The Vasectomy Doctor (3 page)

Early 1947 was very wet and stormy with flooding in many places, but it was not until 24 January that the spell of severe cold weather began. By the beginning of February there were already reports of skating on frozen ponds and the unrelenting cold continued until the middle of March. The temperature did not rise above 5 degrees C at Dublin airport between 22 January and 7 March and on most days during this period the temperature struggled to rise above freezing. In addition, a harsh easterly wind persisted for several weeks as the nor
mal run of Atlantic depressions were diverted to the south of the coun
try. There were between 20 and 30 days with snowfall in most places during this time and snow lay on the ground at Dublin's Phoenix Park for all but two days between 26 January and 8 March. Even at
Valentia Observatory, where there would normally be snow on around
4 days during the first three months of the year, snowfall
was recorded for a total of 50 hours over 14 days during the cold spell.

Indeed I can vouch for all of that. Our neighbour, Tom Dunn, husband of Madam Dunn, the piano teacher from Firmount, called in one day during March 1947 to discuss with my father the absolutely dreadful weather conditions and how they were making farming all but impossible. I was ear-wigging on their conversation, though of course I may as well not have been there at all as far as the two men were concerned. Tom described a scene at his farm that has stuck with me all my life. He said that his cattle were so hungry that one bullock actually got his front legs onto the trunk of a tree in order to be better able to eat a clump of ivy that was growing beyond cattle reach. You would need to understand just how stupid cattle usually are to fully appreciate how extraordinary a story this is. For a bullock to be able to figure out this kind of ingenious way to a square meal says a great deal about the extent of his hunger and the foul weather conditions of the time.

Speaking of Madam Dunn, the music teacher, reminds me of the first great fright that I ever got in life. Piano teachers, as indeed pianos themselves, were a bit thin on the ground in rural Ireland in the mid-1940s. People had quite enough to be doing trying to keep body and soul together without thinking about pianos or how to play them. But for some reason my two older sisters, Bridget and Catherine, and my older brother, Davoc, were all packed off for piano lessons. I was excluded from these on the grounds of being too young. Madam Dunn, two miles up the road and across from the Firmount TB sanatorium, was as we might say these days, the business. I would be left sitting outside on the steps of the old Victorian pile while my siblings were being put through their finger exercises in this academy of music inside.

Some sounds stay with you for all of your life and to this day I can still remember the sound emanating through the open window of Madam Dunn's parlour and my brother and two sisters inside getting their piano lessons. Even to the ear of a five-year-old child as I was then, that piano was so out of tune that, were it not so painful to listen to, it would actually have been quite funny. I would safely say that the thing had not been in tune since around the time of the Crimea. Hideous were its notes, repugnant its tones. Is it any wonder that none of us went on to become concert pianists with such a distorted introduction to the instrument? Any similarity between the sounds emanating from this instrument of torture and those one might hear coming from a proper piano in tune were purely coincidental.

Once, having had quite enough of listening to this cat's concert wafting out through the open window of Madam Dunn's parlour, I wandered off to the farm yard for some light relief. This was a bad mistake. In the yard I discovered a flock of very large bronze turkeys, all hens except for one cock. The cock spotted me of course and took an instant dislike to my presence amongst his precious hens. When a gander goes to chase you he holds his neck straight out in front of himself and his head is positioned one inch above the ground. This he swings to and fro in a menacing arch all the while making a silly hissing sound. But when a turkey cock goes into attack mode he does the very opposite, he holds his head back in the ready-to-attack-you position and remains silent. The turkey cock might be marginally more intelligent than the gander but there wouldn't be a lot in it.

Anyway this old turkey goes into his attack routine and with all those old dangly yokes hanging from his forehead he goes bright red in the face and takes off in my general direction. Sensible adults in this situation would stand their ground. But to me, a then five-year-old child, such an option seemed somehow very unattractive. I turned on my heels and ran for dear life with my tormentor in hot pursuit, his open beak within striking distance of my arse. As I fled past the open window from where a minute earlier ghastly sounds had been emanating, my terror and overall discomfiture were very little relieved to discover that the musicians and their maestro were on a short break and were all standing at the window being greatly entertained by the chase going on outside.

In or around the same time that Tom Dunn's cattle were climbing the trees trying to find a bit of sustenance for themselves, I am taken on the trip of a lifetime. Not far from Downings House runs the Grand Canal making its lazy way from Sallins past Soldiers Island and on to cross the Liffey via a triumph of eighteenth-century engineering that we call the aquaduct. That considerable feat accomplished, the Grand Canal then mooches along to cross under Digby's bridge and on past the tall beeches of Landenstown where Englishmen and Dubliners sit all day under enormous green umbrellas watching their floats and fishing for bream, tench, perch and roach, baiting them with live maggots.

On the opposite bank stands a great heron also fishing. I have always thought of the heron as a forlorn and doleful wading bird but I suppose if we had to stand up to our knees in water all day, hoping that some kind of meal would present itself, we too would have to be forgiven for a certain dolefulness. It must be akin to being in a very bad restaurant where the waiter is drunk and you are wondering will he ever bring out a starter or a main course. Or will you
be fed at all? The heron's life is a precarious one. He holds his
dagger-like beak poised just above the water's surface ready to strike at whatever comes by and presents itself.

From here the canal swings left at Tom Garry's lock and down through a straight narrow gorge heavily overhung from each side by ancient hawthorns, hazel, blackthorn, briars, alder and ash. Now the canal slips in quietly under the twisting Cock bridge, so called because there once was an alehouse adjacent to this bridge called The Cock. From here the Grand Canal turns in a more westerly direction and heads on out through a canyon cut deep into a raised sand quarry where we pick sloes in the wintertime to make sloe gin as a pick-me-up for when we will be out on the bogs snipe-shooting later in the year. From here the Grand Canal then goes in under Healy's bridge, locally pronounced Hayle's bridge, though in fact it's Bonynge bridge according to the plaque on its side dated 1784. At this point the canal gathers itself nervously and readies itself for its final assault down to Robertstown with the hill of Moods to its right and the bad lands of Mylerstown to its left. Finally then it pulls up outside the door of the first Grand Canal Company Hotel where 200 years ago weary horse-barge passengers once dined on Kildare mutton, syllabub and port wine.

This dreadful year and terrible times of February and March 1947 when livestock were climbing the trees, the Grand Canal, usually majestic and useful, has to suffer the rare indignity of being frozen solid and rendered useless. But my father Stephen Rynne, ever inventive and always eccentric, found a use for it. He took his
bicycle down to Healy's bridge where there is easy access to the canal
surface itself. Here he launches himself off in the general direction of the Cock bridge with me, two months away from my fifth birthday, on the carrier behind. And we're whizzing along at a rate of knots. This is cool, this is mighty craic, and frozen snow on the surface of the ice gives us good grip while the ice deep below the two of us makes funny groaning noises.

‘Are you all right there, sonny?' my father enquires, shouting his rhetorical question over his shoulder. ‘And not a word about this to anyone when you get home, do you hear me now?' I am sworn to secrecy for all time – a difficult restriction to place on a child cycling down the middle of the Grand Canal that winter.

* * *

Downings House is a 9,000 square foot Georgian pile. It is where I was born and where I still happily rattle around. My father bought it and the accompanying one hundred acres of land in 1927 from a Captain O'Keeffe who in turn had acquired it as a gift from the Free State for his gallant efforts fighting in the Civil War and putting down the republicans. Truth to tell the good captain was not supposed to sell the property at all as one of the conditions of his acquiring it in the first place was that he held on to it for his lifetime. But of course, Ireland being Ireland, rules are only made for breaking and in any case the captain wanted to get back to his native Cork. So my father bought the house and land from O'Keeffe for the princely sum of £1,250.

At one time this big square block of a place would have been a petty landlord's residence from where he could preside over the tenants of his 1,000 acres of good lands plus large tracts of high bog with their turbury and shooting rights. In 1801 Alice Bonynge, childless widow of the late Robert Bonynge, whose name we have just seen on the plaque on Healy's bridge, married a widower named Charles Bury who had six children by his previous marriage. They moved into a brand new replacement house, its predecessor having been burned to the ground after the Battle of Prosperous in May 1798. And so for all of the nineteenth century and indeed up until about 1920, Downings House was occupied by four generations of Burys. The second last Bury of Downings, Charles, formed a liaison with his housekeeper, Mrs Weld, with whom he had several children. Charles' wife, a Ní Aylmer from Donadea Castle, haunts the house to this day. Although I have to admit to never having met the lady myself I have it on reasonably good if slightly inebriated authority that sightings of her are quite common.

My father moved in alone. Aged just twenty-seven and fresh back from an education in agriculture at Reading University he set about mixed farming with perhaps more enthusiasm than good sense. He may not have been a great farmer but he was a seriously good writer. It was during this period of his life that he wrote his first great book,
Green Fields
– a pastoral journal about a year's cycle of life on his farm with wonderful tactile descriptive passages about its people and animals, its trials and tribulations.
Green Fields
is a classic and a time capsule always there to remind us of how things once were in rural Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century.

Besides being a seriously good writer, my father played the piano badly and had a good strong singing voice, something that I seem to have inherited from him and that has stood me in such good stead ever since. He was an enthusiastic naturalist and one of my many abiding memories is of him sitting here at this very desk peering down a microscope at some hapless creepy-crawly captured under a slide cover. When he wasn't doing that he was drawing and painting – something he was also quite good at when he put his mind to it. He smoked heavily and drank sparingly, his occasional tipple being a half-pint bottle of Guinness brought up from Fallon's pub in Prosperous, each bottle carefully wrapped in sheets of the
Leinster Leader
. Another occasional tipple of his was a raw egg thrown into a glass of sherry. The egg had to be left intact and the whole lot polished off in one gulp. Many years later I was to eat like this when I fell on hard times in London. Drinking raw eggs in milk or sherry, tossed back in one go, requires a special swallowing knack.

Late in life he described his arrival in Prosperous in the following way:

One could hardly hear oneself speak with the clatter of corncrakes; the evening skies were a mixture of lilac and roses. In the late hours of night one frequently heard the rattle of a horse and dray going from Blackstick to Dag Weld's, the harness flapping on the horse's back, the chains rattling and the boy or man on board singing at the top of his raucous voice.

On another occasion during the bicentenary of Prosperous village in 1980 and not long before he died he had this to say of his neighbours:

I have come here tonight especially to thank the neighbours, our native people who were here when I came to Prosperous. In many ways I am a blow in. It wasn't until a little later that I discovered the real
assets of this place, the neighbours: Morans, Cassidys, Harrises, Devines, Healys, Currys, Nevins, Mullens, Fr Tom Clark, Fitzpatricks,
Ennises, Wards, Regans, Dowds, McDonnells, Condrons, Bagnalls, Welds and the three blacksmiths, Raleigh, Underwood and Bryan. The Mulallys, Skullys, Curleys, Bob and Elsie Dunn, Mrs Loo who kept a sweet shop, Martin Mangan who kept a mitching house at the cross of Prosperous. The Dalys, Cribbins, the Booths,
Field, Holts, Kennys, Kanes, Reidys, Dempseys, Monaghans, Gan
nons and Coffeys, all of these people and many, many more not only contributed to my fifty years' happiness in this place but they also enlightened me on the history of Prosperous, on the cotton mills and on that great triumph of the eighteenth century, the Battle of Prosperous.

In truth though my father bought this place not for the big house but for the land and trees that went with it. The house was then, as it remains today, too large to be practical. He treated it indeed with some disdain using the drawing-room to store oats over the winter months – something that quite alarmed my mother, Alice Curtayne, when she brought her civilising influences to bear on the place in 1936, the year they were married. It must have been quite a rift for her all the same, this gentle educated woman from Tralee, this intelligent hagiologist who could speak four languages and who had been working in Rome before she met my father. And now here she was moving into this large old house with only primitive toilet facilities, no heating, no electricity, no phone nor any other means of communicating with the outside world. And then to top it all the entire place is full of horse feed! It must say a lot for their love for each other that my mother was prepared to put up with all of this in order to be with my somewhat eccentric father.