Turtle Bunbury

Writer and Historian

 
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4. VANISHING IRELAND - SAMPLE INTERVIEWS

Vanishing Ireland - Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World was short-listed for the IES Best Irish-Published Book of the Year Award 2010.

CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The CAST

3. Portraits by James Fennell

4. Sample Interviews

5. Media Coverarge

6. General Applause

7. Acknowledgments

 

4. SAMPLE INTERVIEWS

Jack 'Ginger' Powell, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary

Kitty Crowe, Ringsend, Dublin

Bob Murphy, Rathvilly, Co. Carlow

Donal Duffy, Ravensdale, Co. Louth

Jack ‘Ginger’ Powell

Born 1913

Vet

Nenagh, County Tipperary

Jack Pole is the oldest practising vet in Ireland. His only rival was Hal Lambert, a vet who also managed to play both rugby and cricket for Ireland. Hal is retired now. ‘He’s living on his money,’ laughs Jack, ‘but I’m still trying to earn a few quid.’ Jack Powell is ninety-three years old.

His understanding of the changing tides of 20th century Ireland is incisive. Perhaps it is the simple fact that he was alive for so much of it. Indeed, considering his grandfather, born in 1830, was a teenager during the Great Famine, Jack Pole seems to transcend all chronological barriers. ‘One of my grandfather’s duties in 1848 was when his father sent him down to Toomyvara with a horse and cart and a load of turnips. He tipped them up in the village square and people came and helped themselves. If you’ve a hole in your belly, a boiled turnip is probably better than nothing.’

Jack hails from a long line of farmers from village of Toomyvara in the northern foothills County Tipperary’s Silvermine Mountains. His great-nephew is the seventh generation born on the land. In 1932, he went to veterinary college and, aside from serving with the Canadian Air Force during World War Two, he has been practising since he graduated in 1936.

One of Jack’s earliest memories was of the Spanish Flu epidemic that struck Europe in early 1919 and which is alleged to have killed more people than World War One. ‘Our entire house was stricken with Flu. I was the youngest but I think I must have got some sort of immunity because I was always running around with hot drinks. We had no antibiotics. Nothing to treat the symptoms. My father carried on anyway. The farm had to go on. Cows had to be milked.’

Milking cows was a family affair. ‘My father started off with as many cows as he could milk and then according as the five of us came along there were a few more. I milked my first cow when I was five years of age. We finished up with twenty-five cows, three or four each. We’d all sit on out stools and milk by hand. We milked them before we went to school and again when we came back. The milk was taken to the creamery in Toomyvarra with a horse and dray cart.’

Meanwhile, the surrounding countryside erupted in a rebellion ‘which started in 1916 and went on until the foundation of the state in 1921’. Jack remembers his father giving refuge to four IRA men on the run. Over twenty years later, Jack met two of these fortuitous refugees. They remembered his father’s kindness ‘like it was yesterday’. But after independence came Civil War and, in Jack’s opinion, ‘we did far worse things to ourselves than the Black and Tans ever did’. His mother was constantly herding Jack and his siblings back into the house lest a stray bullet caught them. One day Mrs O’Meara who ran a hotel in Nenagh went out to see what all the shooting was about. ‘She was a rather buxom lady but either way a stray bullet got her and killed her.’

In time, hostilities ended and the Free State got a more secure footing. ‘I heard my father say that in his time practically every house in Nenagh had changed hands. So changes are on-going! But it is not long since the small farmer, once abundant in this area disappeared. That has changed the whole structure of rural Ireland.’ Their decline began with the Economic War in the 1930s when the British government slapped a tariff on all agricultural produce from Ireland. ‘Cattle, sheep, pigs – you couldn’t sell them. Top prime bullocks were sold for maybe 7 or 8 pound a head. Sheep and pigs would be sold for literally shillings. You couldn’t sell a calf but you could sell the skin for 10 shillings just to survive.’

In the hard times, a small farmer’s staunchest ally was his horse. ‘I qualified in 1936 and I went to England and practised there until 1947. That was the terrible winter when TB broke out. But even at that time, most of the work here was done by horses. Irish draughts – the foundation of the horses that made Ireland famous. They did everything. They went to church, mass and meeting. They went to the station with a load of coal. They went to the market with the pigs. They were athletic animals, not like the heavy Shires. They suited the country. But then Mr Ferguson brought in the grey tractor and whatever about the father, the son wanted to get the tractor. So the horses had to go.’ Jack Pole asserts that there is not a horse working within a fifty-mile radius of Toomvarra today.

‘We had no electric light, no television, no motor car. We walked to school, regardless of weather. We walked the cattle to the fair. And so of course the standard of living now is vastly superior to what it was fifty or sixty years ago. Everyone has 4 by 4s, faxes, telephones, all mod cons. Rural Ireland as I knew it has gone. I’m still part of it and I enjoy living in it. But small farmers have gone the same way small shopkeepers will disappear. Land that was bought for maybe £10 an acre now fetches £20,000 an acre. One has to accept that changes are inevitable.

‘And probably, materially, these changes are for the better. But in many other ways, we’re losers,’ says Jack, pointing at the television. ‘We went to the neighbours’ houses and we chatted and sang songs and played tricks and enjoyed ourselves. Now you hardly know your neighbours. Young people hardly know their neighbours. It’s not their fault. If we were the same age, we’d be the same. They’re the victim of a way of life. There isn’t the same social contact between farmers as there used to be. Nothing unites people like trouble. We shared everything in the country. If you killed a pig, you’d put it in a barrel, pickle it and hang it up. You brought pork to the neighbours and if they killed one, they reciprocated. There was very close contact and co-operation between farmers and neighbours. It’s not necessary now.’

Jack’s wife Sheila passed away in 2005, and their three sons no longer live in the area. He lives with his hilariously excitable dog Trixie and keeps himself busy by continuing to practise as a vet, keeping a close eye on the progress of his greyhounds and totting up the number of Volkswagens he’s had since 1952 when he owned the first Beetle in Nenagh – thirty-eight at the last count.

Kitty Crowe

Singer and Community Champion

Born 1926

Ringsend, Dublin 4

Kitty Crowe demurely clears her throat, closes her eyes and opens her mouth. ‘Because – because you come to me,’ she begins, ‘with naught save love, and hold my hand and lift mine eyes above, a wider world of hope and joy I see.’ Her voice is strong, remarkably so for a lady of such advanced years. But she can hold the notes. And her hands weave and part at all the right moments too. I don’t know how many times she has sung this song. Niall Quinn heard her perform once. That was when he presented her with a special ‘academy award’ for her contribution to the community spirit of the south Dublin village of Ringsend. On that occasion, she took the opportunity to deliver some JFK prose: ‘It’s not what you take from your community,’ she advised the crowd when the clapping had stopped, ‘Its what you can put into it.’

Music was in the blood. Her father was an O’Hare from Newry, County Down, who as a young man, took on an administrative post with the new Free State Government in Dublin. In time, he met Kitty’s mother, an architect’s daughter raised beside Barrow River in Monasterevin, County Kildare. In her youth, the new Mrs O’Hare had played piano and sung songs with Count John McCormack. ‘My father loved music too,’ recalls Kitty. He would never have let us sit there and watch television. You’d have to get your instrument out and play and if you went wrong you had to stop and start over! I played piano accordion. My eldest brother – Frank, God rest him, he died in London – he had a beautiful accordion. Sometimes we’d play until six o’clock in the morning! We’d hear the roosters going roo-roooooh and think where did all the time go?’

Small wonder that Kitty should take a shine to a piano player. Dave Crowe was a plasterer by trade and an athlete by nature. He ran cross-country through the Phoenix Park with Eamonn Coghlan Senior and the Donore Harriers.

They met at ‘a céilí and old time’ in Sandymount. A leak in the roof above had sent a shoot of water down her neck. Wee Kitty O’Hare was a curly headed blonde, working in the Swastika Laundry on Shelbourne Road. Her neighbours would say ‘there’s a hare running up the street, d’ya see all the rabbits chasing after her’.

Dave heard her shriek and said he’d fix the leak. His accent betrayed that he had been living in England for some time. Kitty said, ‘Oh no, you would have to be a first class plasterer to fix that. And we don’t need anyone from England coming here to do our work.’

Dave held steady. They were married in 1950. That same evening they hosted an all-night party in the front garden of Kitty’s parents’ home on Margaret Place. The street, she tells me, was named for the Padraig Pearse’s mother. And it is in this same house that Kitty and Dave live now.

Kitty remembers the house being built when she was a girl. Her head is full of memories of Ringsend in the old days – of the Gasworks when it was for pumping gas, of endless vegetable rows and ‘cattle in the field by Shaw’s Lane where the Spar is now’. She used to watch cattle coming through the streets. ‘And if I heard a boat coming in [to the nearby docks], I’d run up the big side lane and wave to them. And I’d see a handkerchief waving back and I’d think he’s after reading my signal! We’d hear the drones all through the night.’ By night, the streets smelled of paraffin. ‘It was lovely to watch them lighting the lamps. That was the modern light then!’

In the 1950s and 1960s, Kitty and Dave travelled ‘all over Ireland’ on a tandem bicycle. It broadened their understanding of the country at large. That said, an anonymous tipster counsels me that whenever he saw the Crowe’s cycling by, Kitty’s feet were always up on the handle bar!

Kitty adores Dave, with whom she had six children. ‘You cannot get tradesmen like him,’ she insists. One of his tasks was to re-erect the lions heads back on the stairwell of the British Embassy in Dublin after the building was burned down in 1973. ‘Dave done it and you wouldn’t think a match had hit them,’ says she. Now eighty-eight years old, Dave quenches his sporting thirst by keeping watch on the Premier League – who plays for who, who’s scoring the goals and how much they’re earning.

Kitty attributes Dave’s continuing good health to a daily bowl of porridge. ‘All this stuff in packages now, my father used to say to me, “If I had my foot I’d put them as far as Ticnock.” Pure porridge was what the old people took. It was great for the bones. Even for a mother to get a baby started it is the very thing.’

‘I’ve all sorts of blood in me!’ says Kitty. ‘But anyhow, thanks be to God, I have a good temper and I never got myself into an argument. You have to open your mind. There’s no need to be arguing and fighting all the time. I’m constantly offering advice to my grandchildren. More so today than ever before. There’s so much pressure and anxiety in the world. You can’t expect everything to be there with a click of the fingers. You’ve got to wait and take your time. Everything is not dull. It’s what you make of it.’

‘And be careful – you can walk the street but you never know what’s walking behind you. Joseph [my grandson] says, “Don’t say that Nana, you’re frightening me.” But you have to! Because there’s someone out there who might not want you. It’s going on all the time. It makes you sick. I often just wonder if I went up with my accordion, would it ease their brains? Would it make people stop and go right?’

Bob Murphy

1909–2002

Gardener

Rathvilly, County Carlow

Bob grabs my hand suddenly and whispers: ‘That man there ... d’you see him?’ I look across the ward at another old man, lying down, itching his back. ‘He’s armed,’ says Bob, his eyes wide. ‘With a six chamber pistol.’

I think ‘Ah!’ and recall Bob’s paranoid visions the night he was taken in to the hospital in Carlow. Poor old Bob. The dapper gent of the mushy-pea suits, the feathered trilbies and the coal-fired greenhouse. It’s odd to see him here now, laid up in a hospital bed dressed in pale blue pyjamas, convinced he’s got a homicidal maniac two beds over. Fair play to the old boy though. Bob liked his drink for sure, but he hasn’t had a DROP in over a week. But now he looks at me and says, ‘Maybe I’ll live to be a hundred,’ and guffaws and we’re all grand again.

Thank God he got out one more time before he died. A friend whisked him over to Molloys, his favourite haunt, for a farewell drink. Eithne Molloy caught a tear rolling down his cheek as he made his way out the door for the last time. ‘He knew the end was upon him,’ she says. She had known him all her life. Everyone in Rathvilly knew Bob. ‘He was an icon,’ declares Betty Scott, who lived in the cottage next door to him.

Bob was well known to most drinking establishments in north County Carlow. He was a quiet man but he loved the craic. His tipple was whiskey and 7Up, or a ‘7 ½’ as he called it. Betty would hear him being decanted onto his doorstep by a friendly chauffeur at 4 o’clock of a Sunday morning and not hear another peep from him until Tuesday evening. ‘He was in dry dock, you see,’ explained Betty.

He was the second youngest of seventeen children born to an assistant gamekeeper at my family’s estate outside Rathvilly. Most of Bob’s siblings emigrated to England or America in the first three decades of the last century. He never even met some of his elder brothers. They are all gone now. ‘We won’t get those people again,’ says Betty. ‘Bob was the end of an era.’

During my childhood , Bob was simply Bob, the funny wee fellow with the cowboy hat who stood in the doorway of his home nodding his head at us when we went to visit Betty. She had been housekeeper at Lisnavagh while he was working in the garden there. Then, one day, I met him looking befuddled, standing by the road outside his house. He was awaiting the 2 o’clock bus to Tullow. It was 2:45. After talking to him for a while, he realised the problem – autumn had begun the day before; and his Bob’s watch was an hour fast. Easy mistake, easily rectified. Bob duly tapped his watch, dismounted the wall and disappeared into his house. I waited uncertainly. He returned presently, strapping on a new watch. He explained that he had two watches. One came off at summer’s end; the other went on for the spring.

I was only in his cottage once. From the outside, it was small, yellow and deceptively quaint. The windowsills and drainpipes were powdery blue and a pretty scarf of pink ran around the base. The interior was another matter. Orange tipped eggshells and blue-hued slices of Pat the Baker’s bread. Flailing red strings of peat briquette wraps. Upset primrose pots and chippings of terracotta. A soot-encrusted sofa with springs squiggling north and south. Open pots of blackberry jam with upturned lids looking like nightclub ashtrays. An eruption of loose black-eyed spuds galloping into the next door room. Betty claims that Bob never got ill. ‘There’s no germs alive that could have survived in his house,’ she reasons.

His greenhouse, though, was wonderful. It occupied an old pig-sty to the rear of his house, accessible via a shed full of old furniture and Nellie bikes. The greenhouse was Bob’s pride and joy. The soils were freshly raked and weedless; the petals wholesome and bright. Around the perimeter of the room ran a thick pipe connected to a small stove, fed with coal nuggets in the colder months. It was so incredibly pleasant there that I sometimes wondered is if that was where Bob actually slept.

Betty adored Bob to bits, but never allowed herself to call him anything other than ‘a feckin’ torment’. She is still full of anecdotes about the bachelor’s persistently ‘bauld behaviour’, his quick-fire one-liners, his stubborn resistance to doctors and priests, his merry tours of the region’s drinking emporiums, and such like. When Father Flood came walking past their house one day, Bob drolly mumbles, ‘that’s the first time I seen a flood coming uphill.’

When he didn’t mumble drolly, he was still impossible to understand. His voice belonged to another generation. From his hospital bed, I had deciphered a little about his life and how he advanced via England from raking lawns for ‘The O’Byrne’ in Kildangan to laying pipes in glasshouses and pitching netting over the roses of my own late grandmother. His favourite flower, he confided, was a blue rambling rose.

On another occasion he told of Kevin Barry, the patriot from Rathvilly executed in 1919, standing up to a bully of a teacher and getting his ears smacked for his impudence.

As chance would have it, Bob’s funeral was presided over by Monsignor Deering, a Rathvilly citizen who had moved to Waco, Texas, and came to fame as ‘the Pastor with the blaster’ during the David Koresh debacle. The Monsignor was on a return visit to Ireland and had known Bob in his youth. ‘We all gotta go sometime,’ he drawled to the gathered mourners. ‘And Bob knew his time had come. He opened his arms to the Lord and said, “Take me away Father.” Well, Bob, now that you’re up there, why don’t you plug in a light for all of us!’

Bob would have loved it.

Donal Duffy

Piper

Born 1920

Ravensdale, County Louth

‘I’m 87 years young,’ he laughs. ‘I was born on 24 May. Empire Day. The Union flag was flying high over Belfast! Well, the Empire’s long gone but I’m still here!’

Donal has a wonderful laugh, a softly contagious heart warbler which he has been unleashing ever since he first heard my name. He is funny, positive, intelligent and most eager to share the wisdom of his years. He is well known around Ravensdale for playing the pipes at the annual Poc Fada na hÉireann festival up in the mountains of Mourne behind his home.

At times, though, he is grave. Such as when he recounts the events of a cold morning in 1922 when two armed men approached his father outside their family home in Belfast’s Duncairn Gardens and put six bullets in him.

‘At that time the pogroms were on,’ explains Donal. ‘Ethnic cleansing! My father was Catholic and we lived in a Protestant area. These two boys were outside the gate. “Are you Duffy?” “Yeh.” Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Six bullets. But he didn’t fall. He grabbed the gate. My mother heard the shots and she fell down the stairs and came out to him. A wee Protestant girl on the far side of the street went for a doctor and priest. He got two in the chest and three in the stomach and he lost the use of his arm. My mother was only a wee lassie. I was two years old. So that upset the whole apple cart!’

Donal’s father survived the attack but was unable to work for several years. The young boy was dispatched to live with his grandmother in Tyrone. ‘She thought I was God’s gift but really I was a wee rascal!’

Before the shooting, Donal’s father had worked as a miller. In 1926, he went (del: ‘back’) to work at the oat mills in Letterkenny. ‘We lived in a place alongside the river called Rosewood. That was the nicest time of my life. Hunting rabbits, swimming and fishing after school. I was very sorry leaving Donegal.’

Donal left school aged sixteen in 1936. He needed a career and milling was not an option. As he says, the arrival of corn flakes put an end to oats. That said, he still eats porridge every morning. ‘It keeps you fit,’ he insists, adding ‘with cereals you’d get as much out of eating the packet.’

His younger brother, Jack, would later look west and move to Newhaven, New York, where he still lives. ‘He had a better chance because he was the last of us and stayed at school the full length.’

But for Donal, England beckoned. Not least when he was sacked from his job at a foundry in Dundalk when he asked for a pay rise. In the hot summer of 1939, a friend from Donegal got him a short-term job as a bricky in Aldershot. A few months later, Donal discovered the streets of London were covered in something even purer than gold. ‘Come January, the snow came and it snowed for six week and the snow was at least 4 feet deep. The county boss gave me a shovel and a brush and said, “I don’t mind where you go – just shovel’ (insert inverted comma). I went up to a seaside place where they were all colonels and generals, and so on. “Mister, can you clean my path, please?” No problem! Ten shillings and a beer every time!’

By 1941, Donal was working as a metal moulderer at the Ford plant in Dagenham. A good salary put him within reach of a childhood ambition. ‘When I was a wee boy my father used to promise me he’d buy me a set of pipes, but he never had the money! So I found my chance now. I saved enough money – 29 guineas – and ordered a set from Cork. Then the post office in London told me they’d arrived and there was £25 duty on them. I could have gone to Cork four or five times and brought them back for nothing!’

Nonetheless, armed with his new pipes, Donal had a hobby. He practiced by night, much to the pleasure of his room-mate, Paddy Walton, a half-deaf Great War veteran from Cork. ‘He was at the Dardanelle’s. He told me the sea was red with blood. He was ran through the stomach and left for dead. The reason he lived was the Turkish bayonet wasn’t fluted like the European one. So they couldn’t finish you off. It was like a needle. The Turkish Red Cross saw he was still alive and put him aside.’

Like many an Irishman in London, Donal longed for home. But he was wary too.

‘I met this old man from Galway standing outside The World’s End pub singing a wee song, ‘God Bless the Ship that Brings Me Back to the Old Emerald Isle’. He was one of two brothers. It’s a tough life. Very sad. He was a wino. His brother was dead and so we raised a few pounds and dressed him up in a new suit and sent him back to Galway with the coffin. But a month later, he was back again. He said, “It’s forty years since I was in Galway before. Nobody knew me and nobody wanted to know me. I want to be back with people I know.” That’s the sad part of Ireland.’

By 1943, Donal was back in Ireland, kicking a football about with the lads and playing the pipes to his proud father. In 1962, the thirty-seven-year-old met and married Norah, a Dundalk girl twelve years his junior. ‘I wasn’t in a hurry to marry,’ he chuckles. But it is quite clear that Norah, who bore him seven children and passed away in 1998, was the dearest thing he ever had. They already have twelve grandchildren and three great-grandchildren so he can rest assured that his dynasty will survive.

For over forty years, Donal Duffy has been popping through a hole in an old stonewall and out into a magical riverside glade of stately beech, honeysuckle, glacial boulders and rushing waters. In part, this habit stems from his keen paternal interest in forestry. He certainly knows his timber, tapping fallen Spanish chestnuts with a carpenter’s eye, keeping another eye peeled for grey squirrels. But the real method in Donal’s madness becomes apparent when he unveils his pipes and gets down to some serious practice. One wonders what the local bird population makes of it.



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