Free Heaps of Trouble by Emelyn Heaps

bed. Tiredness forgotten, I set to my task with renewed vigour and, after carefully unfolding, straightening and stacking all of the notes into their respective piles, I began the task of counting and storing them. I checked each pile twice and carefully noted down the total for each bundle before totting them up.
    Totally amazed, I stuffed it all under the rug and, satisfied that it was safely concealed, simply tore downstairs with such excitement that I roared from the doorway:‘Dad, Dad, we took in thousands and thousands of pounds!’ And stood there grinning and hopping from foot to foot with excitement.
    The room was stunned into silence, broken by the sound of a glass smashing as Boy-o-Boy dropped his drink and stuttered, ‘Boy, oh boy, Ron, but that’s great.’

Chapter 4 – Christmas dolls
    â€˜The pipes have busted, the pipes have busted!’ The cry first started in the schoolyard like the soft murmur of approaching rain and slowly the news was taken up in the classrooms nearest the yard. Eventually the crescendo of noise reached our room with such force that it infected us all; even I began to chant with the others, ‘the pipes have busted, the pipes have busted!’, although I had no idea what it meant or what would be the consequence.
    It had been our first day back at Golden Bridge School after the Christmas holidays and I had gone to bed the night before with a sense of dread at having to go back to ‘that awful place with them nuns’. I was in such a state of panic that not even the grandmother (with offers of bribery in the form of sweets, money and promised trips to the local cinema) could stem my howls of anguish. Up until the previous evening, before the awful realisation had sunk in that my Christmas holiday was over, I had been engrossed in the roadworks that were taking place on our street. They had begun at Kilmainham and over the previous months they had been slowly marching up the road in checkerboard slabs of concrete.
    The Dublin Corporation was continuing its effort to rid Dublin of all its old tramlines and cobblestone streets. Since Emmett Road was the main exit route out of the city for all the country people returning to Cork and the southern regions, our road was enjoying the full might of the entire available workforce in an attempt to complete the works quickly.
    All through that first week in January I had watched the workers from my bedroom window, which offered a panoramic view of the operation. They first cordoned off one side of the street, then the other, while they tore up the old, redundant tramlines and, using pneumatic hammers, dislodged the tightly locked and deeply imbedded cobblestones, before installing large mats of steel mesh and filling the void with concrete. Throughout the day the street was filled with an unholy row from the constant jackhammering that reverberated from building to building. Whenever one crew stopped, another was already tapping out its ear-shattering response as if they were in constant communication and were trying to out do each other.
    I saw the removal of the tramlines as the end of an era, since the tracks I viewed from my bedroom window had always guaranteed amusement on a wet day. Inevitably some poor fellow cycling down the hill from Ward’s pub would end up with the wheels of his bike slipping into the tramlines. Depending on his cycling ability, he would display antics worthy of a circus act in attempting to keep his balance, while avoiding being swept round the corner into Spa Road. Sometimes, of course, people just promptly fell off as soon as the wheels hit the lines. But thankfully the odd one had the skill needed to travel the whole road, with bike and body gyrating wildly from side to side, in an attempt to counteract each movement. Displaying great skill, they were able to hop the bike out of the lines before they were forced to navigate the sharp bend into the CIE compound.
    Every evening