I didn't play much football as a child , but one Friday afternoon in February 1975 I played brilliantly. I'd been sent to play with my friends on the green two or three roads away, where I had never dared venture before. A special treat to distract me from the sadness in my Mother's eyes and the hurried whisperings of adults making arrangements for black clothes and the sewing on of dark diamonds on overcoat sleeves. I talked about football, Leeds and Arsenal , my friends patient with my chattering ignorance. I tackled and weaved, passed and scored as I had never done before, nor would again.
Later, just before bedtime, the great dam of grief burst in the green armchair my sister always claimed for hers, my Mother hushing my sobs as tears washed her enfolding arms. He was finally gone. "No more Grandad" my Grandmother has whispered over and over , weeks before, when she finally let us use the good room, a sanctuary we hardly knew existed.
Johnny Allen was my Grandfather. A hero. A neat , quiet man who smelt of soap and soil, and on Saturday's , before confession, the tidying of graves and a bottle of stout in Mrs. Quinn's , he smelt of 4711 cologne. Born in the early years of the last century , he was the last of generations of Allen's who had, since at least the beginning of the century before, worked as stewards and gardeners at Wardenstown, a Georgian manor that stood on more ancient foundations, in Co. Westmeath.
In later years, his bushy eyebrows became the playthings of my baby cousins but I imagined the younger man to have been as handsome as any Hollywood star. My great aunts told tales of his rakish youth, leaping from windows to avoid an approaching girl whose eye he'd taken. Her arrival had been announced by the creak of the Garden Gate that in later years I would listen for in anticipation of his return from the yard for lunch, following the hollow scrape of his wellingtons on the gravel of the laurel walk until he appeared at the little green wooden gate that marked the boundary of "the Big House". A generation before, an infant boy, his lost and only son, had listened for that same gate. I imagined that he too was called "Gosun", or "A mhic", and felt the gentle , tousling hand.
A father to three daughters, the youngest barely an infant, the eldest my Mother, only five, when childbirth made him a widower. Later, he married the woman I knew as my Gran , who had loved him since her teens and loved him to the end. Guarding him, sometimes too fiercely. She bore him a son, taken cruelly by the vaccine that was supposed to protect him from smallpox
Towards the end, when he must have sensed that time was short, having already cheated the black hatted diagnosis once before, his stories poured from him and I was admitted to the company of men, behind the cream painted screen that separated shop from bar.
Years later, visiting the barely changed yards of Wardenstown, I found his scythe , hanging on the wall where he'd left it thirty years before and remembered his slow steady rhythm. Later still , a friend , who had not known him, shared a poem and I was once more, a ten year old boy , grieving for his lost grandfather.
Scytheby John F. Deane
He has been moving
On the widening circumference
of a circle of his own making;
eye bright, back straight, and head erect;
his shirt-sleeves folded, sweat on his flesh,
intoxicating clover-pollen, daisy dust,
rising to him, and the high grass -
in breathless ballet - falling at his feet;
he has achieved a rhythm
that takes him from us for a while,
his soul a hub of quietness,
his body melting into the almost perfect
elliptical orbiting of the world,
soon he will flop down tiredly amongst us
his thoughts, as after sex, moving
on the heroes of myth and literature
while the grass at the centre of his circle
has begun, imperceptibly, to green.
In memory of Johnny Allen, of Wardenstown, Co. Westmeath, who died on 7th February 1975.
