by Eamon Kelly
My Aunt Bridgie often talked about the famine and what happened to the people at that time. She told a story of little children weak with hunger tugging at their mothers’ skirts and asking her to put down the potatoes. To keep them from crying, when they weren’t watching she put small stones in a pot with water and hung the pot over the fire. The children sat on the floor, their eyes glued to the pot, and when they thought the potatoes should be cooked they kept imploring their mother to take them up. In the end, distracted from their pleadings and weak with hunger herself, she prayed to the Blessed Virgin to intercede with the Almighty to come to her aid. She took the cover off the pot and there to gladden the hearts of herself and the children were cooked potatoes. To a child’s imagination everything is possible, but I caught my father winking at my mother and I hoped my Aunt Bridgie didn’t see him.
Though my Aunt Bridgie was old she didn’t remember the great famine but as a child she had heard older people talk about it. She described a house to us where distant relations of our own lived in Glounacoppal. The family lay on the kitchen floor too far gone from hunger to stand up. The father and mother had watched the younger children die one by one. He decided he would try again to find some sustenance for his wife and only surviving son. A raw turnip, maybe half-hidden and forgotten in the garden, or dandelion roots which he could dig up with his fingers. He crawled out of the house and was later found dead in a field clutching a bunch of dandelion roots in his hand.
Because of these memories there was always a deep respect for food in our house. Nothing was wasted. Not a single morsel was ever thrown out. What was left over was carefully gathered and added to the mess for the hens or the pigs. A beggar never went empty-handed from a door in our neighbourhood while there was food in the house, and my mother’s most fervent request of God when we knelt at our prayers was, ‘Feed the hungry!’
When the potato garden faded from dark green to brown and the ageing process had continued until the stalks were white and withered, the spuds were fit to dig. The same spade which was used for the sowing helped to reap the harvest. With his foot on the treader, my father drove the spade deep under the stalk and upturned the earth, revealing eight to a dozen potatoes. I marvelled at the bounty of nature that from one small shoot so many tubers could come. With the tip of the spade my father pitched them into a row as he went and we small people and my mother picked them and put them into buckets. For the winter the potatoes were stored in a pit in the garden. A trench about a foot deep was dug and into this the tubers were put and made into a small rick coming to a point. The neat heap was covered with withered stalks collected for the purpose and finally earthed over until the pit looked like the hipped roof of a long house. There the pit remained, the contents safe from winter frost. One end was opened when a supply was wanted for the table or to feed the animals. Farmers’ sons, who were unpaid, raided their fathers’ pits and sold a sack of potatoes so they could get pocket money coming up to Christmas.
In the potato garden there was room for an allotment for growing cabbages and a bed or two of onions. Cabbage plants were bought in bundles of a hundred in the town market and planted in neat rows with a generous helping of manure. The plants lay in the ground withered and forlorn-looking for a while. Then they perked up and grew with a fairish rapidity until in the middle of each plant the leaves hugged together to form the beginnings of a white head. While the plant was still growing the outside leaves were plucked and broken between the bands into a tub, topped with a mess of Indian meal and fed to the cow while she was being milked.
A cabbage leaf was used as a wrapper. When our cow was dry often we found a pound of butter in a cabbage leaf on the window-sill. It was left there by a generous neighbour before we got up in the morning. Boiled cabbage was the vegetable which accompanied cured bacon on our plates.
There was an iron frame, the rack, which hung like a gate over the fire. It had hooks that could be moved along the bar. When a pot was cooked it could be shifted to the side and another pot hung on. Red coals were also put at the side of the hearth on which rested the frying pan with ‘a bit of fresh thing’, as my mother called meat from the butchers. The fresh thing cooked with onions we got once in a blue moon. The staple diet for the principal meal was bacon and cabbage or bacon and turnips. When you sat down to such a meal there was a mountain of laughing Murphies in the middle of the table and as that mountain went down a small mountain of potato skins rose at each elbow. There was a bowl of semi-solidified milk to wash it down and every bite that went into your mouth was produced on your own holding.
FOOD ON THE TABLE
The fowl had a house in the yard with a hole in the door to give them air at night. My father made a ladder-like roost for them with a stick across fairly high up for the cock to perch on so that he could preside over his harem. When the last person was going to bed at night the word was, ‘Did you kindle [rake] the fire?’ and ‘Did you close the door on the fowl?’ Our front door was never locked, not even during the Tan war, but many is the man regretted not closing his fowl house door at night. The fox was always on the prowl.
When the men at our fireside talked about animals, pride of place for cleverness was given to the fox. Many is the time I heard them tell about the farmer who had a large hole in his fowl house door. The fox squeezed himself through it and having deprecated, as the men said, his stomach swelled and he was unable to come out through the hole in the door. The fox waited until the farmer opened the door in the morning, and was that farmer surprised to see a dead fox on the floor. He took the animal by the tail and swung the lifeless body over his shoulder on his way to dump him in a gripe. When the fox got into the open air, and out of view of the dog, he nipped the farmer in the back of the leg. With a cry of pain the man let go of the tail.
It was listening to the men talking in my father’s house that gave me a life-long interest in animals. I heard them describe how the fox stole honey from the wild bees’ nest in a summer’s meadow. Reynard sat on the nest, his thick coat of fur protecting him. The disturbed bees crawled out and the fox, putting his snout down between his hind legs, sucked the honey from the comb. One of the breed became infested with fleas, according to one of our visitors, and to get rid of them he gathered a ball of wool in his mouth from bushes near where sheep grazed. When the fox came to a lake he dipped his tail, just the tip, and with infinite patience lowered himself slowly into the water, giving the fleas plenty of time to retreat before the advancing deluge. Finally his ears were going under and then his nose and the unwanted tenants, with nowhere else to go, took refuge in the ball of wool. Suddenly, letting go the wool, the fox submerged himself, saying in his own mind, ‘If that ship sinks it won’t be for the want of a crew!’
Badgers and otters were often the subject of conversation. A badger, separated from his mate, will defecate while on the move. The stool, falling in a certain way, indicates to his mate which way he has gone.
But domestic animals took pride of place in the men’s conversation. They were very fond of their horses and their dogs, and the women sang when milking the cows and feeding the calves. People talked to the animals as city folk talk to their pets. There was a cat in every house, not so much a pet but a working member of the family. If the dog had to mind the sheep and bring home the cattle, the cat had his work cut out for him to keep the grain loft free of rats and mice. Men boasted about the intelligence of their dogs and told exaggerated stories about their cleverness. Stories about cats were exaggerated too. A carpenter who worked late at night trained his cat to hold a candle. The carpenter was proud of his achievement and wagered that training beats nature. A travelling man, hearing of this, laid a bet and let go a mouse in the workshop. Needless to say the cat dropped the candle and left them in the dark. Nature will out!
From the money my father earned in the workshop we were well set up in Carrigeen. By the time I went to school we had a cow and her calf, a pony, a flock of hens and a royal rooster and in the out office
next to the fowl house two pigs fattening. My father bought them at the pig market when they were two small pinky-skinned bonamhs. He made a trough in which to feed them and we got straw for their bed. Pigs keep their bed and around where they sleep very clean and use the far end of the house for their calls of nature. My father put a half-door on the piggery so that we could look in on them. Neighbouring women passing by, having inquired about the health of the family, inquired about the animals. My mother usually brought them around to the back to see the pigs. It wasn’t enough for the women to look at the two porkers; they opened the door, gave the animals a smart smack on the rump to admire them walking around, and then pronounced on how much they had improved since they last saw them. The owner of an animal likes to hear it praised and my mother was no different from anyone else.
On a summer’s day my two small brothers and I loved to bring food out in the field. We would also provide some eatables for the pony, the cow and the calf and coax them to come near us while we all ate together. In our innocence we pretended that they were people. They were all tame and came quite close. The pony would eat bread and so would the cow, and when the pony grazed in Murphy’s mountain we caught her by offering her bread or a handful of sugar. The cow, when her time came, was mated with Mac’s bull, for which service we paid five shillings. Neighbouring farmers, who didn’t have a bull of their own, availed of the services of Mac’s ‘gentleman’. They paid for this by giving a day’s work to the owner, and when they came together to cut Mac’s turf they were known as bull men.
I was still of tender years when I took our cow to the bull. There was no one else to do it if my father was away from home except my mother, and it was considered indelicate for a woman to go on an errand like that in our community. The cow was very giddy taking her there, darting in gaps and gates, jumping on other cows and lifting her head and bellowing. I drove her into the farmyard, the owner opened the gate and then opened the stall door. When the yard gate was shut the bull came out with a ring on his nose. His belligerent appearance terrified me as he pawed the ground with his front hoof. He lifted his head high, sniffed the air and let a bloodcurdling roar out of him.
Mrs Mac, a sensitive woman, called me into the kitchen, cut a slice from a home-made cake, buttered it and shook sugar on the top and gave it to me. I was troubled because I had heard the men say at our fireside when such matters came down that to be on the safe side a bull should jump the cow three times.
‘Anything bothering you?’ Mrs Mac asked.
‘The men always said to make sure the cow got three jumps,’ I told her.
‘That will be all right,’ she said, ‘John will see to that.’
I finished the cut of bread and put the five shillings on the table. When the cow was left out of the yard I drove her home a much quieter and more contented animal than she was coming.
When the Civil War was over and some sort of order restored in the country, my father went off with Singleton, the contractor, rebuilding the bridges which had been blown up by the IRA during the two troubles. Singleton had a big red face and wore a broad-brimmed hat and wire-rimmed spectacles. He was always in a hurry and my father made sure he was ready when he called on Monday mornings. Singleton had an old Ford car with a canvas roof. He drove like hell and my father said that when they went over a humpbacked bridge the passengers were lifted out of their seats and their heads bounced off the canvas roof. When they were working in the Gaeltacht Singleton learned two words of Irish, Brostaigh ort! (Hurry on, you!), and used them to great effect on the labouring men.
My father, often I heard him describe it, made the platform which rested on the river bed, and shaped the huge mould to support the new arch. The original archstones and keystones were retrieved from the river and placed in position on the mould, and concrete was grouted down between them. The parapets were rebuilt and coped, and when the cement was set, they struck the fox wedges, the mould slipped down from the arch and in a day or two the road was opened for traffic. Local people who had to go through the river were now able to drive over the restored bridge. On Saturday nights Singleton brought my father home from places as far away as Duagh and Annascaul.
It was when my father was away that our cow – Buckley, called after the man we bought her from – decided to calf. We had watched her barrel grow bigger and bigger during the preceding months and her udder go dry. When the time came and she was in labour, I went and told my mother. She was too unwell to come downstairs as she was expecting another baby but she asked me and my younger brother, Tim, to sit by her bedside and she explained to us what we could do to help the cow have her calf.
Feeling very important we lit a candle and went out to the cowshed to sit and wait. The cow was lying down and the sign we were to watch out for was two hollows that would come on her back just above her tail. When this happened it meant that the pin bones were down and the new arrival would soon be on its way. The first thing that happened was that the water bag appeared. This was the ‘blister’ my mother told us to expect. That broke and the cow’s behind opened very wide as the ‘crubs’ worked their way out. These crubs – my mother’s word – were the calf’s front feet. They hadn’t come very far when the calf’s nose came into view, resting on the feet. The nose was covered with mucus which we wiped away to give the little animal a chance to breathe. The cow looked back at us from where she was tied, giving a low moan with every stitch and with a wild look in her eyes. If the birth movement stopped, my mother told us to catch the front feet and give a gentle tug to coincide with the cow’s natural ejection process. This we did and the calf came gradually into the light, his eyes shut. We heaved, holding a leg each, until all of a sudden the calf shot out, knocking the two of us back on the floor. He lay there, a slimy mess. His body was very small and when after a while he staggered to his feet he seemed all legs. His mother was pleading for him as she shivered with excitement. We coaxed him up, reeling drunkenly on his long legs, until he was under her head. She licked his face lovingly and licked his body.
We had plenty of hot water ready, to which we added bran in a tub. We placed it under the cow’s head and she drank it greedily. We had to coax the calf away. He wasn’t left to suckle the cow. He had to be taught to drink milk from a bucket. My father had placed the rail of the cart in the cowshed. We walked the little calf into this pen and put on the back gate. We went then and told my mother the whole story. She felt well enough to get up and milk the cow. Putting the milk in a bucket she showed us how to teach the calf to drink. She put her finger, dripping with milk, into the calf’s mouth. No fear of being bitten, he had no teeth yet. He sucked the milk from her fingers as if he were sucking his mother’s teat. It took him a few days to get the hang of it, but when he did he put his head in the bucket, drank what was there, and bellowed for more.
After feeding the calf there was plenty of milk left over for the use of the house, milk to colour our tea and to drink. We even managed to save some to put in a large shallow pan. In time the cream came to the top and was skimmed off with a saucer. When there was a fair quantity of cream collected it was put in a small table churn. When you twisted the handle, a ladder-like frame on the inside went through the cream. After much hard work – and everyone had to take a turn – the cream was made into butter. If you were passing a farmer’s dairy on churning day it would be considered unlucky if you didn’t give a hand. It was said if you purposely passed by without helping, you would take the size of your head of butter from the dairy. If you gave a hand I suppose the reverse was true. Anyway, many is the time when passing Murphys’ dairy on churning day I was greeted with: ‘Come here and put the size of your head in the churn!’
There were two products from the churning, butter and buttermilk. The fresh butter with just a little salt added was beautiful to taste and the buttermilk had a sweet-sour tang to it. We drank it and it was used for baking.
My mother baked all the bread for the family. It was only on a very rare occasion that s
hop bread made its way on to our table. My mother’s soda cake was made from white flour but now and then she added Indian meal to make mixed bread. Locally this was called ‘yalla buck’ and steaming hot and with a plentiful spreading of fresh butter it tasted delicious. As a special treat my mother added cream when baking a white cake, and a little sugar. We loved the soft spongy bread. We cheered when we saw her reaching for the cream jug or taking two paper bags from the press, one with currants, the other with raisins, and adding the dried fruit to the small mountain of flour in the bread tray. As she tossed the flour the dark fruit turned white. When she had the flour thoroughly mixed and had added a pinch of soda, she made a hole in the middle of the heap and poured in the buttermilk, soaked the flour and kneaded the dough.
When my small sister, Eliza, Elizabeth, Betty and Bess my mother called her, was big enough to climb on a chair she loved to mess with the flour and the dough. If my mother was in a good humour she let her make a small cake. My mother’s cake was round and almost a foot across. When she flattened it out in the bread tray (a lasad in Irish, sometimes pronounced losset) she cut the sign of the cross on the cake and put a small indentation between the four arms of the cross. Then, lifting it between both hands, she lowered the cake into the pot oven, which had been dusted with flour beforehand to keep the cake from sticking to it. She hung the oven over the fire and, placing the cover on it, she heaped red coals on the cover so that the heat to bake the cake was coming from above and below. Now and again she would lift the cover slightly to see if the cake was rising. When it was baked she took the cover off and a cloud of steam went up, filling the kitchen with the aroma of freshly baked bread. The cat sat up and twitched her nostrils sideways she found the smell so good. The new cake, covered in a piece of cloth, was put on the window-sill to cool. When my mother was in high good humour she would let my little sister put her small cake in an old metal saucepan with the cover on. The coals were piled on top and it baked at the side of the fire.