to get enough money together to buy a bicycle each. In those days a good new bicycle cost in the region of £14. In Bord na Móna they were getting thirty shillings per plot of turf footed. A plot comprised one acre of machine cut turf lying tightly knit in long rows flat on the ground. So if you managed to foot say only ten plots each you had your bicycle. A good worker could easily foot a plot of turf a day and get well started into a second one. It all sounded fine in theory. Given that we worked like everyone else we should have our bicycles in about two weeks' time.

But with us there was absolutely no chance of success. Footing turf is the most soul destroying, boring and backbreaking work that I have ever put my hands to. There we were, young, fit and motivated and between us we staggered to foot a half a plot a day. If you do not do this properly the ganger Con Burke might come along and kick down your day's work. There are no short cuts, no tricks of the trade. You just get on with it and do it and do it right, as they would have said at the time.