To School Through the Fields Read online

  My father often came home with his cap full of crabs and once he asked me how valuable I thought a cap full of crabs was; when I answered, “No value, really,” he smiled and said, “Well, a child who does not respect his fellow human beings is as valuable to the human race as a cap full of crabs.” He did not expect much from his fellow human beings but he was very conscious of the rights of other people and always instilled this consciousness in us.

  We had a very happy young lad called Christy working with us. He loved dancing and was often out until the small hours of the morning as he also had an eye for a pretty face. One night, coming out of a dance in the local hall, he found his bike punctured so he helped himself to a tube of another one as he had a girlfriend to take home on the bar of his bike. Incredibly, Christy was later taken to court and sentenced to six months in jail for this offence. My father was stone mad about it, feeling that Christy was a gay-hearted lad and that the punishment was outrageous in relation to the crime. When Christy came out he was quiet and subdued and all his old sparkle had gone. On his first Sunday back my father and mother went away for the day, leaving all of us children and the house and farmyard in Christy’s care. A few days later he went to visit his mother.

  “Christy,” she asked him, “will they trust you on the farm after being in prison?”

  She afterwards told me that he smiled as he said, “It made no difference: they went away on Sunday and left me in complete charge.” She said that it did more to restore his self-esteem than any amount of words could have done. And, indeed, Christy soon regained his self-confidence and was his old sunny self again; my father had never studied psychology but he had an innate understanding of human nature.

  Wild fuchsia, which we called bell trees, grew along the hedges and, plucking off the bell-like flowers, we sucked their sweet, sticky juices as we had seen the honey-bees do. If thirst overcame us out in the fields, fresh spring water ran along by most ditches, flowing down from the hill behind the house. We were expert at leaning into greenery and, using our saucered hands as cups, we scooped up the crystal-clear water and drank from the palms of our hands. The only polluters of the waterways were the ducks and geese and my father often objected to them as the horses and cows often refused to drink the water after them. My mother, however, stood up for their rights and refused to listen to his objections, stating that as they used only one large stream they were entitled to their freedom and the pleasure they got from the water.

  As summer turned to autumn we stored the best apples for Halloween, or Snap Apple Night as we called it. We diligently watched the nut trees, hoping that they would be ripe in time, but ripe or not we always picked them. These trees were tall with high, arching branches far from the ground, so it took all our climbing skills to conquer them. We climbed to the top and then as far out along the swaying branches as we dared, while we swung up and down at precarious angles, grasping bunches of nuts and throwing them down to the collector on the ground. Finally, gallons full, we slithered to the ground and danced home through the gathering dusk, scratched but triumphant. That night we cracked our nuts with a stone on the flagstone before the fire while apples swung from cords tied to the meat hooks on the rafters of the kitchen or floated in the timber tub of water in the middle of the floor.

  For Christmas too the land provided what was needed, and the Sunday before we made our annual pilgrimage to the wood for the red-berried holly. It was there in abundance as was the ivy and moss, together with strange, interesting pieces of dried-out timber. We gathered them all and tied them up in bundles with hay twine and we brought them home on our backs, holding firmly to the twine across our shoulders. They would all be used to make different decorations for Christmas. There was no money for shop decorations, but we did not need them as all around us the countryside fulfilled our needs.

  The Jelly Jug

  SUNDAY IN THE country was a day of complete rest. Cows were milked, animals and humans fed but, apart from that, we all took time to ourselves. It was a holiday in the kitchen as well so that everyone would be free of the work routine. Unfortunately, we had to rise earlier than usual so that the cows were milked before the early Mass to which my brother went on his way home from the creamery. This left my father free to take the rest of us to the late Mass.

  My father was always present for the breakfast on Sunday, and it was a very relaxed occasion as there was no work waiting to be done. It was the only time he ever sang and his favourite was “The Old Bog Road”. He would tilt back his chair and, rubbing the back of his head with the palm of his hand, he would rumble “her coffin down the old bog road”. He had a voice like a rusty chain rattling in a bucket but what he lacked in harmony he made up for in enjoyment because he only sang when he was happy. He liked poetry and was much better at reciting that than he was at singing. His favourite poet was Goldsmith and “The Deserted Village” rolled off his tongue with such relish that you knew he approved of all the poet’s sentiments. He also had an odd little poem which I never heard from anyone else:

  Once upon a time

  When pigs were swine

  And turkeys chewed tobacco

  And little birds built their nests

  In old men’s beards.

  Once the Sunday morning poetry session was over he turned on the Church of England service on the BBC saying, “Listen to them now; every bit as good as what we will be hearing from our own in an hour’s time.”

  The pony’s job was to take us to Sunday Mass in the trap. This could be a hazardous undertaking in the winter because if the pony slipped on the ice we would all end up out on the road on top of our heads, but in the summer it was a very pleasant way to travel. If we passed anybody walking along the road they were picked up and brought to town. At that time the different premises in the town had backyards where the horses and traps were tied up during Mass. After the ceremony we would call to an aunt’s house with a bastable cake from my mother and two large whiskey bottles full of milk and our aunt would offer us tea and apple tart.

  Then my mother did her shopping. This was of a very practical nature as money was scarce in those days: there was plenty of everything except money, but then the need for money was not great. We produced all our own food and most places we went to we walked, which cost nothing only time, and we had plenty of that. We children stretched our pennies to buy those sweets which cost the least and lasted the longest. The best value was a sixpenny slab of toffee, for which my sister Phil and I pooled our resources, and that lasted us a whole week. It was the lap of luxury to have something to chew on going to school and sometimes it did a two-way journey as we took it out of our mouths half chewed and saved it, wrapped in paper, for the way home.

  Sunday in the country was a leisurely day. As well as shopping after Mass, much chatting was done when my mother met her neighbours and often the talking took longer than the shopping. My father went to the pub for a few pints and met up with his friends. We went to change our books in the branch library which had opened in our town, and although it took much browsing and deliberating, it opened up new horizons for us. Finally we all drifted back to the pony and trap, with my mother always the last to arrive and my father now nicely relaxed as he lit up his pipe and puffed away contentedly. When we were finally ready to go home the pony trotted off at an easy pace.

  Arriving home we had what we called a tea dinner – nobody worked on a Sunday so there was no cooking done, and we usually had a cold meat salad with jelly and cream afterwards. My mother often made jelly the night before for this Sunday treat: I loved making jelly too, and watching it melting under the hot water always fascinated me. One day I put my jelly into an orange jug, not realising that it was a family heirloom which my mother had got from my grandmother when she married. I poured the boiling water straight from the kettle on to the jelly and the jug split in two halves. I can still see the red jelly flooding out over the table as my mother’s gasp of horror conveyed the enormity of my crime. Years afterwards, when I
was the same age as my mother was when this happened, we were discussing the orange jug.

  “Do you know something,” my mother said, “I think that the pieces of that jug are behind in the old turf house in a hole between two stones under the back window.”

  And back I went into the semi-darkness of the old stone house that was now used for storage and there, exactly where she had said, between the stones under the window, were the pieces of the old jug. It took me back years just to see it. I was delighted and brought it away with me to have it repaired, and it now takes pride of place in my collection of jugs. My mother was a hoarder, a trait that proved a great blessing for us too in later years.

  After the dinner on Sundays my father usually went fishing, a solitary pastime from which we were excluded for fear of frightening the fish. But we enjoyed catching the flies that he used. He put a piece of fresh horse dung into a box and this drew the flies; then he closed the box, which had a round opening at the other end, and up against this he put a cow’s horn. The flies flew into the horn which he then covered with mesh wire, and the horn, full of buzzing flies, slipped nicely into his fishing bag. When he came home the bag was usually bulging with brown trout. We washed the fish in the stream at the bottom of the garden and my mother fried them in butter for the supper.

  We children usually spent Sunday in the fields. Sometimes we just lay quietly in the long grass watching the rabbits, of which there were dozens along every headland, and if you appeared suddenly they would scamper into the ditches and down their burrows. The ditches were riddled with burrows: very occasionally you came on an extra-large one and this was the fox’s lair which was also easy to recognise on account of the strong pungent odour that hung around it. Sometimes, too, you might see the fox running at an easy pace along by a bushy ditch and stopping every now and then with ears cocked for danger. Only once ever did I see one out in the open: he ran the entire length of our long fort field where I happened to be sitting at the top of the rise. When he saw me he stood still and stared at me. If he was frightened, I was even more so because I had visions of being carried off between his jaws like my mother’s hens. We stared at each other for a few seconds and then he sauntered off, dismissing me as of little danger.

  Picking wild flowers was another Sunday pastime: the buttercup, the bluebell, the woodbine with its haunting smell, all found their way back to our kitchen where they stood in every corner in empty jam pots. As well as acting as a flower vase the jam pot served many purposes: it kept the goose grease from the Christmas killings, which was used for softening tough shoe leather and easing painful joints; it also served as a fishing net for catching collies, miniature fish that travelled in shoals. We tied a twine around the jam pot’s neck and laid it on the river bed where it sparkled between the stones. Standing motionless beside it we watched the collies swim around our toes, tickling them, until one invariably found its way into our pot and then we swung it out of the water. We often caught other types of fish as well, but we were scared stiff of eels, convinced that they would bite the toes off us.

  Some Sundays we went to the fort which was just behind our house, a very big fort where my father had planted trees years before, so now it was a wood as well. Set on the side of a sloping hill it had huge mounds with hollows in between, and the entire place was carpeted in pine needles so that walking felt like treading on cushioned air. We played hide-and-seek around the mounds and behind the trees and the only sounds beside ours came from the birds. The place was a haven for all kinds of wildlife and here too the foxes often made their headquarters – much to my mother’s annoyance because her geese and turkeys often became their prey.

  We had a series of birds’ nests which we visited, careful never to disturb anything as we watched the eggs increasing in the nest. We were delighted to see the baby gearrcaigh (nestlings) appear and often hid ourselves to watch the parents fly back and forth feeding their young. Every year the swallows came to our cow stalls and stables where the rafters were a maze of nests, and it was a great feather in your cap to be the one to see the first swallow and to hear the first call of the cuckoo. At night we fell asleep to the sound of the corncrake whom we thought said:

  Corncrake

  Out late

  Ate mate

  Friday morning.

  At that time meat was never eaten on Friday so the corncrake was breaking the fast.

  In the grove below the house the pigeons cooed continuously. In the orchard beside this grove my teenage brother started beekeeping, but as his hives increased he moved to the grove behind the house. Here a hive was stationed under every tree and it was absorbing to watch the bees at work, especially in the summer when my brother sometimes went away for a week on a beekeeping course and I was left in charge. The first time this happened I prayed that they would not swarm, but of course they did. One afternoon when I came to check them, there, hanging off a branch like a large cluster of grapes, was a fine thick swarm of bees. I knew the procedure and, though a trifle nervous, I donned the beekeeping gear. Approaching quietly, with one hand I held a bucket just below the swarm and with the other I hit the branch a good belt with the back of a hatchet and the swarm fell neatly into the bucket. A share of the bees buzzed angrily at this intrusion into their peace, but I put the bucket under the tree and when they had settled covered it with a sheet. Now, at least, they could not take off if the notion took them, which was quite possible anytime before sundown.

  Late in the evening I returned to finish my job. Having found the old door of light timber which my brother kept for this purpose, I rested one end of it on the landing board in front of the hive and the other end on the ground, and then covered it with a white sheet. Gently lifting up the bucket I prised the covering off and shook the lump of bees out on to my prepared sheet. At first they buzzed angrily but soon they got their bearings. The trick at this point was to spot the queen, who is a good deal larger than the other bees, and make sure that she went into the hive so that the others would follow. I had beginner’s luck: there she was, heading for the front door, so the rest followed on naturally. There was no need to stay after that as they did the rest themselves, but I came back later in the semi-darkness to check that the sheet was clear of bees. The grove was peaceful at that time of night with all the hives silent after their busy day. If you knelt down beside a hive and put your ear against it you could hear the soft drone within. Our kitchen table was never without a honey supply, whether it was a jar, a section or indeed sometimes a frame of honey straight from the hive.

  My mother was the only one of the family to spend her Sunday in the house. She sat inside the open kitchen window reading the Sunday papers, and she always had interesting articles from the weekday papers put aside to be read on her day of rest.

  At this time, as well, she had the radio to herself. This was a great luxury in our house as there was usually a power struggle when different channels had interesting programmes on at the same time. My mother was an avid radio listener all her life. At that time Mrs Dale’s Diary was on BBC at 4.15 every weekday and she never missed it; indeed, we often ran home from school ourselves to be in time to hear Mrs Dale if she was having a family crisis. Woman’s Hour was another of my mother’s favourite programmes.

  However, her peaceful Sunday reading and radio listening was usually interrupted as she had many callers; this, especially, was the time when neighbouring farmers’ wives came to visit. Apart from these my mother had a varied assortment of visitors. There was one lady gone past her first flush of girlhood, but not realising it, who came to my mother to get her a husband or a “little job”. My mother baulked at the first suggestion but set her up in many “little jobs”. Invariably though, things did not work out and back she would come again looking for another little job. She smoked like a trooper and when we came into the kitchen and sniffed her cigarettes we annoyed my mother intensely by saying: “Oh, you had ‘little job’ today.”

  Another Sunday evening caller was Andy Con
nie. He was an uncle of my father so he must have been fairly old, but he had the heart and fitness of a teenager. Leading in to our outside yard was a five-foot-high gate, and into the garden a smaller one, and he never opened either one but jumped over them. He loved singing and dancing and often stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and danced a jig or a reel. He just danced because he was full of the joy of life and we loved to see him coming as he was like a ray of sunshine.

  Andy’s wife had died at a young age and he was left with a baby daughter, whom he adored. Many of his friends tried to get him to remarry so he composed a little poem to put them off. Mary Barry had been his wife’s maiden name and he invoked her support in his dilemma:

  If Mary Barry of old

  Could only behold

  Her own Andy Connie

  Getting married again.

  Her corpse long dead

  In her narrow bed

  In anger and shame

  Would rise again.

  Andy stayed with us one stormy night and the following morning at breakfast he told my mother that he hadn’t been able to sleep at all as the ash tree at the bottom of the garden was all night calling, “Andy Connie, Andy Connie”. To this day the tree is known as Andy Connie.

  Towards evening, when we all drifted back to the house, the Sunday night jobs had to be tackled as the animals needed to be fed irrespective of what day they had. Two of us went to bring home the cows and two more to feed the calves and someone to feed the hens and other fowl. After milking we all had supper together and there was usually some extra treat because it was Sunday. Then my father went roving and the older ones went dancing, but my brother usually had to hive his swarm before he went anywhere. My mother usually went for a walk in the fields, coming back then to finish her reading. Later, when my father returned, she rounded up the members of her household too young or too old for night life and we all knelt to say the rosary.