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- Herausgeber: Brandon
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
In a series of vignettes of life in her village, Alice Taylor reasserts the priorities of public space and local community. The Parish evokes and explores the positive values of community, which could be renewed and reinvigorated for a present and future that achieves harmony between comfort and the pressing need to respect the environment.
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ALICE TAYLOR
THE PARISH
For Gabriel.
You were the wind beneath my wings.
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.
Contents
Parish People
A parish is a tangle of all human life. Threads of tension and trust, kindness and begrudgery, generosity and meanness, harmony and jealousy, laughter and tears, all intermingle to create a patchwork of parish living. On marrying during the early 1960s into the village shop and post office, I became part of that patchwork. Parish-pump politics predominated and we all knew each other’s business. Newcomers were scrutinised and researched and sometimes we found out more about them than they knew about themselves.
Some of the householders had farmyards behind their back doors where they kept poultry and pigs, and outside the village they had farms from which, morning and evening, the cows ambled into the backyards of the village to be milked. Farmers met daily at the local creamery, and after Sunday mass rows of men arranged themselves around the village corner to discuss parish affairs. A forge at the end of the village made shoes for donkeys, farm horses and racehorses; the harness maker looked after their working wear and their fancy Sunday harness. The blacksmith also made the bands for large timber wheels, put mend-its on metal pots and made the long-legged iron tongs for the open fire. On wet days and at night the forge became a social club where farmers met and exchanged farming and horse knowledge.
The local dressmaker catered for the ladies, and the tailor fitted out the men. Both of them turned and remodelled suits and coats, and many a good navy-blue serge got a second lease of life. Often grandfather’s retired suit reappeared in the well-presented row of First Holy Communion attire. A carpentry shop was kept busy putting handles on pikes and shovels, repairing and making furniture, constructing coffins and the large timber wheels for farm carts. Young lads played hurling and football up and down the main street using their ganseys as goalposts, and in the event of a burst sliotar or football the local cobbler did the stitching. The barracks at the end of the street housed a sergeant and three gardaí at a time when the biggest offence in the parish was a bike without a light or a bull without a licence. The parish priest, wearing a long black skirt and a little bit of nonsense on his head, took care of other parish misdemeanours. His restrictive glance could sometimes be as effective as any garda baton.
There were four small shops in the village where people chatted across the high counters and kept up with the parish news; these shops catered for the entire needs of the parish from rosary beads to chamber pots. In them you could buy elastic for your knickers, corn plasters for aching feet, methylated spirits for the primus, Fynnon salts for lazy bowel movements and Bob Martin’s powders if your greyhound shared your problem. In them also all your grocery needs were met—even tea towels with a recipe for Gaelic Coffee. The know-how to make my first Gaelic Coffee was gleaned from one of these tea towels when a smart chef in Shannon Airport dreamed up this wonderful concoction to welcome travel-weary Americans and soothe their hearts with a warm Irish welcome.
We had four family-owned pubs from which the male regulars ran the world and sometimes went home only to turn. In one pub the woman of the house chopped her cabbage for the dinner on the counter as she doled out frothy pints. Cash-strapped customers would often instruct her to put their merry-making on the slate, and she was the mother confessor and counsellor to the distressed and inebriated.
Our shop, as part of the post office, manned the local telephone exchange. In there was an eight-day clock that Uncle Jacky, on the occasion of his marriage in 1932, had received from the local hurling and football club, and this provided a time check for the entire village. Children going to school put their heads in the door to see if they had a few spare minutes for the kick of a ball before school, and people on their way to mass or waiting for a funeral or bus checked the time on the post-office clock. The regulars who formed a perpetual guard of honour around the village corner could on request provide an instant and precise location for almost everyone in the parish. They observed who got on and off the bus and who walked and cycled through the village. They were the original community alert.
As part of the extended local telephone service we were supposed to know and keep the parish informed about the times of deaths, wakes and funerals. The farmers dropped in their AI calls for an Aberdeen Angus, Short-horn or Friesian and later these were collected by the man from the station, so we became familiar with the breeding patterns of the local cows. When the doctor or priest was missing, we took their calls, so we also knew who was arriving or departing from the parish. On arrival new babies were named after their grandparents, which could lead to a Johnny Jim Pat hanging off the family tree. The era of television names was yet to dawn. You were called after your ancestors and rooted into your own place. Crèches were unheard of and the extended family rocked the cradle. If the family name such as Murphy, O’Sullivan or McCarthy was too common in the parish, you had the Tommy Jim Pads and the Mary Jack Kates to distinguish between the different clans. Farmers had stay-at-home wives who double-jobbed between the house and the farmyard. They were the first working wives, who sold eggs weekly at the farm gate or to the village shop, and fattened geese and turkeys for the Christmas market.
You spun out your last days in your own home where you died in the comfort of your own bed. Many a man or woman was born and died in the same bed, four foot of black iron, bedecked with brass knobs top and bottom. No king or queen size, as the royals had not yet moved into the bedroom; all bedroom action was confined to four feet. Funeral parlours had yet to come in from America. The parlour was where you entertained visitors, and had nothing to do with your funeral. You certainly had no intention of being carted into one to lie in state when you were dead. Money was scarce and life was quite predictable and often boring.
Then the economy took off and the Celtic Tiger roared into the parish. He threw a switch that shot us all into fast-forward. Money poured into empty pockets. We wanted bigger and better houses. The tide of emigration turned and our young people were able to stay at home; as our economy soared, working Europe looked in our direction. They saw jobs and good wages. New houses were needed. Farming income alone slid down the financial ladder, so agricultural land became more valuable for building than for farming. Housing estates bearing titles with no connection to townland or landscape flooded out over green fields. People left the land, farm wives went out to work, and the farmyard became a silent place. For the first time, apartments replaced stables and cow houses on the rural landscape. As giant supermarket chains sprung up around the country, family businesses died in village and town centres.
Our parish, like many others, sprouted houses in remote corners. Young couples clipped heavy mortgages around their necks. Their parents might have been reared with a po under the bed but now their children had a bathroom at the end of every bed. Kitchens with state-of-the-art cooking facilities became the norm, but there was no time to cook. Stay-at-home mothers turned into working wives and needed cars. To reduce his stress, father took two holidays in the sun. There was no time to relax in his own home, but he bought another in foreign parts. The family car became a four-wheel-drive. Teenagers abandoned their bikes and became boy racers. Rural barracks closed and an automatic green plastic man on the barracks door replaced the local guard. Village homes became too valuable for living in and were turned into commercial units while the previous occupants built houses on approach roads. Thus we created the doughnut village. Traffic accelerated. Roads choked.
Today, we are all in the fast lane. No time for conversation. We exchange word bites: “too busy”; “no time”. Two problems have sprouted. Who will hold the baby? Who will mind Nana? Life has turned into a marathon. We are all caught in the speed trap, but parish life still goes on. It moves around the church, the school, the parish hall and the GAA pitch. The church may not be as central to life as before but it is still needed for christenings, weddings and funerals. Some priests could be forgiven for thinking that they are now running a photography studio.
The school is vital for mushrooming parishes with young families. Putting on extensions requires huge local involvement. A mother who had previously been part of such an effort looked on one morning as still newer mothers lined up and was heard to comment caustically: “They are going in there now thinking that that school fell from the sky and they have no memory of the blood, sweat and tears that we put into getting all those extensions and facilities.” A voluntary committee runs the parish hall; without it there would be no venue for indoor games and meetings, and as in every parish there are dozens of GAA stalwarts who put hours of unpaid effort into the young.
As parishes balloon, it requires a marriage of the new and the old to maintain community facilities. The newcomers and the parish permanents are slowly getting to know each other and finding out what makes the other tick. It is a challenging time. When a parish project needs attention, it’s a case of “round up the usual suspects”. Some deep-rooted parishioners believe in their divine right to do nothing. It would be easier to inject bounce into lead balls than get them to move. Some newcomers are reluctant to get involved and steer clear of anything that smacks of commitment. They consider themselves far too busy. But in both groups there are still enough movers and shakers who work to keep the show on the road.
Every parish has a story, and this is the story of our parish and our efforts to cope with the problems that are part of every parish in the first decade of the twenty-first century. We have the doers who get on with the job; the experts who feel too well informed to participate; the advisers whose function is to tell everyone how it should be done; and, of course, the hurlers on the ditch. But we are all part of the pot pourri that makes up life in the parish. We irritate each other, we help each other, we comfort each other and annoy the living daylights out of each other. But no matter how we all get along together, we still live in the shelter of each other.
CHAPTER 1
Recording Roots
She beamed across the high counter of our village shop, her eyes dancing with anticipation, her face alive with excitement. In the subdued light of the small shop she glowed like an exotic poppy.
“My great great great great grandmother Kate Mullins was born here,” she began breathlessly, and as I struggled to keep up with all the greats she continued in an excited American accent, “She left here after the famine.”
Having sewn these seeds of information, she waited with wide-eyed expectation for her family tree to sprout up behind our counter. She was one of the hundreds of Americans who return each year to parishes all over Ireland to trace their roots.
“Do you know any more about her?” I prompted.
“That’s about everything,” she declared happily. “I’m just so delighted to have found her home place. I just knew that if I could find that, the rest would be easy,” she confidently concluded. Joyful anticipation oozed from every pore. How could this vibrant positive girl be told that roots buried for over a hundred years did not sprout up on demand? They could require a lot of digging.
“Was it the parish or the village she came from?” I enquired tentatively, wanting to minimise the digging area.
“Oh!” she said in dismay, some of the delight draining from her face. “Is there a difference?”
“Well, it would help to limit possibilities,” I assured her, feeling guilty to have to cast a cloud over her perfect happiness.
“But this is such a tiny place,” she protested. “Everybody here must know everybody. This is Ireland!” She had obviously been reared on the American dream that Ireland was the promised land where she would be reconnected with her roots. In the face of her unbridled thirst for knowledge of her own people I felt a sense of responsibility. This girl was one of the descendants of the thousands of Irish who had been forced to emigrate and for years had sent home dollars that kept the roofs on family homes. Because I was reared in an old farmhouse where eight generations of the same family had lived, and from where many had been forced to emigrate, I had been taught that we owed them a huge debt of gratitude. My father, even if there was hay to be saved, had always taken time off from farming when the descendants of his ancestors came back to visit their home place.
At the other end of the counter Uncle Jacky, in a brown shop coat, was scooping sugar into paper bags and weighing it on the tall enamel scales where the wavering finger indicated when he had the bag full to its one-pound capacity. His roots went as far back as hers into the soil of Innishannon. Though he had overheard our conversation he had left me to my own resources. I was new to the village shop, having only recently married his nephew Gabriel, and Uncle Jacky was probably letting me find out that there was more to running a village shop than just selling bread and jam. Now he walked over to us, easing his glasses to the top of his head, and stood thinking for a few minutes. With a face glowing with expectation, the American watched hopefully, waiting for him to pull the story of Kate Mullins out of his pocket. Uncle Jacky scratched his head, wrinkling up his face in deep concentration. This was going to take time. After all, we were travelling back over a hundred years. The young American struggled hard to keep silent.
“Mullins is not a local name,” he said thoughtfully, and the light waned in the vivacious face, but rose again as he continued: “though I think that I remember an old woman saying that there were Mullinses here a long time ago.”
“Oh, how wonderful!” she breathed, her face alight with delight.
“They could have lived up in Rathnaroughy.”
There was an impressed silence from the American and then, with a look of dazed pleasure on her face, she whispered, “Say that again and say it very, very slowly. I have never heard of such a beautiful-sounding place.”
“Now, I could be wrong,” Uncle Jacky said quickly before she got carried away by the sound of Rathnaroughy, but there was no holding this girl back.
“Rough … raw … rugby,” she drawled in ecstasy and Uncle Jacky winced in pain at the verbal assassination of this ancient Gaelic townland.
“The best thing to do now, girleen,” he advised her confidentially across the counter, “is to go down the village to the carpenter’s shop at the end of the street and the man there might be able to do a bit better than myself.”
“You’re a great guy,” she assured him, and, with a melting look that would have given a younger man bad thoughts, headed for the door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be right back!”
“Were you trying to get rid of her?” I asked Uncle Jacky in surprise because that would not be his style.
“No, no,” he assured me convincingly. “Jeremiah goes back much further than myself and if there was ever Mullinses here he’s her best chance. Then we’ll send her to Billy in the forge and between the three of us we’ll surely dig up something.”
He was right, and by evening, after much to and froing and joint consultations across our counter, and further inquiries, they had dug deeply and found a trail that had traced the story of Kate Mullins back to an old stone house at the other end of the street. It had taken up a lot of their time but for that day tracing the roots of this young American was their first priority. Billy had horses to be shod, Jeremiah had doors to be made, and Jacky had customers to be served, but all this could be intermingled through their genealogical research. Their commitment to helping this young American was impressive and it was easy to see that they felt duty bound to assist her in finding her roots. They did not articulate it but it was obvious to me that their generation, like my father, felt a responsibility to the children of those who had been forced to emigrate. Because they themselves had been able to remain at home they felt that they had a duty to keep the home fires burning for those who had been forced to leave.
Over the following years, Jacky, Jeremiah and Billy helped many visitors to trace their ancestors. It was interesting to see how from very few seeds they could trace a whole family tree. The key to their success was their knowledge of their own place and their interest in and love of its people. In their desire to help they often called in others and sometimes the weaving of the full story involved a dozen or more people. Jeremiah Mawe was the oldest and the most knowledgeable and the day he died he took a big slice of our local history with him. For many years after his death, people were heard to comment “Jeremiah would have known that”. Then in 1977 Uncle Jacky died and the same thing applied. Soon the entire social history of our parish would be buried in the graveyard. Something needed to be done or our knowledge and sense of pride in our own place would disappear. The roots of any parish are necessary for the healthy well-being of its future. Like trees we need to be rooted in some corner of the universe; otherwise, when the storms of life erupt, we could be blown away.
In the early 1980s we held a history exhibition in the dressing rooms of the local hurling and football club. The aim of the exercise was to gather together all the folklore and history of the parish. We invited people to submit anything that they thought might be of parish interest, be it a story, poem or picture, and we asked the children to talk to their grandparents and write up the family history. The resulting collection was displayed in the dressing rooms and viewed with great interest by the people of the parish. Old family photographs, maps and family histories were on display, and a beautiful oil painting of the derelict houses at the eastern end of the village. Most of us up to then had regarded these old houses as an eyesore, but now we saw them through the eyes of artist Lia Walsh. It was the first time that many of us had seen Lia’s work as she had only just come to live in the parish, but as a result of the response to that picture she set up our first art class and for many of us opened the door into the world of painting. It is this interlinking of people’s skills that forms the basis for a parish community.
At that history exhibition, the item that caused most interest was a detailed history of the village, written by Peg Santry. Peg had been a teenager working in one of the big houses outside the village when “the troubles”, as we call them, broke out. She was of a Catholic republican family but had an understanding and fondness for her Protestant Anglo-Irish employer and, like many others at the time, was caught on the horns of a dilemma. For this reason she was able to tell both sides of the story. She also knew everybody in the parish and, beginning with the first house at the top of the street, she wrote about each family in great detail. Most people when asked to write an article view it as a major undertaking, but Peg just put pen to paper and spilled out her story, which she called “My Innishannon Long Ago”. She began with the words of Katherine Tynan Hinkson’s poem, “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”:
There’s music in my heart all day,
I hear it late and early.
It comes from fields far far away
The wind that shakes the barley.
Peg was a natural storyteller and people were fascinated by what she had written. We had only one copy of everything on display, including Peg’s story, and people had to queue up to read it. After each reading, long discussions took place. As we watched this happen, the germ of an idea took root. A magazine could be written by the people of the parish to record the past and present. Like many other parishes, ours is an old and historic place and every senior citizen who died was taking a little bit of the living history of the parish with them. We decided to have our own Christmas magazine; it would be called Candlelight.
It was 1983 and we had never heard of desk-top publishing; computers were only for the chosen few. We did not have a bull’s notion about how to compile or publish a magazine, but we had a lot of enthusiasm, even though it was thickly laced with ignorance!
The following February, we went around and asked people to write. The immediate response was “What will I write about?” and the answer was always the same: “Feel free.” We wanted a magazine that would reflect all the different facets of the parish. Contributors were told that they had several months in which to write their articles. That was mistake number one! If people feel that they have plenty of time, they put things off.
One of the people we were most anxious to have on board was Jer, who was known in the parish as “the Twin”, and who over the years had thought up witty and entertaining poems about parish events. None of these were written down, but they were floating around at the back of the Twin’s head.
On the day of the Twin’s eightieth birthday, I met him in our shop.
“How are you?” I inquired.
“I’m good,” he told me enthusiastically. “And when you are good, you should say that you are good.”
“Any particular reason?” I asked.
“I’ve met an old girlfriend,” he said with a smile. “And tonight we’re going for a drink.”
“Well, isn’t that great,” I declared.
“There’s only one thing bothering me,” he said seriously.
“What’s that?”
“I wouldn’t want her now to think that this would go any further.”
At a time when most people of his age are busy counting their pills and watching their blood pressure, here was the Twin at eighty occupied with the possibility that an old girlfriend might lose the run of herself. He had never married, and his long life was full of romantic interludes, which he often recorded in verse. He remembered one particular girlfriend in song.
In six months’ long courting she never came late
But right on the dot she was out at the gate.
And my Mary would often point out the old site
Where O’Neill and O’Donnell were beat in the fight.
But ’twasn’t long after that we too were at war
When she asked me politely to teach her the car.
To explain the position I really am bound
To say not an apt pupil in Mary I found.
Sure to sit and look on it would bring you to tears
As she burnt with the clutch and tore with the gears,
But I had no patience and she had great skill
I was told by the lassie from the top of Sand Hill.
Now we had many bumps and we had many spills
But we ne’er had a tiff till down by Jagoe’s Mills
We were going for the ditch when I gave a wee shout
And I knew by her face that ’twas all up the spout.
She told me of driving she now had her fill
And to take her right home to the top of Sand Hill.
When she told me she never would drive it again
Those words surely shook the poor heart of the Twin.
The Twin was interested in the whole Candlelight enterprise, and for that year and every year until he died he pulled a poem from the back of his archival mind.
In many parishes there are people like the Twin who are fascinated by the stories of their own place and people and have the gift of putting them together in entertaining poems and stories. It is regrettable that sometimes their stories die with them.
In 1984, a parish magazine constituted a new venture and people were a bit apprehensive and loath to put pen to paper. So, with the deadline looming, I decided to write a few articles to have them in reserve to act as fillers if necessary. They were never needed because slowly articles began to come in from around the parish and some from further afield. We had contacted people who had left the parish, and some—including Con Murphy of GAA fame, who never forgot his roots—came good.
For that first edition most features came in handwritten, and Maureen, assisted by Mary, took on the task of typing them up. The next step was to get a cover, and here we were blessed with the genius of young Denis who lived up Bóthar na Sop and was studying architecture. He designed a classic cover with a perfect drawing of our village lit by a giant candle and guarded by flying cherubs. It was the ideal Christmas cover and perfectly suited to the name Candlelight. On the back cover we put an old photograph, from the Lawrence collection, of the western end of the village in the 1890s, a view which had, by 1984, almost totally changed. We found that all the expertise we required existed within the parish, and indeed this expertise can probably be found in most places.
On the first page, to capture the whole essence of the Candlelight concept, we put a photograph of a little girl in a long nightdress, lighting a Christmas candle. Every year afterwards we added another child, and now we have twenty-four children, alternating each year between boys and girls. After the first ten years we had the challenging scenario of trying to have ten children simultaneously looking angelic and lighting ten candles without at the same time setting fire to the candle-lighter in front of them. After a few close shaves, with singed hair and scorched fingers, we decided on a cut-off point of five children. The earlier photographs were then transferred to the sides of the page and framed the new children in the centre. Over the years we discovered the main qualification for a Candlelight child was to have a pleasant and helpful mother!
So, after a certain amount of huffing and puffing, the first Candlelight saw the light of day. We were a printer’s nightmare because we hadn’t a clue. However, whereas in some cases I might be a slow learner, where Candlelight was concerned there was no time for pussy-footing about, so I learned fast. We sold it in our own parish, in Kinsale and Bandon, and we lost money. The point of the exercise was never about making money but we still needed to get our financial act together. The following year we got sponsorship from a few well-to-do professionals in the parish, and there are generous people like that in every parish but you cannot keep going back to them indefinitely, so the following year we charged enough to cover our expenses. Finally we got a proper grip on the situation and decided that, if we believed in the Candlelight concept, we would need to set a decent price and any profit would go to parish projects.
To date we have restored a huge historic parish map of the village which is in the local church and we have helped finance a village sculpture of Billy the Blacksmith. Candlelight is written by the people of the parish, so any returns belong to the parish. It is probably something that is happening in many other parishes up and down the country.
We may have originally considered Candlelight a once-off, but as soon as the first edition hit the parish, people started to talk about the following year. It soon dawned on us that it was now expected to be a permanent feature of the parish Christmas. One man who had previously refused to write because he deemed it to be beyond him said to me, “Well, was that all ye wanted?” and so decided to do an article.
Over the twenty-four years, Candlelight has served many purposes. After the first edition, one woman told us, “You know something: that Christmas magazine has somehow brought us all together under the one umbrella.” She had a very good point as it keeps those of us within the parish aware of what is going on because everyone is free to write and tell their own story, and it keeps people long gone from the parish in touch with their home place.
The real treasures are the old school photographs; people are fascinated by them. Sometimes there might be only one such photograph in the parish, and when we publish it everyone enjoys a trip down memory lane. From the Twin we got one of these photos that had been taken about sixty years earlier, and not only did we get the photograph but we also got a detailed description of the day it was taken. Apparently that morning before going to school the Twin, who always possessed a sense of occasion, had wanted to put on his good suit for the photo call but his mother would not allow him. “And there now,” he proclaimed six decades later, “wasn’t she wrong because I’d be looking much better now in my new suit.”
