It was an era passing. The cars, with trailers attached, were in a long queue for a city dump.
The trailers held broken chairs and tables, mouldy carpets, dressing tables of a certain vintage, known only to those of a certain vintage. Nothing would be the same in flatland, once these trailer loads were dumped. The departing decor reminded me of candlewick bedspreads, peeling wallpaper, creaking floorboards - and rent left inside for the landlord to pick-up on Friday. His master key gave him access to all the flats and bedsits.
No doubt, he had a good root around as well, checking for signs that "unauthorised" tenants were not camping down at his expense.
A friend swears she found her "respectable" landlord sniffing her sheets when she came home unexpectedly and laughs that he must have been in some kind of trance not to hear her tramping up the worn floorboards of the house.
Gardaí and teachers were mainly landlords, because their salaries were guaranteed as State employees. So, in an era of economic timidity, banks loaned "permanent and pensionable" pillars of society with mortgages for rented property (now banks are queuing to lend). Then, being gardaí or teachers, mainly from the country, their professional curiosity of the day-job spilled over into their tenants' lives. Correspondence was often inspected, names and contacts filed away for future reference. I imagine many former tenants would be surprised at their landlord's knowledge of their lives as well as their intimate friendships.
Certainly, those kind of prurient landlords were very useful to other "agencies", if an occupant came to the notice of the law.
Absconding debtors, refugee husbands, men defaulting on income support - whatever form of human aberration you care to mention could be found in the warrens of bedsits in the cities. Especially during 30 years of paramilitary activity by a minority of young men, usually from the North. If the gossip is true, then the old boy network of Garda landlords was put to practical use, in surveillance of a fugitive in a rented room. Frankly, if the subject was important enough, a microphone probe was more easily installed with the co-operation of a pliant landlord.
The mushrooming of apartment blocks has, among other changes, ended the era of the hands-on landlords in the decaying Georgian houses.
Companies own chunks of new blocks, other companies do much of the letting. Rents are payable by banker's order, with tenants hardly knowing the name of the legal owner of the property. There is no occasion for the two parties to meet, let alone form an impression of each other's character.
Going, going - the era is gone. Now, there is no rental market for the mouldy carpets and the tired furniture, save for a few pockets of immigrant habitation. Most tenants live in apartments of good quality, with light and airy rooms. The technology of personal contact, from mobile phones to email, means they are unlikely to die of either malnutrition or social neglect.
As long as the rent is paid, and tenants do not make a nuisance of themselves, one can have a wide variety of behaviour and activity going on above, below or next door. From poetry clubs to flat earthers, from student Marxist Leninists urinating in the face of history (opposite wind direction to me, please). If all this sounds like a sentimental song to an era gone, so be it.
Back to the queue for the council dump, priced according to the material. "Solid building materials" cost €10 and so on. Ahead of me a trailer drove up to a free skip for "paper and cardboard only", but other stuff spilled out. Old wallpaper, with plaster attached. Lots of plaster . . . a cascade of plaster.
The dump foreman did his nut and abused the offender and, like a prison guard, stood over him until he swept it all up. It was not a pretty sight, to see the old man humiliated. Others in the queue turned around and departed. Maybe they, too, had a wallpaper of an era gone, with plaster attached. Maybe some were landlords of a certain vintage , not sure how to function in today's property world.
