FROM THE ARCHIVES:Columnist Sam McAughtry was looking for diversion as he tried to write his "Plain Speaking" column on a hot summer's day in 1983. – JOE JOYCE
THE SUMMER sunshine is brilliant, hell roast it. How can anybody write in such weather?
The telephone rings. Some American, newly arrived, wants to know where he can meet everybody in the North who’s anybody in literature.
I ask him why he rang me. I’m in the middle of being remaindered.
Eventually make it upstairs and sit before the typewriter. Reflect that Edgar Wallace was in worse case than me. He had to write thrillers to pay the bookie. You never hear tell of bookies having to write thrillers to pay punters, do you?
The mind is settling and a productive vein has been struck when the front doorbell rings. I peer down from the window. It’s just a lad of seven summers.
I recall that schools are closed for the summer hols. This boy looks well brought up. He is dressed in that sort of way. I sigh for my youth. The lad at my front door is fair-haired and creamy-skinned. In his hand he holds a book of some sort, or a card. In addition he holds a Biro pen.
For a certainty he wishes to tell me that he is about to walk for miles through a forest park, in company with his little friends and in the overall charge of a Sunday-school teacher or a scoutmaster.
Some charity will benefit from their Christian and manly endeavours.
When I was a little man I simply never went in for such activities. I remember, though, being handed a blue card by a Sunday-school teacher. It was a pinhole card.
I stopped people in the street and held out my pin: “If you stick a pin in that and give me a penny, mister,” I said, in my piping voice, “it’ll go to the Protestant Orphan Society.”
“Certainly, son,” they all said, patting my head and making the pinhole.
Then, with tongue peeping out between my teeth, I would enter the name and address of the kind donor on the back of the card.
“It’s nearly full,” I would say, innocently. “When it’s full the Protestant orphans will get a whole shilling, so they will, mister.”
With moist eyes the giver would pass on, and I would make my little spindle legs propel me into the nearest chippie, where I would let the Protestant orphans stand me a pennyworth. When the card was full I tore it up; then, bursting with chips, I sought out the teacher.
Sobbing, I described how the card had been stolen from me by a big rough boy on the Antrim Road.
“Never mind, Sam,” she said, “here’s another one”. I took it. “Mind you,” I said, “I’m going back up to that Antrim Road, even if it happens again. I’m just not going to let those rough boys beat me.”
Emptying a glass of water over the kid at the door, I finally got down to work . . .
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