Quench the Lamp Page 9

  The best of all the fairs was the horse fair which took place only twice a year, in spring and autumn, and at which the amounts of money involved were much greater. Most farmers had two horses, and sometimes a pony for doing handy jobs like going to the creamery; donkeys, too, were very plentiful. All the farmers from the surrounding countryside came into town and were joined there by hordes of tinkers from all over the country who brought colour and excitement with them. Often, after many hours of drinking, they would finish off the day with a big fight, either between themselves or by taking on a few locals who were brave enough or, more likely, drunk enough to get involved. Sometimes a fight that had started between a tinker man and his wife could gather momentum and participants as it went on, and then the women would be likely to turn and throw in their lot with their menfolk. Sometimes, too, those who had started as opponents could join forces against locals who had perhaps gone to the assistance of one of them who had seemed to be losing the battle.

  All in all the horse fair was an occasion of much commotion in the town when hard bargaining and great drinking combined as old friends put the world to rights over big, frothy pints. Sawdust and straw was thrown on the pub floors to absorb the muck coming in on the farmers’ boots. At one of these fairs my father met an old friend down from the hills and they went for a pint where the old man smoked a pipe and spat continuously into the sawdust. The lady of the house was fussier than most and viewed old Jack with growing contempt until finally she brought from behind the counter a large spittoon, an item designed for such occasions and the likes of Jack. But Jack had never before seen a spittoon, and so ignored it completely and continued to spit on the floor, though she moved it around many times trying to place it in the most strategic position to serve its purpose. Finally old Jack, in a fit of annoyance at her antics, shouted at her, “Woman, if you don’t take that blasted thing out of my way I’ll spit into it!”

  At the end of the town was Kate Brady’s doss-house, where anybody who had no bed to go to, or who was unable to make it back to his home, found refuge. Kate had one enormous room with a wooden floor free of the clutter of furniture. She had a stick of white chalk with which she drew out each person’s allotment, and she maintained law and order with a blackthorn crop. On a quiet night sleeping space was ample and guests could stretch out in comfort, but when times were busy things tightened up as the night progressed.

  Our journey to and from the local secondary school helped us absorb many aspects of the life of the town. The school had been set up by a young graduate whose father had taught in our old national school in the fields. He and his wife and sister rented an old house and two rooms in a local hall. These two buildings – their house and the school – were around the corner from each other and there was much running back and forth past the Catholic church, which stood on the corner. Usually we had about four teachers and our number must have been around a hundred, so we all knew each other pretty well.

  Academic achievement was not high on our list of priorities and, though the teachers applied as much pressure as they thought necessary, I never regarded exams as something to get excited about. For some strange reason I enjoyed doing them and felt that I could always do better when there was just the challenge of the paper and myself. My father was not greatly interested in examination results, and that took pressure off us. There was one boy in our class who had a father who was very anxious that he do well and I felt quite sympathetic towards him as not only had he the exam to contend with but a father looking over his shoulder as well.

  We covered all the usual subjects, but Latin and Maths were my two heartbreakers. “Mensa” and “agricola” had no magic for me and I got thoroughly fed up translating Virgil back and forth. As for algebra and the mystery of how A plus B equalled C, it was like the Blessed Trinity to me and beyond human comprehension. I came to the conclusion that when God had created my brain he had omitted the mathematical department, and the only interest I ever had in Einstein was when I heard that he, too, had found school difficult. True or not, it at least brought a human dimension to him.

  English was my special love and I was fortunate enough to have a teacher blessed with both brilliance and impatience; her love of English and her striving for perfection triggered her annoyance at the struggle she encountered in trying to drag us to some kind of literary heights. She put everything she possessed into teaching, but it was not until years later that any of us appreciated her efforts.

  Christian Doctrine was the subject of a novel approach, in which one teacher brought a dozen song-books into class and for half an hour every day we raised the roof with a mixture of rebel songs and hymns. Whatever about the religious content of the class we certainly associated it with zest and enjoyment.

  Our school being so convenient to the church, we were roped in to contribute long Latin chants whenever there was a High Mass for the dead. We made an enthusiastic group of mourners in our enjoyment at the thought of the classes we were missing. On 2 November we did rounds for the Holy Souls, a custom which consisted of going into the church, saying a prescribed number of prayers, coming out and going back in again to repeat the performance. Our religious fervour increased as lunch-hour extended into school-time, and we hailed souls out of purgatory by the dozen. My father was always very sceptical about these rounds: when I came home from school and announced to him that I had so many rounds under my belt, he would give a wry smile at what he called “the whole crazy carry-on”.

  However, I had great faith in the power of novenas and prayer, and exam time was when I sought divine intervention most intensely. I had a novena for each subject, and St Patrick was the man in charge of Latin; someone had informed me that he had found Latin very difficult and had promised to help anyone with similar difficulties. My prayers were not motivated by any ambition to become a Latin scholar, but the idea of a silent army of saints waiting to be called into action appealed greatly to me. So, St Patrick was appointed Dean of Languages and in the event he came up trumps.

  “Alice Taylor,” my teacher asked, “how did you get honours in Latin? There must be some mistake.”

  But there was no mistake and it did not surprise me one bit, because my mother had always believed that prayer could move mountains, not to mind conquering Virgil.

  The supervisor for our Inter Cert exam, which was conducted in the local dance-hall, was an old dragon who had me terrified but who failed to intimidate one of the boys sitting next to me. As the exam progressed he constantly checked his facts from a book which he drew from inside his coat. When I challenged him outside about the risk he was taking he just laughed and said, “Sure, I didn’t give a damn whether she caught me or not.”

  The last subject in the exam was drawing from natural form. A more lenient supervisor would have told us the subject matter beforehand, but our dragon remained tight-lipped. She had reckoned, however, without the resourcefulness of my cool copying friend. He went into the garage underneath the hall and persuaded one of the mechanics to reverse a car under the trap-door in the floor. Standing on top of the car he was able to get into the hall through the trap-door and he reappeared moments later with the news that a wallflower standing in a vase was all set up for the next sitting. At that stage the knowledge was unlikely to benefit us but we did feel a delightful sense of victory over our rigid lady supervisor.

  Half-way through my secondary education a new school was acquired when an old Church of Ireland church became available. This was divided up into classrooms and for the first time we were all accommodated under one roof. Here the partition walls reached a height of only about twelve feet – far short of the ceiling – so the hum from the other classes could be heard in each classroom; we were able to gauge the tempers of all the teachers from the tones coming over the partition. Oak rafters arched high above our heads and sunken windows in thick, ancient walls gave the church a special atmosphere. Our nearest neighbours were the Protestants, including Sarah Curran, who had worshipped here and
who now rested eternally beneath the trees beside the church. While they might have regarded learning as a suitable replacement for praying, they must surely have turned in their graves at the din created by scores of boisterous youngsters now stampeding around their once quiet and hallowed corner.

  For five years we walked the hilly road into secondary school, carrying our books in sacks on our backs or by hand in cases, and we got to know the people in the houses along the way. In the main street of the town was a little bakery where fresh doughnuts were baked every Thursday and the smell, which met us as we came down the street, set our mouths watering. Later, on a winter’s evening we might sink our teeth into warm sugary doughnuts, and the eating of them shortened our journey.

  When we arrived home one of us would dish up the dinner my mother had left warming by the fire and another would light the tilly heater to heat the large upstairs bedroom set aside for study. After dinner we tidied up and lit the tall tilly lamp which stood on the dressing-table in the study bedroom. In the light from the lamp the brass knobs of the two iron beds glinted in the corner of the room. The table at which we laboured wobbled and groaned with books, and often its wood-worm tracks developed many and varied expressions as idle pencils investigated hidden tunnels rather than explore the books on its surface.

  We studied here until supper-time at about seven o’clock, taking it in turns to go down and set the table and have things ready for the adults when they came in from milking the cows. And then, for the first time in the day, we all came together and discussed over supper the day’s happenings. Afterwards we returned upstairs, though occasionally a good programme on the radio might draw our attention, and usually we finished our day at about ten o’clock when we came downstairs for cocoa and a chat. The rovers, as we called visiting neighbours, would be sitting around the fire, from which my father was often missing, having himself gone roving to another house. Soon, however, everyone returned to their own homes and then my mother got us all on our knees for the rosary.

  Quench The Lamp

  THE PACE OF life was slow for those who grew up with oil lamps and candles. It was not advisable to go rushing around in candle-light as the way forward was not brightly lit and you could easily bump into various shadowy objects which would suddenly bring you to a painful standstill. Candle-light was kind, however, to ageing faces, cobwebs and bad housekeeping, its soft, flickering glow casting gentle shadows over many a blemish, human and otherwise. Old Tom, one of our neighbours, always advised against buying a horse or choosing a wife in candle-light, for they were the two principal occasions in life on which he felt you needed the harsh reality of daylight to guide you.

  He never chose a wife himself and his reason for not doing so was a trifle unusual. Females, he said, were either Sunday girls or Monday girls. Sunday girls looked good but Monday girls were good, and the bonus in life was to get a Monday girl who looked like a Sunday girl. He never succeeded himself so he remained a bachelor, and because he was of my father’s generation he declared that the tide had now gone out for him. He was an only son with seven sisters so the female of the species held no mystery for him. All his sisters had long gone from his home and he came visiting to our house most nights. Tom liked female company and perhaps our house, with so many girls in it, reminded him of his childhood.

  As we grew older we began to be trusted with candles in our rooms and we fastened them to the iron bed-heads with pools of hot candle-grease. One of the greatest disadvantages of candles was the candle-grease that inevitably flowed freely on to everything in the house but mostly on to floors. Once a week we young ones were dispatched upstairs with blunt knives to scrape the candle-grease off the bedroom floors. It was a tedious job but for some strange reason it did not make us any more careful not to spill grease back on the same floors the following week. Maybe we were slow learners.

  Often we read late into the night by candle-light, which bathed the bed in a soft yellow light and left the rest of the room full of flickering shadows. One night my sister Clare fell asleep with the candle alight on her bedside table, to be awakened hours later by the heat of a blaze beside her. She quenched the leaping flames quickly by smothering them in the heavy quilt off her bed, and luckily the result was nothing more serious than a burnt-up table-top and a scorched foot caused when she stepped on a red-hot scissors that had fallen through the table.

  My father was never told about such calamities, because any such news would trigger off such a litany of his crucifixions that it was simpler and more desirable to keep him in the dark. How he and his easy-going wife had finished up with five daughters hell-bent on cracking his nerves was one of the mysteries of life which he would often ponder. If reincarnation had been on his list of beliefs and if choice had been involved, there were days on which he would gladly have opted for the life of a monk, the more silent and enclosed the order and the more distant from us the better.

  As dusk gathered into the kitchen on a winter’s evening, we would ask mother, “Is it time to light the lamp yet?” Earlier in the day the globe of the lamp had been washed with lukewarm soapy water and polished with a soft cloth or newspaper. The base had been filled with paraffin oil and the wick had been trimmed. All was done in readiness for the night because leaving these jobs till the natural light had gone could lead to breakages in the dusk, to overflowing oil and to frayed tempers as a consequence. The top of the wick, which had been burned black the night before, was trimmed off with a sharp scissors, and if the wick had burned out the new one had to have time to soak up the oil before being lit. Sometimes it was put down into the bowl of the lamp on the last night of the old wick. The paraffin oil itself was brought regularly in an oil can from town, and if it was forgotten the neighbours could always be depended on to come to the rescue.

  At first the wick was kept down low after lighting to give the globe a chance to warm slowly, because sudden heat could crack it. A hairpin was sometimes hung on top of the globe to prevent this happening. Gradually the wick could be turned up, changing the soft yellow to a white glow, and then the shade was put on, softening the glow and diffusing the light evenly around the room from its position in an iron basket attached to the wall. When the large open fire was built up with logs and turf its leaping flames added to the lamp-light. Before going to bed, if some of her household were still abroad, my mother turned the lamp down low and left it to provide a soft welcome home to the latecomer.

  A second oil lamp was kept in the parlour, and this was a rich relation of the kitchen model. It had a heavy, cream-coloured glass bowl embossed with green and pink flowers, and an elegant brass stand. The pink colour of the lampshade matched the base and was delicately fluted around the top in a way that always made me think of a ballerina doing a head-stand.

  When the lamp was lit it bathed our parlour in a muted pink light, warming up the old bog-oak sideboard with its varied assortment of family treasures on top, including the gramophone. The dark marble fireplace shone in the lamp-light, which was reflected in the mirror above the mantelpiece. On either side of the mirror stood two ebony, semi-nude male figures which had been brought back from foreign parts by someone in an earlier generation of our family. My mother was not particularly partial to displaying semi-nude males in her parlour, but their antiquity gave them a metaphorical clothing of respectability and so she tolerated their presence. On the mantelpiece, too, were a little silver lady’s shoe and two pink-and-white china ones.

  The floorboards in the parlour were polished around a central square of lino decorated with roses, which was almost obscured by an enormous oak table which matched the sideboard. The walls were distempered in a pale pink colour and white, lace curtains hung from a long pole over the single window. The curtains were mostly for decorative purposes as you could see in through them if you so desired, and the cream, tasselled blind that hung in the recess of the window was seldom drawn. The table dominated the room and was surrounded by curved-back chairs with black leather seats. On the e
nd wall, opposite the fireplace, hung a painting of my paternal grandmother, a smiling-faced woman with bobbed white hair who looked down on us with smiling eyes from a serenely beautiful face. A portrait of her husband, a tall, stern-looking bearded gentleman, hung on the wall beside the window, while a painting of my parents on their wedding day hung over the sideboard. Beside the fireplace and sunk into the deep wall was my mother’s ware press, from which I often stole lump sugar, the presence of which was supposed to be known to her alone.

  Between the press and the fireplace stood the rocking-chair: comfortable and ample, it was my idea of heaven to cuddle up in its many feather cushions, rocking back and forth, watching the fire casting shadows along the ceiling. I always felt that the pictures on the walls came alive then and no matter where I hid in the room my father’s eyes seemed to follow me, for even on his wedding day he had apparently been alert for impending disaster. But my favourite picture was the one of my grandmother, who seemed to smile kindly on me. When I asked my father once how such a calm-looking woman had had such a temperamental son, he smiled and said, “The balance of nature: don’t ever marry somebody of the same temperament as yourself – the blend of opposites is a better combination.” I concluded from that that he took after his father. A great admirer of fine trees, fine horses and fine-looking women, he was inclined to be blunt. Once when a neighbour married a very plain-looking man my father sighed and said, “My God, they’ll have to put all their daughters under the table.”

  The parlour was used for the Stations and visitors, and I loved it when the fire was lit there, awaiting family gatherings of one kind and another. When my older sisters left home and brought back friends to stay, they ate in the parlour and I always acted as parlour-maid because then I could listen in to fascinating grown-up conversations about boyfriends and falling in love. Until then I had only come across such things in books, but in the parlour I encountered them in real life, though at second hand. When my sisters graduated to bringing home boyfriends it was better again because then I could enjoy a close-up view of the real thing. The parlour was thus my first step towards the world outside or, rather, it was when the world outside began to come in under my curious gaze.