WAR - A PERMANENT PRESENCE
side-car jumps the officer, looking the part with large dark goggles, battle-dress and a map strapped to each thigh. To my astonishment, he addresses me, "Hello, Louis"! When he raises his goggles I see he's my cousin Jack from Tipperary, an engineer by profession, now a captain on a temporary wartime commission.
Quickly, my mother organises an impromptu high tea with the captain, his driver and our little family all exchanging news and gossip round the table. This goes on for the better part of an hour until the military men barrumph off again towards the Square and Lower Cork Street. What happened the war during their unscheduled break, history does not record!
We did other things which had nothing to do with military exercises at home or abroad, real or mock. In the present age of Nintendo and Gameboys, perhaps I may be allowed a little nostalgia. We kids played conkers and marbles, each in its season, and woe betide the marble-player who had only a glass "chaney-alley" to ward off the assault of a steel ball-bearing. Our street functioned as a kind of trade route for these activities: the best conkers came from the chestnut trees on the road to the convent at one end of Upper Cork Street and ball-bearings, always scarce, could sometimes be had near the other end from the garage on the Fermoy Road.
Upper Cork Street had more serious connotations as well. It was the route to school for most of the boys. They trudged along it and up the pathway to the Christian
Brothers for their daily struggle with Gaeilge, algebra, weights and measures and the mysteries of religion. I remember that if we heard the sound of an aeroplane engine, tolerant Brother Carberry would let us out of class to watch a Lysander bomber from Fermoy aerodrome going "put-put" over the playground. Planes were that rare where we lived, in striking contrast to the anger-filled skies of Europe.
Games in the GAA ground on Cahir Hill took up a lot of time, of course, or maybe I should say hurling, for football in any code, soccer or rugby or even Gaelic, didn't loom large in this bastion of iomanaiocht. I must confess I was no great player or follower of field-sports myself and I well recall how, on the day of an All-Ireland, or the match that really mattered, the Munster final, I'd be the only soul abroad in Upper Cork Street where the emptiness was eerily filled by the young Micheal Ó Hehir whose rapid-fire commentary wafting out from every half-opened window.
Another sound I specially associate with Upper Cork Street was the annual serenading of the New Year by Jimmy Fitz's band. As midnight approached, the bandsmen took up position at the top of the street by the Brigown corner. Whether they played Auld Lang Syne I can't say, but they certainly did justice to Adeste Fideles before marching off to other vantage points around the town. Hardly warlike, but better than the battle hymns in favour elsewhere.
Notwithstanding all this, the war remained a permanent presence. Bread was still grey and turf was still wet. And then there was the case of my father's bicycle. He used it daily to get up and down to the Bank of Ireland in Baldwin Street, where he worked at the other end of the town. Being innocent times, he left the bicycle every night against the wall beside our front door, ready for the morning. On some mornings it was gone, gone for the day. But invariably it was back in its place the morning after that. Diligent observation by the Guards next-door resolved the mystery. Every evening off-duty soldiers from Kilworth would come into town. Any who stayed too long in the pub would miss the van sent to bring them back to camp. The providential provision of a bicycle was an opportunity not to be missed. Its regular return shows how innocent those times really were. The Guards called my father's bicycle "the Soldier's Friend".
We had more serious reminders of war of course, not least news of the war itself for, as we got older, by the age of eleven or twelve, we began to follow its progress on the maps in the papers or school atlases, particularly after D-Day. I puzzle a little to read in the histories and reminiscences about the draconian censorship which kept out of the press anything that might annoy one or other of the belligerents. The censor can't have looked at the imported children's papers which we swapped and re-swapped with one another - in those days before texting and Bebo and even television we were avid readers. The Beano and Dandy comics, aimed at younger kids, carried strip-cartoon series in every issue. One showed the Italian dictator Mussolini, getting into stupid mishaps. It was headed ‘Musso da Wop, he's a big a-da Flop’. No censorship there!
If we paid any attention to this, we would have written it off as "propaganda", which was one of the big words we learned from adult discussions overheard. Another word confused us, though. In the later stages of the war we began to hear about "guerrilla attacks" and "guerrilla successes". We somehow got the impression that large monkeys were on the loose.
These then were the war years as seen from Upper Cork Street and largely through a child's experience. Random impressions only, and reliant on that least reliable of search engines, human memory, which too easily transfers to an earlier time what was learned later. I have tried to avoid that hazard and capture a flavour of what it was like then. This thinking-back leaves me certain that, given the awful sufferings of children in other countries, we were fortunate indeed. To be sure, there was poverty in Mitchelstown, and sickness too - especially TB. But for the most part, and against the backdrop of great happenings elsewhere, there were things to do here, and fun in doing them. I hope William Trevor had as much fun in Youghal or Skibbereen. As the song puts it, yes, we had no bananas. There were also more serious shortages. But they troubled us little enough. No point in complaining. There was a war on, y'know.'
The well-known journalist and author died at the age of 78, in January 2011 – locally many people refer to him as ‘one of our own’.