The Vasectomy Doctor Read Free Page B

with my father the absolutely dreadful weather conditions and how they were making farming all but impossible. I was ear-wigging on their conversation, though of course I may as well not have been there at all as far as the two men were concerned. Tom described a scene at his farm that has stuck with me all my life. He said that his cattle were so hungry that one bullock actually got his front legs onto the trunk of a tree in order to be better able to eat a clump of ivy that was growing beyond cattle reach. You would need to understand just how stupid cattle usually are to fully appreciate how extraordinary a story this is. For a bullock to be able to figure out this kind of ingenious way to a square meal says a great deal about the extent of his hunger and the foul weather conditions of the time.
    Speaking of Madam Dunn, the music teacher, reminds me of the first great fright that I ever got in life. Piano teachers, as indeed pianos themselves, were a bit thin on the ground in rural Ireland in the mid-1940s. People had quite enough to be doing trying to keep body and soul together without thinking about pianos or how to play them. But for some reason my two older sisters, Bridget and Catherine, and my older brother, Davoc, were all packed off for piano lessons. I was excluded from these on the grounds of being too young. Madam Dunn, two miles up the road and across from the Firmount TB sanatorium, was as we might say these days, the business. I would be left sitting outside on the steps of the old Victorian pile while my siblings were being put through their finger exercises in this academy of music inside.
    Some sounds stay with you for all of your life and to this day I can still remember the sound emanating through the open window of Madam Dunn’s parlour and my brother and two sisters inside getting their piano lessons. Even to the ear of a five-year-old child as I was then, that piano was so out of tune that, were it not so painful to listen to, it would actually have been quite funny. I would safely say that the thing had not been in tune since around the time of the Crimea. Hideous were its notes, repugnant its tones. Is it any wonder that none of us went on to become concert pianists with such a distorted introduction to the instrument? Any similarity between the sounds emanating from this instrument of torture and those one might hear coming from a proper piano in tune were purely coincidental.
    Once, having had quite enough of listening to this cat’s concert wafting out through the open window of Madam Dunn’s parlour, I wandered off to the farm yard for some light relief. This was a bad mistake. In the yard I discovered a flock of very large bronze turkeys, all hens except for one cock. The cock spotted me of course and took an instant dislike to my presence amongst his precious hens. When a gander goes to chase you he holds his neck straight out in front of himself and his head is positioned one inch above the ground. This he swings to and fro in a menacing arch all the while making a silly hissing sound. But when a turkey cock goes into attack mode he does the very opposite, he holds his head back in the ready-to-attack-you position and remains silent. The turkey cock might be marginally more intelligent than the gander but there wouldn’t be a lot in it.
    Anyway this old turkey goes into his attack routine and with all those old dangly yokes hanging from his forehead he goes bright red in the face and takes off in my general direction. Sensible adults in this situation would stand their ground. But to me, a then five-year-old child, such an option seemed somehow very unattractive. I turned on my heels and ran for dear life with my tormentor in hot pursuit, his open beak within striking distance of my arse. As I fled past the open window from where a minute earlier ghastly sounds had been emanating, my terror and overall discomfiture were very little relieved to discover that the musicians and