by Tom Phelan
“Stick that up in the hair of your arse,” he said.
Fifty yards beyond the Fitzpatricks’, the Furry Hill made a small dip in the road as it descended a shallow deposit of sand left by the last ice age. The furze-covered field on the left belonging to Isaac Thompson gave the hill its name. Most times we ran down the hill, where one dark Sunday morning on my way to serve mass I skidded on black ice and fell backward off my bike and onto my head. I spent several days in bed before I regained my equilibrium.
It was at the foot of the Furry Hill that Dad and I once caught up with his old friend Mister Bannon, home from England for the first time since the end of the First World War. Mister Bannon had fought in the trenches. In a rare display of emotion Dad almost jumped out of the horse’s cart when he saw the old soldier. They shook hands and spoke over each other in their excitement. Mister Bannon came home with us, and Mam invited him to stay for supper.
As we ate, one of the children said, “Tell us about the war?”
“Sure I will,” Mister Bannon said. “Once in Belgium me and a few lads caught an old hen and killed it. But we had no way to cook it until one of them wild lads from the Wicklow Mountains said he knew what to do. He cut off the legs and the head and plastered the whole thing, feathers and all, with muck. The rest of us gathered sticks and got a great fire going. Your man put the mucky ham into the middle of the blazes. After an hour he broke off the baked mud and there was the hen in its birthday suit. All its feathers had come off with the mud. Then he made a slit in its bum and the guts fell out in a ball. There was great aten, lads. I can still taste it.”
Not far from the Furry Hill, Rourke’s Bridge spanned Rourke’s deep drain. Drunken Uncle Paulie had caught pneumonia in that drain after riding his bike into it on a dark night. On our way home from school, when the water was shallow, we climbed down the bank, stood under the small bridge, and made echoes by whooping like Indians in the pictures.
Next we passed between two fields owned by Lar Dixon. In the drain on the far side of the fence of Murt’s field a grazing donkey had once become stuck in the deep muck, worked itself to death trying to get free, and for weeks polluted Laragh with its stink. Nobody could cover the dead animal with soil because the owner refused to allow anyone on his property.
“Don’t put one foot on my land. Don’t touch my drain or I’ll have the law on you!”
“It’s not your drain, you gobshite,” Dad said.
“Don’t put one of your feet on my property or I’ll have you arrested!”
Eventually, Dad and Podge Nolan rubbed some Vicks under their noses on the night of a half-moon and buried the donkey where it had died.
On the other side of the lane, in the Well Field, Lar Dixon’s horse had galloped in the dark into a handle of his misplaced plough and mortally wounded itself. We trailed our big sister around the corner and up onto the Canal Line. In single file we walked on the side of the lane farthest from the Canal Bank. We knew a boogie man lived in the weedy water waiting to grab children by the shoelaces and pull them in.
This branch of the Grand Canal was four and a half feet deep in the middle and thirty feet wide, except at the Harbour, where it was deeper and sixty feet wide to allow for barges to dock and turn. The Canal came to an end at the top of Laragh Lane. The Canal Company could fine people for damaging the banks, washing dogs, washing clothes, washing one’s person or the person of another, and for stealing water from the Canal.
Across the Harbour, a large, four-storied warehouse sat at the edge of the water like a rough-hewn Venetian palazzo. Above the high black doors in the center of the store’s facade, a large awning of corrugated iron allowed for the unloading of merchandise from the barges in wet weather.
We passed under the overhanging elderberry bush that Dad and the diminutive Canal inspector quarreled about. Dad told the inspector that the low-hanging branches knocked his hat off every time he trotted by in the pony-and-cart, and he asked him to cut them back. The inspector may have been minute in size, but in aggression he was a yellow-beaked cock blackbird defending his territory.
“That elderberry bush belongs to the Canal Company.”
“But it’s growing out over the lane. Couldn’t you cut it back?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll come up with my billhook and chop the whole thing down and throw it in the canal.”
“If you touch that bush I’ll have—”
“—the law with the full weight of the Canal Company’s lawyers after you,” Dad joined in.
Dad did not cut down the bush, but every time he went by he broke off a branch until he had established safe passage for his hat.
When the summers were dry, Dad “borrowed” water from the Canal for his cattle, first hauling it away in fifty-gallon drums and then eventually inserting a pipe through the Canal Bank to siphon off water. The children were used as lookouts for the little runt during the operation.
Where the Canal ended, a quay made of large coping stones allowed for the transferring of sacks of barley and turf from horses’ carts onto the barges. The lane turned sharply and ran between the edge of this quay and the Harbour Master’s two-story house with its overhanging eaves. Whenever the Harbour Master saw us approaching, he stepped away from supervising the loading of the barges to guide us safely through the horses and carts with their sacks of barley and creels of turf. On quiet mornings, his wife sometimes raised a window to say hello. But whenever she did, her unexpected and elevated voice never failed to give my sister a start.
“Holy mother of God!” she would cry, clasping her chest like she was at the Consecration of the mass.
Just beyond the house, Laragh Lane ran out onto Harbour Street. After a hundred yards of smooth macadamed surface we passed Mister Lowndes’s public house, grocery, and farm supply shop on the right. It was here Dad and Mam bought the weekly messages and animal feed. Mister Lowndes killed and butchered our pig every year and helped with the saving of our hay. In return, Dad loaned him horses and bogies when it was time for him to bring the hay home from his small farm. But there had been a disastrous falling-out.
As it did with many consumer items, the Irish government controlled the price of paraffin oil. On a certain Monday in the 1950s the cost of a gallon was set to increase by a halfpenny. On the Saturday before, I had been sent to Lowndes’s for paraffin. I was charged the new price. When Dad heard about it he spewed lava at Mister Lowndes. All commercial, social, and neighborly contact came to a sudden stop. Even Mam’s friendly relationship with Missus Lowndes was no longer sustainable.
What was it about this harmless error that caused Dad to react so angrily? I did not understand how one halfpenny could cause such a war. Later I would come to see that many people in rural Ireland did not have the skills to negotiate. Instead, confrontations were followed by avoidance, and the hard feelings went unresolved even as both parties settled into eternity, close together six feet below the surface of the local cemetery.
What caused my deep apprehension when passing Lowndes’s shop was not the halfpenny war; it was the spookiness I attached to the area after Peter Doheny smashed one of the plateglass windows in Lowndes’s shop with a heavy piece of wood. According to the schoolyard grapevine, Mister Doheny roared as he was subdued, tied up in a straitjacket, and brought to Saint Dympna’s Asylum in Carlow.
In my mind, I was unable to separate the anguished screams of Mister Doheny from the roars coming out of our middle house when Uncle Jack was subduing a fully grown bull. As if I had been at the scene, I heard Mister Doheny shouting while big men held him down on the hard road and rendered him as powerless as a Christmas turkey with its wings and feet strapped to its body. That area of Harbour Street forever retained the terror I imbued it with when I was a child peering at the harshness of life through the cracks in the protective walls the adults had built around me.
Across the street from Lowndes’s was a long, low thatched house with small curtained windows keeping watch on all who
passed by. Often on our way home from school, Missus Rourke was standing in the doorway, waiting to invite us in out of the rain or for a biscuit or to see newborn kittens or pups. Later I would wonder if she was trying to defuse the animosity that existed between her husband and Dad because of a drain, animosity that would flare into open war in times to come.
Harbour Street ran into Lord Edward Street, with Joey Hayden’s shop the boundary line. In one of Joey’s large windows a dusty pyramid of sun-faded Persil boxes maintained its balance for all the years of my elementary schooling. Across the street from the shop, Missus Cooney was often seen resting on her half-door. Her house was like a picture in the Peter Rabbit book Aunt Teresa had sent for my third birthday. The roof was thatch, the chimney smoke was blue, the walls were white, the quoins and window frames black. A pot of red geraniums sat on each of the two windowsills. “I knew your Mam and Dad when they were children,” Missus Cooney once told us.
Just beyond Missus Cooney’s was the row of attached, two-storied, redbrick houses called the Artisans’ Dwellings. Mister Duffy, shell-shocked in the First World War, lived in one of them. When his terrors overcame him, his shrieks and shouts were frightening, so we never walked on his side of the street. Farther along, another veteran, Mister Collins, struggled with crutches and an ill-fitting wooden leg. Sometimes we met Mick Kerwin, the postman, limping his way from door to door; he, too, had lost a leg in the war.
I envied the children who lived in the Artisans’ Dwellings. They had a tarred street to whip their tops and ride their bikes on; they didn’t have to keep looking down to avoid muck or dung as they walked. It would be a long time before I realized that not all the parents in those houses could afford whipping tops, let alone bicycles.
Near the far end of Lord Edward Street, the ancient John Nannery and his hunchbacked sister, Joan, ran a small sweet shop. When the schools closed, children crowded in to spend their pennies on Peggy’s Leg, Fizz Bags, Black Jack, Lucky Bags, and Bull’s Eyes. When someone muttered “Humpy” within the safety of a group, the shop was immediately cleared of the innocent and the guilty, and the children were told to come back in two at a time to buy their sweets.
Lord Edward Street split into a Y at Mansfield’s Pub. When I was in third class, I found a red sponge ball behind the ball alley at the National School. Fat Arthur Mansfield, who lived above the pub, tried to pull it out of my hands. When I wouldn’t give it up, he said, “If you don’t bring it to school tomorrow, I’ll paralyze you!”
I never told anyone at home about Fat Arthur, because I would have been commanded to give him the ball so he wouldn’t beat me up. After his threat, whenever I was sent to town for the messages, I gathered up speed on my bike as I neared Mansfield’s Pub just in case Fat Arthur was lurking.
Lord Edward’s right leg bent and went over the Owenass by way of the Convent Bridge and on toward the town. One night while standing at the parapet, drunken Uncle Paulie got tired carrying his box of weekly groceries and heaved it into the river below.
The Presentation Convent School abutted the riverbank. There I spent my first four years of school under the kind and patient tutelage of those dedicated nuns.
Lord Edward’s left leg became Connolly Street, and where that quickly became Acragar Road, the Boys’ National School sat behind a four-foot wall. Here were my Etonian playing fields, and here I also became acquainted with the casual violence and boisterous brutality of the schoolyard. Here Slieve Bloom could not be seen and I was left to find my own way in a strange world.
12
FIRST BABIES
All the Catholic children in Mountmellick began their formal education in the Presentation Convent School on the west bank of the Owenass River. The Protestant children, whom we Catholics never saw, had their own building farther up the town. It was the 1940s, and the Church was so afraid of defections that she forbade her members, under pain of mortal sin, from attending Protestant schools as well as weddings and funerals.
When I was four, I was placed in the “First Babies” classroom. After living on the outer edge of the town in semiseclusion with my siblings, I was intrigued by all the new faces. My teacher, Sister Genevieve, looked cross in her glinting glasses, but she was a kind woman who quietly convinced the frightened or crying or loose-sphinctered or unruly or already streetwise boys and girls that they were safe with her, that she would take care of them until their parents or older siblings came to take them home. She smelled like the flowers in Missus Fitz’s garden.
At lunchtime on my first day, I stood in the enclosed concrete schoolyard with my back to the pebble-dashed walls, watching a screaming whirlpool of children spinning around in the small playground, delighted at being released from the prison of classroom obedience. Soon I tentatively stepped into the outer circle and was quickly sucked into the rapturous eddy.
The appearance of an old, plump nun brought everyone to a sudden stop. With grandmotherly kindness spilling out of her deep wrinkles, Sister Conception held a dinner plate covered with tiny squares of buttered and jammed bread. Like chickens fluttering to a scattered handful of crushed oats, the children mobbed her and begged to be chosen. On that first day I got one of the tasty morsels, and when Sister Conception bent down to me, she said, “You’re Sister de Sales’s nephew, aren’t you? You’ll be a grand priest.”
My religious indoctrination began in Sister Genevieve’s class. I listened attentively and believed innocently. I was taught how to perform my first religious rite—making the sign of the cross.
“Children, you can only bless yourself with your right hand. It’s a sign of the devil to bless yourself with your left. Now, everyone, raise your right hand!” Half the class raised their left.
I learned that God is everywhere and that the sun shines and the rain falls because God causes everything to happen. I chanted the Hail Mary and the Glory Be. I learned to bow my head every time I said or heard the word “Jesus,” and I learned that my guardian angel walked beside me, protecting me from the devil. Sister showed us a picture of an angel with its wings spread over a sleeping child in a bedroom that looked far nicer than mine, one where there were no overcoats spread on the bed to keep the child warm. I learned I had to pray to my guardian angel every day: Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day, be at my side to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.
Our teacher also taught us songs and stories about crows and foxes and saints and hares and tortoises, ants and crickets, lions and mice. Sometimes the lions and mice and guardian angel and crows and foxes and saints became entangled in my head, and the lion became the mouse-saving guardian angel.
The class counted to ten while Sister Genevieve’s pointer hopped from number to number on the blackboard, and I found comfort in the recitation, in the sing-songedness of the voices. In the herd I was as good as everyone else.
In the First Babies classroom there were no smells of dampness or farmyard or dunghill. Instead, a snug atmosphere was created by the wood-paneled walls coated in linseed oil; wooden floorboards impregnated with decades of dust; sunbeams slanting down from window to floor; the nun’s eau de cologne; the new books and the children’s new school clothes.
But in this Eden there was a dragon. On that first day in school as I whirled in the playground with all the other screaming children, I fell and skinned my knees. Paddy Connors, a boy from the town, saw me struggling with tears. “You’re only an oul girl,” he shouted for all to hear. As I made my way to the wall he continued jeering, which soon attracted a chorus of blood-pecking fowl. “Oul girl! Oul girl! Oul girl!”
As much as I liked my classes, I did not enjoy the social aspect of school. Most of the pupils had been reared in the town, had to some extent grown up on the streets. While I was wearing my wellingtons, dressed in a hand-me-down smock, and doing my jobs in the farmyard, they had learned to play with each other—and fight with each other. And they knew who not to fight.
In glaring comparis
on, I was socially retarded. I did not know the rules of engagement, did not know being called a dirty oul farmer could be ignored. At first, I ran to adults for protection from children I found threatening, and this behavior, along with my being a farmer’s son, gave me the plumage of a different-colored bird, one who attracted the pecking beaks and sharp claws of the birds of a constant feather.
Paddy Connors evolved into the most aggressive bully during my years in elementary school. But I never told Mam and Dad about him, not even when he gave me the Indian torture, or knelt on my chest and flattened my nose with the palm of his hand, or put his hand up the leg of my short trousers and twisted my mickey.
On that first day of school, when Mam asked how I got on, I breathlessly told her, “Seanie McCoy fainted and fell out of his seat and onto the floor and got all white and the nun waved a book in front of his face to make the wind cold!”
13
THE PENNY CATECHISM
As a child I loved the feeling of conquest when I committed multiplication tables, poems, songs, and riddles to memory. But trying to memorize the answers to the Penny Catechism questions was as painful as forcing a path through a stand of blackthorn bushes on a dark winter’s night. Its words were assembled in lawyerly language unsuited to a young mind. There was no music, no rhythm, no comfort. Chanting the text in class quickly became a cacophony as thirty children wrestled with tongue-tying words that were coal cinders in the mouth: ex cathedra, eucharistic, plenary, absolution, contrition, conception, canonization, resurrection, Transfiguration, Annunciation, Assumption, transubstantiation, consubstantiation, venial, mystical, infallibility, brimstone, purgatory, adultery, penitential, matrimonial, temporal, conditional, Beelzebub, calumny, Pentecost, indulgences, Epistle, Epiphany, Extreme Unction, seraphim, cherubim, dominions, principalities.