The Women Read online

  This type of quilt was very warm but not too heavy. However, Aunt Kate and the other women could also turn out much heavier and warmer quilts. For this, more substantial material than wool was used for the lining and heavier garments were cut up for the patchwork pieces. When completed, these quilts were indeed weighty creations. But on cold winter nights when Jack Frost drove his nose through non-double glazed windows and penetrated unheated homes, these gigantic quilts formed a protective barrier between the freezing cold and the slumbering residents, even though sometimes the sleeper might be hard put to achieve an effortless turnover beneath one. Washing these heavy quilts took place only at the height of summer because they had to be laid out on the grass or across hedges to dry as no clothesline was strong enough to bear the burden.

  Making ticks for the beds was another one of Aunt Kate’s undertakings. My mother bought ticking by the yard in Denny Ben’s, where huge rolls of material were stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelving. This ticking was extremely strong navy and white fabric, and the Singer sewing machine was used to make the tick, which was the equivalent of our present-day duvet, except that instead of sleeping under the tick we slept on it. The Singer sewing machine was a resident in most homes. My mother inherited hers from my grandmother and often neighbours without a machine came across the fields to use it. When the tick, which resembled a giant bag, was sewn up, leaving the top still open, it was turned inside out and lathered with carbolic soap as a kind of waxing treatment; pillows and cushions made in the same fashion were treated likewise. This prevented the feathers from later breaking through the ticking. Then the tick was righted and filled with goose and duck down held over from the Christmas plucking. This was a sneeze-inducing, itchy business that involved carefully controlling your movements to avoid a feather snowstorm. A sudden breeze was highly undesirable and if anyone opened a door and created a draught they could be the victim of a disapproving tirade. When all the feathers were securely imprisoned within, the tick was firmly hand-stitched across the top with a good strong needle and heavy thread. It was then laid on top of the horsehair mattress on the spring base of the bed. Diving into bed on top of a newly filled feather tick was a child’s delight – better than any bouncy castle.

  The undertaking that caused the most excitement was the creation of an entire new christening outfit. This was a rare occurrence that only happened when a pregnant neighbour did not already have a family christening gown or when a discerning grandmother wanted to create a beautiful new family heirloom. Either way, Aunt Kate’s visit afforded the opportunity to clothe the next generation with the skills of the past. On her arrival, she advised on the purchase of the required material and threads, and when they came there was much oohing and aahing amongst the women about the delicacy of the fabrics. Aunt Kate did the cutting out and under her guidance other women with the required skills did the needful. But Aunt Kate took charge of the finer details of embroidery and lace edging, and when the entire ensemble of gown, shawl, bonnet and bootees was complete it was a thing of beauty destined to become a family treasure for generations to come.

  We loved it when Aunt Kate came to stay and by the time she departed we were stitched up, darned in and togged out for the months ahead. Her trunk was returned to the attic in a much lighter condition. Her accomplishments enriched her life, our lives and those of our neighbours.

  To this day at antique fairs I make a beeline for the linen table and cannot resist beautifully embroidered cloths of all shapes and sizes. She introduced one of my sisters to tapestry, which began a lifelong love affair. Our love of beautiful things all began with Aunt Kate when she turned our parlour into an Aladdin’s cave and inspired her young charges and the neighbours to enjoy the art of creating beauty in everyday things.

  Chapter 4

  The Handy Woman

  She had no qualifications other than her own experience, and her credentials would never be found in a modern CV. Her title could be hereditary, as she sometimes walked in the footprints of a wise mother who passed down her expertise from years of caring for the sick, delivering babies and laying out the dead. Because she delivered babies and laid out the dead, the Handy Woman was in touch with the two great realities of life, and over the years this had endowed her with a deep wisdom about the world and a great awareness of a world beyond. She lived in the midst of her community and was well versed in everybody’s idiosyncrasies. But she was also involved in more everyday activities. At the time most women sewed and knitted for their own families, but if some found it beyond their capabilities the Handy Woman came to the rescue and added to her budget by doing the needful. She was not averse to going into a neighbouring house and taking on a tubful of washing to strengthen her family finances. When a pig was killed she helped with the filling of the puddings, at the threshing she was there to help feed the crowd at a meitheal, and she also helped to prepare for the Stations when major cleaning and cooking were done. Money did not always change hands, but fresh pork-steak, bacon, puddings, potatoes, milk and cabbage moved between houses.

  Our local Handy Woman lived just beside us and she was present at all our family occasions. Her opinion carried great weight in any decision-making. Because she was involved in all our births, she had a big say in the choosing of names and if she considered a family name to be fading into oblivion she often rescued a forgotten ancestor from falling off the family tree. She would never have understood the practice of choosing celebrity names or ‘unusual’ names for children. As far as she was concerned a child was part of a family and should be christened accordingly. In one sentence she changed my name from my father’s choice of Susan to Alice with the proclamation: ‘Alice is an old Taylor name and if you don’t call her that it will die out of the family.’ And I became Alice because our Handy Woman so decided! The previous Alice was a great-aunt of my father’s and so the Handy Woman reached well back into our ancestry to rescue that long-forgotten lady from the family archives. Years later when I decided to try to trace the family tree, I discovered the wisdom of the Handy Woman – when you are wading through reams of old records family names are like identifying stepping stones that guide you back through the generations. Now whole TV programmes are based on tracing who you think you are; in her time our Handy Woman laid down the guiding markers for identifying family lineage through successive generations.

  She had an acre attached to her cottage and every inch of that acre was used to help feed her family. It had the grazing of two cows and when the grass supply dwindled, the cows were turned out to graze the sides of the ditches along the road. This was commonly called the ‘long acre’. Her two pigs lived in an old wreck of a Baby Ford car minus the seats. How she acquired one of these when cars were as scarce as hen’s teeth beggars belief. But the two pigs roamed the yard behind the cottage and at night squatted down comfortably in the Baby Ford. In the morning when hunger pangs surfaced they stuck their heads out the window and squealed for attention. Beside the pigs’ car was a small house full of hens and ducks, and adjoining it a stone stable for the pony. The pony was tackled up to a tub-trap to take her and the family to Mass every Sunday; or to a cart to take milk to the creamery; or sometimes the cart was converted into a crib by adding slatted sides, making it safe to transport bonhams to the fair, or bring turf from the bog, where she went every year to cut her own.

  She grew all her own potatoes and vegetables and if she ran out of ground she moved into one of our adjoining fields and made good this arrangement by helping us with cutting the corn and saving the hay. It wasn’t that she had no husband – she did – she was simply an independent-minded woman too vigorous to follow anybody. She led, always. The husband worked on the roads with the County Council, but it was she, with all her industry, who truly kept the home fires burning. With no social welfare to back her up, this resourcefulness meant a well-clothed and well-fed family. She had never heard of women’s liberation, but she was a liberated woman in her own way, believing that women were far more resou
rceful than men.

  She reared strong independent daughters and when one of them came for a short time to help my mother she taught my father a sharp lesson. He had five daughters who were there to look after him and save him any domestic chores, he believed – and that included bringing the teapot from the open fire to the table when he needed a cup of tea! Shortly after the arrival of the Handy Woman’s daughter he asked her to bring over the teapot. She coolly eyeballed him and promptly told him to do it himself. We thought this was hilarious! Years afterwards when she came back to visit us, she and my father both laughed heartily at his abrupt introduction to the new world.

  My father had huge respect for the Handy Woman and often regaled us with stories about her. Once she and her husband were out in our Brake Field where they were digging their own potatoes. Normally, in these circumstances, the man would do the digging with a spade and the woman would follow on with the bucket, picking up the potatoes. But with the Handy Woman the situation was reversed. She did the digging and he did the picking. It told a lot about their relationship. On this particular day she had gone far up the field ahead of him and when my father went to chat with her she looked back at her husband and with very little sympathy in her voice pronounced acidly, ‘My little man is failing.’ My father continued down the field to the husband who, with a knowing expression on his face, looked up the field at his wife and told my father, ‘I let her forge ahead or otherwise she might think that she was failing.’ They certainly had the measure of each other!

  The Handy Woman did not trust modern medicine and believed firmly in her own home cures. She was into doing everything naturally, from childbirth to death. On top of all her home industry she was always on call for home births and for laying out the dead. Before the era of the District Nurse, she did the baby deliveries. When the District Nurse was appointed she continued to help, but there could be a bit of a power struggle between them. Sometimes if babies moved faster than expected and came before the arrival of the Nurse, the Handy Woman was delighted to be the one to have seen the new baby into the world, while also taking good care of the mother. A staunch believer in breast feeding, she advised all new mothers that apart from being good for the baby it was far handier, and she advised the new mother to have a soothing nightcap of a warm bottle of stout; this would guarantee both mother and baby a sound night’s sleep.

  She absolutely loved babies and thought that children could do no wrong, and if they were less than perfect she judged it to be the fault of the parents. Where the ‘terrible twos’ were concerned she dished out advice too, declaring that it was best not to ‘cross them’ but to let them work out their tantrums in their own time. She told worried mothers to relax and that the children would eventually figure it all out for themselves. If adult behaviour was less than honourable she would remark sagely, ‘Some day their own will level them; it always takes your own to level you.’

  As well as home births it was also the time of home deaths. Most people died in their own beds, and wakes were held in the family home. As soon as a death took place the Handy Woman was summoned and from years of experience she knew exactly what to do. Because she had known the deceased all their lives she undertook this act of preparation for their final journey as a great honour and performed it with loving kindness. Her aim was to make them look as well as possible, but this was the era before magic makeovers, and none of them looked as if they were about to go partying.

  When an old neighbour Mike died, she was called by his two sisters to lay him out. She had known him all her life. All went according to plan until she looked for his hat. Mike had always worn his hat, even in bed. Few people had ever seen Mike without his hat on. So the Handy Woman felt that it was only right and proper that he should go to meet his maker wearing his hat. Mike, she decided, would feel bare without it. But the hat had disappeared. In preparation for the wake his two house-proud sisters had done a big tidying-up job and Mike’s hat had got whipped out of sight and was nowhere to be seen. But our Handy Woman was resourceful in all situations so she searched the wardrobe of the wake room and found a classy black hat belonging to one of the sisters – and she did a quick Philip Treacy job on it. Because she was an able seamstress she quickly turned the sister’s fashionable hat into a replica of Mike’s own hat. She popped it on his head and nobody knew the difference. But when the funeral was leaving the house his sister went in search of her hat that was nowhere to be found …

  Wakes could go on for a few days and without the aid of modern body preservatives she kept a watchful eye over her charge until they made it safely out of the bed into the coffin and were on the final journey.

  Our Handy Woman and her little cottage are long gone, but hopefully when she arrived wherever it is we are all going she was welcomed home by the many neighbours that she had fitted out for their journey.

  Chapter 5

  The District Nurse

  Known simply as ‘The Nurse’, her name was breathed with the same air of respect as if she were the Queen of England or the President of Ireland. This respect was due to the significance of her role in the community. She was appointed to the district to replace the ‘Handy Woman’, who up to then had overseen the home births. She was the first female qualified medical practitioner to find her way into the homes of rural Ireland. Other nurses earned their wages in hospitals caring for strangers, but the Nurse earned the respect of the whole parish by bringing most of them into the world and then keeping a motherly eye on them. She exuded capability and tranquility. Her very presence calmed frayed nerves. If you were deemed to be running out of steam, the Nurse and doctor came to your aid, but whereas the doctor diagnosed and departed, the Nurse continued to call until you were back on your feet. She had years of experience under her belt, and with so much knowledge of her community she was often more astute than any doctor in analysing a complaint. She usually initiated new young GPs, who were then always men, into the intricacies of rural medical care. She knew the seed and breed of the whole parish and was familiar with the health weaknesses of different families. She had a basic knowledge of the frailties of the various branches in everyone’s family tree. She knew, for example, from years of recurring kidney complaints, that the Browns had bad plumbing but that their leaky water system was nothing to get alarmed about as most of them drained away into their late nineties. She also knew that the O’Learys had the constitution of horses and if one of them went down it was serious business requiring drastic action.

  Often her ears had access to secrets usually heard only in the confessional, and in rows between neighbours she often built bridges with the bones of hidden skeletons in the cupboard, known only to her. Sometimes, driven to desperation, she quietly told troublesome husbands that she had brought them into the world and that if she had been blessed with foresight she might well have deemed that a drowning in their bath water would have made the world a better place! Strong-willed men nodded respectfully when she begged to differ with their rigidly held opinions.

  The Nurse was on duty day and night, and while she was available to cure complaints of all kinds her top priority was in the baby production line. She loved her mothers and babies. They were her pride and joy. Before babies were heralded into the world by gynaecologists in the antiseptic realms of hospitals, the Nurse travelled around the parish where home births were still part of the way of life. Her means of transport was her bike on which she carried her ‘bag of tricks’, as some disrespectful new fathers termed her bag of medical instruments.

  Often she was collected late at night by a stressed expectant father. The mode of transport then could be a posh pony and trap borne along by a well-trained pony in topclass brass and leather tackling, but it could also be a kicking horse hastily tackled to a cart, or indeed a battered butt. As well as the hazards of the protesting horse, the butt might not be too clean, but it was all that was available on the night. Sometimes the butt that came to collect her had some of the base boards missing so the Nurse had to b
e careful lest she fell down through the gaps. On rare occasions she had to get up onto the back of a startled horse behind an anxious farmer and cling on for dear life as they made their way to the waiting mother. But she took all this in her stride. She understood her people and knew that times were hard. If a particular call was to a family in dire straits she came with her own towels and extra bedlinen. She was ready for any emergency. In her world the care of mother and baby were the top priority. Because money was scarce she was not always paid in cash, but bags of turf, potatoes and vegetables or plucked chickens frequently found their way to her door.