I can remember Booterstown and Dalkey and Dun Laoghaire, you went by them on the Dart as it went along the Liffey to Bray. The hotel there was famous locally for its Irish Coffee’s and I was later told by someone long after I’d left there that the town was ‘the incest capital of Ireland, which is fookin’ saying something’. It was, however, a pretty little seaside town with a vast prom and a big white cross on a hill as if to prove its sectarian credentials. If it was the town for incest then at least it was all among Catholics.
I claimed the dole like the good-for-very-little I was. They paid me right there in the little dole office in ready money even though they barely knew who I was and I’d only been in the country five minutes. Generous people but not all of them. On leaving the little dole hut one day one of a bunch of lads said something under their breath that was abusive about me. I squared up to him immediately and he backed down. I was getting to realise that word must have gotten around that I was a Scot here living in sin with an English lass whose Irish mother was doing something similar with a very posh English crook who was here seeking not to be extradited back to England for property crimes.
I, in thrall to love, had agreed to be trained as an insurance salesman, although I wasn’t overly serious about this endeavour. I went out with the crook a night or two on a trial-run then I was on my own.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours” sayeth the crook and I went ahead chapping doors.
“It’s a numbers game” says the sage “If you get one in twenty for me to call on you’ll be doing well”
So here was me working and signing in Ireland and being taught to sell insurance by a crook.
“Here on behalf of Irish Life who are in this area offering the best deals in Ireland on life insurance. Our salesman will be in this district on Thursday…!”
This was a Barrett-style housing scheme on the fringes of Bray. The folk here would be joiners and builders and cab drivers living in these mock-mock-Tudor affairs with their families. Then they get this Scottish accent at the door telling them about Irish Life.
This was the time the Border Fox was on the loose having sprung himself from Long Kesh just down the road. There were police everywhere searching for this rebel freedom fighter who’d killed God knew how many in the cause.
Now, I’m not sure why anyone would thing that a cunning disguise for an escaped prisoner would be to wander around housing schemes introducing himself to people as one selling life insurance policies, but, someone phoned the Gardai on me and somehow I knew the approaching siren was for me.
Oh and I forgot to mention. I was an entirely unlicensed insurance salesman who had as much connection to Irish Life as the Border Fox did to the Grand Wizoo of the Loyal Orange Order.
There was a wood nearby and I promptly ducked down into it, scrambling my way through the dark foliage like Tarzan on the piss. Scratched and scraped I was as I emerged to safety back at the house in Bray.
My career as a life insurance salesman was over.
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