My Life

Mary Teresa, Peggy, John, Laurie, Bernadette, Clare, Victor, Gabrielle, Colette, Gerard, Ethna and Antoinette. Anthony was still born in after Colette and that was it, the bakers dozen. Poor mum and Dad spent the best years of their lives having us and feeding and washing us and worked hard and long days with little time for themselves. There was a French theme running through the names, I never asked why, we were mostly named after saints and holy people.

Life was good for us. In the summer we chased over hills and ditches, had fairy forts and fairy woods to play in. We had each other, sometimes there were Perry’s and O’Connors and others but mostly ourselves. We left the house after breakfast and returned for lunch, after lunch, which was dinner in those days, we were off again until tea or darkness whichever came first. Our Guardian angels must surely have been watching over us because we got into all sorts of scraps, me more than others I would guess . I was game for anything and could never see the danger in a situation. I fell into a flood one time, into a boghole another and would have been gone had Sean Tighe not pulled me out by the back of my neck. Another time I tried to hang myself off the swing, don’t ask I really don’t know what I was doing. It wasn't that I had a death wish, I was just pure careless and awkward. To my mother’s despair I was a tomboy, I was not into girls stuff, I preferred to be off climbing trees with the lads doing boy stuff, I was strong and tough and probably more suited to it than most.

I spent a lot of time in Sharkeys with Francie. He was kind and always full of fun and jokes though his life was probably not that good to him. He kept pigs in the little piggery with the low wall around the pig run. He calved and milked a few cows, by hand, and saved hay and turf. The days on the bog and hay were great fun for us. I am not sure if we were much help to him but we loved being there and when Mary Frances came with the soda bread and jam and bottles of sweet tea, we were in heaven. Sometimes there was sweet bread with currants in it as well. We chased frogs through the grass stubble, twisted hay ropes with Francie and always went home tired and exhausted and pleading to be let come back again.

Mornings in summer we would get up early, when the dew was still on the ground, and go looking for mushrooms. Sometimes there would still be a mist lying on the low ground and there was something clean and good about the early morning. We picked a grass seed stem and tied a knot in the top and we would string the mushrooms we found onto the other end, we would race from one clump of mushrooms to another and in time we knew exactly where we would find them. We had our route, the hilly fields near Sharkeys first, then up to the high flat ones and on across Perry’s lane to Jack Perry’s two near the house. It was good being out in the open early in the day and wild horses would not have stopped us going.

When the mushrooms were all collected and the grass stalks were full we headed home. Sometimes the mushrooms might get lost on the way if a knot unravelled or the stem broke. When we got in we lay the mushrooms out on the range white side down, sprinkled some salt onto the top of them and waited patiently for them to cook. Some did not like the mushrooms cooked like this, I did and probably got more than my fair share of them. Our friend Fr Sean made mushroom ketchup with them once and we had bottles of that in the press for ages.

Fr. Sean called often to our house. He was the local curate and I think in ways we felt he was one of us. He enjoyed my mothers cooking and often went home with a cake of bread or an apple tart. He was very musical and there was always singing and music about him. That was just up our alley because there was nothing better we liked than to sing. Laurie sang Two Little Boys and Fr Sean recorded it and we laughed because Laurie used to do something funny with his breath. I think Fr Sean liked him best all though he made a fuss of us all really. We never knew he was sick, he would go away from time to time and be gone for a few weeks, but we never knew what that was about. He said the nearest thing to heaven on earth for him was Mary Martin’s kitchen. We delivered envelopes for the Church collections with him, he identified the TCP tree, (Tom Cats Pee) drove us around, came to the sea with us, took us swimming in the bog lake and just had fun with him. I think there was some rumblings at one time that he was inappropriate with us but that was just some people in town being nasty. He never laid a hand on any one of us, we had fun with him and he was in the middle of every devilment we were up to. We sang when he said mass and locked the church up with him after an evening service or choir practice. Once we asked him what he would do in the dark church if Our Lady appeared to him, we thought he would say, he might fall to his knees and pray, not at all, he said he would leg it fast as he could out of the place.