John Arnold: Fond memories of Jim... who answered SOS when I was born
A group of prize-winning babies at a Baby Show in Cork City Hall in October, 1946. John Arnold today remembers the man who rushed his mother to hospital when she was in labour with him in 1957
That may sound strange, and maybe it is; but it’s hard sometimes to differentiate between one’s own memory and things learned down the years from others.
Though I was four-and-a-half years old when my father died in September 1961, I have no clear recollection of him at all.
Despite that lack of paternal recall, I think I have a memory of my grandmother- my father’s mother - who died in 1959 when I was two. Maybe I was told that she died in the house and had long grey hair, and that from being told by others, I now seem to think it was ingrained in my own little 24-month-old brain.
When I was young, I had a freckly face and a big mop-head of rusty/foxy curls, and for some unknown reason, the arrival in our house of any one of three people caused terror to me – so much so that apparently I’d burst out crying, run away to ‘the room’ and stay there until the ‘offending party’ had departed.
The woman was a Mrs O’Driscoll of the Travelling community- we called her ‘Curly Nellie’ - and she brought little Holy Pictures, rosary beads and medals. In return for those, Mam gave Nellie tea, sugar, potatoes and milk.
I can remember her husband - I think he was Dan - sitting at the side of our boreen with a sheet of shiny tin and he repairing milk buckets for the cow stall.
There was a lovely television programme on lately about the lives of three generations of one Traveller family where the oldest man was a tin-smith like Dan O’Driscoll.
It’s a trade nearly gone now, remember the line from - ‘By trade I was a cooper, lost out to redundancy’ - coopers, tinsmiths, shoemakers, weavers, going, going, nearly gone…
On a recent visit to Johnstown Castle farm museum in Co. Wexford, I was delighted to look over the range of tinsmiths’ equipment on display. They were fairly basic, many made by the tincéir himself.
Well, after seeing that exhibition, I was even more amazed at the quality of Dan O’Driscoll’s work more than six decades ago. Apparently, Curly Nellie, in our kitchen, jokingly said to Mam one day: “Well, Missus, I’d swop one of my black (haired) lads for your little foxy boy.”
I have no recollection of her saying those words, but was told lately that I ran screaming from the kitchen, down the room - appalled at the prospect that my mother might ‘give me away’!
The two men who caused me to burst into tears in my younger days at home were Tom Coleman and Jim Woods.
I think Coleman was a handyman and skilled at building dry-stone ditches and fences. He had probably done work for both my grandfather and father.
Mam told me years later that when Tom Coleman’s voice was heard at the back door, I’d cause such ‘milé-murder’ that he’d be in a state and say ‘Have that child colic, worms, or what ails him?’
The third cause for my displeasure was strange - it was the self-same Jim Woods who rushed my mother to Mary Kate Griffin’s Marie Celine Nursing Home on Wellington Road in Cork city on the day of my birth!
He was a great friend of my father, even though there was a big age gap between them. They were best friends - both mechanically minded and Jim became a Ship’s Radio Officer. He was handsome with film star looks and lovely smile.
Long after Dada had died, Jim would call at home when back from the sea and, again, the minute I heard his soft voice, my tantrums would start.
Jim left on a long sea-trip in the late summer of 1961. From Cairo, he posted a letter full of news from far-flung places with strange-sounding names to my father, Dan Arnold, c/o St Stephen’s Hospital, Glanmire, Co. Cork, Ireland. It arrived across the miles at St Stephen’s about a week after my father had died. It was given to Mam when she went up to collect all Dada’s clothes and little bits and pieces.
Strange, isn’t it, how a play or a song or a poem or even line in a book can trigger a memory?
The evening the call came at home that Jim Woods had died, I was out in the haggard, the kitchen window was open, and the radio was on. I was doing some job or other, humming away to the tune on the wireless, The Drifters
To this day, wherever I am and whatever I’m at, if that song comes on, I’m reduced to floods of tears as I think of that young man on February 8, 1957, driving at speed through the ‘Hill, Rivertown and Sallybrook on that maternity drive - God bless you and keep you, Jim.
You know, people regularly say to me, ‘John, you’ve a great memory altogether’. In truth, I haven’t, but I got into the habit 40 - nearer to 50 - years ago, of simply jotting down anything I heard as regards times and people of earlier years.
I might have only had an opened out cigarette box or a Mart docket or a piece of cardboard. I’d scribble down the relevant info and later on, at home, ‘transfer’ that information to a big ledger-type book.
Yerra, a lot of it was and is useless bits of lore, lies, laments and love stories. Nevertheless, years later, a bit like panning in a stream for gold, I’d often find a ‘nugget’ of some value.
I love the lines, ‘It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this ‘once in a thousand years’ has come today.” - written by Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin.
It sums up for me the importance of the here and now.
I know you may say I spend a lot of time in the past - a fair point - but then I firmly believe we must know where we’ve come from to appreciate the here and now. I look forward to every day because the ‘once in a thousand years day’ can be each day - different and so full of possibilities.
It’s great, when asked about some small little, inconsequential happening, to be able to truly say, ‘Ah yes, I remember it well’.
App?
