by John A. Ryan
My first journey along that lane between the tall hawthorns was on horseback, when I was only four or five years old. Phil, my eldest brother, was working in our farthest field; it must have been in late autumn, but as the day was dry and sunny, he brought me along, too. He threw me up on Dick’s broad back, where I hung on to his mane as I was told to do. I wasn’t nervous; in fact, I enjoyed that warm seat, high above the ground among boughs and bees and birds, swaying to the big horse’s powerful steps. I had a busy day. I stalked fierce wild animals, tigers mostly; I shot an elephant that was hiding in the bushes, right between the eyes I got him, and he fell down stone dead at my feet; I raced up and down the newly-cut furrows until Phil called me and told me to collect scribs for the fire. When the Angelus rang the two of us made a camp-fire between two big stones and boiled water for the tea. I got my bottle of milk from the stream where I had left it to keep it cool, and then I sat beside my big brother and we ate our sandwiches, and he drank tea and I had milk. We sat on his old coat with our backs to the ditch; I warned him about the tigers, and he said he’d keep a sharp lookout; I offered to shoot them all, but he said no, he thought we’d be pretty safe as long as we kept the fire going. I asked him if the crockodoyles had anything to do with the Doyles who lived in the street, but he didn’t think so. I had to eat just bread and butter because the pismires had got into the little bag of sugar.
After that he went back to his work, I got more dry twigs for the fire, and then I went exploring in the jungle at the far edge of the field. The jungle was dangerous, it was full of rattlesnakes and monkeys and when I crossed the stream I went cautiously by the stepping-stones because you have to be very careful where there are crockodoyles and sharks. Of course I had my gun, but it wasn’t easy, I can tell you. Then I had to run back to put more scribs on the fire. Phil stopped at the headland. ‘I have a job for you,’ he said, ‘an important job. I want you to sit here near the fire and watch out for tigers and things. I don’t think there’s many around, but keep your gun loaded just in case.’ Sitting there at the top corner I could see the whole field where it sloped down towards the river, and also the edge of the jungle, so I loaded my gun and began to watch, but I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remember, Phil was calling me to tell me it was time to go home. When he put me up on the horse’s back he said, ‘Don’t let him go down to the river. He’ll want to go down, to drink. Don’t let him.’ That was all very well, but when we came to where the path branched, Dick turned left, and what could I do to stop him? How could I be expected to turn the huge shoulders that could haul great loads of hay and corn, or his big battering hooves that knocked sparks out of the stones? I heard, ‘Keep him up … didn’t I tell you … ’ but he might as well have asked me to stop the sun in the sky, Dick kept going and then lowered his head to drink while I tried desperately to keep myself from sliding down the horse’s big smooth neck, and Phil started to laugh and I knew he was laughing at me. Well, I managed to hold on and didn’t fall into the water, Dick had a good drink, Phil had a good laugh, and I have never forgotten that day.
Rich became one of our household, accepted, expected, depended on. Some of our neighbours must have wondered at Mam taking in this stray – I heard Tim’s mother saying one time, ‘Hasn’t she enough to do with that houseful, without takin’ in another. And a stranger, no kith or kin’ – but Mam didn’t think like that. If she stopped to think about it at all she probably thought, ‘Well, there’s fifteen in this house. One more won’t make much difference.’ Once I heard Tim’s mother saying that Mam took in Rich to fill the gaps in her life that her dead children had left. Another John – there were two Johns in our family, he was the second oldest boy – died the same year as Teresa who died as an infant, and Mam’s mother, our Granny Cowman, died the year after, so it was very sad for Mam, even though she still had a big family. I never knew John or Teresa, and so I never missed them.
Rich hadn’t the skill or the strength for farm work, knew nothing about it which was strange until we found that he never had worked on a farm and that his gifts really were in his dealings with the two plough-horses and the pony. Never had they been better cared for, never had they looked so well; he would happily spend hours brushing and grooming them, talking quietly, whether to himself or to the horses we couldn’t tell, or whistling tunelessly; never had they been so petted and loved. He had a few other jobs too, the most important one being to make sure all the fowl were safe at nightfall, in case the fox was on the prowl. In the coldest of winter he carried his mattress down and put it in the centre stall in the stable, the horses in the outer stalls, plenty of straw and hay, a blanket that Aunt Kate had found for him and patched, an old cast-off overcoat of Daddy’s. If he couldn’t sleep he talked to the horses. ‘No, it doesn’t disturb them. When they’re asleep they don’t hear me and if they’re awake they always agree with me.’
We were able to show him how to make a cléibhín: you prop up a riddle with a forked stick, tie a long string to the stick, put some meal or bread crumbs under the riddle and then hide somewhere with the other end of the string and wait for a hungry finch to fly down. We often gave up because we got impatient. He said we shouldn’t shoot at birds with our catapults, but maybe it was alright to catch them and keep them in a cage, if we were kind to them. He fed them even when we forgot sometimes. We had found the big bird-cage in the loft, cleaned it up a bit, straightened the bent part and did some repairs with hairpins that we got on the table in Aunt Kate’s room while she was out milking the cows. In any case, although we used our catapults to shoot at crows or magpies, I remember only once killing a bird, and that was a small brown bird that I shot at without really expecting to hit it. I was more embarrassed than elated, almost ashamed when I picked up the small limp body, still warm.
Frocken Sunday was when we went to the mountain. I can’t remember if the frockens were put to any practical use, so maybe they were only an excuse for a day out. It was mostly the older people who picked them. The younger ones played games, and there was great fun and teasing, and we met all our friends, and we brought picnics, and it was late when we got home, hot and tanned and dusty, and we could see the silent shadows of the leatherwing bats against the sky. Tim and I always went together those days; he was my friend. He was my cousin, too, we were the same age and in the same class, but I was much bigger than he was. Our uncle Johnny, the one who had the shop in town, never missed that big day. He said he wasn’t going to break a good habit – he had been picking frockens since he was three. Then he came home with us after the mountain and we knew he’d bring shop-bread and sticky buns with currants, and he’d have his annual tea with us. He lined us up then according to height, all the younger ones, and said, ‘You’re after gettin’ as tall…,’ and gave each of us a sixpence. We’d race off then to the dairy and measure all our heights on the door-jamb and sure enough we had got taller. There must have been mountain days when the sun didn’t shine, but somehow I don’t remember them.
Indeed there must have been many wet days but we went out anyway. We put on our caps and boots and mostly paid little attention to the rain. There was no show-off about that – outside was our natural place. Up early always, school-days or holidays, and then out. We slept in the house and ate there, but outside was where we lived. On very wet days, if the hay wasn’t in, we could play marbles in the hay-barn, or football if there was room, or we might be told by Daddy to clean out the stable or one of the calf-houses. John wasn’t allowed out in the rain though, because he might catch cold which would be very bad for him. We made things, toys and gadgets, in the car-shed, out of bits of iron or timber or whatever we could find. Anyone who had a penknife sharpened it on the stone, and carved things. But even on really cold wet days we could make ourselves cosy in the hay and listen to Rich talking, mostly about horses. He told us about the coach-horses he used to drive for the Bannermans. That was a part of his life that he did sometimes talk about. The coach-hor
ses had magic names, Prince and Beauty, Black Bob and Blazer, and there was a coach and four. The Bannermans were big people, with a house in England as well as in Ireland. But they were Irish, too, because one of the Bannermans had married an O’Moore lady, and he told us about the banshee that cried about the woods or on the turrets of the big house when one of the family was going to die. ‘The banshee follows the O’Moores,’ he told us. After that, any time I heard the voice of the snipe, like a goat in the April twilight, I pretended it was the banshee. I half-believed it, and always hurried home. The marshy land by the stream at the bottom of Knockahoon hill was where the snipe lived and where the dusk smelled of garlic in April. And wasn’t it a funny thing that garlic is what keeps you safe from banshees and other bad things like that, so Rich told us. He told us about the forty eight horses, the coach-horses that he loved best of all, hunters too, work-horses and ponies. They were polo ponies, and he explained how polo was played. I think we hardly believed him, yet if Rich said so, it must be true. There were fifty rooms in the big house and a hundred windows. But we were able to tell him that our house used to be called Cromwell Cottage for the reason that Cromwell slept there the night before he attacked Wexford town. It was John who found out about the name of the house; our family never used that name, but it was on old maps, and Lar, the blacksmith, told us it was quite true that Cromwell had stayed there. We were proud that he had chosen our house, but a bit doubtful about Cromwell himself; he hadn’t a very good reputation and was said to have sacked Wexford. Ned said, ‘I bet he went to see Uncle Johnny, on account of being at our house the night before.’ The others laughed, but I remember that I was wondering if he had sacked Uncle Johnny’s shop too – and how exactly do you sack a place, anyway? Our grasp of history wasn’t very sound. We also boasted to Rich that our house was where the landlord lived before he went to live in one of his other houses, and that he had made big changes, for instance what we called the front door had once opened into the farmyard, but he put the farmyard around at the back and made a new back-door in the kitchen, and then he built all the stone and slated outhouses. He put big windows and a double door in the front wall and a curved drive out to the road. And we emphasised to Rich that an Architect had been employed to see to all those changes. We thought he would be impressed to hear that, but he paid little heed to it and we were disappointed. It was very hard to interest him in other things, apart from horses.
We had many adventures, Kitty and I, and one of our best places was to go down the road to the bottom of the hill, where our road joined the New Road, and then we went up the steps at the far side. They were very steep and there were thirty two, we counted them. Then, out of breath, we would lie on the grass where the land levelled out at the top, and when we got our breath back, we went to the pool with the bulrushes that we regarded as our pool, to watch the dragon-flies, and once we frightened a snipe that flew away in zig-zags, but we saw it clearly, and although I had often heard the snipe calling, it was the first time I had seen one. Then along the lane and after a drink from the holy well we’d cross the field to the old graveyard where many of Mam’s family are buried, including her mother. We went there every Pattern Day, and once when we were standing by our Granny’s grave, Mam told us, ‘One day I’ll be buried here,’ but of course we didn’t believe her, we thought she was joking. Another time we turned off the lane before we reached the well and went to the walled garden of the Big House. The gate was open and we peeped in but just then a man we didn’t know came along behind us; we thought he would be angry but he set down his wheelbarrow and looked at us and even though he had fierce-looking whiskers and was very tall, he spoke kindly. ‘What’s your name, lassie? And your brother?’ (but he said brither). ‘Where do you live?’ and when Kitty answered him he asked us if we would like some strawberries. He had a funny way of speaking but Kitty said, ‘Yes, please,’ so we went with him to a small shed, very dark, that smelled of clay, and he poked on a shelf and found an empty sugar-bag. He filled it with strawberries, there were plenty of them growing in a sunny place with straw around them and a big high wall behind. Then he said, ‘Give those to your mother,’ but he said mither, and Kitty said, ‘Thanks, sir’ and off we went.
As we were going back down the steep steps, I said, ‘Give those to your mither,’ and we started to laugh. Kitty stumbled and spilled the strawberries and they rolled down the steps and into the bushes. We tried to find them but most of them were lost, and then Kitty started to cry, so I said, ‘We’ll go back and ask for more. There’s plenty,’ but Kitty didn’t want to do that. She came with me as far as the garden gate but wouldn’t go in. So I went in and found the gardener and told him what had happened and could we have some more.
He looked hard at me. ‘Where’s your sister?’
‘At the gate, sir.’
He marched me to the gate, but when he saw Kitty he could see she had been crying. ‘All right. Just this once. And be more careful this time, and don’t let me see you here ever again,’ and then as we were going away with our second lot of strawberries he said after us, ‘Not for a month, anyway,’ and he gave a kind of growl that sounded as if he was laughing. After that we always tried to make sure that a month went by before we visited the Big House garden again. Mam told us his name was Mr Smith and that he was from Scotland, and if we saw him again we were to say thanks very much for the strawberries. Whenever I wanted to make Kitty laugh I only had to say, ‘Gie those to yer mither,’ and she would say, ‘You mustn’t make fun of him. He’s a nice man,’ but she would laugh all the same.
We hadn’t many visitors. The postman came now and again on his bicycle. A few women from the cottages nearby came for milk. Then there were our regular callers, mostly members of farm families and usually relations of ours, who paid their customary visits on Sundays between the Masses, or on Saturday nights to sit around the big fire and talk or play cards. The tinkers could be depended on to call maybe once or twice a year and there would be milk-cans and tea-drawers for them to mend; or the thatcher might be needed; and once when a wheel had to be replaced on one of the common cars, a wheelwright arrived, and we became experts on that trade and showed off in school with our new knowledge: oak for the box, ash for the spokes, elm for the felloes. We specially liked that word felloes, John in particular loved collecting words, the bigger the better.
When I think of hay-making, the sun is blazing down and we are sitting in the shade of a hay-cock drinking bottles of milk and eating brown bread and butter with sugar on it. We helped with the hay, too, or thought we were helping, and when I got older I learned how to make a hay-cock. Hay-making was great fun when the weather was good, but heart-breaking for Daddy and the others when it was wet. Later in the year, at the corn, all the boys in their turn, and some of my sisters too, learned how to tie a sheaf or to make stooks. Our corn was ground at the mill, half a mile or so down the road. We liked going there. However, the busiest, most exciting day of the year was threshing day: the noisy smoking engine could be seen and heard while it was still far away on the top road and when it turned in our gate it never failed to knock one of the capstones off the piers. There was so much help from all the neighbours that we weren’t needed, more likely to be in the way than to be asked to help, and although we loved the novelty and excitement, we were told to keep away from the centre of activity because it was dangerous. We hung around with Bob and Brownie and tried to get them to catch the mice that ran out of the ricks, but the dogs were useless, the cats were much better. Thinking back now, the picture I recall most clearly is of one October when the ricks of corn weren’t finished and covered until after dark. Rich called us, Kitty, Ned and me, and asked if we’d like to see the Hunter’s Moon. We had never heard of it before, so of course we went with him, not sure what to expect. The sky was clear; there wasn’t a breath of wind. He brought us to the corn-ricks in the haggard and pointed to the gap between the two huge ricks, the gap where the threshing engine would be
on the following day. The side of one rick was black dark, the other was bright and clear, and out beyond, watching us from the unclouded sky was a great yellow bowl of creamy moon, smiling and calm. Rich said, ‘That’s the Hunter’s Moon,’ though there was no need to tell us. Kitty put her arms around me and Ned, and we gazed at it in a breathless silence. Sometimes I think I can still see the three small children standing in the moonlight between the towering ricks and gazing at the biggest roundest yellowest moon that ever was. There’s no accounting for what memory will hold on to, or what it will discard.
The years went by, and I grew taller, and so did John and Frances and Kitty and Ned. Everyone else seemed to stay the same. Rich, anyway, didn’t change: Daddy tried to get him to whitewash the house and the lawn-piers, but he wasn’t good at it, and splashed the whitewash onto the windows and the sills. He had that one great gift, he could talk to horses. I think Daddy was a bit cross with him, but he was never cross for long, and Mam said, ‘Everybody has one gift, and you can’t expect more.’ The upshot of it was that it was left like that: anything to do with horses or transport, but little else, was Rich’s business.
Kitty went away to learn cookery and house-keeping and things like that, and John went to college in Ross. All the boys in our family went in turn to the Christian Brothers school in Wexford when we finished in our own school, but John was a boarder in Ross, he wouldn’t be able to travel in and out to Wexford, especially in the winter. Years afterwards he confided to me that he had been desperately lonely when he went to college, and missed his parents and all his sisters and brothers, and Rich too, and that his reading and the new things he was learning helped him to forget his loneliness; he tried to explain also that the first time he came home on holidays he wanted to get back to the way things had always been, but couldn’t get over how different the farm was and even his family, but later he realised that they hadn’t changed, but it was he who was different, seeing people and things in a different way. Rich was the only one who was the same. And Mam and Daddy of course. Even after Kitty came home again, she and I didn’t go walking together so much, but I loved her just the same. She was tall and had long red hair that she coiled up in a bun. We hurled or played football in the field at the front of the house, me and Ned mostly, and sometimes some of our older brothers. Rich would come to watch and when I played well I hoped he would praise me but he never did, and I was disappointed. He knew nothing about hurling, anyway, it wasn’t played in his part of the country. When we asked where that was, all he would say was, ‘The midlands.’