Beautiful Affair. Mike Hanrahan

and Scotland.

      DAD

       Firefighter won’t you come and take my pain away,

       Firefighter bring me water, dampen down the flame.

      – ‘Firefighter’, What You Know (2002)

      My dad, Jackie Hanrahan, was a powerful influence on my life, his great strengths being his solid character, great sense of humour and unyielding commitment to his wife and family. My parents shared a very deep love that certainly bound us all together as a family. I have often wondered how they remained intact through all the difficulties and pressures of raising eight children. I cannot recall ever hearing my mother and father argue or show disrespect to each other. If they did, it occurred in the dead of night, far away from our young eyes and ears.

      He worked for the Clare County Council, initially in the supply stores and then as manager of the Ennis swimming pool, which was a great addition to the town and to our lives. We practically grew up in the water and came to be known to some as ‘the Cousteaus’. Our instructor was Dad’s great friend Tom Finnegan, who was the size of four very large men. To pass through the grades in water safety, you had to rescue him from the deep end of the pool. As you approached, he splashed, reached out his long arm, grabbed your tiny head in his hand and held you firmly underwater for seconds, raised you aloft and pronounced ‘Failed!’ before sending you back for another attempt. This went on until he was convinced that you had conquered the fear of approach, could swim round him and grab him from behind. He was a superb teacher who helped many of us to become very capable swimmers.

      My father smoked a lot but never drank. At sixteen he was caught drinking at a neighbour’s house party and a horrible uncle force-fed him beer slops until his face turned green. Some uncle! Dad never drank again, although in his last few months he confided that he sometimes regretted not going for a few pints with his family.

      Dad was a home bird, and especially loved the garden, and most of all his shed. His shed housed everything imaginable for DIY, and was a great source of peace and fulfilment for him. One year, he made nine Christmas stables, one for each of the family, with hazel sticks collected from the crag at the back of our house. He painstakingly cut hundreds of sticks to size, fixed them side by side to form three walls, made a roof and thatched it. Each stable measured two feet by one foot with straw scattered on a flat sheeted floor, peopled with a set of religious figurines. A coloured bulb was pushed through the back wall with a lead and plug hidden from view. They were works of incredible patience, and without doubt the most beautiful Christmas gift I have ever received – and I a very lapsed Catholic.

      When I was a kid, he helped my brother Kieran and friend Vinny McMahon to build a wooden table soccer game. As kids we often called to Carmel Healey’s games room in town, and as Kieran had become quite the champion, he had taken the notion to build his own for home practice. Dad built the wooden stadium from a sheet of plywood, measured to perfection, with two goalkeepers and twenty outfielders all made from half-inch heavy black tubing, fixed firmly to wooden rods fed through holes perfectly measured on the table walls. Two goal mouths completed the scene. A box of table tennis balls gave the neighbourhood many great days of entertainment, and the very enterprising Kieran and Vinnie made a small fortune by charging everyone a penny a game.

      I spent a lot of time in the garden with Dad, growing spuds, cabbages, carrots, rhubarb, lettuce and spring onions, forever planning for the following year. I read a gardening magazine piece on how to grow the perfect carrot by sifting all pebbles from the ground to allow the carrot free passage to grow to perfection, so I suggested it to Dad. I knew by the ‘Oh holy God’ look on his face what he really thought, but he replied, ‘Whatever you think yourself, away with you a stór (a beautiful Clare term of endearment). I’ll get the screed, and you can start sifting away.’

      I dug the appointed plot and painstakingly sifted about a square metre area free of all pebbles and rocks. I was exhausted, but I think Dad was even more exhausted looking at me. However, my efforts were rewarded with perfectly straight carrots – which tasted exactly the same as regular ones. I think I missed the rugged shape of the old carrots, so the following year we reverted to the traditional method, stones and all. I have come to really appreciate and understand his attitude, and what stayed with me from my life with him was his constant encouragement to follow an idea or a dream. He never saw any harm in attempting the impossible, even if it meant spending needless hours and hours sifting pebbles from a patch of ground. It was all about making the effort and doing your best.

      At twelve I started playing my brother Ger’s nylon-strung guitar. A young Franciscan priest, Pat Coogan, had recently arrived in Ennis and was playing soccer with our local team, St Michael’s FC. He played guitar and gave me my first lesson. One day, I sat down on my bed and heard a crack: I’d shattered my guitar. To the day he died, Dad was convinced that I did it on purpose to get myself a better instrument. I denied it at the time, but in hindsight he may have been right because I’d had my eye on an Egmond steel-string guitar in Tierney’s music shop. I eventually bought the guitar, along with my first Leonard Cohen album and book of songs. I was besotted with Cohen and started teaching myself his guitar technique from a system included in the songbook. Every day after that I flew through homework to get to my bedroom to sing his songs. After about six songs, Dad would shout up, ‘Have you learned that song yet, Mikie?’ Yeah, Dad, thanks … You just don’t understand.

      Despite the monotony, his encouragement never waned, and I even heard him reassure a mother distraught to hear that her son wanted to become a professional musician: ‘Sure, Mary, as long as he has a guitar on his back, he won’t go hungry.’

      STRAUSS AND THE TULLA CÉILÍ BAND

      When we were very young Dad bought a Philips record player and the most curious, eclectic collection of records imaginable. There was Strauss with the shimmering strings of ‘The Blue Danube’, the Tulla Céilí Band, the Dubliners with ‘Waxie’s Dargle’, Larry Cunningham, Donal Donnelly, Tom Jones, Doris Day, the Kilfenora Céilí Band and the Beatles. Our first record player was a turquoise blue, portable foldaway that looked like a suitcase. It had a turntable, a three-way speed switch for singles, albums and old 78s, two buttons, one for on/off and the other for volume, but that little box created the most incredible sounds that filled the entire house. I can still hear ‘Take me back to the Black Hills, the Black Hills of Dakota’ from Doris Day, with my mum’s beautiful soft voice singing along. Later, Dad bought a very fancy console-style stereo all in one, with radio, turntable, storage racks and speakers encased in a beautiful mahogany cabinet. Our record players were hardly ever silent and our record collection grew every week.

      THE SUMMER JOBS

      As soon as we reached our teenage years, we found gainful part-time employment at various shops in the town. I worked at Morgan McInerney’s hardware store in the market square, which sold everything from teapots to bags of cement. I was entitled to a staff discount, so all birthday and Christmas gifts carried a hardware theme. Mum’s were usually kitchen gadgets: a four-egg poaching pan complete with lid; a fancy cheese grater; a tomato slicer that required extra-special skills to avoid slicing fingers; and Dad’s favourite kitchen mate, the potato chipper, which he used every Saturday for our eagerly anticipated special treat. He loved that chipper, and we devoured each and every equally-sized chip it cut, the smell rising from the sizzling basket of Mazola oil, chips drained and sprinkled with salt, soaked in malt vinegar and served up with a good dollop of ketchup. Now that’s a food memory that’s hard to