Tea and Talk

by Alice Taylor

  But a wise old fairy cautioned that they should move with care and advised that first they should send a reconnaisance party to test the ground. They sent the most astute and demanding of the fairies to pick out the most ancient and safest trees. When they had selected their fairy homes, they sent out an SOS to the locals that they needed fairy doors. After all, who could live in a doorless house?

  So the Innishannon Tidy Town group came to the rescue and asked a skilled local carpenter to create the doors. Jimmy McCarthy crafted tiny Gothic doors fit for a fairy house, and Tidy Towners, helped by the FÁS workers, painted them bright fairy-like colours and took them to the wood. You would imagine that placing fairy doors on the trees along paths in the wood would be a straightforward job. Not so! Fairies are not like us, and you need to get into their mindset to get things right. So to be sure to be sure that we would get the doors properly located throughout the wood where the fairies would like them, we decided to simply place the doors but not secure them in position until we had them all laid out along the paths. Some we hid behind trees, others were buried deep in tree recesses. This took time. We had started at around 10am, and by lunchtime we were still pacing the paths. Finally, all was to our satisfaction, and we began securing them into position. Then we decided to furnish them with mossy paths and to lay little stone walls around the houses. I admit I got carried away – and one of the FÁS lads declared that he was starving and headed for home, but the other lad was enjoying the make-believe. I think we had both slipped back into childhood mode.

  Earlier in the year, a large tree had fallen and had been cut into logs. These we dragged up a steep path into a little lay-by between the trees to create a fairy meeting place. But when all were in position, it still lacked a fairy table, and we looked around the wood. Behind the little meeting place was a raised bank and out of it protruded a large, flat rock. Now, was this protruding rock a huge stone that could be shifted or was it part of a rock formation that went deep into the earth and was immovable? Only one way to find out! My willing helper dug around the edges, and we tried to shift it, but it would not be moved. Then, walking along the wood, came a tall, strong man, who saw our plight and came to the rescue: this was Oisín coming astride the horse. With two mighty tugs he established that it was indeed movable, and then rolled it down the bank, where it fell into position at the centre of the logs. The fairies had a gathering place.

  As well as the fairy doors, we had also brought to the wood a strange-looking home-made mirror, retrieved from a dump. It was framed with twigs and looked exactly like what fairies might use. This necessitated Tarzan-like activity to hang it high off a tree below one of the paths where the fairies, and children, could look across and see themselves. All finally done, we were delighted with ourselves, but when we emerged from the wood we realised we too were starving.

  The fairies were thrilled. So much so that they sent messages to the Fairy Queen to move the whole kingdom to Dromkeen. And so it came to pass that the entire tizzy of fairies moved into Dromkeen Wood. In the lay-by, they set up their fairy village, with the large stone as the council table and the logs for seats. There they gather every night to dine and celebrate until the dawn breaks. So at night Dromkeen Wood belongs to the fairies! Now the fairies have a settlement of about twenty houses in Dromkeen. All you can see is their doors as you walk along the paths. But they are watching you! Did you know that fairies like to look beautiful? They use their large mirror, and when you look into it sometimes the fairies are looking over your shoulder. So visit the fairies in Dromkeen Wood and remember that the fairies like to keep their wood very, very clean.

  Very late one night, last Christmas, a man driving past the wood saw fairy lights sparkling on a tree. He spread the word, and over the following weeks people went to see if it was true. And indeed it was. The fairies had put up their own fairy lights in the wood for Christmas.

  Chapter 19

  Planting History

  When, as a child, I first read the story ‘Eoinín na nÉan’, I fell in love with its author, Pádraig Pearse. That autumn, long ago, as I watched the swallows line up for departure, I thought sadly of poor, sick Eoinín sitting on the clifftop watching them go. When they returned in the spring, I felt an aching sorrow that he was no longer there to see their return. So vivid was Eoinín to me that when I walked the fields he was beside me. I saw those same fields through the gaze of Joseph Mary Plunkett in his poem ‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’. God and Nature were inseparable in the creative vision of these men of 1916.

  When we in Innishannon came to commemorate the 1916 Rising a hundred years later, an event inspired by these poets and visionaries, it seemed right to do something that would be in harmony with their love of nature. It was decided to plant seven trees as a salutation to the seven signatories of the declaration. The trees would be planted in the village centre and given sufficient space ultimately to reach their full magnificence. The Bleach was the obvious location, edging the much-used walk over which they would in time create an avenue.

  Normally it is advised to begin tree-planting with a sapling as they make better progress, but when a tree is being planted on a ceremonial occasion you need one that makes a statement. Seven trees representing the seven signatories of the Proclamation required seven big statements. So a visit to the nearby tree nursery of Nangle & Niesen was on the agenda. From them we had bought the trees for our Millennium Grove in 2000. As I am now retired, I am readily available for such outings, which is a great blessing. So, with a daughter, who happened to have a day off, and a three-year-old granddaughter, who thought that it was all a great adventure, we headed up the hill to the tree farm. On arriving there, on the week before Easter 2016, we were met by a young man I had not met before. It was Ronan Nangle, and he sure knew his trees.

  We boarded his jeep and set off around the hundred-acre tree farm. Trees of all heights and ages saluted us on our tour of inspection. It was overawing, to say the least. I had come here leaning towards oak, but not quite sure if that was the correct choice, and left the place in a still more confused state of mind. There were just too many magnificent trees available! After much discussion and deliberation, the muddied waters of confusion cleared, and the oaks still stood out. They were the right choice. They would live for hundreds of years and definitely see in the next centenary.

  We got back to Ronan on the Monday before Easter and placed the order. They would be delivered on Holy Thursday. Costing a hundred euro each, they would come ball-rooted and be about twenty feet tall. He warned that they would need good, comfortable beds and rich compost. In today’s world, everything is done by machinery, but in a GAA field that had suffered winter flooding, that was not an option. Luckily we had an alternative: the two Johns, two of our FÁS workers who are not afraid of hard work.

  We also needed a man who knew about making beds for trees, and Jim McKeon, our retired horticulturist and one of our Tidy Towns volunteers, came on board. In glorious spring sunshine, the big dig began, and on the first day four large holes were made. The earth was stony and gravelly and could have been richer, but on the following day when the final holes were dug closer to the river, the earth became rich and loamy. We concluded that in earlier times this area of The Bleach could have been tidal, resulting in this sandy soil. Holes dug, the two Johns went to nearby stables and brought back a trailer-load of old, well-rotted horse manure. (Apparently it is not now permissible in polite society to say horse dung.)

  The beds were ready for the trees, and, in the meantime, we were trying to organise the planting ceremony for Easter Monday and to get the word out. A bit like the Rising itself, it was all a bit last-minute and trína chéile. However, on Holy Thursday, the trees arrived – these were the main performers, and they were looking good! But how were these heavyweights going to be lifted down off the trailer and placed near their future resting place? The expertise of Ronan Nangle in shifting them was pretty impressive. With one of the lads catching them by the crown t
o control direction, he sank a small, solid, steel claw into the ball root and swung each tree effortlessly into position near its hole. With this simple technique the whole operation went seamlessly. The eagle had landed! All was well.

  Along with the trees, Ronan had brought a silver spade. It belonged to the nursery and had been used in many ceremonial tree-planting events: in Mount Juliet by golfer Jack Nicklaus, and in other venues by Fred Couples, Christy O’Connor and Seve Ballesteros, and by Mary Robinson as President of Ireland. Innishannon 1916 was next in line!

  Jim McKeon very wisely decided that we would have the trees standing in their specific beds with accompanying compost beneath and around them ready for planting. So this was done, and each tree stood tall and elegant, waiting to be dressed. We were ready for action. However, on Easter Sunday evening, a phone call from Jim announced that the first hole was now full of water which was not draining off, and so was not suitable for our fine oak. The decision was made to close up that hole and go to the other end of the row where the earth was actually much better. The trees had, in their own way, decided to move around The Bleach corner, which would give them a much more impressive location. Pearse, as we know, was into theatrical presentation! Was he in action here?

  On Easter Monday morning, at 7am, Peter Fehily and Joe Walsh of the Tidy Towns committee dug a new and more dramatic location for PH Pearse.

  At 3pm the troops gathered. We had sent out the news on the GAA and Tidy Towns text system, the local paper, the church newsletters and the noticeboard on the pole at the corner, and got it announced at the church services. Some, as suggested, came dressed in 1916 apparel.

  It was a heart-warming ceremony, introduced by Elmarie Mawe, who gave a brief synopsis of the Rising in Irish and in English, followed by a reading by Margaret O’Sullivan of Pearse’s poem ‘Mise Éire’, again in both languages:

  Mise Éire:

  Sine mé ná an Chailleach Bhéarra …

  Then she read ‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’:

  I see his blood upon the rose

  And in the stars the glory of his eyes,

  His body gleams amid eternal snows,

  His tears fall from the skies …

  Finally came a reading of the powerfully worded 1916 Proclamation, read by Peter Fehily to a silent, attentive gathering.

  IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom. …

  The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

  Then Jerry Larkin, accompanied by musicians Donal Murphy, Jimmy McCarthy and Tommy Kirwin, led a rousing rendering of the National Anthem. Fr Finbarr blessed the trees, and Elmarie read the well-known and beautiful poem ‘Trees’ by Joyce Kilmer, written by this American poet just three years before the Rising, in 1913, and reminding us all of the importance of trees.

  Trees

  I think that I shall never see

  A poem lovely as a tree.

  A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

  Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;

  A tree that looks at God all day,

  And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

  A tree that may in summer wear

  A nest of robins in her hair;

  Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

  Who intimately lives with rain.

  Poems are made by fools like me,

  But only God can make a tree.

  As the trees were being planted, the musicians played and led songs of the time. It was a communal planting, shared by all, and the children loved ladling in the earth with the small spades provided. Many of them will see these trees reach maturity and will remember their planting.

  Further along the path from those trees is a huge stone which will hopefully tolerate the chiselling of a stonemason’s hammer to imprint 1916–2016 on it. That and these trees will be there in 2116.

  Chapter 20

  Our Parish Chronicle

  On the first Sunday in October, three of us gather around the kitchen table to lay out Candlelight. Candlelight is our annual village Christmas magazine and is a collection of writings and photographs from the people of the parish. In my earlier world, ‘laying out’ was the term used to describe the readying of the departed to meet their maker, but now we use it to mean the arranging of the pages of our Christmas annual in preparation for print – and for the appraising gaze of the parish.

  Mary, Maureen and I have done this for over thirty years, and layout day is the fruition of a yearly round-up of contributions. Over the previous few months, we have begged, cajoled and entreated the people of the parish to put pen to paper or to sit at their laptops. The layout of any publication varies from edition to edition, but when the subscribers encompass everyone in the parish who has agreed to come on board, the final edition can often be at total variance with the original plan. The contributors have free rein, as the object of the exercise is to act as a true parish voice, and this results in a potpourri of articles – recent, historical, fiction, non-fiction and whatever you feel like writing about. You name it, it ends up on our kitchen table. Some years we have too much and other years not enough, and we can be amazed, amused or dismayed by what finishes up in front of us.

  The magazine usually runs to about forty or fifty pages, depending entirely on the material available. The original aim of Candlelight was to capture the social history of the parish as we felt that every old parishioner who died was taking a wealth of local knowledge with them, but over the years we have covered all kinds of everything, from match reports to funerals.

  One important contributor was The Twin. He was our local chronicler of events as they happened, and until we pinned him down for Candlelight and every year published some of them, his poems and writings existed only in his head. When he died, many of his writings had been recorded in the magazine – they were often amusing recordings of events, but also contained dates and facts that would otherwise have been forgotten. Then sometimes the children of people who had written an article years previously would come looking for that back issue of Candlelight when the parent passed away. Then the article became extremely precious to them. All parish activities, including GAA games, soccer, rowing, Tidy Towns triumphs and every conceivable achievement is recorded, with accompanying photographs. There is a recurring parish joke that if you appear in Candlelight you are history, but in reality this is not the case because much of the material is actually current. It is important to record the present as well as the past for the future.

  The real gems are the old photographs that come down out of people’s attics or are resurrected when people declutter or move house. Old school photographs, in particular, arouse amazing interest. Last year, somebody unearthed a 1902 school photograph in which not even one child could be identified. Two of us went to the school, where, thankfully, they still had the old roll books stored away, and, after days of poring over them, we actually succeeded in identifying all the children. Some of the great-grandchildren of the children in that photograph are now in our school, and it was uncanny to see the likeness that a particular child in Senior Infants had to her great-grandmother of 1902. It was also lovely to find that sometimes a first name is carried down through the generations of a family, almost like an identifying branch on a family tree.

  This undertaking of identifying the children in the old school photograph, though painstaking and time-consuming, was a fascinating experience. Some old black-and-white school photographs can be surpri
singly clear, and the ones of the entire school group rather than of individuals are in later years far more interesting. Sometimes there might be just one copy of a group photo still existing in the parish, but when we publish it then everybody has a copy for their family archives, which is very satisfying.

  When we started Candlelight in 1984, we had no idea where it would take us, but it has been an interesting journey. Now to browse through the early issues is to look back at a very different Innishannon: no traffic lights at the corner, no houses on The Lawn and no housing estates on the outskirts of the village. A few years ago, in order to capture this in greater detail, we did a chronicle of the way the village has changed within living memory. When houses get turned into businesses or vice versa, or two small houses are blended into one, you soon forget how the street looked previously. My own realisation of this came about when a man who had grown up here came home after some years away, and he and I walked the village, trying to recapture the way it was when he was a child. We were hard put to remember how it had been before the alterations had changed its face. So, for the following Candlelight, we went around to all the old residents and did a write-up and layout of the way it was. This then led to the realisation that some of the farms around the parish had also changed hands down through the years, and only the farmers living in adjoining farms could now remember the names of the previous owners. So we are now in the throes of creating a ‘within living memory’ record of the townlands all around the parish. Sometimes ancient history is well documented, but the ‘within living memory’ history can disappear with the one who remembers.