And Time Stood Still, page 3
Growing up on the land, we became aware very early in life that the birth and death of our animals was part of the natural order of life on a farm. We had to accept and develop a resilience to this way of life. The pattern of the seasons was the backdrop to the farming lifestyle, so we absorbed the rhythm and balance of nature and the need to respect the natural order. Out in the countryside you become conscious that you are only a very small part of the greater pattern of things and this awareness bred in us a respect for the balance of nature and an awe and love for the wonders of the countryside. The land is a hard taskmaster but the people who work it derive strength and a tenacity to keep going. I remember one November evening shortly after Paddy’s accident, being sent with a jug of tea and two cuts of brown bread to my father who was up winter-ploughing in the Brake Field. When I went in the gap I stood and looked across the ploughed furrows at my father and his two horses silhouetted against the skyline of the sinking sun. Even as a child I sensed that I was looking at something special. It was the unity of man, God and nature. Out there, ploughing, my father was blending into the earth and finding redemption.
A Ploughed Field
Oh brown ploughed field
What an ancient skill
Is in your turned sod,
A skill inherited
By generations of country men
Beneath the sheltering trees
You cover the hillside
In a cloak of brown velvet.
What a softness is yours;
You are an open book
Yet to be written;
The virginity of the upturned sod
Waiting to be fertilised
By the hands of man
And nurtured by the warmth of nature.
Inner
Sanctum
Chapter 4
Thinking Time
He told us regularly, ‘I’ll be dead for years before ye realise what a wise man I am.’ As children we thought it was a hilarious pronouncement, but now I realise that it was true. Some people are ahead of their time and are not really appreciated until time proves them right. Now, as I remember my father’s wisdom and vision, I wonder how he was so far ahead. For him life was more challenging than it was for my mother who was fully occupied coping with the present as it unfolded. He was also impatient and quick-tempered, and expected everyone around him to move fast. We knew early in life that when he told you to do something he meant now and quickly. He certainly sharpened our reflexes.
Nature was his balm and daily he walked the fields of his farm. For years I thought that he was out checking animals and boundary ditches, but as I grew older and a little wiser I realised that he just needed to get away from all of us. He had an easy-going wife and six children and often plenty of visitors too, and there were times when all the clatter around the house must have driven him to the outer regions of a nervous breakdown. The fields were his escape hatch and out there he regained his equilibrium; he always returned a calmer person. He had far more respect for nature than he had for his fellow human beings, and felt from experience that nature would never bring the disappointment he sometimes suffered from his fellow men.
We grew up being constantly instructed that one should never upset the balance of nature. He warned us that if people wronged nature there was a terrible price to be paid. Trees were of huge importance in his world; he planted many and would not lightly cut one down, and constantly reminded us that it took a tree decades to grow and that a fool could cut it down in five minutes. Even in those far-off days when water pollution was unheard of, he was constantly monitoring the streams and glaishes that found their way down the hilly slopes of our farm into the river in the valley below. It caused him great annoyance if my mother’s ducks and geese were found swimming in the stream that ran through the Horse’s Field and made the water unpalatable for the horses. In his book nobody, even in the animal world, impinged on the rights of another to fresh drinking water. At that time we drew most of our drinking water from the well in a field behind the house – supplemented by water from our neighbour Bill’s ‘fairy well’. An enamel bucketful always stood on the corner of the kitchen table. When my father came into the house during the day he always went to the dresser for a cup and helped himself from the water bucket, and last thing at night on his way upstairs to bed, he did likewise. In later years, on the one occasion in his life that he had to go into hospital, his one request was that a bottle of well water be brought to him as he considered the hospital water a health hazard.
The river that ran through the valley at the bottom of our farm brought him immense pleasure. Every summer Sunday when he came home from Mass, out came his rod and fishing tackle and then a complicated ritual of catching flies took place – this was done in a cow’s horn covered with mesh wire. These were special flies that were foxy-coloured and long-tailed. If one of us was lucky enough to be allowed to accompany him on these almost sacred pilgrimages to the river we were under threat of extermination not to make noise lest we frighten the fish. I loved crawling along through the high ferns and watching the fish jump. For fear of distraction, we were never allowed to come close enough to watch the actual catch. But gradually the grey jute bag would fill up and he usually brought it home full of slippery brown trout. Then we sometimes wished that he had been less successful because it was our job to take the trout to the water spout at the bottom of the yard, then gut them and clean them out under the running water. But we had no such problem with large numbers when my mother cooked them in the bastable over the open fire and they reappeared sizzling and butter-soaked on the table.
Later in the year salmon came up that river to spawn and poachers went out late at night armed with a ‘gaff’ – a lit sod soaked in paraffin oil to dazzle the salmon and gaff them to their doom. My father took a poor view of this activity and when one unwary young neighbour brought us a gift of a poached salmon, my father promptly opened it up on the kitchen table and showed him and all of us the eggs, and spoke about the destruction of future fish life in the killing of this unwary salmon. We were never again given a poached salmon.
As it is today, the weather forecast was of huge importance to farmers and my father was a constant listener to weather forecasts on the radio. He was also a great observer of natural weather signs and of the night sky, and he had his own way of knowing if the following day was going to be sunny enough to cut the hay or the corn. The moon was very significant in his weather assessments and he never bought a calendar that didn’t show the moon cycles. Often at night he would take us out and point out the varying angles of the moon and the location of different stars in the night sky. I loved my father most at these times when he seemed to be yearning heavenwards to an unknown realm that was way above and beyond our ordinary world.
The arrival of the swallows in spring brought him great delight and we children competed with each other to be the one to see the first swallow or to hear the first cuckoo. When cutting hay or corn he always watched out for nesting wildlife and often a patch remained uncut somewhere in the field until the baby birds were hatched out and had safely flown away. Once when a mother pheasant failed to return to the nest, her eggs were placed beneath one of our hatching hens, and they hatched out along with the chickens. He knew the name of every bird that visited the farm and sometimes at night as he sat by the fire he drew bird pictures in our school copybooks. Later, when the lessons were done and the rovers, as we called the visiting neighbouring farmers, were gone home, he would sit smoking his pipe, gazing into the fire. If asked then what he was doing he would nod his head slowly and tell you, ‘Thinking.’ But most of his thinking was done out in the fields from where he brought home early-morning mushrooms, blackberries and wild crab apples and where he ate haws as he walked along, declaring them to be very good for ‘the system’.
As he grew old he grew more restful and then when you asked him as he sat by the fire smoking his pipe, ‘What are you doing, Dad?’ He would answer calmly, ‘Waiting.’ His journey was coming to a close and he was quite at ease with moving on. I often wondered where this total acceptance came from and came to the conclusion that it was from the farming way of life and his closeness to nature. He had witnessed the coming and going of the seasons and the yearly unfolding of the natural world around him. His animals had been bred, born, reared and died on his farm and he had journeyed with them; at one stage we had three generations of the same family of cows in the herd and they were almost as important as ourselves in the life of the farm.
He was not a praying man and regarded some of the religious practices of the time as daft, but he was very close to what he conceived his God to be – his God was out in the fields, and at a time when each Church went a separate road he would shake his head at the folly of it all and say, ‘We are all going in the same direction.’ He regarded big funerals as a crazy exercise, declaring them to be ‘A queue of mad men following a dead man.’ I think that he would have liked to die quietly in his own bed and be buried with minimum fuss under the trees in the orchard below the house. He got the first half of his wish because one night, after getting into his bed, he died quickly and quietly. His waiting was over.
His wake took place in the parlour where his wedding photograph and old photographs of his parents looked down on him. His was the sixth generation of his family to live in this house and two succeeding generations were now also gathered there. Friends and neighbours came to say goodbye and one old friend came with a mission in mind: he had come not to express the usual mundane sentiments but specifically to ‘look upon’ his old friend and see him off on his long journey. Ignoring us all, he made a beeline for my father’s coffin and grasping both sides of it gazed down fondly for a very long time into the face of his friend of a lifetime. He was in no hurry; you cannot rush saying goodbye to eighty years of togetherness. Having dealt with the main matter, he finally got around to sympathising with my mother and the rest of us.
Later, as the hearse left the yard, it was as if we had come to the last chapter of a long story. After supper I walked down through my father’s fields to his beloved river. He was gone, but his spirit was all around me in the gathering dusk of that February evening. The dark river was silent. Eight generations of his family had lived by this river that had flowed quietly through all our lives. It made me realise how transient we are and how timeless nature is. My father had found his God and his peace out here, and you could feel it in the night air.
The New Moon
You studied the night sky
Saw the future in the new moon
In the plough and in the stars.
You lived in a starry realm
That shone on a kind landscape
Where a new moon opened
A window to the milky way.
Now you have flown home
Towards that new moon
Up beyond the plough
And the stars.
Your wings opened
On the milky way
As you soared
Unfettered into a
New morning.
My Father
Now that you are gone
My father …
What is left behind?
The heritage you left us
Was the treasures
Of your mind.
Goldsmith was your
Special friend
You’d quote him
Verse by verse
I quoted him for you
As I walked behind
Your hearse.
You planted trees
Upon your land
And lived to see
Them grow.
A man who needlessly
Cut a tree
You did not
Want to know.
On all the birds
Upon your land
You could
Put a name
You knew their
Natural habitat
From whence
And where
They came.
Honesty was
Your creed in life
You gave more
Than was due
But never expected
Anyone to do
The same for you.
These are all the gifts
My father
You have left behind
The greatest
Gift of all
A philosophy of mind.
Chapter 5
The Woman of the House
One of the idiosyncrasies that I have inherited from my mother is that I cannot face a mug on the breakfast table. She believed that a cup and saucer were prerequisites to any partaking of tea. It was not that she was into posh living, but she believed that both people and food deserved to be treated with a certain amount of decorum. We grew up in a house where frugal living was the order of the day, but my mother was of the opinion that ‘being without fostered the art of making do’. She was not into ‘house beautiful’, but could put a gloss on meagre provisions; good food was her top priority and a properly laid-out table was necessary for the comfort and wellbeing of her diners, be they the immediate family, neighbours or visiting relations. She had married into a long-tailed family in an old farmhouse on a hillside farm near the Cork–Kerry border from where, out of necessity, previous generations had emigrated all over the world. But though we Irish may have wanderlust in our blood, the tug of our roots is also very strong, so, like the salmon in the river at the bottom of our farm, shoals of Taylor descendants constantly returned to visit the ancestral home and she always welcomed them back wholeheartedly to their home place. They were entertained to tea in the parlour and stories of their ancestors. She had a better knowledge of my father’s family tree than he had, and sometimes had more welcome for his extended family too! A staunch believer in family traditions, she was a cornerstone in his family as well as her own. She often told us that to denigrate your husband’s family is to denigrate your husband – years later the memory of that bit of wisdom often kept my mouth shut! Her one good linen tablecloth and the set of fine china that she had inherited from my grandmother appeared not only when the Stations were held in our house and at Christmastime, but for all special visitors throughout the year.
But there were feasts outdoors too. When we were saving the hay she made a big, juicy apple cake to be eaten out in the meadow and no matter what mayhem was taking place in the kitchen her first priority was to feed the workers in the field. Saving hay was sweaty, hard labour and we complained about hay seeds down our backs and unexpected briars scratching our legs and encounters with moist frogs who made surprise appearances, but when we caught sight of my mother coming down the hilly field from the house carrying a basket which we knew contained apple cake, and a white enamel bucket full of tea, we forgot all our complaints. We loved tea in the meadow and when we voiced our appreciation of the apple cake she would smile modestly and tell us, ‘Hunger is a wonderful sauce.’
With her great sense of occasion she turned Christmas into a magical experience. Children love a swell of expectation and being involved in all the preparations. We were expected to be part of the Christmas clean-up and then it was our job to go to the wood for holly and decorate the house. It never bothered her when, in our childish exuberance, we turned the kitchen into a replica of the nearby grove – as long as she had red-berried holly for the Christmas candle and potatoes boiled to stuff the goose on Christmas Eve, all was well in her world. She was never annoyed by excited children dragging holly branches around her feet and she calmly sorted out stand-up fights when they arose – all this palaver drove my father crazy and he would disappear until the kitchen was decorated to our satisfaction and peace restored. A staunch believer in God and family traditions, she loved Christmas and wove such a spiritual essence into all the celebrations that we children considered the crib to be as important as Santa Claus. A devotee of the nightly family rosary, she brought us all to our knees for the ritual, though when her extra prayers or ‘trimmings’ got out of hand my father would complain, ‘Ah Missus, we’ll be here till morning’ – her title always changed from ‘Lena’ to ‘Missus’ when she over-stepped his threshold of tolerance.
She was a natural cook and led me to the belief that one of the primary ingredients in good cooking is love of people. She loved us all and nothing was too good for us, or for any of her visitors. A firm conviction that everyone was as good as they could be was her central creed in life, which often caused my father to raise his eyes to heaven at the absurdity of such thinking.
The fox was the only creature that drew her ire – he was the bane of her life when he raided her sheds on his nocturnal visits and deprived her of well-fattened ducks and geese. He and she competed to feed their young, she would agree, but his wanton killing, just for the sake of it, was what she could not forgive. When in later years I took up painting and told her that I loved painting foxes, she assured me that if I had had the experience of them that she had there would be no love lost between us!
She was the perfect grandmother as she showered her grandchildren with unconditional love which they lapped up like cats a saucer of cream. When she came to visit our house she fulfilled all their culinary requests and they savoured creamy tapioca and semolina puddings that their mother failed to produce. On annual family visits to Ballybunion she accompanied them nightly to ‘the merries’ and constantly replenished pockets rapidly emptying from swingboat rides and turns in the bumpers.
