Quench the Lamp Page 6

  She would grasp one of the strong timber sugán chairs and slap it face downwards on its front legs with its top wedged against the table and lift the big timber wash-tub on to its back. Sometimes she placed two chairs facing each other and put the tub on their laps. With a tin gallon she ladled steaming water from the black pot into an iron bucket which she carried across the kitchen and poured into the tub; then she added cold water which she drew in buckets from the stream at the end of the garden, where water ran through a pipe we called the spout. When she was satisfied that the temperature was right she put on her bag apron and set to work on the clothes. She caught up one of the bundles, threw it into the tub and rammed the clothes down under the water with the legs of the timber washboard. Not content merely to wash the clothes, she attacked them, banging them on to the ridged washboard and plastering them on to it with a large block of red or white carbolic soap; then she scrubbed each offending garment up and down with great ferocity. And while she worked she would talk, sing or curse, depending on her prevailing humour.

  As she washed the clothes over the ridged surface of the washboard clouds of steam enveloped Bridgie and the glow of her cigarette was like a beacon in the misty kitchen. She squeezed the clothes by hand, rinsed and squeezed again. Meanwhile, the pot was kept full and boiling over the fire as tub after tub of washing was piled high on the table. Sheets and whites got an extra final rinse in blue, which came in a little round solid block in a muslin bag, to give them the blue-white look.

  Wash-day took over the entire kitchen, filling it with a soapy, steamy smell. Sometimes some of the whites were boiled in the big black pot and as they were lifted out with the handle of a brush they sent steam billowing upwards and turned the kitchen into a danger-zone of fog from which Bridgie barred children and males alike, considering both species to lack sufficient intelligence to avoid being scalded alive. To us the kitchen at this point offered the delight of paddling around barefoot in the copious water on the floor but Bridgie always saw us off declaring, “Get out of my way or I’ll catch you by the hasp of your arse and hang you off the clothesline with the washing.” Her knowledge of the human anatomy sometimes sent us off to our mother to enquire the meaning of new words, and my mother often had a hard time trying to come up with explanations.

  When early summer came Bridgie found a use for us: we became the agitators and danced barefoot on the blankets when she gave them all a lukewarm tub wash. The heavy, pure wool Foxford and Dripsey blankets harboured many a flea in comfortable conditions until evil-smelling yellow Keating’s powder put a stop to their jump. Bridgie traced the genealogy of the flea back to the fact that “Adam had ’em”, and she taught us a little verse which we chanted together as we danced up and down in her tub of warm, soapy blankets:

  Big fleas

  Have little fleas

  Upon their backs

  To bite them

  And little fleas

  Have littler fleas

  And so ad infinitum.

  Summer washing was done out in the garden near the spout where there was a plentiful supply of cold water, and then it was the hot water that had to be drawn from the kitchen. Bridgie ordered us to keep away from the wash-tub when it was full of water, but we had a game we played in the tub when her back was turned which we called “doggie sail away”: we floated two bits of stick across the tub and the first stick to reach the other side was the winner. One day while Bridgie was in the kitchen my sister Clare and I leaned across the raised tub urging on our contestants. Suddenly Clare lost her balance and went head first under the water, legs waving over the edge of the tub. I was so shocked that when I opened my mouth to scream no sound came out. I ran towards the kitchen, and when Bridgie saw my ashen face she made immediately for the tub, cursing and praying at the same time as she manoeuvred her considerable bulk as fast as she could down the garden. At the tub she quickly hauled out Clare who, after a certain amount of coughing and spluttering, soon recovered. For weeks after this episode Bridgie kept us at a safe distance from her tub and warned us, “Don’t come within a donkey’s roar of me, ye bloody little brats!”

  In time she forgave us for the fright we had given her and allowed us back around her tub, where I could watch again the soapy bubbles and the delicate colours they made. Sometimes Bridgie gave us an enamel jug full of hot soapy water. Then we broke a bit of a stick off an elder branch in the grove, scooped a hollow in the middle to make a bubble stick, and stood it into the jug and blew until we had a jug full of bubbles. We sat on the warm grass and blew the bubbles into the air, watching them float away in their gorgeous, transparent colours and dissolve into nothingness. Fascinated by colours, on one occasion I watched intently a wasp which had landed on the edge of the tub, his bright yellow stripes contrasting vividly with the dark brown timber of the tub. Unfortunately, I was not satisfied merely to watch but put out my finger to test if the wasp was real and he proved in no uncertain terms that he was.

  Blankets washed, Bridgie turned her attention to the other parts of the beds. On top of the wire spring came the horsehair mattress and the tick filled with feathers and down from the farm pluckings. Both the mattresses and the ticks she threw out of the bedroom windows or down the stairs and then she draped them across the hedges in the garden to give them “a good soak of sunshine”. She rounded up my father to get him to help her stretch wire springs; such maintenance was vital as sagging springs were bad for the back and might slip off the iron frame of the bed pitching the unwary sleeper head downwards and legs in the air.

  The padded and multi-coloured patchwork quilts awoke a poetry in Bridgie’s soul. She washed them with soap and water blended with tender appreciation for the hours of concentration that had gone into their creation. But it was the heavy lace bedspreads that brought out the best in her. These were not for ordinary sleepers but were reserved for honeymoons, childbirth and death, for the grandeur of lace was appropriate to grace all of the most important occasions in life. Bridgie turned the washing of one of these special bedspreads into an act of reverence: running her fingers gently over the intricate design she would talk softly to this family heirloom. “What beauty! How many did you breed? How many did you born? How many did you bury? All life has passed beneath you from the beginning to the end.” Washing the bedspread she became a different person as her face lit up and filled with joy.

  She rinsed the bedspread and squeezed it gently and then took it to the little meadow below the house where she spread it out on the young grass and wild flowers. The rest of the washing she pegged on the wire clothesline or spread across the hedges, but the lace bedspread got special treatment. Finally she brought it in and folded it carefully, placing mothballs between its creases, and laid it, wrapped in tissue-paper, in the old trunk where my mother stored family treasures.

  If the day’s washing finished early Bridgie would draw buckets of warm soapy water from the wash-tub and scrub down the upstairs bedrooms. Then she emptied the timber tub on to the kitchen floor and scrubbed it out. From start to finish it was a heavy day’s work but Bridgie was as full of bounce at the end as she had been at the beginning. She was never told what to do but worked at her own pace, treating our house and our washing as if they were her own.

  When she had finished she had tea with my mother at the kitchen table where she aired all her family grievances. Her husband was in her opinion over-fond of his drink, and so she gave him “a few belts” when she felt that he needed her to “bate a bit of sense into him”. But the one great regret in her life was that, although she had four daughters, she had no son. As she sat after her hard day’s work, swirling her tea around in her cup and puffing her fag, she would say, “Four children, missus, but not one little tassle in my house.” It was one of a number of her phrases which confused me on first hearing, and to my mother fell the task of explaining it.

  One thing that never changed about Bridgie was her farewell to us children. As she went out the door she would call out to us, “I�
�ll be back, brats, on Monday; always on a Monday.”

  Winter Journeys

  THE MOST AWKWARD outdoor chores always seemed to arise on cold, snowy winter days, and few if any were more awkward than taking a turkey to the cock or a battery to town to be charged. The two batteries on which our large brown box radio relied bore little resemblance to their slimline descendants of today. For a start, one was dry, the other was wet and both were large and filled with acid. The radio itself sat on the base of the back window in the kitchen and, as the walls of the house were about three feet thick, the window-ledge had sufficient room for both the radio and, behind it, the two batteries, to which it was connected by leads with little brass claws that fitted under the black and red knobs on the tops of the batteries. Sometimes a green mould formed at the connection point and my father would scrape it away with his penknife until the claw was shining brass again. The dry battery lasted a long time but the wet one had to be charged more often, depending on how much the radio was used, and scarcely a day went by without one of us children being told, “Turn off the radio and don’t be wasting the batteries.”

  One cold January day, after he had taken hay to the sheep down by the river, my father came in and, rubbing his hands together to improve the circulation, went straight to the radio, having as always arranged to finish his morning jobs in time to catch the news on either Radio Éireann or the BBC. But today Radio Éireann had been reduced by a fading battery to a whisper and the BBC was lost in the air-waves over the Irish sea. In summer batteries in need of recharging could be carried into town on the creamery cart, but in winter when the cows took their holidays the cart no longer made the journey, and so now I was dispatched to town.

  Dressed in an extra layer of clothes I clutched the heavy glass battery with icy fingers. Some protection from the pressure of the handle was provided by a pair of furry mittens my godmother had sent from America, but nevertheless I shifted it frequently from one hand to the other to balance the wear and tear. Occasionally I rested, and where the snow was still on the ground I traced the bird- and rabbit-tracks that could be found along by the hedges. Animals that usually merged into the colours of the countryside now contrasted vividly with the snow, and my journey to town invariably took longer than necessary when there was so much along the way to sidetrack me.

  Arriving in town I went straight to Jim’s pub which, amongst its many other services, charged batteries. Midway in the long counter was a big brown cupboard where charging batteries fizzed and spluttered in harmony with the surrounding activities. Old men sat spitting and arguing around the fire, while on the high shelves bottles of amber liquid glinted richly in the firelight. If one of the customers recognised me I was called over and seated by the fire for a warm-up and treated to a glass of fizzy lemonade.

  There was one old man, however, who had to be kept at a safe distance. He had earned the name “Catch” on account of his tendency to grab at any female form from eight to eighty years of age which came within striking distance. He was a small man who flopped around inside an enormous pair of wellingtons that came up over his knees. He lurched from periods of absolute silence to bouts of frenzied conversation but, apart from the occasional grab at a passing female, he was harmless.

  I loved the smell of the porter and whiskey and most of all the mixed tobacco smells off the old men who chewed on a varied assortment of clay, straight and giant turn-down pipes. Sometimes one of the old men in a burst of alcoholic exuberance would get up and do a little dance, to be told by one of his good companions that he had “the makings of a great dancer” and by another that he should “sit down and have a grain of sense”.

  Finishing my lemonade and dodging “Catch”, I collected a fully charged battery in exchange for my run-down one and set out for home. On a lucky day a neighbour might come along in a horse and cart piled with bags of meal and flour. Having climbed up the spokes of the wheels I would clamber in over the sideboard and nestle down comfortably between the bags in the middle of the cart, while the battery was wedged firmly against the sideboard in case it leaked.

  The drive shortened the journey home but I always called a halt in front of Mrs Casey’s because we children simply never came home from town without calling to see her. She warmed many a cold winter’s evening with a big bowl of steaming-hot bread-and-butter pudding, but most of all she warmed it with her welcome. She coaxed her huge, long-haired sheepdog, Bran, back from the fire to make way for me to get into the corner inside the bellows where no draught could catch me. After the hot pudding she gave me sweet, strong tea and a boiled brown egg (she had no respect for white ones) from the red-combed hens which thronged her haggard. Fortified by her goodness I arrived home with the dark and my father breathed freely again, saved from the awful prospect of a night without the radio.

  The battery was carried to town by road, but taking the turkey to the cock was a cross-country marathon. Normally our turkey-cock made this journey unnecessary but one year the old boy decided that he needed a sabbatical. He paid a terrible price for his jaded sexual urges because my mother promptly pulled his neck and he became the following Sunday’s dinner. This did not, however, solve the turkey-hen’s problem: she wanted a turkey-cock and lay on the ground, wings fluffed out and neck stretched forward passively. “The turkey is lying,” my mother said, and if our cock was in no condition to do the needful a couple of miles across the fields was one that could.

  The turkey-hen was bundled into a coarse grey bag; the top was tied but a hole was made where she could put her head out for air, and my sister Clare and I set out with our captive companion. A live turkey in a bag makes an awkward parcel and we took it in turns to carry her under our arms. With one arm firmly around her she was manageable but sometimes her legs got in the way and she dug her long claws into us. As we were leaving home my mother had advised us to keep her head out of the hole in the bag in case she might be stifled. The problem was, however, that when the turkey stretched out her long neck she was quite capable of testing your cheek or finger for flavour. Although she did it out of curiosity rather than aggression, her motivation did nothing to soften the peck, so as soon as we had home and my mother at a safe distance we shut the turkey’s door to the outside world.

  As we crossed the fields we discussed the complex question of sex and turkeys. The ground was covered with hard, frozen snow and when we came to a hilly field we skated down the icy slope. Abandoning the turkey with her head newly liberated and poking out of the bag we climbed back up the hill and skated down again and again, but when it started to snow we collected our turkey and moved on, once more shutting her door.

  Entering the gap of a small field beside the wood, we saw under the total whiteness of the snow-draped trees a cock pheasant resplendent in his colourful coat of rich, vivid feathers. He was magnificent in his gorgeous plumage with his elegant neck stretched out questioningly at our intrusion into his domain. Accompanying him were two less colourful hens and then another cock came out from behind a clump of snow-covered bushes quite near us. They filled the little field with their presence and we stood holding our breath for fear we might frighten them away. Then Clare had a brainwave.

  “Do you think,” she whispered, “that if we let the turkey out of the bag the cock pheasants would solve her problem?”

  But before we could try out her theory there was a sudden flutter of wings and they all disappeared into the wood.

  The greatest obstacle to be overcome on our journey was the river but luckily the water was low and we wobbled over large crossing stones having first flung the turkey across to the opposite bank, where she landed with a loud squawk. We came to the top of the last hill and looked back along the valley. There, under the trees, striding along at his leisure, was a big tawney fox.

  “That’s the boy,” said Clare, “that would solve all our turkey’s problems.” We pulled her head out through the hole in the bag and directed her gaze towards the fox, who looked enquiringly across the river at
us and then trotted off into the wood.

  Finally we reached our destination and Mrs Cleary relieved us of our burden. As she saw to the turkey’s needs we went into the warm kitchen where her daughter, who was about the same age as ourselves, gave us tea and buns she had just baked. As we had our tea Clare went to the back window of the kitchen, which overlooked the haggard, and gave us a running commentary on the turkey copulation outside. When Mrs Cleary was satisfied that all had been accomplished, our turkey was returned to us and we went home across the snow-covered fields, at a faster pace now as both the night and the snow were falling fast.

  Capeen

  BILL BROUGHT HIM late one winter’s night, curled up asleep in his tweed cap. He was tiny: pure white with one black ear and a black stumpy tail. I had never seen a puppy so small. Reaching out a timid finger to test if he was real, I felt his downy puppy hair; then he opened one black eye flecked with gold and peered up at me. A tiny, petal-soft tongue curled around my finger. Then he stretched out full length in the comfort of Bill’s cap but still he was not quite the length of it. Satisfied with his stretch, he sat up on his miniature hind legs and gave a cheeky little bark and I fell in love with him there and then. Bill handed him to me and he was mine, and I called him Capeen.

  Numerous dogs rambled around the farmyard: greyhounds – five or six of them – and a couple of sheepdogs, and a black gun dog called Darkie who went fowling with my father. My mother had a golden rule that none of them were allowed in the house, but Capeen broke that rule on his very first night. He was too small, I maintained, to go outside, and anyway the big dogs might attack him. He slept that night in a box of hay by the fire, where he was to remain for many nights, but when the weather got warmer in the summer I transferred him to a spare manger in the stable.