Chapter two

Every year on St Brigids’ eve my mother hung a black tie or a strip of black cloth on the outside of our front door.  She said that when St Brigids’ spirit passed over that night some of her healing powers would rub off on the cloth.  After that, whenever one of us complained of a headache she got out her ‘Breegie’s Belt’ and tied it tightly round our heads, telling us it would take the pain away.  It usually worked too. My father would shake his head and mutter something about ‘pisrogues’, but he himself wasn’t immune to strange behaviour..  Every time we passed a fairy ring for instance, he took off his cap and saluted.  ‘The little people’, he insisted, ‘one day you’ll see them yourself, and then the grin will be on the other side of your face.’.

The first day of May saw another ritual enacted.  Young nettles were collected from the side of the boreen and boiled in a skillet over our open fire.  Each of us then had to eat a plateful – with mother standing over us to make sure we did.  This was repeated three times throughout the month,  after which we were all pronounced safe from all harm for the next twelve months.

‘There was a healthy mistrust of doctors in our house.  ‘Time enough to call them when you’re dying’, father would say.  For both of them the old remedies were the best.  Boils and blood-poisoned cuts were treated by applying hot bread poultices.  Nettle-water was good for stomach ailments.  The only medicines used with any frequency were castor oil, cod liver oil and syrup-of-figs. Castor oil was used to treat ear aches, heated and poured into the ear – excruciating enough – but it was cod liver oil that was the bane of our lives.  Mother swore by it and poured it down our gullets for all sorts of ailments. The disgusting, oily taste lingered inside you for hours afterwards.

Nettle stings were a frequent occurrence in our short-trousers days, the quickest relief being obtained by rubbing a dock-leaf on the afflicted area. And to remove warts all you needed was a snail, rubbing the sticky substance on the wart. You then speared the snail to a blackthorn tree, and as it shrivelled up so did the wart.

Once, when I dislocated my ankle playing hurling at school, it wasn’t to the doctor or the hospital that mother took me but to the bone-setter in Dungarvan.  This man operated from a dingy back room above a shop and I was in agony as I was carried up the stairs.  Within minutes the bone-setter was massaging my leg and talking soothingly to me. A few quick movements with his hands and the bone slid back into place.  The relief from pain was instantaneous and I walked down the stairs under my own steam. It had cost ten shillings.  Not that a fee was ever mentioned, but I had seen the money discreetly change hands and disappear into my saviour’s pocket quicker than he had fixed my ankle.

The arrival of St Brigid’s day saw father come out of hibernation. The month of January had been a time to recharge his batteries, but the first day of February saw him surrounded by an assortment of tools, all laid out on the old pine table in the back shed.  There were hammers, saws, pincers, crosscuts and billhooks.  He never bought anything if he could make it himself; chairs, window-frames, doors, he hacked away at bits of wood with his selection of implements fashioning functional furniture and fittings.  When these tools needed new handles he wouldn’t dream of buying new ones.  Weren’t there plenty of trees about? The billhook was his favourite tool; he made an armchair once using mostly this implement, that had pride of place in the kitchen, and that no one else dared sit in except him.  It was hard and upright; its only concession to comfort a chaff-filled cushion, but when he sat on it seemed to be part of him. 

My grandfather, Tom O’Brien, had once made a horses cart for Sheehan’s, the next-door farmers, using mainly a billhook.  It must have been a grand affair altogether for I had often heard it talked about afterwards by people in the neighbourhood. It may also account for father’s attachment to the humble billhook.

We youngsters were delighted when inspection time came round for it meant a trip across the fields for us.  There would be river banks and bogs to cross, maybe even ice-covered ponds to negotiate.

Plenty of small groves lay dotted about, mostly pine or spruce, though not so suitable as handle material.  What father was after was a reasonably straight branch of ash or beech. Having found something suitable he hacked all the branches off it with his billhook before taking the saw to it.  It wasn’t very elegant when it was pared and fitted to the implement but it did the job.

We were more interested in the animal signs we encountered along the way.  Burrows were thoroughly investigated; rabbit warrens were fairly easy to recognise as the droppings were a giveaway.   We studied the ground for signs of a path, somewhere suitable for a snare, and set our traps for the unsuspecting animals, checking them every morning to see if they bore fruit.  Fox dens were rarer sights; those suspected of being so always aroused father’s interest.  Hens and pullets disappeared on a regular basis despite his efforts to protect, and any suspected den got ‘the treatment’.  Entrances were sealed up, others stuffed with oil-soaked rages and set alight.  Either the foxes got used to smoking or they utilised other, secret, escape routes for very few were captured this way.

Badgers were rarer still; shy creatures that only came out at night.  Our Jack Russell knew all about their ferocity, having once been encouraged down what we mistakenly thought was a rabbit hole.  He came back with a bit of his ear missing.

Ballyhussa boreen was roughly two miles long.  Winding and overgrown, it degenerated to little more than a cart track once past our house.  Clumps of ash and beech and the remains of several old farmyards were the only evidence that life had once existed beyond us. ‘The last outpost’, was how Dick Galvin referred to our house; and indeed there were days on end when our only companions were the cattle and sheep in the nearby fields.

Like most of our neighbours, father grew all his own vegetables, and when we were big enough we were enlisted to help. About three quarters of our acre was under grass, the remainder being sown with potatoes. Every few years the tilled section was rotated to minimise the risk of disease.

Work started by raking up all the old stalks and burning them.  When father was satisfied he would spit on his hands, tilt the peak of his cap heavenwards and begin.  He favoured a long-handled fork called a sprong, an implement which seemed to acquire the properties of a mechanical digger in his hands.  Biting deep into the soil, he turned over a hefty chunk of it and pulverised it with a mighty whack from his sprong before it had time to settle.  Dig, tilt, whack…dig, tilt, whack…this was the way he worked all  through the day, except for the occasional pause to spit on his hands or push the cap back on his head.  The exposed soil was then left for a few weeks for the elements to break it up some more.

When the acre was finished there were several more plots requiring similar treatment.. Our acre was the only bit of land he owned; the others he paid a few shillings a year for their use.  The Bungalow was an overgrown wilderness with a gate that hadn’t opened for years.  Once a farmyard, it had been the home of Michael Francis Sheehan, a local poet who had published a book of poetry. Afterwards, it became part of Kelly’s farm, and galvanised bungalow was built for Jimmy Kiersey and his family.  Jimmy worked as a farmhand at Kelly’s but had long since moved to a council house in nearby Ballyshunnock.  The farmyard was now a warren of ivy-covered walls and stone floors, but there were still some fertile patches among the ruins.  It was here that father grew his onions, cabbages and carrots.  The bungalow still stood and he used this for rearing his few calves.

Once the digging was finished the preparations for sowing began in earnest.  The dunghill at the back of the house was demolished; wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of it trundled across the acre and deposited over the dug area.  The dunghill was a strange mixture of animal manure, ashes and household waste.  When disturbed it steamed copiously and stank of urine.  Father believed passionately in this concoction and never used anything else on his vegetables.  There was also a dunghill in The Bungalow and this, too, was demolished.  Any surplus was scattered on the acre to promote the grass, or taken to the Bog – father’s other bit of land.

The Bog was too far away to use the wheelbarrow so we used our ass and cart to transport it there.  Neddy, our ass, spent most of his time with the sheep in the Bog, except during the coldest winter months when he lived in a shed behind the house.  There were, in fact, a row of sheds out back; the cow-house, the hen house, the pig house, all built by father over the years.  We called them the tar-barrel houses.  At various times father collected empty barrels from the Tannery, cut the bottoms out using a cold-chisel and hammer, then split them down the middle and hammered them into flat sheets.  These he used for roofing the wooden-frame sheds, waterproofing them with tar he got from friends who worked for the county council.

Neddys cart occupied a lean-to at the side of  the block, where it spent most of its time keeled up, shafts pointing skywards.  It had at last been converted to rubber-tyre wheels by Bat Mansfield, the blacksmith who had a forge at Dunphy’s Cross.  Its noiseless, easy movement after years of grinding metal-rimmed wheels must have surprised even Neddy because he actually consented to pull it these days. Previously he had to be beaten to do so. 

Neddy’s spell of inactivity during the winter months caused his hooves to grow long, consequently they needed paring before he could be tackled up.  This could be a tricky operation for Neddy could kick harder than a mule – usually without any warning.  Father reduced the risk somewhat by tying his back legs together when he wasn’t working on them.  He then hoisted a free leg between his thighs and carved away at the hoof with his curved ‘leather knife’.  He owned a selection of these, all honed to such sharpness he reckoned he could shave himself with one.  When he had pared enough of the hoof away he smoothed it down with a rasp, before fitting shoes specially made by Bat Mansfield.   He hammered the nails home till they came through the side of the hoof, clinching them to keep them in place.

I wondered if Neddy felt any pain as he stood there, stoically chewing on a sop of hay  as the nails were hammered in.  Where was all the blood?  Shouldn’t he be spouting the stuff?  There was a picture of the Crucifixion at school, with Our Lord’s hands dripping blood where the nails pinned him to the cross. Maybe animals didn’t bleed like humans.  They certainly didn’t bawl like them.  When the Master asked Tomjoe Power what the letters INRI on the Cross stood for, and he said ‘Iron Nails Ran In’, you could hearing him roaring two fields away as he was dragged around the classroom by his ear.

Tackling up Neddy was usually my job.  Once the winkers was on I fitted the collar and hames, the collar being buckled around his neck and the hames fitted over it.  A piece of thin rope secured around the ears of the hames held it in position.  The saddle was then slipped on and the belly-band tightened to hold it in place.  After that the cart was dragged into position and the chain loops between the shafts attached to the broad groove in the saddle.  All that then remained was for the traces to be linked to the hames.

Choosing the seed potatoes was the next chore, and usually occupied a weekend.  There were two potato pits; one for the seed potatoes and one for the eaters.  These pits always reminded me of miniature thatched cottages; oblong, triangular-shaped mounds covered with straw and rushes to keep out the frost. The bottoms were banked up with earth to keep the rats at bay.

We carried the spuds to a bench in buckets, where father would do the ‘choosing’. They were examined carefully and any bad one discarded.  By now they were beginning to sprout; dark ‘eyes’ shooting out from their skins to show they were healthy.  The larger ones were sliced in two, the criteria being that each half possessed its own ‘eye’.  All were then stored in one of the outhouses to harden out and sprout some more before being sowed.

Father owned a long-handled shovel that he used for opening and closing drills.  It was of the kind I had seen council workers lean on by the roadside, so perhaps one of them had had given it to him.  He was deadly with it and shifted soil almost as fast as a horse-drawn plough.  I remember trying to ape his actions but it still took me a long time to get anywhere near as proficient.  He adopted a kind of crouch, knees slightly bent, arms extending and flicking scoops of soil to alternate sides.  He moved through the clay as if it was sand, never slackening his pace except for the regular spit on his hands.

We filled the furrows ahead of him with seed potatoes, laying them eyes up on the manure.  Each one had to be planted about a foot apart, and we used a wooden rod to space them.  No matter how hard we worked he was always right behind us, urging us ever faster.  When a drill was closed he tamped it down with the shovel to firm it up and break any lumpy bits of soil.  Finally he criss-crossed the area with timber pegs and strung binder twine between them.  This was to keep crows and other scavenging birds away.  He supplemented this by sticking a scarecrow in the middle; a wooden cross dressed up in an old trousers and jumper stuffed with straw, one of his old caps nailed on as a head.

Occasionally he hung a dead crow on a pole.  This, too, had the desired effect.  Once, he tried capturing a live one.  He had heard of somewhere in Cork

  where they caught the live ones and tied coloured streamers to them  before releasing them back among their compatriots.  It was reckoned to frighten the living daylights out of the rest of them.  He never got to prove the truth of it but he had no doubts; ‘those cute Cork hoors are fit for anything’.

(TO BE CONTINUED)