So yesterday was St. Patrick’s day, and we went down to the pub to be with our neighbors for a while, as usual. We went early, as Peter is still suffering from his cold, and didn’t want to have to cope with the late-night smokiness that sometimes ensues at Moore’s on busy nights.
We headed home at about eight-thirty, puttered around the house taking care of a few things, and settled in for the evening. I turned in around eleven, as usual: Peter stayed up to watch some stuff on the Discovery Channel.
Around one-thirty AM I was awakened by a heavy thump and what sounded like a loud scraping noise outside. A moment later, Peter’s voice came from downstairs: “Hon, I think someone’s had an accident outside! I’m going out to check.”
As he went out, I threw some clothes on and came downstairs to follow him. But he was already back in the house. “There’s a car upside down in the road outside the house,” he said. “I’m calling the Guards.” (To non-Irish readers: the police in Ireland are called the Garda Siochona or Gardai [“the Guards”] for short.)
Peter got on the phone and called them, then turned to me. “I went out there, and voices came out of the car: ‘Help us get it off the road!’ I said, ‘With what?'” (When I had a look at the wreck, it was plain that no three people were going to be able to move it, whether or not there was another car to help, which there wasn’t: we don’t have one.) “I said to them, ‘I’m calling the Guards.’ And they started shouting, ‘Don’t call the Guards! Don’t call the Guards!’ I said, ‘Bloody well I am calling the Guards!'”
We gave each other wry looks as we went out to put some gas lamps on either side of the wreck to help keep other motorists from running into it. (Note to self: buy some road flares.) The passengers’ concern most likely meant that (a) the driver was driving drunk and didn’t want to be breathalyzed, (b) the car’s road tax wasn’t paid, (c) the car hadn’t passed its National Car Test (the mandatory emissions / road safety test for cars over ten years old: the car’s plates were 1991 County Kerry plates): (d) the car wasn’t insured: (e) the car was stolen: or (f) some combination of one or more of the above. In any case, the inhabitants of the car were nowhere to be seen…probably, by this time, they were half a mile or more down the road in the direction of Dunlavin.
While waiting for the Guards, we walked up the road a bit to see what had happened. There is a steepish hill just to the east of us, and the road comes down around it in a fairly tight curve. The Kerry car had come down it, possibly on the wrong side of the road (or possibly just driving in the middle of the road, as too many country drivers around here tend to do on narrow country roads when there’s no indication of oncoming traffic), misjudged the curve, either swerved or drove straight onto the grassy verge on the right side of the road, and there hit the hedge just before our house. This hedge is mostly holly, but some other softwoods as well, and grows in and on an old low stone wall which has almost been swallowed up in that spot by the accretion of roadside dirt and growth over the last century or so. The car hit and smashed a cherry laurel tree that occupied that spot; though the laurel absorbed some of the car’s speed, it couldn’t absorb enough of it to keep the fairly sharp angle of the bank and the old stone wall underneath it from flipping the car over on its back as it was deflected back into the road. Looking at the impact spot, it occurred to me that had the cherry laurel not been there, the hollies might not have been able to deflect the car sufficiently so that it would flip. Judging by the direction of its tire tracks in the soft earth in front of the hedge, it would have plunged through them, down into our front yard, and straight into the corner of our house, three feet from where Peter’s head was as he lay on the living-room sofa watching “The Good Life” on UK Gold.
We spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes keeping curious kittens away from the wreck, the lights of which were slowly going out as the acid dripped out of its battery. (The senior cats were inside, exhibiting a general reaction of “Why should I get up for this?“) …The road was full of broken glass and shattered fender-plastic, and the air was full of the smell of oozing crankcase oil, but fortunately, not of gasoline. Shortly the Guards arrived, turned on the blue flashers on their car, and got out to find out what had happened. They were jovial, and rather resigned to the idea that the accident probably involved drink or possibly joyriding: they were as relieved as we were that no one seemed to have been hurt. The two of them started examining the wreck with flashlights as we directed one or two passing motorists around the wreck, which almost entirely blocked the road. The Guards reached in carefully past the shattered glass and started looking through the wreck as best they could. “Took his keys, all right,” one of the Guards said. They pulled out various plastic soft-drink bottles, a lottery scratch-card booklet, a page of the Sunday News of the World, somebody’s fuzzy hat: but there was nothing more revealing than that. The occupants had been careful to remove anything that might have identified them.
The Guards called a towing service, and a flatbed towtruck arrived around 0230. The car’s roof crumpled and groaned with the strain of being winched up onto the towtruck. “There goes his no-claims bonus,” Peter said. (Sardonic laughter from the Guards, who probably were also in doubt about the car’s insurance status at that point.) Around 0245, the truck and the Guards left the scene, and Peter collected the cats and the gas lamps and came back in to finish watching his late-night TV.
…I went back to bed and put on the radio to help me get back to sleep. A mistake, since BBC Five Live was full of the usual: wars and rumors of wars, mysterious plagues, general madness, and bad cricket results. (sigh) Reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes did more to relax me again than any of that.
Shortly I’ll add a picture of the hedge here.
