To School Through the Fields
‘People read Alice Taylor’s books, people crave Alice Taylor’s company because they want to find peace. They find it in the leaves of her books and the folds of her laughter.’
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‘In Ireland, where scribblers are ten a penny, she has become the most popular and universally loved author in memory.’
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Dedication
To Phil, who was part of it all
Contents
Reviews
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Twenty-five Years Later
Preface: Different Times
A Child’s Nest
Preparing for the Stations
Beneath God’s Altar
Animal Nanny
Forever Young
The Long-tailed Family
Celebration of the Seasons
The Jelly Jug
An Odd Old Codger
Holiday Hens
Open Spaces
Mrs Casey
Tea in the Meadow
Going to Ballybunion
To School through the Fields
Our Daily Bread
My Father’s Butter Box
The Last Litany
The Cut-throat Nuns
Yalla Bacon
Give Me My Shirt
A One-way Ticket
A Touch of Oliver
A Country Child’s Christmas
About the Author
Copyright
Introduction:
Twenty-five Years Later
In the nineteen eighties I wrote a story. It was the celebration of a childhood. It was my story. But it turned out to be the story of many people, linked across three generations: the older generation who had lived through it, the middle generation who had experienced the tail-end of it, and the younger generation who had seen it through the eyes of parents and grandparents. They all looked into a remembering mirror, caught glimpses of their own story and wanted to step inside. So they walked into bookshops all over the country and turned To School through the Fields into the biggest bestseller ever published in Ireland.
A multitude of seeds sprout a book. This one had gestated in my head for many years. It originally took root in there on beautiful May mornings as I watched baby calves get their first taste of freedom and race down sunlit fields. It brooded as we picked potatoes on freezing days with clods of earth clinging to our knees. It glowed on beholding untouched pristine snowfields on winter mornings. It wept on the death of my baby brother Connie, and my old friend Bill. It danced as we listened on summer nights to the corncrake as we drifted off to sleep. It glowed as we gathered with neighbours around our kitchen table to celebrate Mass in the age-old custom of the Stations. It continued to glow as I watched my parents walk the fields and bless them with Holy Water on Rogation Day. It mourned when we buried an old farm horse who had been a family friend. It rekindled as we drank tea in the meadow beside the river on summer days.
The womb of this book was the farm and old house where I was born. Eight generations of our family have lived there. And during my childhood, family members who had emigrated came back from all over the world to the ancestral home. It matters not whether your ancestral home is a small cottage or a rambling castle, it is still the nurturing cradle of your family roots, and buried deep within our core is an inbuilt need to come back to the place from whence we came – a bit like the wild salmon. Those people who returned to walk the fields of their ancestors left a lasting impression on me. They were warmly welcomed by my parents, but I regretted even then that no ancestor had taken it upon themselves to write about their way of life. Famous and historic people and events are recorded, but often not so the life of ordinary people. Yet we too tell the story of a time.
Another inspiration for this book was my children. When my children, like others all around the country, went on holidays to their grandparents on home farms, which by then had many modern amenities, they loved the way of life and came home full of stories.
When I explained that previous generations had grown up there with no bathroom, no car, no telephone and no television I could see that they were unable to imagine what that could be like. It felt as if I was weaving fiction. That made me realise that a whole generation had grown up with no idea of how their parents and previous generations had lived. And that was only in the space of one generation!
So I decided that rather than have us studied in later times like a prehistoric species by a student doing a thesis, our story should be told by one of ourselves. By someone who had run to school through muddy gaps, who had watched with wonder as baby chicks cracked their way out of hatching eggs, who had stayed up all night minding bonhams and in the early hours had watched with wonder the sun rise over the Kerry mountains while listening to the magic of the dawn chorus.
Another reason for writing the book popped up one day in an auction room when a pair of beautifully framed photographs of an elegantly dressed couple was one lot to be auctioned. It set me wondering: these were somebody’s parents or grandparents, and given the way this photograph was so expensively and carefully framed, there was no way that these people ever imagined themselves coming under the hammer! Can you ever be sure what the generations after you will do? Also at that time, there was an antique shop in Cork with a slogan that read ‘Come in and buy what your grandmother threw out’, and in today’s world we are forever moving house so nothing is hoarded in attics for the perusal of the next generation. So, publishing my childhood story would preserve it for posterity.
I sent the manuscript to Brandon. Why Brandon? I knew very little about publishers, but I had just read The Bodhrán Maker by John B Keane – that man of many plays – and on it I saw the name Brandon; and I also loved the idea of a publishing house called after a Kerry mountain! So it was posted in the spring of 1987. Then I went away for two weeks and on my return the son who had been in charge of operations in our absence told me that a letter had come, but he couldn’t find it! So I wasn’t sure if Brandon had responded positively or not until I got an irate phone call from the publisher, Steve MacDonogh, enquiring as to why I had not responded to his letter. We met up the following day and I knew that he was impressed, but he asked me to lengthen the manuscript, telling me, ‘You are writing about a world that is very familiar to you but people may read this who never heard of many of the practices that you are describing, so go into more detail.’
He was right, because later this book was translated into many languages. One of the first was German, and a German woman who visited me told me that during the war she had been farmed out to a family deep in the country and now, years later, it was the one place in the world where she could feel at home; she needed to go back there occasionally and she loved the similarities with my story. When I asked the Japanese translator how come the Japanese were interested, she told me that they too had left behind a forgotten world. Perhaps childhood, animals and nature are universal themes.
The writing of further details posed no problem and I assured Steve that when I was ready I would be back. Deadlines were not on my agenda as writing is a hobby that I love, and I did not want it to become a pressure point which would kill the joy. After Christmas 1988 we went to print and it was published on 14 May of the same year.
The first rule in marketing is getting the product known out there. At that time the voice of Ireland on radio and TV was Gay Byrne, and I appeared with him on both m
edia. When I asked Gay privately how he understood this book so well he assured me that in Dublin too he had seen huge changes in lifestyle. Gay was the ultimate interviewer and always asked the question that was hovering on the mind of the nation, and he was a great listener too, not feeling threatened by silence while he waited for an answer, and should an interview go off the planned path he was not afraid to step into the unknown. He had the ear of the country and through him so had I, and it got To School through the Fields off to a flying start.
Why did my story strike a chord with so many people? It could be that it told a story hitherto unscripted of a people who had worked the land and considered themselves very ordinary. They were, in fact, extraordinary! In To School through the Fields their lives were recorded and acknowledged. John B Keane told me that it confirmed a people and a way of life that needed confirmation; he added wisely that we all need to be confirmed in what we do, none more so than those unheralded heroes and heroines who worked the farms of Ireland. This point was also made to me on a radio station in Birmingham by a young woman from Sligo. She told me that when she’d been home the previous Christmas her mother had kept a copy of To School through the Fields in the pocket of her apron. She told me: ‘My mother is not a reading woman, so I asked her why this book meant so much to her and she told me that her story was in there and it gave her a new perspective on the value of her life.’ At a book signing in London, a lad from Donegal confided, ‘I miss home terribly but I keep this book under my pillow and it brings me comfort because to me it’s a piece of home.’ At another signing in Dublin a beautifully dressed, articulate lady informed me, ‘You slapped a great face of respectability on a childhood of which I was half-ashamed.’
At my first book signing in Eason’s of Cork the queue stretched down Patrick Street until the shop ran out of books. Then people went around to all the other bookshops in the city until they too were sold out. That day I signed 750 copies. People read it and realised that a whole world and a way of life had slowly faded into oblivion and we had hardly noticed it happen.
For years we may walk a path and perceive it as unchanging. But then one day something triggers our awareness and we look around in surprise, realising that while we were busy with living the whole world around us has changed. People who had grown up in the world of my childhood read about it in To School through the Fields and realised, suddenly, that it had all disappeared. Some were glad to see the back of it, and at one book signing a woman demanded of me, ‘Why did you bother writing about that world – it was full of poverty, hardship and misery.’ And, indeed, for some it was. For others, however, it was the nurturer of their dreams. And both have the right to remember it as it was for them.
Nowadays we are going back to the land, which has waited patiently for us to return from playing money-roulette. The land is a not a soft taskmaster, but it can give us our daily bread. And in working with it we may find in the balance of nature a value system that cultivates a sheltering and caring community providing the wisdom to treat our fellow humans with more kindness and to walk more gently on the earth.
It is a great delight to me to see To School through the Fields reissued, because twenty-five years ago the small paperback edition brought pleasure to many readers and through it I met and heard the stories of wonderful people.
The illustrating of this edition sent my friends and good neighbours into attics and abandoned barns to retrieve the memorabilia of an old Ireland. In this country we are blessed with people who will still go the extra mile and I am very grateful to those who lent me their treasures. May you now enjoy this new illustrated edition and may the images of a forgotten Ireland take you back to the way of life that sustained our ancestors. Enjoy the journey!
Alice Taylor, Innishannon, spring 2013
Preface: Different Times
THIS IS THE story of a childhood. In its day it was an ordinary childhood but, with the changing winds of time, now it could never be. Ours was a large family in a close-knit rural community that was an extension of our home. Neighbours came to our house and we went to theirs as freely as the birds flew across the sky; invitations were unheard of and welcomes unquestioned.
The old were never alone as the neighbours joined hands around them and the young, too, were included in the circle. As in every group of individuals, all had their own idiosyncrasies, and we as children were educated in human awareness by the close association with many people.
Sharing was taken for granted, from the milk in the winter when some cows went dry, to the pork steak and puddings when the pig was killed. Work was also shared, from the saving of the hay to the cutting of the corn and preparing for the Stations. It was an interlaced community and its structure helped those within it to support each other.
So please come back with me, to where we had time to be children and life moved at a different pace.
A Child’s Nest
LISNASHEOGA WAS THE nest from which we learned to fly. An ivy-clad farmhouse surrounded by trees, it stood on the sunny side of a sloping hill at the foot of which the Darigle river curved its way through gold-furzed inches to disappear under a stone bridge into the woods beyond.
In the summers we swam in the river and caught minnows with jam pots; on Sunday evenings my father fished in it, each time bringing home a bag of trout. In winter, salmon came up to this quiet backwater to spawn and, of course, there was a certain amount of poaching, to which my father objected strongly. Once, when a generous neighbour gave us a present of a poached salmon, he lined us all up around the kitchen table and proceeded to open up the fish. As the eggs poured out he explained about the huge loss of fish life due to the poaching of this one salmon. In my father’s world nature possessed a balance and man had no right to upset that balance to satisfy his own greed; killing this fish was going against the laws of nature.
The river showed us two different faces of nature: in summer it was our friend, but in winter it burst into brown torrents of anger that overflowed its banks and swept down our valley with a menacing roar. From the river valley the land rose and stretched away into rolling countryside, climbing into misty mountains at the horizon. This was farming country, where the farmers and nature changed the face of the landscape with the seasons.
Our parents were a blend of opposites. My mother was kind and gentle, with a far-seeing wisdom, and she expected only the best from her fellow human beings. My father was a man with a high level of intelligence and a low threshold of tolerance; patience was not one of his virtues. He loved trees, birds and all his farm animals; nature he appreciated to the full, but he viewed his fellow human beings with a jaundiced eye and never expected too much from them.
With seven children in the family, we were reared as free as birds, growing up in a world of simplicity untouched by outside influences. Our farm was our world and nature as an educator gave free rein to our imaginations; unconsciously we absorbed the natural order of things and observed the facts of life unfolding daily before our eyes. We were free to be children and to grow up at our own pace in a quiet place close to the earth.
Preparing for the Stations
IN OUR TOWNLAND our turn for the Stations came around every six years and then it was like three Christmases rolled into one. The preparations might start as much as twelve months in advance as that provided an opportunity to get everything done that needed to be done in the house. The reason, of course, for this big clean-up was that Mass was going to be said in the house and all the neighbours for miles around were going to descend on us.
Broken walls in the yard were repaired and any gate pillar that had lost its balance suddenly found itself standing erect. Gates that had sagged previously now swung with free abandon. Loose sheets of galvanised were nailed down and missing slates replaced. Muddy grey walls became virgin white overnight and dunghills disappeared out of sight. The cows could be forgiven for thinking that they were in a strange farmyard and we almost expected them not to do what they always did.
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bsp; The outside clean-up was insignificant compared to what went on inside: nothing from the roof down was safe. Mice and spiders that had nested comfortably for months suddenly found themselves in need of boating facilities as soapy water gushed around them. Broken panes of glass that had been patched up with bits of timber were replaced, sometimes a whole new window was installed. Bags of rubbish were burned indiscriminately and many a family treasure was reduced to ashes. Rooms that were full of clutter before, now doubled in size: we wandered around in a house full of hollow sounds.
When the burning and washing was finished the painting began and nothing escaped the paint brush. Ceilings, walls, tables and chairs all took on a new, bright look. It was the era of the slow-drying paint and if you forgot to watch your step you could end up with a multi-coloured look yourself. The Stations only affected the downstairs rooms fully, but if a nosy visitor strayed off the main thoroughfare we were not going to be caught with our pants down.
Cleaning and painting finished, the next target was the big ware press in the parlour. Out came delicate china which had been in the family for years. My mother’s respect for the Stations weighed against her fear of breakage, but the Stations won every time. Once when a precious jug was broken, she mourned it for days, telling us all how long it had been in the family. Finally, Dan, our part-time travelling farm worker, said: “Missus, if it was here that long it was time to break it.” And that was the end of that.
On the day before the Stations everything started to come together. The house was full of women polishingand setting tables. White linen table-cloths saw the light of day for the first time in years and moth balls rolled from between their creases. A strict eye was kept on the children, and for good reason. One year on the day before a neighbour’s Stations, all the good furniture was out in the yard while a new floor was being laid. The adults were busy in the house while the children, discoveringa bucket of whitewash, proceeded to paint the dark mahogany furniture a brilliant white. Such potential catastrophes had to be borne in mind.