Uncle Pat


The decentest man in all Ireland is my Uncle Pat, and you’d never think
it if you saw him of a morning on his way to work. He slouches along
with his eyes on the ground, a scowl on his face and his lips moving; a
gaunt raking galoot of a man with a pair of deep-sunk, fanatical eyes,
high cheekbones and narrow temples. He looks more like your idea of a
mediaeval inquisitor than a respectable Town Clerk.

He is also—may God forgive him—the laziest man in Ireland, which is
saying a lot, quite a lot! I’ve seen him stay in bed for a week, and
never get up any evening before six o’clock. About midday, Tim, his
second-in-command, comes up for instructions. Tim is a stocky little
fellow with a face like a fist and a pipe forever in the corner of his
mouth.

‘Tim,’ says the Boss, with his rogue’s smile, ‘I was expecting
you. Take a seat, boy, take a seat, that’s if you can find a seat. I
gave you permission to smoke, didn’t I? Yes, Tim, yes, since you
forgot to enquire, I’m _not_ at all well.’

‘Huh,’ says Tim, ‘I suppose you remembered the man from the Ministry
was coming.’

‘Tim,’ says the Boss in mock alarm, ‘you don’t mean, you can’t possibly
mean ’twas today he was to come?’

‘Gwan ou’ that,’ says Tim. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’

‘Tim,’ says my uncle with a wounded air, ‘is that a nice thing to
suggest? You hurt me, Tim. I didn’t know Mr. Hennesy was coming. An
admirable man, Tim! A most distinguished member of his profession.
Salute! But it’s an astonishing thing, Tim, that the wind of that
excellent man’s arrival—salute again, Tim! Heil, Hitler!—the mere
wind of it is enough to give me a bad cold in the head.’

But now and again the old conscience comes at him. That is a bad time
for us. He is up at seven and has the house demented searching for the
boot brushes; tramping from room to room, cursing me and Brigid and the
girls. ‘What sort of a house is this? Seven o’clock and no one up yet!’
He refuses to speak to any of us, scarcely touches his breakfast and is
at the office a full quarter of an hour before anyone is due in. And by
some remarkable coincidence his bursts of zeal always happen to
coincide with an all-night dance or a football match and everyone
strolls in, fair and easy, around ten and finds the office as silent as
the grave and Uncle Pat like an avenging angel at the head of the long
table. (Usually he sits in his own office and reads detective stories.)

It is also remarkable that those fits of conscience seem to be
connected by invisible strands to faint hopes in the hearts of the
girls and myself that we might get him to go somewhere with us. Well,
now, look what happened on the day of the races. The girls and myself
went down in the car to collect him, but Uncle Pat was in one of his
busybody moods. and stood on top of the stairs, waving his arms and
complaining that the whole staff had deserted him to go to the races,
and left him, all alone, to do the work of a dozen. He was very sorry
for himself.

‘Ah, come on,’ says I, ‘show me what’s to be done and I’ll do it. You
go with the girls to the races.’

‘Ah, no, Willie, no,’ said my Uncle—I had frightened him a bit—‘I
don’t mean it like that, boy. I don’t begrudge you your bit of
pleasure. Ye deserve it, boy, ye deserve it.’

So then I knew it was only that he was posing in the part of
St. Sebastian and I turned and left him in exasperation.

‘Willie,’ says he in languishing tones, just as I reached the foot of
the stairs, ‘tell Brigid to keep something hot for me. I don’t know
when I’ll get through all this work.’

He was leaning over the banisters with his arms folded and a look of
martyred patience on his face. Oh, he was very sorry for himself! I
was still angry because he was such good company on a spree, but of
course I forgot it as soon as we reached the race-course. It was a
marvellous spring day with low clouds and an infinite distance of
green fields stretching away to the ring of mountains on every side of
us, and the misty rays of the sun-lantern picking out a bit here and
there and polishing it till it shone. A heavenly day, and a little old
man working a home-made marionette on an upturned box, and the
trick-of-the-loop men and the three-card men, and a boozy man walking
away across the field with two big pints in his hand saying to himself
in a loud voice ‘Now, where the divil am I bringing these?’  And the
girls and I gaped at the paddock, and suddenly I started and looked
round and who was behind but my Uncle Pat! He raised his hat and
smiled benevolently. He had another man with him, a teacher by the
name of Oweney Mac.

‘Well, the divil fly away with you,’ says I, ‘wasn’t I the idiot to be
breaking my heart about you!’

He frowned and beckoned me on one side.

‘’Twas Oweney Mac,’ says he. ‘Ye weren’t out the door before he came.’

‘And what about Oweney Mac?’ I asked.

‘Sure, my goodness,’ said he in an excited whisper, ‘didn’t I tell you?
All you have to do is to look at him. Once a year; I told you
that. Once a year.’

Now that was a legend of my Uncle Pat’s I could never fathom. Owney
Mac was a decent, fat, hasty little man that I found it very difficult
to stand. He was a most cantankerous man; he seemed to have a
grievance against life, and a grievance beyond all telling, as the
poet says, against Ireland. One wet day was sufficient to make Oweney
Mac fume against the climate of this damned country of ours. He never
by any chance happened to get on a train that was up to time, and all
his experience of Irish railways had never taught him to make his
appointments independent of them, so that he was always failing to
keep them. ‘This damned country,’ he’d rage, ‘that can’t even run a
railway.’ If one of the little boys in school failed to do a message
properly for him, Oweney talked for hours and hours about the
difference between the fine manly intelligent little schoolboys in
England and the dirty louts he had the misfortune to teach. When he
fought with his wife—a decent hardworking poor woman we were all
sorry for—he’d begin talking to my Uncle Pat about Irishwomen, saying
that from the moment they married they never used their brains again,
and that it was for the lack of intelligent conversation and because
of the flaming idiots of wives they had at home that Irishmen all took
to drink sooner or later. And my uncle would listen and nod with a
grave face, and I kept silent with my heart full of rage. I never
could understand why the Christian Brothers stood the man at all,
unless for charity, and I didn’t believe my Uncle Pat when he swore
that Oweney Mac was a remarkably intellectual man, and that the
Brothers were scared out of their wits of losing him. But the most
incredible part of the story was that, according to my uncle, it was
Oweney Mac’s magnificent intellect and his general dissatisfaction
with the people of Ireland that made him go on the booze at least once
a year, and that my uncle had promised Brother O’Doherty to look after
Oweney, so that nothing out of the way would happen that jewel of a
man. It was all beyond me, but I knew my uncle had a devotion to
Oweney Mac and wouldn’t separate from him the whole week or two weeks
that Oweney was working off his accumulated despair about Ireland,
but whether all that was because of his vow to Brother O’Doherty, as
he hinted, or because, as the girls believed, he enjoyed the excuse
for going on a beano himself, I should find it hard to say. Anyway,
there the old rascal was with his rogue’s smile and all at once he
laid his hand on my arm and closed his eyes and sniffed.

‘What do I smell, Willie?’ he says in a faraway voice. ‘I smell the
crushed grass.’ He opened his eyes and winked at me. ‘Come on, boy,’ he
said cheerfully. ‘We’ll put all our troubles aside. We have the spring
clouds and the young trees; we have the smell of the crushed grass.’

‘We have,’ I said, for I was still a bit out of humour with him, ‘and
the shade of the whiskey tent.’

He grabbed me by the arm and guffawed.

‘God bless you, Willie,’ he said. ‘You always spoke the true word. I
said it. You have the soul of a poet. ’Tis all in that, isn’t it—the
smell of the crushed grass and the shade of the whiskey tent. Go away,
you ruffian!’

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said I.

‘And, oh, Willie,’ he said, as though suddenly recollecting something
and speaking in an anxious and confidential tone, ‘tell Brigid to keep
something hot for me. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get home.’

But I notice the ring in his voice was somehow different. It may have
been for Brother O’Doherty’s sake he was looking after Oweney Mac, but
I didn’t altogether like the eagerness with which he responded to the
call of duty.

It wasn’t until next morning that I learned what happened them after
that, for, so far as myself and the girls were concerned, the earth
might as well have opened and swallowed them. It wasn’t easy either to
make sense of my uncle’s story which was that they had had to abandon
two publichouses owing to the absence of a piano, and that they had to
go all the way to Georgestown before they found one. Why a piano?
you’ll ask. Well, it seems, according to my uncle’s version of it,
whenever Oweney Mac’s loathing and disgust of Ireland reaches its
climax, he becomes absolutely possessed by a passion for
music. Italian music, preferably; music with sunlight and laughter in
it, as he says himself in his most exasperated tone of voice; and in
proof of that I may mention how I found him two days later stretched
in bed, with a dozen full bottles of beer at one side and a dozen
empties at the other while he sat bolt upright with his hands clasped
and his eyes shut, listening to the gramophone bawling out _Di
Provenza_. And while I gazed at him, in stupefaction, I must say,
because I’m a normal sort of chap without any particular intellect to
make me unhappy, Oweney began to mutter to himself. ‘A child of the
sun, a child of the sun, and here I am, in exile among the Eskimos of
the frozen North.’  But if Italian music wasn’t to be had, Oweney got
on quite nicely with any other sort, and my uncle had the greatest
difficulty in detaching him from the piper outside one publichouse.
‘Ah, listen, man, listen,’ he was saying irritably to the piper, ‘what
sort of music is that?  Nnnnannnannnaa! Look up at the sun, man!
Listen to the birds singing. They’re not doing any of your old
Nnnnannna. Be cheerful, for God’s sake! We’ll be dead long enough.’

At last they found a publichouse in Georgestown with a piano in the
parlour and Oweney began to sing and play. When he finished one drink
he bawled for another, almost without ceasing his music, and as my
poor Uncle wouldn’t know _God Save the King_ from _The Soldiers’ Song_
he amused himself by looking at a mysterious quart bottle of medicine
which happened to be standing on top of the piano, until, as he said
himself, it put a sort of spell on him. As Oweney Mac thumped the keys
the bottle danced like a prima ballerina in a Russian ballet, and by
watching it my uncle was able for the first time in his life to pierce
to the very soul of music. When Oweney played _La Donna e Mobile_ the
old medicine bottle became transformed into the very incarnation of
feminine light-mindedness, and when he played _Di Provenza_ it seemed
to suffer from all the nostalgia of the south and advanced by
imperceptible anguished trips towards the edge of the piano as though
it were about to plunge over the abyss. There were tears in my uncle’s
eyes; so he says at any rate; but even the emotions of the medicine
bottle tired him in the absence of intellectual conversation, and
after a while he rose quietly and went downstairs to the kitchen to
have a little chat with the publican’s wife. He wanted to explain to
her about his life-long attachment to Oweney Mac, and Oweney Mac’s
genius which nobody really appreciated only himself, and how Oweney
Mac’s highly-strung temperament broke down once a year owing to the
misunderstanding and neglect of an unenlightened population, but I
doubt if the publican’s wife understood much he told her, because when
once my uncle took a glass he began to grow emotional, and when he
grew emotional he passed from incoherence to complete silence during
which he illustrated everything with gestures and expressions. It was
really remarkable how one tolerated him in this condition; one hung
upon every tragic wave of the arms as though some wonderful meaning
were at any moment going to transpire.

However, the publican’s wife got called away, and my uncle went
upstairs to Oweney’s rendering of _Your Tiny Hand is Frozen_ and when he
opened the door his eyes strayed affectionately back to the position in
which he had last seen his old friend, the bottle-ballerina. But to his
horror it wasn’t there. It stood beside the piano stool, quite
empty. Oweney, in my uncle’s absence, had become thirsty and drank it
all. Uncle Pat called for help and insisted on laying Oweney Mac out on
the sofa. Then the publican and the publican’s wife came, and assured
him that there was nothing really dangerous in the bottle. only some
sort of cough mixture, whereupon Oweney began to get sick, and to give
him air my uncle conducted him to the corner of the publichouse where
he put him leaning up against the wall. It was race day and of course
the town was crowded with cars returning. ‘How are you feeling now,
Oweney?’ asked my uncle. ‘This damned country!’ gasped Oweney. ‘I’ll
make them pay. I’ll show them up. There isn’t a country in the world
where they’d give a man beer like that.’ ‘That wasn’t beer,’ said my
uncle, ‘but don’t worry, boy. Don’t move. You’ll be as right as rain in
a few minutes.’ And then he began to think again of the publican’s
wife, and being fond of company, without minding much what sort of
company, and there being no great fun in standing at a street corner
with a man in poor Oweney’s condition, he thought he might as well go
back to the kitchen and reassure her.

It was precisely as he retired that a civic guard came up to Oweney Mac
and pointed to a car by the publichouse.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ says he, ‘but I wonder if you’d mind shifting your
car to the other side of the road. ’Tis almost impossible for anyone to
get past it.’

Oweney looked at the motor car and then he looked at the young
policeman, and it seemed to him that there wasn’t in the wide world
another country where such a thing could happen: a policeman asking a
man to drive a car that wasn’t his, and nothing could have convinced
him that the guard was not doing it for spite.

‘Drive it yourself,’ he snapped.

‘I requested you to remove the car to the other side of the road,’ said
the guard, flushing.

‘And I told you to do it youself,’ replied Oweney.

‘You mean you refuse?’ says the guard.

‘I do refuse, I most certainly refuse,’ replied Oweney Mac, and he
added a few words on the subject of policemen and this young policeman
in particular guaranteed to produce hot feelings. The end of it was
that Oweney Mac was hauled off to the barrack and pushed into a cell to
think better of it.

Then, ten minutes or so later, out comes my Uncle Pat, only to find his
comrade missing. Naturally, he was scared. He went from publichouse to
publichouse, enquiring, but discovered nothing—which is hardly to be
wondered at, considering that his own family often found him impossible
to understand when he tried to translate his meaning into signs. After
that he went to the police barrack. He began by throwing his arms about
the sergeant and endeavouring to explain his vow to Brother O’Doherty
and the loss of his companion. Perhaps, after their experience with
Oweney Mac, the guards were a bit hasty.

‘Is it the man in the cells you’re looking for?’ asked the sergeant.

‘Cells?’ shouted my uncle. ‘Did you say cells? Oweney Mac in the cells?
For what, in God’s name?’

‘For refusing to remove his motor when requested,’ says the sergeant.

With one wide sweep of his arm and a look of rage and disgust my Uncle
Pat consigned the sergeant to perdition.

Don’t tell me,’ says the sergeant ironically, ‘that you’re looking for
a fight too?’

‘Fight?’ exclaimed my uncle. ‘The Attorney General.’

‘Splendid,’ says the sergeant, ‘I’ll have him sent for at once. Stop in
there with your pal till he arrives.’

You could scarcely believe it; the two most respectable men in our town
in the cells like any common drunks. My uncle was half demented. The
like had never happened to him before. Oweney Mac was sitting on a
bench with his head between his hands, and my uncle drew himself up
with clenched fists and took in a long breath that was intended to
convey to Oweney Mac what he thought of it. Then the first bout of rage
came on him and he thundered like a lunatic on the door demanding a
solicitor, the Attorney General and the Chief of Police. That relieved
his mind a little and he turned on Oweney Mac again.

‘Motor car?’ he asked. ‘What motor car?’

‘There was no motor car at all, man,’ says Oweney Mac irritably. ‘How
could there be a motor car? I’ll prove there was no motor car. Inside a
week I’ll have that policeman and the damned saucy sergeant and the
Chief of Police, I’ll have them walking the roads. Every man of them!
Two thousand pounds damages I’m demanding.’

‘But did you, did you explain there was no motor?’ asked my uncle.

‘Of course I didn’t explain,’ shouted Oweney Mac. ‘’Tis their business
to prove it.’

‘Wait till I tell them,’ says my uncle.

‘Do nothing of the kind,’ says Oweney in a rage, grabbing my uncle and
flinging him on the bench. ‘Then they’d let us out and we’d have no
case at all. We must stay here till they bring us before the magistrate
till we show the whole wide world the sort of misfortunate country this
is.’

Whereupon the two old idiots went fast asleep, swearing vengeance on
every policeman in Ireland. It was four next morning when I got on
their track, through the local police who knew my uncle well and would
have done anything for him. I adduce it as an example of the plain
common sense of fellows like me that before I set out I equipped
myself with two bottles of beer from home. In some way I felt they
might prove useful.

When I reached the barrack in Georgestown I found them still sleeping
and the sergeant a little bit nervous about what they might do when he
waked them. It was then I thought of the two bottles of beer. I planked
them on the table before him. The sergeant looked at me and I looked at
him. Then he winked and took down his keys. I will say that whatever
his faults of temper he was an understanding sort of man. He woke the
two old rascals, and whatever their fury was like when they were
arrested it was nothing to what they showed at being wakened at half
past four of a cold spring morning. My uncle grabbed his hat and rushed
out of the cell without as much as replying to the sergeant’s
enquiries. He halted in his rush when he perceived me. Then he
perceived the two bottles. So did Oweney Mac who followed him with a
very swollen countenance.

‘I’m sorry,’ the sergeant said mildly, ‘about the hour because I’m
afraid ye won’t be able to get refreshments for some time to come, but
if I could oblige ye in any way —.’

I noticed the smile that began to dawn at the corner of my uncle’s
mouth. I think he preferred a good joke to anything on earth. Oweney
Mac flew into a passion and seized him by the arm.

‘Don’t do it, Clancy,’ he shouted. ‘We’ll make these fellows pay for
many a bottle before we’re finished with them.’

‘Ah, yes, Oweney,’ said my uncle, ‘but ’twouldn’t be the same at
all. You ruffian,’ he said to the sergeant, ‘you should be ashamed of
yourself.’

The sergeant winked at me and I winked at the sergeant. My uncle has
added a new story to his repertory. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ it begins,
‘how I drank a bottle of beer that cost two thousand pounds?’


(Unpublished. Broadcast, unknown date, probably 1940-45.)