This blog is a personal take on Listowel, Co. Kerry. I am writing for anyone anywhere with a Listowel connection but especially for sons and daughters of Listowel who find themselves far from home. Contact me at listowelconnection@gmail.com
I had the pleasure of Molly’s company for a few days before Christmas.
<<<<<<<<<
In Ballincollig
Nothing beats a family Christmas. I spent it in 2024 with my family in Ballincollig.
Church of St. Mary and St. John
Nice touch from the 220 bus
<<<<<<<<
A Postbox Story
Chris Courtney on Facebook
P & T POST BOX
‘SE’ Saorstat Eireann (Irish Free State) post box in County Monaghan. Cast at the Jessop Davis foundry Enniscorthy sometime between 1922 and 1937. (Source: Irish Archeology). Photos also include Thomas Jessop Davis born 1864, died 1946, founder of St. John’s Ironworks and Foundry which was located in Enniscorthy, County Wexford. Wall tie plates, Manhole covers, Agricultural machinery components, ESB and P and T items testify to some of the many contracts he undertook at the Enniscorthy plant.
<<<<<<<<<
Acts of Neighbourliness
The internet was alive with amazing stories of helpfulness during the recent cold snap.
Beatrice shovelling snow on Charles Street
Pat rescuing a stranded motorist
Eddie cleared my path so that I could safely go to his house for Sunday lunch.
This is a milk delivery to Centra in Dromcollogher. The internet was awash with images of good samaritans delivering milk, drinking water, vital medicines, food, post and other essentials to stranded neighbours, friends and strangers.
Bridie Murphy’s picture of her husband heading out to help a neighbour almost broke the internet and rightly so. This picture of early January 2025 in Co. Limerick says more than 1,000 words.
In the midst of it all Mattie Lennon found a laugh.
<<<<<<<<<
Carmel Hanrahan’s Memories of Growing up in Listowel
Before you read today’s instalment, I have to give you an update.
Muireann O’Sullivan remembers the milkman. Here is Muireann’s comment
I think Carmel’s man on a bike delivering milk:cream was Martin Daly RIP late of Market Street ( the house now lived in by Máiréad Carroll). He certainly delivered to Charles St. on his bike. The late Tom Scannell, Skehenerin, took over the milk round when Martin retired. Our milk was now delivered in glass bottles with silver foil tops. The delivery was made extraordinarily early and, when we collected it from the window sill or doorstep, the cream would have risen to and settled on top – ready to pour on our porridge.
If you have commented in the past, you will probably have noticed that comments no longer appear. I have no idea why. I will try to fix it. Meanwhile dont stop commenting. I can see and approve them even if I can’t upload them to the blog.
Carmel’s Story continued
… Tony O’Callaghan lived at the end of the road and I remember some of his brass works from the house especially a beautiful piece at the fireplace. Working up the road, there were the Landers, then the Jones, Mai Watkins – sister to Aggie Nolan who filled in as surrogate mother to my sister and myself, a wonderful person and I can’t do her justice here, O’Donnell’s, Crowley’s, Us, Givens, Molyneaux’s, Nurse McMahon, Fitzmaurice’s, Moore’s, and a little further up O’Sullivan’s. (I hope I have the order right).
The Givens lived next door. I can still remember our first morning in the new house when Seamus called to my dad through the fence enquiring if we were coming out to play. Seamus, John and Peter were the sons of the house. Pat had been to America which seemed a very exotic and exciting thing to us at the time. Lisha and Pat drank coffee every day after lunch (my first introduction to that magic concoction) and I used to be given a cup also, made on milk and a spoonful from a little tin of Maxwell House powdered coffee. Thus started my lifelong passion (some would say obsession) for anything coffee.
Paudie and Sadie Fitzmaurice lived further up the road. On Sundays, dad gave Sadie a lift to 12 o’clock Mass. She used to allow several of us to come in and play with Mary’s dolls house which with retrospect was a spectacular affair and David’s Fort and his soldiers. Personally, I remember that I preferred the soldiers. Apologies here to Mary and David for commandeering their toys in their absence, but a great memory. I also recall that Mary had a pair of Beetle Boots (white, if I remember correctly), the closest we ever got to a pair and a collection of Beetles records. You must remember this was in the late 60’s when things like this were not common place. Hilda O’Donnell also had a record collection which contained a lot of Elvis records. I remember that Paudie went on holidays several times to Spain and returned with a gift for every child on the road. A doll in Spanish costume was one and a Fan on another occasion. I don’t remember what the boys got (too busy admiring my own).
More tomorrow
<<<<<<<<
A Poem for all the stressed parents with children under their feet for too long
<<<<<<<
A Fact
Food rationing was introduced in the UK in 1940 due to shortages brought about by WW2.
Photo; Chris Grayson in Killarney National Park on January 7 2025
<<<<<<<<
A Tree of Hope Knitting Project
This is the St. Conleth’s Parish newsletter which was sent to me by Mary McKenna.
As you can see this was a massive undertaking, a huge credit to all involved. In Newbridge, knitting is a huge community thing. I have seen and documented here their previous yarn bombing and St. Brigid projects.
Detail shows how each branch and bauble was made.
And someone wrote a poem.
<<<<<<<<
A Birdseye view of Snowy Listowel
John Kelliher took this fabulous photo of the recent snow.
<<<<<<<
Growing up in Listowel in the 1960s and 1970s
By Carmel Hanrahan
(Continued from yesterday)
… My father grew a lot of vegetables alongside all the flowers and ornamental plants he had – he was a passionate gardener and I inherited that gene. There seemed to be a type of barter system going on amongst the other gardeners and himself as it wasn’t unusual to look out the window and see one of the neighbours collecting some vegetables, (or strawberries in the Summer), but we also picked peas and other items in Hilda O’Donnell’s Garden. Between us and the O’Donnell’s was the Crowley’s house. Kitty Crowley was also a keen gardener. Together, Hilda and Kitty (it seems strange to call them by their first names as, growing up, most people were addressed as Mr or Mrs) often did “a run” to Ballybunion during the fine weather. It seems in my memory that no invitations were issued but if you spotted a car being packed you just turned up with your towel and your togs and joined the group. I think we may have broken a few Guinness records for the amount of people in those cars. Kitty drove a Mini and Hilda a VW Beetle and yet, their combined 6 or so children – Susan and Nuala may not have been born at that time, – plus whatever number of neighbour’s children all travelled in layers to the beach – often only one car was taken. A veritable “Lasagna” of people.
We were taken fruit picking by Mrs. O’Donnell, to give her her full title, to a fruit farm where you picked your own. She would then spend several days making jam and marmalade. Her Kenwood Chef was her pride and joy and I later visited her when I was in my 20’s and the machine was still going strong. Mrs. Jones, further down the road taught me to make apple and rhubarb tarts which I proudly brought home. Sometimes we were sent to the Creamery for bottles/jars of cream which you filled from a tap and then paid for through a window on the side of the office building. I also recollect a man with a bike, not unlike a butcher’s bike but with a churn of milk or cream on the front and ladles in pint and half pint measures hanging from the bike, possibly called PJ – end of an era I think.
Another instalment tomorrow
<<<<<<
Just a Thought
I have been fairly busy on Radio Kerry over the holidays. Here is the link to some reflections you wont have herd before. Some of these are included in my recent book, Moments of Reflection.
I was just going through an old photo album from around 2002 and came across the photo on the left of an Edward Rex Letter Box somewhere in south-west Wexford and said I’d share this with ye.
Many of you will know this already but in case you don’t, when ‘The Free State’ was setup, the old red boxes associated with the British Empire were rebranded and painted green. To this day, you’ll spot these around the country and obviously this one in Wexford caught my eye some 22+ years ago.
The letter box on the right is from over in Buckinghamshire in England and as you can see, they are almost identical in design. I’m no expert on this but I believe these were installed/made between 1901 – 1910.
A great bit of rebranding and a sensible and practical thing to do back in the day.
<<<<<<<<<
<<<<<<<
A Fact
The first cheque written in decimal currency in the UK was for £50.30p in March 1968.
January 2025 must have seen some of the most disruptive weather for many a year. I didn’t venture out in the cold snap so most of my snow pictures are taken from my front door or from obliging others.
We’ll start with a few from the fam.
Cliona and Aoife in Kildare heading out to make Aoife’s first snowman.
Carine and Reggie in Ballincollig
Pat Breen with tractor coming to the rescue of a neighbour
<<<<<<<<
The Letters Page
Yesterday’s Sunday Independent had a very interesting letters to the editor page. The “Letter of the Week” accolade was awarded to our own Shane McAuliffe.
Shane was praising the role farmers played in helping out last week. It wasn’t just the farmers. The bad weather brought out the best in most people.
Also on the letters’ page was a missive from an old man in Wexford. He described last week’s atrocious weather as a “smattering of snow and ice”. He remembered hard times in Dublin in the 1960s when he had to have his Saxa salt shaker constantly at the ready to melt his way to work. He all but accused the media of exaggerating last week’s unprecedented hardships.
On the same page, another letter writer, co incidentally also from Wexford, told us that the Healy Rae’s in government would look out first and foremost for Kerry. Of course, that is not how every other politician in this country works.
I love the letters page but sometimes tone deaf writers make my blood boil.
<<<<<<<
A Listowel Childhood in the 1960s and 70s
When Carmel Hanrahan wrote to us with her Full and Plenty story I asked her if she would write a few reminiscences of her time growing up in Listowel. Here is part one of her reply…
Hi Mary,
Following on from our discussion and your request for some memories of growing up in Listowel which would have been in the 1960’s and 70’s – off we go…
With the possibility that I have my rose-tinted glasses on, here goes. We were a lucky group all things considered, in that, our earliest childhood was in a pre-digital age where we learned well how to entertain ourselves and to “just be”. Crossing the two eras of our early childhood and the more modern era of our 20’s which we embraced wholeheartedly has given us a unique position in time. Not that we always appreciated it, and the often-voiced lament, especially in teen age years, that “you can’t do anything or go anywhere without someone watching you” was a given. With hindsight as a parent and indeed a grandparent, I can now appreciate the value of growing up in that relatively safe environment. We wandered at will and as long as you turned up on time for dinner/tea nobody really fussed about where you were.
We lived on Church Street and then Ballygologue before the final move to Cahirdown. At the time we moved, there were houses on one side of the road only – across the road was one cottage belonging to an old woman called Madge?? (I want to say Mulvihill but I don’t know if that’s right) and her older family cottage which was empty and beginning to deteriorate. Behind our row of houses was Foley’s field. This was where cattle grazed for many years before houses were built there. Mr Foley eventually moved to a New Build house at the end of the road and lived with his daughter. His old house was lovely and I remember on a few occasions being sent to buy some apples from his orchard. Where Sexton’s house was (though it might belong to someone else now), stood a gate house at the entrance to the woods, where a man called Dan Dannagher lived. He was quite old and I remember my father inviting him to our house for Christmas Dinner.
This will be my last post of 2024. Happy Christmas to all my blogfollowers and friends. As we head into our 14th year of Listowel Connection, I appeal to you all to rummage among the old photographs or in the memory bank and share your findings with us.
A big thank you to everyone who helped me out in 2024. We had some great stories.
Stay safe over the holidays and I hope we’ll all meet here again in the New Year.
Main Street
<<<<<<
A Christmas Hunt in Ballyduff
Lovely to see country people enjoying old pastimes. They weren’t hunting anything, just enjoying the outing.
<<<<<<<<
A Christmas Long Read
David Kissane is a superb painter of pen pictures. His eagerly anticipated memoir is well overdue.
Photo shows the author all ready for the “wran” during a Christmas in the 1960s with the guitar that Ned Kennelly (pictured also) gifted…
It was the week before Christmas. Suddenly the frost had gently dropped like manna overnight and the meadow to the east of our house glistened in the morning sun. Even the haggard was radiant in its crystal grass-blades and the hill above was coated in a Christmas cloak. The furze slept their winter sleep.
I looked out our front window. The view was stunning. All of North Kerry was emblazoned in white frost. The best window in Ireland, my uncle Mike had christened it once as he gazed out with his eternally satisfied demeanour. From Mount Brandon in the south west to Sliabh Mis and Carrantuohill to the south to the Paps in the south east. They were all there in their December furs. The window itself was now adorned with holly and crepe decorations and my father’s home-made candlestick.
Although I was having an identity crisis with Santy for the first time, having reached the unfortunate use of reason, drifting out of the more predictable age of unreason, I was being infused with Christmas-ness by the frosty morning. Our PYE radio was playing “The Green Green Grass of Home” by Tom Jones (a song I always since associate with Christmas) and the seasonal motto was over our kitchen door proclaiming “God Bless This House”.
Just one thing was gnawing at my heart’s hinterland that morning. A group of us had planned to go out “in the wran” on St Stephen’s Day and I had planned to be one of the first in our area to take a guitar. The previous summer, I had planned to have a guitar by Christmas. There were always bits of electric wire lying around Mick Finucane’s ditches in his Gort below the Quarry to the west. And Mick was such a sound man, he wouldn’t miss a few bits of wire. I had heard about my cousins in Urlee who had made home-made fiddles by using vernacular items. So I brought home the lengths of wire, got bits of a butter box and crafted a home-made guitar of uncertain genetic descendency. It had three of Mick Finucane’s electric fence wires as strings and made a sound akin to a cat with serious stomach issue. It didn’t last long as the strings had a mind of their own and preferred the freedom of shrivellry. And I had worn my fingers away trying to play “Hound Dog”. It was the end of my short music career. I thought.
It need not be mentioned now that Mick Finucane’s cows were found wandering around the hill around that time. I wouldn’t know anything about that.
Now, as I looked out the window to North Kerry, I saw Ned Kennelly making his way up the crystalline path through Mickeen’s Field towards our house. His cap as always sitting at a slight nose-ward tilt on his head. His raised chin to counteract the angle of the cap. A lively gait in his nimble legs. The always-energy of his stride poured out to anyone he would meet. He exuded that bubbly pre-Christmas tingle.
Mysteriously, he was carrying a fairly large package wrapped in newspaper, as far as I could make out. I intuited that something magical was about to happen.
It was that forgotten memory that boomeranged back to me as I headed out for a post-competition walk-jog on Monday night last along the Greenway in Tralee. I had been looking up some old photos during the day in search of sports photos from the 1960s. I came across a musical photo that had been hidden for the best part of six decades. Sitting outside our front door in the 1960s, getting ready for the “wran”.
The rest of the St Brendan’s AC gang are too fast for me so they whizz off to do their 8K while I take the jarvey-journey along the magnificent greenway. They would pass me on their way back later with John Culloty way ahead, charging like a steam train. A runaway human steam train.
I settle into a nice waggly-walk but feel the reminders of the previous day’s national 10K masters championships in my back and shoulders. A glowing walking championships festival in St Anne’s Park in Raheny where masters and seniors walked together. Until the seniors sped away in their 20K and 35K voyages of wonder. I did a pb for the 10K with the help of the real walkers who sped by me at intervals in the up-and-down course.
Now as Monday night reveals a starry sky, the pains come out to share the recovery walk with me. “Your shoulder blades will ache for want of wings” the Romanian poet Nina Cassian had written some years ago. Definitely feel that way now as Sunday’s exertions take their toll. It will be more pronounced on Tuesday when the forty eight hour lactic slump will voice its existence. That poem by Cassian is called “Temptation” and the first line challenges with “Call yourself alive!”
If the body is not alive, the mind comes into play as I head west along the Greenway with the lights of Ballyroe rising up the hill to my right.
And the discovery of the old photo chases me out under the stars and so I recall Ned Kennelly coming in our front door all those years ago. No knocking on doors in those days. We lived “ar scáth a chéile” on our Lisselton hill, seven hundred feet over the valley of North Kerry. “God bless all here” he announced as he came into our kitchen.
My mother had the strong tea pouring in no time but my eyes were on the packaged object which Ned had placed beside him. He chatted away to my mother about Christmasses long ago and how the price of candles had gone up and how the Christmas boxes were getting smaller. I got the impression that he was playing the waiting game with me…whatever was in the parcel was a funny shape, wide at one end and tapering away to slender at the other end. I could read the writing on the The Kerryman that it was enclosed in. A cord was holding the wrapping in place.
I was sitting on a thistle for what was like half my life with my legs hopping on the cement floor. I noticed that Ned was roguishly absorbing the intensity of my impatience.
And then he turned to face me directly and I experienced fully how alive his eyes were. He says “I think you have music in you! You had better let it out, boy bán”! That expression was often used on our hill of people who were not good at cutting turf, digging spuds, shovelling out manure or pulling a calf from a cow.
He had me trína chéile.
He began to tear the Kerryman pages away with a ticklingly crackling sound. Like the seventh veil, the last page came way and fell on the floor and there it was in Ned’s hands! A guitar! A beautiful brown and white guitar. With real strings. Six strings. And Elvis Presley’s name on it. A world of possibilities was held in those hands.
I was struck dumb. My hands fell by my sides and I was disarmed. I was also confused as maybe Ned was showing me someone else’s guitar. He had a big family himself and he was probably going to ask us what we thought of their present…until he repeated the sweetest words: “I think you have music in you… and this is for you…”
He reached out the guitar and my arms accepted it gratefully. My mother said strongly “What do you say!” Not a question. An order.
The rest of that pre-Christmas day was a day with strings attached. It was a stringed Christmas. I am not sure what Santy brought to be perfectly honest a few days later on a frosty Christmas morning. I had an Elvis guitar and it came from my new hero, Ned Kennelly.
Later it was revealed to me that Ned had heard about me going west to Mick Finucane’s Gort in search of the golden fleece of the strings and my aborted guitar-construction. When his eldest son gave up his musical career, left his guitar at home and headed off to England, Ned had decided to gift the guitar to me on that magic week before Christmas in the swinging sixties.
After a goose dinner on Christmas Day, I borrowed a wire clothes hangers from my mother’s wardrobe. I didn’t ask permission as it’s hard to believe how scarce wire clothes hangers were in the 1960s. Anyway, I didn’t want to bother her by asking as she was busy all day with food and washing up. My father was still recovering from his busy week’s as a postman so I grabbed the clothes hangers, ran out to the shed and fashioned the wire into a mouth organ holder.
Then came St Stephen’s Day. With my two-day old guitar-friend, I headed down the hill on my monster-bike. On my head was a made-up cowboy hat that had been thrown away by my father, a bit of black polish on my face and a pair of wellingtons on my feet and a few pieces of crepe paper hanging loose. At Lyre Cross, I joined Mossy Henchy, Pat O’Connor and Tom Mulvihill. Off we went out in the “wran” as we called it.
We cycled to every house from Lyre to Lisselton Cross, through Ballydonoghue and Kilgarvan, via Tullahinell and Asdee and back through Guhard, Farnastack, up Scralm and into Larha. Coining we were! I can see the faces of the audience that awaited in each house. Delighted to be honoured by musicians fulfilling an ancient tradition, they would throw the pennies at us after a few bars of music. We were stars. We were on tour. We were making money from music and we were mesmerising the population of three parishes.
We had enough pocket money for the first weeks of the new year and the whole world was opening up ahead…
I smile now as I look up at the stars on my return jog into Tralee. There’s Venus and Mars up above me as far away as they were six decades ago. The lights of Tralee draw me towards the town as John Culloty, as expected, powers past me with a good quarter-mile to spare over Ursula Barrett, Ivan from Spain and Kenneth Leen.
I see a falling star…
Well, my musical career never happened. After years strumming my Elvis guitar, even with new strings from Fred Mann in the small square in Listowel, it was revealed to me that I didn’t have a note in my head. Or in my hands. Someone told us after the day in the wran that we were given money to stop playing! The boys with me may have some musical talent, but my well was dry.
The next Christmas, I found a drum at my bedside when I woke up on Christmas morning. I had obviously given hints to Santy that perhaps percussion rather than strings was how I could release the music in me. The drum however created logistical problems as I often got inspiration to play it late at night when my parents were trying to go to sleep. And my pet dog Spot attempted to accompany me with a terrier-wail that reached a high pitch. My father suggested strongly that if I went out the hill and played during the day, it might be a better idea.
The drum dream died too. I tried the fiddle later. It felt like a guitar that never grew up, so my fiddling doodled out. As did my dream of music.
I had to rebrand my borders and redefine my definitions. Life ensured that. As Albert Camus said “You will never live if you are constantly looking for the meaning of life.
When I think back now, Ned Kennelly’s saying that I had music in me may not have been a mistaken reading of my child-psyche. Years later I would discover that music and art have many dimensions. Humble or otherwise, there is both in all of us. Some may find the means to express them in a day or a week. Others may take years. For many, it may take half a lifetime to find the methodology of the music, and it may come out in the most amazing ways, once you meet the moments and mark the miles.
Some months after that stringed Christmas, when I watched Ned fashion the treadle for a sleán out of a piece of raw ash, I began to understand what expressing the music meant. When I saw him putting a patch on a wellington so lovingly that the wellington became a friend of his hands, I understood it more. I began to see what he meant by music. When summer beckoned all along our hill, I saw him turn the green earth of the hill field to set spuds where furze bushes had grown only a generation before. I heard his music then too. The instrument of the spade and his keen eye were composing music with the earth that April day.
As I listened to the words of Petula Clark singing “Downtown”, I hinged on the words “the music of the city”. Much later I was privileged to watch, live on stage on Broadway, “The Phantom of the Opera” with its haunting song “The Music of the Night”. Even this very Christmas Eve in Tralee parkrun (for which I was presented with a certificate for completing 100 of them), I could hear the music of the feet and hearts. Some as sweet as Sissel singing “Shenandoah” – although my own foot-music was more heavy metal than Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 9. And what comes on the radio on the way home from the parkrun this morning but Cass Elliot singing “You’ve got to make your own kind of music”! Life re-pitched in its own chaotic creativity.
The generosity and the advice to make my own kind of music outlasted all the Christmasses of my life. The potential that Santy was there in all of us every day was the lesson I learned from Ned. It would carry beyond “Twixtmas” into the years.
Ned has long since gone to his eternal reward. I chatted with his son Eamon this Christmas Eve to tell him about the gift of neighbourly love that I was given on that Christmas week long ago. The guitar has now merged with nature but the abiding legacy of its gifting marches on.
As will my memory of Ned Kennelly who taught me how to put lyrics to the melody of life on a Christmas when my shoulders wanted wings.
<<<<<<<<<
Aspects of Christmas in Listowel in 2024
In Prifma
Mermaids
Dorans’
<<<<<<<<<
Coolahan’s Santa
Picture and text by Pat Kelly on Facebook
Tomas Coolahan’s of Tarbert Grandfather Mickie Coolahan bought this unusual Santy at the Worlds Fair in 1932 in London. He was magical in that era for children as they had never seen anything like it
He stays on the Window of Mary Coolahan’s shop nodding his head, from the 8th December to midnight on Christmas Eve.and then disappears to travel the World with the Toys. He is run by clockwork. A local watchmaker, James Conway put a new spring into him probably in the 1950s. Christmas in Tarbert would not be the same without him.Well done to the Coolahan Family for the story behind him and the MEMORIES.
<<<<<<<<<
Kerry Candlelight by Bryan MacMahon
1
I am standing here in Euston, and my heart is light and gay,
For ‘tis soon I’ll see the moonlight all a-dance on Dingle Bay. So behind me, then, is London, with the magic of its night,
And before me is a window filled with Kerry Candlelight.
Chorus
‘Tis the lovely light of glory that came down from heav’n on high,
And whenever I recall it, there’s a teardrop in my eye.
By the mountainside at twilight, in a cottage gleaming white,
There my true love sits a-dreaming, in the Kerry Candlelight.
2
She’ll be waiting by the turf fire; soon our arms will be entwined,
And the loneliness of exile will be lost or cast behind,
As we hear the Christmas greetings of the neighbours in the night,
Then our hearts will beat together in the blessed Candlelight.
3
Now the train is moving westward, so God speed its racing wheels,
And God speed its whistle ringing o’er the sleeping English fields,
For I’m dreaming of an altar where, beside my Breda bright,
I will whisper vows of true love in the Kerry Candlelight.
<<<<<<<<<<
A Christmas Fact
Santa isn’t the only Christmas character – there are many more around the world! In Italy, for example, a kind witch called La Befana is said to fly around on a broomstick delivering toys to children! And in Iceland, children leave shoes under the window for 13 mischievous trolls called the Yule Lads. If the child has been good, they’ll find sweets in their shoe – but if they’ve been bad, the Yule lads will leave them a rotten potato!
Health warning to the squeamish…A turkey is harmed in this one.
Cold Turkey
Cyril Kelly remembers Christmas in his childhood home in Church Street
My mother was a milliner and her scissors chirped relentessly in the shop. Each pattern was cut to a chorus; straw crackled, silk zipped across the bias and there was a soft wheeze from fur and leather. Hats preened on chrome stems everywhere; sequined veils, beads fantails of velvet in Yule tide red. Looking down at me, those hats were like a flock of exotic birds roosting.
I was kneeling at the stool beside the old Singer sewing machine doing my lessons. My headline, Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat was wrought with an N nib. The letters trembled between the red and blue lines. My mother was at the counter, ceaselessly stitching in silence, working against the clock towards some elusive image of style and beauty. Having agreed to make a gown for Mrs. Mac, she was struggling to have it ready for the Hunt Ball on St. Stephens night. Forty button holes had to be sewn into the gown. With every stitch, she drew the needle up in a long, sighing arc while, beside me, the murmuring from the stove was like a lullaby. The place was a cocoon of warmth and the imminence of Christmas.
But from the way my mother oiled the needle, prodding it through the roots of her hair; I could see that she was agitated. If she caught you with a rap of that thimble it was worse than the wooden spoon! Out in the backyard the turkey was fasting under the solitary tea chest. I sensed that the time was nigh. She had arrived from her free range fields the week before. Even though the daylight hours were failing fast, I went out each afternoon in the December gloom to feed her as soon as I got home from school. Almost as tall as myself, she had a funny way of standing on one leg, the other one gathered up under her as if she were going to produce a fob watch at any moment from a pocket in her plumage.
Her gait was ungainly and I loved to watch the neck craning in syncopated rhythm to every step, head poised at every pause, eye alert for a sign of any smirk from me. Sometimes, the slanting, midwinter light made her feathers gleam; metallic pewters, coppers and bronze. Gazing at her, I often felt sorry for her, away from her friends, away from Clounmacon and her breezy fields of freedom. She had a lopsided look because my mother had clipped one wing so that there was no flying into Dillon’s yard next door.
But worse, far worse, was yet to come. She had to spend her last 24 hours on earth in starving solitary, crammed under a tea chest that had a nine inch block planked on top. Whenever the coast was clear, I sneaked out to press a few scrawny crusts in under the tea chest. Suddenly, exasperated with the intricacies of forty buttonholes, my mother snapped; Aw here, and in a flurry the gown was cast aside onto the sewing machine. Swerving around the corner of the counter, she shut the shop door for the night. The iron bar clunked irrevocably into the sockets on the door jamb. Trailing after her, I left the cozy warmth of the shop behind.
When I got into the kitchen, the place was cold. She was rattling through the cutlery drawer for the knife with the bleached bone handle. It had a short blade, worn to a vicious concave shape from repeated sharpening. Now it screeched mercilessly as she honed the edge to a sliver of steel. I had to pull the kitchen curtains apart to throw light on the corner of the yard. A vague illumination fell on the scene outside, the theatre of operations so to speak. I could barely distinguish the rusty tin outline of the tea chest. All thoughts of the style and warmth in the shop were banished.
In the yard, I could not stop shivering. There was a bit of a shumozle as the tea chest was upended and the turkey hauled towards the shore hole. And then it was my job to grasp one warm wing and the trussed feet. The other wing was secured between my mother’s knees. Gripping the beak with her left hand, she stretched the scrawny neck and bent low over the grating. I braced myself for that dreaded sound; the lisping hiss of two distinct incisions on the loose goose-pimpled flesh of the neck. I felt it as keenly as if I had been slit myself. Immediately there was a splattering of blood near my shoes but in those initial moments the bird remained absolutely motionless. Then, as if realizing that my mother meant business, the legs and wing convulsed. I had to hang on desperately. The frenzy seemed to last an age, tugging and dragging me all over the slippery, sloping surface. Eventually the struggle subsided and, after one final spasm, the bird went limp first, and then heavy. A faint trickling continues into the shore. Head hooded in tissue paper, the turkey was rushed inside to the kitchen; had to be plucked while the flesh was still warm. Sitting on the sugán stool, my mother draped the bird across her lap. At that stage of the procedure my job was to hold the mouth of a pillow case open for the down and feathers. With soft explosive sounds, fistfuls of plumage were ripped out, always against the grain. Sneezing frequently, my mother stuffed every fistful deep into the pillow case. Whenever the dead entrails of the bird sighed a splutter of grey green shit, I had to wipe below the Pope’s nose with a page of The Independent. For days after, the cold clammy turkey hung by the feet from a rafter in the back porch. Plucked and pale, she wore a muffler of congealed newspaper. Every time I passed, she was staring at me through a slit in her slate-blue lids.
Even by Christmas Eve when my father, a commercial traveler, returned to hear what a worthy man of the house I had been in his absence, my response to the accolade of his handshake was wan. And late that night, after I’d hung my stocking from the mantelpiece and was ready to go up the stairs, I could hardly smile when my mother paused to admire the stuffed turkey and chuckle; There’ll be many a bird at the Hunt Ball on St. Stephen’s Night who won’t have such stylish stitching decorating her craw.
<<<<<<<<
New Shop Popped Up
The people behind the delicious Brona chocolates have opened a shop at 3 William Street. As well as selling all their lovely chocolate products, they are selling hot chocolate…delicious!
<<<<<<<<
An Exiles Christmas
Martin OHara wrote in 2021…
This time last year we posted a poem called the Exiles Christmas, about an old retired Irishman, living in a small flat in London, reminiscing about his childhood days in Ireland in his youth.
I based that poem on a man called Joe I worked with in England over thirty years ago. He was from county Tipperary, and he was actually living in a one bedroom flat from the time he came to England, up until I came to know him, a period of 22 years.
He had never been back to Ireland in all that time. When the job finished, I lost contact with Joe, no mobile phones in those days. I often wondered what became of him as he had a fondness for the drink.
To make a long story short I based that poem on Joe, and as it proved so popular last year, I thought we might post it again. And Joe, if your still out there, a very Merry Christmas to you.
