by Alice Taylor
As well as Frewen’s house there were many stately homes around Innishannon. One of them, built beside the bridge at the western end of the village, had a tennis court, while on the opposite bank of the river a Gothic castle set on the sloping hillside looked down on a croquet lawn. On summer evenings carriages swept up to the old stone bridge and while the local aristocracy played games beneath the sheltering trees on the banks of the river, village children earned six brown pennies for holding their horses.
After the 1916 Rising many of the village people who worked in these big houses were caught in the crossfire of divided loyalties. Five large Ascendancy houses, including the home of the Frewens, were burnt. When life returned to normal some of these workers found jobs in the factories and shops of Cork and Bandon, and many took the boat to England and America.
The village was a self-sufficient hive of activity. In the centre of Innishannon the focal point of activity was the mill to which the farmers came, their creaking timber carts laden with bags. In the bags were wheat, barley and oats. The wheat was milled and taken home to make the “wanway” bread that was the staple diet. Crushed oats were fed to horses and hens, and the barley to the pigs to produce sweet bacon. Two men hauled the bags up into the mill with a pulley; one was known as Jerry the Miller while the other had earned himself the title “Try-me” because whenever he was asked if he could do a job he answered simply, “Try me”.
The six houses on the riverside had large gardens with steps leading down to the river; across the road the houses had long hilly gardens that climbed up to the boundary of the Frewen estate. A forge at each end of the village kept the horses shod and a harness-maker known as Happy Mickey looked after their tackling and made leather belts. Other leather work was done by the shoemaker Robin, who constantly stitched the leather sliotars* of the children on their way home from school. Two carpentry shops made household requirements and built farmers’ carts with large, spoked wheels. They also made baby baskets and coffins, so they saw things through from beginning to end. Burly was the name of the man who supplied them with nails, recognisable as his by their large flat heads.
A laundry service was maintained by an industrious woman who washed, starched and neatly ironed the village’s clothes. Up the hill Robin’s sister Lizzy darned and patched, while Tommy the tailor sat cross-legged at his large timber table stitching up suits for the men. He also replaced seats in trousers and turned overcoats, as garments were not thrown away until they had finally gone beyond redemption.
Innishannon’s four small shops were supplied with bread by the village baker. A fowl buyer kept a shed where hens, chickens, ducks and rabbits were bought and sold. Milk was supplied by a woman whose husband kept cows in a field by the river. You brought along your gallon or jug and she filled it up using a tin pint measure. Her husband also sold potatoes and vegetables, though most of the village people tilled their own gardens. Twice a year, in spring and autumn, a fair was held when cattle from the surrounding countryside poured into the village. The country women brought in homemade butter and eggs packed with hay in timber boxes. As some women had earned the distinction of making better butter than others, it was sold in the shops under the maker’s name.
Behind the four village pubs were large cobbled yards with stabling facilities for horses. The animals were tied up while their owners went shopping, drinking, to the mill or the church. Law and order was maintained by a sergeant and three guards in a barracks at the end of the village, and two schools, each adjacent to their respective churches, catered for both religious denominations.
Boats fished regularly on the river. On Sunday afternoons they became pleasure cruisers for the locals, who rowed down to Colliers’ Quay, where there was a riverside pub to quench their thirst, or continued to the little quayside village of Kilmacsimon. Heavier boats were used to ferry coal up from the harbour to a large stone store beside the river. In a riverside field opposite the Church of Ireland church greyhound racing was held with a mock hare on most evenings, and the village children raced along with the dogs to bring back the hare for the next race. This field was known as the Bleach because in Adderley’s time the linen had been bleached there.
Nobody followed in the footsteps of Robin the shoemaker and Happy Mickey the harness-maker when they died; the secrets of their trades went with them. Nobody took over from Tommy the tailor when he passed on, and the village lost another service. Mass-produced furniture came on the market and when Jer, one of the village carpenters, retired he was not replaced, while the owner of the other carpentry shop emigrated. Horses were being used less and less on the land so one forge became sufficient, and as methods of farming changed the mill became no longer viable.
The pubs and the shops, however, continued to prosper. The oldest shop in the village was attached to the post office and had been run by the same family for five generations. It was known simply as “Jacky’s”.
* Hurling balls
JACKY’S
JACKY WORKED ON the assumption that most people were perfect, but his wife Peg waited for them to prove their worth. At a young age he had inherited the shop from his father, who had left many debts after him when he died. Jacky worked nights in Ford’s factory in Cork and broke stones on the road with the County Council to pay off what was owed. After his sister Molly had married and moved with her husband to open a garage at the end of the village, he married Peg.
When her brother’s young wife had died, Peg, because she had a great heart, cared for his children, and when she married Jacky she brought the youngest one, Gabriel, to live with them. He went to the village school and then to secondary school in Cork, cycling the fifteen miles sometimes with a book propped up on the handlebars in front of him, learning his poetry as he went along. The evenings were spent helping in the shop, where he did his lessons and learnt to speak fluent Irish, some from Irish-speaking customers but mostly from a man who came to give classes in the village hall.
Having finished school he helped Jacky and Peg to run the shop, taking over the post office accounts and the all-night telephone service. The post arrived at six in the morning and the telephone service continued around the clock, but though the hours were long Gabriel and Jacky had an amicable sharing arrangement and covered for each other. When the house next-door to the shop came up for sale they bought it and extended the business.
The long, low shop nestled between the high gables of the houses on either side. Four windows stretched across the top storey and beneath them two square shop windows opened to the street, one filled with placards advertising tea and tobacco and the other incorporating a letter-box and green-edged post office notices. To the right of the windows stood bright red double doors with brass rails running across their glass panes, and a clacking brass latch which yielded only to those who understood it. The village people treated the old latch of the shop door gently, and it opened easily to their knowing touch, but it refused to co-operate with rough handling or the use of brute force. And if a persistent stranger drove open the two sides of the door there was a surprise in store, because a step down to the shop could cause a crash landing for those not familiar with it.
The shop was dark green and had white windows and a concrete floor. Under one window a long timber stool was the seating point for discussions about Gaelic football or hurling, or for simply “passing the time of day” as Jacky was wont to describe a pleasant conversation. On a warm day he put this stool outside the door, and people sat there to wait for the bus or to have a chat.
To the right of the shop a door led into Peg’s front room. On the wall beside it hung a glass-fronted press with many shelves. This was the village medicine chest. In here were cures for all ills: if you were feeling liverish then Carter’s Little Liver Pills were the lads for you, and if your toes were complaining then they should wear Carnation Corn Caps. Gripe Water kept baby quiet during the day and a Steedman’s Powder closed him down for the night. Black bottles of iodine could make injuries look
fatal, but it did wonders for men and horses. Another dual-purpose medicine was Glauber Salts, guaranteed to keep you and your bonhams in good running order. Evil-smelling senna pods tasted so bad that they just had to be good for you, while water-coloured peroxide made open cuts fizz like a frothy pint but could also turn you into a blonde, if that was your fancy. A wide variety of aids including cascara and Epsom salts kept the bowels of the village regular and lubricants like Sloan’s Liniment oiled creaking joints into motion.
As well as keeping the body fit, this corner also catered for the mind in the form of a lending library. Or if exercise in the great outdoors was what you needed you could buy a bicycle here, too: a man’s model for £4 and a lady’s for £3 10s. Beside the bikes was an empty tea-chest which Jacky put outside the door every night so that the newspaper delivery man could throw the Cork Examiner bundles into it in the early hours of a wet morning.
Next to the medicine press was the post office, fronted by a slatted timber counter on top of which stood a black iron scales with heavy pound weights for parcels and beside it a small brass scales with tiny ounces to weigh letters. On a deep ledge halfway up the counter a row of collection boxes pleaded the causes and imparted the blessings of numerous charities. Every week Jacky put a silver half-crown into each box. Many people used this ledge as a seat while reading the paper or waiting for a phone call or for the bus. At the end of the ledge a swinging door which allowed you behind the counter always stood open, except when the village children used it for swinging back and forth. In the post office stood a small switchboard with its little black trap doors and dangling leads. Beside it a miniature window with a lace curtain looked into Peg’s sitting-room from where she could keep an eye on proceedings outside.
To the left of Peg’s door the stairs of the house arched across the shop and shelves were arranged under it; in the deep recesses were stacked bags of flour and sugar which had to be weighed out weekly. The sugar came in brown paper sacks and when they were empty Jacky cut them up for wrapping bread and the village children used the paper to cover their schoolbooks. Jacky had a little rostrum in one corner where he stood to do his accounts surrounded by stacks of red and black notebooks, soft covers for the weekly accounts, hard covers for the monthly, and a big brown ledger to cover longer periods. Around him timber shelves were packed with jars, tins and bottles; bananas hung off the low ceiling while boxes of tomatoes, apples and oranges sat on the red formica counter. Beneath the counter a long timber box held crusty basket, wellington and duck loaves. Beside it an old trunk provided storage space for the many differently sized paper bags for the weighing of biscuits, sweets, flour, sugar and tea. Stacked on the floor were cartons of Lux, Persil and Rinso, and timber boxes of red Lifebuoy and yellow Sunlight Soap.
Beside Jacky a door opened into the “oil house” where paraffin oil was piped in from a large drum in the backyard to fill the oil cans of the many customers who used oil heaters, cookers and primuses. On a shelf above the oil-tap was a drum of methylated spirits. Bags of chicken-mash were also stored here and on the shelves above them Jacky laid out his seed potatoes in flat boxes for early sprouting.
The shop was also the bus-stop for people coming and going from Cork and Bandon. While they waited people chatted and exchanged news, keeping an eye on the time on the post office clock which Jacky and Peg had received from the local GAA club, the Valley Rovers, when they married.
VILLAGE WIFE
WHILE SWIMMING IN the impressionable and irresponsible seas of adolescence I dreamt of having seven children. The companionship of our large family had always been a source of great joy to me, so at a very young age the thought grew in the back of my mind, and there became firmly rooted, that it would be nice to have seven children. Side by side with that plan grew another, which was not to get married until the age of thirty-five. The fact that incorporating these two plans into my life would lead to hectic, action-packed middle years never dawned on me.
My heart, however, upset one plan when at the age of twenty Gabriel came along and turned on an extra light in my life. I decided that a fifteen-year wait might dim this light a little, so I did a U-turn on the thirty-five-year plan and got married, with the idea of having seven children still firmly in my head. Family planning and financial strategy never crossed my naïve mind, just rows of little girls in frilly dresses and little boys who behaved beautifully. They were going to be perfect children and I the perfect mother!
When we were children a favourite game we played in the grove behind our home was “shop”, so when I married Gabriel and moved into a real village shop and post office, it was like a transition from playing games to real life. To his aunt and uncle Gabriel was perfection itself, and I soon realised that his Aunty Peg considered that she had me “on appro”. That was a term used by clothes shops when they allowed you take an item home to get the family’s opinion if you could not make up your mind on the spot about the purchase. One shop-owner told me that she had given a hat out one Saturday night on appro, only to see it perched on the head of a fashionable lady standing up for the gospel at Mass on Sunday and have it returned as unsuitable on the Monday morning. I don’t think that Aunty Peg had such a drastic strategy in mind for me, but I soon learned that to his aunt my husband was no ordinary mortal, and no matter what high ideas I had about myself, in her opinion I needed to live up to those ideas and more.
She was a well-built, confident woman, and was known to all in the village as Aunty Peg. She had lived in the parish all her life, had the measure of most people, and never hesitated to be honest and forthright in her opinion. She loved dogs, clothes and gardening, and was a great cook. Before I got married I was living in a flat where the staple diet was beans on toast, but I often came to her for Sunday lunch and was sustained by it for a week. She enjoyed cooking, and grew most of her own vegetables. Her apple cake was a feast of juicy apples in sweet pastry. She kept her eye on me during the first few months of marriage to make sure that things were up to scratch in the culinary department, and I was very much in awe of her superior knowledge.
Peg’s home was a rabbit-warren of little rooms divided by old walls three foot thick. Steep stairs twisted up into three bedrooms, but because there was no corridor we went through the first two bedrooms to get to the third. Steps led into the middle room where Jacky and Peg slept. So many holy pictures lined the walls that I sometimes thought I should whisper, it felt so like a convent. Peg, however, with her earthy language and liking for dashing hats, bore no resemblance to a reverend mother; Jacky, on the other hand, would have been quite at home in a monastery. Peg was fond of rose-patterned carpets and lace curtains with pink flowers, so the bedrooms looked like miniature gardens, except that the prevailing smell was of camphor balls.
At the foot of the stairs a stone-floored room acted as a cold room for the shop. An enormous hand-operated bacon-slicer stood in the corner and boxes of Bandon butter kept cool on the floor. In here, too, was the telephone kiosk. Behind this the bathroom was made available to distressed ladies dashing in off the bus.
Peg’s main sitting-room had a roof partly made of glass which filled the room with light. In here Peg had a three-corner pine press and a large mahogany sideboard filled with ware and family mementoes. She was a great hoarder, and dusted and polished her collection of items daily.
To the front was another tiny room with no windows, where on a long leather sofa you could stretch out on a hot day and imagine that you were down a rabbit burrow, it was so cool and silent.
Next to this was the front sitting-room, the reception point for people who were to be impressed but not warmly welcomed into the bosom of the family. I always knew that the people Aunty Peg took in here were getting the grand treatment but not complete acceptance. It was her testing ground. In here was her china cabinet displaying all her best china, and the little room was packed with soft sofas and chairs and its walls covered with family photographs. Sitting in the deep recess of the window, you could wa
tch through the lace curtains the activity on the street.
At the very back of the house, behind her main sitting-room, ran a long, narrow kitchen with low windows looking onto the garden. Outside the window Jacky’s rose garden grew so close it was almost as if the garden reached into the kitchen. Peg loved flowers and filled the house with vases of them. On the morning of her wedding she had gone out into the garden of the cottage she lived in to pick her wedding bouquet, and she decorated the wedding table with wild flowers.
Gabriel and I shared a large hilly garden with Aunty Peg and Uncle Jacky and I used to love to go out there and watch Uncle Jacky at work. He gloried in his garden, making of it a wonderfully restful retreat, where hens scratched under old apple trees and rambling roses draped over wooden arches. He grew strawberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries and Aunty Peg made jam in a big wide preserving pan, selling the surplus in the shop or giving it away to her friends. There was no obvious plan to his garden: it was full of flowers, shrubs, trees and hidden, sheltered corners. He divided off sections with homemade fencing, some of which had sprouted surprisingly and grown into small trees. Trailing plants darned themselves through chicken wire and climbed up the tree trunks. For Jacky his garden was a love affair with nature, and he always took time to lean on his pike or sit on a stone to have a chat. He enjoyed the shop and loved to give some of what he had grown himself to his customers and neighbours. Aunty Peg took great pride in the garden and usually walked with visiting friends up the sloping pathway to cut flowers for them. The more she liked them the bigger the bunch she gave.
