Dad’s friend Derek was a keen gardener. He only had a small patch to grow on, like all of us on the estate. My dad had planted potatoes and strawberries, easy stuff to grow. We did have an old poplar tree in the middle of the back garden though, so we were more limited.
Derek’s tastes were tangier. The rhubarb plant is also not so difficult to grow in the tricky climes of the English Northwest, but no one else was trying it on our street.
Marrows and carrots yes, but rhubarb?
Rhubarb crumble was a popular Sunday dessert, with custard, as a matter of course. But no one wanted to eat it more than once a month. And the plant, in all its glorious tumescence, looked like a particularly angry Triffid. At least to me and my brothers, in the 1980s, scared out of our wits by “Dr. Who” and the threat of thermonuclear war. We just wanted apples. Or did we?
Derek and my dad were drinking buddies. Derek was a lorry driver and my dad was what you would call a shipping clerk back then. Even though he was qualified in other ways, he wanted a less stressful job, and loved to go out for a pint with the lads. Beer is a great leveler and whiskey a troublemaker, but they knew there was fun to be had in making your own wine.
My dad had tried it over the years. There was a tradition of poteen making even, back where he grew up. They made it out of potato skins and orange peel, anything. Like the fuel that powers Marty McFly’s DeLorean in “Back to the Future.” DeLorean was Irish too so that would make perfect sense. If he had written the screenplay!
My dad tried his hand at elderberry wine and nettle wine and dandelion wine. All stuff that grew around our house before. I don’t know if any of it was any good because we were too young to drink it then. Meanwhile Derek told my dad that he had made a wine out of bananas that was so strong it “blew a hole in my lavatory.” I’m sure that was a line he had picked up in the pub as they were always trying to outdo each other with quotes.
So, between them they decided to use his purple monsters, his man-eating rhubarbs, as an all new super strong, blow your socks off vino.
I got all this information out of my dad much later as I needed to know why they had used me and my brothers as guinea pigs for their evil experiment that late September day.
We were 11 and 12, and my younger brother was seven. We were innocents, but we were also street kids up for anything. I had smoked roll ups on the corner and had the occasional shandy beer at Christmas or a wedding champagne, so it wasn’t virgin territory. But Derek and my dad needed fresh eyes, or at least an untainted palette, to determine how good their new batch of rhubarb wine really was, because they had been in the pub all afternoon.
My mum must have been in the kitchen, as usual, so they rolled in with a couple of bottles of Derek’s TradeMark Rhubarb HomeBrew and gathered us kids in the front room.
It must have tasted okay because we all drank a full glass of the stuff. I liked to think now that it was a murky brew, with bits of flother floating about in it, yet at the same time as delicious as the ambrosia you hear about in, you know, yore.
What was not forgotten by any of us present, was the effect it had.
There was dizzy abandon, giddiness, hysteria and ultimately puking, tears, a right old rollicking for my dad and a never ever seen again Derek.
Anthony C. Murphy is a regular host of the Irish American Writers & Artists Salon. For more about him and his writing, go to to his website here.
