Quench the Lamp

by Alice Taylor

  But the flour bag was undoubtedly the queen of all the objects that entered our house with the potential for alternative use. A soft, white cloth sack, across which was written the weight and source of the flour, it was apt, if dropped suddenly, to engulf you in white, billowing clouds, and if you travelled with it on the creamery cart you might very well come away from it with a piebald look. But once the sack was empty its reincarnation began.

  The first step was to render it anonymous by removing the marks of its previous existence, the blue or red stencil which told its story. It was soaked in a tub of very hot water laced with washing soda, which soon bleached out its identity and the details of its weight – of 112 or 140 pounds. Some people ignored this eradication process and once our old friend Dan came across such a case when he was out looking for one of our horses which had strayed. He had travelled through many fields and over distant hills, searching and enquiring if anyone had seen the horse when, as he told my father later, “Jakus me, boss, I came to a little house up on the side of a hill and knocked on the door. It was opened by a fine ball of a woman in a long white night-dress with 140 pounds written across her chest.” These night-dresses made from sacks were long-wearing and comfortable, but most people removed the printed statistics lest they end up on sensitive areas, either front or back.

  The flour bag often became a tea-towel, in which capacity it had great absorbency. It might also become a table-cloth, pillow-case, bed-sheet (known as the “bageen” sheet) or apron, or answer other female needs when nothing else was available. It lined children’s winter clothes or became the top half of a grey flannel petticoat. It lined a patchwork quilt or, when well worn, was tied around the top of the milk churn as a strainer. The Christmas pudding was boiled in it and then wrapped in another, dry one for storage, and it was wrapped around the hot bastable cake to soften the crust.

  Some of the flour bags were made of better material than others, and the flake meal came in a very good quality bag which was used for making tea-cosies which were lined inside with sheep’s wool. Often they were embroidered with bright colours or the threads were drawn to create interesting designs for colourful, durable tray-cloths, dressing-table mats and runners for the tops of chests of drawers. Some artistic souls painted pictures on this fine, closely woven material.

  Its uses, like its life-span, were endless. It had a soft, pleasant feel, and when put out to dry it soaked in sunshine and every country smell; the older it was the more pliable it became, making it the ideal absorber in which to wrap babies’ free-flowing regions. In its old age it served as a softly caressing face cloth, or a soothing bandage to wrap up bloody cuts and support damaged limbs. During its existence it went through many transformations, until finally it was as fine as tissue-paper. So delicate and transparent was it then that I sometimes thought it could come again into another life as the gossamer wings of white butterflies.

  Of course, those who perfected the art of making do ran the risk of being regarded as thrifty to a fault. A mild enough saying was that “she could live under a hen”, but if Dan was describing someone he considered to be very tight-fisted and conniving he would remark: “That one could live in your ear and rent out the other one without you knowing it.”

  In our house we made do, practising the art with the best of them, but somehow my father was never satisfied and we were reared to a background chant about waste and extravagance, as he constantly complained that there was enough food thrown out of our house to keep another family well fed. One day he was going on yet again about how thrifty they had all been in his young days when my sister Lucy, who could always be depended on to take the wind out of his sails, came out with the comment, “God, the dead were lucky they were buried or else ye’d have made soup out of them!”

  Nell’s Christmas Spirit

  OLD NELL, OUR nearest and most eccentric neighbour, did not believe in Christmas. Despite all my efforts to convert her and re-introduce her to a child’s view of Christmas, she stubbornly remained a non-believer. It was the one point in our relationship on which we could not reach a compromise. To me Christmas was wonderful, thrilling, magnificent, an absolute high point of the year, but Nell dismissed all my excitement and all the general fuss as a load of old rubbish. In this she was, in a way, simply being consistent: after all, she did not observe any of the rituals most of the neighbours considered to be important elements of normal life. Funerals, for example, she dismissed scathingly as “queues of crazy men following dead men”.

  Her main objection to Christmas centred around the question of goodwill to all men. If Nell did not feel goodwill towards you for the rest of the year she saw no reason why Christmas should change anything. What she hated above all else was the expectation that money should be spent; she had no intention of allowing Christmas to force open the brass clasp of her scruffy black purse. If other people wanted to spend money, and if Nell. should happen to be at the receiving end of their generosity, that suited her fine, but she never felt the need to acknowledge gifts, still less to reciprocate; she believed in one-way traffic and that all roads should lead to Nell. Not afflicted with a sensitive nature, she accepted everything that came her way, without any sense of obligation to express or even to feel gratitude.

  Shopkeepers at that time gave out Christmas presents to their best customers and Nell expected to be numbered amongst the recipients, though so meagre was her spending that she could scarcely be described as a customer at all. If she had any doubts about a shopkeeper’s generosity, she presented herself at his counter a few days before Christmas. Having purchased as little as possible, she gave him a big smile. In Nell’s case this could be a rather intimidating experience because her false teeth, which she wore only on special occasions, often came adrift, and when this happened she promptly whipped them out in front of the surprised shopkeeper. At this stage he felt so put out that he handed Nell the first thing available to cover her – as he imagined – embarrassment. What he failed to realise was that he was the only one feeling embarrassed, and in his ignorance he finished up giving her far more than he had intended. By the use of such tactics she succeeded in scoring very well in the Christmas stakes and it always amused her particularly when she managed to drag something out of someone who was, like herself, tight-fisted.

  One Christmas Jim the hackney-man, who owned the local pub where Nell sometimes bought a bottle of whiskey to warm her at night, decided that he was not going to be bullied by her into parting with a free bottle. Having pulled every stunt, including her false teeth trick, there was still nothing doing, so finally she asked straight out: “Jim, what about my Christmas box?”

  ‘What about it, Nell?” he answered.

  “Are you forgetting it’ she asked.

  “No,” he replied.

  “I’ll take it now so,” she told him, “because I might not be in again before Christmas.”

  “Nell,” he said, looking her straight in the eye, “you don’t deserve a free bottle and you’re not getting it.”

  ‘Well, Jim,” she said heavily, “you’re a bad boyo in these festive times.”

  That was a bit rich coming from her, but she held no ill-feelings towards him; if he had parted with a bottle she would have enjoyed it, but when he did not she admired his astuteness in getting the better of her.

  Nell allowed me to decorate her house at Christmas time, and I enjoyed doing so. At home I had to share the decorating with four sisters, and much arguing and disagreement went on, but at Nell’s I had it all my own way. There was no question of her spending any money on decorations, but then we did not buy any at home either, making use of our Christmas cards and balloons which were already in the house. Nell’s one Christmas expenditure was on a big red candle, so that was the centre around which I accomplished my transformation of her long, thatched house.

  On the days leading up to Christmas I prepared her for the festive occasion in which she had not the slightest interest. It was a measure of her tolerance that s
he never objected, or else it was the fact that, having spent so much time with her and come to know her so well, I sensed instinctively just how much she would endure. The big clean-up that went on at home was definitely not possible in Nell’s house. At the very mention of washing the floor and cleaning the windows she would roll her eyes to heaven.

  “Child! Don’t be disturbing clean dirt. My mother used to get the spade to the floor every Christmas.”

  And that brought that discussion to a quick standstill.

  She had great respect for cobwebs, maintaining that they possessed both practical and beautiful qualities; the evidence of her admiration was draped in every corner of the house. She regarded them as the original and best flykillers, and if the spiders had put so much creative energy into weaving them, Nell was not going to destroy the products of their artistry. When we studied the delicate threads of a new creation I had to agree with her, but I found that I did not share her enthusiasm for the furry and soot-laden specimens which hung from her rafters like so many black rags.

  Christmas cards were not plentiful at home but some were quite beautiful and ours were not thrown away after Christmas but were carried forward from year to year as decorations. In a box at the bottom of a press in the parlour my mother kept these cards and I would always appropriate a few. So, on Nell’s window during the festive season cards could be found which wished her and all the children a very happy Christmas. Indeed, anyone who was inquisitive enough to read the cards in Nell’s house would end up completely confused, for there were loving greetings from brothers, sisters and cousins whom she simply did not have. Uninterested in communicating with anyone, she lived in an isolation which was almost complete apart from my intrusions. She would pick up some of the cards with which I had decorated her house, read their inscriptions, and snort in disgust at the stupidity of their senders.

  Every year my mother invited Nell to spend Christmas with us and every year she refused. She did not believe in togetherness, preferring the quietness of her own place; as she bluntly told my mother, she could do without the aggravation of a crowd of children making noise around her. However, she usually called on Christmas Eve on her way home from confession, where she went to impress on the priest how lonely Christmas was for someone like herself – though she never tried this stunt on our veteran parish priest who knew her too well and saw through her manoeuvres. But if we had a new curate she would put on an act worthy of Siobhan McKenna and have him almost crying into his soutane. If he called to her later with something to brighten her Christmas she would say, “God bless him, wasn’t he very soft? For all the learning they have, they must come to the country to be educated.”

  All of her strange pronouncements she made in a high-pitched, piercing wail which made it practically impossible to carry on normal conversation with her. If she was imparting to you anything that she considered to be of a confidential nature, she would warn you in a voice that everyone within half a mile could hear. “Keep that in your belly,” she would say. If this conversation was taking place, as many of them did, inside at Mass, Nell’s whisper would be heard all around the church, rendering the priest mere background noise.

  One Christmas Eve she sat at the end of our kitchen table having tea while my mother stuffed the goose at the other end and we children sorted out decorations in between. Finally the clamour reached such a level that Nell could stand it no longer; just before heading for home she told my mother how glad she was that she had not inflicted on herself the persecutions that my mother had to bear – namely her children. Nell’s particular way of expressing how she had come to be so lucky was, “Thanks be to God that I never felt the need of a man in my bed.” Men were in general, as far as Nell was concerned, the begetters of a wide variety of undesirable after-effects.

  On the following day, just as we sat down to our Christmas dinner, Nell tore in the door, demanding in her piercing wail, “Did ye find my teeth?”

  “Your false teeth?” my mother enquired in some amazement.

  “Yes!” she shrieked at full volume. “When I looked at the jam-pot on the dresser this morning it was empty, and you know my teeth are always inside there except when I’m going out.”

  “But Nell,” asked my mother in a soothing voice, “what makes you think that they’re here?”

  “Because when I was having the tea yesterday evening I took them out. They were getting stuck in that cake and could have choked me,” Nell shouted, determined not to be soothed.

  “Holy Christ,” my father prayed at this stage, but before he could launch into his “if ever a man suffered” routine my mother interrupted.

  “Nell, when I was tidying up last night your teeth were not on the table; so you must have taken them with you,” she said.

  “No,” Nell insisted, and then her eye fell on the still sizzling and golden goose which was lying in state at the centre of the table, and she pointed her black finger at it. “That’s where they are!” she shouted in excitement as if she had been struck by divine inspiration. “They must have got mixed up with the sliced onions because I remember seeing a dish of them near me and they are gone into the goose with the stuffing.”

  “Mother of God!” my father started again, and this time there was no way my mother was going to stop him. “That’s all I need now for my Christmas dinner – Nell’s gnashers grinning out at me through the arse of the goose!”

  “Nell,” said my mother firmly, “if we find them we’ll bring them back to you, or would you like to stay for dinner?”

  “Stay for dinner,” cried Nell, “and eat my own false teeth!” And with that she departed, banging the door after her.

  “Dear God,” my father breathed, “but she is one galvanised hoor!” He seldom used what my mother termed “farmyard language” in the house, but where Nell was concerned his patience quickly reached breaking point.

  After Nell’s departure we all sat horror-stricken, gazing at our golden goose which a few minutes earlier had had our mouths watering but which now apparently held an appalling secret. It seemed a tragedy had intervened to cast a shadow over our young lives. Normally the goose filled with our mother’s beautiful potato stuffing was one of the highlights of Christmas, but Nell had certainly snuffed out that light with the prospect of what might lie within.

  My mother had a simple approach to the sticky situation. “I will dish out all the stuffing and then we will know one way or the other,” she said. So she carved the goose and dished out the stuffing from both ends. Because there were many mouths to be fed our goose had no unfilled cavities and was stuffed to capacity in all departments. As my mother spooned out the stuffing we all watched intently and it was one of the few occasions on which silence had ever prevailed at our table. Even my father, apart from an occasional appeal to the Lord to witness his suffering, saw it all through in silent apprehension. Finally the last spoonful proved that we were in the clear and we all cheered, relieved that the horror of Nell’s teeth had been lifted from our minds. And because we had come so close to losing it, the dinner tasted all the more luscious. Our dogs would never know how close they had come to enjoying a full Christmas dinner.

  Later that evening I went across the fields to Nell with a plate of dinner wrapped in a tea-towel. The countryside had a special stillness and I watched my breath fuse into the cold, crisp air. The water in the glaise looked black against the grey, frosty grass and the cow tracks, frozen hard, bore a multiplicity of designs. As I jumped between them Nell’s dinner cooled in the freezing early night air. Feeling no need to hurry, however, I ambled along and finally arrived at Nell’s house at my ease, to find her sitting by a big fire surrounded by her dogs and cats. From her chair by the fire she had viewed through her kitchen window my progress across the fields.

  “Child,” she said, “you took your time. My dinner will be frozen.”

  She put the wrapped plate on a black pot by the fire and the dogs and cats jostled for position to sniff at it. I lay down on Nell’s
old timber settle, dislodging some of her cats who had made it their bed. I admired the red-berry holly I had placed above it where it contrasted vividly with the black rafters. I decided that all in all Nell’s kitchen wore a festive air, despite her reluctance to be part of the season that was with us. The red candle flickering on the window and the yellow flames of the turf fire filled the room with a warm glow. The colourful Christmas cards stood on the deep window-sill and between the brown lustre jugs and bowls on the dark dresser. The stillness of the room was disturbed only by the tick-tock of the old seven-day wall clock and the hissing of resin from the logs as the flames of the burning sods licked around them. It was then that I saw, out of the corner of my eye, grinning whitely in the shadows, the false teeth resting in the jam-pot which held them more often than Nell’s mouth. How long had they been there? For some reason I did not ask her.

  Goody, Goody

  GOODY WAS A balm to bruised minds and bodies and held a special place in all our hearts. Mothers made it when we were feeling sick, but not sick enough for medicine and definitely not needing the doctor – maybe feeling just a little out of step with our fellow human beings and in need of loving or the knowledge that somebody loved us. It was a simple but effective antidote to all ills and was within the scope of all budgets.