From an early age, Johnny Jr was not someone to provoke or antagonise. Even back then. As Brandon Sullivan, one of his classmates at Primary School in Liverpool, soon learned.
Brandon was the student who always wore his school uniform very precisely. Clean and pressed and according to the guidelines. He was someone who would hand in homework on time and stay out of trouble. Pretty much a model student, he was the opposite of the majority of Irish pupils who regarded school as a place to simply pass the hours.
This made him the object of pranks by the other students, though not by Johnny, who couldn’t be bothered and was ambivalent about Brandon’s existence.
One day at the end of a class, Brandon stayed behind to speak with the teacher. It was the last class of the day and Johnny was almost out the door when he heard his name being called. The teacher beckoned him over and asked if he would empty his pockets, which was not really a request. The teacher found several cigarettes, which he confiscated.
Johnny Jr couldn’t be certain it was Brandon who had snitched, but given how close their desks were, he certainly might have gotten a glimpse of the cigarettes or overheard Johnny Jr speaking about them.
The cigarettes were lost and he received a week’s detention, which he spent scrubbing the school’s blackboards each day.
When he next saw Brandon after school, acting smug and with a self-satisfied smile, it confirmed in Johnny Jr’s mind who had been the cause of his punishments.
He taught Brandon a lesson about being a ‘grass’. It began with a wedgie so severe, his pants split in two. It ended in a paddling with Johnny’s family shillelagh that ensured Brandon’s discomfort when sitting for at least several days, and a black eye, caused when he fell attempting to get away. Or so the story went.
This incident confirmed for everyone that in Johnny Jr’s mind, no slight, however innocuous, would go unanswered. None ever did.
Rumour has it that when Johnny Jr left Liverpool at 17, it was in quite a hurry. It seemed that the local parish priest, Father Fitzgerald, discovered money missing from the church ‘poor box’, which contained funds used to assist the less fortunate. Truth be told, the good Father occasionally used them to purchase whiskey which he kept in his office. For medicinal purposes. The funds were also used to assist widows, particularly those who were in the habit of coming to his office regularly at 11:00 am each Wednesday. They were ones with whom he had a special relationship.
One such widow was Agnes Callaghan who had lost her fisherman husband Sean when he set off in his boat on a stormy night, never to be seen again. The boat, aptly named ‘Sean’s Folly’, was recovered. Sean was not. He was, however, allegedly seen on a trawler making its way to London, the same boat that the youngest O’Reilly daughter was on as well. That’s a story for another time.
