Tommy Garrett

I’d known Tommy Garrett, all my life. He would be a year or two older than me, born a bit before the turn of the century. We went to the same chapel and sometimes the same school. I’d worked alongside him from time to time, and when I took over the farm he had done good work for me, not full time you understand, just helping out when we were busy.

He had spent all his life on the farms and was reasonably competent at most jobs.

He was a quiet, unmarried man, not the brightest light on the street, but steady and usually reliable.

I lost track of Tommy for a while, then started to hear stories that he had taken to the drink and was living rough.

An odd time I’d come out to do the milking of a winter’s morning and find him asleep in the warmth of the cowshed. Bess would bring him some breakfast, and after a little while he’d wander off again.

The next thing I heard he’d been taken up to Ballamona Asylum full of liquor and vermin, and unable to care for himself.

There they cleaned him up, dried him out and put him to work on the hospital farm, which was quite the done thing in those days.

It would be 1947 when they held an open day at the hospital farm so that other farmers could see what crops they were growing, and admire their animals and machinery.

We were all standing on the yard when Tommy comes out of the stable leading a big bay shire in full cart harness. Then to the raucous amusement of some, he tried to put the horse between the shafts of a stiff cart back to front.

Some one said ‘Poor old Tom, he’s having one of his off days’. Then they gave him a broom and told him to go and sweep up.

When the sightseeing was over and the crowd thinning out, Tommy was still pottering about, so I strolled over to have a quiet word on him.

We exchanged greetings and he asked ‘How’s the Missus?’

I said ‘Fine thanks.’

He said he was pleased to hear that, as she had always been good to feed him.

He still had his priorities right anyway.

I nodded toward the cart and asked ‘What was that all about?’

At first he made out like he didn’t understand.

‘Look here’ I said ‘You never saw the day you couldn’t hitch a horse to the shafts of a stiff cart. In the pitch dark of a winters morning if need be.’

He did not reply for a moment, and then looked very carefully all around before he answered confidingly. It was almost as if he thought what he was saying was so bizarre he did not expect to be believed.

‘Well yer see it’s like this Boss, in here, if you do everything right, all of the time, they kick you out.’

David Kelly