by Alice Taylor
Maureen became very close to some of her former students, in a way that was perhaps unusual for a nun of the time. She remembers one young woman in particular. ‘Julie was a lovely girl, happily married to a great husband, with three lovely kids. When she moved away to another part of Australia I really missed her.’ They kept in touch and one night Julie called to tell her that she was in great pain because she had fallen in love with the local priest. Every night for months they talked over the dilemma and gradually Julie’s passion abated and eventually evaporated, and nobody but Maureen knew about the storm that could have wrecked her family. Maureen’s common sense had won the day and Julie was forever afterwards grateful to her.
But whereas Maureen had found her true vocation, others were not so lucky, and she remembers one fully professed nun who wanted out simply because it was not the life for her. Getting out in those days was a long complicated procedure, not laced with the milk of human kindness, and after a long and protracted process of getting dispensation from vows, you walked out with very little and you just had to fend for yourself. Also, coming out of a convent was regarded almost as a disgrace, so you were not exactly received with open arms in the society outside the walls. But Maureen kept in touch with her friend and gave her all the moral support that she could and later encouraged her to make contact with the leader of the order, who gave her some financial recompense.
Over the years Maureen returned occasionally to Ireland but found the first visit home after eleven years challenging as her family had moved on. Her sisters were now married with young children. It was difficult to fit into this changed scene but subsequent visits became easier. The scene in New Zealand had also changed and now many schools were up and running efficiently and Maureen’s management ability and teaching expertise led her into another field.
She applied for an advertised position in a diocesan education office and got it. A team of five religious was employed by the bishop to work in rural parishes who needed support. Maureen provided religious advice, administrative direction and guidance with liturgy. Once again, her people skills came to the fore and she moved from parish to parish, giving direction and help where it was needed. Her field of expertise widened and she got to know and became friends with a wide variety of people. She loved the New Zealand people, their openness and generosity.
Over the years, as Maureen grew older, going back after a visit home to Ireland became more difficult, so much so that eventually she decided that the ordeal of parting from loved ones back in Ireland was so traumatic it was best to stay in New Zealand. The order of St Joseph, in the meantime, had decided that the Irish nuns, if they so desired, were free to return home permanently. But Maureen was very happy in her adopted country and felt no desire to leave it for good.
Then the unexpected happened. The order had a chapter meeting of their sisters and hundreds of nuns from all over the world gathered. Maureen was nominated to thank the order publicly on behalf of the Irish sisters for the freedom to return home. Even though she was not one of those wishing to go, she had no problem speaking for those who did wish to return.
But when she got up to speak, an amazing thing happened: a huge unexpected emotional tide swept over her and she burst into uncontrollable tears. A wave of repressed longing had exploded inside her. It came totally out of the blue and Maureen was flabbergasted. It caused her to revisit her past. Had she kept a lid for years on the heartbreak of losing her young sister? And a lid on the trauma of leaving the family support system while still grieving? A lid on the loss of leaving her roots behind? The upshot of this deluge of suppressed emotions and the ensuing questions it raised caused Maureen to do a rethink. After careful consideration she decided that she too would go back to Ireland. The time to come home had arrived.
Back in Ireland her first job was the supervision of a small respite care centre in her home county. But when she retired from that, she felt that it would be the completion of a circle if a sister of St Joseph’s were to come back to live and work in Newmarket where all the Irish-born sisters had begun their training. That parish now had just one priest instead of the three that had been there when she was a postulant. In Newmarket she became involved in the parish and particularly in its liturgical life – and wherever else there was a need. With her administrative skills and liturgical expertise, Maureen was a great blessing.
Her old convent has long since changed hands and is now the base for LEADER (Liaisons Entre Actions de Développement de l’Économie Rurale) projects under the guidance of Irish Rural Development. There are new houses on the long avenue leading up to what was once the convent, and Maureen has taken up residence in one of these. She is delighted to be involved with some of the activities of LEADER, whose enterprises greatly enrich the fabric of rural Ireland. The parish is enhanced and energised by Maureen’s positive attitude and knowledgeable enthusiasm.
Recently, on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, she returned to Australia and New Zealand, where she had spent so much of her life. She received the following acknowledgement: ‘No gift could properly pay tribute to fifty years given in the service of God’s people. Fifty years given so generously and with such joy and enthusiasm. Bless you, Maureen! You have touched the lives of so many and shown that this pilgrimage we are all on can be travelled with joyful anticipation.’ All her life Maureen has adhered to the philosophy of her order’s foundress Mary MacKillop: ‘Never see a need without doing something about it.’
Chapter 10
The Other Side of the Mountains
Away in the distance across the valley from where I grew up were the Kerry mountains. They edged my childhood horizons and I often wondered what lay beyond them. Looking across at the changing colours, I sensed that the valleys beyond had to be beautiful. And when I grew up and visited them I discovered that they were indeed truly beautiful, but probably the most stunning of all was the Black Valley, which runs from Moll’s Gap to the Gap of Dunloe outside Killarney. What was it like, I wondered, to grow up in that remote valley? To be a woman living in such a remote place? Years later when I met Eileen I found out what life was like on the other side of my mountains.
Eileen was born and reared in the Black Valley. But when her mother Julia was born there in 1895 there was no question that she could remain. Beautiful scenery then did not provide a livelihood as tourism was not the industry that it is today. Emigration was the answer to their problem. One day when Julia was a teenager her mother suddenly said to her, ‘Do you know, Julia, that you are going to America in the morning?’ It was simply part of their way of life that the young went to England or America. So Julia went to the railway station in Kenmare and took the train to Cobh. There she boarded a liner for America and it took her six weeks to get to her destination.
She spent seven years in the United States, but the call of the beautiful Black Valley brought her back. In the final days of her visit home from America she met a friend in Kenmare who asked her, ‘Why are you going back to America when the Black Valley is full of bachelors looking for wives?’ ‘There is only one man who would keep me from going back to America and that’s your brother Denis,’ Julia confessed. ‘Let it with me,’ her surprised friend told her. The result of that chance meeting was a wedding the following year when Julia married the love of her life and went on to rear a family of five, one boy and four girls, and Eileen, now eighty-five, is one of those girls.
When Eileen talks about growing up in the Black Valley her face is suffused with a wave of delight. She had an enchanted childhood. She walked the three miles daily to the local Glen national school. The teacher at the time would live with a local family and as this did not always work out, or as the challenges of Black Valley living proved too much for young teachers accustomed to a different lifestyle, so teachers changed frequently and Eileen remembers five different teachers during her primary-school years.
After school Eileen often emptied her bag of books and headed off up the mountain with her siblings to p
ick wild strawberries, hazelnuts and blueberries. They picked until their bags were full and then sat on the mountainside and ate until they were full, and they brought home the rest. And in the valley below their house were two blueberry bushes on which they loved to feast.
During one winter hike up the mountains Eileen fell into a deep drain and hurt her hand. The local doctor could not travel due to the icy mountain roads and it was a week before her broken hand was set. But with a healthy diet and non-stop walking up and down the mountains the children were fit and healthy and able to withstand the challenges of Black Valley living.
Sometimes, if heavy rains came in winter, the water from the streams and waterfalls ran down the mountain and into their home – a disaster for her parents but very exciting for a child. And Eileen fondly remembers the music of the mountain streams in summer. Bord na Móna cut the turf and the valley women helped with the work of stooking it, and they were paid by the company. It was valuable extra cash. All the homes in the Black Valley faced the winter with a reek of black turf by the house and as Eileen’s family lived in a forest there was no shortage of brambles and fallen trees for firewood too.
The family had seven cows, but farming in the valley was almost entirely sheep farming. The sheep grazed the mountains and sometimes her father extended his flock and rented more land from an elderly brother and sister who lived on the opposite mountain. Her father always watched the chimney of that house to make sure that smoke came out every morning – when it did, all was well, but if not her father went across the valley to check if they needed help.
Lambing time was hectic and often when a ewe had twins or maybe triplets, their father would give each child a pet lamb to feed with a bottle, and they always knew their own lamb no matter how many they had. They grew to love their pet lambs and when the lamb was sold and they got new clothes, that dress or coat never made up for the loss of their pet. Eileen’s father had over three hundred sheep, but he would still notice if a particular one was missing and often came home at night saying something like, ‘The one with the black face is missing’, and he always searched until he found the missing one. The perilous mountain tops could be dangerous, even for the nimble-footed sheep. The newborn lambs announced the coming of summer and to this day Eileen loves the sight of a field full of sheep as they evoke a sense of peace and tranquility and wonderful memories.
As on farms all over Ireland, the pig was the main source of meat. Their pig was bought as a little bonham at Kenmare fair and fattened to feed the family. Eileen was never present for the pig killing because the baby pig had initially become her pet and she would try to warn it about the impending danger, advising it to run away. But the inevitable always happened and at an early age she had to reconcile herself to the tough reality of farming life. She remembers her mother washing the pig’s guts in the running stream and turning them inside out and washing them again. They were then filled with oatmeal, onions and the pig’s blood to make black puddings. The children took some to the neighbours, who would return the compliment when they killed their pig, just as we did where I lived far inland.
Every year shortly before Christmas a large car would suddenly arrive into the Black Valley. The coming of this impressive black car was a source of great wonder to the children and as soon as Christmas was on the horizon they began to anticipate its arrival and look towards Moll’s Gap, waiting for it to turn into the valley. They were fascinated by the driver, who had a gold tooth, and by the two ladies who accompanied him. These ladies wore long luxurious fur coats which at the time were the ultimate stamp of wealth. They wore large fashionable hats and smelt of rich exotic perfume. When the car finally arrived it was surrounded by a flurry of excited children and the gentleman with the gold tooth and his two fur-coated companions doled out sweets, biscuits, dolls and a varied selection of toys. Some adults received gifts as well. The children christened the driver ‘The Sweet Man’. Nobody knew who these people were and no money changed hands; it was a totally anonymous act of generosity. The people of the Black Valley recognised it as a Cork car and concluded that the man must be one of the wealthy merchant princes of Cork.
The week before Christmas, Eileen’s parents would travel to Kenmare in the pony and cart. There the Christmas shopping took place and they came home with a big chestful of Christmas fare. This chest, which was lined with silver paper, had originally been a tea chest. On Christmas Eve, Eileen’s mother would stuff the goose and that night they had a big supper, which always included a pot of jam, a luxury for the children. Behind the fire was a huge log known as Blockeen na Nollag that her father had brought in from the forest. This was put at the back of the fire and it smouldered away for weeks, making it easier to manage the fire over the Christmas period. One Christmas gift that Eileen remembers was a paper lantern that she loved playing with and that later served as a Christmas decoration.
Prior to the building of their own church in the Black Valley the people walked twelve miles every Sunday to Mass in Derrycuinnihy where súgán chairs provided the seating in the church. Having first milked the cows, they left home, fasting, at half past nine in the morning and returned at about half past two in the afternoon. If the river was in flood their father took each of the children on his back in turns across the swirling water. They wore wellingtons on the journey but carried their shoes for Mass. On arrival at the church the women and children went inside but the men stayed outside talking until the priest came. When the bell rang they too filed in.
In 1955 they built their own church, Naomh Muire an Choimín Dubh, in the valley, and this made Mass attendance a far less onerous undertaking. The church was built by voluntary labour, with donations from Black Valley people in America paying for the materials. Electricity came to the valley in the mid-seventies, which was twenty years after the rest of Ireland. In some ways this was almost a forgotten valley where a resourceful people depended for survival on their own abilities and on what the world around them provided.
When her mother was asked what time it was she would simply open the door and judging by where the sun was on the floor she could tell the exact time. Her mother loved music and dancing and constantly sang as she worked. Her favourite song was ‘Maggie’ – ‘I wandered today to the hills, Maggie …’. At night when their father was gone across the valley visiting neighbours, her mother had them all out on the floor set-dancing.
At the age of fifteen Eileen went to Killarney to work in the Muckross Hotel, which is now the Muckross Park Hotel, where she worked for eight years and earned ten shillings a week. Every morning work began at seven o’clock when she took tea to the forty-two bedrooms. She worked with a light-hearted girl named Maureen, who was from Cork, and they often careered down the broad banisters from the top floor to make a swirling arrival into the lobby three floors below. Long before the luxury of en-suites, bedrooms were often removed from toilets, which could be at the far end of a long corridor. The solution was heavy earthenware chamber pots, some of which were colourfully decorated with roses. Eileen was averse to emptying these vessels of their contents so she made a bargain with Maureen that if she did the chamber pots Eileen would do all the rest of the work. So Maureen would proceed purposefully along the corridors bearing her cargo skilfully disguised beneath a draped towel.
When she got time off, Eileen took the bus home to Kenmare and walked the final stretch through the mountains, across the river and then up the mountain at the other side to her home. She remembers coming upon her mother cutting wild fuchsia on the mountainside and then the lovely smell of fresh bread that her mother had baked to welcome her home.
By then two of her sisters were already in London where she joined them to be a bridesmaid at one sister’s wedding. She stayed for three months and worked in the cocktail bar of the Kensington Hotel. It was just after the war, when airraid shelters were still a way of life, and she was taken aback by the smog and smoke of London. It was a big change from the fresh clean air of the Black Valley!
Then America beckoned and Eileen decided that she would go there and see this place where so many from the valley had travelled to make their fortune. At the time the procedure for getting to America was quite long and complex. To kick off the process she went to Dublin where she stayed with another sister and her husband. She had to go to the American Consul for a medical and then went to see an agent about booking her passage. She did not relish the prospect of a long boat journey so enquired about the cost of flying. It cost sixty pounds, which was quite prohibitive at the time, but to her amazement the agent informed her that she could fly for half-price if she facilitated the passage of a baby to a family in America. He told her that on the day of the flight he would pick her up, then collect the baby and take them both to Rineanna Airport (now Shannon International Airport). On the morning of the flight he picked Eileen up and they drove to a convent in Dublin and collected the baby, who was actually a little girl about three years old. Eileen had no idea why the little girl was travelling to America and the travel agent offered no explanation. The child clung to Eileen all the way on the long journey. Eileen never forgot her afterwards and often wondered how she fared. Due a terrible storm they had to come down in Finland, but Eileen has no recollection of being afraid. When they finally arrived in the US a family was waiting for the little girl – this was the fifth child they had got from Ireland. Eileen had no knowledge of the adoption process whereby American couples acquired Irish babies born outside marriage. It was years later when the full story emerged. This was just a little bit of the jigsaw when society, parents, the Church and the government colluded to brush these unfortunate mothers and children out of their hair. Years later when some of these children came back to find their birth mothers, the entire jigsaw fell into place.
