Tea and Talk Read online

  I have always loved clocks. Maybe it springs from the reverence that my father had for the one clock that we had in our old farmhouse. It hung on the kitchen wall and kept exact time as he had perfected the difficult skill of subtly adjusting the brass pendulum that controlled the timing mechanism. There was a tiny lever beneath the pendulum, and the slightest twist in one direction or another would either speed things up or slow them down. There was a pencil mark down the wall beside the clock, and that was the ‘shipping line’ outside which the clock was not to travel. When the wall was being distempered, he issued ultimatums about the dire consequences of moving the clock. If his daughters insisted that this drastic step simply had to be taken, he declared that he alone was capable of making the move. He introduced into this undertaking all the drama of moving the Mona Lisa. One of my irreverent sisters once whispered sarcastically, as he stage-managed this performance, ‘You’d think that we were taking Christ down off the cross.’

  First he ceremoniously opened the little glass door at the front as if he was opening a tabernacle. Then he gently stilled the swinging pendulum. Next he crouched down and peered up into the lower regions of the clock to ascertain the exact point at which the pendulum was attached to the main works. Then he gently eased the pendulum off that hook and carried it across the kitchen as if he was bearing the Ardagh Chalice. He ceremoniously laid it on top of the old battery radio on the window, which he judged to be the only place safe from fussy females and children who constantly kept his blood pressure at boiling point. Then he returned to the now gaping-mouthed clock and gently closed the little door like a loving relative closing the mouth of the recently deceased. Finally he raised both hands heavenwards as if seeking divine intervention and lovingly took his clock down off the wall and held it at arm’s length. Like a high priest, he then proceeded out the kitchen door and up into the parlour with one of his daughters like John the Baptist preparing the way by running ahead and opening doors. Then the clock was laid reverently in the centre of the parlour table, and he ran his hands gently over it as if reassuring his precious clock that all would be well until he returned.

  My clocks get no such reverential treatment, and if I want to slow down or speed up the tempo I have to try hard to remember in which direction I need to twist the tiny lever – if the clock is racing ahead the following day, I know that I have got it wrong. Whether they are going fast or slow, though, the ticking of those old clocks is soothing to the spirit. One is never alone in a room with a ticking clock. And like everything old they require a certain amount of loving care, including a weekly wind-up. Forget your clock, and she will give you the silent treatment.

  One of these clocks had come out of a skip when an old neighbour spotted it and presented it to me with the comment, ‘Missus, you are into all kinds of rubbish.’ To be honest, it did look a bit rubbishy as it was clothed in varied coats of many colours of paint but after careful denuding it revealed a body of rich mahogany embossed with occasional mother-of-pearl. Who would not love it?

  More vocal than the ticking clock is the chiming mantel clock, of which I have three. Yes, three! But now comes the justification. One I inherited from Uncle Jacky. He was given it when he got married in 1932 by the Valley Rovers GAA club of which he was chairman. It took up duty immediately in the post office where it became the village clock to be checked regularly by schoolchildren, bus catchers and Massgoers. It is now on the mantelpiece over the fire in the seomra ciúin and unfortunately the years have slowed it down. Unlike the wall clocks, however, this lady has no visible apparatus for controlling the time. She is mistress of her own rate of progress into the future. Another mantel clock was a wedding present to one of my children from an antique-loving uncle, but this child of the modern world has yet to mature into an appreciation of such things. So it remains with me on a large sideboard inherited from Aunty Peg. This sideboard is the home of many things that came with it and others that have since joined them.

  Then, one day, while traversing an antique shop and praying for the power to resist its contents, a distant clock pealed out the Big Ben chimes, a beautiful, mellow, melodious sound. I grew up listening to that sound on the BBC as my father waited for the six o’clock news to hear how the rest of the world was managing without him. That clock, of course, came home with me. Years later, when I was chatting on the phone to my daughter in Boston, the clock began to chime in the background, and my daughter said nostalgically, ‘Oh, that’s the sound of home.’

  Then I have a grandfather clock, which I actually forgot to include until last and is now peering reproachfully at me from across the room. We bought it to mark the Millennium. It did not cost a fortune as it’s a bit battered and not a creation of immense beauty. And I did nothing to improve its appearance when I shifted it awkwardly for a decorating job and its head fell off and rolled along the floor. This resulted in a permanent tilt of the head so that it now looks as if it is acknowledging you as you enter the room. But, strangely enough, despite its not very impressive appearance, it is a perfect timekeeper. I keep it ticking but not chiming, because unfortunately it does not have the voice of an angel but rather the hoarse rasp of a dying frog. So the vocal cords are never wound up.

  My father would have loved winding it as it’s a bit of a performance. First you retrieve the tiny key off the timber lip that separates the face from the long body. Having opened his front waistcoat with the small key, you then go back to the lip for an odd-looking key that is inserted into his face below his cheekbones, and you laboriously turn this strong key as the clock shudders in protest. While you are doing this, a large weight slowly jerks its way upwards in his inner regions. Then you swing the pendulum into motion. The other weight is for the chimer, but I do not wind that up, so he remains silent. Then I lock him up, and he keeps going for a week.

  My clocks depend on me to keep them ticking, and over the years we have become old friends. Undoubtedly they do contribute to the clutter – though not as much as the books. But that is another story.

  Chapter 8

  The Split

  A laid-back Canadian cousin visited us and the All Ireland Hurling Final happened to be on TV. It was his first time in Ireland, so we pulled out all the stops to make a good impression. First, he had enjoyed a pleasant, sociable meal around the kitchen table as part of an extended family gathering. Afterwards, we sat chatting and exchanging family news. All was going well. Then it was time for the match. Cork were playing in the final.

  There was a mass movement, which included him, into the large front room where the TV resides. Our visitor was full of curiosity about the game as he had never seen a hurling match, not to mind an All Ireland Hurling Final. We gave him the best seat in the house and the rest of us settled ourselves comfortably around the room, with the overflow and the flexible relegated to the floor. He sat back in expectation of a relaxing afternoon’s entertainment and may even have harboured a faint hope of popcorn accompanied by an introductory analysis. Things went calmly for the first few minutes, and, conscious of our guest, decorum prevailed.

  Then Cork scored a goal, and the room erupted in mayhem. As the game progressed, the fortunes of Cork rose, crashed and rose again. With each Cork score we abandoned our chairs, danced around the floor and were transported up to Croke Park, where we jumped and shrieked in ecstasy. Chairs were cast aside with yells of delight and showers of praise were poured on the triumphant. When near misses came, we hurled verbal missiles of abuse at the culprits. Previous heroes quickly became villains. We were no longer in a room in Innishannon but around a Roman arena, rising and falling with the tide of execution. We forgot about our uninitiated cousin, who by now had shrunk into the background. With a Cork victory and the final war dance completed, we came back down to earth.

  ‘That was amazing!’ the Canadian breathed. ‘Yes, ’twas a great game, wasn’t it?’ we enthused, assuming he was referring to the game. ‘Not the game,’ he gasped, ‘you guys were unbelievable. If you did that b
ack home you would all be locked up.’ Would we? We were taken aback.

  The GAA is an unexplainable Irish phenomenon. It is tribal to the core and is rooted in every parish in Ireland. Amongst its members are the idealist, the martyr to the cause, the armchair expert, the fanatic, the thick, the thud and the normal human being. It is the backbone of most parishes and for years has channelled male aggression into hurleys, balls and opponents. It is an outlet for unreleased energy and budding male testosterone. And now the ladies have entered the pitch and are gaining ground fast.

  Politics and the GAA have a lot in common, and sooner or later in both arenas ‘the split’ is inevitable. Here in Innishannon, during my village tenure, I have witnessed a few splits in our local club, the Valley Rovers, and because I married into a GAA family I always had a ringside seat.

  The first split was a little before my time, but the debris was still afloat when I came to the village. It had to do with the purchase of the pitch. Buying land in Ireland seldom goes without complications, and the more people involved in the process the more complicated it becomes. The biggest problems arise when you have an owner but also a renter, who, over time, evolves into a self-perceived owner. John B. Keane illustrated this dilemma spellbindingly in The Field where The Bull, over years of use, had fallen in love with ‘his’ field even though it was actually owned by The Widow. The same thing happened in Innishannon, and when the owner of a suitable field decided to sell and the Valley Rovers decided to buy, conflict arose. This field was known as The Bleach. Its name comes from an earlier usage. A former landowner in Innishannon, Thomas Adderley, was an entrepreneur, and he brought over a community of French Huguenots who were fleeing religious persecution in France; they were wonderful craftspeople, and using their skills he set up a silk and linen industry. They bleached the linen in a large field along by the river behind his house, and this field is still known as The Bleach. This was now the bone of contention. For the GAA it was ideally placed, right in the centre of the village.

  The Valley Rovers felt that they could not pass up the opportunity of a village pitch. The purchasers were dubbed the ‘valley grabbers’ by some people. My husband’s Uncle Jacky was involved in the purchase, but because he was a walking saint he could not cope with conflict. His wife, Aunty Peg, had to man the defences. While the conflict was in full flow and she felt the occasion necessitated it, she would take an opponent by the scruff of the neck and reverse him out her shop door. Aunty Peg was no lightweight and certainly no pushover! After a certain amount of local ‘tally ho’, the deal was completed, things eventually settled down and normality again prevailed. Uncle Jacky was happy to pass on The Bleach endeavours to the next generation.

  Years later, a mini split arose when a local team – against the wishes of the then chairman – were taken to a local brewery to celebrate a win. Direct honesty can sometimes land you into a whole pile of trouble, and when the chairman, never renowned for beating around the bush, stood up in the brewery and told the large gathering, including the brewery heavyweights, that this was no place to bring an under-age team for celebrations, he set the cat among the pigeons. Today, ministers of state are still struggling to disentangle the drink and sporting businesses and it is still proving a sticky problem.

  The next split was over money. My father always said that you only really got to know people when you had land or money dealings with them. Fund-raising is an ongoing challenge for all voluntary organisations, and down through the years the Valley Rovers were no exception. One big fundraising project of raffling a car crashed lamentably when the money disappeared in a swirl of smoke and mirrors. The committee knew where it had gone but were powerless to retrieve it, and, of course, recriminations were not scarce in forthcoming: ‘Ye should have known better.’ ‘What fools ye were.’ All the armchair experts had a field day!

  In recent years, when the latest split came, we were back to landownership again. It proved extremely difficult to get to the root of this latest split. Like everything else in life, even splits have got more complicated. One portion of the club judged that another portion was planning to build on The Bleach. The Bleach is holy ground in the village, and even the murmur of such a thought was enough to cause convulsions. But the standing officers refuted the claim: it was a false rumour, they maintained. Still, even false rumours can bring down governments, and so it brought down the Valley Rovers club officers, who resigned en masse. It took a couple of years to recover from that convulsion, but with time everything is forgiven and forgotten – though maybe never quite forgotten! That is village living.

  Chapter 9

  The Parish Picnic

  It was early morning in Dromkeen Wood. The birds were welcoming the new day with an enthusiastic chorus of delight. Climbing up the steep incline, it was good to breathe in the musky smell of moist bluebells that stretched all around in a carpet of blue. It was Bluebell Day, and the wood was telling the story.

  Over the centuries, Innishannon has had a chequered history of occupation and struggle. The wood too has a history. In 1750, the landlord, Thomas Adderley, planted this wood. The man who then managed the Adderley estate was a maternal ancestor of the well-known actor Jeremy Irons; this fact came to light when Jeremy Irons did a programme called Who Do You Think You Are? a few years ago on BBC TV. After the Adderleys came the Frewens, who took down the Adderley riverside mansion and rebuilt it on a more elevated site above the village with a beautiful view down along the river valley and looking across to the Adderley Wood, which the Frewens promptly replanted and renamed the Frewen Wood. To get the full picture of the Frewens, it is necessary to travel back along the female line, which can sometimes be more intriguing than the male. This particular family tree was made very interesting indeed by its colourful ladies. They were posh high flyers who spent money like water. The well-researched book Fortune’s Daughters tells the story of these extraordinary women. The three beautiful Jerome sisters came from New York, and their family was dripping in riches, but they lacked blue blood, a fact that their social-climbing mother was determined to change. To remedy the situation, she took her daughters to Paris in search of blue-blooded husbands, and when Paris failed to provide the needful she brought them to London for ‘the season’. There they acquired the desired husbands, but unfortunately did not marry firstborn sons, which would have guaranteed inheritance rights that by now were necessary as their father, through bad investments and extravagance, had seen a sudden collapse in their fortunes.

  Jenny, the most beautiful of the sisters, married Randolph Churchill, the youngest son of the Duke of Marlborough, and became the mother of Winston Churchill. Leonie married into the Leslies, a distinguished Irish family, and Clara married Mortimer Frewen, who, as the result of a financial exchange with the Adderleys, now owned Innishannon.

  In Innishannon, Mortimer Frewen set up a fish hatchery, which was very advanced thinking for the time, and the area beside the bridge where he sited it is still known as The Hatchery. Because of Mortimer’s many financial disasters the Frewens were constantly without cash flow, though this did not impinge on their high-flying lifestyle. Eventually, due to the changing face of politics in Ireland, they left Innishannon for good and in later years many of the village homeowners bought out their ground rent from the Frewen estate. This was often a very complicated and time-consuming procedure. The landlord system in Ireland left many deep-seated and painful after-effects, but the two positives were great houses and great trees.

  Thus the Adderley Wood was renamed Frewen Wood, but it is now called Dromkeen Wood, and is the property of Coillte, the Irish State body. Owners may come and go, but trees and wildlife go on regardless of mere mortals. Dromkeen Wood has always been a haven of delight for the people of Innishannon, and the village children spend hours playing here and in the stream that tumbles down the rocky incline near the entrance. Beside the wood was once the village forge, where Billy the Blacksmith, as well as shoeing horses, performed many other functions. When vil
lage children were going to the wood, their parents would instruct them, ‘Tell Billy that you are there,’ knowing that he would keep a supervisory eye on them. The forge was also a male social club where the local farmers gathered at night to discuss the state of the nation. They called it the Dáil, and Billy always said that far more intelligent discussions were held there than in the actual Dáil. Now Billy is long gone, and the village that loved him erected a sculpture of him at the entrance to the restored old forge that is now all smartened up and the office of an architectural firm.

  In recent years, the paths and steps in Dromkeen Wood have deteriorated, so we in the village decided that it was time to improve things and to install handrails for the less flexible. We were grant-aided by the Gwendoline Harold-Barry Trust, Cork County Council, Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Eli Lilly. The work was carried out and supervised by Coillte. When all was completed, we decided to celebrate the transformation with a big thank you to our benefactors and a parish picnic. Bluebell Day was to be parish picnic day.

  I had the wood to myself that morning, and it was a glorious morning. Sunlight slanted through the trees and birds darted along the branches. Suddenly a flick of red caught my eye and brought me to a standstill. A gorgeous fluffy-tailed red squirrel shot up a tree just beside me – it was a native squirrel, a species unfortunately now in danger from the imported grey. The quick glimpse of this beautiful creature filled me with a rush of joy. So seldom seen and so beautiful! Patrick Kavanagh captured well the delight of such a rare experience when he wrote, ‘Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.’ At that moment I understood perfectly the sentiment of the poet. Poetry links across the ages when the poet and the rememberer share the same strain of thought. When you experience something that leaves you speechless and the line of a long-forgotten poem sprouts at the back of your brain, you and the poet are on an invisibly connected wavelength. It is magic! And it makes worthwhile the reading and learning of poetry.