Many years ago when I was a student I had a summer job manning the Pitch and Putt hut at the local park.  One of the more entertaining aspects of the job was meeting the O’Dwyers.

The O’Dwyers pre-dated the programme “Shameless” by a good 40 years but its writers must surely have known them.

Of uncertain stock and disparate parentage, they seemed a United Nations mix of Romany, Irish and Italian.  If this seems a forward thinking model for world peace you would be wrong.  Their household was a template for world war.

I don’t recall all eight of them but certainly Patrick, Michael, Teresa and Alphonse spring to mind.  The baby of the family, as with the Osmonds, was Jimmy.

Initially, when I was asked by the Park Warden to “keep an eye on them O’Dwyers” I interpreted this as trying to prevent their thieving, fraud and arson.  I later downgraded this expectation to simply keeping an inventory of what went missing and any obvious damage.  (As an aside, when I came to read the logbook entries for the other shifts, the staff had made several references to TAPS and the O’Dwyers.  I thought they must have been supplying a plumber with stolen hardware until someone pointed out it stood for ‘Thick As Pig Shit’).

To offset this, though, they were excellent entertainment value and as a scholarly twenty year old I learned a lot from them.  (For “learned a lot” read “they ran rings round me”).

On one small level, though, I did enjoy some fun of my own, albeit quite short-lived. 

To keep a pretence of control I made a note in front of them of their names as I issued clubs and balls.  I knew each and every one of the thieving gets but I made little Jimmy my target.

Now Jimmy may well have been the brightest of them all but had little formalised schooling preferring a more laissez-faire approach to education encompassing ensuring the bookie hadn’t sold his interim dad’s winnings short, or observing how heat rises from burning hayricks, or fencing (not the post-and-rail type, you understand).  So whenever he turned up on his own and I asked him for his name before he gave me his ill-gotten 50p, I always asked him to spell it.

He raced over the first three characters, camouflaging his uncertainty,

“Ow prefoster day…”

I’d stop him.  “What?”

More unsurely this time,

“Ow prefoster day…”

“Oh prefoster dee?” I’d say, enjoying my bullying.

This happened several times and, I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  What stopped it was the last occasion.

The script played out as usual.

“Oh prefoster dee?” I said, just as big Pat stepped behind him.

“Ye nows ‘s fuck’n name. Neeow give im da fuck’n clubs”.