Two Walls and a Roof by John Michael Cahill

Author:John Michael Cahill [Cahill, John Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventure, Explorer, Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9781479164172
Google: 4YazMQEACAAJ
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2012-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

He better get sunscreen.

In about 1967 a man called Larry Anderson called to fix the mother’s TV set. She had it on rent for three shillings and six pence a week; the equivalent of less than twenty cents a week today. It was always in danger of repossession as she didn’t always have even that amount of money to pay for it, and it did get repossessed on a few occasions. The father loved it though as did we, and it was the greatest of pleasures to be sitting in your own home watching ‘Lincoln Vale of the Everglades’, ‘Mr Ed’, or some other exciting or funny programme. It was definitely a lot better than standing in the cold outside Tadgh Hurley’s window with the others who could not afford the magic box of light. The TV sets that were made in those days were very unreliable, and fixing them was like a black art. If you could fix a television set you were considered a kind of God, or at the very least a genius or magician. Those TV sets used valves or ‘tubes’ as the Americans called them, and these valves only had a limited lifespan. Each TV set had as many as twenty valves, all different sizes and costs too. Therefore they were always breaking down because the valves would burn out. If you were trained as a TV engineer, it looked like you were made for life, and as a late teenager I was about to go into that very business.

My Nannie had a large 23 inch Pilot set and my mother had a smaller 19 inch Philips set which was always in trouble. That meant that a man called Larry Andersen was a regular visitor to my mother’s house, and to a lesser extent, to Nannie’s also as he fixed both of them. He worked for a company called Buckley’s Stores in Millstreet town, the location for a famous Eurovision Song Contest held there in later years. On one of these occasions the mother asked Larry, who she liked a lot, if he had any job going for a ‘good lad’. She was meaning Kyrle, as we were both still going to Charleville Tech at that time, and she was preparing the road for her son. I had met Larry a few times when he was fixing Nannie’s set, but I was too shy to ask him for a job even though I loved what he was doing. He had no job then, but told mother that he would keep her in mind if a job became available. She was determined that Kyrle would get a good job, and soon she had answered an advertisement for a job in the ‘P & T’ as it was known then. This was the state owned Department of Posts and Telegraphs, later to separate out into the Post Office and Ireland’s national broadcaster now known as RTE. Kyrle went for that job and got it. He took off

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