Quench the Lamp Read online

  Our footwear, too, was bought at Jack’s. He lifted us easily on to the counter and marched us up and down to ensure a good fit. A fine, tall man of ample proportions, he was always well turned out, as befitted his business, in a grey or navy suit with matching waistcoat and a gold watch-chain draped across his broad chest. Completely bald, his face and head knew no boundaries and his skin had a pale, polished look, in contrast to the brown, weather-beaten appearance of his customers. His spectacles, when not in use, he wore perched on top of his head, a feat that I greatly admired.

  Paying Jack was a seasonal event, depending on many things: a good milk cheque, the sale of fattened pigs, or a good harvest. When the farmers did well, Jack did well. He recorded all transactions in a big leather-bound ledger which he kept on a little rostrum inside the window.

  Only rarely did we visit the harness-maker as my father repaired most of the tackling himself. A tall, rangy man, he doled out good advice as well as leather work. Once, when my father and he were discussing the women in their lives and the reasons why sometimes they were a bit touchy, Billy’s prescription was: “Let the women out to take the edge off them.” House bound women, he figured, were cranky women. Billy himself was not endowed with a great amount of patience. Bighearted, colourful and generous he certainly was, but he was not easily amused. Many years after I had left childhood behind me I went home to the funeral of an old man who was also noted for being particularly serious by nature.

  “Taylor,” he said (he called us all Taylor because he never knew which of us girls he was talking to), “how well you came down for old Bob’s funeral.”

  “Well, Billy,” I said, “he served us faithfully all his life.”

  “Yes,” said Billy solemnly, “without a smile on his face.”

  What made me relish the remark was the fact that Billy himself rarely smiled.

  The same families had been in most of the shops for several generations and had built up and passed on a deep understanding and knowledge of their customers. It was a relationship that worked both ways, and when money was scarce we gave each other mutual support. While all the shopkeepers were our neighbours, my mother always bore in mind that we were related to some of them, for she was a great believer in looking after the needs of the extended family. Allegiances of all kinds were important to her, and if somebody’s grandmother had been good to my mother’s grandmother then my mother was not going to forget that, and so all the shopkeepers – Jack, Ned, Con, Billy and the Miss Bowlers – were not just shopkeepers to us: they were our friends, and shopping was as much a social outing as the acquiring of goods.

  Mrs Tom’s Tan

  AT THE AGE of ten I received my first lesson in male treachery. I was naive and trusting at that point of my development and thought that life as a fairy-tale full of happy endings. He was twelve; tall, thin, blond and devastating, the only boy in a family of four girls, the family treasure. Our mothers were cousins and he came from the city to spend one long, hot summer on our farm – his first visit to the country. On his arrival I viewed him with a certain amount of suspicion. Dressed in immaculate white shorts and pullover, he possessed long, brown, unscratched legs. It was the unscratched legs I distrusted most because they must have been acquired by sunbathing on a manicured lawn, an activity that was almost inconceivable as far as I was concerned.

  Another possible explanation seemed even more unthinkable. The only time I had seen legs like those was when Tom’s wife decided for herself that summer had arrived. Tom was a neighbouring farmer who had emigrated and had then returned home bringing a glamorous English wife with him. We children referred to her only as Tom’s wife, which was strange really because she was a colourful person in her own right, but I never learned her own name so we called her Tom’s wife or Mrs Tom.

  One year, after a long, cold spring, the first sunny day of summer came and on the way home from school that evening we met Mrs Tom walking along on a pair of positively golden, tanned legs. How was it possible? Legs that had been clad in lisle stockings and which I had assumed to be pale and milky underneath, now were suddenly golden brown. Surrounded as I had always been by all the natural voices of the countryside telling me of seasonal change, I knew that in nature nothing was instant, and so the extraordinary spectacle of Mrs Tom’s legs turning brown overnight captured my imagination. It puzzled me for days and then, in order to solve my problem, I eventually went straight to the heart of the matter and asked her to explain the transformation. She looked at me in surprise for a few moments, causing me to think that I had pushed my luck too far, but then she smiled.

  “Come with me,” she said, “and I’ll show you.”

  Taking me into her bedroom, she picked up a bottle from a bewildering array of pots and jars on her dressing-table and clarified the mystery of her instant tan. And from that day onwards I marked the arrival of summer by the change in the colour of Mrs Tom’s legs. The first daffodils heralded the arrival of spring and Mrs Tom’s legs announced when summer was here.

  My cousin with legs like Mrs Tom’s was the cause of great curiosity and my first impulse was to run this paragon of perfection through a glaise to discover if the tan would wash off. I also felt that a struggle with a blackthorn hedge would do him no harm and might even make him look more like one of us. However, his mother and sisters stayed for the first few days of his visit and decorum had to be observed while they remained on the scene. During those few days, as if to emphasise the wild state of my own legs, I scratched myself on barbed wire and gained a scar which, though not deep, ran from my knee to my ankle. In ordinary circumstances it would have been left to heal of its own accord but my mother’s cousin was a nurse and she insisted on washing the wound with disinfectant and putting a big long strip of sticking plaster on my leg. This made the whole thing look a lot more serious than it really was and I went around explaining to the less well-informed that I could actually have died from blood poisoning.

  Robert – for that was my brown-legged cousin’s name – was left to fare for himself when his mother and sisters had departed, and he and I teamed up together. I took him catching “collies” and discovered that his tan did not wash off, walked him in his snow-white canvas sandals into his first cow dung, and took him picking blackberries. He worked in the meadow making hay, blistering his hands on the pike handle, and went for spins in the float, tearing a hole in the backside of his pants. People who came to the house gradually stopped asking who was the visitor because he no longer stood out from the crowd.

  Sometimes late in the evening we went to the well for water and, sitting down on the side of the mossy hill with high ferns forming an umbrella over our heads, we told each other stories in a cool green fairyland where the evening sun slanted through the serrated fronds of ferns. Walking through the dry gap, we cooled our dusty toes in the ice-cold stream that overflowed from the deep well into the adjacent glaise. The stones in that stream were black, flat and smooth and, stacked on top of one another, made a rocker which tested our ability to balance as far forwards and backwards as possible without toppling over. Frogs, too, liked this little corner because it was moist and cool, sheltered by overhanging trees. We rested hands and knees on the large grey stone that fronted the well which arched back into the hill and, leaning forward, we watched our wavering reflections in its depths. At that time I had a story in my schoolbook about Narcissus who, looking into a well, fell in love with his own reflection. I pondered on the improbability of this as I watched my long blonde hair blend with Robert’s in the water of the well.

  Getting up early in the morning, we went out picking mushrooms in the clinging, misty dew of the new dawn. We watched the sauntering cows scattering moisture along the high grass as they went in for milking, and on reaching home we grilled our salt-sprinkled mushrooms on a hot sod of turf by the open fire.

  Catching collies was our favourite occupation. Late in the evening we came with our swinging jam-crocks to the river which curled between high banks over
dark brown stones, sometimes shallow and sandy and then curving into deep, still pools where trout jumped with a splash, sending ripples circling to the bank and diffusing the midges which hung suspended over the water. My dream was to catch a trout in a jam-crock and the practical impossibility of such an achievement never dampened my enthusiasm. We splashed around in the river until daylight moved towards dusk and then we rambled home in semi-darkness through the fields, where the cows now rested chewing the cud.

  I loved the cows and introduced Robert to them individually by name. Back in the stalls I showed him where each one belonged and told him how they all knew their own places. When he suggested that they should have place names over their heads I was fascinated by the idea. That each cow would have her own name over her head was a new and wonderful thought. Ours were going to be the first cows in the country to have their names mounted in their executive offices. But how to achieve such a dream was the question, and Robert had the answer. Back in the city the railway station had a machine that could print on tin and he would do all the cows’ names and send them on to me. It seemed a dream come true and I was sure that the cows would be delighted as well. With a stubby pencil and a notebook I laboriously wrote out each cow’s name and, for good measure, added the horses as well, in case they might feel neglected.

  I was sorry when the time came for Robert to go home, but the thought of the cows’ name-plates arriving compensated for any pangs of regret that I might have felt at his departure. I got a jam-jar and filled it with short, shiny tacks which I dug out of my father’s butter box, doing untold damage to my fingertips and nails. I also helped myself to a small, stubby hammer, which I knew he would go rooting for, but as he could never find anything anyway I felt that one more missing item would not make that much difference.

  With everything in readiness for action, I waited for the name-plates to arrive. Every day I watched for the postman and every day I drew a blank but decided, each time, that tomorrow my parcel would surely come. Eventually, after many weeks, I finally gave up hope. I felt betrayed on behalf of my cows, who were to remain apparently nameless, and I told myself that I should not have expected much from a boy who had legs as smooth and perfect as Mrs Tom’s tan.

  Old Bags

  THE ART OF making do was a virtue passed down from my great-aunt Susan through the female line of our family – mere males were not considered to be safe custodians of such gems of wisdom – and practised in our constant saving and re-using of almost everything. Containers of many kinds were used and used again and the only waste-disposal unit we knew was the pigs’ trough.

  Jam-jars were washed and stored carefully for future use for home-made jams and preserves, and any we couldn’t use ourselves we returned to the shop for a penny for a two-pound pot and a half-penny for a one pound one. As potential sources of pocket-money, few jam-pots were left lying around for long. Another container with multiple uses was the tin sweet gallon. Having booked a gallon with Ned, we got it after a while with little bits of sweets clinging to the bottom, but we soon cleaned it out and had it ready for its new life. Tea was taken to the meadow in a gallon if the meitheal was small or to supplement the white enamel bucket if the workforce was strong, and sometimes a lone man would drink straight from the gallon. It also served to take milk between the houses when supplies were low in the winter-time, and for bringing water from the well, especially if you were too small to carry a bucket.

  Some farmers kept a goat with their herd of cows, and people without grazing for cows usually had goats which fed off ditches and were satisfied with limited supplies of grass. The versatile gallon was used for milking the goat, though the milker had to take care not to get more than milk in the gallon – the odd angle from which goats were milked made this a tricky exercise. And the gallon was also one of the many different kinds of containers used for collecting eggs.

  The soft brown tissue-paper around the Sunday loaf of bread was folded carefully to be used later for wrapping up our school lunches. Empty bottles of many kinds were rinsed with water and sand and re-employed as lunch bottles. The milk of magnesia bottle gave its contents a blue look; small Paddy whiskey bottles also made the trip to school, but old sauce bottles accompanied us more often because we used more sauce than either milk of magnesia or whiskey. Corks were carefully kept but nevertheless on many a morning there was none for the school bottle and the art of making do saw an old newspaper torn into strips and rolled up to form a makeshift stopper.

  Our newspaper, the Cork Examiner, was a multi-purpose item. It cleaned and polished windows and it covered bare timber floors before the first lino or tarpaulin went down, thus providing underlay and insulation. Placed in layers on top of wire bed-springs, it eased the wear on the horsehair mattress; cut into the right shape, it became insoles in heavy leather boots and shoes and, later, in wellingtons when they became part of our lives. Even though it could never be described as baby soft, it was the forerunner of the multi-million pound industry that subsequently provided soft solutions in the toilet-paper business. Rolled into balls it was a firelighter, its effectiveness improved by a sprinkling of paraffin oil. Ned shaped it into funnels and filled it with sweets to make a tóimhsín, as he called it. At home it lined drawers and was considered mothproof and, when nothing else was available, it was used as a dustpan. One of our more industrious neighbours regularly covered her potato stalks with newspaper at night and this protected them from frost.

  An item used to great effect by good housekeepers was the goose wing. It was particularly useful for high-flung cobwebs, and where the wing could not reach the eye would not see. It was just as well, however, that some cobwebs remained after the goose-wing’s flight because they were nature’s fly killers, ready and waiting to trap the flies which had not been discouraged by the nicandra or shoo-fly we hung around the windows.

  Necessity was the mother of resourcefulness and everything available was put to good use. Horse manure fortified our roses without any assistance from shop-bought preparations and garden sprays were unheard of. The suds from the washtub were used to keep slugs off the cabbage. If the tub itself leaked it could always be sealed with a mixture of curds and lime brushed into the base and allowed to harden. Leaking buckets were repaired with a “mend-it” which consisted of two little circular bits of tin with a sandwich of cork in between. One piece of the mend-it was put at each side of the leak and the two pieces were then screwed into each other, the cork acting as a sealer. Care had to be taken when hand-mixing animal foodstuffs in a bucket that had been mended in this way because the tin could pierce deeply beneath your fingernails. Travelling knights of the road repaired items that needed more skill than we possessed; they also made tin gallons which were bigger than the normal ones, though quality rather than quantity was the hallmark of their trade. Every house had a last on which shoes and boots were repaired, and on Saturday nights the children’s boots were lined up for repair with iron tips and protectors, and sometimes for patching, which was done with an awl, wax and a ball of hemp.

  Mending was a basic skill in our household arts, and was much relied on. Old sheets, worn down the centre where the most pressure was brought to bear, got a new lease of life from a centre-to-sides piece of surgery. When the collars of men’s shirts became frayed they were still a long way from becoming dusters, because the collar was turned and the shirt salvaged though admittedly not as Sunday best anymore. Some shirts were collarless and an attachable collar was clasped into position with studs; collarless during the working week, these were what are now called grandfather shirts. My First Communion dress was a hand-me-down belonging to my sister, with a band added on around the tail because my legs were longer than hers.

  We had no need of proprietary cleaning agents because our own remedies were always close at hand. If the cat did what he must where he shouldn’t, turf dust was the removal agent which deodorised and eradicated all in one go. If the hens committed the same offence on the kitchen floor, a shovel of ash
es from behind the open fire came into action, and ashes were also used for cleaning the silver and aluminium teapots. The bag of lime was essential for keeping things clean around the farm. During the summer months, when the animals had gone to the fields leaving their houses empty behind them, these were whitewashed and disinfected with lime.

  Almost everything had more than one use. Warm covers of pots and bastables wrapped in old sheets became bed warmers, and our hot-water bottles were earthenware jars; sometimes, too, the clothes-iron was heated and wrapped up well to warm the bed on a very cold night. Cord which arrived on parcels from town was never thrown away: it was rolled up in a ball to be avail able for emergency service as garters, to keep up knickers if the necessity arose, or to act as a belt. Hay twine kept buttonless coats closed on cold days or secured the bottoms of wide-legged trousers against the perils of both winds and rodents.

  All boxes were made of timber, and these were prized acquisitions. When Christmas supplies came in them you treated them with respect because whether you got timber boxes, and how many you got, depended on your standing with the shopkeeper. The long double department orange box served as two semi-detached nests in the hen-house, as did the smaller apple and orange boxes. The long orange box, stood upright, became a bedside locker and, when it was fronted with a frilly curtain, could look quite decorative. The butter box was the most solid and the most prized of all the boxes and had many uses, including those of tool box and lady’s work box. It became fashionable to cover the butter box with leatherette and put a padded cushion on top, and in this way it served the dual purpose of work box and fireside seat. The five-pound cheese box held nails or other odds and ends in many houses. My mother bought our tea by the chest, and this was a large, plywood box, lined with silver paper. We stored our summer clothes in it during the winter and our winter blankets during the summer.