The Way We Raised Money

IT'S the small hours of the morning. I'm just back from the Honk, my favorite local pub. I had occasion to stay at home through the Easter celebrations but I went out on the night of Easter Monday, the quiet night before the resumption of ordinary work, and I sat up at the bar with my friends, including a small, lively Dubliner.

"We went out hunting rabbits," is what I said when the talk came around to how boys back then funded their activities when spring started, winter ended, and the long golden summer started to stretch out before us with all the relevant costs.

We would certainly need new baits for our spinning rods, maybe even a new and better spinning rod. We would need a new leather real football because, of course, all of us would someday play in Croke Park in the All-Ireland final. And score a goal and three or four points.

We would need a dynamo lighting set for our old bicycle with the genuine racing handlebars. We might need a new pair of football boots or shorts. We would need money for ice creams and what ye call candy.

"We went out hunting rabbits."

It was just after the Second World War, there was still rationing, an exhausted England seemed to have an insatiable appetite for rabbits. So we went hunting rabbits, five or six of us from two Catholic families, three or four good terriers.

And the rabbits were worth a minimum of two shillings each, gutted and delivered to Cathcart's shop for export. And that was the doorstep price.

Once about 1951 they reached a ceiling of 10 shillings each! That was heaven. That was the equivalent of nearly a dollar in your money nowadays!

And the countryside was full of them. And our terriers were brilliantly good. You could go out early on a Saturday morning and come home with 15 or 20 of them on a good day.

Do the sums yourself. Twenty rabbits at that peak price were worth 10 that time. That was the weekly wage for a working man.

We went out hunting rabbits. We kept some for the pot in the kitchen. We sold the rest.

We would do the division of the cash beside the red telephone kiosk outside Cathcart's and then go home with mighty boasts of how well we had done and awful tired little terriers.

They did all the work. They would seek and find the rabbits in the thick thorny hedges of home and then seize them.

We would source the scene of the capture and take the rabbits from their jaws. One quick chop with the side of your hand to the back of the poor little furry neck and the body limped and then just hung there.

It was years later before we discovered how crucial to the family budgets those rabbits were, both the pot ones and those converted into cash. They fed us in hard times. The cash augmented the scarce pennies in the mammies' purses.

"We went to the morgue in the Mater Hospital," said the Dubliner in reply.

It was just across the road from Mountjoy Prison where all our great heroes spent time in their era, where the triangles went jingle-jangle according to the gifted Brendan Behan, a onetime resident, where our history was garnished.

The Mater Hospital across the road, I thought, was where my lovely late Ann once nursed Sean Lemass, the begetter of the modern Ireland. He loved his pipe and she would fill it for him every day for his smoke until one day he just sadly motioned with his hand that he was unable to smoke it any more.

He called her his lovely little nurse from Clare, and the next day he was dead and she and her colleagues cried salty tears of loss right through the shift, and she could not be consoled when I met her after work that evening.

"We went to the morgue in the Mater Hospital."

The tough little Dublin urchins did not have a supply of rabbits available to them. They did what they could.

They were street smart the way we were field smart. They would meet the cattle trains from the country and drive the cattle to the market in the Broadstone for the farmers, and then have to wait a long time to claim their sixpences. Often that was tough enough.

And then if things were very tough altogether they knew how to get into the Mater Hospital morgue across the road from Mountjoy Prison.

The dead of Dublin lay there in rows. Once my friend, as what they call a "chiseller" in Dublin, saw a murdered man lying there. He was from Finglas and he'd been "bottled" with a broken bottle the night before around Parnell Square.

A large plaster covered the mortal wound in the front of his neck. He has never forgotten that.

The victim, like most of the others lying there in the morgue, had his eyes, in the traditional fashion, covered with the large copper pennies of the time. They were about an inch wide, deep brown, some bearing the heads of English monarchs, others the Irish symbol, which was a broody hen and chickens on one side and a harp on the other.

The urchins, predatory as we were in the hills and valleys of Erneside, would file past the yellowed corpses and take away the pennies from all the dead eyes of last night's Dublin.

Three or four pennies went a long way back then. They were worth the hind leg of a rabbit.

My friend was one of a motherless 10 children being raised by a shrewd and saintly father. I don't know about ye, from a different world and economic time and culture, but I think those pennies were not thieved at all. They kinda came down from heaven.

Please agree with me.