Families Part 4- Copyright Robert Fullarton 2007

 Families Part 4- Copyright Robert Fullarton 2007

Chapter 4

On the building site

In a small semi detached house in the recurrent line of council houses, approximately half a kilometer outside the town of Donaghadee, lay Patrick Donnelly inside his small wooden framed bed. He tossed around on the mattress and the duvet cover was knocked on the bedroom floor with all the jerking and twiddling his body mad, while he slipped in and out of consciousness. The clock ticked to its own schedule as it struck half two in the early hours of the morning. Patrick lay idle in his bed like a statute, made of coldest marble he stopped moving and lay still. The house was shabby and the rent was barely affordable, Patrick split his weekly wage and paid for the high accommodation along with two other local men who slept in the spare room in two small bunk beds. Yes Patrick had to share the house with two other men, but it was the only way to afford the rent.

The darkness drowned the light not a living soul could be seen from the view of the bedroom window. Suddenly outside the screeching sound of the male tom cats displaying their aggressive dominance were fighting outside on the garden pillared walls.

The hours dragged by, the clock ticked on and the darkness fled from the triumphant light

Finally the blackbird sung to its heart delight making his mark while wooing the female to his desire. Patrick awakened suddenly from the entangled dreams that scarred his sleep at night. He gazed with his sticky eyes at the silver clock; it was 7 o’clock in the morning. His head felt slightly delirious his legs were stiff from lying in the same position for so long. He grabbed his watch slipped it around his wrist and walked down the creaking stairs. In the small downstairs kitchen he found both his housemates already up, fully dressed with fancy suits, their hair all gelled up, with ties fixed firmly around their shirts and shiny black leather shoes on their feet. They stood up preparing some oatmeal for their breakfast and boiling a fresh cup of tea in a pot on the kitchen counter.

They looked and greeted Patrick.

“Ah, Good morning Paddy, sleep alright.”

“Nah, I have the same recurring dreams, you know the dreams where you dangle on the edge of a mountain pass, or a cliff and then you plummet for a while, but when you’re about to hit the ground you wake up. I shiver, with a cold sweat after when I wake up,”

Patrick responded

He poured himself a cup of tea and he drank black without milk or any cubes of sugar. He scrapped a lump of butter over a piece of wholegrain sliced pan.

“So George what’s it like working as a security guard. Is the pay decent?”

Patrick started a conversation but moved quickly and looked at his watch now and again.

“Well working in the bank can be tedious; standing around all day long while forms are signed money transferred from many hands and the room becomes flooded with people several times a day. The money is more than average, simply because I’ve gotten a raise from my boss, pretty soon in fact I might consider moving out, find a place that’s all mine somewhere near the centre of Belfast where I can find another job.”

George spoke at a hundred miles an hour; he seemed to be in a mad rush.

“Hey Billy, there’s a cup of tea waiting here for you,

A cup of tea in the morning clears the cobwebs inside,”

joked George.

“What a strange expression”

Billy replied laughing.

“My mother used to say that to me at the kitchen table when I was young.

Then shed say, George hurry up and stop daydreaming about, or you’re brain is gonna fall out from underneath you’re head.”

They all laughed, while they wolfed down their breakfasts and slurped on their hot cups of tea.

“Hey, it’s twenty past seven already I better get a move on, hey I’ll see you this evening, goodbye”, said George wiping his mouth at the kitchen table as he ran to the hallway, grabbed his case and ran out the front door in a hurry for work.

“Goodbye”, they both shouted after him.

“Hear, I’m going to have a wash I’ll see you this evening Bill.”

Patrick left the table, and went upstairs to get dressed and washed for work.

Patrick got on his bicycle and cycled across the streets and over past Donaghadee, not far in proximity away from east Belfast. He turned right while he went down a narrow back street near East Belfast and swung into a large dusty looking building site.

Over a dozen other workmen arrived, some carried wheelbarrows with bricks, mortar and cement, while others carried tools and equipment for the job at hand.

Patrick locked his bike at the side of the workmen’s shed, where the equipment, the wooden flooring and the pipes for the plumbing were stored.

Now it was just after nine o’clock and all the workers were arriving on schedule, some had even been working before eight in the morning. The site surveyor, the chief architect and the director of the building site were all out busy engaged in conversation with the hard pressed agile workers. The sun shone out and beat hard on their backs.

At least it was Friday and the workers dreamt about their weekend rest, some however worked on Saturday’s taking only Sunday off as they regarded it as the one genuine day of rest, folk called it the Sabbath day, the Protestant community were strict to enforce it, no building and certainly no football to be played.

Patrick wore old clothes; he wore braces with an old white shirt underneath and a hat to protect his head from injury, he wore old blue denim trousers which were ripped at the sides. He collected nails and tools from a box and after talking to his supervisor he continued on with what he had begun the day before. He hammered nails into long thick planks of wood, which lay in long rectangular lines; he worked on the dining room flooring. Patrick was not distracted and he worked with such effort as a steam train chugs on its long and hurried destination and purpose. He hammered and nailed, chiselled and glued long planks of wood, which he slotted into the floor. On his left and right beside him, men mixed cement and worked on the finishing touches to the grey and incomplete walls of the house itself. The men worked solemnly in the baking summer heat, not a word heard in conversation except when one needed instructions from one of the supervisors. The building site stretched for miles around the compound, the recurrent and incessant sound of labour heard in the shovels digging deep through the mounds of soil to lay the pipes all along. At two o’clock the men were permitted a half an hour’s break to rest their weary soul’s and get a bite to eat. Down the workers went wiping the sweat from their soaked bows. In the workers sheds they grabbed their belongings and formed social groups, they unwrapped their lunches and sat quietly scarcely speaking, focused completely on their jobs at hand. When they all had finished eating most them, rolled their tobacco or smoked their pipe and began to converse to each other.

Patrick tended to congregate with his fellow catholic workmen and they were perched near the walls to the entrance of the construction site on the left corner where they usually sat. Patrick was chatting quietly amongst them and their was a great spirit of camaraderie and friendship, the mood was pleasant, and the weather fine.

Five men sat in a small circle talking; one of them was an overweight, but rather tall looking figure that dominated and lead the course of the conversation.

“Gerry, stop talking and shut up”

, he said in a rude manner to the man beside him.

“So, one summer, on the eve of the twelfth parades, me and Mary moved house from Castlewellan up to Belfast. The council agreed to my demands on housing stupendously on my record of bravery for the British armed services.” He said sarcastically

Patrick interrupted him.

“So you, served on the western front.?”

“Yes at Flanders for two years of service.

So anyway, I moved into this lovely well decorated and well furnished little  

Semi detached house on the lower Ormeau road. We settled in grand and I even found employment working as a partner for a good friend of mine in large greengrocers off Castle Street in the city centre. The Prods would have none of it, no catholic would hold a premises of that size when a Protestant should and could run it more efficiently they thought. So on the eve of the twelfth three years ago we found to our disgust the window panes were all smashed and a letter demanded us to leave quietly in the night or face the music, as they called it.

So next day, with an air of determination in us, I replaced the panes of glass, I worked harder than ever and more customers came to our surprise. Business was good, in fact better than ever and we now sought hard to extend our staff. Time had passed, several months to be precise, we discovered to one morning that somehow some thugs had broken into the shop in the dead of night; they ransacked the place and yes, of course smashed the windows. My wife and I went as quick as we could go to the police and the local council neither did much to help, they promised police protection and yet they would not give an inch to help us and the mobs finished off our hopes and dreams. So my business has closed down and now I’m back here working once again.”

His words left a lasting impression on the other men beside him. There was a quiet pause As the men lamented on his tragic tale to tell.

“And what happened to your partner, the man who helped run the shop!”

One of the men interrupted the awkward silence.

“He moved south of the border, his nerves got the best of him, I still see him occasionally.”

His face was gripped with anger, and his human reason inside had all but diminished.

He combed his long black hair and spoke again, except this time he spoke in a more quiet manner, almost a whisper even.

“Patrick come here for a minute, I need to speak with you!

Walk over here with me, please!”

“What’s the matter then with you?”

Patrick demanded to know.

“Patrick, I’ve known you for a while so can you keep a secret!”

“Yeah what is it Phil?”

“Swear to God, and hope to die, you won’t tell a living sole, now will you.”

“No, I damn well wont, now out with it!

What is it?”

“I know a man involved with the IRA in Tyrone, he’s from Dungannon, and not far from you’re hometown. My wife left me recently, she had an affair with another man, he was an accountant from Belfast, they moved in together and now I live all alone, however in the last three months I decided to join the IRA, we planted devices on local railway tracks, raided and robbed from the rich, shot B men and generally disrupted the Northern state from functioning.”

Patrick looked at him perplexed and astonished with the words ears herd.

Phil looked back warily, and spoke reluctantly.

“I’m wondering, I have a contact if you ever want join, for protection and to defend our community.”

Patrick was certainly not interested, in the affairs of politics and the bloodshed of war and civil strife.

“No, my family would be ashamed of me, if I ever did such a thing.

No, never. Don’t go on about this in such a place as this, if anyone heard you, they’d fire you and have you arrested under the internment act, and probably fire me for having associated with you.”

Patrick worked himself into a rage, his face went scarlet red with fury, and his rubbed his hands through this fine golden blonde hair. Now at this stage workmen began to glance over at what was happening, to listen to all the commotion.

“Hey I know what you’re thinking, don’t scrutinize my life,

 I am not responsible for the murders of those innocent farmers in Tyrone,

I don’t kill civilians, I am a soldier of the republic, and I am fighting to liberate our people against the Brits. They don’t give a damn about you and me and our sort, pat!”

Patrick responded,

“I find it sad that you’ve got to throw you’re life away for a stupid cause, a bunch of uneducated guerrillas, who couldn’t fight a war on conventional lines so they hide and strike in terror. They lost against Collins, so now they try to derail the peace between North and south and kill innocent people while they sleep in their beds at night.

I have no interest; anyway lunch is over, back to work.”

The workmen scattered all around and listened to their work orders from the site supervisors; they grabbed their toolboxes and proceeded back to working.

Patrick began to shovel and remove the waste left over from the building materials.

The day wandered on, the sun moved across the sky its position as restless as the working men. Their hands were covered in mud and their clothes filthy with dried muck and dried cement.

Patrick went sound asleep that night, completely still at one with peace, embracing midnight’s sweet chariot, struck with cupid’s silver bow, he dreamed of the girl who held his heart, she lived back home. Patrick could never pluck up courage to hold her love.

He was a dreamer, one of life’s drifters who came and went, a shadow drifting henceforth amongst clouds of heavy rain.  He was unsure with his destiny and he knew his future hope could not exist within his family’s dreams, which rested upon his shoulders. He was the chosen one, the favourite son in the family and expectation rested on his shoulders maybe too heavy a burden for a human soul to bare. So the night was still once again and the drone of three men snoring could be heard coming from the bedrooms as peace rested such weary men in its arms from the worry and constant troubles of the world outside.