Anthony Doyle
My grandmother was widowed young, and her sister and brother never married. The three lived together in the same flat in inner-city Dublin. My gran and great-aunt Fran worked at a chocolate factory for a time. They also cleaned offices and, I think, a cinema.
Aunt Fanny, as we knew her, was basically another grandmother to us. In fact, grandmother was very much a two-sided coin: May and Fran, Nanny and Fanny. There was also our Great-Aunt Annie, who barely moved or spoke, and spent the last decade or so of her life sitting in an armchair in the corner. She paid attention though, and if I didn’t get some Jaffa cake biscuits, she’d make sure that travesty was set to rights. That corner of the flat felt irredeemably empty after she died. There may as well have been a hole in the floor.
Aunt Fran, my mother’s aunt, was an unusual-looking woman. I suspect Roald Dahl would have turned her into a character if he’d ever met her. But she was also one of the kindest-hearted people I’ve ever met, and she had a wicked sense of humor.
She also loved kids, and she had a good way with them, too; an instinctive knack at communicating with them. There were quite a few cousins on my mother’s side, and when Aunt Fran wasn’t threatening to “gobble” us all up, she’d sit us on her knee and launch into the famous, fabulous, ridiculous “Johnny on the Railway”. My mother didn’t approve, or feigned disapproval (probably the latter). She’d say this wasn’t the sort of thing you should sing to kids, but we all loved it. She’d bounce us on her knee and chant:
Johnny on the railway
picking up stones.
Along came the engine
and broke all his bones.
‘Oh’, said Johnny,
‘that’s not fair!’
‘Oh’, said the engine,
‘I – DON’T – CARE!’
That simple little rhyme, delivered with her theatrical flair, never ceased to end in cackling laughter.
I have never forgotten it. Funny and, well, cruel.
Unconsciously, I’m sure its message was installed way back then, but I recently started thinking about it, and I was actually struck by its stark meaning. This evil relative of Thomas the Tank Engine is no simple train, and if you look past the obvious questions as to what the hell Johnny was doing (a) picking up stones and (b) on the railway tracks, of all places, there’s actually a frighteningly wise message here. One that our great-aunt, a woman with little or no formal education, but well-schooled in the ways of the world, thought important enough for us to learn early doors.
Life is full of trains like this one.
They run on tracks, so they don’t—wont’, can’t—swerve. They follow their grooves, their natures, and they don’t have fast-acting brakes or the slightest inclination to slow down. They run full-steam ahead, and god help anyone who strays into their path, because they won’t stop.
Johnny is you, me, my Aunt Fran. Just people going about our business, which may be simple, perhaps even pointless—like picking up stones on rail tracks—but it’s what we do, and we have a right to do it. Rights are words, not shields. They don’t stop trains. Rights only work if they’re respected, and the trains of this world respect nothing and no-one. It could be an actual psychopath or sociopath, or a narcissist who dazzles, then destroys, or a power-drunk boss, beat cop, bureaucrat, a CEO who sees only figures on spreadsheets, or even—who knew?—a president. There are trains for every imaginable set of tracks, just as churches run on beliefs, parties on ideologies, empires on big ideas…Trains one and all. And there’s no point arguing with them, no point complaining about how unfair it is when they mow you down.
Stones and bones—there’s a beautiful parallel there. Stones are the bones of the earth. Bones are the pillars and architraves of the body. We—“bags of bones”, another of Aunt Fanny’s favorites—go looking for stones to fill our bags (because we’re still, in essence, Paleolithic), but when we meet that iron behemoth powered by steam, we get destroyed. All broken. Scissors cuts paper, rock breaks scissors, train breaks the rock, and all Johnny’s bones.
One thing I’m sure of today, looking back at all the times my Aunt Fran gave us “the Johnny treatment”, is that she probably knew, deep down, perhaps even somewhat unconsciously, that there was more to that ditty than just a funny and slightly wicked rhyme. She knew, I’m sure, that there was a brutal truth in it, a message which no end of idealism should ever gloss over, and which we’d all do well to learn early on:
Stay away from life’s trains, because they will crush you, given half a chance. And no, they will not care.
Anthony Doyle is an Old Scratch Press member, the author of the novel Hibernaculum and the forthcoming poetry book Jonah’s Map of the Whale.
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 