Our neighbour, the old soldier we had never known
Fr Jason Murphy's column - LET THE BUSY WORLD BE HUSHED - this week has echoes of the song Travelling Soldier...
One of our childhood neighbours was a bachelor man, in his seventies, who was part and parcel of the fabric of our everyday lives. He smoked a pipe, leisurely, as he leaned across the gate and looked to the horizon to tell of rain clouds beyond.
He chewed on tobacco that we used to run an errand for and on our return he’d give us a ten penny piece and keep us standing, telling stories of bygone days and people he thought we should know. We paid little heed to him for we heard these stories time and time again and thought he would be our neighbour forever and a day.
He stood out from the ordinary for he always dressed well; a white shirt he washed come Tuesday mornings in the back yard - scrubbed with sunlight soap in a tin bath filled with water boiled in a black kettle on the jubilee range, as he sung an old song that oft - times we could hear being played on a gramophone at evening time from behind the drawn curtains of the dimly-lit front room.
You could set your clock by him as he followed faithfully the same routine each and every day, familiar sounds that became part and parcel of our daily lives - the raking out of the ashes, the filling of the coal, the feeding of the cats that came scurrying out of hedges at the sound of his call, the muffled hum of the wireless he tuned in to hear the news.
Every day on the dot of half past twelve we’d hear the front door opening and the rattle of the letter box as he pulled it closed behind him and headed for the town.
Wearing a neatly folded tie around his white starched collar, over which he wore striped braces with brass clips attached to hold up the trousers of his two-piece suit, a black overcoat, worn in winter, a peaked cap on his head. And, with highly polished shoes, he looked all of a gentleman as he walked towards the town.
We often remarked how it was he was a little different from all the other men we knew - a little more polished yet bearing the same broad shoulders and big working men’s hands.
He’d sit on a bench on the Diamond watching the cars go bye and talk with the other old men who would gather. At two o’clock, he would venture down as far Twinny’s bar and there Mrs Twinny would set his dinner on the counter followed by a glass of Guinness and a couple of rum and blacks.
Then come the evening after the conversations of the day, he’d retrace the path travelled earlier, a plastic bag in hand with his few provisions, tea and maybe sugar, butter and a fresh McCaldin’s loaf. In his home that no one ever ceilied in, he’d while away the hours, listening to the gramophone after drawing closed the thread bare curtains, come the fall of the evening light.
And so it was that he lived out his hours in the unspectacular ordinariness of his every day, as year followed year, and we grew into teenagers and took this man for granted, this man who was part of the pattern of our daily lives.
That was until one November morning our mother missed the familiar sounds of from behind the wall. There was no sound of the front door banging as he headed for the town so come the early afternoon she dared to peek in through the letter box, only to find him slumped behind the door, at the foot of the bare, uncarpeted stairs.
The ambulance brought him off to hospital on that clear November day and, as we came from school, we were told of how the man who had shared our everyday had taken a massive stroke.
He lay for weeks in St Felim’s hospital ranting and raving throughout the night about the bullets and machine guns and ‘for the love of God will ye ever put out that light’ and on the early December morning he finally passed away, the nurse told of how he talked about seeing the dead men lying on the sand dunes all around.
A month on from the funeral when the town clerk came to clear out his little house, she entered in like few before her and revealed the story of his life; a home that had stood still from the 1930s, over fifty years before - religious pictures of the Holy Family, St Patrick and a fiercesome looking Pope.
On his bed were two grey, army-issue blankets and a kaki green old army coat. And in his little sitting room, on a table next the gramophone that played his favourite vinyl records, was a tin box, battered and rusted around the edges, that told the story of his life - army medals and letters to his mother and postcards written in his careful hand, a red covered certificate of service in the Second World War and his discharge papers from the Royal Irish Fusiliers dated April 5th, 1947.
It was a story in all the telling that he never dared to reveal in those years of troubles around the Border - a story he kept hidden of years of service in the British Army to send money home to his mother to make ends meet.
But perhaps we should have known if we had have had only eyes to see; the white starched shirts, the gleaming polished shoes, the strict routine of each and every day, the bullets and the dead men on the beaches that were plain for him to see, our neighbour whom I remember in these days when the poppy on every television screen is to be seen; the old soldier who kept his days of fighting hidden, our neighbour who lived beside us but who we never really got to know.
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