By comparison with the many grim stories of twentieth-century Irish childhood now in circulation, in which malnutrition, destitution, parental alcoholism and sexual abuse are commonplace, Patrick Kavanagh’s childhood was a safe and comfortable one. His parents’ marriage was harmonious: though they were together morning, noon and night, each had a clearly defined sphere of operation; they lived busy, purposeful lives and respected one another’s roles. They were frugal and thrifty, poor yet economically sound, and none of their children ever went cold or hungry. Indeed, the only financial burden they were under was, as we have seen, the self-imposed one of improving their lot by joining the farming class. Patrick grew to manhood in a secure and stable home in which both parents were almost permanently present. Yet, while his was not a deprived childhood, it could not be regarded as privileged or pampered either. He grew up in an adult-dominated society in which children were subordinates, whose wishes and feelings counted for little. The combination of large families and low incomes meant that luxuries were few. In the hard-pressed village of Inniskeen, as elsewhere in Ireland at that time, childhood was generally regarded as a preparation for adulthood, for earning a livelihood, and it was brief; most young people left school by their fourteenth birthday, as did the future poet.
A late starter in literature, Patrick Kavanagh liked to pretend he was younger than he was: he was reluctant to reveal his age and when editors or others asked for his date of birth, he usually lopped off a few years. So during his lifetime the Notes on Contributors appended to the anthologies which carried his poems were generally several years out in giving his year of birth, and when the poem ‘Song at Fifty’ was published in 1958, he was 54. Even in the comparatively early autobiography, The Green Fool, he was evasive about his age, avoiding all specific reference to his birth date, claiming that he did not wish to be restricted to a particular horoscope.
In fact the record of his date of birth had been unwittingly falsified right from the start. According to James Kavanagh’s Cobbler’s Account Book, which doubled as a register of family events, his fourth child and first son, Patrick Joseph, was ‘born 21 October 1904 at 45 minutes past 8 on Sunday night in fine weather’. The details are so precise that it is almost as if he anticipated this child would have his biography written some day. Alas, these details are self-contradictory; Sunday actually fell on 23 October in 1904. So was he right about the day and wrong about the date? The Carrickmacross civil register would suggest that this was the case, for it gives the poet’s birth date as the 23rd. However, the Inniskeen baptismal register states that he was baptised by the curate, Father James O’Daly, in St Mary’s Parish Church on 23 October.1 Since he was hardly rushed from the womb to the font, this suggests that his father was wrong about the day, but right about the date, 21 October. Kavanagh himself considered this to have been his birth date.
The Green Fool affords a few brief glimpses of his early childhood: a baby lying on his back in a cradle, staring up at the holes pecked by the birds in the thatched cabin roof, or held in his mother’s arms and peering into the recesses of a shelf in a kitchen cupboard; a winsome toddler in a pink bib, so totally in harmony with his background of bogland flowers as to be almost indistinguishable from it. Yet such tender memories are deliberately undercut by unglamorous fact — the cradle was an onion box, the kitchen cupboard contained old curtain-rings and rent receipts, the bib, a petticoat, was being worn because he was not yet potty-trained.
As a small child Patrick was fussed over and cared for not only by his mother but by his elder sisters, Annie and Mary, by customers in his father’s shop and by visiting journeymen cobblers. For twelve years he occupied a special place in the family hierarchy as the only son, a status warranting tea at breakfast time in addition to the porridge doled out to his other siblings. Even after the birth of his brother Peter in 1916, the family spotlight was still on him as the elder son in a farming community, where the first-born male was customarily his father’s heir. There was never a time when he was not the centre of attention at home and ever afterwards he consciously or unconsciously courted public notice.
True, his parents were not given to outward displays of affection, to physical or verbal cossetting. By the time of his marriage James was a long-time bachelor, set in his ways. He saw his role as that of provider, and his lengthy working day would have left him no time to play with his children even if he had been so disposed. He only asked that they make as little nuisance of themselves as possible so that he could get on with his business or his reading. Any disruption of his routine or any annoyance to neighbours which might interfere with his trade angered him. Reared in the poverty-stricken post-Famine years, he had never known gentility or politeness. He could be irascible, had a rough tongue and made little effort to endear himself to his children. One of them recalled a typical exchange, his answer to a child who asked where he was going as he left the house: ‘Out to shite. Will you come?’2 This was the kind of remark his son Patrick would revert to in later years when he wished to rid himself of unwanted company. His father provided a model of rebarbativeness which he followed and even outdid from middle age onwards.
His mother presided over the crowded kitchen, where in the evenings neighbours and older children competed for the few stools, and where in Patrick’s childhood there was almost always a new baby crawling on the floor or a toddler teetering about unsteadily among the chickens. Her pre-marriage job of barmaid had taught her to be professionally friendly; every caller was a customer or potential customer. Thrifty to the point of meanness, she exuded an air of hospitality and bonhomie in public, to offset her husband’s more uncertain temper. He took a pride in his workmanship and, when customers brought him boots that needed excessive repair, he would scoop them up and head for the door, threatening to drown the offending articles in the nearest boghole. In a well-rehearsed routine, Bridget would plead with him not to throw away the good neighbour’s footwear, and an accommodation would be arrived at. In her dealings with neighbours, Bridget’s maxim was ‘the easy way is the best way’, not one she succeeded in instilling in her poet offspring. Patrick and his brother came to prefer his father’s more abrupt and abrasive attitude, dismissing his mother’s gentler, wheedling manner with visitors and customers as grovelling, a form of servility bred of famine and poverty.3 In the privacy of the family, however, Bridget was the unobtrusively dominant partner, overseeing every detail of the household management and economy.
Irish Catholic families in the first decades of the twentieth century (indeed for much of the century) were much bigger than low-income parents could afford to rear, and the more responsible, like Bridget and James, who worked from dawn until long after dusk trying to provide for them, were frequently tired and harassed and had little tolerance for youthful idleness and play. Patrick remembers that ‘Conditions on the small farm with families of ten and upwards were really dreadful. Children going about neglected with curable diseases, half-starved.’4 As early as was feasible, children were co-opted into the family pool of labour. In the Kavanagh home the open fire had to be stoked with coal at regular intervals and the wheel bellows turned to make it blaze; drinking water had to be fetched from Meegan’s well a quarter of a mile away; there were calves, pigs and hens to be fed and eggs to be collected, sometimes from outlying nests at a distance from the hen-house. In addition to helping with household chores, the children were hired out for seasonal work on farms. In 1911 when Annie was aged 13 and Mary only 11, both were finding occasional work as field hands. In 1914, Annie, Mary and 12-year-old Sissie worked for William Woods of Drumnagrella weeding mangolds, turnips and potatoes, scutching hay, thinning turnips and gathering potatoes. Patrick, at age 12, was paired off with Sissy for most of July, during the school holidays, working on the Woods’s farm.5 Their youth did not cause them to be treated with any leniency. A farmer would shout at them as they planted seed potatoes on cold early April days: ‘What way is that you are dropping the seed? Pinking them. Stoop your b
acks and put your hand down with the seed. Have you rheumatism?’6 The children learned how to outwit their slave-driving employers. Patrick recalled how one October when assigned the after-harvest task of going over the potato field drill by drill, gathering up any leftover potatoes into buckets and then upending these into large baskets, he and Sissy took the easy way out by filling their buckets directly from the pit of newly harvested potatoes.7
When the children’s employers were customers, the number of days and hours worked by each child was recorded by James in his accounts book and the charge was added to the client’s bill for shoe repairs. After they had acquired a farm in 1910, the children’s labour was sometimes bartered for the loan of a plough or harrow and for help with planting crops or harvesting, because the Kavanaghs lacked the most basic farming equipment and had not even an ass and cart to ferry goods to market. One of the poet’s best-known lyrics begins: ‘We borrowed the loan of Kerr’s big ass/To go to Dundalk with butter . . . ’
Though the Kavanagh parents had a strongly developed work ethic, for the children it was not a case of all work and no play. There were the long school holidays in summer when there were simply not enough chores to fill the day. A few dry days in late summer were set aside for blackberrying and the cans of berries sold for jam-making. Otherwise, when their services were not required at home or as field hands, the children were free to play with other children, visit neighbours’ houses, roam the fields and roads, or read. Later, in ‘Living in the Country’, Patrick would recall one such idyllic childhood summer:
It was the Warm Summer, that landmark
In a child’s mind, an infinite day
Sunlight and burnt grass
Green grasshoppers on the railway slopes
The humming of wild bees
The whole summer during the school holidays
Till the blackberries appeared . . .
In early childhood Patrick played at the front of the house, in the area known as ‘the long garden’, under his mother’s or elder sisters’ watchful eyes. Growing up in a houseful of girls, he joined in what would have been gendered as ‘girls’ games’, variations on ‘playing house’, in which discarded household rubbish was salvaged and imaginatively recycled into the stuff of domesticity, fairy tale and romance. In this outdoors playtime world, bits of broken crockery stood in for kitchen pots and plates, and rags and scraps of paper were pretend clothes or quilts. Such childhood games of make-believe are recalled in his poem ‘The Long Garden’, where an old boot is transformed into a flying sandal, a rusty bucket into the drum beating for a wedding and the clothesline pole is co-opted to serve as the flagpole on a prince’s palace. In retrospect, these acts of make-believe were an early manifestation of the workings of the creative imagination, fashioning an alternative reality out of the ‘bits and pieces of Everyday’.
School introduced him to other boys and soon he was often away from home playing tag or kicking a ragball, birdnesting, torturing insects or ‘rassling’, as wrestling was referred to locally. He liked to ramble off and visit other houses too. One of these was big Matt Rooney’s in Shancoduff where he was fascinated by the rounded depressions in the earthen floor which Matt used in lieu of a feeding bowl for a cat or as a nesting place for a sick chicken. If he were lucky he might see a step-dancing performance, for Matt was known to be so partial to step-dancing that he would take a door off its hinges to provide the dancer with a platform. Nick Kearney, another neighbour, was a wonderful tin whistle player, easily persuaded to demonstrate his skills. The children were always made welcome at the home of their only local cousins, the Caffreys, descendants of the teacher Johnny Caffrey, who had married their great-aunt Mary, Nancy Callan’s sister. The Caffrey family had come down in the world since and were to be found drinking tea out of jam jars, but it was a more relaxed, easy-going household than Patrick’s own. His memory of them is of the assembled family sitting around talking, joking and laughing.
At Christmas in his childhood there was not much talk of Santa. As befitted a cobbler’s brood, the children each left a hopeful boot at the fireplace rather than a stocking. Santa did not always oblige and when he did he brought inexpensive trifles, a packet of biscuits or perhaps a wooden pencil box with a sliding lid.8 In the poem ‘A Christmas Childhood’, Patrick recalls his delight at receiving a penknife at the age of 6. On Christmas Day they had meat for dinner and plum pudding. Like most neighbouring farmers’ wives, Bridget sold the turkeys or geese she reared at the Dundalk market, rather than keeping any for her own table.9 James, released from his bench for the holiday, sang ‘Jolly Holly Christmas’, accompanying himself on the melodeon. As he sometimes did in summer, he sat on the wall outside and played for the neighbours’ benefit:
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans . . .
There was also the excitement of the Christmas parcel from America. Bridget had several relatives in the United States, including two brothers in New York, but the presents came from her paternal aunt in Chicago, Mrs Duffy, who sent board games, toys and light reading matter, as well as hand-me-down clothes.10
Patrick claimed that he only once joined a group of wren boys.11 On St Stephen’s Day it was the custom for groups of young boys to visit the houses in their district and chant a verse to the mistress of the establishment:
The wren, the wren, the king of all birds
On St Stephen’s Day he was caught in the furze
Although he was little, his fame it was great
So get up Mrs . . . and give us a treat.
The rhyme was easily memorised, usually performed with little grace and, if the house had not been plagued with too many wren boy callers that morning, might earn the children a few pence or some food.
Easter Sunday was also a festive occasion. Less of a family festival than Christmas, it was celebrated by groups of children picnicking out of doors on food begged from their parents. Hard-boiled eggs were a treat, for eggs were a saleable commodity, and those few kept for home consumption were usually reserved for the male head of the household. Easter, Patrick remembered gratefully, for its luminosity: ‘Easter, with the bright sun dancing, even in a country of small, watery fields, was a time to delight in.’12
On dark winter evenings there was no need to venture out in search of entertainment, for the kitchen cum workshop was a social centre. Patrick absorbed the tales of customers with names like the Gressy McGeogh, Owney the millman and Parrabawn the hunter, and learned to mimic Mary Ann Dardis, noted for repeating the saying, ‘God forgive half of the mothers — left me here a poor pilgrim.’ Johnny Cassidy, who visited the house almost every night for years, had an immense repertoire of fairy stories and folk tales. He was such a favourite with Patrick and the other children that his death in 1927 was recorded in the Cobbler’s Account Book as if it were a family bereavement. Barney Rooney told more frightening stories and Patrick sometimes went to bed scared after his visits. The same beggars returned time and again: Mary Ann the Plantain and Biddy Dundee, whose party piece was ‘The bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond’.
When trade was good, James was flanked at the bench by one or two journeymen cobblers. These were itinerant craftsmen who carried their cobbler’s tools bundled up in a worn apron. They arrived without warning, looking for work, and left again just as suddenly. All were heavy drinkers who routinely spent their week’s wages in a local pub on Monday, their traditional day off. When they could find no work or the weather was too bad to trek the roads, they took refuge in a workhouse. The same journeymen would turn up again and again. Patrick’s favourite was Garrett Plunkett, whom he recalled in The Green Fool and elsewhere. He was a sensitive elderly man and the children played tricks on him, stealing his tools and even his spectacles, then putting them in a place he had already searched. In the middle of working on a boot, a journeyman cobbler would abruptly say ‘I’m goin’, and walk out. Neither flattery nor wages could detain him. After his last visit to the Ka
vanaghs, within a few days of saying ‘I’m goin’, Garrett Plunkett died. The children felt bereaved. Journeymen cobblers were generally welcome because, in addition to helping clear up a backlog of work when trade was brisk, they were a recognised source of stories, ballads and gossip and generated further business among customers who would make their way to the shop in search of diversion. Some of these journeymen were ex-soldiers with tales of their adventures overseas. They also made up stories to amuse the Kavanagh children, such as the tale of ‘The Big Dog in the Long Garden’.13
Despite Inniskeen’s proximity to the towns of Dundalk and Carrickmacross and the presence of a dispensary with a doctor in weekly attendance, the practice of alternative folk medicine still flourished there when Patrick Kavanagh was growing up. When he had the whooping cough as a baby, his godmother came and put a red tape round his neck; if he had been a girl, his godfather would have come instead. Another cure for whooping cough was bread baked by a woman married to a man who shared her maiden name. When a child got mumps, an ass’s winkers was put around the neck and he or she was led in and out of a pigsty three times by one of the opposite sex who sang in Irish what sounded to Patrick like ‘Hugadh a leena, mucna mucna.’ This was an invocation to the pigs to take the child’s mumps upon themselves. A child who got scarlet fever was made to drink water from a skull, and the cure for a stye on the eye was to have a member of the opposite sex point gooseberry thorns at it nine times a day for nine days. Two houses away from the Kavanaghs lived Harry McElroy whose touch was supposed to cure erysipelas, ‘the rose’, as it was called. He had two cures, the long or the short, the length being proportionate to the patient’s means. One man had a secret cure for the whitlow; another was a bone-setter. Two women held the monopoly in the midwifery business.14
Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography Page 4