In truth though my father bought this place not for the big house but for the land and trees that went with it. The house was then, as it remains today, too large to be practical. He treated it indeed with some disdain using the drawing-room to store oats over the winter months – something that quite alarmed my mother, Alice Curtayne, when she brought her civilising influences to bear on the place in 1936, the year they were married. It must have been quite a rift for her all the same, this gentle educated woman from Tralee, this intelligent hagiologist who could speak four languages and who had been working in Rome before she met my father. And now here she was moving into this large old house with only primitive toilet facilities, no heating, no electricity, no phone nor any other means of communicating with the outside world. And then to top it all the entire place is full of horse feed! It must say a lot for their love for each other that my mother was prepared to put up with all of this in order to be with my somewhat eccentric father.
But in love they certainly were. One year, probably soon after they were married, my father had one of his not infrequent brain waves. Picking a moment when my mother was temporarily absent from the place he went out into the field behind the house and dug a shallow trench, which spelled out the name ‘Alice’. Into this trench he sprinkled snowdrop bulbs, then covered the whole shebang up and said nothing to anyone. Then the next February around St Bridget’s day my mother was led by the hand to an upstairs window. Below in the late winter grass and written in large white letters of flowers was her name. Wouldn’t anyone put up with some oats on the floor of the drawing-room with that kind of romantic carry-on in the place? Those flower letters were there until quite recently when someone inadvertently dug them up while creating a vegetable patch.
Over the years bits and pieces were added to the house to make it more liveable-in. For example a proper bath and toilet were installed at an early stage, together with a water heating system by way of a back-boiler away down in the old kitchen in the basement. It sounds primitive to us now of course but at least, even if it was after much huffing and puffing, one could eventually climb into a bath of heated rainwater harvested from the roof. It was a bit discoloured but otherwise it was fine. Other than this, luxuries were in short supply. Heating was by way of log fires that never seemed to go properly. Smelly oil heaters augmented these poor fires. Cooking was done over an anthracite-driven Aga and night lighting, such as it was, came courtesy of hissing Tilly lamps and wobbly candles. I often wondered how we managed to avoid burning the place down because on many an occasion it was a near miss.
If you never lived through these times of relative hardship then you could never realise just what a miracle rural electrification was when it eventually did come around in the early 1950s. One day you had a hissing dangerous 25-watt Tilly lamp that took ten minutes to get going. The next day there was a switch on the wall inside the door and a naked 100-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling; the mere act of just switching this thing on and off was pleasurable in itself. One day Margaret Hannon was down in the basement slaving over a washboard and a red bar of Lifebuoy soap the next day she was loading a washing machine, albeit a basic one.
Everyone in those days was an ‘electrician’. All you had to do was call yourself an electrician and that’s what you were. Everyone all at once and together wanted to have their house wired for the ‘electric’ and there simply were not enough properly qualified men around to keep up with the demands. The two fellows that ‘wired’ our house brought the power into the house via a hole bored through the window frame and then carried it along on top of a picture rail to drop down each side of the fireplace, one a socket, one a light, both wired back to a single fuse. In those primeval days of rural electrification nobody bothered about casing the wires and as for conduits or chasing the wall properly – you must be joking. ‘Forget about it, we’re too busy can’t you see.’ Whatever inspection there was before you got connected up in those early days of rural electrification must have been of the most perfunctory. ‘Ah sure it will do grand so it will’ kind of stuff. It’s a wonder we weren’t all electrocuted in our beds.
The next great boon to come around to us ‘living down the country’ was of course the telephone. It mattered not in the least that it was a big contraption of a yoke bolted to the wall with a windy up handle on it. Nor did it matter one whit that in order to work the thing at all you first had to call up Rita Hughes over in Robertstown who would, provided of course that she was in the mood to and that you had not interrupted her supper or her praying, get the number for you and put you through. It mattered little also that the same Rita had carte blanche to listen into any conversation that you might care to have, however private or intimate. Nor did it seem all that important that she could let it slip to someone else what she had heard you say to your least favourite auntie (although she swore on a stack of bibles that she would never actually do this). None of these things mattered at all. All that truly mattered was that we were now at long last able to reach the outside world and that our city cousins would now have to stop laughing at us and callings us Culchies with no phones. Electricity running along the picture rail and a primitive phone system brought us into the twentieth century, fifty years behind everyone else. But what matter. We had indeed arrived.
We never had a radio either in those early years as a young family. This seems extraordinary now. My father was a frequent broadcaster on programmes like Down the Country with Fred Desmond (Des Fricker) but when he wanted to hear a recording of himself on the radio he had to go down to a neighbouring cottage where two bachelor brothers, Jack and Paddy Graham, lived and never spoke to each other. When they wanted to communicate with each other they used the dog Shep as an intermediary. Jack might say to Shep: ‘I’m going off to the match now, Shep, and I will be back in a few hours.’ And of course Paddy would hear this and it was as good as if Jack had spoken directly to Paddy – something he had not done for seventeen years and had no intention of doing ever again. Here my father could listen to himself on the wireless on a big Pye receiver driven by a wet and dry battery.
* * *
When I was around three years old, before the devil bit me on the elbow and before my cycle down the Grand Canal, I contracted diphtheria – an infectious disease that at that time would have carried a mortality rate of about twenty per cent. So it was worrying enough for those with the good sense to worry. It is a disease that’s now eradicated in this part of the world thanks to vaccinations and it is one that I never encountered myself as a doctor in twenty-five years of general practice. The general practitioner who was called to this house was a small dapper little man from Edenderry – Dr Michael Fay. Although I suspect he had a shrewd idea about what was going on himself, Dr Fay nonetheless brought in a second opinion in the form of county physician Dr Jack Ryan from Naas. I can remember the two of them standing over my bed dressed in their three-piece dark pin-striped suits with watch-chains and waistcoats, poking at me and looking worried. But I was impressed all the same. I often wonder if it was this early childish impression of doctoring that drove me towards that profession as an adult.
As for the diphtheria itself I was carted into the ‘fever’ section that Naas General Hospital had in those days. I have a clear memory of standing up in a cot and throwing a penny that someone had given me out onto the floor and a nurse coming in and picking it up. So I can’t have been too bad and after all antibiotics had by this stage reached some degree of sophistication and diphtheria is, when all is said and done, a simple, if occasionally lethal, bacterial illness. I was never in hospital again as a patient until forty-five years later when in 1990 I was rushed into hospital to have the bullet removed from my right hip joint.
A frequent visitor to this house during my childhood was my only living grandparent, my father’s mother who we called ‘Gracky’. Gracky was an O’Mara from Limerick and a major shareholder in O’Mara’s Bacon, at the time a hugely successful bacon-processing company long since subsumed int
o some bigger conglomerate. Often as not accompanying Gracky would be her spinster daughter Mary. Out in the kitchen the ‘maid’, who we may have had to dress up and bring in for the day, entertained their driver to hot scones and jam. Mary was sophisticated, spoke with a posh accent and smoked Craven A cigarettes through a long slim cigarette holder. Gracky smoked Churchill, a seriously strong cigarette much favoured by truck drivers. And my father Stephen smoked Sweet Afton. So they’d be all puffing away there beside the big log fire in the drawing-room and drinking real coffee brewed over a methylated spirits burner. This strong stuff was drunk out of tiny little blue cups with a sugar lump added. You held these cups with your little finger sticking out. There would be a decanter of sherry also doing the rounds and they’d all be giving out about this and that and wasn’t it so hard to get any kind of decent domestic help these days and how do you all stick it down here in the country in this old, cold house. And when they had all finished moaning and whining they’d get back into their chauffer-driven Chrysler and have themselves whisked off back to Milltown Road whence they had come and a collective sigh of relief could be heard escaping through the roof of Downings House.
But to be fair there were return visits by us to them as well. They lived in a big Victorian house on Milltown Road called Green Fields – it’s still there. This place smelled of Brasso and polish and mains gas from the Pigeon House. It smelled too of lavender and eau-de-cologne. We would go up for the strawberries and cream – an annual event. Out in the back garden there were many wonders but none greater than the enormous pear tree that always seemed to have big ripe juicy yellow pears scattered out on the ground from its massive boughs.
Other frequent visitors to this house were the St John’s as we called them because they lived in a house in Terenure called St John, a place long since razed to the ground. These were six first cousins, five sons and one daughter of my father’s older brother Michael who was later to serve as Irish ambassador to Spain. These cousins were wild and funny and used to give our farm animals a hard time – they not being used to them. There was also this attitude, one that drove my father wild, that they being from the big city and we being country bumpkins, they by right as it were had to be the smarter. My uncle Michael was much given to advising my father on matters agricultural – an exercise that went down like the proverbial feed of crubeens in a synagogue.
There were a few famous people that would call too from time to time. Kate O’Brien was a life-long friend of my parents as was the writer Maura Laverty. Pádraic Colum, poet and scholar, came down by bus one day. Fr John Hayes, founder of Muintir na Tíre, was also in the house a few times. Then there was a large assortment of priests, nuns and even a bishop (who later went on to become Cardinal John Wright of Boston) who said mass from the sideboard in the hall.
* * *
My early education started off in Prosperous national school in the autumn of 1947. The school was almost exactly one mile away from our hall door. We walked. My first teacher was Mrs McCarthy who also played the pedal organ in the church next door and led us into the Tantum Ergo, all of us off key – including the pedal organ. The Prosperous church choir of the 1940s was a breathless and squeaky affair that did very little to lift the mood of general misery of the times that were in it.
Mrs McCarthy was a kindly and patient Cork woman with a big head of white hair and she taught us young scholars our ABC, how to add and subtract, our first few words of Irish and ‘Who made the World?’ and ‘Who is God?’, all very profound stuff really. We were in the long room upstairs. It smelled of damp turf ash, damp turf smoke, chalk dust, a hint of stale urine, dirty clothes and ink. We made our own ink and there was a funny smell from it. Mrs McCarthy wore a big woolly jumper to keep herself warm. Turf was thrown into a lean-to shed out the back, a cartload at a time contributed by whoever’s turn it was to make such a free contribution. In this way the warmth of our classroom on any given winter’s day very much depended on the quality or otherwise of the turf that had been donated at that time. A lot of people around Prosperous in those days were very poor and often the turf was damp, the fire in the potbelly stove only barely kindling and the heat from the stove negligible.
In the back yard of the school also there were what passed for toilets, one for the boys and one for the girls. These were in effect no more than planks with a big round hole cut into them and laid across two supports, all positioned over a ditch. I could go into some more detail here but perhaps I had better spare you lest you are of a delicate constitution or planning a nice lunch.
The national school in Prosperous in the late 1940s was a great place for nicknames. You needed to be a bit of a character to qualify for one and perhaps that is why I never did. Most nicknames had the definite article in front of them and so you would have:
The Tiler Ward
The Spider Dempsey
The Traneen Tracy
The Cowboy Mullins
The King Keenan
The Pullet Ward
The Pike Keegan
The Crow Doran
Plunkett Condron
Plureen (meaning a drop) Tierney
It was only boys who were given nicknames. I do not know why it is but girls seemed to escape the practice untouched.
For the next two years I was taught by Kathleen O’Sullivan, also a kindly and patient Kerry woman, a good teacher and tireless community worker. There was corporal punishment in the school at the time of course but I have to say I don’t remember much of it being meted out in my direction, but then I was lucky. Had I stayed on longer than the four years I was there, I would eventually have had to face Mickey Brosnan who taught the fifth and sixth classes and whose brutality is still spoken of in hushed tones to this day.
* * *
Looking back now over fifty-five years it is hard to believe the amount of poverty that was around Prosperous at the time when I was going to school there in the late 1940s. I do not remember anyone actually in bare feet but I do remember some poor lads dressed in rags. And what they brought with them for lunch was also very telling. Some, God love them, brought nothing at all and we would share a little of ours with them. For the most part though school lunch in those days consisted of a few slices of batch loaf with a thin spread of homemade blackberry jam on them, no butter and a bottle of cold tea with a bung of newspaper plugged into the neck in place of a proper cork.
Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me. Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea: quare me repulisti, et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus.
I am an altar boy dressed in white surplice and black soutane. I can speak Latin and my hair is blond. This is where I had my first taste of alcohol and very nice it was too I must say. Nothing like a good swig of altar wine on a winter’s morning to give you a bit of a gee up. Drinking is an occupational hazard among altar boys. There may be other hazards too that I mercifully avoided but I have yet to meet an ex-altar boy who didn’t have the odd swig of altar wine from time to time. It was one of the very few perks the job carried.
Little Mrs Dempsey is in the sacristy boiling up two big brown eggs on a good turf fire for himself. Fr Mahon is an unhappy little man. He lives alone and may even be celibate, which could account for his briary disposition. In those days we all believed that priests were in fact celibate. If you looked crooked at him he’d ate the headahya. Everyone, altar boys and congregation alike, is afraid of him. Fully-grown men take flight out the church door one Sunday morning with Fr Mahon in hot pursuit. He had already asked them twice to come up into the pews and by God he was going to fix them good. Men have been standing at the back of the church in Prosperous for 180 years but Fr Mahon was going to put a stop to such irreverence. He seemed to have absolutely no concept of the natural formation of an audience. Some people are only happy if they are right up in the front, others, perhaps slightly claustrophobic, prefer to stand at
the back near the door. That is the natural behaviour of an audience or congregation but Fr Mahon is too insensitive to see it that way.
‘Ave, ave, ave Maria. Ave, ave, ave Maria.’ Mrs McCarthy and her troop of asthmatics are doing their best to defuse the situation.
Fr Mahon kept Springer dogs and shot pheasants over them. He never invited anyone to go with him which must have meant that half the birds raised could not have been shot at since nobody, not even a celibate priest, can be on both sides of a ditch at the same time. Rough shooting pheasants around Prosperous always requires two people, one to each side of the ditch, shooting on one’s own is a waste of time. But of course while the rest of us mortals could only shoot on lands where we had permission, Fr Mahon could shoot where he liked.
A man used to go to Mass there in those days called Luke Curley. Poor Luke suffered from the most awful epileptic seizures. So bad and so frequent were these attacks that men were afraid to be near him at Mass in case he’d have one and they would have to look after him. He died as a result of the same epilepsy in the end. He had been on horseback when a seizure struck him. In those days this condition was treated with phenobarbitone but you could only push that so far before the side effect of doziness would make the treatment worse than the disease. Had he lived a little longer newer treatments would have been available that were much more effective and safe.
In that church in Prosperous at the time the women all wore hats or scarves on their heads and sat or kneeled on the right-hand side of the church as you look up at the altar. All the men bared their heads and stayed over on the left. This convention was non-negotiable and adhered to with a grim rigidity. It mattered not in the least that you may have been lovers, husband and wife, mother and son, father and daughter. Rules are rules and it was women to the right, men to the left and that was that.
The Vasectomy Doctor Page 3
