To School Through the Fields

by Alice Taylor

  When they arrived in the barn the load was tilted out and, while the man with the horse set off for the next lot, the workers in the barn cleared the way for his return. My father usually piked the hay up and one of us took it from him and passed it back to another who packed it farther back. While the hay in the barn was low the work was very easy, but as the hay rose it became more difficult, and we had to work fast if we wanted to have a rest before the float came back. If the draw was long – coming up from the fields down by the river – we had a nice leisurely time when we could take down the books we had stored on the rafters of the barn. But when the hay was coming from a field near the house, on a hot day and the barn almost full, perspiration ran down your back clogged with dust, hayseeds got into your hair and down your throat, and the break between loads was all too short.

  The day the last wynde was drawn home marked the end of the haymaking season. Now the barn was full of soft golden hay, and our animals were safe against the ravages of winter, no matter how harsh it might come.

  Free to be Children

  Give our children

  Time to be children,

  To savour the wonder

  That is theirs.

  To blossom in the world

  Of their simplicity,

  Not darkened

  By the shadows

  That are ours.

  Let them bask

  In the warmth

  Of their sunshine,

  Cleanse in the

  Softness of their tears,

  Be kissed by the

  Beauties of nature,

  Let them be free

  In the kingdom

  That is theirs.

  Their beauty

  Is the purity

  Of heaven,

  Not tainted

  By the ugliness

  Of man.

  Oh, let’s not destroy

  Their simplicity.

  We never can

  Improve

  On what they have.

  Going to Ballybunion

  THE HAY IN and the barn full, it was Ballybunion time before the horror of going back to school befell us. The whole family did not go together: my father went by himself after the threshing when Listowel races were on, while my mother took the two youngest in August. When we arrived in Ballybunion we checked around in a couple of the guest-houses we usually stayed in, and there were sure to be vacancies in one of them. Some were ordinary guest-houses, but others worked an arrangement whereby you bought your own food and they cooked it for you. As they usually had a couple of families staying at the same time, I’m not sure how they sorted it all out.

  In the guest-houses we met up with various families, some of whom we knew from previous years. One family I remember was like the steps of stairs, one after the other, and they had a mother who never stopped shouting. At that time there were no wash-hand basins with running water in the bedrooms: instead we had large jugs of water with basins underneath for washing, and enamel buckets to hold the used water. One morning this particular family were about to bring their bucket of dirty water down the stairs when they started a fight on the top step. The bucket was turned upside down and rolled down, spilling water in all directions; that gave their mother something to shout about!

  But the most important job on arriving in Ballybunion was to make our way to the “Tricky Tracky” shop for buckets and spades. Tricky Tracky was a marvellous shop full of seaside paraphernalia and it always had a small, brightly coloured merry-go-round twirling in the breeze on the low wall in front of the shop. Then, the first smell of the sea was heaven to our nostrils and we saw the donkey carts with their loads of seaweed trotting along the strand. Sunbathing bored us: we climbed rocks and investigated damp eerie caves and packed the long warm day with endless activities. We headed straight for the strand after breakfast and with the exception of mealtimes, we never left again till dark.

  The headland cliffs of Ballybunion are wild and beautiful but also very dangerous for the unwary. My mother was forever cautioning us about the dangers, but her warnings went in one ear and out the other; to us the sea was great fun, where we splashed and dived under waves and got mouthfuls of salt water. There was a huge cluster of rocks called the Black Rocks which were covered by the full tide, but when it was out it left warm pools which sheltered many little sea creatures. We loved investigating all of these and gathering shells and sea grasses. The Nine Daughters’ Hole was our chamber of horrors: there was a legend attached to it that a man had drowned his nine daughters there because they would not each marry a man of his choice, but I secretly believed that nine daughters were too much for any man and he had gone berserk. We were under severe threat not to go to Nine Daughters’ Hole, but of course we did. It was a huge, gaping hole set well back from the edge of the cliffs, but the sea had burrowed its way through the rock at the bottom and thundered in and out with a menacing roar. I always felt the hair rising on the back of my neck as we lay on our stomachs to peer down over the edge. The possibility of slipping brought me out in a cold sweat as I looked down along the sheer black face of the rock at the grey sea belting in and out below.

  Sometimes at night – if we promised to behave ourselves – we were taken to the bumpers. Each car took two people, but even so they were expensive by our standards and we did not get to go very often. They were inside in a large hall that had other games and kiddy rides, and it was here that I had my first experience of dishonesty. I had a shining silver half-crown which I was keeping in case something special requiring big spending turned up. My father had given it to me before leaving home, and now I took it out of my pocket every so often to savour the thrill of having so much money at my disposal. A big girl began to chat me up with a sad story of having no money because her mother was away and wouldn’t be back until the following day: if I gave her my half-crown, she said, she would give it back tomorrow night. My half-crown and I parted company. The next night there was no trace of my new friend and the following night she ran in the other direction as soon as she saw me. It had never dawned on me that she would not give it back, but then the penny dropped. I had lost my half-crown, which was painful, but I also felt let down in a way that was quite new to me.

  The old travelling theatre companies were based in Ballybunion for the summer and they brought a new dimension to my thinking: every night a whole new world opened up before my eyes. I soaked up every performance, absorbing the different emotions flowing across the footlights, but the play that made the biggest impression on me was “My Cousin Rachel”. How I suffered with the young wife and resented the black-garbed, threatening housekeeper! However, the one who really got to me was the leading man, who stole my heart away. It was the first yelp of puppy love and I wallowed in its agony and ecstasy.

  My mother spent her days sitting on a rug in a sunny cove where she met up with many old friends. Ballybunion at that time was the holiday centre for Cork, Kerry and Limerick, so she met far-flung relations and “connections”. She was the only person whom I ever heard use that word: it meant somebody whose family was connected to yours by marriage. There was no blood relationship but they were still, in her calculation, on the outer fringes of the family circle. She loved talking to people and she would listen to the most boring old crones for hours on end and sympathise with all their sad stories. But she met some great characters as well. I remember one happy fat lady who never had a swimming suit and used to go into the sea in an overflowing bra and big pink knickers. She swam like a giant fish and would carry you so far out to sea that you had to sink or swim. Another great source of entertainment was the sight of pot-bellied men and large-bottomed women; bare flesh got rare exposure in Ireland at that time. Listening to these strangers, we found the Kerry accent soft and caressing but the Limerick people had a way of saying “Are you here for a fortnight?” that we would mimic endlessly.

  For the entire two weeks in Ballybunion we never wore shoes except when going to church, to which my mother dr
agged us protesting every morning for Mass. She thought it was marvellous to be able to get daily Mass, but we did not think that it was so great; however, the strand and the sea at that time of morning looked calm and peaceful and it felt good to run down and be the first to leave your footprints along the wide expanse of golden sand. My mother visited the church at night as well to say her rosary, but when I got bored I would leave her at it and ramble off outside. Religion, I discovered, could be very time-consuming. Across from the church was a wide area of waste ground overgrown with weeds and briars, and strangely enough right in the middle of it was a bright red flower. I sat on the wall and imagined all sorts of fantasies about that flower: in one I was an orphan on a desert island who turned into a red flower. My mother’s praying gave me plenty of time to dream.

  At the end of the holidays we came home bronzed and my fair hair was always white from the sun. We were ready but reluctant to face back to school.

  A Memory

  The waste ground was choked with weeds

  They grew above her head

  But in the middle of this waste

  One flower of golden red.

  The little child came every day

  To gaze upon this scene

  The flower it was the loveliest sight

  That she had ever seen.

  This flower took root and blossomed

  It grew inside her head

  And led her on to lovely things

  Long after it was dead.

  To School through

  the Fields

  GOING TO SCHOOL and coming back was so enjoyable that it made school itself bearable. My main objection to school was that I had to stay there: it was the first experience to interfere with my freedom and it took me a long time to accept that there was no way out of its trap. I could look out through a window in the back wall of the schoolhouse and see my home away in the distance, with the fields stretching out invitingly and with the Darigle river glinting in the valley. I made many an imaginary journey home through that window; it was not that I wished so much to be at home, but that I wanted to be free to ramble out through the fields. I envied the freedom of the crows on the trees outside the window, coming and going as they pleased.

  But school became an accepted pattern and even though it had its black days it had its good ones as well. The black days were mainly in winter when we arrived through the fields with sodden boots and had to sit in the freezing cold with a harsh wind whipping in under the door and up through the floorboards. The school was an old stone building with tall rattling windows and black cobweb-draped rafters, and when the wind howled the whole school groaned and creaked. The floor had large gaping holes through which an occasional rat peeped up to join the educational circle.

  The educational process of the day was based on repetition: we repeated everything so often that it had to penetrate into our uninterested minds. A booster, by way of a sharp slap across the fingers with a hazel rod, sharpened our powers of perception. Learning was not optional and the sooner you learnt that fact, the freer from conflict life became. All the same, most of the teachers were as kind as the system allowed them to be, but inspectors breathed down their necks and after them came the priests to check our religious knowledge. One stern-faced priest peered down at me from his six-foot height when I was in third class and demanded to know: “What is transubstantiation?”

  Education was certainly not child-oriented, but our way of life compensated for its shortcomings. Sometimes, though unaware of it, we tried to educate our teachers, especially the ones that came from nearby towns to do part-time duty. One of these asked us to write a composition on “Life on the Farm”. I loved writing compositions and my problem was not how to start but how to finish. I included in my account a description of the sex life of a cow and when I got my copy back from the teacher this section was ringed with a red pencil. A red mark meant an error so I checked every word for spelling in my dictionary but found nothing wrong. I returned to school the following day to ask the teacher what was wrong.

  “That sentence should be left out,” she said.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “It’s not suitable,” she answered, giving me a strange look.

  On returning home in a very confused state I explained my problem to my mother. She read my composition, smiled and said: “People from a different background do not always understand.” It took me another couple of years to understand why the teacher did not understand.

  Ours was a mixed school and this suited everybody because families and neighbours were not split up but could all go to school together. The boys played football at one side of the yard and the girls played hunt and cat-and-mouse at the other side. At the back of the school the boys’ and girls’ toilets, which consisted of a timber bench with a circle cut in it to facilitate bottoms of all sizes, were separated by a stone wall. The little toilet building was partly roofed with galvanised, but this had grown to a complete roof by years of free-growing ivy.

  The school had just two rooms. The master had a room to himself and the second room was shared by the two other teachers: one taught infants and first class at one side of the room, while second and third classes were taught by the second teacher at the other side. It was open plan education and if you got bored at your end you could tune in to the other side, at the risk of a slap across the ear if you were caught out.

  We ate our lunch, which consisted of a bottle of milk and two slices of home-made brown bread, sitting on a grassy ditch around the school, and we fed the crumbs to the birds. In winter the milk bottles were heated around the fire during classes, often resulting in corks popping from the heat and, if the cork could not pop because it was screwed on we had a mini-explosion and a milk lake.

  There was a cottage near the school from which we collected a pot of tea each day for the teachers, and this provided a welcome diversion, especially in summer. We went down a narrow lane which led into a long garden abounding with rows of vegetables, fruit trees and flowers. These flowers overflowed on to the paths and climbed up over the windows and on to the thatched roof of the cottage: it was almost buried in flowers, and when you went down the steps and through the doorway you stepped into another world. Inside, the cottage was shadowed and had an air of mystery because every available space seemed to be filled with the treasures of the old couple who lived there. All around was the smell of flowers and on the table were bowls of fresh fruit from the garden. When you arrived into the kitchen you were seated on a soft súgán chair and given a cup of scalding tea coloured with goat’s milk and a cut of bread with a thick layer of home-made jam, and afterwards you got a fistful of strawberries or raspberries that were soft and luscious. The little window on the back wall of the cottage was frilled with a lace curtain tied back with a ribbon and through the sparkling glass you could see the back garden as profuse and colourful as the front. It was a dream cottage and John O’ and Mrs O’ were ideal occupants. They were gentle people; she wore a long skirt with her hair coiled in a soft roll on top of her head, he was a neat little man with a black moustache, and always wore a navy suit. The trip to John O’s cottage brightened up many a school day tinged with monotony.

  Going to school in the winter mornings through the grey frosty fields had its own beauty. The bushes and briars took on unearthly shapes of frozen rigidity and the trees glittered with outstretched arms like graceful ballerinas; underfoot the grass crunched beneath our strong leather boots. The muddy gaps through which the cows waded up to their knees in gutter were now strangely transformed into frozen masses of intriguing shapes. In their frozen state you could dance from one strange pattern formation to another or try to crack the black ice with the tipped heel of your boot and create your own strange designs. This grey frozen land was much more interesting and comfortable than its rain-soaked winter companion. In the rain you could slip on the wet grass and have a wet bottom to sit on for the day or, going through the gaps between the fields, an unwary step could land
you with two boots full of mud and water. We had two glaises to contend with; these were waterways, larger and rougher than streams but smaller than rivers. Now swollen with floods, they provided an additional hazard and we crossed them on stepping stones while the brown foaming water swirled around our boots. I had mental images of slipping off the stones and being carried by the rushing water down to the river that was roaring through the valley below, but somehow we survived all these winter threats and they added a sense of adventure to making it through the fields every day.

  Summer came at last. We welcomed it and the freedom it brought from the shackles of winter. When the warm days were firmly established we kicked off our heavy boots and long black stockings and danced through the warm grass in delight, the morning fields moist with dew that ran down our bare legs and trickled between our toes. Cobwebs sparkled on the bushes and cascaded on to the grass, joining the fields and ditches in a shimmering web. The sun warmed us and set our journey aglow. The day in school was just an unwelcome interlude then between the morning trek and the return home, and if the journey to school took about thirty minutes, the coming home could take anything up to two hours.

  On leaving school we ran down the lane and over a wooden fence into a large hilly field. We ran around in circles flinging our sacks ahead of us and running after them, like young calves kicking up their heels at the first taste of freedom in an open field. Half way down that field was a small well in the side of a mossy ditch with a grey timber gate covering it. This was John O’s well and the gate was to keep his goat away from it, so the goat had to content himself with the stream outside. This was our first stop. Here we collapsed on the warm grass and stretched out in the sun. We swapped stories, one more far-fetched than the last, and one of the boys sometimes made pools in the well stream for the birds to bathe in. He loved the birds and they reciprocated his feeling because they showed no fear of him.