by Eamon Kelly
My father wore a collar and tie on Sunday. The collar was starched and there often was a struggle trying to get the front and back studs through the starched clogged buttonholes. Standing on a chair I had to come to his assistance and with my tiny fingers try and force a reluctant stud through a starch-sealed hole. Somehow I succeeded and handed him the large handkerchief my mother gave me. He unfurled it, blew his nose with it and put it in his pocket. Younger men wore soft collars and many wore no collar or tie, just a plain collarless shirt with a brass stud at the front.
On Sunday my mother and the women of the parish had no opportunity to display their finery. They all wore shawls which, as the saying goes, covered a multitude. Only one lady, the schoolteacher, referred to as Mrs O, wore a hat and coat going into Barraduv Mass. The women’s shawls, like the Kinsale cloak, lasted a lifetime. Pride of place went to the paisley shawl of two shades of fawn with a variegated pattern around the base and an abundance of tassels. There was a plain brown shawl, a green and black shawl and a black shawl which widows wore. From a distance a group of women in paisley shawls, their skirts sweeping the ground and with their heads together talking after Mass, looked like a cock of hay. The women always covered their heads with the shawl in the chapel, and a woman in the street who threw the shawl back on her shoulders, twirling the ends of it around her hands and with her arms akimbo while she talked and laughed, was a very outgoing person, something seldom seen.
My mother bought her shawl maybe when she was getting married and the only time she visited the shops was to buy a pair of high buttoned boots and clothes-making materials. Her skirt and blouse, a jacket she called it, she made herself. She made all my clothes as well. She bought the Eton collar, bow tie and of course my boots, but the jacket and trousers she made often from an old suit of my father’s turned inside out. She knitted my stockings and my father’s and when we put our toes or heels through them they were darned. Cardigans and jumpers she knitted for the household. My jacket, shirt and trousers were sewn by hand. Very few had sewing machines. The traveller, Mr Roycroft, called to the house in his gig trap but we never had enough money to buy one.
I wore a real suit made by Con the tailor for my first holy communion. He fitted me out with a nice body coat and a short pants in which I looked well with a collar and tie like the men and a navy skullcap with yellow stripes.
I dreaded the day before holy communion when I had to go to confession for the first time. The teacher acted it all out for us in school. The examination of our conscience, the going in the door of the confessional when our turn came, making sure to close it after us, waiting for the slide to come across and then saying, ‘Bless me father, for I have sinned!’ I could hardly go to sleep at night worrying about the sins I would have to tell the priest. I was afraid of what he would say if I had sins to tell and I was afraid of what he would say if I hadn’t. I would have to get it right and I knew it was a sin to make a bad confession. ‘I didn’t do what I was told, father.’ This was an example of a sin which the teacher told us. Her version of it was, ‘I was disobedient, father’. Maybe it was a sin to make up a sin for the sake of having something to tell. ‘I stole sugar, father,’ and ‘I cursed and swore,’ were the other sins I could confess. I made up my mind before I went to sleep the night before that my last sin to tell him would be, ‘I told lies, father.’ The lies I told were harmless but it gave me something to say.
When the time came the biggest fright I got was the darkness in the penitent’s side of the confessional when I closed the door. I wanted to dash out again, but when the slide came across a little light came in, and by rising off my knees I could see the priest inside. He never looked at me and didn’t seem a bit surprised when I told him it was my first confession. He asked me to tell him my sins and I rattled off about being disobedient, stealing sugar, telling lies and cursing and swearing. It didn’t knock a shake out of him. He gave me my penance, which was three Hail Marys and three Glories. Then for the first time he lifted his head and looked at me and whispered very earnestly, ‘Pray for me, my child!’ I came out of the box with a weight off my mind and thinking that the priest must be in some sort of trouble seeing that he was asking me to pray for him.
The following day was my first holy communion, the most joyous day in all our lives, the priest said, when he visited the school. The day when we would for the first time receive the body of our Blessed Lord into our souls. The teacher had gone over it all with us. The going up to the altar, kneeling, and joining our hands. Opening our mouths and sticking out our tongues, not too far the teacher warned, to receive the sacred host. Then as we walked in line with our hands joined back to our places, we were to give thanks to God for coming into our souls as we swallowed the host. But what would happen if I couldn’t swallow it, I thought, as I lay in bed the night before. Would the host melt in my mouth and then the body of our Blessed Lord would evaporate and not go down my throat and into my soul! Supposing I got a fit of coughing. I turned over on the tick and covered my head. Supposing I coughed the host out on the ground. What would happen then? I couldn’t pick it up. The host was sacred and we were told that no hand could touch it but the priest’s because his hand had been anointed. Everyone would notice me. The priest would be mad vexed at having to come down off the altar and pick the sacred host off the floor. My mother would be mortified and my father would be dying with the shame.
I went to sleep and dreamt that a frog came into the bed and was trying to get into my mouth. His huge protruding eyes frightened me, and he puffed and he puffed and his belly went in and out like a bellows. Then he began to swell into a monster and I woke up shouting, my body in a lather of sweat. I was in bed with my two younger brothers and my mother, hearing me shout, got up and lit a candle. She put me sitting at the side of the bed and noticing that my body was wet with sweat she dried me and put on a clean shirt.
‘You’ll be all right now, a stór. I’ll give you a cup of hot milk.’ My mother’s cure for everything.
‘You can’t do that!’ my father reminded her. ‘The child is fasting.’
From twelve o’clock the night before no bite or sup went inside the lips of a person going to holy communion. A neighbour used to eat at half past twelve, claiming that from where we lived there was a difference of half an hour between Greenwich and God’s time, which was the time he went by. I went to sleep again and was up early next morning. There was a lot of fussing over me. My boots were polished and polished again. I had trouble putting a knot in my necktie. My father had to do it for me and my mother said that he made the knot too clumsy and she re-knotted it. Had I a handkerchief? On Sunday mornings there was a clean handkerchief for everyone from the pile of ironed laundry my mother had done the night before.
We had a tub trap for the pony by this time and very well she looked under it in a shiny set of harness. A shake of holy water before we set out to keep us safe on our journey. We all sat in. A rope rein guided Fanny the mare when she was tackled to the common car, but in the trap my father held a leather reins. He sat at the back with my mother and we youngsters at the front. I loved the motion of the trap when we were on level ground and Fanny could trot. Slow-moving asses and carts we passed and fast-moving horses and sidecars passed us. Neighbours waved to me, seeing me in my new rig-out, acknowledging that it was a big day for me.
We didn’t have a family pew in the church. They were for the well-to-do farmers, shopkeepers and teachers, who could afford to buy a new pew and pay the yearly rent for it. Some of those seats were never full, yet outsiders never sat in them and I don’t think they would be welcome. The family pew was private property in a public place. One year the parish priest put up the rental and a family, thinking the charge was dear enough, refused to pay. The parish priest ordered them out of the seat. They refused and the priest had the pew taken out and put behind the church, where in the end it rotted. The family never went to Mass in that church again during that parish priest’s reign, but drove all the way
to the friary in town. They never spoke to the parish priest after. Even when he came to the stations in their house they didn’t speak, because they felt he had humiliated them before their neighbours and friends. There was a large space behind the seats and those of little property or none stood or knelt there, the men at the gospel side and the women at the side of the epistle. It was strange that among the poor there was segregation, while in the pews husbands sat with their wives.
I knelt with my father. He knelt on one knee, under which he had his cap. My mother, who was across the aisle, frowned when she saw me kneeling on my new skullcap. There was an understanding that the children for first holy communion would go to the altar first and when the time came I got the beck from my mother and I joined the other children as we moved towards the altar. Heads bowed, our hands joined, tips of fingers under the chin, and I with my skullcap under my left oxter. As I moved along I kept repeating the prayer before communion and reminding myself that when I had said the prayer after communion I should pray for my father and mother and all the family. I knelt at the rail, putting my hands under the long white cloth and holding it under my chin and I could hear the priest pray as he came from the far end. An altar boy accompanying him held a little silver tray under the ciborium as the priest laid the host on the communicant’s tongue. O Dia linn! God be with us! The priest was at the next child to me and the altar boy was placing the silver tray under my chin. ‘Corpus Christi,’ the priest said and I opened my mouth and put my tongue out. I hoped my tongue would look clean. I washed it in the morning, making sure not to swallow a drop of the water. The priest placed the white circular host on my tongue and I felt the backs of his fingers touch my lips. I closed my mouth and forgot to get up so the boy beside me had to give me a nudge. As I walked back to my place, full of strange feelings of having God in my mouth, I swallowed and nothing happened. Sweet and Blessed Lord, what was wrong? I felt with the tip of my tongue and found that the sacred host had clung to the roof of my mouth. I tried to dislodge it and I couldn’t. Terror seized me as I knelt by my father’s side. I thought that God was refusing to go into my soul. Did I make a bad confession? Had I done something that offended Him?
‘Are you all right, a leanbh (my child)?’ my father said.
I nodded. I was afraid to open my mouth in case the host fell out. A corner of the host seemed to lift from my palate. I manoeuvred it on to my tongue and with a quick swallow it was gone. I could breath freely now. I looked up. My mother had been watching me. She smiled.
I was starving after the long fast as I came out of the chapel with my father. All the men put on their hats and caps and felt in their coat pockets for their pipes. These were lit and smoke began to rise as we came through the chapel gate. The men didn’t make much wonder of me. One man said to my father, ‘Is this Brian?’ thinking that I was called after my grandfather. My mother came out with her friends. They all admired me in my new clothes. Relations gave me money, small coins, but I got a half-crown from my godmother, Bridgie Lar. I went then to Danny O’s shop where my mother bought the messages. Danny O’s sister Nora gave me a cup of tea and a currant bun. I took a bite of the bun and a slug of the tea and I was in heaven. We trotted home. Fanny the mare seemed in a hurry. She was hungry and I was too, despite the bun and the tea. A neighbour had killed a pig two days before and last night the gift plate had come to our house. ‘Bring in a few kippens (sticks),’ my mother said. We did and the fire lit up and in no time the kettle was boiling and a circle of black pudding was sizzling in the pan.
FORBIDDEN FRUIT
Not long after receiving my first holy communion I came home from school one evening to be told by my mother that she had met her distant cousin in town that day. Her cousin was Miss O, a teacher at Lissivigeen School, about the same distance in the other direction from our house as the school we attended. Miss O was teaching infants, first and second class and she asked my mother to let her two boys come to her school. My father was opposed to the change but my mother got her way and one Tuesday morning my brother Tim and I set out for our new school at Lissivigeen. We didn’t start on Monday because there was a superstition about beginning anything on Monday. My neighbours began no enterprise on Monday. If a burial was on that day the first sod of the grave was dug on Sunday. Our hair was never cut on Monday and the clippings were not put in the fire, but carefully placed in a hole in the ditch until we came back for them on the day of the resurrection.
Through some misunderstanding, my brother and I were put in the same class. He was better than me at many subjects, which proved an embarrassment to me for the rest of my schooldays. Miss O was exceptionally nice to us at first, although we could see how strict she was with the others. One of her punishments for mistakes was holding a pencil between the first and second fingers of her closed fist with a little of the pencil protruding and hitting you hard on the top of the head. This was extremely painful, as I found out when I failed to answer a question which was easily answered by my brother. For grave offences like being late for school, offending pupils were sent up to the master to be slapped.
The master was at the other side of the glass partition and had charge of third, fourth, fifth and sixth classes. He had an ashplant fairly thin so that it almost swung around your hand when he hit you. The sting of the pain went to the heart and there was always a slap on each hand. It was a very hard case who didn’t cry, and as they cried the pupils blew into their hands in an effort to ease the pain or pressed their palms under their armpits.
I was fortunate in escaping most of this punishment and my brother was so good that he was never reprimanded. If we were late in the morning I was blamed because I was older and always took the rap. We left home early enough but when we met up with the other scholars on the way we dallied, talked, argued, even sat by the roadside and watched the farmers working in the fields. A horse-drawn mowing machine because of the noise it made we found fascinating. Losing all sense of time, we spun castle tops, and then, of a sudden, realising the lateness of the hour, we plucked a yellow birdsfoot trefoil flower which grew by the roadside. We called it ‘no blame’ and put it in our books, hoping it would save us from the rod. But it never did.
Only once do I remember being severely slapped and that was when I went with some other boys to rob Owen Keeffe’s orchard at play hour. Between getting there and stealing the apples and eating them the time flew and we were very late getting back to school after the bell went. Our hearts sank when we saw that there were no pupils in the playground. We heard the voices in the classrooms reading aloud or doing their tables. For a moment we thought of running away but we had to go in – our satchels were inside. Very timidly and in hangdog fashion we sloped into Miss O’s classroom. We were late, we told her, because we had gone to Healy’s shop for tobacco for our fathers. Where was the tobacco? We had nothing to show but the telltale apples left over after the feast.
We shook at the knees as she ushered us into the master and told him what we had done. He talked about the seventh commandment and he got the pupils who were preparing for confirmation to recite for us what was forbidden by that commandment, ‘unjustly taking what belongs to another …’ He took the ashplant, looped it almost double and let it go with a swish. He told us to empty our pockets of the few apples we had left, and they were placed on his rostrum. He motioned us then to stand by the wall. Anticipating the pain of punishment as we stood under the map of the world was very near unbearable. When the time for class change came, we were called out one by one. It was better to be first because you didn’t know what was coming. What did come was four slaps, two on each hand. The second slap on an aching palm was the hardest to bear and we went back to Miss O’s classroom contrite and tearful. When she wasn’t looking, my brother, who didn’t go on the raid, asked me if I had any apples left. The punishment changed my attitude to robbing orchards for a long time to come. Later when the boys went on another raid, after school this time, I refused to go, remembering the sting of pai
n from the ashplant which went through my system like an electric shock.
Ashman was what the pupils nicknamed the master, because of his dexterity with the rod. But to be fair to him he didn’t slap all that often. After I moved from Miss O’s section into third class I don’t think I was ever slapped again. When things went well and everybody did his best and attended to his homework, life in class was great. The master was kindly and had all our interests at heart. There was a lesson once a week to which we all looked forward. This was the hour we spent in the garden attached to the school residence. The big boys dug with spades in the spring and made drills for potatoes and ridges for onions. We were shown how to grow carrots, parsnips, lettuce, and one year we grew a giant vegetable marrow. Currant and gooseberry trees were added to the garden and there was much celebration among the boys the spring we planted four apple trees, winks and nudges, as much as to say we won’t have far to go when these bear fruit. In the autumn we harvested the fruits of our labour. Peas and beans were spread out to dry on the wide sills of the school windows, the ripe onions filling the classroom with their pungent smell.
It took the apple trees in the school garden ages to bear fruit, and then one spring there were blossoms on a tree. Not a great number but we watched with the master as a honey bee perched on a flower and, poking for the honey, brought away on its hairy legs the yellow dust which pollinated the next flower. We watched too as the blossoms faded and in time a nut-like little apple appeared. In September there were four apples on the tree. We raced ahead of the master on each weekly visit to see how they were progressing. Coming to the end of the month the apples got larger and the master was very proud of his crop but there was many a young stalwart whose teeth swam in his mouth for a bite of one of the apples. There being only four one would easily be missed if stolen. But a greedy descendant of Adam tasted the forbidden fruit without plucking the apple. He took a large bite from the side away from the public gaze so that it was some days before the master noticed. There was an inquiry, the rod lying waiting on the rostrum, and even though we suspected who the culprit was he was never brought to book. The incident was forgotten and we continued to enjoy the hour we spent each week away from lessons in the garden, out in the open air, preparing the soil, planting the tiny seeds and waiting for them to show above the ground and grow to maturity. It brought us more satisfaction than we got from reading, writing and arithmetic.
