WHEN AGNES BROWNE AND HER SIX CHILDREN had moved in next door to the Brady family on Wolfe Tone Grove, Dermot, then fourteen, had befriended the only boy of the Brady family – Buster, also fourteen. The friendship was immediate and rock solid. They had little in common, certainly not in looks. Dermot was lean, blond and handsome. Buster was short, stubby, overweight, with a red face that seemed to smile all the time. But what they did have in common was a love of practical jokes, pranks, and petty crimes.
The suburb of Finglas was divided into two halves, west and east. The dividing line was a river, a tributary of the Tolka river, known locally only as ‘The River’. The two youngsters spent their early days together roaming the fields and exploring the banks of the river.
It was Buster who noticed it first. Dermot was lying beneath a giant chestnut tree set in about twenty feet from the river bank, and Buster was standing down on the edge of the bank skimming stones along the river when he called out.
‘Dermo! Look!’
‘What is it?’ Dermot answered, half asleep.
‘A hole,’ Buster exclaimed.
‘How would yeh know?’
‘Well, has it got a fox’s tail over it?’
It took just a little time before Buster burst into hysterical laughter as he did every time Dermot made a funny comment. Then Buster searched along the river bank for a large stick and began to dig out the hole in the bank. From where Dermot sat all he could see was Buster’s head bobbing up and down and clay flying in all directions. Suddenly all activity stopped.
Dermot sat up. ‘Are yeh all right, Buster?’ he called.
There was no reply. Dermot got up and went to the edge of the river bank. Buster had vanished.
‘Buster! Hey, Buster!’ Dermot was concerned now.
Then Buster’s red face appeared below him, sticking out of the bank like a big-game hunter’s trophy.
‘It’s huge, Dermo,’ he announced, beaming.
Within seconds Dermot had scrambled down the bank, climbed through Buster’s now excavated hole and found himself in a cavern. It was huge. It was very nearly square. What Dermot found weird was that it looked man-made. The four walls were made of rough-hewn rocks carefully placed upon each other and the roof was heavy timber beams butted together. The entrance Buster had dug out was in fact a doorway. The two boys sat in wonderment – this was indeed a magical discovery for two fourteen-year-olds. Their imaginations ran wild.
Dermot suggested it might be a hermit’s home. Buster asked, ‘Like Herman’s Hermits?’ Dermot didn’t reply, he just gave Buster one of ‘those’ looks.
Buster then suggested that as it was so close to the Casino cinema maybe it was where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used to hide.
Dermot’s look didn’t change. Buster shut up.
‘This is great!’ Dermot half-whispered as he looked around. ‘Yeh, this is really great. This’ll be our headquarters, Buster, the headquarters of the Boot Hill Gang.’
The idea of the Boot Hill Gang had been to recruit as many ne’er-do-wells as possible to serve under Dermot and start a real crime ring. Recruitment wasn’t going well, and after ten days the Boot Hill Gang still sported only two members.
Over the next few days the boys moved bits of furniture into the cavern and stored twelve dozen wax candles there, courtesy of the local hardware shop, although the local hardware shop owners were unaware that they had made such a donation. They even had a primus stove, which they used to cook tins of beans. The very first tin of beans they heated up on this primus stove exploded just as Buster was asking, ‘How will we open the tin, Dermo?’
They kept the place a secret from everyone – everyone, that is, except Dermot’s mother Agnes Browne. She insisted on knowing where Dermot and Buster were going day after day. So, reluctantly, Dermot took her down to see their new-found den, fully expecting that she would make them close it up and never play there again. Instead, Agnes was charmed by the whole thing and indeed complimented the boys on how good a job they had done in furnishing the place. She was afraid to ask where the candles had come from.
To Buster it was just a great place to play, but to Dermot it seemed more than that. There was something about the place; he wasn’t sure what it was. At night from his bedroom window he would look across the field and see the chestnut tree silhouetted against the dark blue sky and his heart would lift. There was a special kind of magic about the place. That summer of 1970, Buster and Dermot filled the place with the booty of their shoplifting forays.
On some nights Agnes would let Dermot stay over and he would spend those nights making up stories to tell Buster about knights in shining armour, and about ancient heroes like Brian Boru and Cúchulainn. Buster would sit with his chin resting on his knees, marvelling at each word that came out of Dermot’s mouth. They christened the place ‘Chestnut Hole’.
* * *
In truth, Dermot and Buster were probably the two most unsuccessful criminals in Ireland. They ran all of their operations strictly in accordance with Murphy’s Law – anything that could go wrong usually did.
For instance Buster once had a brainwave that they should run a street raffle. The idea was that he and Dermot would buy a book of cloakroom tickets and they would go door-to-door, street by street, selling the tickets for tenpence each, and offering a prize of five pounds to the winner. The scam was that there would actually be no winner. They would simply tell the residents of Wolfe Tone Park that somebody on Wolfe Tone Grove had won the prize, and they would tell the residents of Wolfe Tone Grove that somebody on Wolfe Tone Park had won it – and they would keep the ten pounds for the Boot Hill Gang.
Sales began well, with one customer for every three calls. When asked what cause the raffle was for, Buster would simply say ‘Silver Circle’. Every school at that time had a Silver Circle raffle to raise funds for sports and such things. Within a couple of hours, ninety-nine tickets for the raffle were sold and the nine pounds ninety pence, nearly all of it in coins, had Dermot Browne’s trousers nearly falling around his ankles. They made six more calls in an effort to sell the last ticket, number 100, and after leaving the sixth door Dermot finally said, ‘Ah, nine pound ninety is enough, come on, we’ll call it a day.’
But Buster, now full of enthusiasm that his scam was working out, insisted on carrying on. ‘Just one more call, Dermo, just one more – come on, we’ll try this one here.’
The house he had picked was No. 57 Wolfe Tone Park. It had an overgrown garden that looked like a jungle. Someone had once taken the trouble of planting a privet hedge right around the garden, but it obviously hadn’t been cut for many years and was now as high as one of the fences in the Aintree Grand National. Dusk was falling and as the two boys walked up the path the garden seemed gloomy. The front door had once been painted buttercup yellow, but now the paint was faded, cracked and peeling. The solid brass door handle and knocker were the same as those on every house in Wolfe Tone Park and Grove – they were usually polished with pride by most of the housewives, but here they were dull to the point of being nearly black.
The two boys arrived on the doorstep and Buster rattled the knocker. For a few moments there was no sound, and Dermot, with a nudge to Buster and a nod of his head, indicated that they should leave. Just as they were about to turn away they heard the sound of a chair being dragged across a floor to the door. Through the bubbled glass windows of the side panels of the doorway they could see a tiny figure climbing up on the chair, and then they heard the clank of a bolt as it was pulled back. The tiny figure climbed down again and the boys could hear the sound of the chair being pulled back from the door. Another clank indicated that the bottom bolt was now being pulled back and after a little fumbling at the Yale lock the door creaked open. The tiny elderly woman that peered through the crack in the door had more lines on her face than you’d find on an AA road map. She had two tiny little grey eyes, no eyebrows that the boys could see and frizzy hair that seemed to grow in patches on her head. Buster later remarked that she looked a hundred and fifty years old. She wasn’t. She was ninety-three. Her name was Nan Sheridan, and she had been moved out to 57 Wolfe Tone Park five years previously from her tenement in Frederick Street.
Nan had met and married Robert Sheridan in 1903, and she soon gave birth to two sons, both of whom she reared with great care. Shortly after her second boy was born her husband Robert died in Blanchardstown Hospital of tuberculosis. So, over the next few years, Nan held down four to five cleaning jobs per day and used the money to educate her two boys. The two boys, Nan would proudly tell anyone who would listen, went on to become a solicitor and a doctor. They both married beautiful girls and Nan remembers the wedding days as being two of the best days of her life. By the time Nan Sheridan was faced that night with the Boot Hill Gang at her front door, however, she hadn’t seen either of her sons for four years.
‘D’yeh want to buy a raffle ticket, missus?’ Buster asked in his polished sales tone.
‘A raffle ticket? For what?’
‘For the Silver Circle.’
‘And what would I do with a Silver Circle?’
‘No, it’s for five pounds,’ Buster tried to explain.
‘Five pounds a ticket! Jesus Christ, that’s very dear.’
Dermot could see that this wasn’t going too well, so he interjected in an effort to straighten things out.
‘Look, missus, the tickets are tenpence each. The prize is five pounds. The money is going to the Silver Circle. Now, d’yeh want one or not?’
‘Ten pence, now that’s different. That’s very reasonable. Come in, boys.’
The two boys entered the house and Nan Sheridan ushered them through the hallway into the front room. Apart from the three bodies that had just entered it, the front room contained just two armchairs and a china cabinet. On top of the china cabinet were two wedding photographs.
‘Wait here now, boys, and I’ll get you the ten pence,’ Nan said, and she vanished into the kitchen.
‘Holy fuck!’ Dermot exclaimed. He was looking up at the ceiling, where a bare bulb hung from the cable. ‘She has nothing.’
Nan soon emerged from the kitchen, opened her hand and into Buster’s palm she dropped seven pence. The two boys looked at the four brown coins.
‘There’s seven pence and I have three pence upstairs I think, hold on.’ She turned to leave the room.
‘Hold it, missus,’ Dermot tried to stop her, ‘seven pence will do. You’re all right, we’ll let yeh off with the three pence.’
‘No, no, I wouldn’t hear of it! That wouldn’t be fair to all the other people who bought tickets. I don’t know why I’m doing this, I never won anything in me life,’ the old woman moaned good-heartedly.
Listening to the sound of Nan painfully making her way up the stairs the two boys from the Boot Hill Gang felt very small. It was five minutes before she returned with the three pence, smiling she handed it over to Dermot. Dermot tore out ticket No. 100 and placed it in Nan Sheridan’s wrinkled palm. She walked to the china cabinet and put the ticket carefully under the frame of one of the wedding photographs.
‘It’ll be safe here. Right, boys, let me show you out.’
The two boys left and began to make their way home to Wolfe Tone Grove. At first neither of them spoke. Eventually when conversation did start it was stilted.
‘Good scam, eh?’ Dermot said.
‘Eh … yeh.’ Buster sounded decidedly unenthusiastic.
‘Ten pounds – it’s not to be sneezed at. We could do this every week and get away with it!’
‘Yeh, Dermo, great isn’t it?’
‘I feel bleedin’ terrible,’ Dermot announced eventually, and he stopped and leaned against somebody’s railings.
‘So do I, Dermo, I feel shite.’
They both knew what had to be done. So they did it.
* * *
‘I couldn’t believe me luck,’ Nan Sheridan told the girl in the post office next day. ‘Honestly, I thought they said five pounds of a prize, but I got a hamper and five pounds. And d’yeh know, I never won anything before in me life!’ She was smiling happily as she pushed her pension book across the counter to the young postmistress along with the five-pound note that she had been given as the prize by Dermot and Buster.
The young girl stamped the woman’s pension book, both on the voucher and on the stub, tore out the voucher and began to count out the eight pounds seventy-five pence cash. She passed the cash across to the woman along with the turf voucher she was entitled to. She then picked up the five-pound note and asked Nan Sheridan, ‘What d’yeh want for this again, love?’
Nan began to explain. ‘I want two postal orders, both for two pounds fifty. One made out to Liam Sheridan and the other made out to Philip Sheridan. They’re me sons, and they haven’t had time to get out and see me recently, so I thought with me winnings I’d send them the price of a drink – well, yeh know the way it is with boys, yeh have to look after them.’
The Boot Hill Gang’s first scam had cost them forty pence.
* * *
Having said all that, the Boot Hill Gang did have some minor successes as would become evident if one had the opportunity to browse through the contents of Chestnut Hole. It contained toasters, electric kettles, small pieces of silver jewellery, and, thanks to Buster’s learning difficulties, two large brown cardboard cases of what were supposed to be transistor radios but were actually toilet rolls. Chestnut Hole, having served the two boys well as a play house in their teens, now served them in their mid-twenties as an excellent store-room. This is exactly what Dermot Browne was thinking as he pushed the large boxes of bum rolls aside to get at his ‘hidey hole’ – a loose brick in the south wall of Chestnut Hole, behind which Dermot kept his own little valuables (things like the condoms he had bought on a trip to Northern Ireland once, or about two hundred pounds he liked to have in case of an emergency). He also used his ‘hidey hole’ for his stash of cannabis. Dermot had got onto the dope soon after meeting up with Mary Carter. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, Dermot eventually got his first ‘hit’ and now relished the thought of a ‘bit of blow’ before introducing his ‘soldier of fortune’ to a most welcoming Mary Carter. It was the ‘blow’ that Dermot removed from his hidey hole this night. After sticking the two little five-spot packs into the breast pocket of his mohair suit, Dermot checked his hair in the small mirror just beside the entrance of Chestnut Hole, straightened his tie and set off for another night of passion with Mary. Although Dermot Browne hadn’t found a love life yet, his sex life was doing fine.