by Alice Taylor
The job, depending on the size of the undertaking, could go on for many hours during which time we children ran back and forth answering his every demand and sometimes anticipating them like a team of nurses tending a surgeon during a major operation. I will say one thing for this exercise: it certainly sharpened our reflexes and if the hammer slipped and he hit his thumb instead of the nail we heard adjectives hitherto unknown to us. Finally the mission was accomplished and our carpenter downed tools. He then found other more important things to attend to and walked away, leaving chaos behind. It was our job to pick up every single item and throw it in the butter box, and this we did with a vengeance so that the final state of the box was worse than the first, thus guaranteeing another performance at a later date. The cleaning up was a slow, laborious, monotonous job and we hated every minute of it, though it was surely a great training in the development of patience. When the kitchen floor was finally brushed and the last bit of rubbish shovelled into the butter box, the floor, which was normally a stone grey, was now a symphony of browns and greens of sufficient variety to thrill the heart of any landscape artist.
My mother, a wise woman, was seldom in the kitchen for these performances. This was not by chance, but part of her marital strategy. She was very happily married for over forty years to a man who was an excellent husband but whose threshold of tolerance was very low. She thus avoided direct confrontation and quietly outmanoeuvred him, believing that in marriage, as in battle, strategy was all-important.
In later years, my father’s butter box became a joke in our family and we often wondered how he would have fitted into a modern semi-detached in suburbia with an equal-rights wife and modern teenagers. He was never designed for “little boxes” living.
The Last Litany
DESPITE THE FACT that my mother was tolerant and flexible in most situations, she did have streaks of uncompromising rigidity. The family rosary was one of these: sick, maimed or crippled, we were all on our knees for the rosary, and helpers, visitors, or anyone who happened to call at the wrong time was apt to be included.
During the summer months I knelt inside the kitchen window looking down over the fields where the cows were grazing after milking. When my turn came to give out the decade I used the cows in the field to count my ten Hail Marys. I mentally sectioned off ten in a corner, but as my mind floated back and forth across the valley the cows naturally moved around so my ten could decrease to five or six. If I said the Glory before schedule, my mother gently intervened in the background – “Two more.” Or if my herd increased and my Hail Marys swelled beyond the ten, she interrupted with, “Glory, now, Glory.” She also fought gallantly to keep us all supplied with rosary beads, but they were continually getting lost or broken. She never tried to convert my father to beads, so he cracked his knuckles as he went along to keep count.
Her rosary was one thing, but her additions to it were something else. First came the litany starting “Holy Mary”, and we would all chant, “Pray for us” in response.
After Holy Mary came a long list and somewhere down along the list came “Ark of the Covenant” and “Gate of Heaven”. After “Gate of Heaven” one night my mother lost her concentration and she floundered and repeated it a few times, failing to remember what came next. Finally a little voice in the background piped up helpfully: “Try Nelson’s Pillar!” Everybody fell around the floor laughing, and my father took advantage of the opportunity to call a halt to the litany for the night.
But the litany was only one of the many additions. There were three Hail Marys for this neighbour and a second lot for another one, until my father would start complaining, “For God’s sake, we’ll be here till morning.” We prayed diligently for years for one neighbour who was studying to be a teacher and of whom my father voiced the opinion that “if a bumble bee had his brains he’d fly backwards”, but despite this pronouncement on the neighbour’s grey matter, he still qualified. It was my mother’s conviction that prayer could move mountains and indeed hers often did; at least they moved mountains of ignorance. During exam time she always lit a candle in the centre of the parlour table. I would come home during exams and peep into the parlour to check if she had remembered. It was always lighting. It was a symbol of caring, and in later years her children wrote as adults to her from many corners of the world asking her to light her candle and pray for their special problems.
She had an implicit faith in the goodness and power of God, but despite this she was always late for Mass. If left to her own devices, she would never have made it at all, but my father was a punctuality addict. He was ready half an hour before time and paced up and down the kitchen floor ranting and swearing; then he would go to the kitchen door and, scratching his head and raising his eyes towards heaven, would declare: “If ever a man suffered!” I think that he was imploring God to witness that this was his Agony in the Garden. Finally he would stand at the foot of the stairs and shout: “Missus, is it today or next Sunday we’re going to Mass?” Normally he called my mother Len, but if she was pushing him to the limits of his endurance it changed to “missus”: this was his signal to her that thus far and no further could she go. Finally she arrived, pulling on her hat and calling instructions back over her shoulder to those staying at home. She was only going to be missing for a few hours, but a stranger could be forgiven for thinking that a world voyage was on the agenda.
Organised planning and good housekeeping were not on the top of her list of priorities – it was to people that she gave her number one commitment. She always had time to listen and chat. If you ever had to leave the house very early in the morning she was there. She was with you having the breakfast to listen to any worries troubling you; late at night she was in the kitchen waiting to have a cup of tea. She never told us that she loved us, but she wrapped us in blankets of love and did not need to use words. Her love and serenity filled the house and she herself was one of the most contented people I ever knew. In an era when corporal punishment was the rule of the day she did not believe in smacking children; she maintained that slapping them made children bold and aggressive. One day I came home from school to find a stream of water pouring out the door against me. She was baby-sitting a neighbour’s little girl, an only child who was always beautifully dressed, and in the middle of the kitchen my mother had placed a wheelbarrow full of sand and water; not a little wheelbarrow, mind you, but a large, rusty, iron model. When I asked her the reason for the wheelbarrow I was informed that it was good for children to make a mess and that sand and water was of great benefit to them.
She absolutely forbade bad language from any of us children, and though my father indulged in all sorts of colourful phrases it was accepted that it was his prerogative and did not extend to the rest of us. She amazed me in later years by quite blandly informing me that my father used only the words necessary to describe any given situation, and she was quite right.
Togetherness
Forced apart
By busy days
We who belong
Together
As the interlaced
Fingers
Of praying
Hands
Join again
In quiet times
At peace
In our
Togetherness
The Cut-throat Nuns
WE LIVED ABOUT three miles from the nearest town but the passage, as we called it, from the road to our home was another half a mile. On each side of the passage from the gateway were high mossy ditches where birds and rabbits nestled, and further down were seven gates marking the divisions between the fields, as this was also the access lane for the cattle and machinery going along the farm. Lorry drivers dreaded our farm and one cranky individual once poked his head out of his cab at my father and demanded: “Does the Almighty God know that people live down here?”
I loved walking down that laneway and I knew every twig and branch along the way. The first time that the joy of returning home along it hit me was a
fter my first enforced absence from home, when I had to go into hospital in Cork for a week to have my tonsils removed. The prospect had not worried me greatly to begin with; however, when I saw my mother’s hat disappearing out the hospital gate I began to feel abandoned, and the week that followed was to put me off hospitals and nuns for the rest of my life. The nuns in their virginal white habits sailed around the wards like billowing swans and, when the operation left my throat feeling as if the French guillotine had done a job on it, I discovered that their snowy white exterior penetrated to their inner regions as well, for the nuns treated us with cool efficiency but with very little of the milk of human kindness. I do not think that they believed in the approach expressed in “suffer little children to come unto me”.
At home, whenever one of us had a sore throat my mother soaked bread in warm milk and this remedy slid down a raw throat like soft butter. Now, in hospital, my throat screamed in agony with every swallow and my stomach groaned because its food supply was cut off. I thought with longing of my mother’s solution: we called it “goody”, a childish word and, like most children’s expressions, an apt description. But when I asked one of the nuns if she had ever heard of “goody” she threw back her head, gave a braying laugh like our jennet when he had been tied up for too long and, looking around the ward, she asked in a high, nasal voice: “Did any of you ever hear of ‘goody’?” She pronounced it as if it were a dirty word, and I wished that I could use some of my father’s favourite phrases to tell her what I thought of her.
The week in that hospital was a bewildering experience. The babies in the ward cried all the time they were awake; it was the era of restricted visiting and the children cried from loneliness. At home on the farm we cuddled our baby animals when they were sick: here in hospital these children fared far worse and it was heartbreaking to see the little tear-stained faces peering through the iron bars of the cots.
After a few days, when I had begun to recover and to get my bearings, I began to plan my escape. Nobody, I decided, could survive in this set-up for very long. Across the road from the hospital was a hotel. I sat on the veranda outside the children’s ward and watched the comings and goings at the hotel. hoping to see a familiar face, and finally I spotted an old friend of my father’s. The next day I watched my chance to make my way out the front door of the hospital and I shouted across at Jack when he appeared. I poured out my troubles to him, and discovered that he was going home by bus that evening. I asked him to call for me on his way to the bus; then I went back to the nuns and told them that my father was collecting me that evening. Eventually they relented and agreed to let me go. I felt like somebody released from jail after serving a sentence of hard labour. As we travelled to Lisnasheoga, the engine of the bus was happily singing “Going Home”.
As I opened the gate of the road to our farm I felt such a surge of joy pour over me that I could have flown over the fields. I sat on a stone and my eyes roved over every familiar detail of that view; in the haze of the late summer evening it looked serene and welcoming. I was so glad to be home.
That was my first experience of a deep-rooted love of the very fields of home. Every evening my father would walk these fields, checking the animals and seeing that everything was as it should be. It was not actually necessary to do this every day but he enjoyed walking the fields – you were never alone in them, with the farm animals and the wildlife all around you. At that time there was a lovely practice known as blessing the crops: these were days of supplication when God was asked to bless the harvest. The farmer went to every field with a bottle of holy water, and he sprinkled the holy water and said whatever prayers he thought suitable, giving special attention to those fields in which crops were planted. I accompanied both my father and my mother as they did this, and I felt a great sense of harmony, a blending of man, nature and God in complete unity.
Yalla Bacon
WE KILLED TWO pigs every year for our household needs. On the day of the killing, my father acted as butcher and the neighbours as fellow executioners. A big timber table was scrubbed white and beside it a timber barrel of boiling water was placed in readiness, and these were positioned outside the old, disused turf house. The pig was then led to the slaughter, but you could not say that he came like a lamb: he fought every step of the way. It took four strong men to hold him down on the table until my father, with the expertise born of years of practice, brought the whole drama to a speedy conclusion with his long, deadly, butcher’s knife, while my mother held the white enamel bucket into which the warm red blood gushed forth. When the killing was taking place I stayed upstairs with my head under a pillow; I could not bear to see my friends meet their death.
Once dead, the pigs were scalded in the barrel of boiling water, washed and shaved clean of hair. Then they were hung by the back legs from the rafters of the turf house, slit down the lengths of their bellies and their insides removed. Then my mother set to work, sorting every bit of the pig into her white enamel bath and buckets. Very little was discarded. The insides of the pig were then washed down with buckets of water that ran out the door and into the stream outside. When the cleaning was complete three ash rods, peeled and pointed, were used to keep the sides apart: one at the shoulder, one at the ham and the third in the middle. The turf house door was then shut and bolted. I used to peep in through the slits in the timber door to see the two white carcasses hanging in the semi-darkness and I felt very much in awe of these ghost-like figures.
They hung there for two days, during which time my mother was preparing skins for the puddings. First the skins were washed and re-washed so many times that our fingers would be numb from cold water. The final washings were done in spring water from the fairy well and this water, because it came straight from the bowels of the earth, was ice cold on even the hottest day. When the skins were snow white they were left soaking in a bath of spring water, and looked like a nest of slithering eels. The lard was removed from the pig and rendered down in the bastable until it was clear liquid; then it was poured into an enamel bucket where it formed a solid block which was used for cooking and frying. When the fat was run off, left behind in the oven were the graves – bits of gristle and meat that were embedded in the fat and would not melt – that were later minced for the puddings. My mother cooked the pig’s blood and liver and many other bits and pieces that only she could identify.
When everything was cooked and in readiness, filling the puddings would commence. All the meats were put in the mincer, herbs and spices were added, and once the mincing was completed a filler was attached to the mincer. We filled white and black puddings; the basis of the black ones was the pig’s blood and the white ones minced belly meat and bread-crumbs. A huge black pot of boiling water bubbled over the fire and as soon as each ring of pudding was complete and tied firmly it was plunged into the boiling water. As the pudding cooked, an aromatic smell filled the kitchen; it was then lifted out of the pot using a clean handle of a brush and rested across the backs of two chairs where the steaming puddings gave off a mouth-watering fragrance. Row after row of puddings replaced each other on the brush handle, enough to feed an army and, in fact, because all the neighbours got a supply, there was almost a small army to be fed.
The salting of the pig took place the second night after the killing. As soon as darkness fell that night all the neighbours came to help with the work. The backbones were removed from the pigs and they were brought into the kitchen in four sides of pork. First they were cut into sections large enough for our daily needs and then the salting began. A big jute bag of salt sat in the middle of the kitchen floor between the two tables on which the pigs were being salted and we children distributed it in basins to the men who rubbed it into the meat and under the bones. Then the meat was packed between layers of salt in a big wooden barrel which was later filled with fresh spring water. The pork steak, backbone, and some choice pieces were left free of salt.
When the work was finished, the tables were scrubbed and the ki
tchen tidied, then the bastable was put over the fire and filled with pork steak. The two tables were set for a late supper and when the steak was golden brown we had platefuls of it with tea and brown bread. The following day we went around to all the neighbours with pork steak, fresh pork and puddings – and they did likewise when they killed their pigs. We had the home-made puddings for breakfast, dinner and supper while they lasted; the backbone roasted was a tasty dish, and the pig’s ear was grilled over the open fire. Even the pig’s bladder was used – seasoned up the chimney and then pumped up to become next season’s football. Every last scrap of the animal was put to use.
If my mother could get away with it she hid some of the puddings, which she hung up the chimney to be smoked. Gradually we ate our way down that barrel of bacon: we had bacon and cabbage, bacon and turnips, and once or twice a year – when my mother decided that the iron in nettles was very good for us – we had bacon and nettles, which we ate under loud protest. The remaining bacon was taken out of the barrel and hung off the hooks in the rafters of the kitchen, where it turned a golden yellow from the smoke of the open fire. If real smoked ham was required the bacon was hung up the chimney, which had ample accommodation in its cavernous interior.
