by Eamon Kelly
‘What way will I give it to you?’ was the accordion player’s tentative question in Irish.
‘Give it to me now,’ the dancer said, ‘according to the way you think I’ll want it!’
He took his place on the flagstone in front of the fire facing the crowd. He waited with the toe of his right shoe resting on the floor. When the music struck up he sprang into action. Well, sprang is the wrong word, because unlike the stepdancers of my native place, his feet were hardly ever raised more than a few inches above the flag. He made an intricate movement with his feet using heel and toe and dancing out to fill the floor space available to him. Now and again he gave an involuntary little hop which brought a reaction from the crowd.
In one of these departures from the routine of the dance there was a commotion in the room off the kitchen. As voices were raised and as people turned in their direction, the dancer came to a halt and the music trailed away. In time we found out the reason for the disturbance. It seemed that visitors had brought a bottle of illicit spirits into the house. The abuse of poitín had been so bad in that district that the clergy encouraged families to have their houses consecrated to the Sacred Heart, at which ceremony a vow was made that poitín would never enter the homestead.
The woman of the house was devastated that the family should have broken its vow to the Redeemer. She cried openly, her lament having many echoes of the sean nós song we had heard a short time before. When the people responsible for bringing in the drink had been ejected, neighbours explained to her that the pledge had not been broken by a member of her family but by strangers over whom she had no control. She calmed down and after a while the céilí was resumed, but the spirit had gone out of the night and the family was glad when the affair was over.
Poitín-making, despite the efforts of the police to bring the illicit distillers to justice, was widespread in Connemara. Church and state were opposed to it and when the mission came every five years the Redemptorist priests preached on the evils of poitín. Fr Conneely in the course of one of of his sermons asked the sergeant – a dark, swarthy Kerryman with a pair of enormous eyebrows that would nearly fence cows out of cabbage – to sit outside the altar-rails. The priest praised the sergeant’s efforts to quell the evil practice, and likened his work to a crusade. And indicating the sergeant he said, ‘Breathnaigí air, nach naomh é!’ (‘Look at him, isn’t he a saint!’) Two old ladies in the congregation did as the priest bade them. Then one said to the other, ‘Ní fheadar mé. Tá cuma a’ diabhail air!’ (‘I doubt it. He looks like the devil!’).
Fr Conneely was a thundering great preacher, a native speaker who could reduce his congregation to tears or fill their hearts with terror. He pleaded with the poitín-makers to bring their stills to the chapel yard. At first there was no response, but then a man giving in to the pleadings of his wife came in the darkness and placed his still by the chapel wall. Egged on by this headline and promises of glory in heaven or everlasting torture in the flames of hell, a few more stills arrived, until by the end of the week there was a great mound of corkscrew pipes in the chapel yard. Sunday night was the closing night of the mission. With lighted candles the faithful renounced the devil and all his works and pomps. Fr Conneely led them out into the yard. The great heap of metal had been drenched with petrol. With a prayer he threw his lighting candle into the heap. There was a sudden blaze that reached as high as the eaves and was reflected in the church windows, giving them the quality of stained glass. The corkscrew pipes glowed red in the blaze and from the scum of alcohol secreted in the tubes a black pall of smoke with a blue-purplish flame at the centre rose to the sky. It was a dramatic moment. As the people gazed at the psychedelic design in the midst of the smoke, the priest, his arms upraised, shouted, ‘Breathnaigí, a phobail Dé! Tá an diabhal ag eirí as!’ (‘Behold, brethren! The devil is rising from it!’)
A CHANGE OF NAME AND A JOB
We left Carraroe on a bright September morning. It was 1939 and coming through Galway city we heard that Hitler’s army had invaded Poland. Having learned about Pádraic Ó Conaire, the writer, in the Irish classes in Carraroe, we set out to see his statue. We found him in Eyre Square sitting with his hat on in the attitude of a seanchaí telling a story. I thought it a pity the sculptor hadn’t depicted his asal beag dubh (small black donkey) standing beside him. Pádraic was happy looking, forever sitting there, and the war wouldn’t worry him. Nor did it worry us. We went and drank a few pints to kill the time before the train left. The crowd of us almost filled the small pub, and much to the amusement of the local clients we sang the songs we had learned in Carraroe. ‘Maístir bád mór ag dhul ród na Gaillimhe’ (‘Skipper of the big boat on the road to Galway’) and many others like ‘Bíonn caipín bán ar amadán, ’s púicín ar mo ghrá’ (‘A fool wears a white cap and there’s a mask on my lover’s face’).
It took some time for the signs of war to appear in Dublin but the dark blue shades I mentioned earlier were fitted to the windows of the College of Art. Wide cowls were put over the streetlamps to keep the light on the roadway and out of the sky. It would be a while yet before food and clothes rationing was introduced. One more year was all we had to go before we qualified. That year we worked hard. We cut down on the number of times we went dancing to the Teachers’ Club in Parnell Square or to Barry’s Hotel. No more fly-by-night relationships with young civil servants in their first year up from the country.
The extra attention we gave to our work paid off and everybody got through the final exams. Some weeks before that testing time an advertisement for a vacancy for the post of woodwork teacher in Kerry appeared in the papers. I applied for it and I was advised by Paddy Mawe, a Corkman, that as county Kerry had two Gaeltachts I should make my application in Irish. This I did and got the post. I found out later that the head man in the Kerry Vocational Committee hadn’t a word of that tongue. He used to wait until an Irish teacher called to the office to translate any correspondence in the old language. He, the chief executive oficer, wrote back to me in English to say that I had been appointed, but when he came to my name Éamon Ó Ceallaigh he half translated it to Éamon Kelly. I was so happy to get the job that I let things rest so and the name Edmund which I had received in baptism became a part of my past life and my new name Éamon Kelly was emblazoned in the records of the Kerry Vocational Committee and in the Department of Education in Dublin.
My first job in Kerry was that of an itinerant teacher, giving a course of six weeks in woodwork in a village and then moving on. Posters with my new name writ large appeared in shop windows and in advertisements in local papers, so that everyone called me Éamon when they got over the ‘Mr’ stage. In time I got used to it. Ardfert outside Tralee was my first stop, and I stayed in the lodgings of Mrs O’Leary. The hall where the classes were to be held was a short distance away beside the ruins of the ancient cathedral. My first night was given over to the enrolment of the students and their introduction to the woodworking implements. I talked about what was involved in the course and gave a lesson in planing, sawing and chiselling. I found a place to crack a few jokes with them as there is nothing like laughter to break the barrier between strangers.
The next day I put a drawing of the first lesson on the blackboard, sharpened the tools and had the wood ready on which each student was to work. It being my first time going before a class, I was determined that everything should be right and of course very anxious to make a good impression. The class was at 7.30. I left the caretaker to open the hall and I made my entrance at the exact time to find the men, young and not so young, all assembled. I walked up the aisle between the workbenches with a ‘good-night’ left and right and went straight to the blackboard to begin the preliminary talk.
I was a little nervous as I removed my overcoat. I put it on a hook and when I turned to survey the class with all the assurance I could muster, I was greeted with a burst of laughter. My confidence received something of a dent. I couldn’t imagine the cause of their hilarity
until I noticed a ladies’ silk stocking draped over my shoulder. I managed a weak smile and then a fit of laughter to cover my confusion. Slowly I removed the stocking and, as I folded it, I painted for the class a picture of Mrs O’Leary’s kitchen, with a shoulder-high clothesline between the fire and the front door. I demonstrated to them how easy it was for the stocking to fall on my jacket as I went to put on my overcoat.
‘A good story!’ one man said, while Brendan Scannell NT took the harm out of it by saying, ‘It could happen a bishop’. I rocked on the rails but in an instant steadied myself and, with confidence restored, my first teaching lesson was a great success. There was a feeling of a bond of friendship being forged between teacher and pupils by the sharing of an unexpected experience.
Our first two weeks were spent acquiring the skill of using the carpenters’ tools, and the last four in making an article of furniture of the student’s own choice. Small tables were made, a súgán chair, presses and a meat safe. One student made, as a surprise for a devout wife, a miniature portico of a Grecian temple with a tympanum supported by four Doric pillars to hold a statue of the Sacred Heart. It had steps going up and a platform in front to hold the small red lamp. In complete contrast another student made a harrow to break up the earth of a ploughed field. The class consisted mostly of farmers and farmers’ sons, with a few shopkeepers from the village and the schoolteacher, Brendan Scannell. Rich pastures and fertile tillage acres abound in North Kerry and Brendan reminded me of a verse from a poem in Irish which ran:
Tá an talamh comh maith san
As so go Cillmhaoile,
Go bhfásfadh garsún ann
Comh fada le stípil!
(The land is that good
From here to Killmoyley
That a young lad would grow there
As tall as a steeple!)
I had a junior class for boys of fourteen-plus each day, Monday to Friday at four o’clock. I taught them freehand and mechanical drawing and they learned to do woodwork exercises from drawings they had prepared beforehand. By the end of the course each student was able to take home a small medicine chest, a cutlery tray, book-ends, a toy wheelbarrow or a wall bracket to hold a Sacred Heart lamp. I had the weekends off and after a few pay cheques I bought myself a bicycle and cycled all the way to Killarney to see my parents. There was great excitement at home now. At Christmas time my brother Tim would be ordained a priest in Moyne Park, Tuam, county Galway. He had spent the years of his novitiate at Gerdingen-Bree in Belgium, and he would have been ordained in the summer, but he contracted tuberculosis and had to spend six months in a sanatorium. That he survived this dreadful disease pleased us all, but my mother more than anybody.
The ruined cathedral was near my lodgings in Ardfert and for anyone interested in craftwork there was much to be seen in the cut-stone window jambs and arches. The west doorway was Hiberno-Romanesque and in its heyday had beautiful carvings, but because they had been executed in red porous sandstone the weather of the centuries had softened and almost obliterated their definition. Around the ruin, and even within the walls, there was a graveyard with a few enormous tombs.
As they worked in class the men talked about a landlord’s tomb being desecrated by vandals in search of valuables buried with the dead. In olden times, they told me, a round tower stood sentinel beside the ruined church. Because soil had been drawn away from one side of it, the tower was blown down the night of the big wind, and tradition has it that it was so well built it remained on the ground in one piece like a fallen tree trunk. They said the round tower was broken up and the stones used to build the curved entrance into Crosbie’s, the landlord’s place. I picked up a lot of lore in Ardfert, made many friends and downed a few pints in Flaherty’s public house.
D. W. Quinlan, the chief executive officer, paid me a surprise visit in class one night and said that my next course would be in Causeway. ‘You’ll be in the courthouse, Mr Kelly,’ he said. I had visions of an imposing Grecian-type building with Ionic or at least Doric columns supporting a sculpture-filled tympanum. When I got there I found that the courthouse was a large room in a house, a one-time parlour off the grocery shop. The space was bare except for a few chairs, a rostrum and posts set into the floor with a rail on three sides to form a witness stand. With the help of the men who brought my equipment in the lorry, I had the furniture moved out to make room for the workbenches and the tool racks. With the blackboard in place I was ready for business that evening.
The course proved as popular as it had been in Ardfert. I had a full complement of boys over fourteen in the afternoon, and every bench was occupied by adults for the night class. The room wasn’t very well lit and when we got down to serious work, one student brought with him a small pocket torch, which he shone on the dovetail markings with his left hand while he sawed with his right. There were many faces at the street window at night looking in. I also had an audience at the other side where there was a cow byre. Contented cows chewed the cud as their large eyes caught the light from the paraffin lamps.
When we got over the early training stage and each man was working on the project he would bring home to show his wife or his mother, many students sang as they worked, such was their enjoyment and total immersion in their new pursuit. The snatch of a love song or a whistled jig sounded pleasant over the sound of hammer and saw or the banshee wail of a pine board under a sharp plane.
I lodged in the same house and my bedroom was directly over the courthouse. As always, I found it difficult to sleep the first night in a strange bed. I was twisting and turning, dropping off and dreaming and waking up with a start. I read for a while, and before quenching the light, instead of counting sheep I counted the religious objects in the bedroom. I had never seen so many in one place except maybe in a huckster’s stall at a mission. There were pictures of all shapes and sizes, statues large and small, a crucifix, a rosary, a scapular on a nail and a little glass cylinder with liquid around the figure of the Virgin. When I shook it before going to bed it filled with snow.
One picture had just the crown of thorns with globules of blood dripping from it. In the normal course of events I probably wouldn’t have given the image a second thought, but now longing for elusive sleep I found the crown of thorns without the Sacred Head discomfiting. A terrifying instrument of torture, and all that blood! Blood too on the Sacred Heart, both the statue and the picture, and on the crucifix where the lance had speared His side and the nails had pierced His hands and feet. There were plenty of religious objects in my own home and in the houses in which I worked with my father, but not until tonight did something which I had always accepted become disturbing. The eyes of the pictures became riveted on me, or so it seemed, and to avoid their accusing stare I put out the light.
In time I fell into a troubled sleep. I have a knack of recalling bad dreams and that night I dreamt of ancient druids slaughtering animals and offering them as sacrifice on a stone altar that looked like a Mass rock. The celebrant, as gaunt as El Greco’s St Francis, raised his eyes to heaven while the congregation in biblical-type dress beat their breasts and lifted their arms in prayerful supplication. Ferocious acolytes pounced on me and dragged me body and bones towards the altar as my clothes were stripped from my back. A knife was poised over my throat and as it came down I bawled like hell and when I woke I was sitting bolt upright in the bed with sweat streaming down my face.
There was a loud knock on the door. It was the landlady. ‘It’s half past ten,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘I am,’ I replied. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’ She must have heard me shout. Goodness knows what she thought of me. I lay on for a little while thinking of the strange dream I had, and looking at the religious objects which I assumed caused it. I thought I heard murmuring in the room below me punctuated by an occasional cough. I dressed quickly and went downstairs. I looked into my classroom of the night before to find the district court in session.
Some of the workbenches were stacked at one end of t
he room and some were put out in the street. The closed tool racks by the wall acted as seating for the small crowd. A half-dozen uniformed gardai stood in front of the rostrum where the district justice sat. One guard was giving evidence of catching people in a public house after hours. He claimed that when he entered the premises the bar was clear, but he found a number of men in the back yard drinking. He went upstairs to the bedroom and when he opened a wardrobe a man who had been leaning against the door fell out. In the bed two more men were sleeping. He looked closely and their eyelids fluttered a bit. They had the blankets pulled up to their chins and their feet were sticking out at the bottom.
‘Did they not feel the cold?’ the justice said, enjoying the scene.
‘How could they, your worship,’ the guard said, ‘when they had their boots on!’
The landlady tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Your breakfast’ll be going cold,’ she said.
I followed her into the kitchen and never found out how the men and the publican fared in the justice’s judgement. A fine is all he could put on the men but the publican could end up with an endorsement on his licence.
A SPELL IN BALLYBUNION
I spent a whole year on the road and visited all the villages of north and mid-Kerry. Often when the lorry with the equipment drew up in front of the parochial hall, youngsters would gather around chanting, ‘The play actors are here again!’ But when they saw the blackboard being unloaded they changed their tune to ‘Come on away, lads, ‘tis only an ol’ school he’s starting!’
In Ballybunion my classes were held in the large dining-room of Beasley’s lodging house opposite the garda barracks. It was springtime and the holidaymakers hadn’t yet come. Wielders of the knife and fork in that dining-room in the high season never enjoyed themselves as much as did the wielders of the chisel and saw in my class.
