Paul Malpas

This morning I woke up determined to let the world know my secret.  This secret, which I have been juggling with for some days now and which I eventually put properly into place last night as I lay in bed, will solve all the worlds financial woes, will put the banks to right, give the Liberal Party a resounding success in the coming election in England, make all your jobs safe for the next thousand years and probably double your salaries within six months and it will certainly send property prices soaring again.

I came down early and took the young fellow to school, rubbing my hands at the titillation I was going to bring to the world.  I returned home in the best mood I have been in for months at the thought of this munificent knowledge I was going to share with mankind.  It was early, not quite 9.00 am, I thought I would leave it a little, let everyone get into work and then rejuvenate their day.  I went into the garden and tinkered with my vegetable patch, lifting the odd weed, planting out a few cabbage, picking up a few small stones that the hard winter’s frost had brought to the surface.  I was at one with my maker and he because of the lovely day he had sent us, seemed at least to be at one with me.

It was just after 10.00 when I came back into the kitchen, made a small kedgeree for my loved one, plated it and took it upstairs with a cup of freshly brewed green tea and placed it at her side and gently shook her so has not to arouse her from her dreams too quickly.  I looked out of the window and saw the colours on this fine Spring day.  The grass which up until last week was brown, scorched by the hard frosts of the winter, had suddenly thrown  off its overcoat and was now the finest emerald.  The sky was azure and not at all like the murky grey of the English sky that could just be seen in the far eastern horizon, tainted with volcanic fall out from northern regions and who, I ruminated could well do with the recent knowledge which I was about to pour onto the world through the web.  The lake, a few hundred yards away, twinkled in the morning light, a different blue from the sky but a welcoming blue just the same.  At this time of year there is no country more blessed than Ireland and no part more beautiful than North Roscommon, with its lakes and rivers, hills and rolling archaeological landscapes exploding in a hundred shades of blues and greens and tinted with dabs of yellow and red from the golden daffodils and proud tulips that seem to have sprung up in readiness for God’s bounty.

I thought “fuck it”, fuck the collapsing chair and the computer that as a will of its own, “fuck it” I repeated and my wife stirred in her repose, “I will launch the boat and have a days fishing on the lake, I hear their biting and refreshed with a few cold tinnies, it will do me good” It is now gone 11.00am I should get six hours out there, drifting from the edge of Erris Bay over to Church Island on the lazy current, I might even catch my supper.

I will have to leave this old contraption of a computer for something a lot more worthy, a boat, a rod and a line.  They have been doing that for eight thousand years round here,  there must be something in it.  So while I consider the afternoon, the early evening comes to mind.  You need something to wash the tonsils with after a hard day and what better than a couple or three pints of the finest Guiness in Ireland in the cleanest and friendliest pub in Boyle, The  Patrick’s Well,

I have not left the house yet and I am slavering at the prospect.  April in Ireland.  Fishing on Loch Ce.  Drinking Guiness in Patrick’s Well.  All my dreams have come true.

Jim Crehan spent 35 years of his adult working life shovelling coal into the gas retorts, firing the coal and clearing out the resulting coke from those long steel tubes.  Back-breaking work, which by its nature, engendered habits which followed him home and into retirement.  Those of course who had retirement.  In 1958 my father contacted the North Western Gas Board, the organization that had taken over The Manchester Gas Company in 1948, to tell them to cancel the pension payment of my recently dead grandfather.  They told him that Jim Crehan was the last Gas Company employee on their books, all the others having died long before.  The dust, the heat and the fumes quickly slicing through the ranks of the recently retired and in fact the ranks of the employed.

On retirement each employee was given the option of a lump sum, which was the equivalent of ten years pension or a weekly payment for life.  Most wisely went for the lump sum, my grandfather decided on the weekly payment.  Once he passed 75, he used to have a laugh every day – for nine years in fact, at the way he had beaten the system.

My grandfather was once a tall man, 6′ 4” my mother always used to say, but when I knew and understood him, he had a bit of a stoop, which brought him down to normal size.  On my parent’s wedding photographs at the age of 67 he was head and shoulders above everyone else, looking remarkably like Kevin, my brother.  He always wore a cap and  full length grey flannel long johns, summer and winter.  During the day he wore a coller-less striped shirt and a knotted thin scarf.  The rest was finished off with a pair of woollen socks, the holes in which, he used to darn himself and after a time there was more darning than original sock, a pair of black boots, moleskin trousers and a waistcoat that was many years passed its best, in which he kept his chewing tobacco and knife for cutting plugs of baccy off the solid block, his smoking tobacco and pipe and his stub of a pencil, which he used for working out his system on the football pools and for writing out bets on the horses.  The whole was finished off with a long black overcoat he wore when stepping out to the pub.

I only knew him in his retired state and taking things easy, he had a chair, grandad’s chair, to the left of the fireplace, on which he used to sit for most of the day, resting, reading the sporting papers, smoking and above all singing.  The cap he wore both inside and outside the house, as he was as bald as a coot and could feel even the whisper of a draught on his head.  In his attempt to get his chin to match his scalp he shaved meticulously every day, taking great care around his small walrus moustache.

The shaving operation was a performance, all done without the use of water.  He would hang his strop up on a hook on the back of the kitchen door, open up his cut-throat razor, which was always kept on the mantlepiece above the fire, and with a gentle up and down motion he sharpened an already sharp  razor.  Sometimes if he thought the razor had been abused somehow the previous day, he would spend ten or fifteen minutes on the whetstone, first of all spitting on the stone and then rubbing his blade in a circular movement on the liquid produced and then reverting to the strop on the back of the door.  As a sign that the razor had reached its keenness, he would pull a hair from my mother’s hairbrush and holding one end of the hair between finger and thumb, he would slice the strand in two without bending it.  This operation gave as much credence to the strength of my mother’s jet black hair as it did to the sharpness of the razor.

He was now ready.  He lathered his face with a soapy foam from a cup, the recipe for which only he knew and without mirror or guidance he performed this death defying feat, leaving his face and chin as shiny and smooth as a baby’s bottom.  However as the years caught up, the razor, with its care and attention, did not lose its sharpness, but his reaction and flexibility certainly did and he started to take lumps out of his flesh.  The ensuing bleeding was staunched by little twists of The Sporting Chronicle, the newspaper of choice for the horse racing aficionado, which gave each day’s horses, their breeding and their form.  These twists he stuck on the wounds which soaked up the blood and stopped the bleeding.  He was a sight to behold, going out to the Anson Hotel for his nightly couple of pints, sprouting newsprint of runners and riders from various cuts.  Later on in life even this butchery failed him and my mother was given the job.  Scared of the cut-throat, she used a safety razor, but my grandfather was never happy as the finished product was never as good.  So the daily sharpening continued just in case his joints freed themselves and he was able to shave himself again.

Another favourite pastime of his was clearing the wax out of his ears with a needle.  I used to wince thinking the needle would disappear into his head and never come out.  Also he would only drink his tea out of a saucer, pouring the tea from a cup so that it cooled quickly,  Never once did I see him drink from a cup.

He loved his couple of pints of an evening, funnily enough I have always been the same, and on his way home he would call at the off-licence attached to the pub and bring home with him two pint bottles of Guiness.  These he stood next to the fire and settled down into his chair and after five minutes or so chat, he would stand and stick the poker into the heart of the burning coals and leave it some time until it was red hot.  Meanwhile he poured out three quarters of the warmed first bottle into a glass and when the poker was ready, he pulled it from the heat, tapped it on the grate to remove any surplus ash and plunged it into the glass of Guiness, with much hissing and steam.  The poker was returned to the fire and the process was repeated as he sat back and enjoyed his hot nightcap.

I did not know I could write so much about this wonderful man but I was young and taking all these remarkable feats in and storing them for posterity.  I have promised myself and Helen that I will limit myself to no more than a thousand words a day so has to improve quality and also and most importantly to enable me to carry out all the household tasks that are set me on a daily basis by my loving spouse.  So I will finish here and continue apace tomorrow with My Grandad  Part3.  I am already 200 words over my rations.