From Bottling It At Baileys To Bailing Out For Breda

So, with teaching crossed off on the single line list of my possible careers, and no-one around who might give me a steer — or who I would have heeded anyway — I headed off to Dublin City.  Moved into the box bedroom in the house my oldest brother was  sharing, which was owned by a Civil Service pal of his.

Don’t ask me where I heard about it, but there was work going in a nearby enough bottling factory that winter, and I didn’t even have to take off my coat to start, it was so cold on that draughty production line.

Four of us were at the end of one line, and we had to shepherd the odd wayward receptacle back into the vast straight lines about to be filled with Baileys Irish Creme liquor, and also pack boxes of the filled product on to wooden palettes for forklift collection. 

Less than cerebrally exhilarating, it did pay the bills for my house share in a dreary housing estate in Blanchardstown, north of Dublin City, as I contemplated my next move. Not. 

Opportunities for advancement in this first phase of my post-teaching career seemed limited, amounting, it seemed, to the overseeing of us bottle straighteners and palette stackers. The really ambitious overseers would tell you to do it all a bit faster. These were the scourge of perverse palette stacker slackers everywhere.

The sole perk came after work on the wind-chilled production line when you were allowed guzzle any amount of tiny plastic containers of the stuff. Poured from those dissenting bottles that had refused to be filled correctly, the first one or two of these sickly sweet concoctions were agreeable enough, giving you a welcome warm feeling, but any more and my tummy would start to turn. So no danger of falling out of the place pissed, or even squiffy. 

It did get me over those first weeks of living in Dublin, and made picking up Christmas presents easy enough — ‘Baileys, how lovely!’ Fair play to my Dad, he refrained from hassling me too much on Christmas Day and over the brief festive period with the family over me chucking in teaching so easily. More likely, though, I just ignored the sighs and signs, and didn’t dwell back then on the disappointment I knew he felt. Or the worry I was causing him. 

In the full knowledge that my best years on the Baileys production line were ahead of me, I foolishly resisted the urge to scale the dizzy heights mapped out for me there, my appetite for such accomplishments unaccountably satiated. Same as with teaching, actually.

The next stop on the circular line of my early career journey was an office job with Dublin County Council — the Drainage Direct Labour department in Dublin’s Clondalkin, no less, which I started in the January.

 This involved looking after the paperwork for various sanitation projects, ringing up suppliers, doing funny voices into the short-wave radio down my end of the office, and jollying the irate foremen who would set the floor of our little prefab office quivering when they came demanding that that load of concrete be sent out fucking pronto.

And I loved it. Not the work, which was beyond tedious, but the straight-talking, often irascible but usually hilarious job foremen, my three fellow office clerks, and the little cadre of engineers and surveyors in the adjoining prefabs were a top crew altogether. The lunchtime banter could be vicious but rarely mean, and was great training for getting on with all sorts later. 

After a quick ham and cheese roll, and a cream-topped circular apple pie scoffed in one bite, there would be a frenetic half-hour’s football in the yard, or a game of poker in the central prefab where we ate. There were lively evenings in the pub but also organising and playing football matches, or pitch and putt games. 

My first sporadic romantic dalliances happened over this period too. Hardly auspicious. 

One really funny, tiny dark curly haired girl from Co Meath, never showed up for our second date, which mifftified me and certainly put me off for a while. Not drinking and socialising, mind, just from putting myself out there to get shot down. A clear-eyed cynic at 21.

Meeting one of the engineers from next door, Vincent from Cork, years later in a Dublin City pub, we immediately recalled how both of us had missed penalties in a shoot out playing for the office team in a cup competition, and we had lost. Laughing about it into our pints, but genuine regret too.

And then, that fateful day, doing the washing up with my older brother — the caravan owning, former-black-mini-with-the scraped-side-fender-driving-one — and deciding I would quit my office job and head with him to Breda in Holland.

It was one of those big decisions made in a little minute. He was washing, I was drying. Telling me he was going to work again in Holland for the summer. With an uitzenbureau, or temporary work agency. He had been there the previous summer with our youngest brother. This time, he was going to put the money with his teaching salary paid over the summer and change up his little powder blue Fiat 127.

Listening away, I suddenly heard myself say: “I’m going with you!”

And that’s how I ended up in Breda, after handing in my notice to Dublin County Council and completing six months to qualify for the dole on my return.

TO BE CONTINUED …

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