My CV Part 2

Am I qualified to do my job?

The following is Part 2 of a series entitled ‘My CV’. If you have not already, please navigate back to read Part 1, other wise this will make absolutely no sense.

On the Farm continued

Day Four:

The sheep shearer has arrived and I thought this was going to be more craic than it actually turns out to be. It’s probably from watching too many cartoons that I have a romanticised idea. I pictured overjoyed sheep having their woolly fleeces delicately shorn off so they can bounce across lush green fields to their mates with their new do’s and nibble on a buttercup. The reality is that there is no field. We’re in a shitty yard and the men who have come to shear are definitely Irish I am told, but I can’t understand a word they are saying. They have hands like wood, and the pronunciation skills of a goat chewing on a welly. You just know by them, they are not tender lovers.

The sheep just get louder with their ‘BLLLLLLEEEEAAAAHHH’ as the men throw them around, arse over head with no consideration given for the sheep’s decency. There are little nicks and cuts and no romance. I become less scared of them as they begin to annoy me with their bulgy eyes and saying the same constant thing. I have the urge to punch one in the face but I don’t. One of them has missing an eye. The farmer says a crow pecked it out and I totally understand the crow’s perspective.

My job is to catch the fleece that has been shorn. They throw them at my head as they are flying through the ewe’s, chucking them every which way. They must be getting paid by the sheep. I have to open the fleece on the ground, pick off the lumps of shit, roll them up and put them in the trailer. Gloves were not a thing in the 90’s. The shit on my hands isn’t even the worst bit. As the trailer fills up I realise I am sticky all over. My face, my hands, my clothes, I am becoming caked in some layer of whatever is in those fleeces.

I go home and get given out to for ruining my clothes.

Day Five:

The best part of working on the farm is lunch time. We drive back to the house in the tractor and he takes items out of the fridge to make a sandwich. This is the first time I have met salad cream. He puts salad cream on his sandwich. I assume this is a protestant thing. I try it and I love it. We don’t talk.

The next job, he says, might need me to bring some friends. I have no idea how I am going to get friends when he’s left me in a field the size of 4 football pitches, 10 miles from home, to pick weeds. Some of the weeds are as tall as me. Some of the weeds look very like the crop. I’m left there for hours. The open air, no one for miles around, and a field far too big for me.

I go home and tell Mam about the salad cream, she buys me some.

The next day I bring some friends which at times feels like less work will get done considering the messing we have to get done first. The farmer comes to check the work and calls me lazy again.

Other days I did a bit of work in a fibreglass factory. The first job I had there was sitting in the office, sticking stickers to bits of paper. The phone would ring every five minutes and no one would answer it. They had a bell that rang on the factory floor every time the phone would ring and still no one would answer it. It was making the sticker job impossible, so I would answer the phone.

‘Hello (Insert name of factory here), Stephen speaking’

You could hear the man on the other side of the phone who wanted to order a boat or a shower tray or something, stutter at the sound of a 13 year old answering a phone so I’d just make it easier for him.

‘Give me your name and number and I’ll get them to call you back.’

When the stickers were finally done, the boss took from his pocket some pound coins and 50p pieces and I couldn’t believe I was going to get more than one of them.

‘Just in future, stick to the job and get it done first rather than getting distracted.’

‘If you answered your phone I am not going to get distracted.’

‘Fair’ he said.

I would go back there some days and do other jobs. More interesting jobs. I got to wear a full white body suit and spray fibre glass with the full face mask, like I was cooking crystal meth in Breaking Bad. I got to to it all with Joe. The coolest man in the world. He listened to Atlantic 252 all day, smoked silk cut purple and he could take one of his teeth out. He never spoke down to me and if I ever saw him in the street outside of the factory, he’d smile and give me the nod, and I felt like a man.

Without really knowing it, my life was about to be turned upside down. At the end of that summer, my last in Cork, I used the money to buy a white Umbro quarter zip up top. On the lunch time break from secondary school, us boys from the Christian brothers school would walk past the windows of the convent on our way to the shop. The girls would hang out the window and whistle. One day the girls shouted ‘Mullan!’ followed by their giggles. ‘Jacinta fancies ya!’ The lads would jeer and punch me, my face reddening. Then I heard one of the girls say the words: ‘He’s a ride in his white top’. And it made every piece of sheep shit worth it. I felt on top of the world.

To be continued …