In 1981, when it was time to go back to college for the second year, I once again had nowhere to live. Maggie, my lovely landlady of that first year, had died over the Summer and her house now stood empty and awaiting probate. I went back to the B&B I had briefly stayed in at the start of my first year and scoured the evening paper every day for a lead on a room… any room, really.
In the
spirit of ‘Any old port in a storm’, I ended up in one of those old Georgian houses
on Lower Sherrard Street. They are prettier now than they were then. It was a
rather peculiar set-up. The run-down house was populated entirely with men who worked
the building sites of Dublin as labourers. There might have been 12 or 15 of
them at any time and the turnover of people was often fast. Every Monday to Thursday,
two ladies came into the basement kitchen and prepared an evening dinner for the
residents. The weekends were a free-for-all, taken up primarily with drinking and
sleeping.
At just
turned eighteen, I was far-and-away the youngest resident of the Lower Sherrard
Street establishment, and, in retrospect, I really shouldn’t have been there at
all. I was a skinny little dude in among all these giant bull-workers of men.
Still, I had my little room at the very top of the house which had a bed and…
well… it had a bed. So what if I had to pass through another man’s bedroom to
get to mine and so what if that man was a huge Viking red moustached guy who
never got out of his bed because he didn’t have the money to pay his rent and
who feared, if they caught him with his feet on the floor, he would get chucked
out.
So what? I
had a place to stay, a roof over my head. That was something.
In the weekday
evenings, when drinking was never done, the men would mostly gather in the
basement room and watch the little telly here. Nobody really spoke to me much
at first. One evening I tried to break the ice with Frank, who was a cool-looking
Northern Irish man who looked like a rough cross between George Peppard and Lee
Van Cleef. Frank was evidently struggling with the crossword in the paper, and
this was the first tiny sign of something I might be able to help with. I was
sitting on a chair beside him when he groaned for the fourteenth time and
scribbled a word out.
“What’s the
problem?” I asked, smiling all the time.
He looked
at me.
“There’s no
problem,” he said as he turned away and went back to his puzzle.
They were fine
men, just tough and circumspect in their relationships. The vast majority were
from Northern Ireland, and they retained the natural caution that growing up there
in the sixties and seventies would unavoidably instil.
There was
no magic bullet. Over time, as I stayed and settled in, I became a trusted (if
odd) member of the cohort. I did my own thing and minded my own business, and
the men came to accept me, probably for holding my own with them. I was so
different to everyone else there. I was the only one under twenty, the only
student, almost the only Southern Irish person. I was naïve and possibly a bit timid,
but I was funny too and, after I learned how far I could go with a joke or a
quip, I think I gained a little respect for that.
People just
get to know people too, don’t they? One Friday evening, in the quiet time
before the pubs let out, I was watching the film of ‘Woodstock’ on the telly. I
got a bit lost in an extended song by someone or other, eyes closed, going with
the flow of it. When it ended, I opened my eyes and Crossword Puzzle Frank was
grinning over at me.
“You were really
enjoying that,” he said, with some hint of amazement in his voice.
“I was, yeah,”
I replied, and, in these tiny ways, friendships can be started.
I generally
went home for the weekends because the level of debauchery and drunkenness in
the basement room often reached epic levels then. In weekends where I had to
stay because I had work to do, I would camp out in my top room, sitting on the
edge my bed with my drawing board and tee square balanced on my knees and a gang
pack of fig rolls by my side. I would go to a movie on Saturday night and have
a McDonalds but, otherwise, the fig rolls were my primary fare until Monday
evening’s dinner.
Weeknights,
there were often epic games of 25 around the basement table and I became quite
good at it. Mostly because you didn’t want to play the wrong trump at the wrong
time to this crowd.
But mostly
it was the telly.
One
evening, a sizable bunch of us were watching ‘Death Wish’ on the telly when,
suddenly, the basement window exploded inward in a shocking hail of shattered
glass. I sat in my chair and looked around.
“What the
hell was that?” I asked the room.
But the
room was empty, apart from two guys behind the couch. Everybody else had vacated
the space with blinding speed. The Northern Ireland reflexes were much more
finely tuned than my own.
The ‘explosion’
had been caused by a drunk passer-by on the street finishing his bottle of beer
and discarding the empty through our basement window. His failings were
eloquently pointed out to him by some of my housemates. The less said on that,
the better, I think.
There was
one other resident of the house who was not a building construction labourer. A
sullen middle-aged man, he wore a dark grey suit at all times and came and went
from his dinner without much to say. He never had anything to say to me.
Until, one
day, he did.
It was late
on a quite a Monday in the basement TV room. There was only a handful of us in
the room and I was the only one bothered with the telly. I was watching ‘Film ’81’
with Barry Norman and Barry was busy reviewing the latest Disney animation ‘The Fox and
the Hound’.
This man
came into the room and stood there.
“Is anybody
watching this?” he asked, pointing towards the television with his chin.
Nobody
spoke, until I did. I had been there a little while at this point and felt I was
a member of the household.
“I’m kind
of watching it,” I said.
He glared
at me, seethed a while, then erupted.
“Fuckin’
cartoons. Fuckin’ cartoons. I don’t work all day to come in here and have to
watch children’s fuckin’ cartoons on a Monday night.”
“It’s Film ’81,
this bit will be over in a minute.”
“Fucking
cartoons_”
I figured
it was time to go to bed. Sometimes the temperature rose in the TV room, and it
was best to get out of it. I got up and left the room.
But the guy
came after me. He caught up with me on the stairs. He spun me around and grabbed
me by where my lapels would have been if my jumper had lapels.
“Fuckin' Car-Toons.”
He had quite
a bit of age, height, and weight on me. I couldn’t do much more than let him run
down his rant and hope it didn’t get too bad. Eventually he stopped and stormed
back towards the TV room, most likely to change the channel.
Word got
about the house that I had been accosted. When the ladies who made the dinners
let me know that the guy had been warned about his behaviour, I didn’t have
much faith in that. But when Frank asked me my opinion on five-down and quietly
told me that the guy would not trouble me anymore, I figured I was okay… and I
was. The guy moved out shortly afterward and I, for one, was not all that sorry
to see him go.
Frank was
philosophical about the little interaction.
“Men in his
line of work sometimes get like that at his age. You have to watch out for
them.”
It turned
out that he was a schoolteacher.
This second-year
accommodation of mine was no place for a young student. I should have started
looking for a different place at first opportunity, but I stayed all year.
Then, for third year, I went back again.
It wasn’t
ideal, far from it.
But I learned
some stuff there that has served me well over the years, I think.
1 comment:
I also lived in a B&B for a while. This was in Aberdeen and I was a lot older than eighteen but still retained, as I continue to, some of my youthful naiveté. I don’t talk about that time. It was during the lowest time in my life and, well, I just don’t talk about it. The room I had, at the start at least, I shared with another guy and there was a third who had to cross our room to get to his glorified cupboard. It was an odd setup but, as always, the poet in me hoped to find inspiration in the diverse mix we shared the place with. He never did. In fact I only wrote one poem the whole six months I was there and I've never drawn on any of my experiences from that time since which, personally, I find a bit odd, out of character, but I’ve never got my head around how this whole inspiration thing is supposed to work.
Post a Comment