Quench the Lamp

by Alice Taylor

  Mike had received little formal education but he had a great interest in the wonders of nature and the movements of the planets. When one of our neighbours’ sons qualified as a teacher he gave night classes in the local school for people such as Mike, who had missed out on schooling and were keen to broaden their fields of knowledge. An interested and interesting collection of students, young Dan the teacher must have found them quite a contrast to his day pupils. One night he was endeavouring to explain to them, with the help of a globe, about the world turning on its axis and the regularity with which this took place, but it was too much for Mike who slapped the bench with his hand.

  “Will you for God’s sake, Dan, talk a bit of sense. I’m over there on that farm with seventy-five years,” he exclaimed, pointing out of the school window in the direction of his own place, “and the bloody ground never stirred an inch.”

  When electricity came Mike was fascinated by all the gadgets that came with it, and his was the first electric blanket in our part of the country. He also purchased an electric clock and was delighted with the fact that it kept perfect time. For years he had been at the mercy of a temperamental alarm clock that, a little like himself, decided to take a rest every so often. The alarm clock had been used in both the kitchen and bedroom but now it was placed on permanent bedroom duty while the new electric clock took over in the kitchen. One wet day Mike decided to investigate the reason why the alarm clock kept such bad time. Maud had gone into town and he had the place to himself; he pulled the kitchen table up close to the fire, sat himself down in comfort and proceeded to dismantle the clock. Every little screw and wheel was taken apart and laid out on a newspaper on the table, and Mike passed an enjoyable few hours studying the intricacies of his timepiece. He had taken careful note of every piece in the process of dismantling, yet when he had put it all back together again he found that he was left with one spare part.

  “Do you know something,” he said to Maud, “it’s no wonder that clock kept bad time: the fool that made it put in an extra wheel.” The clock, of course, never ticked again.

  Mike and Maud had no children because, as he put it, time was against them, a fact for which he was eternally grateful. He suffered from no unfulfilled paternal longings, unlike his neighbour and friend Pat O’Shea, who lamented his lack of a son and heir in verse:

  Fine green fields

  And no one for them;

  She fooled poor Pat O’Shea:

  She said she was

  Twenty years and four

  But she was forty years

  And far more.

  She fooled poor Pat O’Shea:

  My fine green fields

  And no one for them.

  Mike gave Pat very little sympathy and he always said that what Maud did with the land when he died was entirely up to her. And when he did die, his last words to Maud were to mind his greyhounds.

  As with everything he did, Mike took death in his stride. One morning he was not feeling well so he stayed in bed, and at lunch-time he just closed his eyes and died. Maud was not one to panic, so in due course she sent for Mrs Casey to lay him out. As she was passing our house Mrs Casey called for my mother and when they arrived at Mike’s my mother talked to Maud while Mrs Casey went into the bedroom. After a few more neighbours had arrived Mrs Casey beckoned my mother into the bedroom.

  “There is something wrong here,” she announced. “He is not cooling down.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” my mother asked in surprise.

  “Mike is dead long enough to be getting cold, but he’s not. I’ve laid out many a dead man and I know how dead men act and Mike isn’t acting like a dead man.”

  “But he must be dead,” my mother insisted, not knowing quite how to handle this development. “He looks dead anyway.”

  “Well, he doesn’t feel dead,” Mrs Casey said, putting her hand on Mike. As they pondered their dilemma Maud entered the room and saw the two of them looking at Mike.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why are ye not laying him out?”

  “The way it is, Maud,” Mrs Casey explained, “Mike is hot and he should be cold.”

  “Oh,” Maud said, looking puzzled and going towards the bed. She examined Mike and the bed and then her face cleared and she smiled. “Well, the old devil,” she exclaimed, “he had the electric blanket plugged in – he loved the comfort of it.” And going to the foot of the bed she unplugged Mike and Mrs Casey was able to get on with her job.

  Maud died a few years after Mike and now their little house is in ruins. They had gone into marriage with no great expectations on either side, yet their home had always been full of contentment and good humour.

  “Come Home Dacent”

  NOTHING COULD COMPETE for excitement with the carnival, which came to town every year in June. We lined the street waiting eagerly for the fancy-dress parade, squealing with excitement when it came into view and straining our eyes to identify the mysterious locals dressed up in their costume disguises. The carnival queen, with her glittering tiara and her ladies-in-waiting dressed in frothy, full-length gowns, was the ultimate in glamour and the envy of all the little girls dressed, as we were, in our sunbleached hand-me-downs. The parade over, we went to the “merries”, where we swung high in the swinging boats and chased each other around the big spinner, inside which dolls and sets of ware competed with each other to tempt mothers and fathers.

  My father did not go to the carnival but sat at home and smoked his pipe by the kitchen fire, grateful for the rare pleasure of having the house to himself. On such occasions he never lit the lamp but sat in the gathering dusk, the only light being the yellow flicker of the turf fire and the red glow of his pipe. When we returned home at about midnight we burst into his silent domain, regaling him with stories of money lost and won on pongo, of rides on the merries, of the excitement of our day, and patiently he listened to us before seizing an opportunity to escape upstairs to bed.

  We left the carnival field as night was falling, but before we headed for home we gathered around the door of the old ballroom which stood over a garage in a field. The field was hilly and the garage seemed to burrow into the hill at the rear while the dance-hall rode on its back, its doors opening on to the street. We watched open-mouthed while older sisters and neighbouring girls with curled hair went in, all dressed in swirling skirts. Curls were the fashion and nobody would admit to straight hair except the old ladies who caught their hair into a knot or “cuck” at the base of the poll. How we envied those glamorous girls, and when the door opened and we caught a glimpse into the hall itself it was a sight from another world. Glittering balls hung from the ceiling, the floor shone with a maple sheen, and bursts of familiar tunes escaped with each swing of the door. We were well versed in the music of the day and the band was playing all our tunes; Guy Mitchell provided the foot-tapping numbers, while Frankie Lane and Nat King Cole slowed the tempo.

  Finally we were dragged away by my mother or a neighbour, or else my sister Sarah came to the door of the dance-hall to dispatch us all off home. If we had any pennies left we called into a little shop that stayed open late for the carnival and pooled our resources to buy a bar of chocolate for the road home. A full bar of chocolate was an unheard-of luxury, so one bar was broken up into squares and shared around, and sometimes squares had to be further divided so that everyone could have a bit. The miracle of the loaves and fishes was no miracle to us.

  We walked up the old road, as the road home was called, and the strains of the music became fainter, soon to be replaced by the call of the corncrake and the occasional crow of the cock pheasant. The moon shone down, lighting up the road ahead and throwing the hedges into shadow; we enjoyed imagining that all sorts of spooks lurked in these shadows, and this often triggered off an unplanned race along the road. When we ran out of breath we staggered to a halt and sat on a mossy ditch to recover; here we told each other stories or, if the girls outnumbered the boys, we planned what we would wear at our
first dance when we were old enough. Starting off again we lapsed into silence for a few minutes and could hear the cows snorting and munching grass inside the ditches. We leaned against an iron gate and some of us climbed up to sit on top and watch the cows in the moonlight. We seldom saw the countryside this late at night and it had an eerie stillness under the moon, with the farmhouses huddled on the hills and trees crouched on the horizon like dark, shadowy figures.

  * * * *

  And then the years had passed, the carnival was in town again and I was sixteen, quivering in anticipation of my first dance, waiting to take my first step into a new and exciting world. I was just finishing my Inter Cert exams and the last subjects received scant attention as the other girls and I planned our big night. We tried on each other’s dresses, skirts and blouses, each seeking the magic combination which would show her off to her best advantage.

  To me the unattainable dream was a low-cut dress with sufficient cleavage inside it to keep it afloat. But, at a time when fashion demanded round-bosomed, curvaceous female bodies, I suffered the pangs of adolescence, yearning to be other than I was, with my long legs and my body so thin that my grandmother had told me I was like the stroke of 1 on a sheet of paper.

  One of my friends, on hearing of my fervent aspiration to display a plunging neckline, brought me a bright red, scanty dress which belonged to an aunt of hers who was home on holidays from London. It was the last word in sophistication: I was about to become a scarlet woman, the fulfilment of all my dreams. But when I waltzed into the kitchen with this flimsy model high above my knees and cut so low that it displayed what I had not got, my mother nearly had heart failure. My sister Sarah pronounced a sarcastic verdict of “dressed-up tart”, and my father, as he passed through the kitchen, scratched his head and muttered something about a “hoor’s top”. And it was there in the kitchen that my red dress was whipped off me, wrapped up in a brown paper bag and thrust back into my schoolbag beneath my books. I was sent off to school on the last day of my exams with my only hope of becoming a scarlet woman buried beneath Virgil and Shakespeare. I had always been impressed by the tragedy of Lady MacBeth, but that day her tragedy seemed pale by comparison with mine.

  After trying on black taffeta shirts with white frilly blouses and miscellaneous dresses, all of us first-timers got ourselves sorted out. Ownership posed no problem: we pooled our resources and a democratic vote decided who looked best in what. It was unanimously decided that a white dress with a shower of pale pink roses looked best on me, and once the decision had been reached I resolved that if I could not be red and devastating then I would be pale and interesting. In fact, I was going to be the most pale and interesting girl who ever went to a dance, and so intent was I on creating this image that I refused to go out in the sun, hoping that my tan would fade and my freckles disappear. I had read in Sarah’s copy of Woman’s Weekly that a face-pack of flake meal whitened the skin and removed blemishes. The beauty expert who had written this sterling piece of advice had no doubt assumed that only normal people read her column, people who would be intelligent enough to carry out the operation just once a week. But she had not reckoned on an enthusiastic sixteen year old determined to become ashen-faced within a week.

  I pursued my beautification programme under a tree, in the suitable seclusion of a grove behind the house. Here I wedged between the two lowest branches of a tree a jagged piece of broken mirror advertising Irish Whiskey and examined my appearance. I had to angle my face sideways in order to get a good view of it in between the R in Irish and the W in Whiskey below. As I tilted my head lumps of the caked flake meal that I had applied to my face fell to the ground and the hens from the nearby hen-house gratefully gobbled it up. My dedicated beauty therapy came to an abrupt end, however, when my mother decided to investigate the reason why her large jar of flake meal for the morning porridge had been reduced to such a low ebb. It seemed I was destined not to be pale and interesting either.

  Everyone else was going into curls for the big night but my hair was too long so I had to opt for plaits. Until I had reached fourteen my hair had been pure blonde but when I needed it to look its best it decided to go a strange-looking brown. To remedy this for my dancing debut and to recover my former flaxen glory, I purchased a bottle of peroxide in the local chemist’s shop but, before I could achieve my objective, my mother thwarted me again. I was striving desperately to make myself beautiful but my mother was equally determined to keep me the way I was. Quietly and firmly she outmanoeuvred me at all points and, despite my tantrums and tears, she never lost her cool. In the end the only course open to me was to plait my long hair and coil it around my head; at least that way there would not be too much of it on view.

  Before venturing on to the dance-floor it was obviously necessary to learn to dance, and this responsibility my sisters undertook with determination and great insensitivity. Propelled around the kitchen, I was forced to reverse into complicated semi-circles that made me feel that my legs and head had suffered a breakdown of communications. No suitable records were available to play on the gramophone because my father’s repertoire favoured John McCormack and Delia Murphy. “The Old House” and “If I Was A Blackbird” were not exactly ideal for the quick-steps and sambas that I was supposed to master. This left the radio as the sole source of our ballroom dancing music. Victor Sylvester on the BBC had a whole hour of ballroom dancing, but an hour was not enough so, when any suitable music came on, the sister on kitchen duty ran to the front door and blew the whistle that was normally used to summon men in from the fields for meals, thus sometimes creating a false alarm. I was expected to come running, even if the whistle sounded at the most inopportune moments, and on many occasions I left a half-fed calf bellowing in protest as I raced for the kitchen, casting wellingtons ahead of me so as to have my feet free for action. Often I would not make it in time: the dance music had died and my flight had been in vain. If my father happened to witness any of these performances, and especially if he had answered a false alarm, he would take off his cap, scratch his head, cast his eyes to heaven and exclaim: “Lord, pity the man who has five daughters!”

  The morning of the big event dawned at last. Those who wanted to curl straight hair had had to commence operations the previous night, rolling their hair up in little tin curling pins called dinkies for the tight look or donning huge spiky rollers to achieve a softer effect. These devices were not, of course, conducive to sound sleep and those who used them paid a price for their curly locks; as my father remarked, it was like going to bed with their heads in barbed wire. Some brave individuals went to Mass without taking out their rollers but wrapped scarves around their swollen, lumpy heads. Older people disapproved of this and peers, especially those of the opposite sex, often passed caustic remarks, leading the unfortunate girls to find out how difficult it was to treat a comment with contempt when your head was twice its normal size.

  After the last Mass that Sunday the troops gathered when pals came together as much for the shared anticipation as for the final dress-rehearsal. But first body reclamation began: under-arm fuzz was mowed down with a safety razor stolen from my brother while he was out; we passed it around and it soon lost its edge but one resourceful young lady had a packet of blades which allowed us to continue the hair eradication programme. Legs were inspected, some were declared ripe for harvesting, and once we got started nothing was safe. Eyebrows were trimmed to near-extinction and some hairstyles deemed to be not quite right came under attack from scissors, often with disastrous results.

  Next we turned to underwear. We had recently discovered the wonderful world of the bra: some because they were too richly endowed, others because they sought to give themselves what God had not, by recourse to “falsies” or by stuffing their bras with hankies. Our inexperienced manoeuvres with our bras provoked high entertainment and we spent more time laughing than fitting them on. Stockings were even more novel, for up to now we had always gone barelegged about the farm, and when I saw my
first suspender-belt it reminded me immediately of a pony’s tackling.

  The long-legged knickers my mother favoured were cast aside for flimsy silk panties, very brief, with lace edging around the ends. Not quite trusting the delicate elastic, I got a good firm type from my mother’s work box and with a safety-pin re-threaded the band; I was determined to avoid the experience of an older friend who one night had suddenly felt that what should have been around her hips were now down around her ankles. The dance-floor had been crowded and nobody had noticed, so she had smartly stepped out of them and whipped them up, slipping them unobtrusively into the jacket pocket of her dancing partner, who later had quite a surprise when he reached for his cigarettes.

  Our activities were brought to an abrupt end when my father banged on the kitchen ceiling with the handle of a brush and demanded to know if there was anyone to bring in the cows for milking, to feed the hens and the calves, or had we all taken leave of our senses and did we want him to sell out the whole place and buy a dance-hall. A mad scramble ensued and we all scattered in different directions to get the various jobs done while neighbouring pals ran home across the ditches to do likewise. The cows were gallopped home across the fields; buckets of milk were slapped under calves’ heads, and hens and chickens were rounded up to be fed. The jobs completed in record time, we gathered in the kitchen for supper, which had been hastily prepared by the sister on duty there. Supper finished and ware washed, we resumed the real business of the evening: getting ready for the dance. Dress-rehearsal over, the live show was about to begin.

  In various corners of the house we scrubbed ourselves down over enamel dishes and buckets. Then we gathered in the upstairs front bedroom where the beds were buried deep beneath our dresses, skirts, blouses and frilly underskirts. First bras and suspender-belts were fastened, and those who wanted to look thinner than they were squeezed themselves into corsets with much gasping and breathing in. Next came the delicate operation of easing fine nylons over our legs, while avoiding the tragedy of a ladder, before hitching them to suspenders. Then we drew on our panties, about which old Tom aptly remarked that they did not provide much shelter.