Out of Fashion

 I’m on the road from Party to Tourmakeady, my father in the passenger seat mime-critiquing my driving; his left foot breaking hard into the rental car’s floor as we veer, at twenty miles-an-hour, into a sharp corner.  

I feign indifference, poorly; my teeth grind-critiquing his not-so-fancy footwork.  

Off to our left, gateways in the trimmed-by-Guinness-and-cattle-lorries blackthorn bushes that line the fields yield us an occasional glimpse of the beauty and expanse of Lough Mask extending its gunmetal-grey watery surface all the way to foreign land of County Galway.

Home on holidays after handful of years in Boston, today my father and I are on a fashion mission.  I would more precisely describe it as a lack of fashion mission, but the fashionistas have solemnly decreed that indifference to fashion is, by their achingly ironic logic, itself a fashion. 

My goal for today is to procure a navy-blue jumper, heavy enough for even a Boston winter day, but light enough that it doesn’t look quite like a suit of armour.  Ideally it would be the progeny of the selfsame navy-blue jumper that I’m both wearing today and have worn in Boston for the past two years, with its clothing-name translated to “sweater.” 

A navy-blue jumper that covers a never-met-an-iron-in-its-life collared shirt, with a pair blue Wrangler straights and black leather, never-in-their-sad-life-polished shoes is the attire in which my fashion-indifferent mind clothes my human body.  The only modifications to this lack-of-fashion dress code are when work requires that I either swap out the Wranglers for a pair of anonymous navy pants or that I swap the never-polished black shoes for muddy work boots.

My simple mind needs life itself to be simple.  And because life is never simple, I exact revenge by keeping anything I can under strict control.

On a previous trip home, I had elected to shop in Clerys in Dublin.  Clerys was the huge shop – or at least in the 1970s was considered huge in an as yet not consumerism-fixated-Ireland – to which every Irish mammy dreamed of visiting to outfit the entire family in one extreme jumper-tugging, foot into shoe squeezing, “be quiet ya brat” back of the head clattering, session. 

There I was in Clerys, my trusty blue jumper cast off as I rifled through the bins of jumpers that Clerys buyers had erroneously thought were “fashionless enough” for strapping young Irish men.  I wildly plucked one jumper after another out of the pile, exasperated at the sight of fashionable designs, colours other than blue, highly risqué collar shapes (probably from France,) until I finally found what I wanted.  Pulling on the perfectly weighted, navy-blue jumper, I felt the thrill of success, only to realize I’d just tried my own old jumper.

 Dejected, I walked out onto O’Connell Street to plead my case with Jim Larkin.

“Now ‘twas out this way that I solved my first case as detective,” my father, his left foot momentarily still, says with a sigh.

“Are ya serious?” I respond with genuine enthusiasm for his opening up.  Perhaps his nervous-passenger stress is prying open his mind.  I know for sure he’s another being who keeps anything he can under control.

“Yeah, ‘twas way back in the early sixties, an’ did ya know that when we’d be out on roads like this, they’d on’y be dusty ould dirt roads.  I’m not jokin’ ya.  There was hardly a drop a tarmac in the county, maybe not even in Connacht.  The only road that was tarmacked out of Castlebar atallatall was the Roscommon road for people going to Dublin.  Everywhere else we were bumping along in old Ford Zephyrs, God bless an’ save us, but they were great ould yokes, them Zephyrs.”

He grits his teeth and throws his head back.

“No road signs nor nuthin, no need for them, sure everyone knew where they were goin’.  We’d get sent out ta find someone, no address nor nuthin, just a name an’ a townland.  Half the people’d be helpful, an’ t’other half wouldn’t even look ya in t’eye.  That’s how it went out here, an’ a course we’d get lost, every road looking the same ta us as t’others.  An’ d’ya how we’d find our way back?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I say, after a decent few moments of pursed-lips, head shaking.

“Telegraph poles.  Nearly every village had a Post Office with a telegraph in it, an’ we knew if we followed the poles an’ wires for long enough we’d end up on a main road.”

“An’ wouldn’t you meet other cars that you ask where they were comin’ from?”

“Orra, hardly atallatallatall, sure who’d have a car in them days on’y t’odd doctor maybe or a teacher who had to drive a ways ta their school, an’ judges I suppose.  Them ould shi…,” he shakes his head fierce fast, “always took care a themselves, an’ them on mileage.  That was a big thing then, ta be on mileage.  Some lassie above in Dublin an’ her maybe from Cork or Kerry pro…cessin’ mileage forms sent in from Mayo.”

He throws his head backwards.

“An’ the poor thing, she couldn’t find Achill on a map, if she had a map ta find it on.  An’ sure there’d be roads washed out with rain an’ a tree blown down could close a road for a day or two, all kinds of reasons why courthouses were tens a miles further apart than a crow would fly.”

He grits his teeth again, stares straight ahead at the sun glistening off the wet tarmac.

“Ah sure back in them days, I don’t know that we even knew we owned the country.  I think the half a them, certainly the civil servants above on cushy numbers in Dublin, were thinking Harold Macmillan would come take the country back any day now, an’ pay all the crazy bills they’d run up.”

“Are you serious?  Did people really think the Brits’d come back again.”

“Naaahh, I don’t think so,” he shakes his head slowly.  “I think some of them above in Dublin as thieved as much they could, they woulda ben happy to have someone come in an’ fix things again.  Sure, there was ships full a people leaving this country in them days an’ the supposed guverment able ta do nuthin about it.  You’d turn around an’ half a village’d be gone.  The best a young lads an’ lassies, all over there in New York, Chicago, London, even Boston.  Sure, you’re the wan that’d be meetin’ them people who left then.”

“I suppose so, you do come across a fair wallop a people who’ve been out in Boston since then.  There was ould fella from Leitrim I met in a pub one night.  He was fierce bitter altagether.  He had never gone back to Ireland, not even once since … I think it wuz sixty … three.  The father had died a few years before he left, an’ then mother died suddenly, a heart attack or something.  Anyways, twoulda taken him a week or more to get home on a ship an’ she’d a ben buried by then, so he never went.  Then he fought with the brother over the farm. The two of them sendin’ nasty letters over an’ back across t’Atlantic.  Course the mother, or father, had left no will nor nuthin.  Anyway, the brother drank the farm in a few years an’ he went off to London leaving nuthin’ but money owed.  So, yer man never went back.  Nuthin’ to go back to.  Isn’t it sad, them sorts a lives?”

“Aaahhh, ‘tis, ‘tis, sure this bleddy country … ya can’t trust it.  When I was a young buck, back in the thirties, an’ Dev takin’ on the might a the British Empire … on our backs.  ‘Burn ever’thin’ British but their coal’ says he, an’ him atin’ three square meals a day above in Dublin.  An’ sure I believe the British barely notice we went again them.  Meanwhile, below in Clare, out in Tullig we’re flingin’ calves over the side of the cliffs ‘cause the farmers didn’t have the grass ta feed them.  Yeah, yeah, ‘twas terrible, so bad that Dev started givin’ a few bob for calf hides to at least stop that madness.”

We drive on, the tires hissing through a huge puddle.  The clouds clear revealing the surprise that a clear, blue sky lives behind their grey-gloom.

“D’ya see up there now,” Da points across in front of me.  “That’s where that Shaw lad lived, d’ya remember him, t’actor.”

“Oh yeah, the fella from Jaws.”

“I don’t know … what he was in,” Da throws his head back in disdain at Hollywood.  “But he was a big shot.  He had ta register with us within in Castlebar as a foreign alien.  I mean not in the way some Pakistani fella’d be registerin’ with his paperwork all upside down, speckled with food stains an’ half the pages missin’.  No, no, no.”

He shakes his head.

“Shaw’d have a Ballinrobe solicitor come in with all the paperwork in perfect order.  An’ it’d barely be on yer desk when the shites above in Dublin’d start ringin’ down ta the barrack ta tell us ta hurry up he was goin’ abroad ta Hollywood.  ‘Abroad ta Hollymount is it?’ says I ta wan them, ‘sure he’s free to motor over there any day he likes!’  I’m glad I’m done with that lot an’ them ringin’ ya on the phone makin’ ya feel like you’re the eejit.”

He turns and stares across me out to Lough Mask as it turns slowly from grey to blue.

“An’ the poor ould divil of a Pakistani tryin’ to make a few bob sellin’ shirts outta the back of his van above in Market Square, all his paperwork’d go down ta the bottom a the stack when a big shot’s pile came in.  Ferranti, the Italian millunaire out in Massbrook at Lough Conn, he was another one.  He had ta register with us too.  But he was wan a them as didn’t like anyone ta have anathin’ over him.”

“An’ why was yer man from England, t’Irish fella that useta be on the BBC, why was he in our house on Riverdale talkin’ ta you about Shaw one time?”

“How did you know Terry Wogan came ta our house?” he turns fast to me, his bushy eyebrows knitting together.

“I brought ye a cup a tea within in the sittin’ room.  My one brush with t’rich an’ famous.  I was in there all ears, goin’ as slow as I could with the tea, an’ he said sumptin about Shaw.”

“Ahh, that was all ould talk.  He was tryin’ ta get Shaw inta some filum, sure the money these fellas’d talkin’ about, it’d choke a horse it would.  How could anyone be worth milluns ta stand in front of a camera sayin’ a pack a lies of a story?”

He shakes his head rapidly in disgust.

“I’ll tell ya, I said ta the lads above the barrack wan time, after I had ta go down ta Massbrook ta get Ferranti’s signature that was missin’ from wan a the forms.  As good as his Dublin solicitors were they missed a form, or maybe we brought in a new form ta confuse them.  Anyways some shite from the Department rang an’ said ta go down an’ get it signed fast.”

He snorts at the memory of the phone call from Dublin.

“An’ sure Massbrook is a bleddy mansion of a house.  Orra yeah, with everything just so, white tablecloths an’ a big ould clock tickin’ away in the corner, glasses for wine an’ … oh stop would ya.  Nuthin, we’d useta.  An’ nice enough of Ferranti he offered me a cup tea or a drink if I took a drink.  But afterwards, I said ta the lads above in the barrack that if Ferranti could see how I lived, it’d be like how I feel when I go into a Traveller’s caravan.  It’d be the vury same thing.  He wouldn’t be able ta live like me any more than I can live like the Hen.”

“But why did Wogan come to you?”

“Aaahhh, he was havin’ a hard time trackin’d down Shaw ferta talk ta him, an’ … I don’t remember who I asked, but someone tol’ me when Shaw was below in the big house for a few weeks.  So, whoever it wuz asked me, I tol’ them an’ Wogan come over from London ta see him.  I’m not sure if anything ever came of that filum, but unless an’ it appears on the telly some evening, I’ll never know.  I certainly won’t be goin’ above ta the cinema puttin’ money in Shaw’s nor Wogan’s pockets.”

“In…terestin’,” I say, remembering not knowing who Wogan was at the time, but knowing his was a big shot because of the sportscar parked outside our house on Marion Row.

I see a roadside sign for a pub serving lunch.

“Will we go in this place comin’ up for a bit a lunch?” I ask.

“We won’t no, no, no!” Da says, surprisingly emphatically.  “I’ll tell ya what, after the wool factory, we’ll go home be Westport; there’s a place down the quays there that has a good lunch, they do great potatoes.  I find a lot restaurants cannit do good potatoes.  I don’t know what they do be doin’ within in them restaurant kitchens, even an ould dope like me can cook a pot a potatoes.”

With the courage of the righteous, we press on to the Gaeltra Wool Factory Shop in a clueless attempt to assuage my craving for a lack-of-fashion.

Our tires crunch in across the Factory’s graveled car park.  Da’s left foot mimes a hard stop as we approach the factory wall and my left foot obliges … but only at the last minute.

We stand out. 

I stretch all four limbs.  My body, not yet recovered from jet lag, and too many nights with too many pints, welcomes the stretch’s release of a wave of fabricated good feeling.

Inside the Gaeltra Factory Shop the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with shelving jammed with thick wool jumpers.  I take one look and know immediately that these jumpers have a distasteful essence of fashion about them and thus fail to qualify for a role in my fashionless wardrobe.  Still, I don’t want to immediately disappoint Da that the trip, his idea, was entirely for nothing, so I start rummaging amongst the dowdiest shelves in the hope they might contain a morsel of fashion despair.

After a few minutes I tire of my dissimulation as an avid shopper and mope around, hands pushed deep into Wrangler pockets, unpolished black leather dragging sideways across Gaeltra’s carpet.  Da, his hands pushed down into the pockets of his anonymously blue pants, is at the other end of the shop, his reading glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose, head cocked backwards to catch the lens just right as he reads the shop’s notice board.

“I think I’m good here,” I say, coming up and standing next to him.  “I didn’t find any….”

Embarrassed to say that I didn’t find a jumper precisely like the one I’m wearing, I hesitate.

“… you know they didn’t … have any … eh … yeah so.”

I mock grimace at the injustices regularly visited by designers upon the fashion-less.

Da turns around, hands on hips, his blue eyes peering out over the top of his reading glasses.

“Ah yeah,” he says, slowly surveying the room lined with floor-to- ceiling shelves full of wool jumpers.  “Sure, there’s no jumpers here atallatallatall.”

“Come on so, we’ll go,” I say hurriedly, afraid we’ll insult the Gaeltra’s efforts to induce fashion in the West of Ireland.

We leave, waving meek goodbyes to a heavyset, customer-indifferent woman perched on a tall stool behind the counter.

Back in the car, I follow Da’s directions up narrow-grass-growing-up-the-middle roads to get to Westport for a high-quality-potato lunch.

“How do you remember these roads?” I ask, shaking my head.

“Ora, … I suppose I wuz up an’ down them enough lookin’ for this fella an’ that fella.  Indeed, now that I think of it, this is the very road them calves were stolen on in the first case I solved as a detective.”

“Oh, my goodness, that would have been way back in the early sixties I suppose.”

“That’s right, we had just moved down from Clones, I wuz barely in the door a the barrack.  The super here at the time was a hard charger, he wouldn’t let nuthin go atallatallatll. That’s fine too, the more you keep after the small criminals, the more the bigger wans pay attention.”

He sighs, stares ahead silently for a moment and then continues.

“Anyway, a fella out this road had three or four Aberdeen Angus calves stolen on him.  An’ the poor divil, that was the whole year for him.  He’d a gone hungry that winter if we didn’t get them back ta him.  He paid ta have the bull come ta his Aberdeen Angus cow, a few pound for that, an’ then maybe a few pound with the vet if anything went wrong, course there was no taggin’ back then, so that wouldn’t be anything to him.  He’d to raise the calves for a few months on the bit a grass he had.  Then he’d then sell them off up the country ta some thief of a jobber who’d mark them up a hundert percent an’ sell them on ta some big farmer up t’country.”

He purses his lips, shakes his head.

“Anyways, he comes out wan mornin’ an’ there are the calves … gone!  Nuthin’ in the field, but whoever took them closed the gate after himself.  So, he wuz either a farmer himself, an’ done that from habit, or it ‘twas some regular thief who done in the mornin’ an’ didn’t want ta bring too much attention ta the fact that the calves were gone from the field.  We tried ta get fingerprints offa the gate but ahhh ….”

I can sense him shaking his head fast

“You know with the rain an’ back then the ould fingerprint kits weren’t great, sure now the lads from Dublin Castle can do so much with hair samples, an’ bits of a fellas clothes.  Abroad in England an’ the US they have this new D…N…A stuff that’s supposed ta be woeful powerful altagether.  Sure, a time will come when them microscopes know ever’thin’ about who done anythin’.”

He stops talking, shakes his head slowly, eyes staring ahead at the grass in the middle of the road disappearing under the car.

“An’ so how did you solve the great mystery a t’stolen Aberdeen Angus calves?”

 “Oohhh, it ‘twas good ould fashioned polis work let me tell ya that.  It took a few weeks but ….”

“A few weeks!” I interrupt.  “Sure, wouldn’t them Aberdeen Angus calves, an’ them as black as night with no markin’s whatsoever, have grown so much even the fella who owned them wouldn’t recognize them after a few weeks!”

“Aahh, that doesn’t matter with ould fashioned polis work.  No, no, no.  See, it ‘twas an awful thing ta do that poor farmer an’ the village knew it.  So, we done a bit a talkin’ ta this fella an’ that fella, an’ with a bit a …” he nods silently, “lookin’ t’other way to coax a lad ta talk, we got an inklin’ as to who might’ve suddenly grown a few calves in his field.  Sure, once we got a name, let me tell me, we didn’t have no D…N…A at that pint!  No, no, no.  We just worried it outta him!”

Nodding his head to unseen people in the past, his eyes stay gazing at the grass middle of the road getting eaten by the car.

“Oh yeah, you can leave the D…N…A stuff at home if you can get a thief worried.”