Hughie Mittman's Fear of Lawnmowers

by Conor Bowman

Genres: General Fiction; Friendship

Synopsis

Sometimes it can be hard to find a new beginning in the middle of so many endings... Hughie Mittman is in search of forgiveness. He has just lost his mother and believes it is all his fault. And, with his father more distant than ever, how can Hughie make things right? As he does his best to navigate this unfamiliar version of his life, and overcome his fears - of loss, of change, of lawnmowers - he ignores the questions he really wants answered. Was his father telling the truth when he said Hughie was adopted? And will he really never get to see his mother again? Hughie Mittman's Fear of Lawnmowers is a heart-breaking but uplifting story about grief, the end of childhood, the power of friendship and the acceptance that although there are things we cannot change, the future can still be bright.

Release date: April 4, 2019

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 336

Sample

If starting at the very beginning is good enough for Julie Andrews, then it must certainly be good enough for me … Sometime in 1965, February, I arrive on the planet. Was it raining? Was it cold? Who can say, now, all these years later? I suppose it doesn’t really matter, in a way, because babies are just born, aren’t they, regardless of the weather? Nothing cloudy gets in the way of birth, no rain dampens the heat of the moment, even sunshine hardly matters at the hour of arrival, does it?

I imagine a room full of lights and people, a lot of pushing and pulling, then blankets and towels and hot water, like in the movies (I’m thinking 101 Dalmatians). A little like with luggage carousels in airports, as I’m sure that, for those in attendance, there is a degree of trepidation and surprise while it’s all going on. Then, eventually, the newborn is held aloft, like the Sam Maguire Cup, and the adventure begins.

I wonder about midwives: about the feelings they must have day in, day out – in the middle of the night, perhaps on trains or at 20,000 feet, when waters break that weren’t meant to in ladies who were advised not to fly. How do these people, the gatekeepers of this world, feel about what they do? Is it a mix of excitement and concern, with a dash of upset thrown in from time to time? I don’t know the name of the person who welcomed me into the world back then, so long ago, but I was helped into the light and someone cleaned me up and laid me down and heard the first sound I made.

Beyond that small room, away from everything I could hear, there was a vast world filled with Beatles songs and hydro-electric dams and mini-skirts and instant mash and tractors and the Rose of Tralee, and all the rest of it. Others arrived on the same day, taking the same train, but stepping down at other platforms all over the place. Is there an anteroom to here, where everyone waits and waits together until their time arrives? How insane would it be if a room full of about-to-be-born babies existed somewhere, like a glider full of troops approaching a dropzone, waiting for the signal to release themselves, one by one, towards this earth, with nothing but a parachute of hope to keep them from falling too fast and/or drowning in the marshes? Perhaps we’re all meant to rendezvous, at least those who land safely, and go on together to take a town or hold a bridge until reinforcements arrive. Who knows?

Anyway, I landed.

This is the point at which I should probably say, ‘Let me show you the real Galway.’ Then you and I would embark on a day trip through that wonderful city, and from time to time, I’d point out places and people and say, ‘That was where I went to school,’ or ‘See that house? The family who lived there had a dog called Fever Lee,’ or ‘There’s Lydon House – a woman called Joan worked there and patrolled the café every Saturday to see if teenagers were nursing empty coffee cups.’ But what is the point of that, of taking you in a car and pointing at places and just saying things that I remember about the places I point at? You wouldn’t know the people I mention, or even whether or not what I said about them was true. In the same way as you could drive me around your town, point and comment, and I would be none the wiser, either about who you really are or about what really matters. I don’t drive!

I’m not really sure what is important anymore. All I know is that there have been things that occurred which I cannot fully understand. Which pieces of life are real? Which are imaginary? Is there a difference between illusion and imagination? What I want to do is to ask you to bear with me while I sort out various parts of my own life, then to make up your own mind about what you are shown.

So, you know there was a beginning: I landed. That much at least is not in dispute. Yes, there is a ‘real Galway’ for me, but I cannot make it real for others simply because it’s real for me. We are all the victims of our own memory; perhaps that is all we can say about that. The places are window-dressing. It’s what makes us feel that matters.

If it’s good enough for Julie Andrews then, yes, of course, it’s more than good enough for me. A place to start: perhaps that’s all we need. The rest, surely, is a mix of what we remember and what we are unable to forget.

I grew up in Galway or, at least, I was raised there. I’m not sure whether or not boys ever grow up. We live on Taylor’s Hill, which is the Fifth Avenue of Galway City. It’s a steep-ish climb, from the traffic lights at Nile Lodge up to the highest point of the road, where it begins to flatten out and leads west to Knocknacarra and Barna. At the spot where the flattening-out begins, if you look to your left you can see all the way down the slope of Threadneedle Road to the sea. It’s a magical view. Out away at the mouth of Galway Bay lie the three sentries of the Aran Islands. Go down the hill and turn left along the seafront and you’re in Salthill, the Las Vegas of Connacht, filled with hotels and slot machines and the bandstand remnants of better, or at any rate simpler, times.

The thing about Galway is that the sea is everywhere. When it rains, you can taste the salt and smell the ocean. There are lots of different bits to the city but no matter where you are, you can nearly always see or smell the sea. I don’t mean in a bad way – not like the way you get to know the canals in Dublin, or the estuary in Shannon – no, I mean in a good, comforting way, like you can rely on the key being under the flowerpot or the credit unions being there when you need them, that kind of way. Galway is always heaving with people: in the summer it’s the tourists; in the winter it’s the third-level students from the university and the other colleges. There is a small good-natured country-town feel about the city, like it’s always Christmas Eve somehow. The best bit about the whole place, though, is really the very centre of the city: the chunk that runs from Prospect Hill through Eyre Square, meanders down Shop Street and veers off to the left past the knitwear shop, Kenny’s Bookshop. Tigh Neachtain’s and The Quays pubs, then down to the Spanish Arch. That’s the bit of the place a cardiovascular surgeon would be concerned about if Galway were a person instead of a place and had high cholesterol instead of a high season. Sometimes I’ll think of one of those landmark places in the heart of Galway, and the next week when the Connacht Tribune newspaper comes out, there’s a photograph of that very place on the front of the paper. Just coincidence, I suppose.

Our house is one of those to the right on Taylor’s Hill, about halfway up, just before the girls’ secondary school, also, rather unimaginatively, called Taylor’s Hill. These houses were built in the 1930s and do not match. We have a gravel drive and a decent front lawn, and rose bushes, and hedges, and a monkey puzzle tree, which grows right in the middle of the lawn and has always overshadowed our lives and our home.

The house itself is two-storey with ivy climbing rather grandly up the front, so that in the height of summer the tendrils clutch at the sills or tap on the windows of the bedrooms. In the long back garden we have a huge greenhouse in which my mother successfully plants tomatoes, and a square vegetable patch, where carrots and cabbage and onions somewhat mysteriously grow only every second year or so. In the ‘other’ years they either don’t appear at all or else are decimated by rabbits. I never did figure out why that happens every second year, but when they do flourish, it’s like we’re back during the war or something and producing enough to feed the whole neighbourhood.

Our family didn’t always live on Taylor’s Hill: at one stage we lived in Tipperary, when my father was working at Nenagh Hospital as a general surgeon. I was only five when we moved to Galway and had just completed my first year at Terryglass National School. It was a tworoom school where Mrs Cleary taught junior infants to second class in one room, and Mr Cleary taught third to sixth class in the other. They were an odd pair – strikinglooking, and huge. She wore a series of two-piece outfits, with a jacket and skirt, and sometimes when she bent over to fix the fire, the zip at the back of the skirt would open and we could see slightly more than we’d bargained for. The outfits were always of the brightest and most vibrant colours: pink tweed with green stripes is one I particularly recall.

Mrs Cleary’s room always smelt of perfume and Plasticine (‘marla’, we called it). The large strips of new coloured corrugated Plasticine were unwrapped every now and then, and inevitably all merged into a uniform, dull brown poo colour, and would sit in rolled-up balls along the windowsill of the classroom waiting to be called into action on rainy days when playing outside was not an option. Mrs Cleary played a strange musical instrument, a long green and white thing with a thin mouthpiece and note buttons or keys along its sides. It looked for all the world like a small alligator. I don’t remember the tunes, or whether we sang along or just listened as she played, or even whether she played in tune or if we liked it. The instrument lived in a box, a long one with a satin-lined drawer, which slid out to reveal the apparatus lying like a person in a comfortable coffin.

Mr Cleary was also very frightening. He spoke in a loud voice, which was constantly punctuated by coughs. He smoked a pipe, and would stand on the steps of the little school, at break and lunchtime, cutting pieces of tobacco from a dark block, then forcing them into the bowl of the pipe with another part of his penknife, which opened out like a butterfly wing. When the pipe was being lit, Mr Cleary would suck and puff, and light and extinguish a succession of Maguire & Paterson matches with a series of flicks of his thumb and wrist. The place reeked of tobacco. The other thing that comes to mind when I think of him is the almighty sound of his blackthorn stick on the desks, from the other room. This noise of terror came at us through the wall, like a preview of Hell, as he’d roar and shout his way through Irish poems nobody wanted to learn by heart.

One day a magician came to our tiny school in Tipperary and performed in front of the whole lot of us. We younger ones crammed into Mr Cleary’s room, jamming ourselves in beside the older children. The only things I remember are that the conjuror wore a top hat and a cape, and one of his tricks was to put Joan Davoren into a big box where her head stuck out of one end and her feet the other. When the lid was closed, the man took out a series of swords and began to push them through the box in various places. Joan Davoren was in sixth class, and used to look after mine whenever Mrs Cleary had to step out for something. At the time, all I could think, as the blades made their way in one side and out the other, was who would mind us now?

I was only four and a bit years old when I was in that school, and I stayed for one year. I don’t know how many people were in my class, or even in total in Mrs Cleary’s room, but I know that at break there were only three boys on our side of the playground: Vernon Crosby, Michael Meagher and myself. Two of us would hold hands and be the horses and the other would grab our jumpers from behind and be the driver. I don’t remember anything much about Michael Meagher, but Vernon Crosby had warts on his hands. Sometimes he tried to take them off, using a penknife behind the boys’ toilets at the bottom of the playground.

One day when my mother was walking me home from that school, and there were whitethorn flowers on the hedges, we heard music up ahead, coming from a farm we had to pass by to get to our house. We kept walking and the music seemed to get fainter, even though we thought we were drawing closer to it. When we rounded the bend, we saw a man, who was bare from the waist up, carrying a portable record-player across a farmyard. The music was interrupted by a series of scratches and scrapes as the needle jumped with his movements. A long white flex trailed behind him and led all the way across to a window in the house. On the other side of the yard a number of cows had gathered inside a gate and were looking out at the man as he carried the music towards them. When he was three or four feet away from the cattle, he placed the record-player on top of a milk churn that I would easily have fitted inside.

My mother and I stood on the road and watched as the man turned up the sound and the cows continued to listen. As if sensing that he was being watched, he suddenly turned around and waved at us while, in the background, the cows seemed to sway ever so slightly in time with the words of the song, something about tears and a shed. I thought the song was about a cowshed. The man turned back to his herd and I asked my mother as we continued our walk home, ‘Who was that, Mammy?’

‘It was Elvis, love. Elvis Presley.’

I was an only child when we moved to Galway and into the house on Taylor’s Hill called The Moorings, and that was how it remained. My father’s name is Simon Mittman, and although his name sounds American, or even Jewish, he is Irish through and through. His great-grandfather had come from Norway in the nineteenth century and ended up in the wilds of County Limerick somewhere as an engineer on railway bridges. My mother’s family were Dalys from County Meath and my parents met in college at UCD in the 1950s, when everyone wore ties and print dresses and attended dances at a place off Stephen’s Green called the Irrawaddi Ballroom.

I longed for a brother or a sister, but none arrived, so we settled into our new life on Taylor’s Hill where trees separated us from our closest neighbours – on one side, we had the Flynns with four daughters and an Alsatian dog (Leah); and on the other, a sculptor called Mr Rennick who lived in Galway most of the time, but in the summer when the weather gets better, went off to Australia where it is winter.

Although I was on my own a lot, I was certainly never lonely. The garden went back for what seemed to me to be miles. Far away, past all of the vegetable patches and the greenhouse, there was a wild untouched stretch where an old orchard had been forgotten. There was a small turn like the beginning of something else, and around the turn, until the garden ended, an area that was completely out of view of the house. At the extremity of the entire plot a brick wall was painted white. This was of unbelievably high construction so that even if I climbed one of the old apple trees I could barely look over it. Behind our garden lay the unexplored and vast fields that would eventually become Maunsell’s Park housing estate.

For Christmas, when I was six, I got a cowboy outfit and a pair of white-handled Old West pistols, which were heavier than they looked. They took a roll of caps each, and when you fired, the smell of the caps was like burning. If you fired quickly enough, the guns would give off smoke from the opening where the hammer hit the cap. The noise the guns made was not really loud, more of a snap than a bang, but it was enough to scare off crows and Apache Indians and, at six, that was effective enough for me.

One of the bigger outposts in the cowboy world I inhabited was the garage that adjoined the house but only had room for a car if you cleared out everything else. We never did. As a result my father would park his car on the gravel outside the front door near the monkey puzzle tree, while the garage became a dumping ground for everything we’d ever owned but had not got around to throwing out. For me this was Heaven: the space took on the aspect of a goldmine, with its tunnels and passages into, around and through old tables, settees, paint cans and all the other paraphernalia and detritus of family life as it moved on. It included a cot and a stand-alone hairdryer unit that had once caught fire in the kitchen while my mother was sitting under it reading a magazine. Also housed there was the lawnmower: an ancient and faintly red Iverson petrol-powered Rotary Sickle Mower manufactured by the Rotary Mower Company of Omaha, Nebraska. On the side, a silver tag was secured by two small screws and bore the patent number: US 2165551 1938. This lawnmower had been ours when we lived in Terryglass, and I can still remember the distinctive, proud roar and cough of its motor when you started it by pulling the handle and moving the control to the ‘Power On’ position.

Once we’d moved to Taylor’s Hill, a gardener, Mr Cody, came once a week to cut the grass and to clip around the flowerbeds in the front. When I was seven, in the summer of 1972, Mr Cody went away for two weeks to visit his daughter who lived in Donegal and I decided to take over his duties for him in his absence. The lawnmower was heavy as I pushed it out of the garage door and onto the patio behind the kitchen window. Inside, I could see my mother carrying a pile of ironed clothes across the kitchen and heading for the stairs. I remember thinking that I would mow the lawn and have it finished before she came downstairs. I wondered if cowboys ever mowed their lawns or whether their horses kept the grass short.

The starting handle was very difficult to pull. Each time I failed to start it, the lawnmower simply retreated back at me, so that nothing happened: no noise, no engine roar or cough, nothing – just the clacking of the wheels as the thing rolled back towards me. I knew that I would have to find a way to keep the mower steady as I pulled the handle. In a flash of genius I remembered that the side passage leading around the garage to the front was just about wide enough for the lawnmower to be wheeled through.

I manoeuvred the Iverson Rotary Sickle Mower into the side passage and parked it sideways so that it was jammed between the garage and the wall that separated us from Mr Rennick’s house and garden. When I’d secured it as well as I could, I placed one foot on top of the mower and pulled the handle with both hands. After two attempts, the engine burst into life. I remember its vibrations shuddering through my blue runners and up my leg. I began to jiggle the handle, trying to turn the mower so that I could push it down the passageway and out into the front garden.

I remember hearing my mother shouting behind me and I turned. The combined effect of her voice startling me, and the narrowness of the space caused me to stumble and lose control altogether of the mower. I fell backwards into the passageway. The newly freed Iverson Rotary Sickle Mower had somehow dislodged itself from between the two walls and, instead of now facing the front garden, was beginning to advance in the opposite direction, towards me, as I lay on my back.

As my mother rushed along the passageway, to try to shut off the machine before it devoured me, I turned onto my side to get to my feet. There was an awful grating sound, which interrupted the smooth operation of US Patent 2165551 1938 – and then the engine stopped. I felt the most extraordinary pain in my right foot and saw chewed-up bits of my runner, sock and foot flying past me before I lost consciousness.

‘You’ll be able to walk,’ my father said, when he came into the children’s ward with five student interns following him and hanging on every word he uttered. I watched one of them, a male student, mouth the words, ‘He’ll be able to walk,’ as he wrote some notes. When I’d woken up from the surgery I had thought I was at home in my own room and was just dreaming about being in a hospital ward. I remember saying to myself, ‘This is only a dream, don’t worry. Wake up and you’ll be fine.’ But it wasn’t a dream at all.

‘Your father saved your foot,’ Mammy said, when she came to visit me later on that day. I had visions of my foot being placed on the mantelpiece in the sitting room at home. What she meant, of course, was that he’d saved it from having to be sawn off the end of my leg. I couldn’t remember being brought to the Regional, or being changed out of my cowboy outfit into my pyjamas. Nothing seemed to have happened between my falling on my back in the side passageway, seeing bits of my runner flying past, and now being in a bed in a ward – but, of course, so much had happened: oxygen, intubation, anaesthetic, me being wheeled down corridors to theatre, cutting, sewing, being wheeled back to the huge lift. And now my pyjamas – my favourite set, with the Indian tepee and the piebald horses – had a slit cut at the bottom of the right trouser leg.

My right foot now had only three toes, although it continued to feel to me as if I had retained all five. Through the swaddle of bandages I felt I could wiggle all of my toes, and even my nerve-endings believed they were all still there. So I didn’t really think any damage had been done to my foot, not right away at least. Although I’d seen pieces of it fly past me in the passageway, I suppose I didn’t believe in the damage until I had to. I’m almost certain that no one actually told me I’d lost two toes for quite a while. I was comforted with a lot of phrases, such as ‘You were very lucky,’ and ‘It’s incredible what they can do nowadays,’ and ‘Sure you’ll be hopping around the place in no time.’ I suppose bad news is always better told in dribs and drabs rather than being thrown at you in one go.

The bed was comfortable, I remember that, and for the first week or ten days I wasn’t allowed to leave it. I ate, slept, peed and pooed all in the one place, because I was not allowed to put any weight on my damaged foot.

Around me in the ward other children were suffering from a variety of ailments and conditions. Some had had their appendix or tonsils out. Others were thin and had problems with their blood. One boy, who was younger than me, had fallen off the roof of a car and hit his head on a stone. His name was Dominic and he spoke in a very high-pitched voice sometimes, but in a more normal voice when he talked in his sleep. One boy was in a wheelchair and had had his head completely shaved so he looked really cool. I don’t know why, but I remember that boy’s name was Michael and he wore a cardigan that was the same colour as the Galway football jersey – maroon.

My bed was at the end of the ward, near the window, and out of it I could see the vast bulk of the cathedral and, away to the left, the university. The grounds of the hospital lay below us three floors down. . .