THE paraphernalia of coming from a Garda household littered my childhood and continues to pervade the various ways I view life and people. The barracks (where we lived in "the quarters") was a powerhouse of activity. We were at the centre of things. Even in winter when it appeared there was nothing much happening, the Co Kerry barracks hummed along, fuelled by an energy of its own and the things it dealt with.
Even when the summer tourists had gone, the schools had reopened, the emigrants had returned to Harlesden, Camden Town or New York, and the extra guards drafted in for the season were scattered, there was a new, but no less exacting routine for my father and three or four guards who were there all year round.
The barracks in Ballybunion is in a commanding position, taking up one side of the square. From its windows you can look down the Main Street, up Church Road and see all the incoming traffic from Tralee, Listowel or Limerick. It is a big, rambling house with a long landing upstairs and wide window-seats everywhere. You could sit reading, hidden behind the curtains. We had no inside bathroom for a couple of years. Then, a small bedroom was turned into one leaving me with an abiding yearning for bathrooms that are real rooms.
Then, in the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, the barracks was a caravanserai at the centre of things. The guards did the census and much else of an official nature. People came to get passports, references, requests to find missing relatives in England, to look for advice if they were thinking of taking a civil case - often over land - to court, or to get a young man to marry the girl he had got into trouble.
There was little or no welfare and I remember my father sending women, widowed or deserted, or men with problems to Dan Spring, our TD. My parents never discussed politics but it was taken as read that it was Dan Spring who got things done.
You could set your watch by my father. He went out our back door, crossed the yard and went in the back door of the barracks at 9.20 a.m. precisely every weekday except Mondays. On Mondays, they had a special inspection and drill in the day room at 9 a.m. sharp. His uniform, which was always spick and span, got a special damp ironing that day. He polished his shoes until you could see yourself in them. He Silvo-ed his buttons, using a special gadget that fitted around the buttons, so that the liquid did not get on the material. My mother would brush down the back of his jacket. His hat was put on with a little more care on Mondays and court days.
At one minute to 1 p.m., he recrossed the yard and came back into the kitchen for dinner. Afterwards, he sat in the enormous easy chair near the range and read the paper. Sometimes he closed his eyes and appeared to doze. After the Topical Talk on the radio, he would ruffle through the paper again. He was always gone by ten to two. At twenty to four, he came back again for a cup of tea and a couple of plain biscuits. Then, he donned a gaberdine coat in winter, or a light tweed sportsjacket in summer, called the dog and often one of us, and set off down the Main Street. At five to four exactly he dropped a bundle of official brown envelopes with a harp on them into the letter box outside the post office - the post was collected at 4 p.m. There was never a day when he did not have a decent handful of letters to send off.
In summer, we went to the strand for a swim. In winter (after the Listowel Races until Easter or Whit) he, or we, would go for a long, brisk walk back the Long Strand, or up and down the now eroded path on the sandhills that skirted the golf course. Sometimes he would go all the way to the Cashen River, and come back by the road, calling in at the graveyard to inspect new graves - about six or seven miles in all.
He liked walking but he and the guards also often cycled out the country. They were sometimes on official business but nonetheless stopped along the way to talk to farmers working in fields or in their haggards. There were regular houses where they would have a cup of tea or a drink of water.
A few times a year we would go on a really long walk to the Hill and down the other side. In that flat part of north Kerry, the Hill is simplistically named but it has a heroic past. Its real name is Cnoc an Air, and it is where Fiona and the Fianna are supposed to have fought a bloody fight with invaders. You went up past Doon Church, to Rahavannig and Derra - the dividing line between us and Ballylongford. Lahasreagh Ballynoneen and down by Moohane and Ahafona and back up the village by East End.
On this walk, the townlands merged into one another. My father knew them all. He knew where each one started and finished. He knew who was in every house, who had died there who had emigrated and who had troubles. He might tell you things, but not much. He was compulsively, obsessively secretive, or perhaps it was just discretion. Sometimes, he would spell things backwards for my mother and we would try to guess a word here and there. Sometimes, they would talk in Irish. We would try to keep up. But there was an implicit, unspoken rule that we never repeated anything outside the house. Usually we had little interest.
This undefined discretion permeated to the wives of the guards. They had a special relationship. While they were part of the general life of the town - the ICA, cleaning the brasses in the church or whatever, they also had a particular friendship with each other. Often it was only the jobs of their spouses they had in common but that close, almost familial thing existed between them, like a mantle of responsibility.
This clannish rapport between Garda families was a universal thing. When someone got promoted or someone else's child did particularly well in any field, it was almost as good as if it happened to one of us.
We picked things up by chance and stored them away. For example, there was no bank in Ballybunion for much of my childhood. A lending agency ink Cork used to ring my father to find out - about people's credit worthiness. If he took the call on the phone extension in our hall, we would overhear the conversation by staying very quiet on the landing upstairs or opening the door of the back kitchen a fraction.
"Yes, he's fine," he would say. "A good farm of land there. They re an industrious family." Or, he would urge caution. "Well, I wouldn't give him that much. Maybe half. They say she is bringing a good dowry with her, but nothing definite is settled yet.
Sometimes, late at night, women would ring, their voices shrill with bitterness and anger. They wouldn't give their names but demanded that such and such a pub or hotel be raided. Usually it was because their husbands were holed up, drinking after hours, unwilling to go home.
My father was famous for his strictness, his authority and his sense of duty. He came from that generation of sergeants and guards who were never off duty. If the barracks was closed, people just came round to our door. The phone was always turned over. He never took days off and only had minimal holidays to visit relations. The shelves in the pantry off the kitchen were laden with bottles of whiskey, brandy and sherry which the publicans and hoteliers delivered faithfully every Christmas Eve. I used to wonder why they bothered since he continued, to raid them all with assiduous regularity.
Brendan Kennelly says he and his pals always had to give duty dances to the sergeant's daughters, feeling it might lessen the penalty if they were caught without a light on their bikes going home.
My father used quaint language when talking about some "clients" as he described them with a withering tone in his voice. He would call some of them "blackguards" or "real blackguards". A rogue or a rascal was a lesser evil.
We often went to sleep to the howls and rich, roaring language of the drunks in the lock up, which faced on to the back yard. They would bang the door, curse and swear until they passed out, exhausted in the tiny cell.
My father was a tall, tidy, meticulous man with neat, distinctive writing. His own father had been in the RIC and had died young, leaving my grandmother with five young boys to rear on a small pension. My father's pride in the Garda Siochana or "the force", as he usually referred to it, was cosmic. There was no other body of men like it, no better members, no higher standards. He died the year after he retired, in 1975 - 21 years ago tomorrow.
