The Man with the Pram

The first thing they did was drop me.

After the lightning in the afternoon, there were fireworks on the Quay to open the festival.

My Father  left  the “No Stir – Yet” sign stuck  in the window of the attic flat. 

He had thought it might placate the queries of the general public and spare them - (and him)- the trek back up the 4 flights of stairs.  But on that October night as the Opera festival was putting on Lucia di Lauimermoor by Donizetti - my Mothers waters broke and she pushed me  into the world, and I opened my tiny mouth and screamed a duet with the soprano, to let the planet know I had arrived.  

 Knowing him as well as I do now almost half a century later, it is indeed a miracle my Father didn’t burst.   It was often noted that his crowd  behaved more like an Italian family, warm, demonstrative, affectionate, hysterical.  Every member of them cried like babies at my parents wedding the year before, while my Mothers clan in the opposite pews looked on in amazement and some considerable amusement. 

Despite the protestations of the Priest, who advised her to call her daughter by a Saints name like Brigid or Attracta, Siobhan stuck to her guns and named her firstborn after a Beatles song she loved.

They were delighted by my safe arrival and over-awed at the prospect of parenthood and could hardly wait to bring me home and get stuck in. At my first bath in the flat,  they fussed around like clucking hens, checking the temperature of the water with their elbows, laying out all the creams and powders and the soft towel to wrap me in. Alas, they were so busy being so perfect that each thought the other had a hoult of the child, and so I was dashed head first onto the tiles, sliding with the suds out of their soapy hands. After a heart stopping moment they heard the roars of me, exhaled and carried on regardless

 My earliest memory is of being a small toddler in the big room my parents slept in. I was in a home -made wooden cot with collapsible sides. Siobhan would place me in the cot, fed and washed and then not long afterwards my Father would open the sitting room door after hearing scratching and find me perched in the hallway,  the front of my sleeping suit manky from crawling down the lino on the stairs. It became a source of wonder that I was escaping on a nightly basis and he checked and re-checked the hinges. They came as a double act one night and after singing themselves quietly out of the room, stood on the landing waiting. Through the crack of the door they watched as I sat up and went rummaging in one corner of the cot, lifted the foam mattress and quietly slipped through the webbing underneath.

“Aha, me lady” says Tom picking me up and placing me back into the cot while I howled my disapproval. A halt was literally called to my gallop when he placed a sheet of plywood under the mattress.

 I remember crawling up the lino stairs to see my Great  Great Uncle Nick in the bed.  He had taken to it in the latter years of his life and it was into this home that my parents moved, after living in a succession of rented flats around the town.  It was to be their first house purchase and their last, as despite viewing others as we grew both in number and age, primarily in the pursuit of a garden, they never moved again.

Nick came with the house and I often wondered how Siobhan felt having to look after an old man in his dotage AND a small child who was enough work for ten pairs of hands. He spent his days issuing orders and instructions from his bed and tapping his stick on the floor to demand attention or tea or the bucket.

 I was in the kitchen doing similar.

There was a crucifix and a Sacred Heart lamp on the bedroom wall, a picture of Pope John and a gas tap. I had been warned under pain of death not to touch this or the whole house would blow sky high. For years this tap would come between me and my sleep as I wondered if an errant arm had knocked against it and it was slowly seeping out the colourless, odourless poison  that would choke us to death as we slept in our blanketed beds. It was an old house with 3 storeys  -  on one side of a tree lined square, where the  headscarfed women cycled to work in Cousins Mineral Waters, almost colliding with the black faced men cycling back to Pierces before the foundry horn sounded.

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By the time we had moved to the square as a Trinity, Siobhan was pregnant again and would give birth to my brother, in the January of 1966. There was ructions when she brought him home as I was demented that another baby would wipe my eye. He was a different animal altogether and a quiet baby, and actually content to lie in his cot or around the house in baskets or on mats in the sun.

I was kneeling on a stool looking out the back kitchen window as my Great Uncle Billy Rossittor let his Jack Russell loose at a rat.

As a small child, I was allowed out to play “on the path” and was admonished severely not to even think about crossing the road. Considering the only traffic back then was the occasional Morris Minor, or a horse and trap, the fears of my imminent plastering on the street proved unfounded.  I contented myself with nosing around other people’s houses and finding out news.   

 It seemed every house had a giant black Pedigree pram with a gurning baby alternately chawing on, or shaking a rattler behind white netting.  Putting the babby out consumed a considerable amount of time, and meant checking and re-checking that it was still alive, not swarmed by midges, or stolen by Tinkers. There was a preponderance of prams outside the shops on the main street as people would park their offspring, put the brake on and then casually shop for hours. One of the kinder things said to me as I was being chastised for any or all misdemeanours was the fact that I was a changeling baby and that I had been swapped for a Traveller child.

 Between all the Boogey Men, Quare Fellas, Chancers, Gougers, Tinkers and Nuns I was lucky to escape with my life. Back then the summers lasted for about 4 years and my mind throws up images of a small girl in a knobbly jumper whiling away the long hot days and nights tormenting her parents and plotting where she would bring her smaller brother the next time she was allowed out.
He was not exactly an unwilling accomplice, as the joys of the path had worn off for him quite quickly.  It was in the spirit of discovery and innovation that I escorted him by the hand, firstly across the road, and then when our impudence was not immediately discovered, running  faster until it was safe to explore. I knew what I was doing in that I only went a distance that we could leg it back from quickly, and so it is in this vein we managed to attend mass, a wedding, and the circus. The reader must remember that this was the late 60’s and children were as welcome anywhere as the flowers of May, which may explain why I was found waltzing in an old man’s arms at a wedding in Whites while Barty made himself sick eating the hard white icing off the cake.

 Everyone simply presumed we were everyone else’s children. 

Ditto the circus, where I took the daring step of heading to Harvey’s Field with the massed throngs of the town and thrust my brother under the flap at the back of the big top to do a recce. When he was not unceremoniously flung back out I lifted the flap and followed him in. We sat on the benches at the very front and smelt sawdust and animals and chewing gum. A woman beside us, enquiring for our Mother and general welfare – I waved a hand vaguely at the queue for candy floss - took pity on us and bought us 2 tubs of HB Ice-cream. By the time we were running down the hill home, he sprinting ahead as if to disown me and any or all part in the adventure, and a crowd around the doors of Carrigeen wringing their hands and cardigans sent up of a cry of – Oh, HERE they are!!  Mary Larey, propped in the doorway gave us a mournful eye and intoned “Oh, hun, you’re going to be kilt” and I looked up at her and said “Eff off”.

It was the shock.

“Oh, there is a lovely quiet child sitting in a Tinkers camp wondering where we are”

I could pass a number of hours scavenging around the house, rooting in wardrobes, then sitting on the path dragging a lollipop stick around the cracks, finding the gradgey bits in discarded chewing gum, or eating the bottoms  off the fuschia that grew outside the Garda Barracks. Someone else showed me to how to do this. They said it would taste like honey. 

It didn’t.

 I also realized there were men in behind the barred windows and would spend time shouting up at their disembodied voices on tiptoes, trying not to step in the channel of piss that ran alongside.

“Ketch me hand” Little Thomasina  would say as he retrieved me.

Nana Mahon was always warning me about church yards and not to be hanging around in there playing on the grass. The church grass was the only kind we had as the yard at the back of our house was barely big enough to put a bin in. The reason I was not supposed to be trick acting around the chapel was  The Booshey Man.

Don’t talk to nobody said my Nana - utilizing a double negative beautifully -  as she cleared the table around me while  I ate lunch, drinking weak diluted orange from the red plastic mug with the frayed edges from years of teeth, that she kept under the sink with the Vim and Pledge,  watching in amazement the ash on her  cigarette lengthening  in the corner of her mouth by the minute.

On a Sunday evening in Winter - just before teatime -  I  saw the man with the pram. We were coming back from an unusual walk.  It was not till after four that a break in the clouds prompted Siobhan to announce that a little fresh air would do us no harm.

“Come on, shake yourselves, that wind will blow the cobwebs off yee. You’ll have corns on your backside from sitting ” she said as she rooted under the stairs in the coat press , her voice muffled by the fabric and how far in she was, looking for the rain cover of the pram that held my new baby sister. She knotted the strings of my Nanas handknitted bonnet under my itchy chin.  

I suffered agonies in the damp cloakroom at school getting myself in a black knot of temper as I tried to remember which loop of the knitted bonnet to pull. One allowed freedom, and removal from the horrific smell of warm milk  and jam, and one allowed Sr Concepta to berate me for tardiness. It became such an issue that  Mam as she was walking me across the road, would put the right  loop in my  gloved hands which I then held  all the way to school, “dont get off the path and dont talk to strangers” Siobhan  said as she kissed me  goodbye.

 I was learning my Communion Prayers and how to make my first confession.  

 Then, on that cold evening, our breath fogging the dusk,  the road wet and and squashy with the promise of  spring in the rotting cones and slushy leaves, I trailed behind my  family, dragging a stick along the old Prez wall. From the clinic gates just as we approached Harveys Hill where the booshey man and quare fellas lived, I saw him on the path.

 It was a big old fashioned high black pram with a hood and silver emblems. Even from a distance I thought the scene looked odd.  The man pushing it had a queer walk.  Bow legged.  It appeared incongrous.  Noteworthy, to a small child who believed in Santa and the tooth fairy.  A bandy legged man pushing an antique pram was a strange sight in  1970 when very few men had much to do with childer.

 I watched from under my bonnet as he saluted my parents with his flat cap and they passed on without remark , my Father holding my brothers hand, my Mother pushing the pram with her new daughter.  

 400 yards from them, streeling along in their wake, I was about to get a look at the other baby.

 As he drew level, he looked back over his shoulder and then at me,  and smiled a slow smile.

I smiled too.   

 Then, he drew his coat back and leered, and stood displaying himself.    

 I stared.  

 At first I was not sure what I was seeing. 

The pale pinkness of his flesh against the dark fabric of his trousers was unsettling. 

And then it hit me.  

 And in a moment of clammy shock and panic I saw that what I was being forced to observe was him and his. 

In recall this could only have taken seconds, but a hinge creaked somewhere and a gust of wind whistled as the door to my  childhood slammed shut.  

 I walked on and then began to run, a sob forming in my throat, which I instantly stifled, and knew I must not tell.  

 My childish mind could not form the sentences to describe and discuss the shocking monstrous thing that  he had done. Daddy would have got the Guards.  I clutched at my Mothers sleeve, and she looked down at me and smiled, and I never ever told.  

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned”

M.D.M. Feb. 2014