Interview with a neighbour

Sorry for the light posting. I've been taking night classes in Dublin, so on school nights I've been getting up around 6 am, bicycling a few miles to the bus stop, leaving my bike in my neighbour's barn, and taking it to my day job. I work my day job, go to night classes, and ride back around 11 pm. Even on nights when I don't have classes, I've been riding home around 9 pm. It hasn't left a lot of time for writing outside of my weekly column.

I would have done this earlier in life, but was spending all my spare time with my daughter. These days, my now-teenager mainly wants to spend time with her friends. Occasionally she's willing to go to a movie or concert with me -- we went to see Charlie Chaplin's City Lights a few months ago, and is willing to see Verdi's Aida on stage with me in November -- and I'm satisfied with that. Most teenaged girls wouldn't want to go with their father to such things at all these days, so I count my blessings. Most of the time I reluctantly play the villain of her story, the Strictest Parent among all her friends.

With all this going on, it was relaxing to sleep late today, fetch some vegetables right from the garden, sautee them with blood pudding and coffee on a chilly Irish morning, and tend to the garden. Tomorrow I'll be extracting the honey from my hive for the year, which should last us through next year and make some Chrsitmas gifts for the neighbours.

Speaking of the neighbours, I've been spending almost every weekend visiting with one of my local elders, and sometimes travelling with them while they show me around. I walked with one elderly friend around the ruins of Carbury Castle last weekend, and I'll have much more to write about that. For now, here is a snippet of our interview -- I've left his name out and changed the local names for privacy.

Me: I remember when a friend of mine visited from America, and she was interested in the River Boyne knew that the head was around here. We found it on the map and looked for it on the ground, came onto the old estate there in Carbury, and met the old landowner …

Neighbour: Mr. Robison.

Me: That’s right – and he pointed out where the head of the Boyne was, and that’s where the whole river starts. I’d never seen the head of a river before – it’s just a pool. You associate the Boyne and its history with the North, but that’s where it starts. 

Neighbour: There’s also a holy well there; we hold an open-air Mass once a year, on Trinity Sunday. The family that built that estate moved out of Carbury Castle in the 1600s, the time of Cromwell, but they wanted to live where they could still see the Castle in the distance, and you can. 

The other thing I wanted to say to you is that the local burial ground is up there too, for hundreds of years but not always in the same place … When they were building the canal – according to the local history, this is what we were told -- with the route the canal was taking, there was a graveyard in the way, so they moved it all to one side. 

Me: The caskets?

Neighbour: Ah, this was a long time ago, I’d say there were only bones. I was told they moved it with horse and cart, and there were only clay and bones. When you see the local burial ground it’s much higher on one end, because a lot more bones were put there. That was the local burial ground for people of this area, their forebears going back several hundred years or more. They were the old names of this locality -- they intermarried, and it was their hands that ploughed these fields and cut this turf going back several hundred years or more.

Me: So each of the old families here owned plots of land along the canal when it was built? How big were the plots?

Neighbour: Anything between seven and ten acres.

Me: Was that enough to live on?

Neighbour: It had to be. And when the estates were broken up, they were given an additional 15 an 20 acres to go with that from the Land Commission.

Me: Because their families were always expanding?

Neighbour: Yes, and the English landlord of this area left each family seven to ten acres to live on, and in each generation some of the children just had to leave. That was supposed to feed them with the help of whatever money they made working for the landlord.

Me: But the landowners would own huge chunks of a county, wouldn’t they?

Neighbour: The local landlord here owned perhaps 20,000 acres. Often the local farmers paid rent to the landlord – that’s why there were evictions during the Famine. 

That wasn’t the case in this area – most farmers' ancestors had helped build the canal, and were rewarded with ownership of their little plots. They might have starved, but none were evicted. 

A swiftly tilting land

I take the bus to my day job in Dublin every morning, and most days that means I study, read or write articles. On the days when Liam is driving, though, I stand at the front – unlike most bus drivers, he’s chatty, and I know I can talk to him and hear everything that’s happening around the neighbourhood.

He knows that I like to interview elderly people in our area, people who grew up here in Ireland before it became modernised, and ask about the details of everyday life. I’ve told him that they represent a vast and unappreciated resource – among the last people who grew up living a low-energy life, keeping to an older set of values, and part of an organic community rather than as atomised individuals staring at screens.

That culture is disappearing quickly here in Ireland – the last few years have seen one tectonic political shift after another, mostly funded by the technology corporations that have come to dominate the economy. Pope Francis visited the island last weekend, and while he got a sizable crowd, it was much reduced from previous visits – and disproportionately elderly.

I’m seeing fewer and fewer of the old men and women who still garden their own plot, repair their own tools, bicycle to church and can join in old songs at the pub. The younger generations here, I find, have no country but social media, and their grandparents feel like aliens in their own birth-village.

“Have you talked to the local historical societies?” the bus driver asked.

I have, I said, and they have been of some help – but their interviews often asked about family genealogies or big historical events, and I’m more interested in the minutiae of life. My elderly neighbours usually insist there’s nothing interesting to say about their lives, or they try to turn the conversation to whatever was in the newspapers at the time. I’m more interested in how often they ate, what dinner was like, how they courted, what they wore to swim in the river, and how long the washing took. 

I want to hear how they kept silence as they walked past a bend in the path where a man had died a hundred years’ prior, how they and their school-mates walked across the fields in deep night to a school dance, and how they pricked their fingers and wiped their cheeks with blood to give them a flush.

 “You know who would have been great to talk to is my Auntie,” Liam said. “When she was a young Irish girl she somehow became the hand-maiden of a French duchess, and met all the nobility of Europe.”

That would be a great story, I said – but she’s gone now?

“Yes, we took care of her in her final years, and the doctors told us she was getting senile. ‘She seems to be delusional,’ the doctor said, ‘She's telling wild stories that she used to be hand-maiden to a French duchess.’”

***

If my neighbours don’t recognise their country’s culture anymore, neither do they recognise the weather. This past spring we got a metre of snow, in a country where we never get more than a light dusting of snow once a year. Thankfully our bees survived, but many other beekeepers in the area say their hives did not.

A hard winter alone doesn’t doom the crops or animals here, but then we got one of the hottest, driest summers in recent memory. The result was lovely and comfortable for me, but not great for our neighbours; the lack of rain meant far less grass for the cows to eat, and far less grain to harvest for humans. As a farmer friend of mine told me the other day, they won’t have silage for the winter either.

Here in the bog, moreover, a hot, dry summer brings dangerous fires – not of trees or other above-ground vegetation, but of the ground itself. The very land below our feet is made of peat, which we and other Irish use for fuel, and which burns slow and hot like coal. I was talking with one of my neighbours about local history when our neighbour Jack drove by on his tractor, shouting, “The bog’s on fire again!” and sure enough, we saw the column of smoke in the distance. Thankfully, the bog was still damp enough that no fire spread very much, but any drier summers ahead could bring genuine catastrophe.  

Even now, in September, we have felt an unseasonal warmth, and everything is delayed. Butterflies cover our mint plants, and my bees are as busy as they were in May. I haven’t harvested any honey from them yet, instead letting them have their fill while they can.

The swallows have still not left the rich feeding grounds for their usual winter holidays in Africa. On the other hand, I am seeing more of the predatory birds that almost disappeared from Ireland, which I take as a good sign for the local ecology. The other day I was walking to the woodland when an explosion of small birds burst out of the trees, followed by a goshawk, expertly weaving through trees in pursuit.