Chapter 1: Birth of a Smuggler
I became a smuggler when I was nine. Before you start thinking that was fierce young, let me tell you that my brother Jimmy was also a smuggler—and he was only six. You may well wonder how two young Donegal lads got into this line of work at such a tender age. The fact is, we never got paid a penny. We did it for fish and chips.
Our father—now that’s a different story. He was definitely in it for the money. He ran the canteen in the shirt factory up in Buncrana. He had the franchise to feed all the factory girls, and it didn’t take him long to realize that he could make a hefty profit by smuggling Irish Free State meat and dairy products in from Northern Ireland. Cheese, butter, cream, hams, and bacon could all be bought for half the cost across the border in Derry. It had something to do with trade agreements—the Republic of Ireland exported the food to the North, and the people there could buy it at fifty-percent less than it cost in the South.
Every Saturday morning we’d go up to Derry in my father’s baby blue Morris Minor. He’d be driving, my mother would ride shotgun, and my two brothers and I would be in the back seat. The baby was two—the youngest criminal of the bunch—and couldn’t do much, but he made a great prop. After all, what kind of person would ever suspect that a couple would willingly endanger their young boys and baby by smuggling across borders in all kinds of weather, not to mention doing business in the middle of a virtual war zone?
Before we headed back across the border to the Republic, our parents would stuff bars of Kerrygold butter up the sleeves of our coats, and packets of Galtee bacon slices into the waistband of our trousers, and while I never witnessed it, I suspect they sometimes jammed a few pounds of butter or a ham bone under the baby’s blankets. When the Customs and Excise officers at the Muff border crossing looked into the car, they’d see a normal—albeit bulky—family, heading home after a day’s outing. According to my father, the shirt factory girls he served breakfast and lunch to each day had every bit as much right to eat subsidized butter on their toast as did their neighbors to the North.
Not that he cared much for politics. My father was a capitalist, and a bartering capitalist at that. My brother and I eagerly awaited our weekly trips across the border. Once our parents were done with food shopping, they’d take us to The Dolphin restaurant for a feed of fish and chips smothered in brown vinegar. Once fed and watered, we were off down the street to the Odeon cinema to see a matinee. To this day, I don’t know if we were taken to the film as a family treat, or if our handlers were buying time in order to cross the border when the Customs and Excise officers would be coming to the end of their shift and anxious to have their tea. I always suspected the latter. At any rate, we were never caught.
I do recall one time, though, when the game could have been up. It was an unusually warm and sunny Saturday, and after the butter had sat in the car for several hours, our parents proceeded to squish the gold-foil-wrapped bars up our sleeves in preparation for our journey South. As we took our place in line with the rest of the cars waiting to be searched, I felt melted butter running down my arms. Part of me knew it wasn’t my fault, but another part of me knew how easy it was to catch a beating. I had enough sense to keep quiet—but Jimmy often spoke without thinking.
“Mommy,” he complained, “the butter’s gettin’ on me.”
“If you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll be gettin’ on you,” she warned through clenched teeth.
While we didn’t fully understand the need to hide food inside your clothes and under the seats of the car, we knew enough to keep it from the men in uniforms when they raised their hands to stop the car.
“But what if the man sees the butter on me?” he whined. He just couldn’t let it rest.
“The butter’s yellow, right?” her voice strained urgently. “If he sees it, we’ll tell him you peed yourself.”
Not a bad strategy, I thought. However, not quite what my brother wanted to hear. “Ah, Mommy, sure he’ll think I’m a baby.”
I waited for a fist to come flying back at us from the front seat. You could expect fists to go flying when we went for a drive.
Flying lefts always came from the driver. If you wanted to dodge his fist (and his were definitely the fists to dodge, as they packed a lot of punch), you sat directly behind him. That way he’d have to stop the car and get out to give you a beating.
I always sat right behind him, and Jimmy sat to my left. Jimmy was his favorite, so he rarely got hit. Sometimes when Jimmy was acting the maggot and would make our baby brother cry, our father would reach back with his left hand like he was going to grab Jimmy, but he would get a hold of me by the hair or ear, and pull hard. I wanted to shout out, “I’m not Jimmy, I’m John Patrick!” I could never tell if he did it by accident or knew it was me he was hurting.
My mother, on the other hand, was a wild card. If she didn’t have the time to pull over, or wasn’t angry enough, she’d simply lash out with a flying right from the front passenger seat. If you vexed her sufficiently, she’d turn around in her seat, get on her knees and beat the living shite out of you with both hands. I could always tell when she worked herself into a fit of rage. Her green eyes burned in her head and her clenched teeth made her look like a wild animal going in for the kill. No need to stop the car for “Sarah the Slasher.”
With that, the car came to a stop in front of the custom man’s outstretched arm. Our father wound down the driver’s window.
“Good evening, sir. Anything to declare?” asked the man in uniform.
“Nothing at all, officer,” my father lied with a smile. “We just took the boys up to the Odeon to see a film.”
The man peered over my father’s shoulder into the back of the car. Maneuvering his focus around my father, a big, broad man who easily blocked the view of the back seat and made no attempt to move out of the way. The man in uniform caught sight of my brother’s downcast face.
“What’s wrong with the wee man?” he asked. “Did you not like the film?” My parents had begun to feel the pressure.
“Ach, they did,” my mother assured, turning around to convince us to back her up. “Youns loved The Jungle Book, didn’t youns boys?”
By the age of nine, I had become an expert in reading faces—well, my parents’ faces anyway. My mother’s smile, forced through clenched teeth, spoke volumes: If you don’t be nice to this hoor so he’ll let us through, I will beat you to within an inch of your lives; and when I’m through, I’ll hand over what’s left of you to your father.
“It was lovely,” I assured the man in uniform.
Had I known at the time that child protective services would have taken us away had they known what we went through at home, I would have claimed political asylum, or whatever it is that a nine-year-old can claim in order to get put into a witness protection program. Jimmy was still fidgeting with his fingers and mumbling about “butter bein’ all over” him.
“Are you sure he’s all right?” the customs man asked my mother, nodding back behind her at my brother.
“Ah, don’t mind him,” my mother smilingly replied, “he’s just gone and peed himself,” at which point Jimmy started crying in protest that it wasn’t pee, it was butter.
“You can come in and use our toilet if you like,” the man offered.
“Thank you, but we’ll be getting out in a minute to get them some fish and chips anyway,” my father chimed in. With that, Jimmy stopped sobbing and asked through teary eyes, “Are we getting more chips?”
“That’s what it was,” the customs man chuckled. “He just needed a plate of chips.” As we pulled off through the checkpoint, my brother again asked about stopping for chips. I knew it wasn’t going to happen, and I nudged him to be quiet.
“I’ll give youns chips,” growled my mother. At that point, even my butter-soaked brother knew there’d be no stopping for chips.
Our smuggling was done during peacetime in the early days. Then one Saturday as we drove down the Strand, we noticed Army tanks rolling down the streets and soldiers carrying guns. It was scary. I asked my parents about it, and they just did that grown-up thing of not answering. But I could tell they were scared too.
There was barbed wire everywhere. Down home, the only place I’d seen barbed wire was in fields, where it was used to stop cattle from straying. I never liked the stuff myself. One time when we were playing cowboys in a neighbor’s field, I nearly tore my mickey climbing over it. There’s no cattle straying in the middle of Derry, I thought.
Our parents most likely knew right well about the dangers of doing business across the border in the North and in the middle of what was fast becoming a war zone, but they never said a word. After all, it’s not a good idea to scare your employees. At no point did they show any fear or hesitation when it came to carrying out their mission. Far be it from them to be fussing over some bomb that could potentially be detonated as we were filling our trolleys with Free State dairy products.
Strange as it may sound, bombed-out buildings became a regular part of our weekend life. One week the store we shopped at would be boarded up after the glass front had been blown out, and the next week the window boards would have the words “business as usual” painted across them. A smuggler’s patience was quickly rewarded in the North of Ireland in the late 60s and early 70s.
****
The summer after I had cut my teeth as an under-aged butter smuggler, my father decided it was time to bring me into the family business—well, at least the more legitimate side of the business. I helped around the canteen, collected meal money from the factory girls, opened cans, and stirred sauces and gravy. In exchange for performing these chores, I was paid one shilling a day. I have no idea if this was a fair wage or child exploitation. One thing it did teach me, though, was discipline when it came to saving. The auld fella made me save the money and buy savings stamps at the Post Office.
The only real regret I have about those days is the fact that I was too young to fully enjoy the girls. The Buncrana shirt factory was any young man’s dream. One-hundred and fifty young women, all but five or six of them younger than twenty-one, would hit the breakfast and lunch lines twice a day with a vengeance. Later in life, I would think back and imagine them all (the good looking ones, anyway) undressing me with their eyes as they waited to pay for the fruits of our smuggling. When I attended secondary school in Carndonagh a half-dozen years later, and could better enjoy carnal thoughts about young lassies, Buncrana and Derry girls always made our Top Ten list. As a matter of fact, the Top Ten list was really a Top Two list, as no other girls compared to the ones from Derry or Buncrana.
I would venture to bet that if you were to take a poll amongst the priests in the Inishowen peninsula area in the mid-70s, they’d have revealed that the majority of sins teenaged boys spoke of in the confessional revolved around immoral thoughts about those girls. In the safe, anonymous darkness of the confessional booth, we even told the priests where the girls were from. Our thought process on this was twofold. First, the priests were men themselves and they had to see what we were seeing, even though they probably wouldn’t admit to it in a month of Sundays. Second, it placed the blame on our neighbors, making it appear as if they were the only distractions to which we succumbed.
Unfortunately, I heard the phrase, “Isn’t he a wee pet!” too many times to hold out hopes that any actual mental undressing occurred. Maybe that was a good thing; after all, those wouldn’t be the healthiest of thoughts for a twenty-year-old woman to be having about a wee ten-year-old boy.
****
That wasn’t my only regret about my time working at the canteen. During one holiday period, Jimmy was allowed in to “help.” Even though I was probably still young enough to qualify as a UN poster child for under-aged labor exploitation, I could see that my brother contributed nothing whatsoever to the overall operation. I didn’t mind the fact that he was more interested in playing with a can opener than doing any real work, since I realized that he wasn’t as close to manhood as myself. It was the fact that we were equally rewarded that got to me.
At the end of the day, our father gave each of us a shiny shilling. I may have been annoyed, but I wasn’t stupid. I immediately saw an opportunity—not only to make a little extra coin, but also to readjust the balance of power so that seniority and a disciplined work ethic were once again assured their rightful place in the work force.
“You don’t want that,” I assured Jimmy, who was fondling the shiny shilling, “when you can have this.”
With that, I produced a golden thrupenny bit from my pocket. Before decimalization was introduced to Ireland, there were twelve pennies to a shilling, and a thrupenny bit was worth three pennies. It was golden in color and had twelve angled sides. Every morning before he headed out to work, our father would come into our bedroom and drop a thrupenny bit into one of our shoes so that we could buy sweets on the way home from school.
“That shilling is no use at all,” I lied. “You see how many sweets this one buys us every day.”
“So this one is better?” he asked, holding up the gold coin.
“Much better by far. You know how we can get ten licorice Black Jacks for a penny? Well, with this gold one, you could buy thirty.”
“That’s a lot of blackjacks,” he agreed, “but why did we get this shiny silver one if it’s no use?” He wasn’t as slow as he looked.
“It has some use, but it’s not as good,” I countered. “Remember when we saw that film in Derry the other week, about the old man Darby and the leprechauns?” The look on his face told me that I had him hooked, so I forged ahead. “Well, they had pots of gold just like this. And if the man had been able to catch the leprechaun and keep the gold, he’d have enough money to buy all the sweets in Ireland.” His eyes bulged like a rabbit with myxomatosis.
“Can you give me the gold one and I can keep the shiny silver one as well?” he whispered. I was beginning to wonder who was taking advantage of whom here.
“I’ll do better than that,” I told him, fishing around in my pocket. “How ’bout I give you two gold ones for that one silver one?” The two-for-one deal was too good to resist. “Yes, please,” he beamed. I walked away feeling a little disappointed that he didn’t go for the straight swap. I hadn’t done badly all the same, though. I had doubled my six penny investment by getting twelve pennies in return.
Then it hit me—it was actually all pure profit. I had pocketed the two thrupenny bits out of the money tin earlier when I was working the lunch line. I viewed it as a perk for risking my neck as a weekend smuggler.
Later in life I would look back in amusement at the thought of skimming from my father, who had in turn been skimming from the Departments of Agriculture or Finance—one of those grown-up organizations anyway.
