by Alice Taylor
By the time the younger children got up in the morning at around seven o’clock, my mother was already out with my father and older brother and sisters milking the cows. It was the job of another sister to call us and then light the fire and lay the table for breakfast. A large pot of porridge was always by the fire; my mother made it the previous night and left it to cook slowly on the warm cinders. She was a staunch believer in a good breakfast, maintaining that it saw you through the day, so after the porridge came boiled eggs and her own homemade brown bread. We then prepared our own lunches and as we were leaving the house my mother was usually on her way in. My sisters had come in earlier from milking to get ready for school.
After breakfast my father took the milk to the creamery and my mother started what were known as her ‘outside jobs’. First on the agenda was feeding the now-bawling calves. They were definitely the loudest of all the animals, but every other animal around the yard was also yelling in hungry protest! The baby calves were bucket-fed individually and the larger ones herded around a trough into which my mother poured buckets of milk. The slugged it all back very rapidly. Then they were all released out into the fields where they danced with delighted freedom. Next on the feeding list were the pigs, and this was a tough job. Their feed had first to be mixed in a large timber tub in the mess house, then my mother faced the onslaught of the demanding pigs when she opened their door – and tried to maintain her balance as she struggled over to their circular iron trough in the middle of the piggery. They always strove to upend the bucket, but once its contents made it into the trough they buried their snouts and silence reigned. Then the timid hens got their rations, and when released from the confines of the henhouse they shrilled with delight and ran around my mother, pecking up the scattered oats. They were joined by flocks of waiting birds who swooped down from the surrounding trees. Then the geese and ducks were released and they headed off down the fields towards the river. Gradually all the animals were fed and quietened.
On her way back into the kitchen again my mother picked up a bucket of turf and an armful of blocks of wood to stoke up the fire, which by this time was beginning to run out of steam. Then it was time to tidy the kitchen, wash up the breakfast ware and do the baking. Every day she baked one large cake of brown bread and one white. While the bread was baking, she prepared the dinner – we were the ordinary people that Jackie Healy Rae referred to as having their dinner in the middle of the day. Sometimes, if it was not already done, my mother went to a field near the house and dug up the potatoes and cut the cabbage and turnips that were our staple diet. If the spring-water supply was running low, she went to the well for a bucket of water. This water was brought into the kitchen in a white enamel bucket which stood on a side table and was strictly for drinking and making tea. Nobody would dream of putting it to any other use. Beside our house there was a constant supply of other water that ran down from the hill further up the farm, and in our yard it ran into a pipe that we called ‘the spout’, and under this spout we washed the potatoes and anything else requiring a good scrub. Once she had washed the potatoes under the spout she put everything in pots over the open fire to cook. While the dinner was cooking she went upstairs to make the beds. Then when all the pots were deemed ready, she laid the table, took down the whistle off its hook and went to the door to summon the hungry in from the fields. Anyone helping on the farm was included in the head count and dinner was put aside for the schoolchildren. If it was hay-making or harvest time the dinners had to be multiplied to match the size of the meitheal. Despite all the preparation involved, my mother always maintained that feeding people presented no problem once the supplies were sufficient, and she believed that a ‘good table’, as she termed it, was an important part of any home.
When she had unexpected visitors she was always delighted to be able to make them welcome with a nice meal. As we lived at the end of a long boreen about three miles from the nearest town, with no corner shop nearby to provide a backup in this situation, this was not always easy. But she had the ability to whip up something nice with very few reserves and was a great believer in the presentation power of fine china on a good tablecloth.
If it was a Monday the family wash, which was a marathon of soaking, washing, lathering, scrubbing on the board, rinsing, boiling and hanging out to dry had to be packed somehow into this busy schedule. The annual quilt-and blanket-washing could spread over a few days and would turn the kitchen into a temporary lake. The decision to wash blankets depended totally on the weather and the highest recommendation that my mother could give to a day was to say that it was ideal for washing blankets. In her opinion, days came no better than that.
After dinner she brought down the sewing machine from the parlour and put it on the kitchen table. She sewed and patched our clothes and often it was then that neighbouring women from across the fields would arrive for a chat. My mother loved good-quality material and put a lot of consideration into the purchase of good wool blankets and pure cotton sheets, and if her budget did not stretch to quality cotton she made the sheets herself from the white bags in which the flour came home from the mill. These bags were made of either rough linen or good quality cotton, and when washed and bleached could be turned into long-lasting sheets, pillow cases and aprons. She gathered these throughout the year and those she did not get around to using were put into Aunt Kate’s trunk to await her visit – Aunt Kate was our amazing family seamstress.
Some time in her day she went out and gathered the eggs from the outhouses around the farmyard. The hens had their own house with built-in laying boxes, but they often preferred to make their nests in the barn and the horses’ mangers. Needless to mention, the horses would be delighted to come home after a hard day’s work out in the fields and polish off a nestful of eggs to put a gloss on their coats. We also had a greyhound who was partial to a raw egg tonic and she had to be tied up every day until my mother had gathered the eggs.
Then it was time for the customary four o’clock tea. After that came the time for ‘stray jobs’, as she used to say. If it was fruit-picking season, she cracked into jam-making action. Other jobs might include making a bran mix for a newly calved cow or tending to a calf who had the scour. The scour, which was a bad dose of diarrhoea, was the scourge of the baby calf world and had to be controlled as it was highly infectious. After that it was time to feed the calves, pigs and hens again and house them all down for the night. At around six o’clock the cows were brought home for milking and when that was over, the yard work was finished for the day. In the summer the cows were turned out into the fields for the night, and then it was supper time.
After supper came darning time and she sat beneath the oil lamp surrounded by knitted jumpers and socks that had numerous holes. As she darned we did our lessons, and she chatted with neighbouring men who often gathered around the fire in evening time. Her last job of the night was to make the porridge and to arrange the brought-in washing on the backs of chairs around the fire to make sure that the clothes were well aired.
Despite her incredible workload I have no memory of my mother being in a hurry. She always had the time to sit down and talk to us and to the neighbours. Sometimes in the summer evenings she went back into the old fort behind our house where my father had planted trees and she gathered bundles of sticks for the fire, and sometimes took a metal gallon-sized can to collect blackberries for jam-making. Then too, she might go for a long walk up through the fields and she’d be gone for hours. This, I think, was her quiet, meditative time when she regained her equilibrium out in the silence of the fields and came home at peace with her world. My father would occasionally say to her, ‘Lena, when you disappear up into the glen would you take a whistle with you because if you fall down into a hole up there we’ll never find you?’ To this request she turned a deaf ear. Turning a deaf ear was her strategy when the necessity arose.
As a child I took all her hard work for granted, but now in hindsight I wonder how she found the time to d
o all that had to be done and yet have time to go across the fields to neighbours who were ill or needed help. Every journey in those days took a lot of time. Every week she went back the road to visit her own mother and each Sunday when going to Mass she took a cake of brown bread and bottles of milk to an old neighbour in town. I think that she somehow never heard of hurry. One of her great blessings was that she never lost her head in a crisis – that was my father’s speciality! But she calmed troubled waters around him and had the incredible skill of bringing things into perspective with a well-phrased placatory comment. When he was on a rampage about something that he deemed to be a disaster she’d remind him mildly, ‘At least there is no one dead.’ I sometimes recall that comment when I get my knickers in a knot over something that is annoying but will soon pass.
She was also a great radio listener and her day was punctuated by radio programmes. Normally a fan of Raidió Éireann, she turned over to the BBC for Woman’s Hour and Mrs Dale’s Diary. At night there were often arguments between my parents – and in later years, us children – as to what programme should be turned on, but during the day she had free choice. Much more traditional than my father, she came from a strong republican household, supporting Fianna Fáil and De Valera, whereas my father held totally different views and firmly believed that De Valera had ruined the finances of the country with his economic war. But they agreed to differ on politics and we joked that on polling day they should just stay at home as they cancelled each other out at the polls. And whereas my father held a slightly cynical view of some of the religious practices of the time, my mother was an unquestioning practitioner. Every night, without fail, we all went on our knees for the family rosary and she furnished each one of us with miraculous medals and brown scapulars for protection. Holy water was liberally sprinkled on us as we came and went, and was also sprinkled over the crops on Rogation Days when she went out with my father to bless their fields.
My mother had married into a long-tailed family and into an old farmhouse where eight generations of Taylors had lived and from where many had emigrated. As the woman of the home place, she welcomed them all back with open arms and treasured their family traditions as her own. She wanted them to feel that her home was also their home.
Chapter 2
This Land Was Her Land: Nana
The late John Moriarty, Kerry poet, philosopher and prophet of our time, wrote about taking care with his very young niece of a cow calving on the home farm. In the process the little girl told him that she too had come from her mother’s tummy. When he asked her where her mother came from she told him from Nana’s tummy, and when he asked where Nana had come from the little girl looked shocked at his lack of knowledge and unhesitatingly told him, ‘Nana was always there.’ It said a lot about the woman in question. The child perceived her Nana as the back wall of her world. John Moriarty’s writings about his mother reveal an extraordinary person, a strong earthy woman who laid down a deep well of spirituality in her offspring.
Women like John Moriarty’s mother were toughened by the hard work on the land and yet something in their deep being connected with the creativity of nature and the battle against the elements. The land was their master, their salvation, their nourishment and their constant challenge. In summer, when all was well, it was the face of God, but in winter, when they fought with its harshness, it was a battle with the Devil. But these women took it on and sometimes understood better than their men the nature of the land and the animals that survived on it.
John Moriarty’s writings ring memory bells of my own grandmother. These women were forged from strong metal that enabled them to wrest a livelihood from the land. In England and maybe in Irish urban areas these grandmothers were usually called ‘Granny’, but in rural Ireland it was always ‘Nana’.
In our family we called our grandmother Nana Ballyduane. I am not sure why we did not simply call her Nana, as she was the only one we had – our paternal grandmother was dead before any of us were born – but for some reason our maternal grandmother took her title from the townland in which she lived. It was almost as if she owned that whole townland, and in truth she often acted as if she did. When in later years my siblings and I talked about her I sometimes felt that we were each talking about a different person – there is no doubt that memory paints many pictures – but the general consensus, despite our varying recollections, was of a woman with whom you did not trifle. Widowed at a young age, she took over the running of the farm with efficient determination. My grandfather had been a gentle quiet man, with a sensitive diplomatic nature, so they were a good combination. He was often away as he traded in cattle, so Nana was well used to running the show on her own.
Many years later, at the very mention of his name her whole demeanour changed and she would smile in loving remembrance. I sensed that these two very different people had walked in harmony and, though he was gone, the face of her remembrance brought him back – and I felt that any man who could transform my grandmother so profoundly, even years after his death, had to be someone special.
When she came to live in Ballyduane, there was a mother-in-law, a father-in-law and a brother-in-law already in the house. It was not a large house, but a long, low thatched farmhouse common in the countryside at the time. Because she was no shrinking violet, it’s difficult for me to imagine life in that house without a certain amount of conflict. But her in-laws have always remembered her as the woman who fitted in very well with them and contributed greatly to family harmony. Maybe the reason the family all got on together was because they were so busy trying to eke out a living off the land there was little time for bickering. Nana was a formidable six foot tall and her new mother-in-law was small in stature – and she was most impatient! Nana would sometimes recall that they would go out together in the mornings to bring home the cows for milking; some animals did not rise fast enough for her tiny mother-in-law so she would simply leap over them and continue to round up the fast movers, leaving the dawdlers to her daughter-in-law.
Nana was past the fresh flush of youth when she decided to enter the matrimonial field so she only had three children, which in today’s world would be considered ample but at the time was considered a very small family. My mother was the eldest and took after her father, for which I was forever grateful! A few years after my grandmother’s arrival in Ballyduane a sister-in-law died leaving a young son, and Nana Ballyduane brought this young lad home and reared him as her own. Various members of the family always felt free to come and stay, and a distant relation who came to help on the farm stayed for years.
It was wartime when Nana was a young married woman and the women of her generation played a huge part in the struggle for independence. She was a staunch republican and when the Black and Tans were raiding houses for young fellows who were waging guerrilla warfare and on the run, her home was on their list – these houses where the men would find shelter were known as ‘safe houses’. It was a dangerous time, but she would not back down when the Tans raided. Sometimes the locals knew that the Tans were around and the lads would move on, but occasionally houses could be taken unawares. One night my grandmother had a nephew of her husband’s hiding in the house and in the small hours of the morning the Tan lorries drove into the yard. The punishment for hiding a rebel could be pretty drastic – you might be burnt out or roughed up, or maybe worse – so she delayed opening up as long as possible to give him a chance to do whatever he could to render himself invisible. Finally, when the banging could no longer be withstood, she opened the door and the soldiers, in their hated black and tan uniforms, strode in and ransacked the house. She stood and watched, waiting for the young fellow to be discovered, but to her amazement it did not happen. As the Tans were leaving, the officer in charge, who had raided the house several times before, eyed her and said, ‘You remind me of my mother.’ ‘Indeed!’ she snapped back acidly. ‘Your mother mustn’t be up to much to rear a scoundrel like you.’
When they were gone, nobody moved
for a long time because they had learned from experience that the Tans would sometimes double back and catch people unawares. Eventually judging it safe, she stood in the middle of the kitchen and called out, ‘Where in the name of God are you?’ Beside the fire was a long old wooden settle bed. This could open out into a bed but when closed up it looked just like a seat. Beneath the seat, however, was a space and in here bags of flour and sugar were usually stored. Nestled down amongst the bags was the young lad, who had watched the whole scene through a slit in the laths. The Tans had probably never seen a settle so had no idea of its hidden potential.
Accidents were always part of farming life and it usually fell to the woman of the house to deal with them. Nana never lost her head when there was a catastrophe but dealt with it calmly and efficiently. She had no medical training but had an innate sense of what to do, and once when one of the farm workers sustained a very serious injury and she rendered first aid until the doctor arrived, he told her that her prompt intervention had saved the young lad’s life.
When her husband died she had the expertise and foresight to hire great workmen, whom she treated with the height of respect. Johnny came to her as a young lad and she trained him up to be a good farmer. But she did many of the ‘man’s’ jobs herself too. The skill of killing a pig was usually a man’s job, but she had mastered it. This barbaric exercise had to be executed with absolute precision to avoid undue suffering. She later taught Johnny how to do it. It was simply a job that had to be done and as there was no one else to do it she did not shrink from the undertaking; in fact, she did not shirk any tough job that had to be done. One time she evicted the local vet from her yard when she deemed that he was doing a bad job in assisting a cow who was having difficulty ficulty calving, and she took over the job herself, saving both mother and calf. In the world of male-dominated farming she never underestimated her own ability.