Sowing the fields

The farm year began as the crisp winter days began to grow and warm, when Mark McGaugh remembered taking the horses from the stables to the local blacksmith – whose father and grandfather were the village smiths before him – to shoe the horses before putting them in front of the plough. “The aroma still lingers of the moment when the smithy first tested the red-hot steel to the horses’ hooves to ascertain if it was a correct fitting,” he said. “Those steel shoes were essential for the animals to get a grip in the earth as they trudged along turning the deep heavy soil onto its side.”

The plough needed to be painted, sharpened and oiled, and set at the right depth for the crop. “To the amateur onlooker the process of ploughing appeared to be simple, but there had to be some technical preparation beforehand, as the headland area needed to be measured out in order to give the turning space to the horses at the end of each furrow,” McGaugh said. “The positioning of the two wheels of the plough determined the depth of the furrrow, and the depth was influenced by the crops; sugar beet or potatoes both required deeper soil, while turnips could thrive on a comparatively shallow drill.” (Around the Farm Gate, 97)

When the plough and horse were ready and relatives had come by to help, he said, “the pristine lea field would be scored with the precision of a surgical knife. As the curlews [birds] soared in ever increasing numbers on the exposed subsoil, the very heavens seemed to cry and lament. The solitary figure of the farmer against the enormity of the cumulus sky presented an awesome spectacle. Presently the unspoiled green field would be transformed into a canvas of burnt umber.” (Around the Farm Gate, 135)

When Marrie Walsh’s family readied to sow their wheat and barley, her job as a child was to fill the bags her family would wear around their waist, reaching in and flinging seeds all around them to “where the fresh soil was waiting to receive and nurture it,” she said. Such actions were once so familiar that when new technology appeared, people explained them with farming metaphors. When radio was invented, the signals spread in all directions from a tower like seeds scattered by Walsh’s father, so people described it using the same word; they were “broadcast.”

“It was a joyful sight; a biblical scene,” she said.“Man sowing the seed, throwing hope into the air, hopiing that when it fell that the God-given Earth and combination of the elements would yield a good harvest in due course.” (Irish Country Childhood, 122)

 

In stillness and storm

 A childhood running barefoot through fields and climbing trees meant that my elderly neighbours had a respect for the natural world, rather than seeing it as something to be stripped bare for money, or as the Edenic exhibit of so many environmentalists. “Growing up surrounded by trees coloured our lives,” she said. “My father was a planter of trees and gave nature free rein ... [he] instilled a deep respect for trees in us, telling us that it takes a tree many, many years to grow, but a fool can cut it down in five minutes. He also believed that a person who planted a tree was far less likely to chop one down.”

When a tree needed to be cut, Marrie Walsh remembered, “we would tell the tree the reason for cutting it down. Then we would run around to the other trees and tell them not to cry. My father and brothers would
mark the first cut with the hatchet, then rub soap on the cross-cut blade and start sawing. We would watch from a distance to see which way the tree would fall.” When her father  fastened the horse to the tree and set off dragging it home for wood, she said, “some of us perched in the branches, swaying hither and thither as we tried to balance ... by this time we would have collected several children from houses along the way, all wanting a ride on our tree.”

Like all children until yesterday, they spent their formative years in the world and not seeing it out a window or through a screen. Just as Angela or Patty Bolger watched the birds’ nests, so Tony Carr fished the rivers, Taylor and her siblings watched the swallows come every spring to nest in the barns, and Rose Smith and her friends dammed the streams to create temporary swimming pools.

Walsh remembered watching with fascination as the summer sun dried the bog and exposed the skeletons of ancient trees buried in its depths, “like sentries with their jagged stumps bleached white and ghostly, as if trying to reveal the glory that was once theirs before they were indiscriminately burned down. Their roots resembled long, bony fingers reaching out to touch and console each other in remembrance of their majestic past. In the moonlight they looked like shrouded spectres rising from the bog, trying to convey their former greatness, when they covered the land and held in their arms the birds of the air and harboured the many wild animals which roamed without hindrance through the Ireland of old.”

City children might seem far removed from Nature, but in Ireland, at least, even inner cities had parks, woods, gardens and cow pastures, and every school and hospital used to be surrounded by gardens . Ellen Miller, who grew up in Dublin in an area now covered with motorways and high-rise buildings, remembered it was then only a short walk to fields where they gathered cowslips.  

In Belfast, “… many streams still oozed from the floor of the forest ... where we spent many summers climbing trees, making woodland dens and decking them with the bluebells, violets, primroses, forget-me-nots and sweet-smelling delicately pink wild roses that grew in abundance in the early summer,” Marianne Elliott recalled. “It made for a magical dell-like landscape ... ponds full of tadpoles and wild irises; rivulets to be bridged with driftwood and stones, marking out imaginary territories.”

Woods allow children places to create their own dens, tree-houses and forts, where they collect their own treasures and form secret societies. We’re all Stone  Age tribes under the surface, and something in us needs to live that way for a while as children. The most meagre “vacant” real estate can for children become a secret and dangerous place full of old gods and buried treasure, of canyons to be leapt across, a place to smell a campfire, feel a ladybird on one’s arm, feel the freezing water of a winter creek and a breeze ripple the green barley. Time can stand still for a child, and the primal moments we feel in stillness and storm are what stay with us when our bodies are old and everything else has faded.

 

Memories of Belfast

 “… there were so many children in White City of the same age that a group very quickly formed when any were seen playing outside. Street play ranged very widely indeed, depending on the weather and numbers involved: making dens in the covered alleyways; playing hopscotch on the flagged streets ...

Hours would be spent bouncing tennis balls off walls, sometimes as many as three or four at a time, advanced levels of expertise commanding considerable respect from other children. Marbles were played by the girls and boys alike, the brightly coloured “bulldozers” the desirable prize.

The large space at the top of Portmore Hill lent itself to more organised play --- rounders, Pussy-in-the-Four-Corners and skipping, with the older girls able to manipulate two hefty ropes simultaneously and queues of children lining up to jump in while chanting the many colourful skipping rhymes. (Hearthlands. p. 82)

The Deep Woods

 

Based on notes from 14 years ago. It goes by fast. 

 

My four-year-old runs joyfully through the deep woods, arms raised, her dress flapping behind her as I follow at a distance. She raises her arms and twirls through shafts of green sunlight that slant to the ground around us. She runs her fingers through the shaggy moss, peeks gingerly in the black hollows of the ancient trees, and rummages through the undergrowth for snails and mushrooms like Easter eggs.

 

We come here often to roam these patches of the cold rainforest that once covered Ireland. We found mushrooms like saucers that we take home for dinner. We sit on giant roots that stretched like jetties over the water, watch the tadpoles gather under our toes, the kingfishers flashing like jewels in the trees, the herons that lurk like gargoyles over the water. 

 

These woods teach that death is not the end, even in this world; a fallen tree erupts into mushrooms, and the sunlight falling through its empty space in the canopy wakes a carpet of flowers, so a death in the forest brings an explosion of colour. In a few years a sapling will fill the space, its young leaves sheltered from the winds, and on autumn evenings its turning leaves bathe the woods in an orange light, a candle against the coming darkness.

Learning years ago

From an article I'm working on: 

Tens of thousands of children, often barefoot and dressed in clothes sewn from flour bags and worn by several other children before them, walked to schoolhouses each morning across Ireland. Their tiny hands often carried bricks of hand-hewn turf, or sticks that they picked up along the way, to keep their single rooms warm – or less bitterly cold – as they studied. School budgets effectively did not exist; children often carried a few coins here and there for the teacher when the parents could afford it. Nor did children go to school all year; they left whenever the parents needed an extra pair of hands on the farm, or to baby-sit their brothers and sisters, or to bring in the turf for winter, or to make some extra money at a job. Some children described going to school until they were 16, or 14, or 12, or 11, and then never again.

Now: Tell me what kind of education they got. 

Every modern person, without exception, assures me the results would be pathetic -- the “three Rs,” so named because we assume that backwoods hillbillies would have spelled the subjects “reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic.” We assume that the poorer you are, the worse your education, and these days that’s true – in the USA today, two-thirds of all adults cannot read at a proficient level, and a third cannot handle a basic level. They are adults and can’t read.

Also, some of these children lived a century ago, and since we assume knowledge only becomes vaster and more refined over time, our learning must soar far beyond anything they could have imagined, and our children’s learning farther still. This is why we spent 25,000 hours of our best years in giant cement warehouses – our parents wanted us to keep up with the competition in a race forward. It’s is why so many of us spent years in college, and decades paying off college, to join the future and not be left behind.

Not a bit of that belief, though, stands up to the simple test of listening to accounts of schools a century or two ago, or reading actual school papers on file in Irish historical societies, or reading newspapers from the time, or looking at the books everyday people read. Children then often read classics and sophisticated literature that few college students – or professors – attempt anymore. So did mechanics and farm-hands, house-wives and fishermen.

They did not read them to boast that they had done so, as a few college elites might today, but out of a passion for learning. They talked about these works with friends. They wrote about them in their diaries. All this, you’ll recall, in addition to their practical skills, their knowledge of local lore, of the natural world and the people around them – all of which are also rare today. 

... more on this later. 

St. Necklace Day

Myself and my daughter, some years ago.

  

One morning years ago, as I tried to sleep in, a metre-high blond person jumped up and down on me shouting, "Look what St. Necklace brought us!" I liked the "us" - she was as happy for me as for herself.

The sixth of December is St. Nicholas Day, when many families would leave presents in children’s shoes. That year my daughter got chocolate coins and a few other goodies. In my family -- and this part seems to be unique to us – St. Nicholas leaves tins of sardines and octopus. The Girl was calling him "St. Necklace" -- she got a necklace on this day a year or two ago, and the name stuck. In the Irish countryside our every Christmas was small and somewhat isolated, but these moments make them meaningful.

Meaning is something we often lack in modern Christmas celebrations, where we feel pressured to spend too much, eat too much, drink too much, listen to the same terrible rock songs, watch certain television specials, put up enough lights to make our house visible from space and pretend to be cheerful when we are not. There’s nothing sacred about these pop-culture traditions, though; Santa Claus and many of the carols we sing are of surprisingly recent invention, often less than a hundred years old, and often created as advertising campaigns.

I’m not trying to be a Grinch about this – by all means, enjoy the holiday. I simply don’t feel obliged to hear all the songs, over and over, for a few months. What’s more, the new ones are squeezing out many local and truly traditional family rituals that date back longer than we can measure.

Take Wren Day, when local families gathered in the nearby woods for a ritual called the Hunting of the Wren. Men dressed in straw – “straw boys” – stole a statue of a wren, and its defenders – “wren boys” – gave chase with all the local children. After all the children had been nicely exhausted – while their parents sat back sipping tea around the fire – the Wren Boys and children came back holding the Wren in triumph. The Wren Boys and Straw Boys shook hands, made peace, and the Wren served as King of Birds for another year.

I brought my daughter to this ceremony, but it is one of the last times it would be celebrated. A ritual that might date back to Druid times, two thousand years ago or more, will soon be another casualty of the Great Forgetting of our era; my daughter might be one of the last people who will remember it.

Take wassailing as another example: neighbours walked from house to house carolling and being invited inside, giving everyone a chance to meet their neighbours. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen anyone do this in a long time, nor do many people these days feel comfortable introducing themselves to their neighbours.

Many families do use Christmas to see loved ones, share meals, sing songs together, and tell old stories, and that’s wonderful. But here’s the thing: people used to do these things every day. Here in Ireland, for example, wassailing wasn’t just once a year, but all through the winter; neighbours gathered at each others’ homes, brought instruments, played music, sang songs, and told stories that broke up the long darkness. It allowed each family to share what they had, making deposits in a community favour bank. It strengthened the feeling of community, so that burdens were lessened because they were shared, and joys were heightened because they were shared. Every day used to be more like the best parts of Christmas today.

This year, when many of us are strapped for cash or will have an unusually quiet and empty Christmas, you have permission to ignore the usual spending, eating and drinking extravaganzas. Perhaps you can turn off the television, put away the phones, go for walks, read A Christmas Carol to your children, make gifts with them, and perhaps go carolling at the doors of your elderly neighbours. You’re not here for the holiday; it’s here for you, and you decide how to enjoy it.

When I was raising my daughter in the countryside, every Christmas became sacred. Those moments, with her climbing into bed with me and sharing her contagious awe, were my comfort and joy, and when I prayed, they were the engine of my gratitude.