Living in the Past: A Northern Irish Memoir Page 8

  As we got almost down to the bottom rows of sheaves which, underneath had dry branches and leaves and rats’ nests, usually there were lots of boys’ dogs around the rick waiting. But I think there was another threshing going on somewhere and we had only our Sport.

  Our rick had been placed by someone with foresight about ten to fifteen paces from the ditch, which was just full of stinking black muck. We knew they would soon make a run for it and, suddenly, rats came out in a burst and headed for the ditch. Sport was amongst them in a flash and seemed to kill them instantly and go for another. He killed six before they reached the ditch but they were close then when we saw the seventh. We roared at Sport but he was already in the air and he threw himself on the rat as it went into the ditch. They both disappeared into the thick black muck.

  “He missed it,” somebody said. “It’s gone.”

  ‘“Well, it was impossible,” I said.

  Sport started to crawl back up the bank. He was just a thick mass of black sticky slime. We couldn’t see the shape of him; we could only guess where his head was. We got a piece of straw and we wiped what seemed to be his head and cleared his eyes and then his face and there, still in his mouth, was the rat which he deposited on the grass. Job done.

  We also had a big grey tom cat that looked just like a tiger cub. It was very useful as it kept mice and rats at bay. My father kept it in the barn loft at night among the bags of cattle feed and nothing dared come in while the cat was in charge. Then one day it committed a great sin of killing a chicken.

  The hens and their chicks just wandered around the yard and the fields and were very vulnerable, but the cat had seemed to know that they were to be left alone. Once a cat takes a young chick it would take them all until none were left. You either killed the cat or got rid of it. But who would take it? Not a farmer.

  The driver of the lorry that delivered our cattle feed from the wholesaler in Dungannon was having a cup of tea in the house when my mother happened to mention the cat.

  “Well,” he said, “we’re having a lot of trouble with rats in the warehouse and if it’s as good as you say I’ll take it with me.”

  So he put the cat in a sack and put it in the lorry. The next time he came he said the cat had settled in well and had cleared the rats. He saw it walking along the rafters in the roof hunting sometimes. Everybody fed it and made a fuss of it.

  For a while we enquired about Tom, but as the weeks passed we forgot about him. Dungannon is about seven miles from our house and we didn’t expect to see him again until one morning, about six months after we had given him away, he strolled into the byre at milking time and joined the other cats waiting for a drink of milk. We stared in disbelief and ran into the house to tell the news. Everyone came to see and couldn’t believe their eyes. It was like seeing an apparition after all this time.

  My mother was in a quandary. It was autumn and there were no chicks about until the spring. So she allowed him back into his usual haunts in the barn loft. When the lorry man next arrived he said the cat had disappeared about a month ago and they thought he may have been killed by a car on the main road outside. When he suggested he take him again my mother told him to rub the cat’s feet with butter which he said he would do.

  He later reported that the cat had settled down again and this time he didn’t come back. But one morning a white cat appeared at our hearth when we were getting ready for school. I was putting on my boots by the side of the fire and there it was, almost creamy coloured, sitting washing its face in front of the fire. Of course, we were all excited about the cat. No one had seen it come in and it seemed quite at home. From that time we began to have a lot of good luck and we put it all down to the cat. My sister Elizabeth won a ton of coal in a raffle, I won a pair of short trousers for a ha’penny in a raffle at school. Someone else won the top money prize in the parish raffle and so on. Then the cat disappeared again and the winning streak ended. Of course, we all said it was a magic cat.

  Summer is a busy time on a farm, but it had its compensations as meal times, when working in the meadows, were very special, especially for young people who were always hungry. About midday we would start glancing up towards the house which was just visible searching for someone coming with the food. Eventually someone would arrive carrying a big can of tea and a basket of boiled eggs and soda bread, among other things.

  We usually sat along the river bank on the hay where we could look at the little waves and ripples and watch the moorhens and ducks go drifting by. Everyone would be famished and the boiled eggs and freshly made butter and soda bread were delicious.

  Grasshoppers were a nuisance as there seemed to be hundreds of them around, hopping on the bread and everything. We just flicked them off and carried on. Afterwards, when most of the men lit their cigarettes, we’d just sit and rest for a while. I remember once we had a young man called Mick McCann who was a beautiful singer. My sister, Mary, asked Mick to sing and he didn’t need to be asked twice. He sang a hit song at the time, it was called “Arm in Arm Together” and it was beautiful. Mick became very popular as a guest artist around the dance halls in the parish.

  Then it was everybody back to work until evening, when swallows and swifts would start flying over the meadows in their hundreds looking for their evening meals of insects. When we saw them we knew we would soon be going home. It would be a weary bunch of young legs that plodded the mile home and everyone slept soundly that night.

  If there was school next morning my mother would have difficulty getting us up and ready. I’m sure that morning we would all be late and it depended on the mood of the Mistress whether we got caned or not. Elizabeth said she would always use the cane if she was wearing her brown shoes. I don’t know how accurate that was.

  Halfway to school we always met Jinny, an old lady coming from the school pump with a bucket of water. We would ask Jinny what time it was and she would always say nine o’clock. We always hoped she would say five to nine, but she never did.

  Autumn was blackberry season and gathering these fruits was a way of making money. Every afternoon, after school, we would all be out blackberrying. There were lots of brambles about the hedges but there were many pickers and we would often go into fields and find that someone had been there before us. But on good days we would find an abundance and quickly fill our cans. There was a man called Mr. Carberry who called each week. He would hang the can of fruit on his hand held scales and give us about a shilling or whatever it was worth. But first, if he saw the juice at the top of the can, he would pour it off onto the road because pouring water onto the blackberries was a great way to increase the weight.

  I remember coming past a house once after Mr. Carberry had been there and the road was a beautiful pink where he had poured what must have been about a gallon of juice and it had run down the brae making it all look like fairyland.

  There was one lady who was the nearest to a professional picker in the district. She would be out at dawn every day except Sunday and she was called Ally. If Ally had been there before you there would be nothing left.

  The season lasted about two months and like everything else it came to an end. Sometimes, when a gang of us came upon Ally, we used to shout, “Ally, Ally, Ally,” very fast in unison. She would look up and shout, “What are you Allying about? Does Ally owe you anything?”

  She lived with her sister, Mary, who was adept at reading tea leaves. If Mary came into anyone’s house it wouldn’t be long until a cup of tea was in her hand. One day she was in the shop and Elizabeth asked her to read her cup. Among other things she said that there was going to be an accident outside, and a few minutes later a boy called Tom McMahon was hit on the face with a stick and was brought in bleeding. This enhanced Mary’s reputation enormously.

  People made a living as best they could. The poor families were kept alive and one way or another got enough to eat. Many of the men worked for the peat company. The reclaimed bog around where we lived was called the moss and was dry exc
ept for parts where the turf had been extracted every year until it was below the water table. A very large portion of it belonged the peat company. William Robert Abraham was its manager and the men who cut the turf for Abraham, as he was commonly referred to, were on piece work and were paid by the chain which was twenty-two yards long (20.12 metres).

  If the turf was cut downwards, across the grain of vegetation that it once was, then it was called cutting turf and a special two-sided spade was used, and each turf was thrown to a capper who caught it and placed it back in a row to dry.

  The method used in the peat moss was called breasting turf. This was cutting horizontally with the grain and placing the turf on its side, one on top of the other about four deep.

  Only one man was required for this but it was a hard job because the breaster had to bend down like he was using a shovel and then lift the heavy wet turf up to the bank. I don’t know how much he was paid per chain, but I can imagine it wasn’t enough.

  The turf then had to be dried and that was achieved by first putting them criss-cross on top of each other so that the air could circulate through them and eventually they were put into stacks on the ramparts until lorries would come and take them away.

  The stacks looked like little houses, the turf being the bricks and the sides were sloped in to meet at the top so that the rain would fall off the turf and keep the inside dry.

  These stacks were a great temptation to local people who could walk into that great plane of turf at night if they were short and get a sack full. Abraham was always complaining about it to anyone who would listen and one day he was holding forth to one of the turf cutters who said to him, “I blame the Fridayers.”

  “Who are they?” said Abraham.

  “Oh, sure you wouldn’t know, being of the other kind,” he said, meaning Protestant. “They’re the people who do the nine Fridays, that is they go to mass and holy communion on the first Friday of every month for nine consecutive Fridays. Holy Joes, that’s what they are.”

  “Ah,” said Abraham.

  A few days later, he was having a chat to someone standing on the rampart. The two of them lit their fags and Abraham walked over to lean against a stack of turf and when he did he fell right into it, as the turf had been stolen from the inside of the stack and the wall replaced. His companion got the turf off him and pulled him out and the first words Abraham said were, “To hell with the Fridayers.”

  The peat moss may not have paid much but it kept a lot of families alive. Also, after a certain period, these men would have enough insurance stamps on their cards and be able to draw the dole or the buroo as it was called locally.

  While drawing the buroo, people weren’t averse to doing a job for the local farmers at busy times like bringing in the hay. One promising day my father rounded up a few men for the Brilla as the weather forecast was good, or maybe my father’s big toe might have warned him that he had but a day to finish the meadow. Usually, the meadows were well hidden from prying eyes but we had one meadow that came very near to the main road and that’s where we were on this day.

  The buroo men would be on the lookout for one or two men about whom they had their suspicions, having been given a tip-off from a jealous neighbour, perhaps, and they would slowly cruise around the roads, hoping to catch them red-handed. They usually carried binoculars and because of this some men adopted disguises.

  I heard from my nephew Colm of a man who met another man on the road one morning, who was sporting a red beard and wore dark glasses. He didn’t know who this bearded man was, but there was something about him that seemed familiar. When he told his wife she said, “Och, do you not know your own son? He’s away to his work.”

  When we were working in the meadow near the road one man called John was very wary as he raked the hay into a pile and his eye would stray to the road, looking for a car which might contain the buroo man. There were only one or two regular cars which used the road and they were well known. I was right beside him and I think he had attracted my attention with his furtive glances and talk of mysterious buroo men. He suddenly threw himself on the ground and the man beside him threw a forkful of hay on top of him. John lay there for a few minutes until the car had passed out of sight and then he was prodded and the all clear was announced.

  I remember once coming from school with a boy called Paddy who said to me, “I wish I was eighteen, Arthur, and I could go on the buroo, like our John.” What ambition, between the buroo and the peat moss.

  Another source of income was from flax. Quite a lot of flax was grown in the district and there was a scutching mill, as well, quite near. When the flax was ready to be harvested it was still green and would be pulled out by the roots. Usually a gang of men would pull a field in a day or two. It would be tied in sheaves like oats or barley or wheat, and finally it was taken to the flax hole to be steeped, that is soaked in water for about two weeks, I think. I’m not sure because we didn’t grow flax.

  The canal, at one point, ran along the Coalisland road, and between the canal and the road, flax holes had been opened and were all ready full of water from the canal. The flax holes were about eight or nine feet wide and about thirty feet long – I’m guessing now. The flax sheaves were put on their ends, bottom end up, and packed in rows tight against each other. The sods would be cut from the surrounding area and placed on the flax to push them down and keep them there. Now, one could walk over them, if necessary.

  While the flax was retting – that was the name given to it – the smell of stagnant water would begin to permeate the countryside, but that was only a foretaste of what was to come. When it was thoroughly retted, which was when the outside layer of the stalk fell away from the centre (the linen fibre), a brave man was needed to continue the process. The sods were removed and replaced on the land and the brave man appeared with nothing on but an old pair of trousers and shoes. He had to get in there up to the waist in the stagnant pool and lift the sheaves out to be stacked and dried and taken to the scutching mill to be scutched: separating the fibre from the rest.

  Coalisland had its own linen mills and that is where it eventually ended. Afterwards the owner would wait for his cheque to arrive depending on the yield.

  Incidentally, the country would be stinking during this time, but we got used to it. The smell always reminds me of when I learned to swim or, rather, when I got my feet up off the bottom. There was a little river called the Tarn which ran parallel to the canal down to the Blackwater river. We who lived down in Derrytresk, that is young chaps, would go to bathe in the Tarn at a place called Proghy. It was only waist deep and the Tarn was fast flowing and always clean. Every Sunday I tried to swim but I could only ever get one foot off the bottom. I think I had a fear of drowning.

  One Sunday I came home and decided I would go the next day by myself and sort out this problem. It had been raining all night but I went anyway and when I got to the Tarn I couldn’t believe my eyes as it had overflowed its banks and was careering along like a mill stream. Worse than that, it had washed all the stagnant water out of the Coalisland flax holes and the water smelled very badly but I wasn’t deterred. I stripped off, went in and found the water was up to my neck and lifting me off my feet. I turned and went with the flow doing swimming actions and there I was swimming away in what I imagined to be the correct way, at break-neck speed with feet thrashing. After that, I could float and do a very poor breast stroke, but I never became a ‘swimmer’. It took me a long time to get rid of the stinking smell, as it clung for weeks and I got a lot of funny looks for a while.

  Chapter Nine

  When I was thirteen I went to the Academy in Dungannon, a Catholic secondary school where an entrance exam was required in order to get a scholarship for two years. I don’t believe anyone did not get a scholarship; it was quite simple.

  It was seven miles from where I lived so, naturally, I travelled by bicycle and usually got home about four in the afternoon. There were about half a dozen of us who travelled home t
ogether and usually we would be larking about racing each other, so I didn’t look around much at the countryside. Then one day I caught the glimpse of a dog’s tail in the distance across a flat piece of grazing land. It was a few hundred yards away, hidden by rushes but it looked exactly like my dog Nora’s tail. When I got home she was at the door wagging her tail and I thought I was mistaken.

  When I saw it again in the distance a few weeks later I was intrigued. It was always about the same spot, about three or four miles from our house. When I mentioned it to my mother she said that Nora would be lying asleep in the kitchen and she would suddenly jump up and take off at the same time every day. She said she didn’t seem to wake up first but went straight from sleep to motion.

  So that’s what she did. Each day she came to meet me, not coming near but keeping me in sight, or maybe keeping me in scent. She got home before me and watched at the gate or at the door. I wonder if I was late would she also anticipate that? I wish I could understand the instinct of animals. Someday somebody will and that will be a breakthrough worth waiting for, particularly if we can plant the stem cell in humans.

  I started the Academy in 1939, when the war was about to start. It was called the phoney war to begin with, because although all the preparations were going ahead, like the issuing of gas masks and the building of air raid shelters, no fighting was taking place involving the allied forces and the Germans. The British Expeditionary Force and the French were sitting behind the Maginot line facing the German forces, sitting behind the Siegfried line, and not a shot was being fired.

  The eight o’clock news each morning would announce, “All quiet on the western front,” and it became a bit of a joke until, eventually, one morning on the eight o’clock news again, we heard that Hitler had ignored the Maginot line and just drove his tanks around it, through Belgium and down to Paris. The Allies were eventually driven back and the British Expeditionary Force escaped across the channel at Dunkirk.