Another reject by - RTE Sunday Miscellany -

Bank managing the turf.

When I was moving from our country town to Dublin, I got lots of advice, most of it rooted in country living and lore.

The best piece of advice was the bit I got from my Uncle Mickie. He told me I would meet Quare Hawks in Dublin.

You will meet a man up there who is so sure of himself he thinks he knows everything. Well be sure he does not! If you don't believe me, ask him how many floors of turf there are in The Dale Tree Bog. He won't know that!

I came to learn that there were seven floors of turf in the bog where Grandfather, then Mickey and Paddy reaped their summer harvest so that when winter came they were snug and secure and blessed with a shed full of dry turf to banish the Winter cold, and heat the kitchen.

We had our Bank on the Kildare Bog, an isthmus of that county nestling Laoghis and Offaly, near the town.

When the spring to summer weather had reached a reasonable period of calm, and dry days rather that wet weeks might beckon, we traveled by bike and all met and began our harvesting season on our bank. The one Uncle Mickey told us we had our investments in.

“We are investors each year”, he said, “in a bank that has no big locked door, no money, no manager, shareholders or funds. The only loan we will get is the loan of a bog-barrow hidden in a drain. But the bank does hold a treasure we can pan.”

The first jobs of the day were usually mine: dig a safe in the wet side of the high bog and place the sandwiches and the bottle of milk in there.

Then locate a wooden bog barrow, or two, in drains along side turf banks and borrow them or recognize them as your own: out on loan, and wheel them back to the work site.

Then place the wheels of bicycles that might have myriad puncture repair patches on the tube, into another wet drain, in case the patches lifted in the sunshine.

Then I could sit down, and watch the work begin. Dad would have toppled the high bog into the water filled bog-hole of last year’s crop, and cleaned the site.

After a bit of muscle stretching, checking for a sharp blade, and a comment or two about the weather “Thank God”. Uncle Paddy, Cutter, Uncle Mickie, Barrowman and Dad as Catcher set up their conveyor belt of cutting and spreading.

Paddy was a turf cutting artist: with a fluid slicing and swinging rhythm the wet brown top-cut turf sods were created and tossed onto the bank of the cutting; then Dad speared each sod with a short-pronged fork and tossed it towards the flat bog-barrow; with a twist of his wrist the sod was released from the fork to slap onto the surface and then as quick as a flash its companion was tossed in beside it.

Row by row the load grew until Uncle Mickey lifted the shafts and teased the wooden wheel from the grip of the wet, mulched work area and pushed the barrow out into the dry brown hollow and spilled each sod beneath the warm sun and the drying bog wind.

As the cutting deepened the hard black turf appeared, it was heavier, and adjustments were made to the piled up rows on the barrow, otherwise barrow and man might sometimes become bogged down in a patch of wet hollow and sometimes production would have to be halted while spilled sods were reloaded.

Experienced barrow men would make sure that this catastrophe would not happen, but a helping youngster: covering for a break, with weak wrists and barrow shafts carried in crooked elbows was likely to overturn his load easily.

When enough turf was cut and spread, and the basement level of the floors of good turf was reached and the hollow was covered with the sods: we had a short week or two of weather defined rest, while the turf dried: then the real harvesting began.

As I grew older and stronger I dreaded being sent alone to the bog to work on the turf. I hated handling the unending plot of turf because once you finished one job: you were preparing the plot for another.

You had to turn the turf, by scrabbling it over with your hands. On hard turf, this meant split nails, cuts and grazes and painful blisters. Then a while later you had to stook it into small piles so that it could catch the drying wind. Then you had to barrow or donkey cart it out and build a clamp on the road.

When the roadside clamp had been built and the lorry came for the transport home you had then to beedfork heavy dry turf up onto the lorry, and when it was deposited outside the house on the road you had to wheelbarrow it into the backyard, throw it into the shed and then clamp a retaining wall of sods inside the door.

You weren’t even finished then; all Winter you had to break the brown sods for kindling; chop the hard black sods and then carry buckets of turf into the house.

It's a pity Europe had no interest in Turf Cutters then. It might have stopped what I came to regard as the exploitation of child labor.

Rejected - by RTE Sunday Miscellany -

Not cutting hair any longer.

When I was very young growing up, and I suppose our town had this in common with other towns, or indeed county houses - you had your hair cut at home.

It was usually done by your mother or father.

Some of us had a scissors and comb cut, a dry cut they call it today. Others had a Bowl Cut, just like Moe Howard, The Leader, had in The Three Stooges.

It was a simple and quick method of achieving a neat somewhat fashionable hair style. The pudding bowl was retrieved from the cupboard. It was placed upside down on your head and the hair that stuck out underneath was clipped off with a scissors.

You were left with a “Mop” of hair on your head, with a fringe just above your eyes.

Although if your head was big and the bowl was small: the fringe could well be just above your ears.

At some stage Old Bill, my Grandfather, got hold of a a pair of hair clipper from somewhere.

A hand operated gadget, with a flat surface at the top, that housed the blades that cut hair when you squeezed the handles and presented the hair to it above a steadying comb.

I remember it had two sticking out flat knobs on each arm that steadied the squeeze and helped apply the hand pressure. Granddad was a danger, in the vicinity of stickie-out ears.

I was often sent up to him for a haircut.

What a commotion! If you moved your head constantly as little boys do, you would be seized in a ferocious grip by your above-neck hair, the same grip he used for holding a pony's mane to steady him while the collar was put on.

Then the haircut would proceed under his rules. Even now I imagine I can feel the stinging hair- pulled pain in my scalp.

But no matter how many times when we were squirming - and he threatened to shave our head with his cut-throat razor, that he sharpened on a leather strop: he never carried out the promise.

Instead a fidgety kid might only get half a haircut: a terrible botched job, before he was released by the statement. “Good Lad, off you go now. The job is Oxo. Tell yer mother I was asking for 'er.”

At time progressed Francie brought me to Larry's in the Main Street for more torture.

Larry smoked a pipe, well tried to smoke a pipe while cutting hair. It kept going out and had to be restarted interrupting the haircut.

The phrase “Keep her lit” could have been coined for Larry.

We had a song then. “Larry the barber - shaved his father, with a rusty razor. The razor slipper and cut his lip. Hurray! For Larry the barber”.

He had a collection box in the shop. It was used for contributions to what we called The Black Babies back then, the Nuns in the school made similar collections.

Larry's box had a carved and painted small head on a stick at the top of the box. He nodded, thank you, as the coppers dropped down the slot into storage in the bottom of the box.

Larry's small shop, a small converted room in the front of a two up, two down, was always crowded, and the wait was long, and hot as the body heat filled the shop.

It was sometimes so bad that if you wanted to check the queue: the moisture running down the small window prevented this.

But then as teenage years came, I changed to Franks, beside The Barracks, for my Crew Cut: with a flat top. A more fashionable style than Larry was prepared to provide.

I suppose he knew that when Francie called in for his Short Back and Sides he might ask. What did you do to the young fella'?

This could lead to a conversation where barber and customer didn't want to go.

Also a report back to Headquarters would be required, with a predictable outcome: Francie or Larry, or both, would get the blame for my hairstyle.

I stuck with Frank, until himself and the family decamped to Drumcondra Road Lower, near where the Drumcondra Suburban Railway station is now housed.

The shop today has lost the family name over the door for the more descriptive Barber Shop sign.

Then Seán who took over the shop, got the chance to spruce me up for dances in the CYMS Hall at home, or more further afield: Danceland in Portlaoghis, Dreamland in Athy and the once year jamboree that was The Tullamore Harriers Festival.

Even when I came to Dublin, but went home most weekends I continued to have my hair cut in the town, I can't remember much about the conversations we had while the job was being done but I do remember I had a haircut on November 22nd 1963.