By the buachaills and the cáilins on the Deck beside the Road.
A word of praise for Thomas Kirk, he gave the timber free,
And the joiner Tommy Murray, he left it as you see.
But the Scotsman, Tom Gilmartin, his praise we all echoed,
For the ground, he gave it gratis, for the Deck beside the Road.
And God forbid I would forget our Local Committee,
There is Bernard Owen and Tommy, Joe Nugent and Frank Fee,
These learned men of talents great, made out of rules or code,
Which was enforced most stringent on the Deck beside the Road.
The good priest listened for a while and then he said: he thought
These round dances were an awful curse, and ruin often brought
To maidens young and innocent, of grief a heavy load.
So I can’t give my consent to have this Deck beside the Road.
The Committee looked sorrowful, a tear hung from each eye,
When John Garvey to his Reverence he made this quick reply:
‘Oh, Father dear, at seven o’clock each lass to her abode
Must go without a sweetheart from the Deck beside the Road.’
‘Now John, act to your promise and you’ll have my consent.’
With three cheers for the sagart, it’s cheerful home they went,
The messengers they were despatched, on bicycles astrode,
To tell the boys and girls about the Deck beside the Road.
And on the Sunday after, what groups assembled there
From Dundalk, Carrick, Crossmaglen, and Louth too sent its share.
James Drumgoole set them in motion, how sweet his music flowed
Across the bogs and rushes from the Deck beside the Road.
John Duffy, the young tailor, danced jigs, aye nine or ten,
Outclassing Grant the Champion from dear old Crossmaglen.
But, on my oath, the Muckler Grant when Sweet Moll Roe he told
He had the widows smiling at the Deck beside the Road.
Now, when the dance is over, see the cáilins with their pails
Milking the cows upon the hills and in the flowery vales,
And hear them chat about the dance as home they bear their load
Across the stiles and boreens from the Deck beside the Road.
My blessings on each lad and lass who loves an Irish dance,
And my curse upon the men who first commenced the Game of Chance,
For from my trouser-pocket where some shillings bright were stowed
They disappeared last Sunday at the Deck beside the Road.
Now the last dancing-board, or crossroads or roadside dancing-deck that I remember seeing in all its glory was on the Boa Island in Lough Erne: and that was sometime in the 1930s. Although I must not forget the Square at the top of Roquey Rocks in Bundoran where, when the weather was behaving itself, Irish dancing was, and may still be, excellently performed.
The commercial dancehall killed such places, with the oddest ally in the old-style clergy who did not like the idea of the open-air dances when the dusk came on and the couples might fade out, when their blood was up, into the fields and hedgerows to do all sorts of sinful deeds. The idea was, in those innocent days, that if the young must dance at all (and the young and quite a few of the old will insist on dancing) then they had better do it in the parish hall and under proper supervision. Improper supervision would be no use at all. And how long is it now since to dance after midnight on one side of the river (or what the E.S.B. left of the river) in Ballyshannon was a sin. But on the other side of the river you could dance until dawn rose and your feet fell off, and your immortal soul not be one bit the worse for wear. Nowadays the College of Cardinals and the Choirs of Angels, all armed with electric guitars, could hardly make their voices heard to supervise or anything else in a discotheque – although their costumes and, perhaps, the angelic hairstyles, could attract admiring attention.
The poets long ago cast an eye on the roadside dancingdecks. And it is most likely that the anonymous author of ‘Sé Dubhach é Mo Chas’ was thinking of some such place when he wrote the lines that J.J. Callanan upset so well into the English:
With the dance of fair maidens
The evening they will hallow,
While this heart once so warm
Shall be cold in Cluan Meala.
And John McEnaney, the Bard of Callenberg, in his pursuit of the proper study of mankind and with an occasional dart at justifying the ways of God to man, did write the great poem, or song, which we have just read, or sung.
The Bard of Callenberg, as we have noted, was against gambling because of sad experience. He was also against drink even if he did like it and caroused a bit. For when he was inviting friends to come to his wedding reception in Paddy Kavanagh’s village of Inniskeen he promised them music but warned them severely against he dangers of drink. Listen to him:
But if you like sweet music I pray you do come down
To hear Fiddler Conor Cumiskey and B. Murray of Stonetown.
We’ll treat you to the very best. But your whistle you can’t wet
With whiskey, ale or porter. Too soon you might regret.
So is you come to Inniskeen you’ll return home, I think,
With a firm resolution to ne’er give way to drink.
He was also against the British Empire and for the gallant Boers and General de Wet. He was all for love of country and for love of a girl called the Star of Inniskeen, whom it would seem that he married, against the opposition of many fellow bards of The Donegal Democrat. And as far as I can judge by what the scholars would call the internal evidence of his poems, he was devoted to the then emergent Gaelic football and the men who played it; and we must remember that, at a later date, Patrick the Poet kept goal for Inniskeen.
But Pause Awhile, as the old parish-priest used to say every now and then in the course of the Stations of the Cross. Pause Awhile and meditate.
Do I hear somebody in the back of the hall saying that (as did two old retired schoolmasters in the snug of a pub in Dundalk, and in my hearing) he or she, man, woman or person, has never heard of the Bard of Callenberg? Well he walks, alive and singing, into one of the prose fragments of Patrick Kavanagh that Patrick’s brother, Peter, had published under the title of ‘By Night Unstarred’. Patrick wrote: ‘Off in the nearby bog, John the Bard, a notorious character who spoke only in rhyme, had a visit from his neighbour, Johnny Longcoat’s mother, who hadn’t been on speaking terms with him for more than a year. The Bard, who had been out breaking gravel for the road contractor, limped in on his crutches. As we said, the Bard always spoke in rhyme. Once when he sued this very neighbour he addressed the Court:
My heart with indignation swells
As I state my case to Mr Wells:
Alas! To tell about my bother
With Johnny Longcoat and his mother …
And so on. That was how Patrick Kavanagh introduced the Bard and that, I feel, is the way every poet should talk. What’s the use of being, or of being called Thomas Kinsella or John Montague or Seamus Heaney if you go about talking prose? Anybody could do that. I could do it myself.
And another Bard, by the name of Scott, wrote in praise of John McEnaney, the Bard of Callenberg:
From Clogherhead to Castleblayney,
And from Carrick Town to dear Lough Derg,
There’s none to equal John McEnaney,
The famous Bard from sweet Callenberg.
They may talk of Shelley and Paddy Kelly;
And Alfie Austen who is all put-on,
Why the great Lord Byron couldn’t hold an iron
To smooth the collar of immortal John.
Sure Mudguard Kipling is all up the spout.
And the great Shakespearian he quakes in fear again
The Dundalk Democrat again comes out…
Few poets ever spoke so well, so nobly, about another poet.
The rattle of all those fee
t bouncing on the Deck beside the Road must have got to my head, and my feet. Nor can I rest now until I’m back to boyhood and meet a circus on the road and on the way to the town. Denis A. McCarthy wrote the lines we need:
The circus, the circus is coming to town,
With camel and elephant, rider and clown,
With horses and ponies, the best to behold,
And chariots all gleaming with scarlet and gold,
With cages of lions that blink at the light,
And tigers all baring their teeth for a fight,
With banners and flags, all bespangled with stars,
With cowboys and Indians, soldiers and tars,
With jugglers and jumpers, magicians and monkeys,
With richly-dressed knights, fair ladies and flunkeys,
With giants and dwarfs of the widest renown –
The circus, the circus is coming to town.
The circus, the circus is coming to town,
With strange-looking people all brawny and brown,
With athletes and acrobats ready to seize
And soar through the air on the flying trapeze.
With rattle of harness and rumble of wheels,
And bands playing jigs and quick marches and reels,
With torches that flare in the darkness of night,
While all the folks gather to stare at the sight.
With canvas and tent-pegs and guy-ropes and poles,
And children delighted all running in shoals.
The face of a child has no place for a frown
When told that the circus is coming to town.
The circus, the circus is coming to town.
The boys all excitement run up and run down,
Devouring the posters which, everyone knows,
With modesty speaks of the greatest of shows.
And there is much planning oh how to obtain
A ticket to enter the magic domain.
And hope rises high in the heart of each lad
That he may be taken, perhaps, by his dad,
To see all the wonders and feel all the thrills
So lavishly promised, and praised, on the bills
Of all the good news, this good news is the crown
The circus, the circus is coming to town.
The circus, the circus is coming to town.
That call in my memory no noises can drown.
It rings in my heart as when first, long ago,
I saw the big posters announcing the show.
When Bill and myself read on Haggerty’s gate
The name which began with the adjective Great,
Then wandered around from one fence to the next,
Just gloating with joy over picture and text.
And so, when I see on the fences today,
The bright-coloured posters their promise display
Of rider and wrestler, of camel and clown,
I’m glad that the circus is coming to town.
Thirty-four years ago I was writing, under the name of Patrick Lagan, a daily column for a revered daily newspaper that, God help us, is no longer with us. What an outrage that The Irish Press should no longer be part of our national life.
But thirty-four years ago I was hunting for the words of that old poem about the circus. I remembered reading it in the Our Boys, where it delighted my boyish eyes, but that was all I remembered. I mentioned the matter, or Patrick Lagan did, in the column and Seán O’Luineachain of Carrigtuohill came to my rescue. He told me that he had snipped the poem with many others by Denis A. MacCarthy, from the Our Boys of the 1930s. There were such pleasant affable masterpieces as The Tailor that Came from Mayo’ and The Old Schoolmaster’:
Don’t you remember old Anthony Cassidy?
Sure, and you must.
Man! But ’twas he had the mental capacity,
Hadn’t he just?
How he could argue a case categorical,
Roll out the wonderful word metaphorical,
Talk for whole hours at a stretch like an oracle,
When he discussed.
Seán O’Luineachain told me that from the files of the old Our Boys he drew all the honeyed pleasure of recalling boyhood. He said: ‘I remember a series of articles even earlier still in the Our Boys, which I was too young to value at the time, and I often wonder were they ever published subsequently in more permanent form. They were “The Adventures of the White Arrow”.’
And well I remembered them myself. The author was a Mrs Pender who wrote a fine novel called The Green Cockade. but I don’t think the White Arrow stories were ever collected between the covers of one book. If that is so, then more’s the pity. They told of the doings of a lot of brave young fellows, Garrett Og MacArt, Rory the Runner and others in the days of Owen Roe O’Neill. Their com- pany I enjoyed with that of Richard Tyrrell of Tyrrellspass, and as I rode by Granard Moat.
We’re almost there. Just a few more echoes and a few more twist of the road …
There’s a plane up there somewhere coming in over the sea and heading over Waterford and Wexford. And I am back in 1912 when Corbett-Wilson made his famous flight from Wales to Ireland. Nobody nowadays would write a poem about such a commonplace effort. Nobody would look up if he heard the noise of an engine overhead. But eighty odd years ago it was a wonder. And I myself am old enough to remember when Scott’s Flying Circus toured the country, and based for a while on Strathroy Holm near Omagh Town, and most of us thought that the end of the world had come. Most of us. But not We All. For there were the few, or maybe more, who knew that it was not an end but a beginning.
In 1956 Leo McAdams read an authoritative paper on the Corbett-Wilson flight to the Kilkenny Archaeological Society. And a man in Belgrave Road in Birmingham, who was in Enniscorthy on the day of the flight, wrote a letter to Patrick Lagan. That man’s memory of seeing the plane going past at forty miles an hour and at about eight hundred feet was still vivid:
It caused great excitement even among the crows of a local rookery. It was about sundown and like the crows he came in from the South-West.
He lowered himself in three anti-clockwise ellipses of mean diameter of three-quarters of a mile. His final three-quarters included a skim over the top of Vinegar Hill and the same over the spire of the Cathedral and then to the touchdown in the Showgrounds. A repeat occurred about six o’clock on a Sunday morning. Surely Corbett-Wilson liked Enniscorthy. It tested his skill.
And it was a Kilkenny poet, P. Connor of Prospect Park, who wrote two poems on the achievement of Corbett-Wilson. This is one of them:
’Twas on the twenty-third of May, and in the afternoon,
That Mr Corbett-Wilson went up to see the moon.
Right well he done when he began, with courage bold and true,
He soon was far above us from the field of Ardaloo.
The field was a splendid one, no better could be found.
And I was told by many it was once a polo ground.
But never cold the stick and ball nor man with helmet blue,
Bring half the crowd that cheered so loud that day at Ardaloo.
’Twas half-past three when I arrived, the place it seemed alive.
But I was sorry when I heard He could not fly till five.
I roamed about from field to field, I had nothing else to do
But wait to see that splendid flight that day at Ardaloo.
I went down to the hangar, or rather to the nest
Where this great bird was covered up and peacefully at rest.
The canvas soon was taken off to let us have a view
Of that great machine that ne’er was seen before at Ardaloo.
At last ’twas wheeled out to the field amidst a silent throng.
All eyes were fixed upon it as it quickly raced along.
It gradually just ascended, just like a big cuckoo,
And flew for miles around us that day at Ardaloo.
Some people murmured: ‘If he fell …’ And some said, ‘Ah,
No.’
While life and pluck with him remain he’ll always give a show.
For none but Him who rules the Earth, and can the storms subdue,
Could share the nerve of that brave man that day at Ardaloo.
Kilkenny always held its own with all that came the way,
But now with Mr Wilson it proudly takes the sway.
You know he is the first great man that o’er the Channel flew,
And landed down in Wexford not far from Ardaloo.
Long life to Mr Wilson may his courage never fail.
May one hundred years pass over e’er his coffin needs a nail.
May God Above protect him and bring him safely through
To give us all another show some day at Ardaloo.
The kindly wish of the last verse was not, alas, to be granted. For the brave aviator went to World War I to be the first man of the British Flying Corps to die in aerial combat.
Did he ever, I wonder, in all his circling go north a bit more and circle over Sweet Avondale where the ghost of Parnell still walks? That errant thought brings back to my memory, and my ears, the sweet voice of my friend Margaret O’Reilly of Gowna singing about the Blackbird of Sweet Avondale. Margaret was known as the Queen of the Ballads. From the threshold of her home, where I often had the happiness of standing with her, you could look down on the beauty of Loch Gowna and over a fair stretch of North Longford.
Margaret, I would say, sang like the birds from the moment she was able to sing and she could have filled a barrel with the medals she won, here, there and everywhere – ever since the great Dr Ben Galligan of Cavan town (he was a good friend of mine) heard her singing and set her on the road to the appropriate places.
Here I look at a letter she wrote me years ago, sending with it the words of ‘The Blackbird’. Of the song she said: ‘The first verse of this song is the Blackbird Parnell. The other two verses belong to another song also called The Blackbird.’ And here it is:
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 23