For Percy’s dad, Pat, it was spoons. He collected spoons from every place he ever visited, and took to delegating the procurement of these blessed objects to anyone going anywhere, as if they were a tribute owed. Many a conversation was halted by Pat nudging his head in the direction of his spoon box and asking had you anything in your pocket for him.
Compared to such foibles and fancies, my dad’s own hobbies seemed slightly less niche. He had no interest in sport, save a passion for Formula One that alienated and intrigued me in equal measure. He loved cars and racing from a purely technical standpoint, and was subsumed by the drama of every tune, stop and corner. I tend to share the sentiment of Sean Lock when it comes to Formula One, in that I would get the same amount of enjoyment from turning on two washing machines at the same time and seeing which finished first. What makes Sean Lock’s gag even more applicable here is that my dad genuinely would, and I think at least once actually did, enjoy watching two washing machines go at once. We had two right beside each other in our utility room – the prison laundry – and routine testing of their abilities would have been par for the course.
When we were growing up, Daddy liked nothing more than lying, supine, on a grubby cloth he’d laid on the floor, muttering the names of screws to himself while he tried to ‘fix’ a machine he’d bought that same day. Our garage is still a mausoleum of bikes, mowers and machines of all types and stripes. My dad is not exactly a hoarder, but he does still maintain that the six old Superser heaters he has there will likely come in handy some time soon. Ditto the four or five propeller mowers, two or three ride-on tractor mowers, and a thousand other units of mechanical detritus that have sat in our cavernous garage for so long you could spend a lifetime there and never notice them.
This gadget graveyard was useful to us as kids, in the sense that it occasionally sucked Daddy into a time warp that gave us free rein for a few hours, especially on Saturdays, when he would otherwise be lining up chores for us. So when he was preoccupied, it was glorious. We’d watch him head out to the garage, intending to find, say, a pair of pliers, or a photograph of John Paul II, and audibly cheer as we watched him get waylaid mending a strimmer that hadn’t seen active use in twenty-two years. As we got older, we’d sometimes seed these distractions ourselves.
‘We don’t have a chainsaw, do we, Daddy?’ I’d ask innocently.
‘Why?’ he’d reply.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Well, Kev Nash said he didn’t believe that we had a chainsaw, not one that worked anyway.’
‘Did he now?’ This with indignation. ‘Well, would he be surprised to know that we actually have three?’
‘But working, I mean.’
‘They work fine,’ he’d retort, putting on his jacket and reaching for the garage door remote as my siblings and I prepared a mental schedule of which terrible action movies we’d be watching in the sitting room in eighteen seconds’ time.
This was only good, of course, as long as he didn’t press-gang you into service, which was a very real threat. That was the worst of all possible worlds, worse even than being given typical Saturday-morning Daddy jobs like fixing the gutters or hoeing the weeds. Those, at least, were drawn from our own dimension of time and space, chores with purpose and an end. Hoking around in the garage with Daddy, by contrast, was a senseless infinity of thankless tasks. It meant at least an hour of Daddy barking orders at you to hand him invisible, often impossible, objects, which he described solely in relation to their proximity to other impossible objects you were supposedly standing beside.
‘Pass me the goblin fork,’ he’d shout. ‘The goblin fork! The red one. With the ladle bells. The ladle bells. It’s over there, beside the cheese press – ach, for Jesus’ sake it’s right in front of you!’ He would then walk precisely to where you were standing and materialise a gigantic object that somehow bore all the unlikely characteristics he’d just mentioned, which had been sitting right in front of you this entire time, sandwiched between an inflatable pulpit, a bag of javelins and the Nepalese Handball Federation’s team bus. There were ham radios, pool tables and plough parts. I’m fairly sure at one point we had a large mechanical loom. Once I was instructed to find something behind ‘the ship’s engine’. This I did, even though my father has never fished nor sailed in his life.
Daddy is an avid technophile. Perhaps this is an inherited trait. During the fifties, his parents became the first people on the street to have a television, which caused a great stir at the time, and led to neighbours and family members constantly dropping in to catch whatever was on. In a more sombre, prestige version of this story, we’d picture people crowding round the flickering diode, nudging each other to get a look at the screen, grasping their faces in horror at discovering that JFK had been assassinated, or staring in reverence as man landed on the moon. In the more prosaic realities of rural Ireland, my father recalls only that, well into the seventies, my Great-Uncle Edward would be sure to make himself known around lunchtime on Saturdays so that he could tune into the wrestling and watch Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy beating eight shades of shite out of each other on World of Sport.
When my father became fascinated with genealogy, he deployed the same attention to detail; tracing the family tree as far back as any Irish person can – about 150 years, until the entire square-tentacled mass retreats back into a freckled full house of illiterate farmers, people who left no names and never troubled the government for documentation. There were some odd additions – our great-great-great-great-uncle Edward Maguire was, supposedly, the first chief of police of Chicago – but for the most part it was rustic sod-botherers, rank and file. I suppose the dream of genealogy is that you’ll dig deep enough in the rough and find some shiny gem of notoriety, some improbable link to fame, fortune or foreign royalty. The best my dad could manage was his discovery that Bishop Edward Daly, a man he’d already been friends with his entire life, was very slightly related to my grandmother, a woman so close with his own mother that she had babysat the infant bishop anyway. And all his family had also been farmers, most definitely reared on cabbage and praties and stiff-shirted Irish republicanism. It wouldn’t exactly have made a rip-roaring episode of Who Do You Think You Are? is what I’m saying. My father spent years at this, and basically ended up with the exact same information he would have got if he’d guessed the entire thing while very tired.
For other people this might seem like an underwhelming achievement, but for my father, who loves process above all things, the outcome was irrelevant. He loved every aspect of the search; the days in the library, the collecting of the information and its deployment in the desired datasets, the accumulation of the requisite stationery to perform each task, the architecture of the database he then used. Even the visual direction of the massive family tree itself, split among some twenty rolls of fax paper across the entire wall of his office off the garage, was a source of constant joy. But it is in that very garage office, where this family tree was displayed, that my father kept his greatest project. Not a battered wooden box of foreign spoons or a corrugated-iron hut of fatal whiskey, but fifteen to twenty small, towered cabinets containing nearly a thousand VHS tapes of films he’d recorded off the TV.