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The dockers were the hardest men in the world. Their guts were lined with coal dust and pitch. They came to work armed with blades, iron bars, bale-hooks, their own knuckle-dusters. They drank to wake up in the early houses before work. And they drank during work, washed down the world’s dirt and grit and fed the headaches. And after work when they went to collect their wages, in Paddy Clare’s or Jack Maher’s, the dockers’ pubs, they drank what was left in their hands after the stevedore had finished doing his sums. While their children starved - and their wives too, on top of being fucked by the stevedore after he’d drunk his cut of the wages or sold them back to Paddy Clare - the dockers drank themselves into fighting form and looked around for some poor goat to take the place of the stevedore. Glasses of whiskey went into the pints of porter. And God help any poor eejit who walked in on top of a roaring docker swinging his belt. Harmless men ended up in the river and some of them never climbed out; they went under the lock and fed the mullet. The dockers were beyond the law. They knew no rules except their own and the stevedore’s. They were heady company for a young man who’d been left all alone by the dead. And I started to keep up with them.
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