by Alice Taylor
“I wonder would they let that out as a flat?” I said to Nellie and Eileen.
“Let’s ask,” Eileen suggested. A few minutes later a surprised middle-aged lady assured us that she had never thought about the idea, but to call back the following night and she would let us know.
Two weeks later we moved in. The house was a large, rambling three-storey building where the couple lived on their own. We had two of the three rooms on the top floor, and the bathroom, with its one cold tap, was on the floor below. The rooms were big and sparsely furnished and the floorboards creaked, which made coming in late at night a bit unnerving. But the comfort of having our own fire was wonderful. The old timber fireplace had a deep grate set high off the floor and fronted by curved iron bars. It gave out great heat and the brass fender at the front had two little seats with soft leather tops at either end, and here you could sit and toast yourself on a cold evening after coming home from work. Between our kitchen and bedroom was another room which was let out a few weeks later to a young man who was teaching down the street. He had a girlfriend who lived on a farm outside the town and she brought him presents of fresh eggs and brown bread from which we benefited as well. On weekends when he and I were alone in the flat, we left both our bedroom doors open and held long-distance conversations across the rooms.
Gradually other parts of the house filled up with tenants. An old couple who had given their farm over to their son moved into one section. Every day the husband dressed up in his good suit and walked the streets of the town, but he had about him a dejected air. He sat sometimes in the garden where he looked like a trapped bird. My heart used to ache for that old man who had spent all his life with the soft fields beneath his feet and who had been accustomed to the open spaces of his farm.
One day as I came down the stairs I heard him whistling happily. I had never heard him whistling before so I stopped in surprise. “I’m going back to the old place,” he said to me with a smile. Apparently the son to whom he had given the farm was building a new house, so the couple were going back to their old home. The old man looked twenty years younger and there was a new light in his eyes.
We settled happily into our flat but sometimes had to tread carefully as parts of it were suffering from age and decay. One morning as I eased open the large kitchen window, the weather-beaten frame crumbled and the entire window dis-appeared before my eyes to crash onto the pavement three floors below. I stretched out through the opening in the wall in amazement and peered down. Luckily nobody had been walking past at the time.
Though we were on the top floor we spent a lot of time in the kitchen on the ground floor with Dan and Mrs O’Brien. We were always welcome to call in for a chat, and they did little acts of kindness for us, such as bringing in our washing off the clothes-line in the garden. Dan was very interested in politics. At night his friends gathered into the kitchen and long political discussions were held while he sat in his high-backed chair, puffing his pipe and pronouncing upon the questions of the day. As each of us became eligible to vote he made sure that we were registered. When a general election came around he called the three of us into the kitchen on the night before polling day and with a sample voting card showed us the correct way to vote. But more important still from Dan’s point of view, he instructed us to give No 1, 2 and 3 to his favourite party.
We got to know the people in the houses along the street, which included two pubs and a little shop where we bought our groceries on our way home from work. One of the publicans had a few different sources of income, including an undertaking business and a milk round. One frosty morning the milk van would not start so Billy put the milk into the hearse and gave some sleepy housewives a surprise awakening to the day. He had working for him a handyman called Jack whose job it was to dig the graves. In between jobs Jack slept in an old hay loft in the backyard. Sometimes he covered himself with hay so that Billy could not find him to give him extra work. If Jack refused to answer to prolonged calling Billy got a pike and went around poking it through the hay to root Jack out. After a few close shaves with Billy’s pike Jack hit on a better plan. He crept into one of the coffins that stood waiting for a permanent tenant and slept soundly. This ruse worked on many occasions until Billy discovered his sepulchral resting place.
Some mornings we walked across town to early morning Mass. This required careful timing as one priest was always late and extremely slow while the other was a few minutes early and got through the ceremony very fast. If you arrived to find no priest on the altar it was difficult to be sure if the slow fellow had not started or the fast fellow had finished. The speedy one brought Holy Communion regularly to an old man who was confined at home. This jolly old man used to remark that, “As soon as I hear his car stop I stick out my tongue.”
We joined the Legion of Mary which was involved with helping old people and we became very friendly with some of them. One lady called Miss Brown impressed us particularly. In her eighties, she was over six feet tall and so thin and erect that her long clothes hung straight down almost as if they were still on the hanger. She favoured knitted grey cardigans over brown blouses and long black skirts, so she moved around the house like a faded ghost. On Sundays the brown blouse was replaced by a cream satin one with a cameo brooch at the neck. She was imperious and demanding and seemed to be totally alone as she never mentioned any relatives, except “my cousin the bishop” who lived in Australia.
Her overgrown garden was more than matched by her house which was crowded with dark Victorian furniture. Her front room was congested with sideboards, foggy mirrors and sagging sofas. In dull silver frames, faces yellowed with age rested on the mantelpiece, while moth-eaten red velvet curtains kept the room in a state of permanent semi-darkness. The kitchen further back along the gloomy stone corridor was from another era. Everything appeared to have lain untouched for years; the rusty range was never lit and the cooking was done on an archaic primus which sat on top of the table and coughed out black smoke when it was not handled carefully. Beneath this enormous table a smelly, long-haired old dog growled; stubbornly refusing to make friends, it responded only to Miss Brown’s commands.
I moved around that kitchen in a state of perpetual nervous apprehension. Old newspapers were stacked on wobbly chairs and if I shifted anything out of my way enormous spiders were disturbed into action. One day as I moved warily around the kitchen a rat scuttled across the old range into a box of newspapers. I froze to the floor in terror, but the old dog sprang into action and cornered him in the box. When I recovered my wits I ran up the street to a friend who was also in the Legion, and while he prodded the box with a brush I stood on top of the table from where I could see but still be at a safe distance. Each time the rat poked his head out of the box the dog barked, I screamed, and Ted made another swipe with the brush. While all this pandemonium was taking place Miss Brown – who was fairly deaf – sat in her front room sewing buttons on one of her blouses. Finally Ted turned the box sideways and the rat made a dive for freedom, but the old dog – more by accident than design – turned him upside down and Ted finished him off with the brush. Every time I had to go into the kitchen after that I first peered cautiously in through a slit in the door.
Despite the fact that she had very few facilities to make her later years more comfortable, Miss Brown strove gall-antly to cope and behaved always with great finesse and dignity. We dared not tidy the house as she would have resented it deeply. When she suddenly became ill we took turns at preparing her meals. The key to her front door hung on a string inside the letter-box, so we just fished it out and let ourselves in.
As my friend Sheila and I left the house late one Saturday night we arranged that I would prepare the breakfast the next day and she would take care of the lunch. The following morning when I opened the front door the old dog was whining in the hallway and there was a curious stillness in the house. I ran up the stairs two at a time and pushed open the door to Miss Brown’s bedroom. She lay half in, half out of
the bed. A strong smell of vomit filled the room. I eased her back into bed and cleaned things up hastily. She was breathing heavily and I knew at once that this was more than I could handle on my own. I ran to the phone across the road to call the doctor and the priest, so shocked by what I had discovered that my hand shook as I rang the numbers and my voice came out in gasps.
When I came back to the house I could hear the old woman’s breathing as I climbed the stairs. I was so frightened by the sound that I stopped for a few moments outside the door summoning up the courage to go in. Crossing the room I stood at the bottom of the iron bed grasping the brass rail, just looking and listening. I had no idea what to do.
The doctor came first. He clattered up the stairs and breezed into the room. “How are you, old girl?” he asked her cheerily. But Miss Brown was in no state to respond to cheerful salutations. After a brief examination he cocked his eye at me and said: “A few hours at the most.” He snapped his bag shut and left.
At that point I began to think there might yet be two corpses instead of one, but soon afterwards an overweight priest lumbered up the stairs. When he had anointed the old lady he, too, headed for the door and then, as if something about the situation had struck him as strange, he asked, “Has she any relatives?”
“No,” I answered, “only a bishop in Australia.”
“He’s not much help now,” said the priest.
“And neither are you!” I thought as he pounded down the stairs and the front door banged shut behind him. I felt like somebody on a deserted island when all the boats had pulled out.
Miss Brown and myself were on our own. The only light at the end of the tunnel was the knowledge that Sheila was due at lunchtime which was about two hours away. It was the longest two hours I ever put down. I did nothing to comfort Miss Brown. Because she had always kept everybody at a distance, it seemed like an infringement of her dignity to touch her. Not that I wanted to touch her, but I felt that I should be doing something to help, except that I did not know what. With a great sense of relief I heard the door opening and Sheila’s light step on the stairs. I went out to the landing to prepare her for the situation inside.
“Oh my God! What are we supposed to do?” she asked in alarm.
“Wait until she dies, I think,” I said lamely, but I felt much better with somebody to sit with me. And so we sat, one on either side of the window, looking down onto a wet, deserted Sunday-afternoon street where a cold wind whipped a newspaper back and forth. In the bed beside us the breathing became more laboured and we knelt to say the rosary and the few prayers for the dying that we knew.
We heard the front door open and a friend of Miss Brown’s arrived. We were delighted to see her because she was much more competent to deal with the situation than either of us. When Miss Brown died at about four in the afternoon, the friend took charge. She dispatched Sheila to the undertaker for a habit, and told me that I would be needed to help her lay out the corpse. I was too bewildered to refuse and anyway there did not appear to be any alternative as this woman was fairly old and could not do it all by herself.
I was young and had never before seen anybody die, still less had I ever laid anyone out. My new acquaintance with death haunted me for weeks. I would wake up at night to the sound of Miss Brown’s tortured breathing and the feel of her cold, clammy body. But gradually my horror faded and later I regretted that I had been of such little comfort to a dignified old lady who had died alone with nobody to hold her hand.
There were many steps on the Bandon social ladder. The old rich, the new rich, the old poor and the new poor, and on each of these steps were pockets of different religious denominations. It was like a chest of drawers, and while all drawers ran smoothly together, people were inclined to move around within their own compartment. When I asked Dan why this was so he commented tersely, “This was a garrison town; it leaves its mark.” Whatever the reason, it was interesting. At first I found the town cold and austere but gradually I grew to like the old place, with its narrow winding streets on hills and the footbridge across the river. Bandon was rather like a reserved old lady, I felt, and once I began to see behind the façade I learned to appreciate its qualities.
Occasional intrusions upset this air of faded gentility. We had our own town flasher whom we christened “Johnny Walker”. He crept around in a pair of knee-high wellingtons and a long black overcoat; a crumpled beret sat like an overgrown mushroom on top of his head. If you came on him unexpectedly on going around a corner, he whipped open his overcoat like double doors to display all. However, his tattered underclothes, which acted like lace curtains, rather defeated the purpose of the exercise.
At work we dealt at our switchboard with calls from smaller post offices; they passed their telephone calls on to us and we then connected them up. It all worked by numbers and nobody mentioned names, but a little old lady in one of the offices had the delightful habit of coming on when her parish priest wanted to make a call and announcing in a voice loaded with reverence: “Hold on for Fr O’Hara!” The tone of her voice suggested that we ought to genuflect in homage, and I always felt that her announcement should have been accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets.
In another office was a young man with a laughing voice who was always very pleasant, so we gave him great attention. His name was Gabriel and sometimes if I was on early morning duty I would ring him for a chat when the switchboard was quiet. Soon after my arrival in Bandon I met him when I went dancing with some of my friends to the nearby village of Innishannon.
They had there an old parish hall with a very unusual dancing arrangement. The hall was small but they had overcome this problem by extending the dance-floor outside the building. This dancing space was known as “The Platform”. Early in the evening people danced outside and as it grew cooler they moved indoors, though the big old timber door was left open all night so that couples had the choice of dancing inside or out. When the main crowd was outside, any couple whose dancing gymnastics required extra space could dance in through the open doorway and have the entire hall to themselves.
As the dance-hall was on the side of the main road, passing motorists stopped and swelled the crowd as the night wore on. Many people sat on the stone wall across the road listening to the music and watching the dancers. The music was provided by records played over an amplification system. There was no entry fee but tickets were sold for a raffle if you wished to try your luck. The hall had a gay carnival atmosphere and I was delighted to have found this source of entertainment. The whole idea – a one-man show in aid of parish funds – was the brainchild of Gabriel: he provided the records, played them, made the announcements, sold the tickets – and succeeded in dancing every dance. On my first night there he swept me off my feet.
Being five foot seven I had often had to resort to flat shoes to counteract a lack of inches in my boyfriends. But after my second date with the six-foot Gabriel I bought the highest pair of high heels I could find in Bandon. It was an instinctive act of trust in our future, as I must have felt that we would at least wear out one pair of shoes together. From the day of my first dance there, Innishannon was to become a very important place in my life.
VILLAGE ROOTS
INNISHANNON LAY ON the banks of the river Bandon, cradled in a sheltered valley between wooded hills on the upper reaches of Kinsale harbour. Swans drifted back and forth behind the houses of the village and above them pigeons fluttered from the Gothic windows of an old church tower. This church had changed hands between different denominations down through history but now Catholic, Protestant and French Huguenots slept peacefully together around the ruins, serenaded by the dawn chorus and by the crows coming home in the evening to the wood across the river.
The Huguenots gave their name to the hill behind the forge, while midway along the main street a hill curved up to the Catholic church whose grey-white steeple looked down over the village. At the western end of the village a Church of Ireland steeple saluted the old square tower whe
re once its faithful had prayed. On calm summer evenings the two elegant steeples and the tower lay reflected in the still waters of the river.
In medieval times an ancient ford beside the old tower had marked the first point at which animals and wagons could cross the river, so it became a major commercial route linking West Cork to the rest of the county. Innishannon developed around this ford, and grew into a large walled community surrounded by many castles. But when a bridge was built in Bandon in 1610 Innishannon was no longer vital to local commerce and soon afterwards the Bandon garrison destroyed many of its castles. Innishannon was then granted by Cromwell to an Englishman named Thomas Adderley and he built the present village in 1752. He brought in a linen industry and gave free houses to the French Huguenots; he also introduced a silk industry, for which mulberries were grown around Colony Hill where a nearby house was known as Mulberry Cottage. Adderley was a Member of Parliament for the area and was also a member of the Wide Streets Commission appointed to lay out the new street plan of Dublin. This may account for the width and character of Innishannon’s main street. Adderley, however, went bankrupt and the estate passed into the hands of the Frewen family. Up to that time Innishannon House had been sited beside the river but the Frewens rebuilt it on the hill across the road from the Catholic church. This afforded them a beautiful view down over the village and the wooded river valley. Morton Frewen sat as an Irish Nationalist in Westminster and was married to Clara Jerome of New York; she was an aunt of Winston Churchill, who came to Innishannon on boyhood holidays.
Much employment was provided on the Frewen estate where local girls were trained in good housekeeping and cooking and the young men in the care of horses and gardening. Among the village people who worked in the Frewen gardens were Jerry the Pink and Tim. One day Tim decided to take things easy in a quiet corner of the garden and was stretched out enjoying a good rest when Morton Frewen came on him unexpectedly. “What are you doing, Tim?” he demanded. Because he had no alternative Tim had to admit, “Nothing, sir.” Walking along, Frewen came on Jerry the Pink leaning on his spade and enjoying the view down over the river. “What are you doing, Jerry?” Frewen enquired. “I’m helping Tim,” came the reply.
