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- Herausgeber: Brandon
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Irish cottages, the pleasures of walking in autumnal woods, a hens' hatching house and a country garden: these are just some of the elements in this varied patchwork quilt of views of rural life from Alice Taylor, Ireland's favourite storyteller.
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A Country Miscellany
Alice Taylor
Contents
The Cottage
NONIE’S COTTAGE, LIKE herself, was small and welcoming and exuded warmth. She lived a few fields away from my grandmother’s farmhouse. During the summer holidays I often stayed with my grandmother, and every Tuesday we took two large baskets of eggs from the free-range hens down to Nonie’s cottage, where they were collected by the egg man. As we came into the shadowy quietness of her cottage, Nonie would swing the black heavy kettle on the iron crane over the blazing fire in preparation for tea. Then, straightening up, she would come down the little kitchen with outstretched arms and enfold me in a comforting hug. To Nonie, my mother was still a young woman, so this made me think that Nonie was very, very old, but she had none of the austerity of my grandmother and always called us children her leanaí (“little ones”). Her snow-white hair was coiled in a knot on top of her head, but little white tendrils escaped and framed her face in a soft halo. Because she and her daughter were its only occupants, and both were fine-boned and dainty as delicate china, the cottage had the aura of a feminine haven. Long white nightdresses edged with lace often blew on the clothes line or hung airing by the fire beside hand-embroidered pillow cases and lace tablecloths. Crocheting and lace-making were Nonie’s great loves, and her high-necked white blouses were always edged with lace; around her shoulders she wore a black crochet shawl, and her long black satin skirt swung clear of her tiny, black, soft leather boots. Her little boots were polished to such a high shine that I could see the firelight reflected on her toe-caps. Her daughter, a cheesemaker in a creamery ten miles away, cycled daily to work and back every night. She was the breadwinner, and her wages, together with Nonie’s pension, maintained them in a reasonable degree of comfort.
The inside of the cottage, like the outside, was whitewashed, and the yellow thatch came down snugly over the windows like the peak of an old man’s cap sheltering small deep-set eyes. In the thatch over the door grew a rosette-forming, evergreen houseleek which flowered in the summer. As well as looking and smelling good, it had an accompanying legend that it prevented bad luck from entering the house and safeguarded against fire. A half-door, while leaving in the fresh air and sunshine, kept out the multi-coloured hens that pecked industriously on the cobbled yard outside. When Nonie wiped the breadcrumbs off the table into her cupped fist, she tossed them over the half-door to the hens outside who squawked in disagreement over the biggest crumbs. The little window in the front only partially lighted the kitchen because the three-foot-thick mud walls funelled the light, leaving some of the kitchen in shadows that were diffused by the flickering firelight and the light from over the half-door.
On the back wall opposite the window was Nonie’s dresser, having the ingenuity of design that provided a decorative showpiece for her entire kitchen collection. The large brown and blue dishes stood at the back of the centre shelf, while smaller plates backed the ones above and below; basins and jugs of various colours stood on the shelves, while smaller jugs and cups hung off the hooks on the shelf fronts or rested in nests of saucers between the basins. The two drawers beneath the wide base separating the top and bottom held all the cutlery, while in the open space below stood the black iron pots and kettles for the open fire. As well as the practical need it fulfilled, Nonie’s dresser was a pleasure to look at, with its lustre jugs and flower-patterned bowls. One jug in particular was my favourite. It was cream-coloured with a scatter of pale pink roses and a pink rim and handle, and in this Nonie kept the goat’s milk. She had only a small green patch of grass at the front of her cottage, so the goat, together with the donkey which provided Nonie’s means of transport, grazed the long acre. The donkey cart sheltered in the open shed at the end of the cottage, its orange shafts and wheels contrasting vividly against the black rick of turf beside it.
At the lower end of Nonie’s kitchen a door opened into a small bedroom, and apart from this all the living was done in the kitchen. The little house was heated by two turf fires for which the turf was cut and drawn from the nearest bog. As the man in the house had died many years before, any work requiring male muscle was done by the neighbouring men. It was part of the interlaced system that prevailed at the time and helped those within it to support each other.
Nonie’s cottage was a social centre for those going to and coming from town. Walking down the hilly roads, strong boots and protective clothing were needed, and as Nonie’s cottage was on the side of the main road it was used as a changing depot. Often bicycles were parked against the donkey cart rather than pushed up a steep hill on a dark, wet winter’s night. She provided numerous cups of hot, sweet tea coloured with goat’s milk and crisp brown bastable bread (baked in a pot on the open fire), and if stronger sustenance was required you got a speckled brown egg standing in a blue china eggcup.
Now the smoke no longer curls from the chimney of Nonie’s cottage, for the roof is long gone and the birds build their nests in the ivied gable end that stands as a monument to a noble people who lived in those mud cabins. They were the farm workers who, having no land of their own, helped the farmers till the land. In a primarily agricultural country it was the only means of livelihood available to them. These were the ordinary people of Ireland who, together with the tenant farmers, died of starvation by the roadsides of Ireland during the famine of 1847. Others boarded the coffin ships and sailed for America and Australia, many dying in transit. Of those who made it to a new land, many never returned. Today their descendants come back looking for their family roots amongst the grey stones of Galway and the green hills of Kerry.
Those who survived those terrible times in Ireland became the heart of rural life, their roots buried deep in the soil of the countryside. Some lived on in their thatched mud cabins, while others moved into the cottages built by the British government at the beginning of this century. Accompanying most cottages was an acre of land which they tilled intensively and which provided all that was needed for the kitchen table. If their needs were greater than their acre could supply, they got the use of an adjoining farmer’s field. It worked on the basis of a gentlemen’s agreement and served both sides well provided that both sides behaved like gentlemen. The design of those cottages varied very little throughout the countryside. They were small, compact, well-built houses, each with a high-pitched slate roof and at the front two windows, one on either side of the front door – though sometimes the two windows were together, to the right or left of the door. The door opened straight into the kitchen, which had an open fire at one end, over which a black iron crane stretched. Off this hung the kettle and cooking pots. Around this fire the family gathered at night as this was often the only source of heat in the cottage.
These people, some of whom still lived in the cabins but the majority in the cottages, were a tough and great-hearted people. They had to be tough to eke out an existence on what was available to them, but their great hearts gave them broad vision. Because their ancestors had suffered much and survived, they knew that they too were survivors. Because of their Celtic origins, a love of music and dance flowed through their veins. Fiddle, concertina and melodeon music, some plaintive and haunting, some bubbling with laughter and gaiety, filled the low-ceilinged cabins and cottages, while the people beat out the rhythm of their hearts in the set-dancing on the stone floors of their mountain homes. The cottages held what they termed “house dances” where the music, singing and dancing were local and spontaneous and the people gathered in from the surrounding countryside. They nurtured and cultivated the old customs of our race, for the cottages of Ireland were the storehouses of our traditional singing and dancing.
Emigration had always been part of Irish life, and when economic depression peaked, as it did in the 1930s and 1950s, so did emigration. Many of the children from our cottages emigrated to England and America and sent home much-needed money. Young boys from the bosoms of large families and close communities went to the wild and lonely plains of Oregon, where they herded sheep in total isolation for many months. What terrible loneliness must have eaten into the marrow of their bones. And when the dollars came back across the Atlantic to help those at home, was it ever realised what a price in human suffering was paid for them? Girls from quiet hills arrived at Paddington station to work to pay the passages of younger sisters and brothers, either to join them or to go further afield to America. When returning Americans come tracing their long-lost ancestors, we might bear in mind that it could be that the dollars of their forefathers kept the heart alive in rural Ireland.
Very few cottages are now in their original state. The economic boom of the 1970s blew out gable ends for extensions and the little cottages mushroomed into much larger homes. Some were abandoned for modern, labour-saving bungalows, and now you will see in rural Ireland the shells of little cottages standing like ghosts in the shadows of new houses. The people who are now seeking out these cottages to restore them are often returning emigrants or people fulfilling a dream of escaping from the stress of living in the fast lane. But the important thing is that our Irish cottages should be alive with the sound of human voices and have smoke curling from the chimneys, not dotting our landscape like quiet grey shadows of another day. Any cottage that sheltered many generations has a past, and there is about an old cottage a sense of timelessness and relaxation that enriches the lives of the occupants. Old stones that have absorbed years of living, sunshine and rain make soothing companions.
Memory on its
Soft grey clouds
Wafting through the rooms,
Webbing here
The part of me
That belongs,
The living that was blended
Through these stones;
So I take with me
Past soul of this house,
And leave behind
Part of mine.
From Close to the Earth by Alice Taylor (Brandon, 1988)
The Hatching House
AS YOU PUSHED open the old door it dragged along the floor and you had to lift it up slightly. The house appeared to be in total darkness, but as your eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light you gradually became aware that you were not alone. Slits of wintery sunlight filtered in through the straggling ivy that covered the only window, and in the semi-gloom the outline of an old stone boiler with its rusty door hanging off one hinge stood out from the side wall. At first there appeared to be nothing else in the house, but gradually you saw them, sitting in hatching boxes around by the walls of the old stone house, and your nose absorbed the smell of hens, hay and hatching: a smell full of moist feathers, warm eggs and hay darned with down. Along by the walls the broody hens sat motionless in a hypnotic state, their wings in a maternal spread covering their past products and their future families.
