West Cork railway: the torn cords incident!

News of the fiftieth anniversary of the closure of the West Cork railway reminded me of the torn cords incident.
As a child, I lived in Glengarriff Road in Bantry. The entrance to the nearby Boys' Club was at the place where a railway bridge had crossed our road in the days of the West Cork railway. There was a sloping wall separating the grassy embankment from the road running through the Boys' Club.
One afternoon in the 1970s I spent a pleasant hour or so using the slope as a slide. To use a Cork expression, I didn't have much "cop on" at the time and I was sliding in my brown cords on rough concrete! Needless to say, I tore a hole in the seat of my cords!
I walked home in a panic, wondering how my mother would react. I decided to postpone the inevitable by hiding the torn area. This necessitated sitting down as much as possible. When I had to fetch something for my mother I would sidle around the house with my back to the wall.
I really thought I had her fooled but she must have copped on because she sent me down the road on an errand.
Since backing along the fronts of the other houses would have looked silly, I had no choice but to run as quickly as I could from our house in the hope that my mother would not notice my rear end! I was barely (no pun intended!) past the second house when I heard her call me back.
I froze and then slowly turned around, Frank Spencer style, to see my mother beckoning me back to our door.
I think she was more amused at my vain attempt to deceive her than annoyed about the torn cords.
Naturally, she had a solution. The next morning I was sent out wearing the same brown cords with the two back pockets removed and sewn into the seat to cover the rip.
A decade later in Dublin, I had a guitar playing friend who sported a pair of faded denims with quilted patches sewn into the seat. I realised then what I had not realised on that morning in the seventies: instead of being embarrasssed about my patched rear end, I could have turned it into a fashion statement.