McCormack's

When Uncle Rody got married (I think 1946), it would no longer be suitable for the Dublin Killeens to stay in Rody's little cottage at Corclogh/ Gortacallow when holidaying in Lusmagh. Daddy, therefore, arranged to take possession of another cottage, McCormack's, in nearby Bally-Mac-Coolaghan.

Old James McCormack had been living independently in his cottage up to this time, but now had moved to live with his married daughter, and the cottage became vacant.

My father arranged, with his brother, Packie, to take over the cottage, and that was our destination when Summer came round again. I suppose father bought the cottage for Packie, but I don't know for sure.

Up in Dublin, we all piled into Taxi Madden's station wagon, fully laden now with bodies and bags, and headed for Ballymacoolaghan. At that time, of 69 houses on Norfolk Road where we lived, there was only one car, Taxi Madden's. Likewise, where we were headed, in the parish of Lusmagh, there was only one car, that of the taxi-man, Francis Keary.

When we arrived in Ballymacoolaghan, Packie was there waiting for us, but he would not let us into the house. The floor was not yet fully set, he said. We had to empty out of the wagon and let the driver go, stacking our bags in front of the house.

I noticed that my father was a  bit cross and bit his lip. It was apparent that he had sent the money and given instruction for a cement floor to be laid in plenty of time for our visit. However, Packie had left it to the last minute, and only this morning had laid the floors with quick-set cement.

The cement was laid over the flagged floor previously used, i.e., a floor made of large flat flag-stones laid on the ground.

Father was fastidious, but Packie was laid back.

Well, the floor dried in good time, the furniture was restored to its position, and we all entered. 

There were three windows and a door in the front of the house, but no windows at the side or back. As was normal with rural cabins of the time, there was a door, also, in the back wall, directly opposite the front door. That back door I never saw open. The front door had both a full sized door and a half door. It was normal, in day-time, for the full door to be kept wide open and folded back to the wall, and the half door to be flipped open whenever you went in or out. At night, of course, the full door was closed, and, also, I suppose, when the weather was bad.

We didn't have hens or farm animals, so there was no real need for the half door, but it was normal for houses of that time and place.

There were three rooms in the house, each with a window in the front wall. When you went in the front door, you were immediately in the kitchen, or living room,  a particularly large room. At the kitchen wall, to your right as you entered, stood the dresser, where the crockery and kitchen stock was stored, as well as any other bits and pieces needed for daily life, and a few ornaments.

Before you reached the dresser was the door to the "bottom" room. This was a large bed-room which contained two double beds and still plenty of floor space. The three boys would sleep in one of these beds and the girls eventually in the other, although, this first year, Mary, the baby, slept in the parents' room, so the boys had the back room all to themselves.

Turn left from the front door and you came across the dining table, rectangular in shape, in front of the kitchen window, and across the kitchen floor from that was a utility table, which held a basin for the washing up and a bucket of drinking water and other utensils. Here, food was prepared, hands and faces were wiped, and other chores performed. Butter was usually wrapped in oil cloth and stored in a bucket of water, for there was no fridge in those days.

Between the dining table and the front wall was a long wooden stool, called a form, (pronounced "furrum"). The table was usually pushed in against the wall, over the form, but pulled out for meals. The boys sat on the form, with their backs to the wall/ window, and the parents sat on bentwood chairs pulled in to the other side of the table.

Then, at the far wall was, on the left, the door to the top room, or main bedroom, and to the right of that the large open fireplace, with two timber seats built into the corners of the chimney. Each of these seats could be lifted, disclosing a built-in storage space for fire-related utensils. You could stand under the chimney and look up to the sky.

A crane folded over the open fire-place, and on this hung hooks for holding pots and kettles. The kettle, black as soot, and the cooking pots, similarly black, were placed on the ground near the fire.

There was no running water or electricity, but the kitchen was lighted, in the evening, by a paraffin lamp. Candles were used at bed-time when progressing to the bedrooms, if it was dark enough.

To the right of the fireplace, sods of turf (peat) were stacked against the wall and, after that, there was an old chest, no longer used for oatmeal or flour, but now holding bits and pieces. Not so long ago, a small farmer would take his oats and wheat to the mill to be ground, one bag at a time, and the bag of oat-meal or flour would be stored in such a chest. 

Now, approaching the 1950s, farmers no longer had their own grain ground, but bought flour and flake meal in the shop. This led my mother to  observe that, when she was young, the flour ground at the mill had to be used within a fortnight, or it would go sour, but shop flour would last for months or years. 

"I wonder what the commercial mills do to the flour to make it long-lasting," she would say.

Well, now I can tell you. Whole corn seeds, if kept intact and stored in a cool, dry place, will last forever. They have found grains of wheat in the pyramids, still intact after thousands of years, and scientists have been able to re-cultivate the wheat varieties of those ancient times from those grains. But when a grain of corn is crushed, it starts to decay. The modern mill, however, abstracts the wheat germ as part of the milling process. The germ is the sprouting section and it is this part that causes the flour to sprout and decay. Of course, it is also the part that contains most of the vitamins.

In the far corner, past the oatmeal chest, was a somewhat cluttered corner, whose contents are unclear to my (no doubt unreliable) memory. Perhaps there was another little table there with contents over and under. Perhaps there were hooks high up on the wall from which raincoats, or such, were hung. Perhaps spare cooking utensils and things like wellington boots were found there.

At adult shoulder-height over the fireplace a large timber beam set into the wall served as a mantel piece.

Was there any other storage space? O, yes, there was. The cottage had a thatched roof. The thatch, resting on timber beams, lay over the edge of the top of the cottage walls, so there was a place, along the top of the wall, under the thatch, for random objects, such as Old Moore's Almanac, or whatever.

The walls were about two foot thick. They were built from rubble and plastered over with blue clay, a kind of potters' clay harvested from the drains in the callows. The clay hardened over the rubble wall and was then white-washed, inside and out. This was, indeed, genuine white wash, made from slaked lime dissolved or suspended in water, rather than shop-bought white paint. They often added some blue stone to give the coating a whiter than white look.

A visitor from England, skilled in pottery, noticed the blue clay and set up a pottery in Banagher. However, while the blue clay was suitable for plastering cottage walls, it proved to be unsuitable for pottery, and the potting clay had to be imported.

The experience of living in our country residence was a delight, from the necessity to bring water from the well, cooking on the open fire, lighting the oil lamp, the half door, but mainly the fact that once you went out the door you were in the wide open countryside, and, of course, there you found Jack Searson, who lived in the next house up from McCormack's, actually formerly a schoolhouse, and still known as the Schoolhouse. Jack, by being the fourth member of the Killeen gang, perfected this childhood society and made me feel an  equal member rather than the insignificant junior.

Idyllic for us kids, we never thought of the nuisance it was for our mother to have to bake the bread every day and wash and cook without any modern conveniences.

We were near the Shannon. Fishing and hunting were popular pastimes of the local adults. Quite often men would drop in to present us with the catch of the day: always a bunch of little perch, which we wholeheartedly enjoyed. However, for mother this was a nuisance, for these fish had to have all their scales scraped off before cooking. (I often wondered why they could not be cooked first and then the skin, with scales, simply removed before eating, but that was not the way it was done).

One day, we went to visit James McCormack, the former owner. His new home was within the walking range of the Killeen boys, but Rody's horse and cart were borrowed for this excursion, presumably because walking that distance would be too taxing for a mother with baby in a pushchair.

When the horse and cart and its passengers burst in through the open gate at McCormack's new residence, the hens scarpered across the farmyard in fright. James McCormack, who seemed to me like a man in his nineties, with matchstick legs that barely held him up, was there outside his daughter's cottage. He watched the hens scarpering and said, 

"The black one won."

I didn't know what he said. I said, "What did he say? What did he say?"

Roger answered: "He said, 'The black one won.'"

"What? What?" I said, for I didn't follow.

Roger answered: "He was talking about the hens. He thought they were having a race, and he said that the black one won."

"Oh, I see."

James McCormack's daughter came out of the house, touched James'  elbow and said,

"Come in out of the air," and James was escorted back into the house, where he was put sitting by the fire and minded. Our parents and baby went into the house, while the boys amused themselves with the hens and other farmyard attractions.

Another place we went by horse and cart was to visit the Birmingham's, (perhaps not this first year, but a year or two later: my mind's calendar is not well organised). Packie Bermingham, the father of this clan, was my father's first cousin, but somewhat older than dad. There were about eight children in the family, all jolly and outgoing, older than us, and a delight to visit. Jimmy Bermingham had already settled in Dublin, where he had a pub, but there were plenty of Berminghams left to keep us amused. Jimmy was a great hurler and played for the county team, until his attention to his business caused him to neglect his hurling training. Apparently, Jimmy and his brothers had, in their youth, been inspired by my dad's hurling feats for his parish, Lusmagh.

Bermingham's was right beside Boora Bog, so this family were deeply into shooting game on the bog. They had two or three large, fierce, hunting dogs, but these were locked up during our visit.

Before coming home from Bermingham's, we also visited another family of cousins, slightly more remotely related, called Kelly's.

While Rody's, McCormack's and Bermingham's were all beside a public road, there was a long avenue, a private road, up to Kelly's. There were gates on this road, and someone had to get down off the cart at each gate to open it and then close it again after we went through. Now, the land traversed by this avenue was owned by the McNeill's, a relation of ours on the distaff side.

A row had broken out between the McNeill's and the Kelly's. Kelly's claimed a right of way over this avenue, but McNeill's said Kelly's required their permission to use it. On St Stephen's Day, McNeill's had put a lock on one of the gates and stopped Kelly's using the avenue for that day. This was to make it clear that the use of the avenue was "by permission" and not "by right."

You might say, "What difference does it make whether it is by permission or by right?" But it makes a big difference. There was no other convenient way from Kelly's farm to the public road except by this avenue. If they did not have the right, then their land was of no value.

Another problem was the maintenance of the avenue. It had to be periodically repaired to keep it in good order. Whose responsibility was its maintenance? Could the Kelly's put new metal (sand and gravel) on the road, or did they need the McNeill's consent?  Who should bear the cost of this maintenance? In recent years, Kelly's had brought a tractor on the avenue, which was more damaging than horse-drawn vehicles, and was this permitted, and who should pay for or repair the damage? Had the McNeill's a responsibility to keep the avenue up to the standard of maintenance that previous generations of Kelly's had enjoyed, and had they the responsibility to bring it up to the standard required to support modern machinery?

The gates were closed, but not locked, the day we visited Kelly's and there was no mention of the problem when we were there. However, the row was becoming very serious and there was a danger that one or both parties would take out their shotguns to sort the matter out. The neighbours and relations of both sides were concerned, and somebody arranged that the matter would be arbitrated by my father.

A day was appointed for both sides to meet at our house, McCormack's, in Ballymacoolaghan. All four children were put out of the house and told to stay out all day long. I think the shed across the yard from the house was opened, for once, in case we needed shelter, though I spent most of the time up in the tree. Kelly's young daughter, Denise, arrived with them, and she was consigned to stay outside with the Killeen children.

The house was re-arranged. Each bedroom was allocated to be a station where one of the parties to the dispute, with their advisers, would be stationed, and the kitchen was to be the arbitration room, where father sat with his assistants.

Several cars arrived, and there was plenty of space for them in our farmyard. (The fact that there were, in fact, cars, indicates to me that this was not during our first year in  McCormack's, but two or three years later). The McNeill's and their cohorts were stationed in the top room and the Kelly's in the bottom room. 

My father took up position in the kitchen, with his acolytes. Mother and the ladies had plenty of sandwiches prepared for the day and continuously made pots of tea.

My father and his assistants prepared questions and propositions to be put to both parties. Each party would respond by sending a messenger to the kitchen with their reply. The replies were transmitted to the other party, and, so, the messages went back and forth, until, eventually, compromise was reached on all matters and the parties finally met and shook hands and headed home.

We said goodbye to charming Denise and resumed residence.

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