By Brian McDaid
A leaf landed on the windscreen of the van.
It looked too green, but there was a storm the night before.
I was sitting in a traffic jam at the top of the Back Road.
As I awaited the lights to turn green I watched the leaf fluttering across the top of the wiper blade.
It looked like a beech leaf and I gazed across to the group of trees that it came from.
Autumn has arrived a bit too early for me this year.
I’m still waiting for the summer.
But that’s the thing about autumn: it’s a powerful change in the surroundings as everything goes from green to gold.
I have travelled along this Back Road all my life – as a child, as a teenager and as an adult.
At this time of year it’s my teen years that I think of the most as this month of September arrives.
On September 7, 1977 I signed my initials, ‘B McD 7/9/77’ on the rafter of the petrol hut at Hegarty’s Auto Services in Ballymacool.
There were initials and dates of those who worked on the pumps before me on the unpainted rafter.
I was 14 years old that year.
I dropped out of St Eunan’s College and went to the Tech to follow my dream of doing practical subjects like woodwork, metalwork and mechanical drawing instead of Latin, French and commerce.
I was a week in the Tech when my Auntie Sadie sent me down to Andy Hegarty’s garage to ask about an evening job on the petrol pumps.
Her son Brendan was leaving school that year to start work in the stores and was giving up the evening job.
I met Andy and was lucky enough to get the job, starting the following Monday with Brendan showing me the ropes.
Working on the pumps was more than a job for me back then.
The 1970s were very difficult times in our family.
It was seven years since my mother passed away but it seemed far longer than that growing up.
I still can hear the reception drifting in and out of an old battered up radio in the pumps.
I’d listen to Radio Luxembourg 208 remembering names like Elkie Brooks singing Pearl’s a Singer, songs names like Nights on Broadway, Carly Simon’s singing the James Bond film theme Nobody Does it Better and Elvis Presley singing Way Down.
Other than seeing Elvis Presley in films I had no notion what any of the singers that I listened to on the radio looked like.
I sang along with the radio in a little world of my own, less than a mile from the hardship of childhood, but light years away.
When Gerry Lynch, who shared the week’s hours, moved into the garage to start his apprenticeship as a mechanic and panel beater, I took on his shift as well as my own.
I liked working there so much.
Hegarty’s was one of the busiest petrol pumps in the town at that time.
Along with all the town customers we had everyone from as near as Glenswilly to as far away as Glenties who called in for petrol on their way home.
In the days when cash was king we didn’t accept cheques for petrol and only the very few had petrol accounts.
Businesses like Chas Kellys’ had sales reps out on the road and they would have an account; John Loughery and Paul Reynolds who started off together in business, ‘Reynolds & Loughery; Hickey and Clarke Insurance (who are now located where the garage once was); Micheal Mellett who was the manager of the Irish Agricultural Wholesale Society (I.A.W.S.) who had a company account for his beautiful wine coloured Ford Granada.
Micheal always asked us to try and finish on a gallon rather than on a pound.
This made it easy to remember what the price of petrol was back then -10 gallons of Super Shell was £9.40 in 1977 making it 94 pence a gallon.
Regular Shell was a few pence cheaper at 92 pence.
We didn’t sell much diesel back then, it was about 30 pence cheaper per gallon.
Calling into my granda (Pop Coyle) who lived on the Back Road back then, my Auntie B who looked after him told me stories of when they once lived ‘over the row’ in number 19 Ballymacool Terrace.
She recalled herself and my mother Mary Ellen sitting on their front door step watching the train streaming out of Letterkenny heading for Burtonport and where the garage stood then was once just green fields down to the River Swilly
It nearly felt as if I didn’t find this job that gave me an escape from a very angry child but the job and location found me.
My Auntie B was a very positive person and always tried to instill a positive belief into whatever path we took as young children growing up.
She told me I was following my grandfather’s footsteps selling Shell petrol in Andy’s pumps, something that Pop did for most of his working life with Irish Shell out on the road.
In the background someone is blowing the horn. Another customer at the pumps perhaps.
Naw, the lights have turned green, greener than the leaf sitting on my windscreen.
I’m back in the game again. I’m trying to give the driver behind me in the jam the daggers through my wing mirror.
The traffic slowly moves forward and the 7th of September is around the corner.
I imagine scribbling the date on the leaf. ‘7/9/24- B Mc D’ – kinda looks older than the one back in ‘77 from another decade.
Remembering an important date in my life where I get ready to start another year at a very special time.
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