We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

by Tom Phelan

  When Isaac worked in our haggard at harvest time, it was he who engineered the molding of the thirty-by-fifteen-by-seventy-foot pile of hay into a rounded, waterproof shape that would withstand the water-laden wintry blasts bellowing down from Slieve Bloom. When the Angelus rang out at noon and six o’clock, Isaac leaned on the handle of his pitchfork and looked at his feet while the Catholic men took off their caps and prayed.

  Five of Dad’s fields abutted a twenty-acre field of Isaac’s, where a small grove of trees had long ago established itself. One Sunday morning when he knew Isaac was in church, Dad went hunting rabbits in the grove and discovered a young misshapen ash tree. It had grown out of the ground shaped like the letter J. This bend indicated that the grain of the wood was curved perfectly for the making of hurleys. The bole was sufficiently thick to produce several of the sticks used in the Irish sport of hurling.

  Perhaps from the age-old practice of evading the British excise man, the Irish are secretive about their wealth or the lack of it. No one would ever ask a farmer how many acres he owned. No farmer like Dad would ever admit to his neighbor that he had trespassed on his land, because the intrusion might be interpreted as snooping around.

  Dad wanted the lower four feet of that ash tree, but if he asked Isaac for it then Isaac would know Dad had been walking his land. As well as that, if Isaac refused, the refusal would place intolerable strain on the relationship between the two men.

  The only neighborly way to get the tree was to steal it.

  One night when the moon was full, Dad interrupted our homework. To Eddie and me, he said, “I have a job for you. Put on your overcoats and your wellingtons and come out to the yard.” When we joined Dad, he whispered, “We’re going to cut down that ash tree of Isaac Thompson’s and bring home the bottom part.” My impatience at having been taken out of the warm kitchen and away from my studies suddenly disappeared; under Dad’s protection we were going on an adventure in the moonlit world.

  “Won’t Isaac catch us?” I asked.

  “We’ll be quiet.”

  “But won’t he hear the saw?”

  “The wood is so fresh there will hardly be any sound.”

  Dad handed Eddie a rope with a horseshoe attached to one end and gave me a stout eight-foot pole of seasoned beech. In a low voice Dad said, “Voices travel farther at night. If we have to talk at all we must whisper.”

  Then, carrying the crosscut saw in the middle, the two ends swinging up and down like the tired wings of a crow in the evening, he led us across the Limekiln Field on the animal path until we reached the hedge separating us from Isaac’s twenty acres. When Dad turned left and headed for the gate, Eddie whispered, “Why don’t we take a shortcut and get over the hedge here?”

  “Isaac might see our tracks in the grass and know it was us.”

  In single file we walked along the cart track beside the hedges at the end of the Hollow Field, the Sandpit Field, and the Rushes, Isaac’s big field on our right the whole time. When we sneaked onto the Canal Line, Dad untied the piece of old baler twine holding Isaac’s gate shut, and we followed him in a line through the dewy and moon-blanched grass.

  I was brimming with anxiety and excitement. What could Dad possibly say if Isaac suddenly appeared? That thought made me quake, but then I realized Dad would handle any crisis like a commando in the pictures, talking himself out of a sticky situation. As our boots swished through the ankle-high grass I wished we had daubed our faces and hands with soot from the kitchen chimney.

  Dad took the horseshoed rope from Eddie and threw it over a high branch of Isaac’s young ash tree. When he was sure the shoe was secure he handed me the other end and said, “Stand over here, Tom, and when we start sawing keep tension on it. Once the tree begins to fall, drop the rope and run.”

  Dad was right about the sound of the saw in the fresh wood. I could barely hear the sharp teeth gnawing away at the damp, white meat of the tree. Back and forth the saw went from Dad to Eddie until Dad whispered loudly, “Get ready to run, Tom.”

  The ash tree seemed to stand tall for one last second; then the leaves and branches quivered, and unable to maintain its balance, it sighed and fell into ruins. For a moment, we stood looking down on the tree as if gazing at the still heaving body of an animal we had just killed. Then Dad organized the salvaging of the lower four feet. He pushed the beech pole under the tree and pointed to the place where Eddie and I were to saw. We knelt in the damp grass and sawed and when the blade was halfway through the trunk Dad put his feet together and lifted the long end of the pole.

  We resumed sawing and Dad, by gentle increments of lifting, kept the cut from closing and locking the saw. And then we were done.

  Dad tied the purloined prize to the beech pole. “Eddie, keep your feet together and you won’t get a hernia,” he said, and then he and my brother lifted the prize onto their shoulders. The piece of tree was a dead pig being carried home by half-dressed natives in the jungle in the cinema. I handed the crosscut to Dad and took my place at the end of the procession.

  Dad gave a covetous look at the remainder of the tree. “It’s a pity we can’t take it all; there’s great firing in dry ash,” he said.

  In the moonlight we trudged toward home in the same roundabout way we had come. When we arrived in the farmyard, we hid the stolen wood behind a pile of stakes in the turf shed.

  “If anyone ever asks where that ash came from, just say it came out of one of the fields and you won’t be telling a lie.”

  A year later, when the ash had seasoned, Dad asked Paud Fitz to saw four hurling sticks out of the wood. But Paud cut the hurling sticks so thick that only three were produced, and the business end of each hurley—the turn of the bottom of the J—was too heavy.

  “That Paud is a lazy slob,” Dad said angrily. “After all our work getting the tree, he made a hames of the whole thing.”

  Despite Dad’s bad opinion of the hurleys, my brothers and I used them to play “three goals in” in the farmyard. When we grew out of boyhood sports, our abandoned hurling sticks could be found in the corners and niches of the yard. Once I saw Mam throw one at a gourmand cat that was stalking her chickens, and Dad sometimes grabbed one in an emergency to direct an errant animal into its house.

  33

  BURNING BUSHES

  Sixty yards down the lane from our house the Nolans lived in a three-roomed, thatched cottage. From the time I was small I toddled between the two houses. Missus Nolan was called Missus and her husband Podge.

  Missus Nolan was a short, pudgy woman with bad feet. Like Granny and Missus Fitz, she dressed in black, a grey bun nestled on top of her head, not a loose hair showing. Every Sunday morning Mam drove her to mass in the small trap pulled by the black pony.

  Podge Nolan, a tall man with a bushy moustache on his thin face, smoked a shiny wooden pipe that had a metal lid with holes. When the pipe went out he darted his hand into the edge of the turf fire, grabbed a small piece of live ember in his fingers, and dropped it into the bowl.

  Many times when I shyly slipped into the Nolans’ house, Podge entertained me with one of his tricks or inventions. He once made a twelve-inch wooden man whose limbs were attached to the body with interlocked staples. It even had elbows and knees and ankles. A dowel, about two feet long, was stuck into the little man’s back.

  On a kitchen chair, Podge sat on the end of a strip of pliable wood with the other end sticking out beyond his knees. When the little man stood up near the end of the strip, Podge asked, “Are you ready, Mister Dancer?” Mister Dancer answered by tapping his feet. Then Podge whistled “The Rakes of Mallow” and not only did the little man dance, he jumped up, did a somersault, and landed on his feet; he did a split, then hopped up and ran from one end of the board to the other; he stood on his head while his arms and legs flopped around; he flew into the air and spun around like the pinwheel I saw in Woolworth’s in Dublin. When Podge stopped whistling, Mister Dancer began to sing, “My poor old cow all red and white I lov
e with all my heart, she gives me milk with all her paps to pour on my rhubarb tart.”

  Then the little man jumped into my face and shouted, “Moo!” I fell back and Missus Nolan clapped her hands and laughed.

  Whenever Podge wanted to get rid of me, he caught the cat by the tail, lifted its hind legs off the floor, looked at its arse, and said, “It’s half past, Tom; time to go home.”

  One of the winter jobs on our farm was hedge cutting, and Dad always hired Podge to help him. Whenever he arrived in the farmyard, Podge opened the kitchen door a few inches and called, “Good morning, Missus.” Without waiting for a reply, he went to the boiler house to sharpen the briar hook and billhook and the hatchet. While Dad was still milking and feeding the wintered cattle, Podge strode out to the fields with the cutting tools over his shoulder, the red-handled sharpening stone sticking up out of a pocket. By the time Dad was ready to follow, Mam had a sandwich of butter and jam ready for Podge, as well as a mug and a bottle of tea corked with a twist of newspaper.

  After school, wearing damp and torn overcoats, old caps, and wellingtons, Eddie and I joined Dad and Podge. They had already thrown the heavier bushes into piles and it was our job to rake up the smaller pieces with four-grained forks. We knew that before we went home Dad would cast his hawkish eyes on the area to make sure the job had been done properly.

  By the following springtime, the piles had sunk down on themselves, and the bushes had lost some of their sap. After a week of rainless days we all set out with Dad and Podge to burn them. Looking forward to burning the bushes created an adrenaline flow comparable to that of going to the circus or the pictures. Dad brought the matches, and he and Podge carried the four-grained forks. We boys argued over who would shoulder the sacks of straw; they were large and light and we pretended we were Samson before Delilah snipped off his curls.

  Dad and Podge stuffed straw into several places in two piles. Then we followed Podge to watch the striking of the match and spreading of the flame in the straw. Matches were a luxury and only used on rare occasions; in our kitchen Mam used a piece of rolled-up newspaper to take a flame from the fireplace to the wicks of lamps and candles.

  The men lit thin sticks off the first clump of flaming straw and carried them around to the other clumps of kindling. While we waited for the fire to get going, Podge and Dad, using their penknives, equipped each child with a wooden poker. Then Dad spent the next hour shouting, “Keep back a bit or your wellingtons will melt!”

  Even though the bushes had had a week of sunny spring weather to dry out, they still contained moisture. As the hesitant flames licked their way up through the piles, they created dense dark smoke that trundled along the ground like a huge boa constrictor. We held our breath and chased each other through the wide cloud, our eyes red and burning when we emerged.

  Finally, the smoke grew sufficiently hot to lift itself off the ground. In slow motion, rolling bundles rose up and up and made a giant’s stairway climbing into the sky until it reached the land where Jack had stepped off his beanstalk.

  As it got dark, we walked around the two circles of red-white cinders and pushed the glowing remnants toward the middle. We reddened the tips of our pokers and made heavenly halos around our heads while Dad warned, “Don’t stand too close to the fire! The cold wind rushing in will give you cricks in your necks.”

  There were usually seven or eight piles of bushes, and the burning was stretched out over several weeks. Ashes from wood contain potash; potash is a potent fertilizer but too much of it is harmful to vegetation.

  Days later, when the fires were cold, Eddie and I, each with a shovel, went to scatter the ashes. We made a game of throwing shovelfuls up in the air to watch the wind catch them and carry them off, ever thinning, like disappearing ghosts. No matter how clean we scraped the surface where the fires had been, the crops growing in the circle that year were greener and stronger than the surrounding ones. In a field of wheat or barley, the sites of the fires were islands of lushness.

  One year while cutting the hedges with Dad, Podge saved a stripling of what he called the fairy bush. “The fairies make their fiddles out of it,” he said. Several days later Podge presented each of us with a whistle he had whittled out of the piece of wood. “If you play the magic notes on the whistle, the fairies will leave a tiny fiddle on the windowsill,” he said.

  We never discovered the magic notes, but all these years later I still glance at the four windowsills whenever I visit the farmyard.

  34

  WE WERE RICH AND WE DIDN’T KNOW IT

  The Second World War was over and the rampant lion of the British Empire was prostrate, licking its mortal wounds. Ireland was an economic corpse.

  But a silver lining lit up the jagged edges of the Irish despair: the postwar cities of England had to be rebuilt. Suddenly, jobs were to be had, and the flow of Irish emigrants across the Irish Sea became a river in full spate. Able-bodied men and women flocked to the mail boat and the ferries, while priests in the pulpit worried aloud that these innocents, facing the temptations offered by the heretical Protestant nation, would soon lose their faith. Prayers for their eternal souls floated across the water, and money for the temporal life flowed back to the emigrants’ families.

  The working men who stuck it out at home lived hand to mouth, mostly as farm laborers. Their bones and muscles were their tools. Many small farmers had little cash to spare, and wages were minimal, sometimes nominal, and often paid partly with a bucket of potatoes, a few heads of cabbage, and maybe a slab of bacon. There was no pay on rainy days when field work was impossible.

  During this time, my farming family, living on fifty-two acres, managed to earn sufficient funds at harvest time and from the sale of livestock to pay the rates and the bills accumulated during the year for groceries, animal feed, and clothes. Given a run of two or three years of fairly good weather and good fortune, my parents were able to put some money aside for the bad times. They could afford luxuries beyond the grasp of many people, like a pulper for cutting turnips into more manageable pieces for small calves; a separator that used centrifugal force to take the cream out of milk; a pony’s trap large enough for the growing family; a chemical toilet; an Aladdin lamp for the kitchen; a wind-up gramophone; and a Brownie box camera. We even had a wet/dry batteried radio whose aerial stretched high across the farmyard from the kitchen chimney to the corner of the loft.

  For me the words “And now for the shipping forecast” on the BBC segued into a song about faraway places. I imagined sailors hearing the storm warnings in Utsire and Fisher, where “gale eight to gale nine winds and poor visibility” were expected. The names of places where ships sailed on the distant seas sang out amid the forecasts: Humber, Thames, Tyne, Faeroes, Viking, Finisterre, Ross, German Bight, Sheerness, Shetland, Jersey, Biscay, Shannon, the Lizard, Trafalgar, Anglesey, Dogger, Malin, Hebrides, Lundy, Fastnet, the Irish Sea.

  But the radio caused as much stress as joy. The wet battery, the size of a five-pound bag of sugar, was made of heavy glass. No one in our house knew anything about the science of plates of lead and water and sulfuric acid. We just knew that the electrical charge in the battery did not last long, and therefore any listening to children’s programs had to be done surreptitiously. For Dad, the radio was only for the daily news, the weather forecast at six o’clock, and GAA games on Sundays. Once when he caught me with the radio on, Dad strode across the kitchen, turned it off, and crossly said, “The next time the battery dies you’ll be the one to bring it the two miles up to Padraig Scully’s.”

  Only through distance and age have I realized how poor some of my schoolmates were, and why they believed my father was a rich oul farmer. My sandwich of buttered bread was sometimes grabbed by a townie who ran away, glancing behind like a dog making off with a bone, as he stuffed my lunch into his mouth. For years I thought those boys were bullies, but as an adult I came to understand it was hunger that drove them to their desperate acts. They weren’t bullies and I wasn’t
their target; I was simply holding the sandwich.

  As a child I believed my family was poor. After all, some of the children in the town went to the pictures far more often than we did; they had pennies to buy Peggy’s Leg and Black Jack and other sweets; and they did not have to go home immediately after school to do farmwork.

  We seldom went to the cinema or bought sweets because Mam and Dad said there was no money. What they probably meant was, “After such hard work to get it, you’re not going to waste it.” Or perhaps this was their way of keeping us from running with children they considered undisciplined. After all, we did have an aunt who was a nun, and no nun would want her nieces and nephews loose on the town.

  Dad believed attending the pictures was a waste of time because it meant several hours of sitting and doing nothing. But occasionally—likely at Mam’s intervention—he let us go to a matinee on a Sunday.

  For me, the pictures were more than magic, more than escapism. They were real adventures in exotic and sunny lands and I was a real person in them; I grasped my wooden chair when danger appeared; I shouted, “Quick! Look behind you!”; I trembled on the edge of incontinence when the hero was sucked into quicksand; I held my breath when he struggled underwater with a crocodile; I galloped across prairies; from behind rocks I shot black-hatted cowboys; I screamed in runaway trains; I swung on vines through the jungle and wrestled with lions. How I envied the townies talking about the latest movies manned by Randolph Scott, Roy Rogers, Audie Murphy, John Wayne, and Alan Ladd. Trying to be part of the crowd, I joined in their conversation: “That detective knew all the time who the cruke was.”

  “It’s not cruke, ya tick oul farmer, it’s crook. . . . Phelan said cruke,” one of the boys said.