Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Joseph O’Neill
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was re-engaged by the Corporation as a driver of garbage trucks, works lorries and other vehicles. Jim became active in (possibly even the leader of) the Cork Corporation branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, and it may be that this fuelled the hostility of Philip Monaghan, the city manager. For whatever reason, Monaghan apparently had it in for my grandfather and fired him in about 1950 for accepting a bag of potatoes from a market gardener to whom Jim had delivered some goods as a favour. The hard times returned and Jim, by now in his forties, was forced back to intermittent labouring work. But during the course of the ’fifties, his technical flair, which ranged from knowing how to wire a house to understanding the workings of the combustion engine inside out, finally began to pay off. He worked for the South of Ireland Asphalt Company, maintaining plant and machinery on jobs that took him all over the country. He worked for McInerney’s, a company from Clare, and, doing a mechanical fitter’s job, in Foynes, Co. Limerick, for John Browne Engineering – the British company for whom, thirty years later, my father would work as the project manager of pharmaceutical construction projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In around 1958, he worked at Whitegate in East Cork, where a refinery had been built. It was around then that Jim, in his late forties, was paid to undergo a one-year apprenticeship as a pipefitter. A Dutch company, Verolme, was building ships at Rushbrook, near Cobh, and there was such a shortage of skilled labour that the government and the company invested in extensive training of the workforce. Not long afterwards came trade union recognition of single-year apprenticeships and my grandfather at last became an officially recognized skilled worker. From then on he easily found employment as a pipefitter on construction sites, and by the end of his working life, in the early seventies, his technical adeptness had led to work on weighbridge installation and calibration. In around 1968, Jim’s work took him abroad for the only time in his life. He went to Holland for Foster Wheeler – the company that had given my mother her first job in Mersin – and spent a few months in Rozenburg, near Rotterdam. In the only letter he ever sent to my father, my grandfather complained of the monotony of the experience, which was only broken, he wrote, when my grandmother visited him for a week.
Jim was born on 16 October 1909, ‘in Libra, the sign of balance,’ my aunt Ann said with a little laugh, because in fact her father was an agitated, moody man prone to explosions of temper. He was rarely at ease. Sitting about, relaxing, was out of the question: there was always a chore to finish, always something to be done. Punctual, he was intolerant of tardiness in others: if you were late for an appointment, he wouldn’t wait for you. He followed a strict morning routine: get up, turn the potatoes, eat breakfast, get to work early. When he returned home in the evening he went straight to the bathroom, washed, changed, and then came down for his dinner. He never ate in his work clothes and on Sundays he wore a three-piece suit and a hat. He sometimes smoked a pipe. He took great care of his appearance: he was a very handsome man with a fine physique – slim hips, broad shoulders – and not without vanity. He liked his children to look the part, too, insisting that they were always dressed well: he would tell Grandma (who made pretty skirts that the girls loved to wear) that they couldn’t afford to buy cheap clothes. He changed the soles of the children’s shoes himself: he’d buy the leather from O’Callaghan’s, cut it rough, let it soak overnight, and stitch it on the next day surrounded by the aromas of hemp and wax. Strips of bicycle tyres would be glued on to the soles for extra protection. Jim could fix just about anything, and his skills extended to woodwork and making furniture: my grandmother’s oak and glass china cabinet, still in use, was his handiwork. He was a disciplinarian, stern and domineering with his family, which (in Jim Junior’s phrase) he ran like an army. He was very authoritarian: his children said that fumes would come out of his ears if you tried to discuss something with him. ‘Don’t answer back!’ he’d snap, even though they might not be contradicting him. His daughters, growing up as teenagers in the ’sixties, sometimes felt he was anti-everything unless it was Irish. He’d yell if he caught them listening to Radio Luxembourg. If he heard a band playing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
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