Living in the Past: A Northern Irish Memoir

by Arthur Magennis

  Later on, though, it was with Elizabeth that I first tried to learn to ride a bicycle – a great challenge when we were young. I’m not aware that any bicycles were made for children then. If they were, it would have been for rich people who could afford them.

  We were lucky in that everyone who came to the shop came on a bicycle and it was leaning against the wall while they were inside. So when we saw a lady’s bike we tried to ride it down the road, one foot on the pedal and the other pushing along the road. Some people were not pleased, others were more tolerant.

  Most of the ladies’ bikes were the sit up and beg type, with very high handle bars, and it must have been laughable, if you were not the bike owner, to see us stretching up to the handle bars and beating the ground with our left foot.

  There was one man, called Terence McCann, who didn’t seem to mind at all and he used his wife’s high handle bar bike. Up and down the road we went, my sisters and myself, and the joy we felt if we got the left foot up even for a few yards. However, we were continually ending up in the hedge, or worse, on the road. We realised we had to get up some speed in order to have enough time to get on and keep going, so we tried it very bravely on the hill past our house, with disastrous results.

  Then we decided to go to Joe O’Neill’s brae further along, which was a very gentle slope but was out of sight of the shop, and we would be in trouble if Daddy should find out. We took Terence’s bike, and I held it for my sister Elizabeth, and then pushed her a bit as she wobbled but, sure enough, she moved down the little hill to shouts and screams from both of us. When it was my turn I, too, managed to ride for a bit. Terence was at the corner looking for us and didn’t say a cross word. After that, no bike was safe – not even men’s.

  Elizabeth and I were a daft pair and we had a lot of fun in our teens. She taught me to dance, up in the loft with a hurricane lamp perched on a bag of cattle feed.

  One, two, three; one, two, three, at first, round and round for the Waltz, and then, after that, the Foxtrot. We were both crazy about Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Perry Como. When Housewives’ Choice would be on the radio in the morning, I would be milking and Elizabeth would be in the kitchen and when a new tune came on she would shout down to me.

  One morning, Ella Fitzgerald came on singing her latest hit, “My Happiness”. She shouted, “Arthur, ‘My Happiness’.”

  I left the cow and bucket and raced up to the kitchen. My father happened to be coming down from the shop as I went flying past him. He looked at the stool under the cow and the bucket, half full of milk, and he said to my mother, “Saviour God, did you ever see anything like that in your life?”

  But, what could I do? “My Happiness” came first and in a few minutes I was back under the cow, probably singing it to her.

  After all, we were a musical family. Kathleen and Mary went to Coalisland for piano lessons once a week. They got off school an hour early and went with the bread man, Mickey Madden, who called at the school for them. The music teacher was called Miss Waters. Kathleen and Mary walked home from Coalisland after their music lesson and they were very scared of a tall man called Pat English who stood outside his house every evening when they were passing. Of course, they thought he was waiting for them and crept or ran past him but, I suppose, he didn’t even notice them. Each Monday evening we would hear about another narrow escape.

  Kathleen showed great promise as a musician and Miss Waters sang her praises. “She has the touch,” she would tell my mother. She did well in her exams, and Miss Waters entered her for a prestigious competition in Belfast. Incidentally, Miss Waters was a Protestant.

  Kathleen was about twelve years old at the time and, when she finished her playing, there was a great burst of applause, and everybody went crowding around Miss Waters congratulating her. Of course, they took no notice of the child. Children were of no account then; it was all about the teacher.

  Then a man came to Kathleen to take notes and asked her what she intended doing. She told him innocently enough that she was going to a boarding school in a convent. Soon after that, she discovered that the prize had been awarded to the second girl who was a Protestant.

  At school we were taught that it was most important to be a Catholic, because otherwise one would go to Hell, which was a terrible fate. As I took it all very seriously, I was worried about Miss Waters, and I asked my mother one day, “Mammy, will Miss Waters go to Hell when she dies?”

  “If she is good, she won’t go to Hell,” she replied.

  I was relieved, but still puzzled.

  Mary, also, won a prize when she was at the convent, but it was a gold medal for coming first in Northern Ireland in religious knowledge. That gold medal sat in a little box on the piano at home until I left. I suppose it’s lost now.

  Both Kathleen and Mary went to the convent boarding school and there was great excitement when they were coming home for the holidays in summer and for Christmas. My father harnessed the horse and trap, which had soft rubber hooped wheels and was as comfortable as a car with cushioned seats, and Jim, our horse, was dressed in his best gleaming harness.

  We would wait to collect them off the bus at Tamnamore corner and the fun would begin. When we got home, Kathleen would make straight for the piano and that’s where she practically lived for the next two months. The music she played was swing and jazz. She could make that piano bounce.

  She could also play the cello and was in the orchestra at the convent, where they performed musicals – she taught me Gilbert and Sullivan operas that they had done that term.

  I remember one holiday she had the music with her for “Lullaby of Broadway”, which was a hit at the time, and how she could play it! We could hear her out on the road when we were going past. I can still hear her now, and when I think of it, it’s not long before my foot starts tapping.

  Chapter Four

  After school one day I went with Frances to milk the black cow which was left alone in the fenced meadow in the Brilla and had to be milked every afternoon. We were walking along the main thoroughfare called the Brilla rampart – Frances carried her pail in one hand and held my hand with her other. We had just turned a bend in the rampart and were walking through a damp patch where the rushes were taller than I was because I could see the little clusters of seeds at eye level. Frances started to sing “The old pals are always the best you see”, which was a popular Jimmy Rogers song at the time.

  “That’s wrong,” I said to Frances, then sang the same line again going a tone higher on the final note.

  “Do you think so?” said Frances, then she said, “What day is this, Arthur?”

  “It’s Wednesday,” I replied.

  “No, but what date is it?”

  “It’s the fourteenth of June,” I said, then screamed, “It’s my birthday!” and I let her hand go and took off through the rushes. In my bare feet and along the soft moss road I ate up the distance and burst into the shop to tell my father, the custom being that I was given a bottle of lemonade and a lot of creamy biscuits to celebrate with. That was 1933 and I was seven years old.

  The Magennis Family around 1933

  (The baby, Peggy, isn’t on the picture.) Left to Right:

  Back Row: Mary, 13, Kathleen, 11, Elizabeth, 9.

  Front Row: James (father), Shamey, 3,

  Arthur, 7, Teresa (mother).

  Birthdays were celebrated like that, with lemonade, biscuits and cakes, and we had little parties. But apart from Father Christmas, who never forgot us, there wasn’t any custom of buying or giving presents.

  Christmas, like everywhere, was exciting for a child. We wrote our note and left it on a ledge up the chimney – in the soot – as it was an open hearth. I particularly remember checking when I came home from school and finding that he hadn’t called. This worried me a lot and my mother assured me that he would call that night, and sure enough he did.

  On Christmas morning my stocking would contain, in the toe, a penny and an orange, other little things
like sweets and, glory be, a horse, which couldn’t get into my stocking but was attached. One year I got a wind-up creamery cart in which the horse would run forward, buck in the air and then run backward. That was the greatest present I ever got from Santa. God bless him.

  At Christmas we also got presents from the reps who called on us throughout the year. The best presents, as far as us children were concerned, were those from the sweet and chocolate reps. Miss McCauley, who I think was a director of the company, came from Portadown and would arrive down at our house with big boxes of chocolate tied with beautiful ribbons. When she left, the table in the parlour where my mother put them looked like Aladdin’s cave. Then there was the tea rep and the cigarette rep and others who would bring individual presents for us. Someone once brought me a cricket bat and ball. I had no idea what cricket was, as we only played Gaelic football, so the bat and ball just lay there untouched for a long time. Another present was a tennis racquet but that wasn’t any use either, as the nearest tennis courts would probably be in Dungannon, seven miles away.

  On Christmas Eve it was the custom for shops to give presents to their customers. My father gave each customer a quarter of tea and a pound of sugar. These weren’t packed as they are today, but had to be weighed out separately from the tea chest and the sack. This was a lot of extra work and my father had to have extra help. My mother said that people came whom she hadn’t seen from the year before, and some would go to another grocer and maybe two if they were hard-faced enough. But it was only once a year and it wouldn’t do to refuse them in front of a shop full of customers.

  One year a young man called Dermot O’Neill came from Belfast to stay at Hughes’. He was probably in his teens and when he saw the cricket bat and ball, he decided to instruct me in the rules of the game. We went into the garden and he bowled and I batted, then I bowled and he batted but when he left a short time later, the bat and ball just lay around and were forgotten.

  While he was staying at Hughes’, Dermot came with me in the cart one day when I was delivering a small sack of flour to a customer. I think he knew as little about a horse as I knew about cricket. I took the flour into the customer’s house and I left Dermot in the cart minding the horse. I heard the horse and the cart take off and on running out I discovered that the horse, which was skittish, had run away. I yelled at him to grab the reins but he grabbed the horse’s tail instead and leaned back pulling with all his might. I think that the horse was so shocked that he stopped about fifty yards along and all was well.

  The house where I delivered the flour belonged to Mrs. Ann Doyle. James Pat was her son and he was a cobbler. We took our boots to him to be mended and when we called back for them he was invariably behind time but he would say, “They’re nearly ready, just sit down for a minute.” He was usually laughing and he would start on the shoes while we watched. He was surrounded by lots of shoes, either repaired or waiting to be repaired, and sparbles, which are little nails that are hammered into the sole so that we were walking on sparble heads instead of leather. Sparbles littered the floor and on top of all a great piece of leather which must have been one side of a cow.

  Sitting up on his stool in the middle of this, he would grab the leather, which was very stiff and difficult to control, and manhandle it onto his knee, where he would cut a piece from it with his very sharp cobbler’s knife. He would shove the large piece of leather away from him and it would spring away onto the top of the pile like a live thing. Then at last we saw our boots when he reached into the pile and found them first time.

  He placed the leather on the boot sole and, tacking it to the sole of the shoe, he cut around it and the outside piece fell onto the floor on top of a little mound of pieces. All the time he was laughing and joking and singing this song:

  When my wife dies I’ll get another one

  A big tall yellow one just like the other one.

  When the piece of leather was fitted to his satisfaction he would put it on the last and hammer in a row of rivets around the edge, which he took out of his mouth,. Then he took the sparbles and hammered them into the sole in a pattern. Next he went around the edges with black wax and our boots looked like new. It was fascinating to watch and I asked him for a piece of the off-cut leather, which was about two or three inches long and he gave it to me and said, “What do you want that for?”

  I didn’t know myself. I think it was the smell of it and I kept it in my pocket for ages.

  After that, I decided I was going to be a cobbler. I told my mother and father but they took no notice, however, Charlie, as usual, was much more understanding and would say, “Aye, aye, aye,” as if he understood perfectly.

  I told Charlie that I was not going back to school and we discussed where I would have my cobbler’s shop and Charlie said, “Aye, aye,” and I knew he was in full agreement.

  I thought about nothing else for a while. Nothing seemed to matter except this one ambition and yet it passed and the next thing was that I wanted to be a carpenter, after having woodwork lessons at school, so Charlie had to go through it all again. I told him I was going to get a chisel and Charlie said, “Get a Mathieson chisel because it’s the best chisel,” and I persuaded my mother to buy me one.

  I still have an urge to make things, to cut and fit things together, and writing this gives me the same satisfaction; fitting sentences together is perhaps similar.

  When I was about ten or eleven, a gang of lads would appear each Sunday morning going past our house with their dogs on their way to the canal to hunt water hens. My mother was over careful with me, I thought, and she didn’t like me going to the river or the canal, but when the gang of hunters, all about my age, arrived I had to join them, no matter what.

  I had a little white prayer book and I used it to coax Paddy the Guy’s big brown dog, Tray, away with us, as he had a powerful nose and was a great hunter. I don’t think it would have been any good without him. When we reached the canal we went along the meadow side, the opposite side to the towpath, as it was thick with reeds and great cover for water hens.

  Tray and the other dogs would run along the edge until they saw or scented a water hen and they would go splashing in after it. It would either dive, in which case they would go paddling around looking for it, or it would fly away into the trees on the other side and we’d chase it for a bit, screaming and shouting and, if someone had a catapult, they would lose a fusillade of pebbles at it, which didn’t reach halfway.

  All together that’s what we did, mostly a lot of shouting and screaming and running. We all followed behind Tray, because his keen nose would pick up a scent, and then he would stand still like a pointer and, suddenly, he would plunge and the water hen would either dive or take off followed by a crowd of us shouting and screaming again.

  On considering it now, why should we hunt these birds which are inedible and uncatchable? I think it was just children playing. We certainly enjoyed it and came home on Sunday afternoon worn out but happy. I’ve never heard of hunting water hens before or since then. I think some bright spark must have done it by chance and enjoyed it so much he told all the others and a new sport was born.

  Afterwards, I returned Tray to Paddy the Guy, a character who was a permanent fixture at Hughes’. He didn’t live there but in what was left of a house belonging to Mrs. Hughes. It was just one bay that was still standing, well thatched and comfortable enough. It was about half a mile from Hughes’ and he had to go past our house, morning and night, on his journey every day. The problem was that he could barely walk. Arthritis had him crippled. He was bent over and he used a very short stick to walk. His stride was about one foot long and he took about one hour to walk that half mile night and morning. He always had his dog with him and it would toddle along beside him, taking one or two steps and waiting. They were both an example of extreme patience.

  When his dog was young he would go running after his tail, as dogs do. He’d go round and round so fast that he would fall in a pile on the road and Pad
dy informed us that he thought he had a worm in his tail. So, his first remedy was to shave the dog’s tail and for weeks the dog went around shaved down to the skin. He must have shaved it every day but the dog still chased his tail.

  Paddy decided that he would sting the dog’s tail with nettles and the nettle acid would kill the worm. After that, the dog’s tail was red, as Paddy probably stung it every morning, but he stopped chasing it. I think he broke the habit and the Guy thought he had killed the worm.

  Why did Paddy the Guy live where he did when Peter would have kept him at home, I’m sure? I think he liked his privacy. In his house he had a bucket of clean water from the nearby well, a piece of sacking hanging on a nail in the fireplace where he kept his loaf, a mug and a knife and a little table beside him, and he could make tea and eat his bread without having to get up. His bed was on the other side of the room and the dog slept beside the bed.

  I think he also had his pride. After he arrived at Hughes’ in the morning and had his breakfast, he would go out with his dog to the back garden and work all day. The back garden was a small orchard and between the rows of apple trees, Paddy planted rigs of early potatoes. He had a very short, sharp spade and would dig that garden, manure it, plant the potatoes and eventually harvest them. All this at a snail’s pace.

  Paddy loved to sing. He had a powerful voice and on a frosty still morning we could hear him almost as soon as he left the house, which was at eight o’clock.

  When my sister Mary was ill, Paddy would stand outside our front gate or, rather he had a way of sitting on his stick, and sing a song for her. Sometimes he would call in and say, “I sang one for you this morning, Minnie,” and she would say, “Oh, it was lovely, Paddy, thank you.”

  It seems that he had been a heavy drinker at one time, and would have been found lying in the ditch frozen in the wintertime, and that is how he became arthritic. My sister Elizabeth said he had eyes like John Wayne and was quite handsome, but then she is a romantic soul.