by Alice Taylor
Practically all the meat we ate was produced on our own farm. My mother reared and fattened chickens, which she boiled and roasted; we also had roast duck and, on festive occasions, roast goose or turkey. Trout was a regular Sunday dish and, as my father also liked to shoot, pheasant sometimes came our way.
In the autumn the potatoes were picked and drawn home from the field. They were then stored in the potato pit, a six-foot-long trench that was about two feet deep and three feet wide. Butt loads of potatoes were poured into it and stacked high, and then thatched with straw to ward off the rain and frost. The turnips and mangles were treated in like manner. The turnips were for kitchen use while the mangles, chopped up in a machine called a pulper, were fed to the horses and the pigs. The pig was the waste disposal unit of the farmyard and ate anything that came his way. Any heads of cabbage still remaining in the fields were cut and brought home to be fed to the cows because cabbage, unlike the other vegetables, could not be stored over the winter. And so the fields were cleared of crops and when the weather got cold the cattle were also brought in off the land, back to the farmyard, where they slept in their comfortable straw-filled houses at night and went out during the day for water and exercise in a field near the house.
The turf was drawn home from the bog and built into a rick behind the house. The turf house was also filled to the door and here what we called brus, the broken up sods of turf, formed on the floor over the following weeks. This brus was used for lighting the fire, with little bits of kindling which we collected from under the trees in the groves and the fort.
At the beginning of winter a mountain of logs was stacked high beside the house. We were surrounded by trees and when some were brought down by storms they were cut up with a large saw called the cross-cut, which was worked by two men. Then they were split with the sledge into wedges, and finally chopped smaller with the hatchet. I loved sitting on the pile of freshly cut logs, running my hands over the different shapes and smelling their woody fragrance. To this day I think that there is nothing as interesting to look at as a heap of newly cut logs, the delicate colouring of their veined insides telling their life story, while they wait to bring warmth and comfort.
And so, a bit like the squirrel, we gathered in our stores for the winter, and if the snow came heavy and we were cut off from the outside world, we were safe and self-sufficient. Our wheat, which had been ground into flour at the mill, was now stored in bins to make white or brown bread. The timber barrel was full of meat and eggs came from the hens daily. When God’s light faded we had the candles in the sconces and the lamp casting a soft glow around the kitchen. Facing into winter the entire work of the farm wound down, and we looked forward to the long, leisurely nights around the fire.
One of the last jobs to be done on the land was the winter ploughing. Our work was carried out in groups but my father spent long days alone with his horses when ploughing. One winter’s evening I went up in the early dusk to the field where my father was ploughing; I walked in the gap and there across the furrows of brown earth the man, the plough and his horses were silhouetted against the darkening sky. The last rays of the winter sun haloed these three in a fusion of soft light: I held my breath, afraid to intrude because I felt that I had come on a holy communion of nature, God and man. My father, who worked with the earth, had a closeness to nature and a full acceptance of its laws and the laws of God. Years afterwards, when he was a very old man, and I was visiting him, I would ask, “How are you?” and he would smile serenely and say, “Waiting.” Death was as natural to him as the seasons and he had come to terms with his God out in the fields. He was not a praying man, but he was a thinking man, and he had thought it all out right to the end. In old age he found an inner peace; it was as if, coming near the end of the road, he looked back and saw that all the turnings had led him in the one direction.
Give Me My Shirt
HE WAS NOT blessed with a sunny disposition but possessed a razor-sharp brain and a biting wit. His role in life could best be described as a part-time travelling farmworker. How much he travelled and for how long he worked was entirely of Dan’s own choosing; he was a free spirit and marched to the sound of his own drum. Trade unions would have been completely unnecessary to Dan because if conditions did not suit him he just moved on. He was master of his own destiny, but he never wronged anybody and he was completely honest.
Dan came to our house a couple of times a year and the length of his stay depended on many factors. His wardrobe consisted of a brown paper bag containing his spare shirt, which he entrusted to my mother on arrival and demanded back when he made his sometimes hasty exit. Some people believe in making an entrance, but Dan was one for making an exit and his parting shot was always: “Give me my shirt – I’m going.”
He usually arrived at Christmas time, because then he had the farmyard more or less to himself. At that time farm-workers went home on Christmas Eve and did not return until the first of February, which was the beginning of the working year, and Dan would survive longer if he had only my father to contend with, though even he was too much at times. At the end of our house was a large room where my brother slept, with a bay window opening on to the garden. There was always a spare bed in the room and some mornings Dan would be in the bed, having arrived during the night without disturbing anyone. More mornings the bed would have been slept in, but Dan missing, as he would have gone to bring in the cows for the early milking. He was a light sleeper and an early riser, and when he had the cows brought in he’d rattle around the kitchen and make such an infernal racket that he would wake the whole household. If anyone complained, the only satisfaction Dan gave them was to remark: “Don’t be sleeping your life away.”
Among the other farm houses that he favoured with his presence was a widow woman who lived across the river from us. She was very mean where food was concerned and Dan enjoyed dragging the last bite from her. One day for dinner she gave him a huge plate of cabbage, which was plentiful on the farm, and a tiny bit of beef. Dan demanded more beef and got a little, with still more cabbage, and when he demanded more beef again she said:
“Dan, that heifer will be bellowing inside in you if you eat more beef.”
“Jakus me, ma’am,” Dan snorted. “If she will it won’t be because she’s looking for cabbage.”
Eventually he got fed up with the widow woman and one morning, bright and early, demanded his shirt and was gone. She met him a couple of months later in town, and complained bitterly about how wrong it had been of him to desert her when she had needed him so badly.
Dan drew himself up to his full five foot two and, glaring at her from under his bushy eyebrows, he snapped: “Madam, I deserted the King of England, so where does that leave you?”
Dan usually got on well with my father, but they could have their differences too. One winter’s day Dan left the cows a bit short on hay so my father asked him to give them a little more. (The cows were kept in for the winter and tied up in their stalls in a comfortable cowhouse where they were fed with hay daily.) The next day my father went to the cowhouse to find the cows up to their ears in hay: Dan had decided to go overboard on it. My father pointed out that this was too much, whereupon Dan said:
“Jakus me, Boss, hot or cold won’t please you. Give me my shirt and I’m going.”
We never knew where he went to and we were never surprised when he reappeared. Once when he returned after an absence of about twelve months my father remarked that we had not seen him for a long time.
Dan looked up at him and said, “I was a guest of His Majesty the King.”
We children often came under fire from Dan’s erratic temper. One day during one of these forays I called him “Daneen” in a fit of annoyance. My mother intervened, reprimanding me for being so cheeky, but Dan soon put things in perspective. “Missus,” he said, “children have only what they hear.” We heard a rare deal of things from Dan. Across the valley from us was a large fat man with an enormous pot-belly. Dan described
him one day: “Jakus me, Boss, if he was cleaned out he’d make a fine duck house.” Ever after when I saw a pot-bellied man I had visions of rows of ducks sitting comfortably behind the straining waistcoat.
Dan was a little man and he carried a large walking stick with a big knob on top. He would put his two hands on top of the knob and rest his chin on them. Then, with a faraway look in his eyes, he would say:
For man to man
Is so unjust,
We do not know
What man to trust.
We trusted many
To my sorrow,
So pay today
And we’ll trust tomorrow.
He was a man of little sentiment and held few illusions about his fellow human beings. One day he stood watching Mick trying to put a handle on a hammer and failing to make it firm. Finally Dan could take it no longer and grabbed hammer and handle saying in a withering tone of voice: “No wonder Oisín came off the horse.” When Mick’s father died later in the year, leaving a lot of money after him, Dan’s only comment was, “Jakus me, but he killed awful well.” Death, to Dan, was nothing to mourn about, and the practicalities of life had always to be faced.
He had spent many years in the British army and had served in the Boer War where his job had been burying the dead. He claimed that no man was ever killed whom he could not lift by himself: he was able to shift bags of coal and meal effortlessly as a result of the muscles he developed lifting dead Englishmen. A bag of coal, Dan declared, was a tidy bundle compared to a gangling corpse. After the excitement of the war, Dan, with his appetite for the unusual, found the army boring so he deserted. On the night of his return to his home village he met up with his old buddies and got uproariously drunk. After closing time he staggered up the centre of the village, singing at the top of his voice. At the end of the street was the barracks where a six-foot sergeant stood at the door and viewed this miniature troublemaker, but Dan, oblivious to all but his own happy state, never saw the sergeant until he got a crack of the baton on top of the head. Dan’s head, however, was immune to all kinds of bangs, so he just stepped back and beheld his long-legged opponent. Perhaps Dan thought he was back in battle and that this was an upright corpse to shift; anyway, he put his head down and charged. He rammed the sergeant with his cast-iron skull, keeled him over his head and, grasping a long leg over each shoulder, gave the big man an upside-down piggy-back down through the village before throwing him, stunned, over the graveyard wall. He then beat a hasty retreat across the fields.
Needless to mention, this encounter did not endear him to the law, who were also after him for desertion from the army. Dan enjoyed the chase and if he passed a barracks late at night he loved to leave a note on the door to annoy the occupants: “The great Dan passed this way.” But finally he was caught, court-martialled and sent to jail.
The policeman who had been taken for the piggy-back informed the army sergeant who took Dan into custody that Dan had broken his mother’s heart. This piece of information confirmed the sergeant’s already low opinion of Dan, and when he marched the reluctant soldier around the barrack square he shouted: “Man, you broke your mother’s heart: but you won’t break mine!”
But neither could he break Dan because Dan thrived on controversy and cleampar. Finally, the army gave up on him and, after putting him on bread and water for a month, discharged him. But as Dan loved a good fight, especially with someone in uniform, he was often a guest of the prison service and of His Majesty.
When Dan ended up in court it was usually on a charge of disturbing the peace. On one occasion an attorney by the name of Burke prosecuted for the state and took great pleasure in listing out Dan’s long litany of misdemeanours. Burke had a dark scar on his cheek as a result of a brawl in his student days. He completed Dan’s history of wrong-doings saying, “Your Honour, this man has spent his life going from fight to fight.”
“But,” Dan shouted across the court, “at least I brought a clean face out of all of them!”
The entire court was highly amused, including the judge who had often suffered the long-winded, pompous Burke. The case was dismissed.
Dan had one special fighting partner whom he called “The Boar”. This man was the local undertaker and as soon as Dan and himself sighted each other the coats were taken off, sleeves rolled up and a fight ensued until one or the other was knocked senseless. Dan always insisted that “The Boar” was the only man he knew worth fighting with: he provided a real challenge. Why he called him “The Boar” was known to Dan alone. One day, when they were both old men, Dan called on his opponent and just as “The Boar” stood back ready for action Dan held out his hand in friendship, saying: “We had many great fights and you gave me much enjoyment, but now I’m giving you the last round. I am going to die soon and nobody else would enjoy burying me as much as you would.” Before the surprised undertaker could open his mouth, Dan slapped an envelope of notes on the table and, going out the door, he looked over his shoulder and said: “I will call you Boar no more.”
When Dan died he left a will bequeathing thousands of pounds to all the people he disliked most, and they were many. The fact that he did not have a penny to his name proved that Dan marched to his grave to the sound of his own drum.
A One-way Ticket
CHILDREN WHO DIE very young leave a warm memory in the hearts of those who loved them. It is as if their candle of life, because it glows for such a short time, shines especially bright. Connie was the youngest of our family, born in the autumn of my parents’ childbearing years. He was a long-legged, fine-boned little boy with silken blond hair that touched his shoulders. His birth brought great joy – if nothing else, after five daughters, he was a welcome change. An imaginative, sensitive child, he blossomed in the adoring love of this predominantly female household. My older brother at this time had left the free world of childhood behind and was finding his feet in the quicksands of adolescence.
There was just a year between Connie and me, so we grew together in early childhood like a pair of twin lambs. In my earliest memory I am sitting on a warm flagstone outside our house while Connie sits in his pram under a huge palm tree. The palm tree dominated our garden and its branches brushed against the window panes, filling the rooms at that end of the house with moving shadows.
Connie and I spent our days in the grove behind the house. The others were gone to school so we were left to our own devices. We played imaginary games beneath the trees where the ground was soft with the fallen leaves and pine needles of many years. One old tree had a huge hole in its trunk and into this we sat and pretended that we were travelling to many strange places. Because we could not see the top of this tree, as it seemed to go up and up and up, we believed that it grew into heaven. Heaven in those days was very real. The sky was our roof and the ground floor of heaven; up there were God and the angels and our cat that had died the year before. Everything that left our world finished up in heaven and we never questioned that it was a one-way ticket; after all, if heaven was where we all hoped to end up who would think of coming back?
We fed the ducks and the chickens every day and the baby calves were our favourites, though all the young animals around the yard were very much loved by us. We often visited Bill at the top of the hill, where he told us stories and gave us rides on the donkey. We could ramble through the fields and be missing for hours and nobody had need to worry because the countryside was free and safe. The only disappearance that ever created panic happened one wet winter’s morning when Connie went missing. The stream at the bottom of the garden had turned into an angry torrent of flood water that backed up the garden and overflowed into the grove behind the house. Connie was nowhere to be found, and the terror was that he had fallen into the flood water. A thorough search proved that this was unlikely but the possibility could not yet be overruled. Every corner of the house and farmyard was searched to no avail. Most of this consternation sailed over my head, and I decided that I would visit our sheepdog in the haybar
n who, the previous week, had had a litter of cuddly puppies. And there, curled up with the new mother, was Connie, sound asleep, almost indistinguishable from the pups who were draped all over him.
At night we slept together in a big bed that had a high, old-fashioned timber base and headboard. The fluffy tick, filled with soft duck and goose down collected over the years from the Christmas pluckings, provided warmth, and fun too as we stood on the timber headboard and dived into its comforting fullness. It had sunken pathways and fairy tunnels and countless hidden possibilities. Going to bed early, when sleep was the least of our interests, we turned the bed into a playground peopled by whoever and whatever took our fancy; we scratched pictures on the headboard and Lowry men and women pranced around our pillows. Nobody cautioned about damaging the paintwork. There were no dolls and teddies to cuddle in bed as these were the war years and such luxuries were non-existent – but never missed. Instead, our resourceful mother provided us with two little statues, one of Saint Theresa and the other Baby Jesus. There was no shortage of statues in Irish homes at that time, so every night we took our battered and chipped and much-loved statues to bed.
Once a week my mother left home to visit my grandmother, who lived a few miles down the road. She was never missing for very long, but home lost some of its warmth when she was gone, and if she was not back by bedtime my oldest sister Frances did the needful. This was the case one winter’s night, so my sister changed us into our night-clothes and, lighting a candle, led us upstairs to bed. The older children were trusted with candles in their bedrooms but the younger ones settled for moonlight once they were tucked up in bed.
