by Joe O'Toole
It was Minnie the Brewery, when I was a young lad, told me about the death and dying of my great-great-grandfather. It was the simplest of accounts.
‘I was there. He got up out of bed, went down to the chamber and did his business. Then he went in to bed again and died for himself.’
A few questions elicited more detail of the events.
‘Was there anyone with him?’
‘You can be sure that all his family were around him when he died. None of them were going to lose out.’
Apparently, whenever any of the family came to see him and he had established that things were going well for them, he would counsel them: ‘Never be short of money.’ For emphasis he would take his stick and rap hard on the locked chest he always kept under his bed. That chest became the stuff of dreams and the source of wild speculation among the family. How much was in it? What would they do with all that money when he was gone?
But the door would be firmly locked whenever he opened the famous chest and nobody was allowed to see its contents. ‘You’ll have plenty of time for that when I’m gone,’ he’d say.
The chest and its prospects became a bonding that kept the family together and attentive to the old man. He was well looked after and never wanted for anything. The estimated value of the chest was well spent on him over the long years until he finally died with his wits and family about him.
It goes without saying that the beneficiaries could hardly contain themselves; before the body was even prepared for the habit they had hauled out the chest and opened it for the share-out. It was stacked full of small, heavy, bulging bags. These were quickly emptied and, one after the other, they discharged their contents onto the floor – small stones, little bundles of cipíní, buttons. There wasn’t a single item of any value. Not a brass farthing among the lot of it.
‘Well, the old bollox!’
And I have no doubt but that the old cladhaire was breaking his sides laughing as he looked down on his family searching in vain for his ‘insurance cover’.
A wonderful image and a parable for all parents: the family that hopes together, stays together!
SEÁN THE GROVE
‘Sugar spilt is profit lost.’
My grandfather, Seán the Grove, had a cautionary tale, if not a parable, for every little incident. He would carefully tip the last few grains of sugar from the large scoop into a strong brown-paper bag on the scales. It was one of those old-fashioned balances with the pound weight on one side and the bag of sugar on the other. Finally the sugar would have the measure of the weight and would gently seesaw itself downward as the weight went upwards, until they were in perfect balance. Granda would stop the flow of sugar exactly on the mark.
‘Don’t do the customer and don’t do yourself.’ And then would come the question. ‘How many should we have?’
‘Half a hundredweight is fifty-six pounds. There should be fifty-six bags.’
‘Good. Good. You’re not wasting your time up there with the Brothers. Now we’ll count them, to be sure.’
There would be a restatement of the lecture during the count.
‘Don’t waste. Be honest. Give every man his due.’
Of course there wasn’t the slightest need for him to be filling bags of sugar. There was plenty of help around if he wanted it. But he undertook the task for a number of reasons. Firstly, few things irritated him as much as spilt sugar. The sound and feel of grains of sugar underfoot grated on him to an irrational degree. Taking charge of the sugar himself ensured that it would not be spilt. Secondly, it kept him in the centre of things and it meant that he wasn’t idle. Also – and this was important – it wasn’t hard work. I don’t think I ever saw him break sweat.
In fact, Seán the Grove had a great lack of confidence in the potential of people with the reputation for being hard, physical workers. He held the view that they would never get much further than where they were. A great believer in exploiting and making the best of any given situation, one of his better moves was to acquire the heart disease angina in his late middle age. He minded it and nursed it for about thirty years and at any moment would explain to you the importance of ‘minding the ticker’. Mind it he did, and it improved the quality of his life. When he finally died, in his late eighties, it was not from angina but ripe old age.
He was a most successful businessman, but he rarely took his hands out of his pockets. What he excelled at was buying and selling. He would purchase quality at a bargain and sell at a profit and all parties in between would be treated fairly. He made money without making enemies. There was nobody he did not have word for, he was a great talker and his popularity was legendary. The people he did business with tended to trust him and become his friends. Commercial travellers warmed to him. One of them, Denis Guiney, asked him to become a partner in acquiring a substantial drapery business. My grandfather declined. Guiney went on to build his business, Clery’s, into one of Dublin’s great department stores. A very rare missed opportunity for Seán the Grove.
My grandfather was born in 1885, or so he told me, and christened John Moriarty. As often as not he was called Jack. He acquired the name of Seán the Grove from the name of his farm, The Grove, just on the edge of Dingle town under Cnoc a’Chairn, where he had been born, and to distinguish him from all the other Moriartys. It is hard to describe his daily activity in a manner which reflects his success. Every day he would walk up to the farm in the Grove and look around. I can never remember him to work on the farm, but he would question Uncle Benny, or give directions. In the shop, which was quite small, he would talk to the customers while my grandmother did the work. All he ever seemed to do was to sell men’s shoes and caps and to weigh and pack the loose sugar and tea. I have no doubt but that he was given the task of fitting the shoes because my grandmother, who was spotlessly clean, refused point-blank to be subjected to the olfactory onslaught from feet and socks just released from the hot and sweaty confines of heavy leather boots or rubber wellingtons. In fact, my grandmother would regularly advise people with smelly feet that the best cure for them was to bathe them regularly ‘in your own morning water’. I never tried it myself, but I know that ‘morning water’, that first urination before breaking fast, was commonly advised as a cure-all for things like chilblains and other foot problems. Anyway, grandfather sold footwear to all, smelly feet notwithstanding. Nothing pleased him more than the customer who walked in in a pair of shoes, stuck one big foot on the small footstool with the request, ‘Same again, Jack, size eleven.’
‘You got good value out of them,’ he’d reply, ‘they’re a great shoe and they’ll last forever if you keep them soled and polished. Clark’s make them well.’
‘I’ve no complaints, Jack. I wore those shoes at every Mass, funeral, wedding and races these last five years.’
Every night he would call down to our house. Every night he would play cards with us and every night there would be political talk. Seán the Grove loved politics. Even though they held differing political views, he got on great with my father, Myko. The happenings of the day would be recounted and lessons drawn from them. He mixed general advice on living with specific advice on playing cards: ‘Trust every man if you must, but always cut the cards,’ or the caution, ‘The two worst payers are the one who pays beforehand and the one who does not pay at all.’
No two nights were ever the same. The card game that was played in our house was ‘31’, the West Kerry version of ‘25’, with the best trump being worth eleven. It was a game in which every deal was a test of judgement, skill, cooperation and survival tactics. The decisions were complex; it was not just a matter of winning a ‘trick’ and it was not simply about winning out. There was also the consideration of whether or not it would be better to allow someone else to win in order to prevent the leading player from getting out. But in allowing another player to take one ‘trick’, you had to question whether your own trump card was good enough to take the next one. We were required to take the broad view. Se�
�n the Grove expected you to make judgements on the quality or potential of a player’s hand from the early tricks and plays.
My moves came under particular scrutiny. Every mistake I made would be analysed during the next deal. ‘If you had held back the knave until the following trick you could have taken the last two and Myko wouldn’t have won.’ ‘Only a fooleen would have led with the Ace of Hearts. Didn’t you know the Five was still in play? If you had waited you could have taken two tricks with a sporting chance of the last!’ At the time it was humiliating, but in reality it was no more than learning and teaching through the group method and typical of my mother’s people, the Moriartys. For them, everything was a lesson to be learnt. Each day’s experience layered on yesterday’s. I can still hear my grandfather’s voice when I had made some mistake. Shaking his head in mock sadness, he would sigh, ‘Níolagan wouldn’t be such a fooleen, John Pheadaí would be cuter.’ This was a pointed reference to two of my schoolmates, Pat Neligan and John Francis Brosnan. If the truth were known, they were two of the easiest-going of all the gang and would be horrified to think that they were being held up as examples that would show me to disadvantage. They are the same and every bit as decent today.
Myko would relate the latest views and happenings from his colleagues in Tralee Garda Station, the ‘experts and the philosophers’ as he always referred to them. Many of the stories originated with District Justice Johnson, who also sat in the Dingle court. He had a wry sense of humour and was forever trying to unravel pub brawls, fair-day fights and neighbours’ quarrels about rights of way. Whereas the protagonists were introduced to the court by their full baptismal names, the oral evidence from witnesses in the box would refer to people by their pet names and nicknames, so, for example, Mr Patrick James Coffey became Red Padger in the telling. The defendant might have been baptised John Savage, but nobody ever heard him called anything but Daggers. Confusion reigned. Blank looks on the faces of witnesses. Lawyers trying to relate nicknames to official names. On these occasions the good judge was in the habit of interrupting the proceedings and cross-examinations with a plea to the lawyers that they ‘read out the cast in order of appearance’ so that he might interpret the evidence by knowing their names both as ‘players and characters’.
No doubt his experiences in the courtrooms of Kerry provided the inspiration, but Justice Johnson went on to write a play called The Evidence I Shall Give, which was popular among amateur dramatic groups around the country for many years.
Our house was across the road from the courthouse, so we were right in the middle of the excitement on the Wednesday court sittings. As children, we often managed to slip past the garda on the door and sneak in to the back of the courtroom to listen to local scandals and see justice being doled out. We shared that space with every layabout from the town. They were all there to glory in the discomfiture of publicans who served after-hours, the ‘found-ons’ as the illegal drinkers were officially termed. This was all the stuff of meaty gossip later in the evening, none more so than fair-day fights and rights-of-way disputes.
My first visit to a dentist was at approximately five years of age and for some reason, which has been long forgotten, it was Seán the Grove who brought me. All that remains in my memory is the pain of the experience and the soft, patient voice of the dentist, Michael Fitzgerald. My grandfather was a firm believer in the importance of young people minding their teeth and constantly cautioned against losing them, as he himself had done. That was quite forward-thinking at that time inasmuch as dentists were still seen as a sort of modern-day luxury and convenience. People would do anything rather than attend at the dentist. Every conceivable method to kill the pain of toothache was tried, from whiskey and poitín to witch hazel and cloves, and it was only when all else failed that the dentist was brought into play. Even then it was never to save the tooth, but to ‘pull the damn thing and give me some peace’.
The accepted wisdom was that by middle age we would all be losing our teeth, to be replaced by dentures, or ‘false teeth’ as we called them. People used to take pride in their perfect false teeth and show them off. It was the introduction of school medical examinations that brought a new education and awareness to a generation as to the importance of dental health and hygiene. Seán the Grove made sure that his own children appreciated the importance of good grinders. Teresa always insisted that we brush our teeth at least twice daily and with Euthymol toothpaste, which at the time could only be purchased in a chemist’s. That confirmed for her that it was the best!
My recollection of that first dental visit is that it was occasioned by a minor playground accident, which resulted in an injury to my front teeth and gums. Eventually, three of my upper front teeth were extracted to allow adequate space for two adult teeth to come down. And indeed the two buck teeth did eventually make their appearance. My grandfather insisted on weekly reports as to how the new teeth were doing. They did fine. For a quarter of a century after that he would ask me, ‘How are Michael Fitz’s teeth?’ They gave no trouble for over forty years, at which point it became necessary to crown one of them. They are still grinding. And when the time came, Michael Fitz always voted for me in elections. Two victories at age five.
Being a practical man, Seán the Grove gave great consideration to the future employment of his family and his grandchildren. Any of his family who were interested in getting into business could count on him for a hand-out. At one stage four of his children, including my mother, had thriving businesses around the town and another had the farm. My grandparents were unusual for their time in that they made very little distinction between sons and daughters; they each got their opportunities, regardless of gender. Third-level education was an option for all of them, even though he would prefer to see them in business. My mother, Teresa, insists that the week she matriculated and was set on doing pharmacy, he convinced her to change her mind and gave her the shop on the Mall, which he had just purchased.
Although he was certainly a practising Catholic, Seán the Grove never struck me as being particularly religious and he tended towards the iconoclastic. One of his daughters, who was a qualified and practising pharmacist, surprised us all by joining a religious order and becoming a nun. My grandfather did not appear best pleased, but said very little. He would be the kind of man who, after investing significantly in her qualification, would feel cheated that the Medical Missionaries would get all the good of it. It was not that he was mean. He was not. But he was thrifty and practical and liked to enjoy the results of his investments.
Previously, this aunt, Aunty Ita, had been in a relationship with and on the point of engagement to a most interesting man who had been a bank official but had given it all up to become an artist full-time. They were committed to each other and it seemed as though they would marry and spend their lives together. They never did. She felt the call of her religious vocation around this time and she answered it. It was the most difficult decision.
As a nun, she spent almost all of the rest of her life in Africa, returning only when she was well past retirement age, while the former bank official went on to become the leading and most celebrated Irish artist of his day. The week of his death the newspapers carried various reports and obituaries. In one of the accounts it was reported that as a young man, Tony O’Malley’s heart had been broken by a woman whom he loved, but who had rejected him, asking, ‘What would she be doing with a man who had given up his steady job, had only one lung and a few old paintings?’
The report was upsetting, untrue and unfair to Aunty Ita. As far as I can establish, the statement was made, but never by her. It was Seán the Grove who apparently said it. Why? Not from any animosity towards the man himself, but no doubt because of a concern that his daughter might not be provided for by a husband in seemingly indifferent health who had given up a secure job for a precarious profession. Those were different times, when neither the State nor all of its citizens had matured to an appreciation of the contribution of art to the commu
nity.
So the pharmacist and the artist split up, but each went on to make a significant contribution in their different areas. Still, throughout our lives we have derived great pleasure from some of the early works of the young Tony O’Malley, which he gifted originally to Aunty Ita and which hang to this day in my parents’ house.
One of Seán the Grove’s great heroes was his uncle, his mother’s brother, Fr John Martin. For some reason, within the family he was always referred to as Fr Martin rather than as Fr John. Fr Martin was a scholar and linguist, well-versed in the Classical languages and in German. He had travelled through the Continent and had been a curate in Lancashire as a very young priest. In the first decade of the last century he was appointed parish priest of Tarbert, north Kerry. Immediately prior to that he had been a curate in Cahirdaniel, in the southern end of County Kerry. As a curate he had established a reputation for taking a great interest in the affairs of the community and the welfare of the people. In fact, in an effort to stabilise prices, each Sunday he would read out, at Cahirdaniel Mass, the average prices of food by the merchants in the neighbouring towns of Sneem and Cahirciveen so that parishioners could decide in which town to spend their money that week. Clearly he had no Moriarty blood in him. The Moriartys would have been best friends of the merchants. Having no interest in wealth for himself, it was said that he left Cahirdaniel without even the travel cost to Tarbert. On his elevation to PP it was important that his new status be reflected in his trappings. As a gift for his uncle, my grandfather bought a horse in Dingle and rode all the way to Tarbert, a journey of about sixty miles, to deliver the animal. When he arrived at the presbytery, wasn’t there a trade-union picket, placed by the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO), outside the priest’s house!
Apparently, when Fr Martin arrived in Tarbert there was a vacancy for a teacher in the local school. A very popular local teacher expected to be offered the job, but Fr Martin had a different idea and he was the school manager. Sure, he knew a mighty good teacher from Cahirdaniel who was available and came highly recommended. Her family were the best of people. He duly proposed her for the job. Clearly the poor man wasn’t very political. There was outrage. The school principal and the teachers were incensed, as was the community, that a runner-in would take a job earmarked for the local and said that they would oppose his proposal – no light undertaking in those days when the clergy’s word was law. Fr Martin was determined to stamp his authority on them and insisted on having his way. There was an immediate strike.