The Tools of My Dad’s Trade
I’m pretty sure we were the only house in our street in possession of a barometer. It wasn’t like having a colour TV of course, like the Pattons at Number 18, who had the neighbours coming round to have a squint at their superior goggle box. In our case, there was no queue forming to pop in to check on the air pressure before venturing out to work. But judging by the furnishings of my friends’ houses, nobody else was giving up on the old system of looking out the window to see whether it was going to rain.
It’s not that my father was a sailing man, either. As far as I knew, his only experience on deck was on the ferry to England where he went looking for work. The barometer, gleaming sleek brown wood and silvery metal on the wall over the hall table, was a gift from Arthur Guinness and Company. It wasn’t a reward for my father’s custom, he rarely drank the stuff. Nor did he ever work there. This gift was from a friend who worked in advertising, so the barometer, as well as featuring the usual dials and needles and measuring paraphernalia, was also adorned with a large cartoon toucan and a message reminding you that ‘Every Day is A Day for Guinness’.
But no matter, it made a handy decoration and was large enough to cover that damp patch on the wall of the hallway which had mysteriously appeared the day after my uncle put the wallpaper on.
But the Guinness barometer wasn’t the only household item bestowed on our family by a beneficent drinks company. We ate our Cornflakes from breakfast bowls which urged us not to be vague and Ask for Hague, drank our lemonade from exotically shaped glasses advertising Tubourg lager. The gravy boat was sponsored by Vladivar Vodka, the clock on the mantelpiece as well as announcing the time, also said ‘Hey Mabel, Black Label’, and a swashbuckling mustachioed pirate called Captain Morgan leered from ashtrays. Dinner plates hissed ‘Schww…..ask for Schweppes’ by name, while salt cellars proclaimed ‘I’d love a Babycham’.
Our bookshelves were sparsely populated, consisting mainly of volumes of the annual Guinness Book of Records, while the records next to the hi-fi featured such titles as ‘Teacher’s Choice – All Time Movie Theme Tune Greats’ with a cover dominated by a blonde model wearing a mortar board and a mini skirt.
The reason our house was dominated by so much marketing paraphernalia was simple. My dad worked for the trade magazine for the Ulster Licensed Victuallers Association. He didn’t own it, or even edit the publication, that was a mysterious figure whose name was rarely mentioned. Dad was, as he described himself, the chief cook and bottlewasher of the mag, reading proofs, collecting subscriptions, dealing with advertisers, and inhabiting the strange little office above the bookies in Castle Street in town.
I loved that office. It was straight out of the set of a Sam Spade movie – down a stark unfurnished corridor, an opaque glass door with an arc of old fashioned lettering announcing the occupants and inside, a desk strewn with papers, box files teetering on the edge of wonky shelves, old copies of the magazines piled high in every corner, a filing cabinet leaking dusty documents, a swivel chair and there, in pride of place, as far as I was concerned, was a small desk topped by an ancient typewriter. Next to the desk was another swivel chair. That was where I sat when, long before they introduced ‘Take Your Child to Work ‘ days, my father would give in to my insistence that I accompany him to work on school holidays. I wanted a go on that typewriter and so, having wound up the chair height to its maximum and augmented it with a couple of thick catalogues and telephone directories, I addressed the keys of the venerable Underwood machine and wrote my first typed sentence in the flat Courier font. I was hooked.