I stood in the middle
of the living room with a hurley in my hand, now and again swinging it to
emphasise my point. The Hannigan boys, at least the two of them old enough to
use the toilet by themselves, were sitting on the couch, a captive audience.
Two weeks into their summer holidays, I’d become heartily sick of them
declaring themselves bored on a daily basis. Their punishment was to receive a
lecture about their lack of imagination.
“What is this?” I
asked, brandishing the hurley.
“A hurley,” said Abe in
a note-perfect, disaffected pre-teenager tone.
“What’s it for?”
“Playing hurling.”
“Correct. But it can be
used for much, much more than that.”
They weren’t impressed by
this statement. They just shrugged their shoulders so then I gave them both
barrels about how they need to learn to create fun that doesn’t involve video
games, television, computers, iPods, Kindles, and all the other electronica
they have at their disposal. The ensuing lesson involved a full-on trip down
memory lane to the Cork of my youth. The 12 year old rolled his eyes and the
five year old looked at me as if I was suddenly speaking a foreign language.
Which, in a way, I kind of was.
You know you’ve turned
into your father when you start waxing lyrical about how, in ye olden days, we
had enough imagination to make the best of our limited resources. The boys were
unimpressed when I held the hurley up and explained how, to us, a hurley was
never just a hurley. It was also a sword
(more of a Claymore than a rapier in terms of size and heft), a rifle (the lack
of a trigger or anything resembling one never a big obstacle) and a club (woe
betide the boy on the other end of a smack of the bos).
Of course, I continued,
hurleys could even do other sports. For a few weeks each summer when the cricket
tests were live on television (the only thing live on television it often seemed),
hurleys became cricket bats. That we never wore white and couldn’t bowl
properly was no hindrance to our attempts to mimic Viv Richards and Ian Botham.
We stepped to the crease, well, the area in front of the largest lamp-post in
the square in Togher. That lamp-post was another incredibly versatile piece of
equipment. Aside from proving a place for us to hover around in the evenings,
it also did time as a cricket wicket. Indeed, it was the perfect substitute
wicket because if a ball made it past your hurley and even grazed the hollow
metal it made a sound, thereby proving you were out.
All of this was flying
over the heads of these American children so I tried another tack, explaining
that hurleys also doubled as oars because hurleys were what we used when we
took to the ocean wave. Well, not exactly the ocean wave. There were no waves
really, just the tiny ripples in the otherwise still waters of the Glasheen
Stream where large, brown rats swam in front of our boats (well, not boats,
actually bath-tubs liberated from nearby building sites), obviously as scared
of us as we were of them.
Finally, the kids’ eyes
grew wide at one of my anecdotes. So I paused and then the eldest spoke.
“Will you buy us kayaks?”
Slowly, I put the
hurley down for fear I’d us it as a murder weapon.
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