Quench the Lamp Read online

  Emptying the po was an exercise that had to be carried out daily and this delicate operation was performed by the senior females of the household after they had first established that no unexpected visitors were within the precincts. My grandmother, if she had misjudged the situation and found herself approached by someone who was where he should not have been, whipped her long black apron into action, covering all before her. The fact that at seventy-five this gave her a decidedly pregnant look did not disturb her in the least.

  When she had visitors and wanted to know if they needed to avail of her chamber-pot facilities she asked, “Would you like to sit down?” and “Would you like to tidy yourself?” On first hearing this politely worded invitation I was somewhat confused, as I observed that the lady to whom my grandmother had addressed her questions was already sitting down and looked quite tidy. However, I knew my grandmother well enough not to question the appropriateness of her terminology and after a while I managed to figure out her meaning.

  One neighbour had occasion to use her chamber-pot to dampen unwelcome male ardour. A drunken visitor refused to stop knocking on her front door in the small hours of the morning. After repeated attempts to persuade him to depart she finally, in a fit of temper, opened a window above the front door and baptised his head with a mixed blessing, which proved most effective in speeding him on his way. Another old neighbour, when the handle fell off his ware chamber-pot, used it as a money box and still kept it under the bed.

  The same old man used a new chamber-pot he had in reserve to solve the problem of some unwelcome visitors. They had invited themselves to stay with him and he was at his wits’ end as to how he could shift them when he got a brainwave. He brought out the new chamber-pot, but pretended that it was the one from under his bed. Then he placed it on the kitchen table and proceeded to wash the ware in it. His visitors made a hasty exit.

  The po might have many titles: those with a musical bent called it “the piano”, those with literary notions “the Edgar Allan” and those with medical inclinations “the vessel”. We children called it “the jerry-po” and those with no respect at all called it “the piss-pot”. But the title that appealed most to me was that given to it by my dear old friend Molly who termed it “the goeseesunder”.

  The once-humble chamber-pot has since climbed into the exalted realms of the world of antiques, which it graces as a collectors’ item. At an auction recently a Wedgewood model fetched a handsome price and I smiled, thinking of its late owner, an eccentric old gentleman who had refused to transport his fragile anatomy to the modem wonder of the flush toilet, maintaining that the po position kept things properly in motion. Now his precious po was destined to become an expensive flower-pot, and I had no doubt he would have considered it a fitting end for so serviceable an item.

  Home Drama

  A TRIP TO Cork City assumed for me as a child the momentous importance of a journey to a foreign country, and it was on one of these rare and wonderful excursions that I discovered books. A collection of hardback classics which I found on the shelves of Woolworths provided me with a passport to another world. I drew my books home from the city one by one and, if funds were unusually plentiful, I might sometimes stretch my haul to two. I cried at the hungry plight of poor Oliver Twist and rejoiced at his final escape into a better life. I moved enthusiastically on through other books by Dickens, relishing his characters, but all of these paled into insignificance when the territory of my reading shifted northwards; I came across the brooding Brontës and was drawn into the absorbing tension between the correct behaviour of their time and the powerful undercurrents of dark, wild passion which was embodied in their writing. I read and re-read their books until I felt I had a personal relationship with the entire family and believed that I could easily find my way around their isolated house and across the lonely moors. The only respect in which the world of the Brontës disappointed me was in its cold, detached father who failed to match up, I felt, to our colourful and dramatic man, who sometimes stretched our patience to the limit but around whom there was never a dull moment.

  These popular classics had cream-coloured covers, were printed on soft cream paper and were well bound so that they did not fall apart. Their smell when new was of another world, a world of the imagination, and I loved it so much I would run my nose up and down the pages to inhale their essence. I found that just as some gardens offered welcomes with their fragrances and some houses had their special atmospheres, the feel and smell of a new book was an indication of the life within. The books in Woolworths cost three shillings each, an amount which was hard to come by, and my appetite for reading seemed always to outstrip my supply of coins, so I was constantly in search of opportunities to earn some pay for special jobs at home.

  We children bargained with my father for so much per drill for thinning turnips and picking potatoes, and sometimes we had to threaten strike action to extract our earnings. If a calf, a bonham or a lamb was sickly – an íochtar – we became foster-parents and staked our claim for a share of the price when they were sold. Another source of revenue was “stands”, as we called them: visiting friends and relations often put their hands in their pockets and withdrew a brown or silver coin. Brown was the usual story but occasionally we might get silver and then we struck oil, for a shilling had a lot of spending in it and a half-crown was riches indeed. A friend of my father’s, who was having a pint with him one fair day, gave me a half-crown and I could hardly believe my eyes. I never forgot his kindness and the way he smiled and said “enjoy spending it”, and I did indeed because it became the down payment on my much-prized copy of Little Women. Years later I travelled many miles to be at the funeral of the man who gave me the key to the world of Louisa May Alcott.

  We did not own a car, and neither did any of our neighbours, but there was a hackney-man in town who went to Cork weekly or sometimes even twice weekly if he had a load. There was also a bus, and this set out early each morning, returning late at night, but its route wound through a wide swathe of surrounding countryside, so the hackney-car was first choice for comfort and convenience. Jim the hackney-man was also the publican, so we waited on high bar stools for him to drive us to Cork, sipping fizzy brown lemonade and watching the old men drinking their frothy black pints as we waited. Like most pubs it did not restrict itself to selling drinks, and this was also the place to buy needles, hairpins and elastic. Jim was very much a part of our lives, as well as of our neighbours’; unfailingly patient and pleasant, he was a storyteller who could shorten any journey. He was involved in most of the important events in the lives of the people of the neighbourhood because he drove us to and from weddings, funerals, christenings and other family occasions. During his years as hackney-driver he had witnessed the life stories of many families, but he treated every family as his own and was never known to divulge a confidence. Being so aware of the goings-on in families and being so understanding with it, he was often called upon to sort out family tangles. Once when Lucy, home on holidays, was complaining about her earnings as a newly qualified nurse he asked her how much she was being paid; she told him and he just said quietly, “Many a man is keeping a wife and children on that.” She was glad later that he had put matters in perspective for her.

  With every trip in the hackney-car to Cork my collection of books grew and soon I felt the need for a special corner for them. At the top of the house was an old attic which we called the black loft because it was poorly lit by one small dormer window and a tiny deep one in the gable-end overlooking the grove. When we were small we sometimes squeezed through this window, which led on to the roof of the old stone turf-house and from there down into the grove, but later we outgrew its miniature proportions. The dormer window was the better of the two because it had a view out over the fields: from here I could see the old stone school – from a safe distance – and the little bridge over the river that crept along between high banks, forming a natural boundary between neighbouring farms.

  The
black loft was my retreat corner and I created a world of my own there amongst the relies of the past: the family cradle and the brass cot, both of which I, as the youngest in the family, had been the last to occupy; the butter churns and the horse tackling – too far gone for use but awaiting repair some wet day unless it might find its way eventually to the harness-maker. The plaster on the walls was crumbling and rafters bared themselves under the roof, the floorboards sagged, revealing the ceiling of the room below and making it essential to step gently to avoid a hasty and unpremeditated exit to the lower regions.

  Three steps led down to the black loft from my parents’ bedroom, which was in a newer part of the house which had been built above the level of the old house. Just inside the door of the loft a sagging rafter could catch unwary visitors and easily render them unconscious. At the far end stairs led down into a room below the parlour, which was used as a spare room and had bay windows opening into the garden. Thus I had more than one exit when seeking to escape from undesirable chores, even though the stairs at the far end were officially closed due to their dangerous condition. I loved the thrill of using it as an emergency exit; swinging past the gaps I relished the excitement of knowing that if I fell into one of the black holes beneath me I might never be seen again.

  Mice had made the place their own, so when I was about to enter I always gave them prior notice by flinging one of my father’s boots in before me, and they duly scattered in all directions and out of respect for my presence never invaded my privacy. They were less considerate, however, in their habit of leaving evidence of their visitations. Also, they had an unfortunate appetite for our home-made glue, a paste of flour and water which they seemed to regard not at all as an adhesive but as a heaven-sent source of sustenance. Had it not been for impenetrable iron trunks, many a scrapbook and home-made picture would have been destroyed by them.

  Scrapbooks provided the perfect medium for paying private homage to the glamorous film stars of the time, and one of my hobbies was collecting movie magazines and compiling scrapbooks about my favourite stars. Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth shone as foremost beauties while Stewart Grainger, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable were the dashing male heroes. Sometimes on summer evenings after the cows had been milked we walked to the cinema in town to see some of the stars in action. My mother did not entirely approve of all these bare-breasted beauties, nor their frequent changing of husbands, but when I showed an interest in the British royal family she was much more positive, feeling that even if they were rather far removed from us, at least their morals were apparently above reproach.

  I was denied the luxury of a bedroom of my own because demand exceeded availability, so I shared with sisters and with many visiting cousins during the holidays, and this often led to chatting which continued far into the night until my father thumped on the timber partition and eventually silenced us. But nobody else bothered with the black loft and so it became my private domain. In the summer it was very hot and in the winter it was freezing, and because the window did not shut properly the weather outside sometimes found its way in. High winds sprayed raindrops in and blizzards whirled snowflakes through to fall like thistledown on the bare, dusty floor. The conditions, however, did not deter me, and it was here on a woodworm-eaten and wobbly table with one short leg that I wrote my first story.

  My sisters and I underwent a phase of impromptu home drama. To begin with we used the kitchen as our stage, the room off it serving as our dressing-room, but as we progressed we found these arrangements too amateurish and so we moved to an empty loft over the stalls. This loft was normally used for storing straw but was empty between seasons. We put it to good use. Old curtains that belonged to the parlour were rigged up and props collected from all over the farm.

  We lacked a script so we made it up as we went along, which often resulted in the cast becoming involved in long, heated arguments on stage because their dialogue was failing to co-ordinate. Then an intermission was called and the whole thing was gone through before we started in again. We were an ad lib, think-as-you-go-along theatre group, and as the audience for one show could be on stage for the following one we tended to restrain our criticisms. Sometimes we might purport to present a play that we had heard on the radio, but if the playwright had happened along he might not have recognised it as his work.

  We whiled away many a wet day up in that loft until my mother decided to turn it into a hen-house, to which we strongly objected, but our needs were of no importance in comparison to the needs of the hens, so for the summer we moved out of doors and performed under the trees in the grove behind the house. The only constant supporter we had was our old friend Bill, who came up with helpful prompts when any actress ran out of lines. He was a most accommodating audience. My father refused to allow us to move our theatre group into the black loft, which was my suggestion, as he was afraid that in the excitement of high drama we might forget the sagging floorboards and one of us put our foot in the wrong place and come down through the parlour ceiling. So we remained a mobile theatre group and whichever stall, stable or pig-house was available, we moved in, though sometimes we had to put a lot of work into eradicating the aroma of the previous residents.

  I made gallant efforts to provide plays for our performances but they were taken apart on stage and rewritten to suit individual performers. The cast was entirely female as my brother had set up his own boxing club which had declared an empty corner of the barn their boxing ring. Sometimes when there was no play on we became the ringside audience, shouting on whichever of the champions we favoured.

  When I first saw boxing gloves I was intrigued by the size of them and sometimes when my brother needed a sparring partner I donned the gloves and learned to dance around and duck and weave. He usually used a punch-bag which hung off the rafters of the barn for practice but he assured me that I was slightly better. We developed an interest in boxing championships then and gathered around the radio to follow the fortunes of Joe Louis and Bruce Woodcock and other champions of the ring, especially the Irish ones. The night that Rinty Monaghan became world champion and sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” we all danced around the kitchen with glee, and we followed with the greatest of interest the career of our own local hero, Irish middleweight champion Pat O’Connor.

  The black loft remained the corner where I spent time on my own. In the spring when the swallows came they refurbished their old nests under the roof beside the window and I watched them swishing in and out. In the evenings during the summer months I might sit inside the little window to watch the shadows slanting across the fields and listen to the corncrake playing the same tune non-stop like a record with the needle stuck. The monotonous regularity of his voice merged into the chorus of night voices so completely that sometimes I was quite unaware that he had stopped.

  In our family we all felt the need for our own places to which we could retreat from time to time and often as I looked out from my perch at the top of the house in the quiet of the evening I would see my father walking down the fields to his own particular spot by the river. I liked to watch him saunter along with his hands in his pockets, his cap pushed to the back of his head and the dogs with him chasing rabbits, real and imaginary, through the bushes. That was his relaxation time when he went, the cares of the day behind him, down to his favourite place to watch the fish jump and to listen to the sounds of the countryside.

  A Marriage Of Convenience

  MIKE AND MAUD had a small farm on the hill across the river from our house. They were too far afield to be on my visiting list as a child but as I grew older the distance became shorter. Mike had been well into his fifties before he had decided that a wife might add to the flavour of his life, but because a do-it-yourself effort had never appealed to him he had simply let it be known in the right places that he was available and hoped that somebody suitable would feel that he was just what she wanted. He was quite realistic about his requirements and about what he had to offer. As he des
cribed it later, he was not in the market for “a flighty young one who would burn me out in no time at all”. What he wanted was companionship with a mild bit of excitement thrown in, and he was quite emphatic about the small measure of the excitement because he needed reserves for his greyhounds, who were the great love of his life. Indeed, the one essential qualification he did insist on was that his future wife should love his dogs as himself. In due course his greyhound contacts came up with the answer; being doggy people themselves they knew exactly what Mike was looking for, and thus Maud came into his life.

  They had been married for over twenty years when I first started visiting them. Mike loved to tell the story of how Maud had come to be his wife. According to him Maud had a sister and it was she he had met first; they had decided to get married but she had had a cold on the morning of the wedding and so Maud had come instead. Maud for her part neither contradicted nor confirmed his story, only shaking her head and saying, “We must listen to the wind that falls the houses,” and maybe that was the secret of their happy marriage. Mike felt free to live like a bachelor while Maud ran the farm. He had never had any great interest in work, whereas she had shared the running of a small, mountainy farm with a sister and two brothers and she had the desire and ability to carry far more responsibility. “She likes to get her head,” Mike constantly remarked approvingly; being of a leisurely disposition himself, he had great admiration for industrious people, despite having no wish to imitate them. He was tolerant and Maud was pleasant and good-natured and, as Mike said, “her heart was in the right place”.