Patty's memories, part 2

Things were very scarce, and money tight. When I was older I met this boy in Sallins, and he used to play in a band, and I often used to go with him, and eventually we were married.

I remember as a young mother of two in ’47, it was a terrible winter. 1933 had been a terrible winter and the snow never melted, and no one talks about that, but 1947 was the worst. The roads were very bad – first it snowed, and then after a while the snow melted and it froze, and it was after the war so there was no coal, and the turf men couldn’t get through with the carts. We used to have rows upon rows of pony carts full of turf, but this time the ponies weren’t able to walk on the ice. I remember putting the kids to bed so they would stay warm. There was no central heating then.

When the turf men did get to Sallins, they charged a penny a sod. The reason they did that is that they had to go slowly – they had to stop and put a bit of hay on the ground in front of the horse, or the horse would be slipping and sliding. It was desperate mean, we thought, but there was a reason for it.

When the coal did open up again, one of our neighbours in Sallins said to the turf men got a letter from “I’m five-and-a-half years waiting to tell you that I don’t want any more turf -- you can stick it where the sun don’t shine. You’ll have your sons at Clongowes on our misery with all the money we’ve paid you.” And to think about it, he really was wrong, for those men had terrible work – they had to cut it, and foot it, and dry it, and drag it home, and then drag it to us. So I was sorry for the men.

Me: Did anyone cut their own turf?

Patty: Not around my place, but around the bog some people did have what’s called a turf bag. My husband’s sister married a man called Holt, and he used to cut his own turf. And sometimes you’d get this lovely black turf in wartime, cut with a wing-slane. The breast-slane cut the top of the bog, the soft, spongy stuff, which wasn’t as good.

The day the coal came back, somebody was in Naas and got a package with the coal, and a woman opened the package and held up oranges in her hand, saying “The oranges are back!” and a there was a young lad who came in to us, he grabbed it, and she said “Let me peel it for you,” and he shouted “No, I want to play with it!” He had never seen an orange, and thought it was a coloured ball.

When I got married during the war we were all given a half ounce of tea each, 12 ounces of butter and three-quarters of a pound of sugar. Everything was very hard to get. So they made up this rhyme,

“God bless De Valera and Sean McAtee,
They gave us brown bread and a half ounce of tea.
Bless them all! Bless them all!
So we’re waving good-bye to them all!
When Hitler comes over
He’ll give them turn over
So cheer up he has blessed them all!”

I can remember people singing that.

Me: Was it serious or sarcastic?  

Patty: Well, kind of sarcastic.

Patty: It was a parody of “The Sergeant-Major’s Sores,” a war song sung to the same tune.

Me: So did you have books in the house?

Patty: Oh yes, I was a bookworm, fond of reading. I married quite early, and in three or four months became pregnant, and I was at home by myself – my husband was away often with the band, and there wasn’t much company around. So I read, read, read all the time. I was sorry later that I didn’t take my leaving cert. I would have liked to work in a shop, but you had to pay a big fee.

A factory started in Celbridge in the Old Mill, called Irish Gowns, paying ten shillings a week -- and everybody thought that was grand, and I told them don’t do it, as it wouldn’t keep tires on your bike. My grandmother was all her life a big believer in the aristocracy, in working for the proper people, and not in being a barmaid or working for someone who wasn’t as good as yourself, or going out to a farm and being a drudge.

So she got me trained to be a silver service para-maid with Miss Fowler, and they had swanky friends who worked at Howth Castle, and they got me a job working there, and they made a person out of me. When I was working at Howth Castle, I trained under an English butler and an Indian valet – very strict. That experience stayed with me, and I still demand attention to detail – the people say “Oh, she’s particular.”

I’m 95 now, and if I don’t look it I feel it – and my hearing’s not great, but I still have my brain.

Photo: My neighbour riding her bicycle home from Mass.

Simple years ago

This is part of my recent interview with the wonderful Patty Trabears, who lives in a nursing home near us -- she's 96 years old and sharp as a tack.

***

Patty: Sometimes when you are asked a question, it puts your mind back to something you had forgotten about for years. For example, when you asked that I remembered when we used to say the rosary at night.

There was eight of us, and we’d all say the rosary. And when we were done Daddy would say to us, “that’s the end of that now –say your own little prayers, like good children.” Well all you’d hear was the tick of the clock, the all-weather clock on the wall. And that was all you’d hear was the quiet, but these days everything is buzz, buzz – noise everywhere, and people in a hurry all the time.

I remember well my young days, particularly Black ’47. I’m a child of the state, for I was born on Christmas Day 1921, and the treaty had been signed but not ratified. I made my First Communion on Trinity Sunday 1928. There’s a lady here who was born in ’28, and I think I’m doing better than she is.

Me: So you’re older than the state.

Patty: Well I would say so – you mean from the time the treaty was ratified?

Me: | suppose so.

Patty: Oh, no I’m not then – the treaty was signed on December 6, but it was ratified until sometime in January. It was because of Dev and Michael Collins and all the rest.

Me: You grew up in Sallins?

Patty: Well, I come from farmers from Rathcoffey -- we are an old, old family, and go back there a long, long time. My father had a couple of brothers and no sisters, and he was an eldest son, and left a heap of his own. He married his first wife and was widowed in three years, with two children, one six months old, one two or three. That would be in the early 1900s. He always knew my mother, as they both went to Ladychapel Mass in the one parish Maynooth.

Then the First World War started, and he went over to take part in it -- you had to do three years. I don’t remember, but my father told me he was a tilly steward for a Mr. Ganaher (sp?) on a big estate. My mother was there as well, in one of the child’s houses, the daughter.

He married my mother on the 10^th of June 1918. At their wedding she said, “Look at all the flags going – the war must be over,” and he said, “I don’t think so,” and sure enough it wasn’t until that November.

I wasn’t the first baby – the first baby was born dead, and there was one or two misses, and then I was born Christmas Day 1921. Ever since 1921 I’ve tried to live my life; I married quite young, and worked in Howth Castle in Dublin.

Years ago if you worked in a shop then you had to pay a fee. Well there was eight of us – two boys, six girls – and we didn’t have a lot of money then; my father was trying to screw a living from the land. That was before the Land Commission, which brought up those people from Kerry and Mayo and such places. Some people got land and two or three houses and mowing machines and such – and my father did get a divide of land but he only got land. He had to supply everything else himself. 

There was only one big farm and eight children. But he built our house in Straffan on a loan and a grant – he applied for a loan from the Free State government – and that’s where I was brought up – Barberstown, Straffan.

I was brought up in Straffan – but all my family and heritage were from Rathcoffey -- Johninstown, Straffan, they call it.

Me: So you had lots of cousins in the area?

Patty: I had family, but there are also lots of Trabears in the area that aren’t related to us. One of my nieces found that we were actually French Hugenots, and there’s a graveyard near Stephen’s Green that’s a Hugenot graveyard, with quite a few Trabears in it.

Money was very tight now, and you’d be great if you got a penny off somebody. I think I made my Communion around the time Kevin O’Higgins was shot – everyone in school was excited about getting money for their First Communion, but when the time came Kevin O’Higgins had been shot and people could talk of nothing else, and I didn’t get that much money, just a few half-crowns.

When we’d go to school you’d slide a lot -- the winters were harder then, and you’d be breaking the ice on the lochs of water. You could buy oil coming in for the winter, for the lamps, but if you didn’t get there by a certain time by daylight, you wouldn’t get it, for they wouldn’t go to the oil burner at night. It was peculiar.

Things were so simple years ago. Once in a while you’d get a pot of jam and a packet of biscuits, and bread was four loaves was a shilling.

They’d lots of things people used to do. My father had only a small plot of land, and it wouldn’t keep you in it, and he was just one man. So like many, he got paid to be in charge of a stretch of by-road by contract and to patch up all the holes on it, putting gravel in. And he’d have to go to a local pit with his horse and cart, and fill it up with gravel – sometimes the men who worked the pit would just give it to him – and use that to fill all the potholes on the road. If he didn’t, he would get a letter from the County Surveyor saying, “Trabears, such and such a road was very bad – I noticed you haven’t patched it lately,” down by Round Tower or Trabagore, and then my father would have to go and do it. 

My father also did his own bit of farming on 27 acres, four fields, which went down Barberstown road and stretched around the back road behind Straffan toward Celbridge. You’d go around the back of my father’s farm and across a by-road and would be right at the Liffey. There was always a man in the summer time and go swimming – we called it swimming, but it was really just paddling around – and there used to always be a man in the summer time with a scythe, cutting grass.

I remember one day he was making a lot of noise, and my sister Eileen said “That man is trying to talk to you,” and I stood and said, “Yessir?” he said, “Young Trabears, will you get those children out of there – the flood’s coming down from Ballymore, and the Liffey will be rising and you’ll be drowned in the current.” I was the biggest one, so I brought them all home.

 

Happy Celtic New Year

The Irish celebrate Halloween with fireworks, as Americans would Independence Day -- as I found out when I first moved here a few days before Halloween with a new baby. And on distant country hilltops and outside Dublin tenements, people build giant bonfires.  

Originally it was the day when the veil between this world and the next grew ragged, and things could pass through. It’s the midpoint between the equinox and the winter solstice, or Christmas; it marked New Year's Eve in traditional Ireland, when the nights grow truly long and dark, when the skies grow dim, and when we first feel the bite of winter. It is the day when it seems most appropriate to remember loved ones that have died, as we do in our house, a bit of gravitas to go with the trick-or-treating of children and the heedless bloodletting on the television.

The more we learn to live with the seasons, the more I see the logical pattern of old holidays. Six weeks after Christmas, the midpoint between the Christmas and the spring equinox, is Bridget’s Day here, Groundhog Day or Candlemas elsewhere. Six weeks later is the equinox, and the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox is Easter. Six weeks after the equinox, halfway to the summer solstice, comes May Day, once widely celebrated in the USA and now not even a memory.

My more devout friends back in the USA resent hearing the astronomy behind, say, Christmas or Easter, believing it distracts us from “the reason for the season.” I understand – they are flooded by a culture that exploits holy days to sell people more things they don’t need, and they want to protect their children’s innocence and preserve the day's meaning. I get it.

In purging their lives of the shopping-mall culture, though, they inadvertently throw out some of their oldest traditions. The holidays celebrate the cycle of creation, and the religious commemorations were placed there because of the season, not the other way around – the birth at the turn of the year, the Resurrection at the season of new life. The pagan seasonal markers do not supersede the holy days, but ante-cede them, marking another turn on our journey from this world to the next.

In the same way, I know many sects who worship in bare rooms and plain churches, and I’m glad it works for them. My second-favourite churches have the rich colours and flamboyant architecture of Catholic churches, an explosion of praise frozen in stone. But the best religious service I have ever attended took place in an old forest near us, by candlelight. There, a crowd gathered around the priest under a green canopy, amid living pillars whose lives stretch so far beyond our own, in a tiny remnant of what was once the first and greatest of cathedrals.

I used to walk through those woods every week with my daughter, and now that she is a teenager I walk alone. I hope I can walk through them with her again soon, for while I don’t always go on a Sunday, every visit feels like a Sabbath.

Cleaning up after storms

As usual on a Sunday, I came back from Mass and dropped The Girl off at her weekly medieval camp training. A few years ago I found a local expert in medieval martial arts -- an occasional advisor and extra for shows like Vikings and Game of Thrones, both of which are filmed here in Ireland -- and he trains kids and adults to become expert sword-fighters, archers and riders. It’s become The Girl’s big passion, and she now goes to historical shows and medieval fairs across Ireland displaying what she can do.

I’m pleased to see my teenager spend her spare time working hard at developing skills, especially ones that, in her words, make her really prepared for a Zombie Apocalypse situation. Lord knows enough of her peers are involved in far more destructive activities.

Occasionally, though, we still share a movie together. Last Friday night it was Strangers on a Train, and we were reminded of all the deliciously creepy scenes -- of Robert Walker staring malevolently forward at a tennis match, when all the people around him were turning back and forth; of watching a murder reflected in a fallen pair of glasses; and of Farley Granger’s hero and Robert Walker’s villain locked in a final battle on an out-of-control merry-go-round, as children laugh and scream around them.

“Hitchcock is so dark,” she said in awe. “I love him.”

***

On the way back from dropping The Girl off, I saw my neighbour Seamus, who has lived along the canal for 86 years and knows every tree and bush of this part of the bog.

“How is your land after Ophelia?” he asked, as we hadn’t talked in the fortnight since the hurricane.

Not bad, I said -- a few willows down, but they’ll come back quickly.

“I lost one of my great apples,” he said sadly. “I planted it 37 years ago, and it had grown giant and was laden with cookers.”

Sorry to hear it, I said -- the entire tree, and not nothing salvageable?

“Uprooted,” he said. “It was one of three, but the other two survived, thank the Lord. I’ve been cleaning up the apples all over the property before they go bad.”

Our trees survived, but they were also quite small and sheltered, I said -- I’ve been gathering our apples as well. What do you do with yours?

“I always keep them in a steel barrow in the shed,” he said, “and then put hay above and below. The steel keeps it cool, and the hay makes the apples sweeter.”

It took a beat for me to follow. The hay makes the apples sweeter? I asked. Why?

“Because hay is sweet,” he said with a puzzled smile, like this were obvious “That’s why cows love it.”

He tells me things like this every time -- what plants to plant together, what to keep away from each other, and how to keep food from spoiling. He could be pulling my leg for all I know, but sometimes I'm able to test his folk wisdom, and darned if he isn't right.

***

We finally got our chainsaw fixed, so The Girl and I spent the afternoon trimming the trees that broken or strained by the hurricane. A fallen tree anywhere else on our land is no big problem, but along the front of our property any downed tree a.) blocks the only, single-lane road, b.) falls the other way and destroys our greenhouse, and c.) takes down the phone lines in which they are all tangled.

Because of the overhead lines, I can’t cut some of the trees myself, so I’ve been fighting the county for months to trim the trees, and they said they would months ago. They still haven’t done, though, and I expect more will be brought down by the winter winds.

Thus, we set off to judiciously cut what we could, with me cutting the trees one by one and The Girl pulling on them with a rope and watching for cars. One by one we took down four willows and a dead elder, and when they crashed down into the road we set upon them with the chainsaw, axes and secateurs like lions on a gazelle before any cars came along.

On the fifth tree the chainsaw broke again, but by then we had cleared the worst of it. I’m never pleased to take down a tree, nor am I happy with the gap in the hedge, but none of these trees had been around very long, nor did their irregular plantings make a proper hedge. Rather, they were all about 20 years old and still healthy, and they will send up shoots next year, and we will bend them down and weave them into a proper, near-solid hedgerow that should provide shelter and privacy.

***

I gathered the last of the apples from our trees, along with rose hips from our hedgerows, and I decided I would pickle apples again and use the peelings and hips to make compost jelly -- jelly from whatever you have.

For the pickling, I mixed about 500 ml of cider vinegar with 200 ml of water, mixed in 100 ml of sugar and added five cardamom pods, one clove, six peppercorns, about 5 ml of cinnamon and 10 ml of chili flakes. I diced the white interiors of six apples and stuffed them into a Kilner jar, with peeled and shaved ginger mixed in, and packed them as tightly as I could.

Once the liquid had boiled I simply poured it over the apples and ginger until the jar was full to the rim. I then tapped it gently to release some of the bubbles, and as it cooled the vacuum lid sealed shut, so no hot-water bath was needed.

I took the peelings and apple cores -- 766 grams of them -- and mixed them with 100 grams of rose hips from our hedgerows and a chopped-up lemon. I put them in a pot with 1.5 litres of water, and boiled them for an hour while we played Civilisation. After an hour I strained the remaining liquid -- 600 millilitres -- mixed it with 450g of sugar, and boiled it on high heat for about 15 minutes until it set as jelly.

I had tried this a few days ago, but the jelly never set properly, only gradually going from liquid syrup to soft candy without ever reaching the magic stage in-between. I realised I needed a higher heat than most recipes recommend -- perhaps because Ireland is so damp and humid, or perhaps our stove is just slightly off. The second time was the charm.

As a result, apples that would have gone to waste were preserved for the winter, and should remain good for at least a year.

Top photo: Rainbow over Dublin. Middle photo: Fallen tree. Bottom photo: Salvaged orange peels with various hedgerow fruits -- going clockwise, crabapples, elderberries, blackberries, sloe and rose hips.