Against the Tide (3 page)

Having provided himself with this enormous sheet of black glass, he would then bring out a manual and begin to write musical notes, his fingers as controlled as precision instruments. We would
then be told to climb up on our seats, for all the world like clumsy blackbirds on the branches of a tree, and singing lessons would begin. We sang and sang all day long. The odd thing is that I do
not recollect that we ever acted as a choir in St Mary’s church, which would have justified the time spent on the lessons.

Brother Maher, my teacher when I passed into the higher class, was a tall powerfully-built, curly-haired, bright-eyed young man, who took his teaching very seriously and was good at it.
Unfortunately, he also liked to support his methods with the free use of the cane. To us he was a giant and although he never beat me — indeed I was not beaten by anyone during my time in
Athlone or Ballinrobe — being beaten by these men must have been a truly shocking experience for a child.

During school breaks from the classroom we played in the stony playground. Few of us escaped a visit to the local District Hospital with torn knees and hands, results of our falls. With three
other boys I was once caught taking apples from the Marist Brothers’ orchard. I can remember the threat of the Brother, ‘I should take you down to the station’, but he did not
carry it out.

The most enjoyable part of my life in Athlone was when, aged about seven, I was taken on as helper by the (to me) enormous Mr Molloy, our milkman, who delivered milk in his donkey cart to his
customers at a decidedly leisurely pace every morning. The poor donkey, heavily laden, could not be blamed for taking its time. The warm milk, straight from the newly-milked cow in the cowshed, was
contained in a truly grand brassbound steel churn about four feet high. A brass tap delivered the milk into a classic triangular pint measure. The donkey cart was the regulation Reckitt’s
blue, with red shafts and red wheels. Even though I was small, there were just about nine inches for me beside Mr Molloy on the seat, a long flat plank placed across the sides of the cart.

We meandered along upper and lower Irishtown, delivering the milk. Then, in the pub near the bridge over the Shannon, Mr Molloy, who was a quiet, redfaced moustached man — he had been a
rowing man in his youth but had badly ‘gone to seed’ — would take a ritual mid-morning pint. I minded the donkey. After I had ‘served my time’ and learned how to
drive, to regulate the tap and to fill the measure (once or twice according to the customer’s needs with always the small extra drop for luck or for the cat) it became Mr Molloy’s
practice to dismount slowly and solemnly outside the pub, enter a sweet shop, and bring me out a small twist of brown paper, filled with a pennyworth of sweets. We never said anything to one
another. I knew real happiness for the first time in my life when he would hand me the reins of the donkey. I had absolute freedom and responsibility to drive the cart back to Molloy’s farm
at Ballymahon. I was a Roman charioteer in full flight with my fine, intelligent, speedy donkey and we trotted home just this side of a gallop. I learnt the well-known truth that the sprightly
willing horse or donkey, on the way home, is an entirely different animal from the same perpetually exhausted creature on its way into town, to the market. They lose years, and develop a new
spring, power and speed in their legs and feet, on their way back to the stable and a feed of hay in the manger. Mrs Molloy, a kind and gentle English lady, hearing us thundering down the hill on
our way to the farm would caution me of the danger of a fall and the consequence of injury to myself. But I enjoyed standing up in the centre of the cart, aflame with the excitement, the clinking
noise of the harness, and the iron clatter of the wheels on the road.

Mrs Molloy probably rendered all of us in the family a very special service, for she always insisted that I take a can of milk home to my mother to make rice puddings and porridge and use for
the tea. It became the only worthwhile feature of the otherwise bread-and-rhubarb jam diet of our class.

Our kitchen had a single cold tap, and an open Stanley range on which was a giant iron black kettle. My mother continually organised our spotlessly clean and ironed clothes. The iron was a flat,
solid contraption, heated on the red coals of the fire; she would spit on it to judge the heat by the sizzle. She boiled the black kettle endlessly on the range, making tea, washing dishes, or
laundering the family’s clothes. She made our bread, cooked puddings and porridge and, thanks to Mrs Molloy’s kind gift of milk, occasionally baked a raisin-filled rice pudding in the
oven. She sweated and scorched herself over the old bastable pot oven making the large cartwheels of soda bread needed to keep her growing family nourished. One persistent memory I have of my
mother is her hands, her thin hands, stoking the coals with the tongs on to the top of the lid and under the pot itself in order to raise the heat enough for cooking bread well into the night. Her
face and forehead would be wet with sweat, the lines of her black hair clinging to her harassed face, pink with heat. Always it was ‘for the will of God and His Holy Mother’, as she
would tell us to the end of her life.

From my mother I learned an assortment of semi-religious secular sayings for every disaster, every dilemma: ‘age is honourable’, ‘show me your friends, and I’ll tell you
what you are’, ‘the mills of God grind slow but sure’. Most things were ‘a sign from God’. Throughout the many disasters which affected herself and the rest of us
until her lonely death in a London workhouse, she kept this unquestioning childlike faith, trusting in a kindly God. Progressively, slowly, but in her memory regretfully, I ceased to share it.

Long after our homework was completed under the yellow light of the oil lamp and our rosary had been said, lying in bed upstairs we were lulled to sleep by the rhythmic swish and stop and swish
again of my mother’s foot treadle Singer sewing machine. A dressmaker before her marriage, she made all our clothes as well as knitting our pullovers and socks. My father, in spite of his own
exhaustion, still managed to mend our boots on the oldtime last, inseparable from any workingclass home.

A member of the Murphy family, a Republican, with whom my mother had worked in Ballinrobe before her marriage, stayed with us on his release from Custume Barracks. He had been imprisoned by the
Free State forces.

My recollections of my father are slight. He was out virtually all day and home later, dead tired with little to say to us. When I could I stood beside him, watching and following him like a
tail on a high-flying kite. With the exception of the incident of the ambush outside our home, I cannot recall him showing anger or displeasure with anyone. My mother and my father appeared to find
peace and tranquillity in their loving relationship. I recall on one occasion seeing him sitting by the evening lamplight in a great galvanised iron bath by the fireside, his back being washed by
my mother, following a truly horrendous day in mid-winter in which he had had to cycle through many miles of rain and cold. His income of £5 a week remained static as he slowly destroyed
himself working long and late hours.

On Sundays my father derived much pleasure from singing and accompanying himself on the piano in the parlour, surrounded by all his prizes for athletic success. His songs were old Victorian
ballads, such as ‘The snowy-breasted pearl’ and ‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls’. He had a pleasant light tenor voice and we children greatly enjoyed listening to
him. He took us for walks in the surrounding country-side, but they were largely silent, though pleasant, excursions.

Being from a rural family, he used to cultivate our garden. He’d slice the potatoes and show me the ‘eyes’, which he then placed at regular distances, pointing upwards, in the
straight neat ridges of rich black clay. There was no babble of information. We planted a seed pip from an apple which became the fine apple tree that still grew in that garden the last time I
looked for it.

My father’s work was concerned with the protection of children in the surrounding counties, who were at risk from deliberate cruelty. On an old-fashioned high-framed bicycle he cycled
virtually everywhere, covering great distances in all weathers. The usual causes for cruelty to children were widespread poverty and the fact that most families were too large to manage. Because of
his somewhat distasteful job, taking children from their homes on court orders in cases where, in his view, they were enduring needless suffering, my father’s activities were frequently
greatly resented. He was assaulted on one occasion outside the courts and on another was shot at on his way home towards Athlone. But the most awesome demonstration of hostility happened one
afternoon in mid-summer. We children were playing with our tops outside our house when we heard the sounds of wailing women, crying and shouting. They came from the direction of Lower Irishtown and
were heading our way.

Amongst the crowd there was a distinctive lady, the centre of the cursing, jeering and shouting crowd which continued to gather outside our house. She was a distinctly frightening,
powerfully-built, very old woman. We children scattered up the lane and into the house by the back door to watch her and the crowd from a safe distance, behind the curtains of the parlour windows.
This old lady had long, tangled, rusty-grey, curly hair, which reached down to her shoulders and around her neck. Her loose wrinkled skin had the awful yellow dirty colour which is sometimes seen
on the aged who have lived their lives indoors, in semi-darkness. Her clothes were simply an old skirt, green with age, and her once black shawl. Her eyes were of a watery blue, washed with tears
of anger or distress. Her mouth had long since lost all its teeth.

Like a great Diva playing a sequence in grand opera, she sank slowly to her knees. She then opened her powerful lungs and in a mighty voice, and with great feeling, called on God, his angels,
and his saints, to curse and damn for ever my father, with all ‘his breed and seed’. She then turned to each of us children, and wished us unending disasters and unhappiness to all our
children, and to their children throughout their lives, with a death in the end for all of us of great agony and pain, to be followed by never-ending torment by the devils in a deepest hell.

Her curses on our house and home completed, exhausted but happy, she slowly rose and, with imposing dignity, moved away, the crowd following her. Whatever my father’s real or imagined
crime had been against her family, horror and damnation were facing us in reprisal. Looking at the life of each one of us since, much of it tragic, the peasant in me sometimes wonders about the
power of an old lady’s maledictions.

A country child’s introduction to life and death is rough, direct and inescapable. Infants are born and animals die, cruelly, deliberately, slowly or for whimsical reasons of sport. My
father was a purposeful and pre-occupied man who made little attempt to detail or explain what he was doing. There might be a short conversation with my mother in the kitchen around the table at
tea-time. . . . ‘She’s old, and hasn’t laid an egg for months’, he’d argue. Later came the action. He cornered a hen at the back in the dark black turf house,
frightened, squawking, feathers flying as if she knew.

He’d already made the preparation — the old dependable bone-handled hacksaw-edged knife; the preliminary sharpening; backwards-reverse-forward, backwards-reverse-forward, no
explanation, just the business-like sounds of steel on the worn stone edge of the smooth back doorstep.

Over to the blackened brass cold-water tap in the corner of the yard, now turned on, wastefully gushing down into the trap. I would see the reason for that soon. He wore his black trousers and
countryman’s white striped shirt, open at the neck with its brass stud, the shirt sleeves rolled up. He had the hen clutched between his knees. There was a last glimpse of shining, terrified,
tiny amber eyes. Her head was gripped tight, bent into a feathery half circle rainbow of copper red, pressed to the shining edge of the knife. A shudder, a strangled scream for freedom, the kicking
yellow claws protesting hopelessly. Her neck was tougher than he expected, the knife blade not as sharp. He made a desperate sawing action. He surely disliked what he was doing. The pumping flood
of crimson burst at last from the heart of the red feathers, held now quivering under the gushing tap. For years she had strutted the yard, behind the lordly cock, scratching and clucking over her
little ones, tearing at the newly wet black soil for what she might fall on to kill and eat. With that blood down the trap flowed my childhood innocence.

Beside us lived a widow called Mrs Bracken, who had already reared her own large grownup family. She had grey hair with a wisp that always seemed to straggle out, a reminder of a handsome
curly-haired young woman; she was brisk and vigorous, with a Junoesque figure. It was difficult to understand her speech because she had so few teeth. She didn’t talk much, but smiled
continuously, above all with her eyes. Her sleeves were always rolled up, revealing plump powerful arms, ready for action on her washing board, scrubbing a tubful of washing and wringing out heavy
sheets or blankets on a permanently waving multi-coloured line of washing. As each of the Brownes came into the world Mrs Bracken would take over our house and family. So gentle and natural was her
presence that we hardly noticed the loss of our mother, who was yet again committed to bed to add to our growing family.

Mrs Bracken acted as mid-wife; we had no money for a doctor. As a new life took its place among us, we asked no questions and were told nothing. Blood-stained cotton wool in a corner waiting to
be burned, and a new tiny voice crying at night; later my mother, pacing the floor with the ailing child. In our ‘big bed’ all of us, boys and girls, top and toed, would lie awake,
tired and puzzled. There was a noiseless burst of violet blue flame as my mother lit the metal, spider-legged, methylated spirit lamp on the small side table, illuminating her white face, broad
forehead and black hair. She would pace the room as she waited for the small saucepan to warm the milk needed to pacify the infant. Peace restored, the small metal cap dropped on the violet flame,
darkness returned, and we all slept. My mother would go back to her cold bed, with its broken sleep. Was it we men who invented that mocking phrase, ‘the gift of a child?’