by Alice Taylor
ABOUT DO YOU REMEMBER?
‘A thoroughly enjoyable read.’ Irish Country Magazine
‘A journey into nostalgia with spiritual overtones.’
Irish Independent
‘Abounds in anecdotes of Irish rural life in former times, told in Alice’s Taylor’s distinctive, homely style.’
The Opinion
ABOUT THE GIFT OF A GARDEN
‘Illuminated by the glowing photographs of Emma
Byrne, enriched by such stories as the tree-planting meitheal, the gathering of manure and the history of the garden shed, The Gift of a Garden is itself a gift.’
Irish Examiner
‘Alice is a storyteller writing about the plants and the people she loves, making this a delightful read.’
Country Gardener Magazine
ABOUT AND TIME STOOD STILL
‘And Time Stood Still warmed my heart and reminded me of the value of family, friendship and community.’
Irish Independent
‘Anybody who has lost someone can find solace in this book.’ Arena, RTÉ Radio 1
The Women
Alice Taylor
photographs by Emma Byrne
Dedication
To Eileen of Farnagow,
who enriches all our lives
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1 The Candle Lighter: the Mother
2 This Land Was Her Land: Nana
3 A Great Pair of Hands
4 The Handy Woman
5 The District Nurse
6 The Road from Puck
7 The Chapel Woman
8 To the Manor Born
9 Faraway Places
10 The Other Side of the Mountains
11 A Dependable Woman
12 A Family Secret
13 The Salt of the Earth
14 The Island Woman
15 Behind Closed Doors
About the Author
Copyright
Introduction
Sometimes in life you hit a wall. You are down to the wire. You need the motivation to begin again, just a little spark of inspiration and stimulation. Then you meet someone who ignites that spark. It lights the way forward and suddenly you can see where you are going. For me this special spark glows from the lives of inspirational women. – women who move with tranquility and purpose through their lives, opening up possibilities around them. They quietly reach out to others and leave behind imprints of comfort and encouragement.
My inspirational women are not well-known women. They live seemingly ordinary lives but they enrich the society in which we live. They swim beneath the tide of life and quietly change the currents of their time. They are the glue that holds society together. These women are the biblical stone rejected by the builder that became the cornerstone. They were and still are the silent cornerstones of our world.
The lives of these women are an untold story. Some still live among us and others are long gone – extraordinary women who because they were and are perceived to be ordinary never had their story told. We Irish walk in the footprints of great women. Women who lived through hard times on farms, in villages, towns and cities. They are often invisible in our history books – only a tiny handful are written about or celebrated.
The women I want to celebrate are often farm women who wrested a living from the land and raised large families on very limited resources. These are the women of my childhood years, who lived all around us on our hillfarm in north Cork. The term ‘working wives’ had yet to be coined, but it could certainly be used to describe them – they were the original working wives. Their workplace was the farmyard, but because it was adjacent to their home they were perceived as stay-at-home wives. But proximity to the job did not lighten their workload, which could be hard and demanding. They were the multitaskers of their time and added substantially to family incomes.
It is sobering to remember that the grandmothers of today’s grandmothers were the first generation after the Great Famine. Those grandmothers were born into an Ireland still reeling from the hunger pangs of famine. Their habits were formed at a time of huge poverty and starvation. How did they move on to live with such grace and generosity, I wonder? Because that’s what I saw in them – they were caring, generous women. And they passed this on to their daughters and granddaughters.
For our grandmothers the worst aspect of life was the almost guaranteed loss of their young adult children to emigration. I don’t know how their hearts didn’t break, and stay broken. Emigration for them and for generations to come was a necessary evil that wrenched children from families, children whom these mothers might never see again, children who faced huge risks in faraway places.
Their last farewell gathering earned the term ‘The American Wake’, and it was, to all intents and purposes, a wake, because even though there was no death, there was still the sense of a final parting. Some emigrants never again came back. Some felt that the fare home would cost too much, so they sent the money back instead to help out back home. Others got immersed in their new way of life and severed all connections with home, and some fell through the cracks of a new, challenging world and were never heard from again. The mothers they left behind had to dry their tears and turn their faces to the job of survival. I can only imagine the sadness and emptiness of this. And the courage needed to face life without the children.
The voyage to America took months, though with time that journey gradually dwindled to six weeks. The first letter from America, known as the ‘landing letter’ and telling of the emigrant’s arrival, often took months to come back home. But how could any letter describe the tough challenges that these young people faced in a strange country and the hard lump of homesickness they endured? Most of the emigrants were very aware of the home situation and usually painted happy pictures of a new life to avoid worrying already burdened parents. Brian Friel depicted it on stage in The Loves of Cass McGuire.
Slowly, American and English money leaked back and eased the burden of poverty at home and also often paved the way for other American wakes when siblings joined the early departures in their new country. The foreign money did work wonders. It kept food on the table, bought extra fields to make farms viable, re-roofed houses, put cattle on the land and clothed younger siblings. The emigrants were still part of the home. American dollars and English pounds kept the home fires burning.
Other young women left home in a different way. Young idealistic girls went into the many convents dotted around the country. Coming out of homes burning with the religious fervour of the time, they dreamt of bringing some of this zeal to foreign lands. Other nuns stayed at home to educate our young and run our hospitals, and some joined contemplative orders and are still providing pools of peace in a frazzled world.
Out in the fields the farm women saved the hay, cut the corn and drew turf from the bog. Their town and city sisters reared large families on meagre wages, often supplemented by cleaning other people’s homes and offices. The tenements where they lived are now replaced by high-rise apartments.
This book is a salutation to all those women, those who stayed at home and those who emigrated. They kept a light glowing in the windows, and they kept the doors open in the homes of Ireland. Some of these doors and windows are long gone and the ruins of old thatched cottages and stone farmhouses are buried in remote corners of our landscape. But great women who drew water from the well and lived close to the earth once inhabited those houses. Every spring on Rogation Day they went out with holy water to bless the crops, as their Celtic ancestors had done before them.
Despite swimming against the tide of poverty and despite their lack of inheritance rights, our female ancestors left us a rich heritage. So let us r
emember and celebrate them with appreciation and respect.
Chapter 1
The Candle Lighter: the Mother
Whenever we were faced with a formidable undertaking on the home farm my mother would say, ‘Isn’t it great that we have the mind on us to do it.’ And if we questioned our ability to succeed, her answer invariably was, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’ She firmly believed that you could do anything if you thought you could do it, and once you got going nothing could stop you. Getting going was to her what it was all about. Her ‘can do’ attitude, I’m convinced, was forged from the hard practical challenges facing women in their everyday lives at that time, with no electricity, no running water, no modern machines to help with the tough jobs. This must have made these women strong, both physically and mentally.
But there was a softness and warmth in my mother as well. Whenever any of her children or neighbours was facing a challenge she would light a candle and place it in a glass bowl at the centre of the parlour table. It was her way of reminding God to keep an eye on things. If she judged that the candle needed backup, she would kneel by the table silently saying the rosary. In later years she was often contacted by children and grandchildren from all over the world pleading with her to light her candle, and they knew it would be accompanied by her prayers. It was heart-warming to imagine her loving support back in the home place. At times of tumult I now light the candle. Mothers create the inner essence of their daughters.
In 1928 my mother moved from her family farm in north Cork to my father’s farm a few miles over the road where she grafted onto a new family tree. She had moved into a mortgage-free house and a job for life. As was the custom of the time, I assume that she brought a ‘fortune’ with her. Daughters like my mother, who worked in the home place, did not get a wage as such, but when they married they were given a lump sum, a kind of dowry. That fortune was then invested in the farm or perhaps was given to a sister-in-law to enable her to move on to another farm. It was said that the same fortune moved from farm to farm all around Munster!
As a child, my mother walked the three miles to and from the local national school in the nearest town every day. At that time, during the War of Independence, the Black and Tan soldiers were everywhere. They were unpredictable, untrained soldiers with a reputation for savagery and lawlessness. The children would hide in a ditch when they heard the Tan lorries coming – one time the soldiers had pointed their guns at them and fired bullets over their heads, and after that the youngsters disappeared off the road instantly at the sound of those engines.
She had one brother and one sister, but she married into a much larger family, as my father had two sisters and six brothers. His parents were both dead, so she did not have a mother-in-law or father-in-law, but the youngest brother and sister were still living on the farm when she came there. But sharing her home with in-laws was no hardship to my mother as she had come from a home where many members of the extended family came and went over the years.
She often told us about her first social challenge in her new home, which was to host the wedding breakfast of her new sister-in-law. The reception was to be held in the home place, with a magnificent wedding cake that the bride-to-be had made taking pride of place in the centre of the parlour table. Older brothers with wives and children came back for their sister’s wedding and while the ceremony was taking place at the church all the children were left to play in the garden. One curious young lad spotted the beautiful cake through the parlour window. He was mesmerised and called the others to view it. They had never seen anything quite like this cake. The temptation proved too great and in they went, and the young lad merrily dished out slices of cake to his assembled cousins.
When the wedding party returned, the bride was not impressed! It wasn’t a great start to my mother’s career as hostess in her new home. My father and mother tried to calm troubled waters but it was a long time before that particular brother was allowed by his sister to forget the misdemeanours of his son. But in later years she had indeed forgotten all about it. She had married a man who had an extensive orchard and every autumn when we were children she visited bearing gifts of huge bags of apples; the cake and the erring boy were never mentioned.
My mother was of the belief that when you married your husband, you also married his family. Once in later years, when I was airing my views about the disadvantages of having my husband’s aunt living next door, she promptly told me that when you denigrated your husband’s family you denigrated your husband. That put a stop to my pontificating! But she was not blind to the family flaws of her own new family tree. She informed me, in an amused tone of voice, that early in marriage she had discovered that the Taylors thought they knew better than everybody else. I never forgot that little bit of wisdom. As a Taylor, it’s a trait with which I constantly struggle.
It was to my mother’s advantage that she was not into constantly airing her views but moved with quiet determination among her more loquacious in-laws. But she had firmly held convictions about the importance of family, home life and the need to keep everybody in the house well fed and nourished. Sometimes my father went on a rant about household expenses, declaring that there was enough waste in our house to rear a whole other family. There were permanent callers to the house as neighbours moved freely between each other’s homes and my mother kept an open-door policy. All had to be fed or at least offered some form of hospitality. Then too, the ‘Travelling People’, known at the time as ‘Tinkers’, as the menfolk were tinsmiths, called regularly and never left empty-handed. If my father was on one of his economy drives he would tell my mother that they were all better fed than us – to which my mother simply turned a deaf ear and continued blithely on her way. She regarded the kitchen table as her domain.
The main source of food at the time was the pig. This too was women’s business, apart from the actual slaughtering which was carried out by our Uncle Daniel, who was known for the skill. Dealing with the dead pig was a communal affair. Neighbouring women came together to fill the sausages and puddings and each had a different recipe, but the recipe of the woman of the house prevailed at her pudding filling. We all enjoyed savouring the different flavours throughout the year. Filling the puddings, as it was called, took over the whole house, with disgusting-looking buckets of pig’s guts standing all around the kitchen, as well as enamel buckets full of boiled blood laced with herbs and all kinds of mysterious concoctions. There was a black-pudding mix and a white-pudding mix. It was a messy business, but finally the mixture was pushed into a mincer to which a funnel was attached, and over this went the pig’s well-washed gut, which was then filled with the mixture. It came out in long, thick tubes, and my mother cut it at intervals into loops, then plunged them into a pot of boiling water that stood on the open fire. Then she filed them along the handle of a brush until they cooled. Nowadays we can buy the world-famous Clonakilty black pudding in most supermarkets, but it all began with the resourceful women in the farmhouses of rural Ireland. Preserving every bit of food the pig supplied was most important. Fresh porksteaks as well as the home-filled sausages and puddings were distributed among the neighbours, who returned the compliment when their pig was slaughtered. Thus fresh meat was had more often throughout the community.
After the pudding-making, the men gathered to salt the pig. Then my mother took over again to fill the pickle barrel in which the meat was preserved. This was done very carefully as it would feed her household throughout the year. It was a very precise process. She layered the bottom of the scrubbed-out and well-scalded tall timber barrel with a layer of salt. As each layer of salted bacon went in, more salt was laid between the layers until the barrel was full of meat. She drew buckets of spring water from the well in the field behind the house to pour into the barrel over the meat. But first more salt was added to the water, and in order to ascertain that there was sufficient salt in the water she placed an egg on top – if the egg floated, there was enough salt, but if it sank, more had to be added. When
she had the barrel filled with pickle and bacon she placed a large well-washed stone or a heavy plank of wood on top of the meat to prevent floating. Later she lifted the bacon out of the barrel and hung it off hooks along the kitchen ceiling where it cured slowly. She took particular care of the ham and to this day I struggle to achieve the flavour of her wonderful Christmas ham.
She had seven children, the youngest of whom died when he was four, which caused her immense grief. In later years when we talked about it, she told me quietly, ‘I should not have mourned Connie so deeply or for so long.’ ‘But, Mom,’ I protested, ‘he was only four and it was heart-breaking.’ ‘I know that,’ she said, ‘but I got bogged down in my own grief and forgot about the effect it was having on your father and the rest of you.’ She felt that women had to be constantly strong and comforting for the sake of the whole family; they set the tone. That conversation with my mother has always stayed with me.
She was a woman of quiet ways and deep wisdom. She never boasted about our achievements but enjoyed whatever little triumphs we had quietly in her own heart. I recall one time when a woman who was forever boasting about her wonderfully talented family left our house after a long, boring visit, my mother rose from her chair, saying in a puzzled voice, ‘One would wonder what was all that telling about!’ My mother believed that the facts should be allowed to speak for themselves.
The workload of our mothers and grandmothers was unbelievable. As well as rearing large families in houses that had no electricity, no piped water and no labour-saving devices, they milked cows and fed calves, pigs, hens, ducks and geese every day of the year. They managed the larger animals too, looked after their housing and nursed them when they were sick or giving birth – apart from the cows, which was usually, though not always, a man’s job.