“And here I will digress a little and tell you my opinions of drapers in general. With a few exceptions, I considered them to be the meanest money-grabbing types it has ever been my misfortune to come across,” writes the exasperated Lionel Cohen in this thrilling, trenchant and hilarious Cork memoir.
He had just turned down a sudden offer from the new Israeli government, an offer that would have made him chief officer of the first Israeli Coastal Radio Station. He was longing for the sea, for his salty “Sparks” cabin aboard the 6,000-tonne Kedmah as she plied between Marseilles and Haifa under the Star of David.
Trained at the old Cork Radio School, the style of his morse-code signalling had become an instantly recognised personal signature from Tilbury Docks to Parramatta Docks. In 1940 he had run away from home and joined the Irish Army in response to de Valera’s appeal for men to defend their country against invasion. It was the first of his many responses to appeals for help, a character trait that would determine the course of his entire life.
As army recruit No. 213032 he was present to enjoy Major General Costello’s pithy speech to the Coastal Artillery unit: “His message was that if there was an invasion of Ireland, we would never get off Spike Island alive, so make sure we died like soldiers.” This part of his memoir must constitute the best personal record of Cork Harbour’s Coastal Defence units ever written, or ever likely to be written. After the Emergency he set sail on various tramp steamers and cargo vessels, eventually serving on a homeward voyage as Radio Officer aboard a luxury P&O liner. Then the foundation of Israel intervened.
Then his Uncle Dave died and his father needed him to come back to Cork to run the business, a life he dreaded. He was soon shackled to the family garment factory, a business surviving on a pitiful margin of five per cent while selling to Munster drapers who demanded 40 per cent discount. The business was viable only as long as Lemass’s import tariffs protected the little enterprise. Lionel’s consolation was motor-cycle racing and he became a crack scrambler and, for twenty-five years, secretary of the Munster Cycle and Car Club.
But running a business with 60 employees was no easy task, especially after he ended up in Sarsfield Court hospital with TB. By the time he recovered the Cohen business was doomed: ‘The bank overdraft was creeping up again. I knew I had to make some decision or else I would be back in hospital... This was really one hell of a time and I walked and walked the streets trying to reason it all out.’
The fact was he had no head for business, no instinct for profit. What happened next was as extraordinary as any other unexpected turn in his life. He took a job with the Brothers of Charity at their boys’ care-home in Lota, Cork. This inspired him to attend the Kilkenny Diploma Course in Residential Childcare, run by his hero, Sr Stan. The knowledge gained in Kilkenny transformed his life, bringing joy and fulfilment as he now worked with empathy and renewed stamina. Even his morse-code skills came into their own as he learned the special sign-language “Lámh” that was used to communicate with deaf special needs children.
Inspired by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he became involved in the Special Olympics and he would meet her in Dublin in 1985. Those late years were wonderful years; and this memoir, written only for family reading, is one of the best Cork memoirs ever, a worthy companion to O’Connor’s An Only Child, Galvin’s Song for a Poor Boy and O Murchú’s Black Cat at the Window. The book is enhanced by marvellous photographs: Lionel in uniform at his sister’s wedding, Lionel with his beloved May at the Victoria Hospital dance in 1952, Lionel with his granddaughter Ruth walking by the sea at Ballinskelligs – all of it part of one of the most colourful lives ever lived by a member of that serious and mainly literary community of mid-century Cork Jews.
Thomas McCarthy is a Waterford-born poet. His prose book, Poetry, Memory and the Party, is published by The Gallery Press this December
