Quench the Lamp Page 5

  The mission continued for a week, and to each of us it meant different things. My friend Ann spent the entire week sitting in the front seat of the upstairs gallery aiming spits on the bald heads of the men below. My father was once the victim of her marksmanship and threatened that he would dry her spit if she dared try again; religious toleration did not extend to wet insults landing on my father’s bald head. Ann was full of bright ideas on how to make life more exciting. Long queues formed for confession, which was part of the spiritual clean-up operation of the mission. We young ones had a special time set aside for us and once when the missioner was late my friend decided that action was required to relieve the boredom. She posted a lookout at the door and sat into the confessional to hear our confessions herself. We took turns going in on either side and telling the most atrocious sins we could think of. Suddenly there was a warning call from the door and we all scattered – all but the girl on the right-hand side of the box who, because she was furthest from the door and the sound was deadened by the heavy baize cloth of the confessional, did not realise that the missioner had replaced Ann. When the grille of the confessional was drawn back, thinking in the dark that it was her friend, she stuck her finger into the missioner’s eye. We discovered that day that even holy men knew how to use strong language.

  The mission closed with a grand finale. It took place on a Sunday evening when, cows milked, calves and pigs fed and the resulting farmyard aromas eradicated, we all headed for the church. Women arrived laden with lumpy parcels almost as if they had done their Christmas shopping. The stalls did a roaring trade now as this was the last opportunity to get something and have it blessed by the missioners.

  The church was thronged to the utmost because anybody who had not come voluntarily to the mission had been visited by the missioner and a speedy conversion had been effected, so tonight they were all in except those we considered the real lost causes. The main aisle, which was reserved for men, was packed to capacity, and some brave bodies overflowed into the mortuary, which was normally reserved for single, laid out occupancy but which now offered standing room only. The confession boxes provided more comfortable accommodation – too comfortable in some cases because a gentle snore could sometimes be heard from them when proceedings proved particularly lengthy. The women’s aisles to the right and left of the altar were a sea of colour as many a devout woman overflowing with missionary fervour crowned it with a new hat or sometimes even a complete new outfit. Sexual segregation did not rise to the three galleries where the steps as well as the seats were lined with people. The less enthusiastic took refuge on the gallery stairs and it was not unknown for a game of cards to be quietly played.

  Gleaming brass candelabras bore dozens of tall lighted candles, their heavy waxen odour blending with the spicy incense from the swinging thurible. Rows of altar boys in bright red soutanes flanked the two missionaries in their gathered white surplices. Children overflowed into the aisles and sat around the altar-rails while the choir in full volume filled the church with organ music and Latin hymns. We said the rosary and were given a mixed grill of a sermon which recapped on every aspect of the previous week, and then, with everybody bearing a lighted candle, we renewed our baptismal vows. We drowned the devil in holy water and buried him in candle-grease, and evicted him out of sight back down into hell.

  Mad Saints

  THE KITCHEN WINDOW was broken one night when my mother and father were at the mission. Nobody saw it happen and nobody in the house was at fault, and the lack of explanation annoyed my father more than if there had been a culprit on whom he could have vented his anger. To make matters worse, the mission already had him in a bad temper because it demanded of him for the sake of peace a shut mouth, and this he found difficult to maintain. He went and listened to the missioners but the wry, caustic comments which occasionally escaped from him made clear to us that he was not overly impressed by them and only the fact that my mother took the mission so seriously prevented him from giving full expression to his opinion.

  Wet days not suitable for farm work were repair and maintenance days, and so it was raining when he arrived home from the creamery with a big new pane of glass wrapped in dripping newspapers. He propped the glass carefully against the kitchen press, voicing long.. detailed ultimatums regarding the fate of anyone chancing to come within half a mile of it. Having lectured all of us about the seriousness and delicacy of the job in hand, he proceeded to remove the broken glass.

  Our old friend Bill sat by the fire with a few of us balanced on each knee, telling us funny stories while the two sheepdogs lay stretched out drying themselves in front of the open fire. Normally dogs were not permitted this comfort but, as my mother had gone to the morning mission and must have been delayed, we had taken advantage of her absence and let them in. The sight of easy-going Bill, the dogs and the gang of noisy children cluttering up the kitchen did nothing to soothe my father’s frayed nerves. We regularly told my mother that she should have married Bill instead of my father because then we could have done as we liked. As Bill did not believe in work my father’s answer to this was, “You’d all have died with the hunger.”

  Painstakingly he removed the broken glass from the lower pane of the window, just as he had done many times before, as this particular pane stood right in our favourite line of fire. Now we kept clear of his end of the kitchen lest we might trigger a calamity. Things proceeded calmly enough and, having removed the glass, my father kneaded the putty in his hands, which seemed to have a soothing effect on him.

  A wet day in the country was conducive to visiting the neighbours, and restless spirits set to wandering. So it was that Dan could always be counted on to choose such a day on which to turn up. Knocking being a formality he never deemed necessary, he simply walked in the door accompanied, as usual, by his huge mongrel, an animal of such mixed ancestry that it scarcely merited the term dog. Our own dogs normally treated this excuse of a mutt with contempt and completely ignored him, but the sight of him strolling into the inner sanctum of the kitchen, where they themselves were seldom allowed to stretch before the fire, was more than they could tolerate. They shot into action and in the ensuing tangle of dogs, locked together in a vicious, snarling ball of legs, heads and tails, they careered around the kitchen scattering everything in sight including my father’s carefully propped-up pane of glass. It broke into smithereens and sprayed around the floor in a thousand fragments like a shower of solid raindrops.

  Fighting dogs are a danger to interfering hands and limbs but anger disperses all caution and my father, with a few well-placed kicks of his strong leather boot, evicted the scrapping dogs out through the gaping window. Into the aftermath of this chaos sailed my mother, who had just walked home from the mission. So imbued was she with religious zeal that she failed to register our situation. Without even taking time to remove her coat she announced in a surprised and wondering voice, “The missioner this morning said a strange thing. He said that if our ignorance and insanity did not save us we would all be damned.”

  “In that case,” thundered my father, “there is no fear of us, because if it’s ignorance and insanity that’s necessary for salvation then this house is full of saints.” And, catching his cap, he made for the door saying, “As a matter of fact, woman, you’re standing on holy ground.”

  The Eternal Flame

  THE VERY LARGE open fire which stretched across one end of the kitchen was the central point of the life of our home, and our family activities and gatherings all revolved around it. At its base a deep ash hole in the floor was covered over by an iron grid shaped to fit into the top of the hole, and an underground tunnel ran from the hole to the base of an upright iron bellows which stood on the right of the fire. A person sitting beside it in a comfortable sugán chair could turn the handle of the bellows, sending a draught along the tunnel and under the fire. The faster the wheel was turned, the brighter the fire would glow, but if handled too roughly the strap around the wheel could slip off and
bring the whole proceedings to a standstill. As children we hated being landed with this awkward job. If the bellows was out of balance the strap would slip continuously and become a source of great annoyance; indeed, one of our neighbours, who was not renowned for his patience, found this so frustrating that he hit his iron bellows a belt of a sledge-hammer and broke it into smithereens.

  Over the fire and extending a few feet on either side of it was a huge chimney, and if you leaned in over the bellows and looked up you could see the sky. Smaller chimneys from other rooms joined it as it rose towards the roof-top, like a big river being joined by tributaries. Directly behind the fire the wall was black from years of smoke but on either side of this black area the hob was pure white, because whitewashing the hob with lime was one of the regular Saturday jobs in the house. A black iron crane stood on one leg to the left of the fire, a long arm extending from it, and half-way along that arm another one hung down and curved to form a hook at the bottom. From this arm swung the hangers to hold the various pots and kettles over the flames. The crane was operated by a long handle which curved into a smooth knob and the hangers could be eased up and down or the whole crane, which was on a swivel, could be swung forward, leaving the heat behind it.

  Two heavy iron kettles provided boiling water: the larger of the two was always called the tea kettle, while the smaller one was reserved for less prestigious uses. When a kettle was brought to the boil over the fire the cover would dance up and down giving out a whistling noise and we would call to our mother that the kettle was singing. She was very fussy when it came to making tea: she never took anybody’s word that the kettle had actually boiled but had to see for herself; then, when she had made the tea, she set the teapot to draw on a few red coals known as gríosach.

  Accompanying the two kettles was a pair of black, three-legged iron pots. The larger one was used for boiling the potatoes and the smaller one for the meat and vegetables. They were hung from the crane by the pot-hangers which hooked into the iron ears beneath their protruding upper rim, and they were covered by a heavy iron lid with a raised handle on top. To lift off the lid when it was hot the long iron tongs was sometimes used and saved many a person from scalds or burns. These two pots were used daily but they had a bigger brother which was used for Monday’s washing of clothes and for Saturday-night baths. The baby of the pot family was the skillet, in which the porridge or gruel was cooked overnight in gentle heat by the fire.

  Another companion of this set of pots was the bastable, which was about one-third the depth of the others and had straight sides. Its design struck me as less interesting since it lacked the generous curves which had given rise to the descriptive term “pot-bellied”, but it played an important role in the house, being used for baking bread. When it had been nicely warmed it was either greased or floured and a large round cake of bread was laid to rest inside it; the cover was securely settled on top to keep out ashes and hot turf dust, and then on the outer circle of the cover a ring of red-hot coals or cíoráns were placed.

  My mother, being a night person, was usually the last to leave the kitchen, and so it was she who generally “kindled” the fire. She raked it out and put the red coals to the side, and then covered them with hot ashes. Without a draught beneath them the gríosach did not light up but kept the “seed” of the fire alive so that in the morning they were still red. The first person up in the morning removed the cover from the ash hole, emptied out the ashes with a cracked cup, which gave a dull, hollow sound as it scraped off the fire bricks, and made sure that the small underground tunnel to the bellows was clear. Having raked out the still warm ashes at the side of the fire, the hot gríosach was put on top of the grid which had been replaced over the hole.

  The materials for starting up the fire again were usually stored overnight in a box at a safe distance from the fire but drying out in its warmth. We children were often sent out to gather a gabháil of cipíns or of “roots”, which were not as defined in the dictionary but were rather what my mother termed “the limbs of trees”. These we cracked across our knees or split with a hatchet to render them into more manageable proportions.

  On top of the gríosach were placed balls of dry hay, then cipíns, then the previous day’s cinders and finally cíoráns, which were broken sods of turf. Then the bellows was turned gently to fan the small red “seed” of the fire and the hay gave off a rich aromatic smell as it smouldered into flame, filling the kitchen with its spicy essence. Once the fire got going sods of black turf were put standing up around it like a guard of honour and soon the yellow flames licked around them. Then the ashes from the previous day’s fire were shovelled into an old tin bucket which had been retired from carrying liquids, and the area around the hearth was brushed clean. The fire was ready for another day.

  The entire household revolved around the fire, which provided warmth, cooking facilities and a social centre around which we gathered at night to chat or to read. My father had his own particular chair to the right of the fire beside the bellows and it was his job to turn the wheel to keep the fire glowing. Behind the bellows a cricket often chirped, making its own contribution to our conversations. To my father’s left and under the oil lamp sat my mother, usually darning or patching, for it was a continual struggle to keep six pairs of childish heels, knees and elbows from breaking out. To the left of the fire stretched a long timber stool or form on which we children sat in a row, feet swinging above the floor. The chair next to our form belonged to our nearest neighbour and daily visitor, Bill, and other chairs in the circle were occupied by older members of the family or other visiting neighbours. If the circle of people became too big and we ran out of chairs, another timber form, which seated three or four depending on their circumferences, was brought into service from inside the kitchen table.

  Family hygiene also depended on the fire because every Saturday night the big twenty-gallon pot of boiling water bubbled over it and the washing commenced of an assortment of little bodies which were encased in the mud, grass, earth, hay dust and chaff that perfumed our daily lives like our own country version of eau de cologne. Our hair was fine-combed to evict the tenants of our time, for if this was not done on a regular basis then they established squatters’ rights and proved highly undesirable lodgers. On Monday morning the big pot again came into action for the weekly wash-day, which took a full day’s hard labour because keeping clean was no easy job in the country.

  From the kitchen fire came the “seeds” to light the other fires in the house. A big, battered farmyard shovel, minus the handle, was filled with blazing gríosach and carried, a whirl of smoke behind it, at a lively pace into the parlour. It was also used to carry the seeds to upstairs bedrooms and later I would lie in bed listening to the fire crackling and watching the figures of light and shade dancing up the walls and across the low ceiling.

  The kitchen fire stood at the centre of our lives, an eternal flame never to be quenched. Only when houses were finally abandoned were their kitchen fires allowed to die, and when one of our neighbours built a new house he carried the seed of the fire across the haggard in a bucket from the old house to the new. The fire was the heart of every home and its warm glow was never extinguished while people still lived in the house.

  Always On A Monday

  AN ENORMOUS WOMAN – in circumference rather than height – Bridgie came every Monday to do the washing. Great rolls of flesh were restrained within her cross-over navy overall, the straps of which disappeared into deep furrows; safety-pins glinted in rows on her bosom like medals on a soldier’s chest. So intense was the pressure on the overall to cover her vast higher regions that it could not succeed in reaching her knees. She never wore stockings and her heavy legs curved neither in nor out but seemed to have been poured straight down into her men’s boots. Her too-tight jumper just covered her elbows, below which large hands brought everything and everybody surrounding her under her control, and often she caught me by the scruff of my neck to get me out of her way.
The hair which inadequately covered her head defied restraint, sticking out like straw in a variety of colours induced by her habit of rinsing it regularly in cold tea.

  Above all else Bridgie’s teeth set her apart from ordinary mortals. Each tooth went its own way with no particular collective direction in mind, and the top row lacked any sense of togetherness at all. Her dental arrangements enabled Bridgie to accomplish something which would otherwise have been impossible: both a non-stop talker and a chain smoker, she was able to park a cigarette between two top teeth and continue talking without a break. There it remained smouldering away until Bridgie remembered it and it flared back into life again as she gave it a gigantic pull. Sometimes, however, she forgot the parked cigarette and lit another one: then we would dance around her shouting with delight, “Bridgie, Bridgie, you’ve two chimneys smoking!” Her answer to this was to snort “Shit!” in frustration and fling the old butt into the fire. My mother forbade us to adopt Bridgie’s rough vocabulary but she dared not try to curtail Bridgie’s own colourful flow of words, for the vibrations of her wrath could shake the very foundations of the house.

  Early on Monday morning the big twenty-gallon pot was hung over the fire and filled with water and by the time Bridgie arrived it was sending steam signals up the chimney. Seasonal weather variations had no effect on her outfit and the only concession she made to extreme cold was to don a pair of hand-knitted grey socks that she turned down over the tops of her black boots. She threw a well-worn tweed coat over her shoulders; as it fell short of the overall it afforded scant shelter, but she maintained that “only the too thin and the too lazy feel the cold”.

  On arrival she made a pot of black tea and had a fag before commencing operations, sorting out the clothes into different heaps. As she sorted she gave a running commentary on the clothes – though it could equally have been on their owners. Catching up a very dirty pair of pants she would exclaim, “Ah, you dirty bastard!” and coming to the whites she might hold up a night-dress and declare, `You little strap: another wear would do you no harm.”