The Parish Read online

  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 fr
amed 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.”

  The photograph, like all black and white photographs of the time, was crystal clear, but it was unframed and the folder holding it a bit battered around the edges. After that Christmas we had the photograph framed to preserve it for the Twin, who hung it up in his front hall where it was admired by all his callers. After he died, I went to his auction to buy the photograph for the local school. It was in a box with other odds and ends and I took note of the number. However, just before it came under the hammer, I went back to check on the box, only to discover that the photograph was gone. Somebody had taken it. It takes all kinds of people to make up a parish!

  Candlelight records things that would otherwise be lost and often, when a contributor dies, their family is glad to have their Candlelight articles, some written many years previously. New families are now coming to live around the parish and Candlelight fills them in on the history of their chosen place. It also gives new writing talent a sounding platform; one of our original writers is now with The Irish Times and another with the Irish Examiner. We are not claiming that we contributed in any way to their success, but it makes us feel good to think that they started with us.

  Some of our writers now have their names written in the golden book and to browse though the back numbers is to realise how much our parish has changed over the last twenty-four years. The cow shed that was behind Jeremiah’s carpenter shop is now the Private Collector Art Gallery, selling original Irish art at prices that in Jeremiah’s time could have bought out the entire village.

  Over those years, some writers came to us from the most unexpected places. Having read my book, The Village, one man wrote to me from England. His mother had been one of the travelling people and she had called to all the houses on the road from Innishannon to Kinsale. Later he was taken into care as his father had got into difficulties, and the young lad spent his childhood in the orphanage of St Patrick’s Upton in our parish. At the age of sixteen, he went to work with a local farmer and one night, coming home from a fair in Bandon, the farmer and himself had visited Mrs Hawkins behind her butcher’s shop in our village. There, he wrote, he got the biggest and the first steak that he had ever seen. He went on to tell how he had left Ireland and gone to work down the coalmines in England. There was a scheme prevailing at the time whereby your fare was paid and in return you went to work down the mines. When he got out of the coalmines, he became a long-distance lorry driver and did well.

  His letter was articulate and well written, with no trace of bitterness. He had experienced a life style that very few had documented and I knew from his letter that he could write a good article. The following summer he came back to Ireland and called to see me. He was a grand man and, after a short time in his company, I felt that the world was a better place. He had a lady wife now and two attractive daughters, but he talked about his time in the orphanage and how good they were to him, adding, “The food was bad but they had no better themselves.” He also told me about walking down to the village to see the travelling theatre groups known as the fit-ups.

  I gave him a copy of Candlelight, suggesting that he might like to write his story, and sure enough, we published it the following Christmas. Shortly afterwards he wrote to tell me that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and that his time would be short. In life he had got off to a tough start but he had pulled himself up by his bootlaces and carved out a good quality of life for himself and his family. He was one of the most positive and well-rounded people that I had ever met and I was glad that he had written his story for Candlelight. Great people like him should not leave life without getting the opportunity to tell their story, and sometimes their story helps to keep others afloat.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Step in Time

  “Have you thought about the millennium?” asked a tentative voice at the other end of the phone.

  “Well, not really,” I said, taken by surprise. “Sure, that’s months away.”

  “People are already planning what they’re going to do,” she told me.

  “Don’t I know it?” I assured her. “They seem to be flying in all directions for the occasion.”

  “Do you think that we should have something in the parish hall?” she asked

  “Will there be anyone left in the parish to go to it?” I wondered.

  “At the moment it looks doubtful, but the very young and the old won’t be going anywhere, and wouldn’t it be nice to have something for them?”

  “I suppose it would,” I agreed. “Did you have anything in mind?”

  “Well, nothing in particular,” she said vaguely, “but I thought that we might organise something. You’re good at that kind of thing.” As alarm bells began to ring in my head, she continued: “That ‘Meet the Neighbours’ night was a great success and wouldn’t something like that be grand?”

  A few years previously a “Meet the Neighbours” night had been organised for the newcomers to the parish so that they could get to know each other and meet the home-grown residents. The night could hardly be described as having achieved the purpose for which it was intended because most of the newcomers never came, but for those who did, it had been a great night. Our village, like many other small villages, was expanding
at such a rate that we could lose our sense of being a village, and nights that brought us together helped us to retain that sense.

  After the phone call I sat at the kitchen table and wondered where to begin or whether to begin at all. Diarmuid, who was in his twenties, breezed in and sized me up pretty quickly.

  “You look a bit bothered,” he declared, viewing me across the table.

  I filled him in on the phone call and he grinned, rubbing his hands together.

  “Mother,” he gleefully informed me, “you’ve got a jumping monkey.”

  “What’s that?” I demanded.

  “Well, in our business if you have a job that you want to get done but don’t want to do yourself, then you have a jumping monkey. So the trick is to meet up with a colleague and pass on the job. Then the jumping monkey jumps from your back on to their back. So, Mother, a jumping monkey has just landed on your back!”

  “If I decide to hold on to him, do you think that people would come to the parish hall on the night of the millennium?” I asked.

  “Not a hope in hell,” he told me. “Sure, wouldn’t it be full of screeching children and old fogies?”

  “Like me,” I said.

  During that day I ran the idea past some people in our shop. The village shop and post office is a great place to be if you want to do a parish survey on anything. But the general reaction to the millennium night was that nobody with a glint of imagination or a sense of adventure would be found in the parish hall on the night. Faraway places beckoned. That evening I put the idea to my husband Gabriel who always had his finger on the pulse of the parish.