A Hare’s Breath 3 - The Accident

A Hare’s Breath 3 - The Accident

My mammy said she’s not being a snob or anything but the food we have to eat in our house is better than what a lot of other families have to eat in Ballymoney especially on a Sunday when we’ll have a chicken or a pork chop. Patsy Oliphant the butcher in Victoria Street always winks an eye at her when we’re in his shop and he leaves a bit of a kidney connected to one of the chops if it’s chops that she’s asked for. Patsy always says the chop with the kidney is for my daddy because it’s him that puts the food on the table but it isn’t him at all that puts it there. He only puts out the knives and forks and also the bottle of vinegar if we’re having a few chips and it’s my mammy who puts the food on the table. But my daddy goes to work every day and he brings home the money that he gets from Mr Glover Site Investigation so because of that he has the pork chop with the bit of kidney connected to it so I suppose the kidney’s a perk of his job.

Patsy Oliphant the butcher always talks to me when I go in his shop with my mammy and my sister. He’s a nice man and he’s always laughing but I never know what to say to him. Well to tell the truth I do know what to say but I’m too shy to come out with it to his face and with all the other mammies with their weans in the shop who’ll be listening while they’re waiting for their chops or maybe sausages. I’d like to know what are the perks of his job and does he get a bit of a kidney connected to the pork chop on his plate of a Sunday.

Sometimes when he gets home from doing his boring for Mr Investigation my daddy opens the back doors of his white Morris 1000 van with the blue joined-up writing on the sides and takes out a rabbit and tells us that one of his friends at work or a farmer he did a bit of work for gave it to him for the pot. I said to my daddy that we haven’t got a pot and he said something about Irish people never having a pot to piss in so I was even more confused after that and not sure I’d ever want to be eating a bit of rabbit from a pot that’s likely been pissed in. When he says things like that I think he’s a bit angry with himself or with everyone else around him or maybe it’s because of the soldiers from the British Army that want to look to see what he has in the back of his white Morris 1000 van when he’s running about the lovely County Antrim countryside in it trying to do his work.

Now and again he has in his white Morris 1000 van a few brown trout wrapped up in pages from the Belfast Telegraph. He says our Uncle Jimmy would have taken them away from people who didn’t have licences for catching brown trout in the river that goes by his wee farm in Glen Dun. Hearing about the people getting into trouble for not having licences for their brown trout worries me because it reminds me of when my mammy forgets to buy a dog licence at the post office for our dog and perhaps a river bailiff like Uncle Jimmy might take our dog away from us and give it to one of his relatives. Uncle Jimmy also gave my daddy a pheasant once that he said he had accidentally shot while he was out after Protestants. All the grownups laughed and my daddy said he couldn’t imagine the size of a pot you’d need to put a Protestant in to cook it. Uncle Jimmy said you wouldn’t do that anyway because there’s very little meat on a Protestant and what there is would be tough and too salty.

My mammy’s a Protestant from England and my Daddy’s a Catholic from Ireland so we don’t have to go to church because if we did we might upset some people by going to the wrong one. All the weans at the school I go to in Ballymoney are Protestants but all the weans at my old school in England were Catholic. The Catholic weans in England had Irish names but the Protestant weans in Ireland have English names.  In our family we all have to keep our mouths shut about the school in England and the nuns that were the teachers there and say that we’re not Protestants or Catholics or anything. My friend Bobby asked me if we are Protestants or Catholics because his mammy and daddy wanted to know. I told him that we’re neither of those so he said we must be Jews then and that’s why we don’t go to church because we’d have to go a way off to one of the big towns like Coleraine or Ballymena to find the special church for Jews.

It’s difficult because all my friends are Protestants but sometimes when we’re walking home from our school of an afternoon we see some Catholic weans walking home from their Catholic school and we have to shout things like ye wee Fenian gobshites and throw stones at them and they call us Proddy dogs and throw stones back. I think I might really be a Catholic because of all the things still in my head that the nuns at the school in England said to me about God and Jesus and his mammy being a blessed virgin and all the saints in Heaven which is a place that we’ll all go to but the Protestants would never be allowed in. My friend Bobby is definitely a Protestant and I really like him so I’ll miss him when we’re both dead.

One day my daddy was in an accident when he was driving along in the lovely County Antrim countryside in the white Morris 1000 van for his work. A big hare that wasn’t looking where it was going like an eejit jumped off a bank at the side of the road and hit the front of my daddy’s van. He said he was driving a bit fast so the whole of the hare from its head to its arse went crashing through the windscreen and landed on the leather seat where my mammy usually sits. I think she’d have been a bit scared and screaming if she’d been sitting on the seat when the hare came in because she always gets into a rare old panic when just a wasp or a moth comes in through a window at the side. My daddy said the poor old hare died straight away but its blood and the glass from the windscreen went all over the inside of the van and my daddy and the mess was something he’d never seen the like of. 

I always pretend my daddy’s white Morris 1000 van with blue joined-up writing on the sides is Thunderbird 2 off the television so it’s a pity it’s not the same colour. I saw pictures of Thunderbird 2 in the TV Century 21 comic and it’s green instead of white and on the black and white television it’s grey but it does have writing on the sides that says Thunderbird 2. I don’t know why they need to write Thunderbird 2 on Thunderbird 2 because everybody would know it was Thunderbird 2 if they saw it coming even if they couldn’t see the writing or if they couldn’t read at all like some of the poor weans at the Catholic school. When my daddy’s white Morris 1000 van is parked in the street at the back of our house nobody really notices that it’s there but I’m sure that if Thunderbird 2 landed there all the men in our street and round about would stand beside it and say Jaysus, is she not a beauty? or ah the bodywork on her!  

I don’t know what Virgil Tracy would do if a big old hare that wasn’t looking where it was going like an eejit came crashing through his windscreen. He’s the driver of the real Thunderbird 2 and he goes in it to help people when there’s been a major disaster but I’ve never seen him at a disaster so major that he has blood all over the leather seat beside where he sits or covering the trousers of his International Rescue organisation uniform. And he never has a wife or his mammy to sit beside him. He lives on a secret tropical island with his daddy and all his brothers and none of them has a wife which my daddy said is a bit peculiar if you ask him.

My daddy said when the poor old hare came flying into the van he stopped in the road for a few minutes but he didn’t know what to do so he drove off again with all the blood from the hare and the glass from the windscreen all over him until he found a telephone box in a village.  He used the telephone to talk to the people at Glover Site Investigation and they said they would treat it as a major disaster and send somebody to rescue him. I heard the Thunderbirds theme music playing in my head while my daddy was describing his accident. He said that twenty minutes later Thunderbird 1 arrived but really it was a man from Dervock called Hugh in a class of car that’s called a Land Rover and it’s bigger than a white Morris 1000 van and a lot dirtier and so is Hugh because he lives on a farm where the toilet’s in a tin shack at the end of the farmyard and you have to walk through a load of chicken shit to get to it so you’re best not going out there in your slippers.

My daddy said that everywhere Hugh goes he has a hessian chicken food sack with him probably for keeping his sandwiches in and the accident was after dinnertime so Hugh was able to put the poor old dead hare in it and leave it on the grass by the telephone box. Then he drove away in the broken white Morris 1000 van with blood on it so my daddy put the sack with the poor old dead hare in it in the back of the Land Rover where there was a lot of filthy drilling equipment for boring rock samples out of the ground and then he went home. Mr Investigation told Hugh to tell him that he didn’t have to do any more work that day so he sat in our kitchen all afternoon with a lot of cups of tea and cigarettes and my mammy was crying and he said that it was himself that should be crying because it was him that had been within a hair’s breadth of crashing the white Morris 1000 van into a wall with a bloody old hare sitting dead on the seat beside him.

I heard my mammy say that she hated the white Morris 1000 van but it was better than the green Land Rover because that’s what the soldiers from the British Army go about the lovely County Antrim countryside in so all the Catholic weans might think we are British soldiers and throw stones at us and we’d be within a hair’s breadth of being shot at by some paramilitary eejit with a gun but I don’t think she meant Uncle Jimmy.

The next day she wasn’t crying anymore and I heard her talking on the telephone to Mrs Tweed who lives next door and telling her that nobody would think our Land Rover was full of British soldiers because it was too dirty and the windscreen wipers don’t work. She also said to her that we had a nice bit of hare to put in the pot on Sunday and that it was one of the perks of my daddy’s job. But when my daddy asked if me and my sister would like a lift to school in the Land Rover I said no because I didn’t want anybody throwing stones or shooting at me but my sister went with him because it was raining and she had on her nice new shoes.

I told all the other weans in our street and round about all about the hare with the blood and glass on it and the Land Rover with all the dirt on it and that the hare was dead in a chicken food sack so it would be going in the pot and we’d be having a different class of a Sunday dinner on Sunday. But they all laughed at me and when we were playing in the school playground and I was looking for my sister to see if she was still alive or if she’d been shot by a paramilitary eejit they all shouted there goes the wee boy whose mammy cooks him dead animals off the road to eat for his Sunday dinner. They were wrong to laugh because a lot of them had mammies who only cooked sausages for dinner on Sundays, though some had a cousin who worked at the abattoir on the Finvoy Road and could hide a few pigs’ feet up the front of his jersey to sneak home for a wee treat once in a while.

Since the day of my daddy’s accident I’ve looked for the hares on the Green at the front of our house from my bedroom window every night. They play even when the Moon isn’t shining but without it they are harder to see. I’d be depressed if I didn’t see them at all. I’d be worrying that they’d crashed through the windscreen of a white Morris 1000 van somewhere with blue writing on the sides and I always feel sick when I think about a hare going in a pot. I said my prayers for them but I don’t know if the prayers will work because I only know Catholic prayers and because we live in the North of Ireland the hares might be Protestants or Jews.

Image: My own photograph of my own pre-decimalisation Irish threepenny piece with a hare on it that’s been faffed about with for ages using post-decimalisation photo-editing software on my own computer. Actually I’ve more than one. I’ve an old tobacco tin full of them. I counted them and found that there are sixty-three, which amounts to fifteen shillings and ninepence.

The next part:

Coming soon!