Mr O’Connor’s Jag

The O’Connors lived in Mopoon Villa beside our house The Boulders on Sydenham Road.  Mr O’Connor was a jeweller and had the look of a West Highland Terrier about him. A black and white framed photo of him with a chain of office around his neck talking to the ancient President, Eamon DeValera, stamped his status on all who visited  their house. His eyes had a sparkle but were dulled by the stress of raising five attractive daughters.

The shortest, fastest way between the two homes was to run and take a giant step into my mother’s flower bed and use your momentum to land on top of the small convex-shaped wall, grab the solid vertical metal pole which was embedded in concrete on the O’Connor’s side and project yourself pole-vault style into the middle of their driveway.

Even the postman used this highway, which often came in handy as our Labrador hated him and often tried to bite chunks out of his uniform.  The postman had a heavy stick which he used to leave at the gate and he used it fence the dog off, d’Artagnan style, up to the front door, and then leg it using our passage to safety. The flowerbed developed a hard, calloused path due to the traffic that constantly used it.

Mr O’Connor must have thought that it was time to demonstrate his success and decided to buy himself a Jag. But now it was not just any ordinary Jag, it was one that was the same pink colour as Lady Penelope’s Rolls Royce in Thunderbirds, a pink that was audacious; one that turned wondering heads, ‘Can he be serious’?

A game of chase had spilled over from our garden into the O’Connor’s garden. I, being a little stout (as the man in Switzers said to my Mother in front of me when I went to try on my Holy Communion outfit), was at the back of the gang being pursued by whomever was on. The squealing group of children sprinted across the flower bed, jumped on the wall and swung off the pole to safety. My greater bulk was too much for the pole, and it buckled just above ground level but didn’t quite break. I propped it back up, petrified that Mr O’Connor would find out that I had broken it.

This was, in retrospect, not such a good idea. Just then he arrived home in his brand new car. He drove it slowly up the drive, giving the assembled kids plenty of time to gawp at it through the hedge and parked it beside the small wall. It was like a lipstick slash across the front of their house; a showy statement that he had arrived at the front door of achievement and success.  That day was a very windy day, and one of the gusts was the last straw for the old pole. It toppled straight over onto the wing of Mr O’Connor’s Jag.

No-one saw it fall, but I imagine it moved in slow motion and hit the car with almost no noise, crumpling the wing under the impact. Mr O’Connor must have nearly fainted in an apoplectic fit when he saw it. He was volcanic with rage. He immediately summoned all the likely miscreants to be interviewed in his kitchen that evening. I went into a blind panic and immediately ran down to Simon Cudworth’s to cobble together some kind of alibi. He was cucumber-cool in his mature analysis of the situation. ‘None of us did it, so none of us is to blame’.

Story set, we turned up at the allotted time. Mark, my brother, me, Simon Cuthworth. and Ivor Kenny was also caught up in the round-up. Short of the bright lights and loud noises it felt like a Nazi interrogation. We all denied any culpability, but my memory of propping the post up made me blush nearly as pink as his car. Frustrated with our reluctance to admit anything, we were all ignominiously thrown out whilst Mr O’Connor mumbled under his breath that he thought we were all guilty due to my evident embarrassment.

The pink Jag was repaired, but we never were allowed anywhere near it – banished to Mrs O’Connor’s Ford Escort for ever.