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- Herausgeber: Brandon
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
'We walk in the footprints of great women, women who lived through hard times on farms, in villages, towns and cities. The lives of these women are an untold story. This book is a celebration of the often forgotten "ordinary" women who gave so much to our society.' Alice Taylor Alice salutes the women whose energy and generosity made such a valuable contribution to all our lives. '[It] warmed my heart and reminded me of the value of family, friendship and community... I was enthralled... wonderful.' Irish Independent on And Time Stood Still
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ABOUT DO YOU REMEMBER?
‘A thoroughly enjoyable read.’ Irish Country Magazine
‘A journey into nostalgia with spiritual overtones.’
Irish Independent
‘Abounds in anecdotes of Irish rural life in former times, told in Alice’s Taylor’s distinctive, homely style.’
The Opinion
ABOUT THE GIFT OF A GARDEN
‘Illuminated by the glowing photographs of Emma
Byrne, enriched by such stories as the tree-planting meitheal, the gathering of manure and the history of the garden shed, The Gift of a Garden is itself a gift.’
Irish Examiner
‘Alice is a storyteller writing about the plants and the people she loves, making this a delightful read.’
Country Gardener Magazine
ABOUT AND TIME STOOD STILL
‘And Time Stood Still warmed my heart and reminded me of the value of family, friendship and community.’
Irish Independent
‘Anybody who has lost someone can find solace in this book.’ Arena, RTÉ Radio 1
The Women
Alice Taylor
photographs by Emma Byrne
Dedication
To Eileen of Farnagow,
who enriches all our lives
Contents
Introduction
Sometimes in life you hit a wall. You are down to the wire. You need the motivation to begin again, just a little spark of inspiration and stimulation. Then you meet someone who ignites that spark. It lights the way forward and suddenly you can see where you are going. For me this special spark glows from the lives of inspirational women. – women who move with tranquility and purpose through their lives, opening up possibilities around them. They quietly reach out to others and leave behind imprints of comfort and encouragement.
My inspirational women are not well-known women. They live seemingly ordinary lives but they enrich the society in which we live. They swim beneath the tide of life and quietly change the currents of their time. They are the glue that holds society together. These women are the biblical stone rejected by the builder that became the cornerstone. They were and still are the silent cornerstones of our world.
The lives of these women are an untold story. Some still live among us and others are long gone – extraordinary women who because they were and are perceived to be ordinary never had their story told. We Irish walk in the footprints of great women. Women who lived through hard times on farms, in villages, towns and cities. They are often invisible in our history books – only a tiny handful are written about or celebrated.
The women I want to celebrate are often farm women who wrested a living from the land and raised large families on very limited resources. These are the women of my childhood years, who lived all around us on our hillfarm in north Cork. The term ‘working wives’ had yet to be coined, but it could certainly be used to describe them – they were the original working wives. Their workplace was the farmyard, but because it was adjacent to their home they were perceived as stay-at-home wives. But proximity to the job did not lighten their workload, which could be hard and demanding. They were the multitaskers of their time and added substantially to family incomes.
It is sobering to remember that the grandmothers of today’s grandmothers were the first generation after the Great Famine. Those grandmothers were born into an Ireland still reeling from the hunger pangs of famine. Their habits were formed at a time of huge poverty and starvation. How did they move on to live with such grace and generosity, I wonder? Because that’s what I saw in them – they were caring, generous women. And they passed this on to their daughters and granddaughters.
For our grandmothers the worst aspect of life was the almost guaranteed loss of their young adult children to emigration. I don’t know how their hearts didn’t break, and stay broken. Emigration for them and for generations to come was a necessary evil that wrenched children from families, children whom these mothers might never see again, children who faced huge risks in faraway places.
Their last farewell gathering earned the term ‘The American Wake’, and it was, to all intents and purposes, a wake, because even though there was no death, there was still the sense of a final parting. Some emigrants never again came back. Some felt that the fare home would cost too much, so they sent the money back instead to help out back home. Others got immersed in their new way of life and severed all connections with home, and some fell through the cracks of a new, challenging world and were never heard from again. The mothers they left behind had to dry their tears and turn their faces to the job of survival. I can only imagine the sadness and emptiness of this. And the courage needed to face life without the children.
The voyage to America took months, though with time that journey gradually dwindled to six weeks. The first letter from America, known as the ‘landing letter’ and telling of the emigrant’s arrival, often took months to come back home. But how could any letter describe the tough challenges that these young people faced in a strange country and the hard lump of homesickness they endured? Most of the emigrants were very aware of the home situation and usually painted happy pictures of a new life to avoid worrying already burdened parents. Brian Friel depicted it on stage in The Loves of Cass McGuire.
Slowly, American and English money leaked back and eased the burden of poverty at home and also often paved the way for other American wakes when siblings joined the early departures in their new country. The foreign money did work wonders. It kept food on the table, bought extra fields to make farms viable, re-roofed houses, put cattle on the land and clothed younger siblings. The emigrants were still part of the home. American dollars and English pounds kept the home fires burning.
Other young women left home in a different way. Young idealistic girls went into the many convents dotted around the country. Coming out of homes burning with the religious fervour of the time, they dreamt of bringing some of this zeal to foreign lands. Other nuns stayed at home to educate our young and run our hospitals, and some joined contemplative orders and are still providing pools of peace in a frazzled world.
Out in the fields the farm women saved the hay, cut the corn and drew turf from the bog. Their town and city sisters reared large families on meagre wages, often supplemented by cleaning other people’s homes and offices. The tenements where they lived are now replaced by high-rise apartments.
This book is a salutation to all those women, those who stayed at home and those who emigrated. They kept a light glowing in the windows, and they kept the doors open in the homes of Ireland. Some of these doors and windows are long gone and the ruins of old thatched cottages and stone farmhouses are buried in remote corners of our landscape. But great women who drew water from the well and lived close to the earth once inhabited those houses. Every spring on Rogation Day they went out with holy water to bless the crops, as their Celtic ancestors had done before them.
Despite swimming against the tide of poverty and despite their lack of inheritance rights, our female ancestors left us a rich heritage. So let us remember and celebrate them with appreciation and respect.
Chapter 1
The Candle Lighter: the Mother
Whenever we were faced with a formidable undertaking on the home farm my mother would say, ‘Isn’t it great that we have the mind on us to do it.’ And if we questioned our ability to succeed, her answer invariably was, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’ She firmly believed that you could do anything if you thought you could do it, and once you got going nothing could stop you. Getting going was to her what it was all about. Her ‘can do’ attitude, I’m convinced, was forged from the hard practical challenges facing women in their everyday lives at that time, with no electricity, no running water, no modern machines to help with the tough jobs. This must have made these women strong, both physically and mentally.
But there was a softness and warmth in my mother as well. Whenever any of her children or neighbours was facing a challenge she would light a candle and place it in a glass bowl at the centre of the parlour table. It was her way of reminding God to keep an eye on things. If she judged that the candle needed backup, she would kneel by the table silently saying the rosary. In later years she was often contacted by children and grandchildren from all over the world pleading with her to light her candle, and they knew it would be accompanied by her prayers. It was heart-warming to imagine her loving support back in the home place. At times of tumult I now light the candle. Mothers create the inner essence of their daughters.
In 1928 my mother moved from her family farm in north Cork to my father’s farm a few miles over the road where she grafted onto a new family tree. She had moved into a mortgage-free house and a job for life. As was the custom of the time, I assume that she brought a ‘fortune’ with her. Daughters like my mother, who worked in the home place, did not get a wage as such, but when they married they were given a lump sum, a kind of dowry. That fortune was then invested in the farm or perhaps was given to a sister-in-law to enable her to move on to another farm. It was said that the same fortune moved from farm to farm all around Munster!
As a child, my mother walked the three miles to and from the local national school in the nearest town every day. At that time, during the War of Independence, the Black and Tan soldiers were everywhere. They were unpredictable, untrained soldiers with a reputation for savagery and lawlessness. The children would hide in a ditch when they heard the Tan lorries coming – one time the soldiers had pointed their guns at them and fired bullets over their heads, and after that the youngsters disappeared off the road instantly at the sound of those engines.
She had one brother and one sister, but she married into a much larger family, as my father had two sisters and six brothers. His parents were both dead, so she did not have a mother-in-law or father-in-law, but the youngest brother and sister were still living on the farm when she came there. But sharing her home with in-laws was no hardship to my mother as she had come from a home where many members of the extended family came and went over the years.
She often told us about her first social challenge in her new home, which was to host the wedding breakfast of her new sister-in-law. The reception was to be held in the home place, with a magnificent wedding cake that the bride-to-be had made taking pride of place in the centre of the parlour table. Older brothers with wives and children came back for their sister’s wedding and while the ceremony was taking place at the church all the children were left to play in the garden. One curious young lad spotted the beautiful cake through the parlour window. He was mesmerised and called the others to view it. They had never seen anything quite like this cake. The temptation proved too great and in they went, and the young lad merrily dished out slices of cake to his assembled cousins.
When the wedding party returned, the bride was not impressed! It wasn’t a great start to my mother’s career as hostess in her new home. My father and mother tried to calm troubled waters but it was a long time before that particular brother was allowed by his sister to forget the misdemeanours of his son. But in later years she had indeed forgotten all about it. She had married a man who had an extensive orchard and every autumn when we were children she visited bearing gifts of huge bags of apples; the cake and the erring boy were never mentioned.
