Looking Under Stones

by Joe O'Toole

  Seán the Grove was allowed through the picket line to his besieged uncle, who told him how he had made the choice of the Cahirdaniel girl above the local. He finished his story by asking, ‘What would you have done, Jack?’ My grandfather, who knew that all business is local, replied that, if it were up to him, he would have ‘given it to the local girleen’. Fr Martin had no doubt been expecting the full moral support of his nephew, and snarled, ‘Well, maybe then you should go outside and walk up and down with that crowd!’

  Seán the Grove loved telling that story and would finish it by saying, with more than a degree of satisfaction, ‘and in the end he had to give in and give it to the local’. Things obviously improved after that first contretemps, as Fr Martin spent the rest of his priestly career in Tarbert, which he grew to love. He became popular and respected. He also had the support of a very loyal housekeeper and there was a whispered family rumour, never proved, that perhaps the relationship was more than platonic. But then those were the days when it would not have been unheard of for a parish priest to ask his housekeeper to go up and warm the bed for him. It would be an easy and understandable thing to get so cosy and comfortable that she might still be there when the priest arrived in the bedroom.

  When eventually he died, Fr Martin was buried in the graveyard beside the church in Tarbert. If you are driving past, it is easy to pick out the grave by the Celtic high cross that marks its location, to the left, at the very back of the cemetery. I find it very ironic that, while his headstone stands authoritatively and imposingly at the back, anyone wishing to visit it must first walk past the first grave to the left of the entrance gate. It is the last resting place of a former INTO president, Brendan Scannell. Brendan was a larger-than-life character and a friend of mine. He would have appreciated the quirk of fate that has him providing a perpetual picket to the man who did battle with the INTO and who was my great-granduncle.

  Seán the Grove was always looking ahead and planning. One day, when I was a young child, he asked me what I would like to be when I grew up.

  ‘A bishop or a carpenter,’ I answered innocently and enthusiastically, sure that my choices would satisfy him.

  ‘Not bad. Not bad.’

  But before I could bask in the afterglow of his approval, he astonished me by advising me to become a parish priest. He claimed it was the best job of all. My childish protests that prayers and praying did not really appeal to me were dismissed as being utterly irrelevant. This had nothing whatever to do with religion. He did not even bother to explain that a bishop was also a priest, a linkage that had clearly escaped my assessment of career options. The point about being a PP was that it was a well-paid and respected position that brought with it much influence and a good house. Nobody could order you about, not even the bishop. In fact, in his estimation it was better than being a bishop, who was answerable to a number of layers of higher power. Times have changed somewhat on this one, the bishops have wised up and nowadays parish priests have to sign a contract with the bishop before being appointed. However, long before that alteration had occurred, my mind was made up that a clerical life was not for me. And Seán the Grove knew that well.

  My grandfather’s world was one of farming and business, and if he had his way that’s where he would have wanted to see all of us. Sometimes he took a mischievous delight in presenting himself as being a bit naive. ‘Tell me now, girleen,’ he said to Joan the first time he met her, ‘are ye in business or have ye land?’ When Joan explained that, yes, her father had a farm, but that she was the youngest in a family of four boys and four girls and had no entitlement or expectations in that direction, he completely dismissed her protestations. ‘It does not matter, girleen, some of it will fall to you.’ Dingle friends loved that story. And indeed, maybe he was right. Joan’s father very generously gave us the site on the farm where we built our house.

  Seán the Grove always maintained that any young lad could learn a lot from being given a ten-pound note and a map of the world and told to come home in five years. He felt that every new experience should fit into a steep and continuous learning curve. I remember being with him at the Dingle races when he took me to see the ‘Trick o’ the Loop’ man. This particular gent operated out of sight of the police. He carried with him a small wooden box on which he placed a cloth of green baize. Taking a longish, soft leather belt, he brought the two ends together, put a pencil in the resulting loop, then wrapped the doubled belt around the pencil and laid it on the table for all to view. I could clearly see the pencil in the loop.

  He kept up a great chit-chat all the while.

  ‘Now, keep an eye on the pencil. Nothing could be easier. Keep your eyes open and make a fortune. Don’t ask me why I do it, but I’ve given four half-crowns away in the last half-hour.’

  On removing the pencil from the loop he most foolishly offered the audience an even-money bet against them returning the pencil to the correct loop. He even showed us how easy it was, by holding the pencil, pulling the belt straight and, sure enough, the pencil was trapped in the loop. No wonder he was losing money, I thought. It was simple, anyone could do it.

  ‘That man is going to lose more money foolishly, Granda.’

  The bet was offered again. A man who was not a local placed a bet and won a red ten-shilling note. The Trick o’ the Loop man looked worried.

  ‘You’re making a poor man of me!’ he protested. ‘But I’m going to give you one more chance.’ Carefully and in full view he rolled up the belt again with the pencil in the loop.

  ‘I’m going to leave the pencil in the loop so you can all have a look. Now, any bet?’

  Sure, you couldn’t lose. It was money for nothing. My grandfather finally conceded to my earnest requests for money and granted me a loan of half-a-crown. I rushed forward to make my fortune.

  ‘Are you sure, young fellow?’ he said doubtfully, looking around when I handed him the half-crown. I never noticed my grandfather nodding to him.

  Taking the pencil from the foolish fellow I stuck it in the obvious loop with more certainty than anything I had previously done in all of my young life.

  ‘You can still change your mind,’ said the Trick o’ the Loop man.

  Hah! He knows he’s lost and is trying to talk me out of it. ‘No, it’s this one. This is the right one,’ I said smartly.

  ‘All right, young fellow,’ he conceded. He pulled the belt smoothly. It came clean; the pencil was outside the loop. Someone shouted, ‘Guards.’ In one simple movement he lifted my bright half-crown and ran off with his table, muttering ‘damned Peelers’ under his breath.

  There I was, bereft of fortune and naked in my scarlet embarrassment; the object of much comment and ridicule from the passing public.

  There was not a day during the following month nor a week during the following year when my grandfather did not find some reason to refer to my foolishness at the races – losing a ‘lorry wheel’ to the Trick o’ the Loop man. The story became a parable to the younger generation. As a learning experience I would have to concede that it was a far more impactful lesson than a puritanical lecture on the evils and dangers of gambling.

  As soon as I was old enough – and that might have been before the legal age – I was deputised to drive Seán the Grove to funerals in the estate car belonging to his son, Foxy John. These were never dull outings. Burying the dead with due respect was important and was a cooperative effort. It was done in Dingle in the same manner as the biblical civic responsibility. Attendance at funerals was much more than a mere political or business-related drudgery. Certainly, it was discharged out of a sense of duty, but it was also genuinely part of neighbourliness and community. It would be unthinkable not to attend the funeral of a neighbour, and ‘neighbour’ was a loose term that actually meant anyone in the locality. Contradictory as it may sound, dying was an inexorable and inevitable act of living. It is a purely logical fact that one has to be alive to die.

  As youngsters we saw death being greeted as a n
atural part of life. We were never shielded from it. Young children would be brought gently to the coffin of their grandparent and spoken to in a soft voice.

  ‘We’ll say goodbye to Granny.’

  Even the use of the colloquialism relaxed the tense and timid child.

  ‘Goodbye, Granny.’

  ‘Do you want to give Granny a kiss?’

  A step too far, maybe. A slow shake of the head.

  ‘That’s all right, a ghrá. Say a small prayer.’

  But sometimes there would be no demurring when the mother, holding the child’s hand in her own, would quietly reach across and in the most natural way in the world place both their hands on Granny’s. Curiosity satisfied and fear banished. It was a learning experience.

  There always had to be a report on the funeral for those who were unable to attend. It was a reckoning of popularity; a noting of surprising absences, or perhaps surprise attendances; a naming of extended family and far-out relatives, particularly arrivals from overseas.

  ‘Was it a big funeral?’

  ‘The cars were stretched back around Milltown Bridge and up the High Road. In fairness, all the nephews and nieces came back for it. They gave him a fine send-off.’

  Most aspects of Dingle life were competitive, and this included funerals. The language had to be carefully chosen. ‘That was the biggest funeral I can remember’ would be all right to say to a family member or relative of the deceased on the day, but if it were said to neighbours it could easily put them into the position of having to defend family honour by reminding the listeners of the huge gathering at their last funeral.

  Because they were such a common feature of our lives, funerals did not tend to be very sad occasions. All the good done by the dearly departed would be recalled and celebrated and any bad would be hidden away. ‘Never speak ill of the dead’ was a given on these occasions. As a sign of their grieving and as a mark of respect to the dead, close family relatives would wear a black cloth diamond sewn on the upper arm of their jackets for a mourning period of months. Afterwards, life went on as normally as circumstances would allow.

  Tommy McCarthy was a neighbour and lifelong friend of Seán the Grove’s. They grew up together. They met at the fair. They talked in the snug and they were business competitors. Their friendship never wavered. Tommy’s eldest daughter, Sheila, married Seán the Grove’s eldest son, Patty. The friendly rivalry of youth continued between them through life. Tommy was a publican, farmer and bakery owner. The bakery had a strong cultural impact on our lives. Normally it supplied two types of fresh bread on a daily basis – the ordinary builín or batch loaf and what was called the basket loaf. This was smaller in size and had a curly design on the top; my recollection is that it had a sweeter, richer taste. At Hallowe’en it produced rich, curranty, treasure-filled barm brack. Just before Christmas, McCarthy’s bakery also provided an extraordinary bread called butterloaf. This was a big loaf and had different flavours; it was baked in a cooler oven, but was particularly memorable for the fact that it was a seed loaf, with copious amounts of caraway seeds mixed into the bread. As children we hated it for the appearance, taste and smell of the seeds; we thought they looked like mice droppings. As we grew older we grew to love that bread. My search of bakeries through the years has failed to yield similar bread anywhere, and to this day my mother looks forward to receiving by post, from Tommy Devane, an annual pre-Christmas gift of a Dingle butterloaf, though nowadays it is baked in Castleisland. It’s as appetising as ever and stays fresh for days and days, like long ago.

  The day of Tommy’s funeral, my inclination was to be a little bit more deferential towards my grandfather. There was a sense of loss and sadness about him and he was quiet for a long time. The normal chat about business and family stories was missing. But by the time we were back in the town and had the car parked he had come to terms with it. We were rounding the corner from Green Street into Main Street when, with a glint in his eye, he turned to me, straightened himself to his full height, which was not that high, and said, ‘Do you know, I’m the oldest man in the town now.’

  Something gained out of the day. Age was venerable in Dingle.

  After the funeral of Seán the Grove’s sister, we were leaving Kildrum graveyard, at the end of the Long Road outside Dingle, when he took a good look at the family tomb. There was a bit of a crack in the side of it. He turned to me and said, ‘I’ll be next in there. I’ll give you a red ten-shilling note if you come back next week and fill in that crack. I hate damp.’

  The family tomb was a large, plain affair, most unattractive. The story was that Old Johnny, my great-grandfather and a son of Daddy Tom’s, bought the plot when he felt he was coming to the end of his life and built the tomb himself. When he had finished it he went home and took to the bed, which he didn’t leave for the remaining six months of his life. My uncles recalled a revolting habit he had of keeping a container of rancid butter beside his bed from which he would take a dollop to drop into his mug every time he was having tea. Maybe that was what killed him.

  My uncle Patty Atty, the eldest of Seán the Grove’s eleven children, told me that every time a new child was born into the family, Old Johnny would call to the front door of the shop in Main Street. He would rap on the red-and-black floor tiles inside the door for attention. Having ascertained whether it was a boy or a girl, he always made the same comment: ‘A poor man can’t have too many of them.’ Eventually, Patty Atty plucked up the courage to query his daunting grandfather about this. Old Johnny explained that where there was a small family, the children were inclined to stay to inherit the property. When the wealthy man had a large family, they would all stick around disputing the wealth, contributing nothing, protecting their own interests, and there would be endless feuding and fighting. However, when the poor man had a large family, what little they had was shared in their rearing, there was nothing for them to stay for or fight over, so they tended to leave and fend for themselves. In all likelihood, if they did well for themselves they would be generous towards their parents and would be happier and friendlier towards their siblings. It was the type of explanation regarding the inclination towards good or evil of humankind that one might expect in the ruminations of Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau, but it came from Old Johnny and probably had a wealth of experience behind it, not to mention the lubrication of rancid butter!

  CONNEMARA ROOTS

  John O’Toole had spent his life on the move. He and his young wife were tired of it and wanted to settle down and start a family. As he sailed through Cill Chiaráin Bay in south Connemara, north of Lettermore Island, and along by Inis Treabhair, he saw a small shallow island off his starboard side. There was no house on it, no sign of life. It was nowhere more than ten feet above sea level, and not much growth on it either. Guiding his boat around the lee side, he dropped anchor in the sheltered spot between it and a larger island.

  The small island John O’Toole had found was called Laighean and shortly before 1800, he built a small house on the shore of the adjoining, larger island, Eanach Mheáin; there was only nine or ten yards between it and Laighean; the house would be protected from the south-westerlies and it was possible to walk from one to the other at most times of the tide.

  Not much has changed physically in the two hundred years since. But today the two islands are joined by an attractive stone pedestrian bridge, courtesy of the local golf club, whose course extends over both islands.

  John’s eldest son, also called John, was born on Eanach Mheáin around 1800. Young John O’Toole was my great-great-grandfather. In time he met and married Kitty Browne from Cross and they reared the next generation there, the eldest of whom was Pat ‘Kruger’ O’Toole, my great-grandfather.

  How did the O’Tooles, traditionally a Wicklow clan from the east of Ireland, come to be in Connemara at all? On these matters the clan history is well documented. Dunlong was the first O’Toole to settle in Connaught. His grandfather was a nephew of Saint Laurence O’Toole. Dunlong went we
st in AD1325 to marry a woman of the O’Malley clan who was gifted the beautiful island of Omey as a wedding dowry. No bad deal that, whatever her looks. Omey is one of those offshore islands that are usually surrounded by the sea on all sides but are accessible across a causeway at low water, in the manner of Mont St Michel in France.

  The O’Tooles settled happily on Omey for ten generations, until 1586, at which time Theobald O’Toole of Omey was the head of the family. He is described in the Annals of the Four Masters as ‘a supporter of the poor and a keeper of a house of hospitality’. But the good die young and there were hard times ahead. In 1586 Theobald was hanged by Sir Richard Bingham and a party of English soldiers. Not only that, but his estates were confiscated to the Crown. The family were routed and penniless. Some remained in the area, but the rest were scattered to the four winds.

  Theobald O’Toole’s grandson, Connor, made a name for himself fighting for King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. He survived the battle and settled afterwards in Kilcogny in County Cavan. Most of the others tried to re-establish themselves around the Galway-Mayo coast by claiming pieces of poor land along the shore. They are still to be found on many of the islands, but Inishturk more than any other place became their home.

  Because of the nomadic nature of their existence, it is impossible to track the precise movements of the various branches of the family during the following hundred years as they tried to scrounge a living, battling for survival. But it was in those circumstances that John O’Toole ended up on Eanach Mheáin.