Living in the Past: A Northern Irish Memoir (8 page)

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.

W
hen 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 together 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.

When the war broke out the radio was everyone’s link to the rest of the world. My mother would turn it up in the morning, I think to waken us all up to get ready for school, and I used to lie for a while listening to the progress of the war. When Churchill proclaimed that Britain was fighting for the freedom of small nations, we would all roar with laughter and shout at the radio, “What about this small nation?” And when the British army was forced to withdraw and Mr. Churchill made his “Fight on the beaches” speech, I wrote a two line poem in my exercise book.

Some people were pro German mainly because they didn’t understand. They imagined Hitler coming on a white charger and setting us all free. Jim Joe Hughes was very pro German and he and my father had such arguments nearly every night. My father would get very red in the face trying to reason with him. Jim Joe said that under Hitler’s socialist regime all land would be divided up in equal shares to everyone and we would all work for the common good. I think he confused Hitler’s socialist regime with communism. My mother used to say, “Don’t argue with him,” but as soon as Jim Joe started the battle would commence again.

Lord Haw Haw was eagerly listened to. He was the German propagandist and we would all gather round the radio in the evening to hear him. All we wanted to hear was a mention of Northern Ireland and when he said something like, “What about the downtrodden people of Northern Ireland?” we thought, “Yes, somebody cares. Somebody out there knows about us.” That gave us hope.

I don’t think there was any Irish history taught to the Unionist children or, if there was, it was doctored to suit the situation. The English people knew very little Irish history. At the time of the recent troubles, most people hadn’t much knowledge of what the fighting was about. In a television programme about Northern Ireland one evening, some Ulster Protestant school children were being asked questions about their history and they all thought that they were the indigenous population and that the Irish were the usurpers.

Just before the war was declared a few people from Coalisland, fearing conscription, hightailed it across the border and joined the Irish army, but also a lot joined the British army. A family near us, called Rush, lost their three sons, Peter, Barney and Patsy. Patsy was my age and I knew him very well.

But the preparations in Dungannon continued. We would hear the air raid sirens practising every day when we were in class and learned to distinguish between the air raid warning and the all clear.

Air raid shelters began to appear all around us, built with reinforced concrete. The first one I noticed was in Church Lane and there was the blackout, of course. Car headlights were covered with a black material with a small hole about two inches by three inches, through which a tiny beam of light shone and was all the driver had.

There wasn’t much bombing in Northern Ireland, except in Belfast, which was very heavily bombarded. The most exciting thing that happened for us lads was that a new cinema opened up in Castle Hill. Before that there had only been the Astor in George Street.

On my first day at the Academy, a little chap called Bill McCann from Cookstown told me at lunchtime to come to a shop halfway up Church Street on the other side from Murray Richardson’s, the stationer’s, where we got a cup of tea and I don’t remember what else, but maybe biscuits, but he also told me I could get broken biscuits at half price in Burton’s at the corner of Church Street and the Square. Bill was definitely my financial adviser.

The principal, or headmaster, of the Academy was Father McKernon, a larger than life man who amazed us with his eccentricities from the beginning. He taught us Latin and we never knew what to expect when he came into the class. One day he said, “I don’t feel like doing anything today so I suggest we all sleep.” Everyone had to put their heads on their arms and sleep and if they didn’t he would call out their names.

He had his car parked outside the classroom window and some days he would stand their admiring it for a long time with his hands deep in his soutane pockets, and he would carry on a conversation with any of the boys about him, particularly my friend Bill who sat next to me.

“Bill McCann,” he would say, “Do you think that’s a very posh car?”

“Yes, Father,” Bill would naturally reply.

“Who do you think a car like that would belong to?” was the next question.

“You, Father,” Bill would say.

“No,” he’d reply. “Wouldn’t you think it belonged to Chinny Davidson. That’s who you would think, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Father.”

I surmise that Chinny Davidson must have been a rich businessman or entrepreneur, but I had never heard of him before.

Father McKernon also had a parrot in a cage and some days he’d bring it into class. The parrot spoke exactly like him, which was with a nasal twang, and many times we were scared out of our wits by Father McKernon’s voice right behind us, as he had a habit of leaving the cage in different places in the garden, perhaps to let the parrot get the sun.

He also had a wire fox terrier called Rory. Often you would hear Father McKernon calling “Rory” only to find it was the parrot speaking.

In front of the door of his residence was a little wood with lots of tall trees and shrubs. When we came in we cycled around it to the bicycle shed. If we were late we might hide in the wood until the second period as that was when Father McKernon did the roll call. But the first morning I tried the wood I got a shock when I heard Father McKernon’s voice shouting, “Come out of the bushes; come out of the bushes.”

I was just about to do that when the boy who was with me, said, “It’s the parrot,” and, sure enough it was.

Dungannon parish chapel was just a hundred yards past the Academy, and on Sunday mornings Father McKernon would say one of the masses there. On the morning when the priests’ dues were collected, he had his own unique way of extracting money from the congregation. Normally, the priest would walk beside the altar boy who had a tray for collecting the donations and the altar boy would call out the name of the donor, such as, “James O’Brien 5/-,” and the priest would repeat it in a loud voice.

Or that was what he was supposed to do, but Father McKernon would pause and say something like, “He could afford more than that,” or something similar. Of course, the congregation looked on it as a bit of light relief, except for poor Mr. O’Brien.

So that was our headmaster, with his two assistants Rory and Polly and, of course, his shiny new car.

As the war progressed and food became scarcer, rabbits became very popular as a source of meat. When I realised that I could get one shilling each for a rabbit I bought snares and, under Charlie’s instructions, I set them all over the farm and moss. In the mornings I would set off running before school to check my snares and often I was late for school as my snare area got bigger.

Ferrets became very popular, as well. Rabbits were terrified of ferrets as they could go into the burrows after them, so the rabbits had no safe haven. The ferrets were really pets; they would go to sleep in one’s coat pocket or anywhere that it was warm and were easily fed and cared for.

When a ferret was taken to a rabbit burrow it would disappear down a hole, and if rabbits were inside they would come flying out, terrified. They would be caught by putting rabbit nets over the holes or shooting or killing with dogs. The nets were the best, of course, but at the beginning we weren’t that sophisticated.

Sometimes the ferret might kill a rabbit in the burrow. If it didn’t come out again, then we had an idea that that is what happened. When the ferret had had enough to eat he would fall asleep underground, and they are very good sleepers so there isn’t any point in waiting.

The first time this happened I was with a boy called Michael who owned the ferret. Michael knew not to wait around and said he would come back the next day when he would meet me at the burrow in the morning. When he came he had a piece of fried bacon tied to a piece of string and he placed it at the entrance to the burrow. Very soon the ferret appeared, blinking in the daylight, and he popped it into his box.

I sold my rabbits to Murphy the Beef man, as we called him, who called every Tuesday evening and more or less twisted my mother’s arm until she went out to the van and bought something.

“Come on away over, Mrs. Mac,” he would say.

“No, I don’t need anything, Mr. Murphy.”

“Och, sure you don’t know until you’ve had a look. Come on away over.”

In spite of all her protests he won the majority of the battles and my mother would return with at least a pound of sausages. I would be waiting with my rabbits and he would give me a shilling each.

Once a weasel or something had eaten the head off a rabbit but he still gave me 9d for it. I liked my mother to go over to the van because if it was bad weather, or raining hard, Mr. Murphy might not bother opening the van.

“Away with you. I haven’t the time,” he would say and I’d be left with the rabbits.

If it was wintertime the rabbits would keep for a few days, but in the summer it was more difficult. Then I heard at school from another entrepreneur that Fairburns in Dungannon was paying 1/6d for rabbits. So I put them in a sack and got the bus from Tamnamore corner, three-quarters of a mile away. The return fare was only 4d. When I got off the bus I had another mile to go but I thought it was worth it, and so it was.

One day my sister Mary, who was on her summer holidays from boarding school, had arranged to meet some school friends in Dungannon. She was outside the stationer’s shop in Church Street and when she looked down the street she saw me coming towards her.

When she got home she said, “Oh, Mammy, I had such a narrow escape. I was outside Murray Richardson’s and when I looked down the street I saw Arthur coming with a sackful of rabbits on his back. I had to rush everybody back into the shop and buy a pen that I didn’t need and keep them inside until he was gone.”

I went once a week with my rabbits in the wintertime but in the warm summer weather I had to go twice a week. Once I thought my rabbits were fine and I set off on the bus but in a short time I became aware of a smell and on investigating I found that it was the rabbits. Soon the conductor came past me and stopped and looked at me hard.

“What have you got in that bag,” he asked.

“Rabbits,” I replied.

“Well, you’ll have to get off or else throw your rabbits off,” he told me.

So, off I got. It was out in the country so I emptied my rabbits out on the roadside. I knew the one it might be as I had taken a chance with it. I threw the rabbit over the hedge and the rest were fine. I got the next bus into Dungannon and all was well.

Even once I started at the Academy I still liked to call into Hughes’ after school. As I grew older so did Eileen and, naturally, her boyfriends became more mature. I remember one Sunday afternoon a quite fat solicitor arrived from Dungannon, who seemed to have over-indulged himself with a liquid luncheon. Eileen wasn’t at home so Peter took him down to the parlour, gave him a drink and asked my sisters, Mary and Kathleen, who were in the house, to go down to chat to him. Kathleen told us, “Mary chatted away to him about the beauty of the sun shining on the heather until the poor man’s eyes started to close. Finally, he gave us money to go and get sweets. He was gone when we came back.”

Another time, Mary or Kathleen had to help Eileen out when she had double dated, by getting one man out of the window while Eileen held up her unexpected visitor in the hall.