Gander at the Gate by Rory O'Connor

Author:Rory O'Connor [Rory O’Connor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843512226
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

– 13 –

Uncle Jack

MY UNCLE JACK gave me a fair share of tormenting in my young life, but he was also my great protector. He was my mother’s brother, the youngest child in a family of three boys and four girls, born in a small cottage at the edge of the town of Abbeyfeale on the road to Limerick city. Their father, my grandfather, was a small man called Maurice, a gardener who spent his whole life tending the flowers and the trees and cutting the grass at the local Convent of Mercy about four hundred yards down the road. I never knew him as a child except to see him in a small old photograph, standing up with what looked like a fair bit of pride beside an ass’s car with a small donkey between the shafts. He was wearing a cap, with a good moustache and a fine pipe with a nice curled stem in his mouth. He looked very old to me, and as he fell out of the same car not too long afterwards and died from his injuries, I never knew too much about him one way or the other. He was no more than seventy years of age.

Jack, being by far the youngest, was reared a pet and was a reluctant scholar. His big sisters dragged him down the road to infants class in the convent school winter and summer, until he grew out of his childish ways. He was then sentenced to about ten years, to complete his education in the local national school in Church Street. It was shortly after the start of the First World War at the time, and Jack carried out his own small wars with the teachers who were trying to make a man of him. It was said he could have done well at the lessons if he set his mind to it, and he had a great attachment to simple lyric poetry, and balladry, which he carried with him to the end of his days.

The trouble was he had a mind of his own, with a kind of a pride in himself, and he disputed this, that and everything with great adroitness and dexterity, with anybody who was unfortunate enough to become entangled with him. This was not an endearing quality with hard-pressed teachers, especially as Jack was not so much interested in the subject at hand, but in winning the argument. The result of this was that, as they said, he never succeeded in making anything of himself, unlike his sister, my mother. She, with the help of the nuns, went on to become a Junior Assistant Mistress, a kind of national school teacher, and taught for all her working life at Knockbrack school, a mile across the valley below Knocknagoshel village.

He became, as he said himself, a jack of all trades, and became adept enough at fairly skilful work, such as painting, fixing roofs, fixing gates, or even at times doing small extensions to cowhouses or pigs’ cabins.

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