by Tom Phelan
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To my sisters
In loving memory of
Annie, JohnJoe, and my brothers
AUTHOR’S NOTE
We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It presents my own recollections. I understand that others may have memories of the events described here that are different from my own. Some names and characteristics have been changed, and some of the dialogue has been re-created.
For readers unfamiliar with the Irish vernacular or farming terms, a glossary is provided on page 201.
1
JOHNJOE’S CLEVER PLAN
In the early 1930s, my father, JohnJoe Phelan, having borne the dictatorship of his father until the old man died and having buried his aged mother in the local cemetery two years later, became the master of his own destiny and the owner of a farm in Laragh, one-half mile from the town of Mountmellick in County Laois.
Mointeach Milic, which the British corrupted to Mountmellick, means the “marshy land beside the bog.” JohnJoe’s farm was fifty-two boggy acres that, as he himself said, were so soft they could be tilled with the belt of a blackthorn bush.
A few years before his parents died, JohnJoe began planning for his future. He knew that upon their deaths, he would have to get his sister, Molly, out of the house so he could bring in a new mistress—a wife. He already had his eye on Annie Hayes, a young woman who lived on the far end of the town in a cottage on the edge of the marsh but still in the bog.
JohnJoe was a good planner; he had a plan.
His distant cousin Kate Larkin, an aged spinster living in the townland of Aganloo, was the sole survivor of a farm-owning family. Kate was also related to JohnJoe’s uncle Pake Nugent, whom JohnJoe disliked immensely. “Pake’s nothing but a land grabber!” he would snipe.
With the future relocation of Molly on his mind and Kate Larkin within a death rattle of the grave, JohnJoe bought a strawberry-jam Swiss roll and set off one Sunday morning in his pony-and-trap to travel the eight miles to Aganloo. Upon arrival, he made tea for Kate and himself, then sweetened his cousin’s toothless mouth with the Swiss roll. “Ah, JohnJoe,” she said, “this cake is nice and aisy on me oul gums.”
JohnJoe went down on one knee before the ailing woman. “Sure, Kate, I have a favor to ask of ye. I’ll have a hard time getting a wife as long as Molly is living at home with me. Would ye ever think of leaving yer house and farm to her?”
Kate generously told him to arise. “JohnJoe, I’ll be changing me will tomorrow, and when I’m wearing me shroud, this place will be Molly’s. I’m just sorry I’ll miss yer weddin.”
JohnJoe sliced the rest of the Swiss roll and placed it on a chair convenient to his benefactress. Then he set out for home, his success bearing him up. But as his pony trotted down Kate Larkin’s avenue, he met Pake Nugent coming up the road on his rattling bike. JohnJoe assumed that Pake, with five sons and four daughters, was about to ask Kate for her farm.
“Did you bring her anything, Pake?” JohnJoe called. “I brought her a Swiss roll.”
“Maybe she’ll give me a bit,” Pake shouted back.
“It’ll be the only thing she can give you!”
JohnJoe could not contain himself, and he roared out laughter as loud as the bawl of a mare ass.
Not long after JohnJoe’s visit to Aganloo, old Kate breathed her last, and soon Molly immigrated to the Larkin farm, JohnJoe driving his horse-and-cart with beds, mattresses, and a few other sticks. His sister drove on ahead in the pony-and-trap; Molly would not be seen in a horse’s cart in close proximity to an equine arse. After all, she was now a landowner.
Free of his sister, JohnJoe wiped the muck and the cow dung off his wellingtons and set about entrapping Annie Hayes in his amorous plans.
2
JOHNJOE GETS A WIFE
On the day JohnJoe Phelan and Annie Hayes met at a camogie game, they were not total strangers. Both belonged to the Gaelic League, and at a language class in the Mountmellick Boys School one evening, Annie had seen JohnJoe gaping at her across the crowded room. She had been casting furtive glances at the good-looking lad since the course had begun. Now she lowered her gaze and hoped he hadn’t seen her blushing.
At the local GAA field some wolfish and sex-starved young men attended every camogie match in the hope a gym slip might flare and give them a glimpse of thigh. But JohnJoe wasn’t wolfish, and besides, he was only interested in one particular girl. Even though he was inclined to be shy, he drew on what reserves of daring he possessed and walked away from his friends. Soon he “accidentally” encountered Annie Hayes, who was standing alone on the sidelines watching the game through her round-lensed, metal-framed glasses and holding a notebook and a pencil.
I can imagine JohnJoe said something romantic like, “What’s wrong wich ya? Why aren’t ya out on the playing field?”
Annie would have told him that without her glasses she couldn’t see the camogie ball.
“So that’s why you’re secretary of the club?”
“Yes, and I hear you’re a big shot on the selection committee for the county minor hurling team.”
“I used to be.”
“Oh?”
“Last Monday I proposed Paddy Ruschitzko for the team, but the chairman didn’t even look at me. ‘I can’t spell that name,’ he said. Then he shouted, ‘Next!’ I said I’d spell it for him but he ignored me and called out ‘Next!’ again. I went up to the table and shouted, ‘Is it that you’re as thick as a double ditch that you can’t spell? Or is it that you’re saving a place on the team for your two-ton son who wouldn’t know one end of a hurley from the other?’ Then I went home.”
Annie would not have known then that she had just heard JohnJoe’s method of dealing with people he considered unfair: assault them with anger and forever after not speak to them because he lacked the tools to rebuild the bridge he had blown up. JohnJoe and Annie would be married and have a child before she realized that in confrontational situations, her husband behaved like a blind man striking out at a biting dog with his stick, hitting himself on the shins and knees as often as he hit the dog.
When the camogie match ended, JohnJoe invited Annie to go with him to the Rock of Dunamaise on the following Sunday. As the blood rushed to her face, Annie managed to croak out, “I’ll go if I can borrow a bicycle. I’ll let you know Sunday after the eight o’clock mass.”
A few days later, when Annie saw JohnJoe in the crowded churchyard, she shook her head, then turned to go home. JohnJoe quick-stepped after her, and when he touched her elbow, she whispered, “People will see us.”
“Could you not get a bike?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then I’ll carry you on the bar of my bike.”
“No. If people see me on the bar of your bike they’ll think we’re—”
“We’re what?”
JohnJoe hoped Annie would say “courting.” It would establish an understanding between them.
“You know—”
JohnJoe quickly said, “I’ll meet you at the Level Crossing with an extra bike at eleven.”
“But people will see us and talk.”
“When I give you the bike you can head around by the railway bridge, and I’ll ride back through
the town. I’ll be waiting at Carn Bridge.”
“But if we meet someone on the way, they’ll tell everyone we’re hedging and ditching.”
This was in an era of church- and society-enforced chastity, when the only place a young couple might be alone was in the countryside under a hedge or in a dry ditch. The local priest had recently declared from the pulpit, “There’s too much hedging and ditching in this parish, so I’ll be out with me blackthorn stick every night from now on.”
JohnJoe reassured Annie of his pure intentions. “Sure, someone would have to see us in a hedge or a ditch first. We’ll be on our bikes.”
She finally agreed to go.
A half mile north of the railway crossing, Annie’s home in the townland of Derrycloney was two miles from JohnJoe’s. There, in a three-roomed, thatched cottage she lived with her six siblings and her parents, Martha and Tom. Tom Hayes was a cantankerous fellow who drank most of his wages and demanded his wife boil a brown egg for his breakfast each day. Only a brown egg would suit. What he didn’t know was that Martha often served him a white egg that she’d boiled in leftover tea.
Most days when Tom came home from a day of turning barley in Codd’s storage building, he was either nasty in his drunkenness or nasty in his craving. Once, after drinking bad poteen, he staggered into the house wielding a pitchfork. Sixteen-year-old Annie tackled him, knocked him to the floor, and twisted the weapon out of his hands.
Despite the poverty of the Hayes cottage, Annie attended the girls’ secondary school in Mountmellick. Perhaps some nun in the National School had recommended her and she’d been taken on as a charity case. But she only spent two years in the groves of academe.
“Here comes the scholar,” Tom Hayes would jeer. “The scholar reads books while her father kills himself working. . . . Silence in the house when the scholar walks in!” Defeated by her father’s constant belittling, Annie left school.
In June 1936, ten months after their meeting at the camogie match, Annie and JohnJoe were married at the 7:30 a.m. mass in the Mountmellick parish church.
In my parents’ wedding photo, the youthful JohnJoe’s wry smile betrays his discomfort at being out of his farming clothes. Pretty Annie is smiling, her skirt and coat at her calves, her brimmed hat at an angle.
The reception was held in Derrycloney in the front garden of the Hayes cottage, where one of Annie’s brothers, my uncle Paulie, took his first sip of alcohol and began the ruination of his life.
As a wedding present JohnJoe gave his bride a red ten-shilling note. He and Annie spent their two-day honeymoon in the Clarence Hotel in Dublin, and Annie ventured forth into the intimidating city to buy clothes for her sisters and brothers. While he waited for her near the shops, JohnJoe leaned over the wall of the River Liffey, watching the boats on the water below. In that position, no smart aleck visiting the city from Mountmellick would notice his choking shirt collar or his tie and tiepin and pass embarrassing remarks:
“Did ya stay up all night, JohnJoe?”
“Keep yer boots on fer a bye, JohnJoe; socks for a gerl.”
When the honeymoon was over, Annie took up residence on JohnJoe’s farm in Laragh. Forever after, she savored the remembrance of her extraction from Derrycloney and her arrival in her new house with its seven rooms, including a parlor with a wooden floor.
3
THE JUBILEE NURSE
Nurse Byrne was the sparrow that killed Cock Robin with her bow and arrow. Hiding in the elderberry bush near the Harbour Master’s house on the Canal Line, her quiver slung across her back, she let fly and sank an arrow into the chest of the bully who thought he was cock of the walk. Little grey and red feathers flew up in the air and floated across the canal like the tiny sails of tiny ships.
In my childish mind, Nurse Byrne and that bushwhacking sparrow were one; the robin was every bully. Birdlike in her shape, eyes, and movements, Nurse Byrne was a tightly wound package of energy. Even at mass on Sundays she was never seen dressed in anything except the feathers of the Jubilee Nurse—navy blue stockings, dress, cardigan, overcoat, and hat. Her gloves and shoes were black.
Nurse Byrne concocted an ointment called Nurse Byrne’s Cream. P. J. Walsh, MPSI, sold it in his chemist’s shop in round cardboard tubs with her name on the lid. Whenever I heard about a fly in the ointment, I thought the fly was stuck in Nurse Byrne’s tub of cream sitting ever ready on the high mantelpiece in our kitchen. Dad rubbed the ointment on cows’ dugs when they were sore. He used it, too, to take the squeak out of the wheels of the winter hay cart. When I got ringworm on my face, the ointment was rubbed on every day, and a “special” medal from the nuns was held against my face, too. Later, Mam told the nuns that the medal had worked a miracle.
Nurse Byrne darted beak-first into other people’s misfortunes. “Open the door, Mister, and if your wife has any marks on her I’ll get Long Tom down here in two shakes.” Guard Thomas McGoldrick was called Long Tom to distinguish him from Guard Oliver McGoldrick, who was called Spuds. Dad said Spuds carried a bag of potatoes in the seat of his trousers.
Nurse Byrne washed the dead with Lifebuoy soap and blocked their orifices with wads of cotton wool. She dressed the corpses in their shrouds and positioned them in their beds in preparation for their waking. Except in Protestant houses, she weaved a set of rosary beads through the cold fingers and clamped the dead hands together in an attitude of prayerful humility for eternity. “And don’t light a fire in the wake room.”
She spent a lot of her time on her bike wobbling around deep potholes in mucky country lanes in Mountmellick’s environs. Much of her life was spent in kitchens rubbing ointment on children with various ailments. Sometimes she dosed a child like Dad dosing a sick cow out of a long-necked bottle, the cow’s head pulled to one side and up, the eyes bulging—Dad’s two fingers up the cow’s nostrils to hold the head steady. Even though tears ran down the child’s face and he tried to wiggle away, Nurse Byrne always won because of the fierceness of her eyes and the sharpness of her bird tongue and the strength of her tiny wings, and the medicine went into the mouth and down the throat without a drop spilled. “Now, that wasn’t too bad, was it, child? You’ll be better before you can say Jack Robinson.”
For noisy chests and suppurating wounds and boils, she made poultices from a mixture of hot bran and goose grease. Goose grease was also rubbed into sprained ankles before they were tightly bound in bandages cut from white flour sacks. She used guilt and guile on farmers to give her dry bran and goose grease for poorer families. Out of her own pocket, she bought jars of sweet and gooey Mountmellick Malt and brought them to houses where the children were not thriving. “Now, that’s not for spreading on bread. It’s for the children; one spoon each in the morning and before bed.”
She stood up to big men, fluttering her wings while she pecked at them for abusing their wives and children with their porter drinking. “There’s no bigger eejit than a drunk father; hanging is too good for you, Mister. Shame on you! Shame on you!”
She had the same respect for the poor and not-poor, and if a tongue-lashing was deserved, then it was fearlessly delivered. She shouted at Father Kelly in public for allowing his dog to run free and knock Missus Fitz off her bike and break her hip, reduced him by her form of address: “If you can’t control your dog, Mister Kelly, then don’t keep a dog. You have no respect for other people.”
The nurse dressed the ulcerated legs of women who had borne too many children. She changed bandages for farmers who injured themselves with machinery. She cut fishhooks out of eyebrows and lips. She sewed up scrotums that had been ripped on the barbs of barbed wire.
“Ah, Nurse, shure I’m too shy to show ya me bag.”
“Mister,” she’d reply, with hands on hips, “you don’t have a bag; you have a scrotum, and I see scrotums hanging out of dogs and bulls and asses and horses every day. There’s nothing special about yours. Take off your trousers and stop thinking your scrotum is any better than a stray dog’s.”
&n
bsp; She dressed wounds caused by flesh-ripping saws, finger-squashing hammers, bone-piercing chisels, through-the-foot crowbars, awkwardly swung mallets, through-the-hand awls, cutting-to-the-bone fishing lines, stepped-on glass, drunken falls from bikes, hand-squashing iron-shod cart wheels, flesh-eating drums of turnip pulpers, piercing slivers of wood from the blades of wielded hatchets, and stepped-on rusty nails, which required the administration of an injection.
“Be a man, for God’s sake! It’s only a needle. Try giving birth to a baby someday and you’ll know what pain is.”
She repaired those who’d been kicked by horses and gored by horns or who had done a bad job of trying to kill themselves. “If you don’t come to see me before you try this again, I won’t lay you out for your wake and you’ll lie there in the bed all crooked with your eyes bulging and your tongue hanging out, and your water leaking out of you and stinking, and won’t that be a grand sight for your mother and father!”
Like Dad pulling calves out of cows, Nurse Byrne pulled three generations of babies out of their mothers in Mountmellick and its surrounding townlands. To some houses she brought her own towels and only demanded warm water. When she delivered me and slapped my bottom I cried so loudly that she muttered, “This lad has a voice that would fill a church.”
Those were the first words spoken about me ex utero. Because it was the Jubilee Nurse who uttered them, the Oracle at Delphi had spoken. I imprinted on the church like a chicken imprinting on the duck that has accidentally hatched it out. The course of my life was set before the slime and blood of birth had even been cleaned off me. The nurse’s words became so firmly attached to me that four years later, on my first day in school, I was told by three nuns that I would make a lovely priest. Pious believers had taken the midwife’s words and run before me, preparing my way and making straight the highway to the priesthood.