JEMMY

Jemmy was my father’s older brother. He had inherited the wee farm near the Louth / Armagh border. I’m sure there was no formal arrangement. He just never left. He spent his whole life in the same house with just a room and kitchen. Jemmy never married and indeed had little time for women. He preferred to do all his business with the male of the species but in latter years found it increasingly difficult. At over seventy he’d cycled the eight miles into Newry every week to collect his pension. The woman in the local post office had asked him one question too many. A very private withdrawn sort of man, he was always suspicious of outsiders asking questions no matter how trivial they might seem
The farm had only a couple of acres. Great land Jemmy would say; pity it was standing on it’s head and full of rocks. As a younger man he’d supplemented his income at the potato hoking in Scotland. He’d ride the bicycle to the boat in Larne then travel on to his place of work on the other side
I only remember Jemmy from he was in his late forties He was a small stocky man with a brown wrinkly face and well oiled thinning grey hair. I was fascinated by his big hands. The palms covered in a variety of welts and calluses and the odd nail bit down to the quick, looked as if they belonged to a much larger man. Mammy was always giving out to me about biting my nails so I took comfort in seeing somebody else who had this disgusting habit
His sister Brigid who was a bit slow lived with him for a number of years after their mother died. Then the neighbours noticed that Brigid was becoming very throughother and wandered the roads at all hours of the night. She was about forty then and spent the next thirty years in an institution. Jemmy had neither the skills nor the understanding to care for her .She had no sisters. It broke his heart the day they took her He never saw her again for he couldn’t bring himself to visit .The hospital was close enough but he was afraid she’d ask him to bring her home and he couldn’t cope with that.
My father and Jemmy spoke about her rarely but it was their one big regret that Brigid had in some way been let down. If only they’d gone to visit and saw how happy she was. The nurses all loved her for she was that gentle and her wants so few. In her childish way she was contented in her new home with her lovely dolls and more warmth and comfort than she could ever have imagined. Even in the nineteen sixties the house in Forkhill had little or no improvements made since it was built just after the famine. There was no running water, electric light nor a toilet of any description. Bridgid might have thought she’d fell on her feet.
As a child I liked to meet Jemmy in Omeath or Blackrock on the fifteenth of August. This was a sort of national holiday where old friendships were renewed with a few bottles of cheap stout in the ’free state’ as many called it then. I was always sure of a half crown but I had to be alert for he almost threw it at me. I think he was a bit embarrassed at handing it over and certainly didn’t want any closeness or displays of affection. He didn’t want to be considered mean either. 

I didn’t object to his awkward manner for I’d usually got more than enough pats on the head to last me a life time.
.Mammy and her sister Cissie were full of sympathy for him one year when he was angry at somebody stealing the pump of his bike. But they were lost for words in front of me when he showed them the better one he’d took off somebody else’s bike At that time there’d be dozens of bikes piled in a tangled mass along the sea wall.
Jemmy was very tidy of himself as mammy would say. He always wore a dark grey suit with the waist coat stretched badly at the buttons. When he gave up the manual work he got stouter but new clothes would have been out of the question. He wore an old suit during the week and kept the good one for the chapel on a Sunday. His washing spread over the whin bushes round the house was a bit ragged around the edges due to his miserly way of life but it was as white as snow between the Sunlight soap and the washboard in the tin bath. He was a dab hand too at patching a pair of trousers or setting a V shaped piece into the back when they no longer met. Many a frayed collar he turned on a shirt and got another couple of years out of it. Mammy said you’d need a magnifying glass to find the stitches and him with no glasses and the wee windows that let in so little light. It would be black dark in the kitchen before he lit the Tilly.
The small two roomed dwelling was sparse. It leaned more towards hermitage that home. Every item apart from a transistor radio and a sprung mattress that replaced the chaff tick was put there by his mother and father .He only switched the radio on once a day for the Radio Eireann news for the batteries were very dear and he couldn’t bear waste.
Every stick of furniture that hadn’t collapsed from one wood infestation or another remained in the exact position his mother had left it The white delft dogs on the fire board now had several layers of soot and the Sacred Heart picture had seen better days. His mother’s hand I’m sure was the last one that touched them and her dead thirty years. The whole house from the white washed walls to the bumpy clay floor was a museum piece when his neighbours were building mansions with the proceeds from the latest smuggling scam .It was said that the ink hadn’t dried in Brussels till South Armagh found a loophole.
Jemmy lived for over seventy years in that house and he left little behind except piles of old newspaper clippings for he had a great interest in history and politics. Newspapers were cheap and there was no end to their uses. Invaluable for lighting the fire they provided him with a clean tablecloth whenever he fancied. Every time he sat down to his ’sup a tay’ from the blue and white bowl some item or other caught his eye He drunk out of that vessel as he called it for he could put more in it. He maintained the second cup never tasted the same as the first.
Nothing could beat a newspaper either for cleaning the globe of the Tilly lamp. When he went out on the bicycle in the winter he pushed a few newspapers down the front of his grey gabardine coat before he tightened the belt. Jemmy swore by them for keeping in the heat.
He wasn’t sophisticated enough to cut them into squares and hang them in the outside toilet for he hadn’t one. This puzzled me as a child and I came to the conclusion that some how he just didn’t go.

In all them years in the house he never once bought a book, or an ornament. He never splashed out on something even verging on extravagance or something just totally silly. Every purchase was purely functional and a last resort. His wee house was a shrine to the make do and mend theory.
Apart from the odd bottle of stout bought by a neighbour for a kindness, for small farmers were very dependant on each other, nobody ever bought Jemmy anything. He never got close enough for that sort of relationship. He gave up farming when advancing years made him too dependent and he was uncomfortable with that.
Jemmy was always in a hurry, anxious to be somewhere else. He’d hardly have time to drink the neighbour’s stout while accepting it graciously. He’d be on his feet for the last few mouthfuls. There’d be a fear on him. Fear that he’d be drawn into drunkenness and the squandering of his money or a closeness might develop with the men in the bar that he neither needed nor wanted. Jemmy was afraid too that the drink might loosen his tongue and he’d tell them too much of his business. He only ever drank the one. Daddy often said it was hardly worth Jemmy’s while throwing his leg off the bicycle.
In his mid seventies Jemmy became increasingly frail. The journey to Newry for his pension was proving too much for him. He had lost interest in cooking and looking after himself. Social Services became involved but they felt they could offer him only limited help in his present accommodation. They were keen for him to move to a near by housing estate.
I went to be with him when his social worker called to discuss it. In answer to Jemmy’s queries about the rent of the new house he was assured that it would cost him nothing. Was this due to the inexperienced social worker’s shock at my uncles’ impoverished circumstances or Jemmy’s shrewdness after years of living on his wits? Though polite and respectful he gave nothing away when he answered the questions about his money. He trusted few and ’ the welfare’ as he called them were to be told nothing.
After the social worker left he was anxious and distressed. He looked bewildered as he paced the hilly field surrounding the house. Eventually Jemmy sat on a big rock and held his head in his hands.
Sadly I approached this vulnerable old man who had isolated himself in his own community. He had hard choices to make. Would he be able to move from the only home he ever knew? Would he be able to let strangers into his house to look after him? They would know his whole business he’d think and spread it over the country.
He looked me straight in the eye and announced sadly, ‘I can’t go.
Being mindful of not moving too close or touching him I told him how much we all cared for him and wanted him to be safe and comfortable. Jemmy put up his hand to interrupt before I took it any farther.
‘I can’t go now for at the minute I‘ve forgot where I hid my money and I‘ll certainly not leave without it‘.