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Lenor Fabric Conditioner
By
Jim McConnell

Born on a cold and bitter Wednesday morning in February 1964, Thomas James (Jim) McConnell was a noisy but healthy bundle of son. Number eight for his mother 'Pearly'. Surely to God this would be the last Pearly said to Lewis!

Another mouth to feed and with two older sisters and two brothers in the house I was destined for a life of hand-me-downs. I never knew any better, only when I started secondary school did I realize that there was a difference between a blouse and a shirt. In the 70's the boy's shirts had pointy tips to the collars and the girls had rounded ones. Of course my friend never mentioned it, only every chance he got. He too wore hand downs of course, but he was lucky he had an older brother next in line. It never really bothered me because I knew that if we could have afforded pointy collars my mum would have bought them.

All of us have a soft spot for our mothers. When we think back and reflect on our child hood we can all see the good things and in my case there are plenty of those. My mother Margaret Jane (Higgins) McConnell was an angel on Gods earth, in all my life I never knew her to tell a lie to anyone, she was kind and generous to a point where she would have given anything she owned to help another, as I said I know we all feel like this about our mothers, but mine really was like that.

True, we never had much but these were different times, no one had much. Yes there were differing degrees of poverty and life in our home was by no means the worst, my father was a good worker who liked a drink every now and then. It seemed to me like this 'every now and then', was every Saturday in life, to the point that I used to dread Saturday afternoon. He would come back drunk usually around three our four o'clock when the horse racing had finished. I dreaded this, not because of what you may think, like he hit us all or was bad to my mother, not at all. Quite the opposite all he wanted when drunk was for my mother to go back out with him to wherever he had been for more drink and a good time. This of course never happened my mum was far too sensible and practically minded to waste even more money on that kind of stuff. He would go on and on, 'Come on Pearly it will do you good.' She always got him in her own way. "Ok Lewis", she would say "I will go out with you, after you go up to bed and have a wee sleep, and while you are sleeping I will get ready". He bought that every time. Off he would go and four or more hours come back down, more or less sober and have forgotten all about it, or at least had now the good sense to know that it was best left alone.

Being a married man myself I now fully understand, there are times when all the male bravado and macho nonsense goes out the window and the self defence mechanism kicks in to tell you just sit down and say nothing, else the wrath of hell will be unleashed on your head and you will have to do all sorts of things for weeks, like hovering! Men are not supposed to think like this but who makes these rules anyway? I have often thought that the emotional swings of highs, lows and roundabouts that women experience apply to men too, albeit not as often.

My dad arriving home on a Saturday afternoon would have been the sign that my friend Tony and me should get out. No point in going to his house. He too had a dad in there trying to get his mum to go out for drinks.

What was it in those days a man could not for love or money get his wife to go out for drinks? Changed times, nowadays it is rare for the same situation to be found.

Tony and I often went for 'country adventures', for most people this was simply a walk in the country not us guys. A country adventure involved leaving home in whatever you found laying on the bedroom floor that morning and making off in the direction my nose or Tony's nose happened to be pointing. Luckily we both had the homing instincts of Wood Pigeons. Ballyclare was, and still to this day, a small town and in 1972 had none of the sprawling developments, which now house most of its population. Tony could swim a little, although this had never been put to the test beyond the deep end of a river pool on the 'Six Mile Water', the river that runs thro Ballyclare. We never were sure where he learned to swim, I put it down to all those foreign holidays he went on each year to somewhere called The Isle of Man, and they always stayed with what I believed to be a man called Douglas. Only later did I find out that the Douglas was the name of the town on the island where they stayed. For all I knew it could have been off the cost of Spain or Greece.

We tended to wander over the fields investigating anything that came our way. Seldom did we realize the danger of some of our activities. It was not that we were particularly stupid, it was more the fact that we did not realize that we could actually be hurt. Boys of 8 or 9 tend to think of themselves as indestructible, or at least immortal, whatever that meant!

On one occasion we came across a cliff face, wow! A real cliff in the shape of a great big horseshoe and the bottom was full of water and old rusty machinery. On peering over the edge I saw at the bottom of the cliff what looked like an old detergent bottle bright blue like the Lenor softener bottle, this would be our entertainment for what seemed like hours, trying to hit the bottle with stones from our vantage point on our cliff. We then caught on to the notion that we could try to see who could run from a certain point and stop closest to the edge! All this was perfectly reasonable to us immortals. Never mind the fact that I could not swim, and the drop was at lest 100 feet. We gave that up quickly as Tony had spotted a man out walking a dog and we did not want him to find our cliff. Of course what we had found was an old disused stone quarry, a death trap for anyone not immortal. We returned there several times and used the code name of 'Lenor' when talking about where to go next.

How on earth the two of made it thro childhood was a miracle. The downside is for my own children; I am perhaps over protective and never let them wander too far without knowing exactly what they are doing. When I think of 'Lenor' or the rafts we built for sailing down the river. My parents never knew any of this happened, mortals would not understand. Times are different and I guess life for children now is full of much safer entertainment like computer games, we of course had no such things, making our own fun and without realizing got an education too. Walking miles in the countryside investigating everything we came across taught us many things such as crops, rivers, birds where they made nests and why, how fast farmers could run and most of all, that we are not immortal and should enjoy life while we can.

Jim McConnell

Note: No part of this story can be reproduced in any way without the author's written permission. All rights remain with the author.

Trees by Jim MacConnell

Swimming with the current by Jim MacConnell

Sweet Old Woman by Jim MacConnell

Not long now by Jim MacConnell

Lenor Fabric Conditioner by Jim MacConnell

A trip down memory lane by Jim MacConnell

My novels can be seen at

http://www.btinternet.com/~mikeco158/onetear1.htm

http://www.btinternet.com/~mikeco158/cuppa1.htm

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