Morning Came and Morning Went: A Fragment of Memoir, Musing and Dreams

By James Mulligan

A memoir of growing up in the rural Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098301682

Book preview

As it was in the beginning …

Well I suppose the best place to begin is at the beginning… I was born at almost midnight on Thursday 17th, January 1946. I was the first-born in the family and over the next seven years four brothers Eddie, Tommy, Leo and Anthony arrived. I remember the day that Leo was born—the midwife was a Nurse Mitchell who parked her Austin 7 car right alongside the front doorstep. Nurse Mitchell was right out of Central Casting for Fifties midwives. She exuded no nonsense and wore her district nurse hat at such a rakish angle that in retrospect it resembled a tilted frisbee—not of course that on June 8th 1951 I, nor the rest of the world, knew anything about frisbees. The front door was wide open, there was the drone of a tractor engine from away out in the fields, and the June sunlight created shadows and flickering dappled patterns in the June roses that tumbled from the hedge in front of the house.

I remember even more clearly the day Anthony was born. A different midwife this time—a Nurse McCusker—and after she left around eight in the morning I and Eddie went upstairs and viewed in wonder our new brother. My father wanted both of us to stay home from school that day. But at seven years of age I loved school and said, C’mon Eddie, we’re off. We’ll be late. It was a very mild January day with the first intimations of a welcome spring in the air. In school that day I won a prize for performing a recitation (it was about flying my kite; a kite I didn’t have by the way) in front of the class. The prize was a box of oil crayons. I thought that I hadn’t deserved the prize and that our teacher, Mrs O’Neill, may have given it to me because of my new brother – but looking back she probably never even knew about the new arrival in the Mulligan household. After school all the children who travelled home in our direction came to our house and trooped upstairs to see the new baby.

But back to January 1946. As was the practice in those days I was quickly baptised—on a snowy morning, Saturday, January 19th. The church was a worse-for-wear, creaky and crumbling early nineteenth century building known locally as Blackbog Chapel or Moneyvriece Chapel. Rectangular, functional in design, eschewing any attempt at architectural aesthetics, it had dreadful acoustics and its wooden galleries and stairways made it a classic fire trap. My godparents were my aunt Mollie (my mother’s twin sister) and Ray Cassidy, God rest their souls. Ray was the greatest athlete the locality had ever seen. Reputedly he could run the ‘100 Yards’ in ten seconds—well give or take some Irish hyperbole. Sadly Ray never bequeathed to me any of that athletic ability. My christening name was James but I was always called, Jim, Jimmy or sometimes Seamus… I suffer from a condition (well, suffer is not the right word as there is no suffering involved) known as synaesthesia. This means I see figures and letters in colours—James, Jim, Jimmy are always an emerald green. Seamus is a cobalt blue tending towards mauve. I was in my teens before I became aware that this was not the norm—the vast majority do not see letters and numbers in colours.

We lived a mile or so outside the small village of Ederney in County Fermanagh in the north of Ireland. If you have ever heard of Ederney it may be because of its church, the beautiful Lombardic Romanesque church, St Joseph’s, the much-needed replacement for the inexorably and irredeemably deteriorating Blackbog Chapel. I remember as a boy of eight or nine selling raffle tickets to raise funds for our new place of parish worship which, with its marble, parquetry, terrazzo, mosaics and stained glass, was consecrated on a rainy Sunday in November 1957. It is now a ‘listed’ building meaning that its fabric cannot be interfered with without permission from the civil authorities.

St Joseph’s Church, Ederney

My home was a farmhouse at the very end of a long gravel and limestone shingle lane, Moneyvriece Lane, in the townland of Moneyvriece. A townland is the smallest geographical division in Ireland. There are over 60,000 of them and they range in size from an acre or two up to thousands of acres. The majority are in the hundreds of acres. In general streams and rivers form the townland borders but in some locations hedgerows and stone-built banks form the boundaries. Townlands have various origins some bearing ancient Irish names while others were created after the coming of the Normans in 1169. The Gaelic names of the majority of these divisions would seem to indicate a pre-Norman date for their creation. Post-Plantation attempts at anglicising the names complicated things. No general statement can be made as to why places received names for there are many different explanations. We may infer that some townlands were named recording events or person(s) of significance and names often combined a description of the geographic characteristics of the location.

These name changes from Gaelic to English phonetic synonyms, invariably losing any vestige the original meaning, really changed Ireland quite significantly. In his play ‘Translations’ the Omagh-born playwright, Brian Freil, presents chilling observations on the insidious destruction of Irish culture involved in the anglicising of Irish place-names.

So… Moneyvriece, Monavreece, Monabriece, Moneymurish, Moneyveerst: what does the name mean? Not so easy this one. In order to establish the meaning of Moneyvriece recent research was carried out by the Queen’s University, Belfast Place-name Project team in a consultation with the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland and the following meanings deduced as the most plausible:

Monavreece—the name of the townland of Monavreece near Edernagh (Ederney) is recorded as ‘Monemorish’ in 1628 and 1639 and the most satisfactory interpretation of the place-name appears to be the Irish, Móin Mhuiris, ‘Maurice’s bog’. This is quite close to the interpretation in the Ordnance Survey Memoir of 1834 which recorded ‘Moneyvreest or Moneymurish from one Murish, crofter (small tenant farmer) who was killed there’. Other interpretations include:

Monabriece: Moin-a-brice: Bog of Bryce or Bryce’s bog.

mona—bog

(Bryce or Brice, both English variants of the Welsh name Brychan—possible descendant from the Plantation era.)

Moneyvreece: ‘money’ —shrubbery; broken shrubbery.

Monevreece: broken bog; ‘hill between the bogs’.

Moneyvriece: Hill of the Primrose.

So there you have it. Take your pick. I sort of like this Primrose Hill interpretation. There is a Primrose Hill in London, a green and leafy public park—but it’s not a patch on Moneyvriece. And on primroses; my grandmother was a little superstitious, as were so many of her generation, and she felt that anything yellow brought misfortune. Hence no primroses or daffodils in the house.

Next door there was another two-storey house which was occupied by Eddie Ginn, one of the Ginn brothers born in the adjoining townland of Clonee. From the evidence of the 1834 Ordnance Survey map and stonework strewn around the immediate area, there seems to be a strong indication that there was, in pre the 1846 Famine times, a thriving agricultural community here and the remains of a millstone still exists alongside Moneyvriece Lane about fifty yards from the house. Some seventy yards or so further along the lane are the remains of a lime kiln. Moneyvriece Lane extends from our house to what is now called Tirmacspird Road, the road leading in one direction to Ederney and in the other to the village of Drumquin in County Tyrone.

I grew to love everything about Moneyvriece. When I was about nine or ten years old I heard on Radio Éireann the song ‘A Little Bit of Heaven’. It was sung by Ruby Murray. I appropriated and rearranged the lyrics to:

They took a little bit of heaven

And they placed it outside Ederney

And they called it Moneyvriece.

Then the angels thought:

‘This looks such a place of peace.

Hey! Let’s always call it Moneyvriece.’

Okay, I was never going to be a Hoagy Carmichael or a Cole Porter as a lyricist. But… Hey! I still remember those lines, and it’s still Moneyvriece, and it’s still a place of peace.

A local poet named James ‘The Stroller’ Keown has committed a description of Moneyvriece to verse. James Keown lived in Back Lane in Ederney (a street which ran parallel to Main Street, Ederney but no longer exists) and was a prolific writer of verse. He earned the sobriquet Stroller from his practice of strolling the local hills and the banks of the Glendarragh River while composing his poetry. While in no way innovative—indeed, as can be seen at a cursory glance, it is extremely derivative of a style that had disappeared even by the early 1900s—his poetry does provide useful local historic description. He emigrated to Scotland still a young man around 1920. His poem tribute to Moneyvriece reads:

‘The Hills of Moneyvriece’

From the little town of Ederney alone I chanced to stray.

The birds were sweetly singing in the merry month of May.

I trod along right joyously, all nature seemed at peace

As I wandered up the Oul’ Bog Road to the Hills of Moneyvriece.

From that great elevated spot, there is a glorious view

Drumcahy’s rocks I now could see

And the great Glendarragh too.

Drumsawna’s groves the partridge loves

Also the thrush so neat,

Those charming sights you will enjoy from the hills of Moneyvriece.

Then cast your eyes round Largy braes in the pleasant morning air,

And the lovely purple heather that adorns its banks so fair.

Corbally’s hills look higher still where the sheep and lambs do graze

On a summer’s day those sights you’ll see from the hills of Moneyvriece.

As I stood upon this glorious spot to view the scenes around

The thought of some old residents was pictured in my mind;

The homes of the McGrieces and the Carletons of the Glen,

Ah sure Moneyvriece in days gone by you had some famous men!

Then cast your view to Oghill Braes and the valleys far below,

The scenes so fair, none to compare, no matter where you go.

The flowery glens of Corlaght and the lovely Bracklin Hills

Where hours are bright and hearts are light and I’m sure they always will.

Okay. Not in the class of W.B. Yeats or Seamus Heaney, but Moneyvriece caught in one man’s experience at one time and under a sky never to return. The McGrieces and the Carletons of the Glen mentioned in the poem were Moneyvriece families that I was to hear about as I grew up. Tom McGriece, an impressive 6’ 3, who lived in the house at the Tirmacspird Road end of Moneyvriece Lane, was the Big Drum-playing leader of the Ederney Flute Band and Jimmy Carleton was a local mason who struggled a bit with the demon drink. Jimmy gave himself the nickname ‘The Big Mason’—although he was not particularly big. I remember my grandmother telling that he took the pledge at one of the famed Redemptorist missions in the parish. He came to our house shortly after this and held aloft the mug of tea my grandmother had made for him saying, This is my drink from now on Mrs Dolan." Sadly, my grandmother saw him a few days later on Moneyvriece Lane the worse for drink and with a bag of bottles on his back. That’s our lives… lives of the best among us. Two steps forward, one step back. One step forward, two steps back. But we forgive. Forgive ourselves too.

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, "I tell you, not just seven times, but seventy times seven!

Matthew 18: 21-22

A world strange and new …

How many of us can remember that first awareness of this world? It’s all stored there somewhere in memory; it may need a bit of searching out but it’s there waiting to be uncovered. I distinctly recall that first moment of awareness—it was like waking from a dream and going straight into another dream. I must have been around two years of age. I was bouncing a rubber ball around the floor. The ball was green. I got too near the fireplace and someone held me back. On the table was a wind-up gramophone, one of those with the flared megaphone, and a stack of those now long-outdated 78 rpm shellac records. The gramophone was playing a beautiful song. I learned later that this song was ‘The Meeting Of The Waters’ sung by John McCormack:

Sweet Vale of Avoca! how calm could I rest,

In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best

Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease

And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace.

It seems that on this day the family had been to the county town, Enniskillen, and I had been bought the rubber ball and my mother had bought several John McCormack records including ‘The Meeting of the Waters’. Years later I used to pick up this record and gaze on the bright red label reading Victrola. There was an illustration of a faithful dog with its head leaning into a gramophone listening to his master’s voice. This beautiful recording had ushered in my first awareness of this world.

Then another memory is etched. This is of my grandfather—my mother’s father, Patrick Dolan. He died in September 1948 so I was at the most not quite three years of age. My grandfather was sitting back in an armchair. He had his head tilted back and was wearing a hat. He smiled the most enigmatic of smiles. It was almost scary and I have always associated it with his death. He seemed to be saying in that smile: I know something that you do not know.

Wanderlust …

As a child it was apparently very difficult to keep me within the doors of the farmhouse. When I was about two and a half years old I was found amid the brilliant yellow-flowering whin bushes on a small hillside known as the ‘Whiney Nough’ (I think those who named it may have meant whiney knoll, but we all know what rural Ireland does to pronunciation) on the farm belonging to our neighbour Johnny Beacom. This was an impressive distance for a toddler of this age to have travelled. Apparently the admonitory lectures—insofar as it’s possible to lecture a two year-old—and the necessary confinements following this escapade didn’t do much to curb my wanderlust as it seems that when I learned to talk coherently one of the first things I announced was my intention to climb the mountains of Largy and Glenarn—two purple-tinged hills that could be seen from our front door on the distant horizon. To be precise here, although there is a townland named Glenarn in this area, and we always called the mountain by that name, the correct name is Tappaghan and on its summit nowadays the pylons and huge propellers of a large wind farm blight the horizon. I never climbed Glenarn/Tappaghan, which in reality turned out to be several joined-up high hills, but I did climb Largy several times and by that time had realised that it too was nothing more than a fairly high hill. Yet my earliest memories still store Largy and Glenarn as holding more mystery, challenge and awe as the peaks of Mont Blanc, Matterhorn, Eiger, K2 or Everest.

These exploratory wanderings occasionally threw up surprises and sometimes surprises I could have done without. I remember the first time I was truly frightened. One morning—I must have been no more than four years of age then, I heard my mother and father talk about how during the night a cow belonging to our neighbouring farmer, Eddie Ginn, had broken through a hedge and into our farm to plunder the potato pits—not pits but ingeniously constructed earth mounds which, by layerings of earth and rushes, preserved the potatoes—and how the cow had choked to death. Just before dusk that day I surreptitiously made my way down the ‘Far Field’ and across the ‘Cart Road’ to where the potato pits were. (All the fields on the farm had individual names … the Far Field, the Brick Field, the North Side (a group of fields), the Well Field etc.) At first I could see nothing unusual around the potato pits. Then, with unapologetic suddenness, the sight of the carcass of the dead cow under the hawthorn hedge that bordered the potato field and the Cart Road froze fright into every cell in my four-year-old body. The bloated body of the cow was a mottled grey and blue-rinse blue and its tongue protruded out from a swollen, black and blue half-opened mouth. Its huge wide-open glazed eyes gazed lifelessly at the heavens. All four legs were splayed and rigid, resembling an overturned milking stool. Two rope tracks were gouged into the cow’s belly where Eddie Ginn had tethered the carcass and dragged it with his tractor to the Cart Road hedge. It is said that this type of childhood fright often lingers and lurks in the subconscious and can emerge unpredictably and cause psychological complications later in life. Well maybe, but in my case the image of the dead cow sightlessly gazing at the heavens would have to jostle with many other images and scenarios, although perhaps none so vivid.

Anyhow, the wanderings continued. I loved windy days and would stray off to hilltops on the farm to take advantage of where the breezes might be the strongest and where, preferably, they whistled and sighed through wildly swaying overhead branches. One of my favourite spots was the top of the Far Field where a peculiar echo effect created strange moaning and sibilant singing sounds through the branches of an ash tree and an alder tree at the very summit. When I got older I used to climb the ash tree and get a glimpse of the silver streak of Lough Erne away in the distance out beyond the villages of Ederney and Kesh. I also liked to make my way to the top of the North Side fields and stand or sit on the remains of a millstone that had been used here in times before the Great Famine. The rising and falling breezes seemed to breathe songs of longing and yearning through the rough-velvet leaves of a huge chestnut tree at the bend where Moneyvriece Lane turned and branched into parallel entrances to our house and to Eddie Ginn’s. It was best here around September and October when the wind would bring down the chestnut pods which would split and reveal their treasure of glossed-mahogany chestnuts.

I have retained all my life a love of windy days, storms and gales—and best of all if these occur along sea shores. The well-known passage from the Book of Kings reads:

The Lord said, Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

1 Kings 19: 11-13

Yes of course God is in the gentle whisper and more profoundly in silence. But for me God is also in the whirlwind.

In my early twenties I discovered the work of Chaim Soutine, the Jewish, Russian-born Expressionist artist who lived and worked in Paris. He loved landscape which he painted with a thick impasto of wildly applied paint and his painting of the effects of the wind through cloudy skies, trees and fields seem to me to align the rhythms, echoes and pulsations of nature with the almost palpable innermost stirrings and yearnings of the soul. One of my all-time favourite paintings is Chaim Soutine’s ‘Windy Day in Auxerre’.

Chaim Soutine

Also on the subject here of the ‘wind that bloweth where it listeth’, I have been intrigued that at the place of claimed apparitions, Medjugorje, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Blessed Mother Mary is alleged to have one evening told the young visionaries to listen to the wind. Her sign would be the wind. This, in my lateral thinking, (more on lateral thinking later) brings to mind Jimi Hendrix’s haunting record, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ with its crazy lyric, The traffic lights turn blue tomorrow.

On the late Jimi Hendrix, I recently heard an aphorism attributed to him: ‘When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace’. Kudos to Jimi if he came up with that originally. And further on Jimi Hendrix: when I was on my teacher-training course in London I was sent by my college on teaching practice to St Thomas Apostle High School in Chertsey in Surrey—a school now sadly no longer with us. On my first day on arrival there the Head teacher pointed out to me that the length of my bushy, frizzy hair was unacceptable and insisted that I go out and have my hair cut in a barber shop in Guildford Street. He also phoned up the college and complained that he had been sent a student who looked like Jimi Hendrix. What astonished me was that the Head teacher, a right old fuddy-duddy, should know of the existence of Jimi Hendrix. These days, with my shaven bald head, the memory makes me laugh. By the way, that year of the Jimi Hendrix Head teacher was the academic year of 1968/69. It brings to mind a colleague student teacher (Theology was his specialism) from that cohort—thankfully this man never became a teacher. His name was the Elizabethan-sounding, double barrelled, Duncan Le Wolsley-Jevons. Right away I figured there was something distinctly odd about him. He dressed in tweed jackets, old school tie, cavalry twill trousers and spoke with a plummy Public School accent. (For those ouside Britain Public School means private school.) His hairstyle featured a severe parting and short back and sides. Remember this was the late Sixties and, as Scott McKenzie had informed us in his song ‘San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)’ a year or so previously, the time of:

Such a strange vibration

People in motion

There’s a whole generation

With a new explanation

(Hmm… it seems we never found out what the new explanation was.) Dress code among young men in those days included the ubiquitous blue jeans (flared of course) and hair was grown long and shaggy.

My instincts and unease about this man turned out to be correct. A total Walter Mitty character, he had never been to Public School and his name wasn’t even what he claimed—he was in fact plain Duncan Jevons. One morning in the 1990s I picked up The Times and there on the front page was a piece about Mr Jevons. He had been jailed for stealing library books; thousands and thousands of library books—around 42,000—from libraries and academic institutions all over Britian. Some of the books were rare and very valuable. The thefts dated back to his student days. When police had searched his home they found the structure of the building unsafe due to the weight of the thousands of books stashed there. At his trial he was described as a sad, inadequate, obsessive man who found it difficult to form lasting relationships and lived alone except for his cat. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

…

But let’s return to my early landscape exploring. There was one area of our Moneyvriece farm that I began to be somewhat reluctant to visit much as I got older. This was the ‘fort’ at the bottom of the Well Field. The fort consisted of a large, flattened-top earth mound circled by a wide entrenchment. These landscape features are found in every part of Ireland and, as with the Well Field fort, they mostly consist merely of a circular entrenchment, with the central area slightly raised above the level of the adjoining land. Tradition claimed that such ringforts were ‘fairy forts’ and date back to early pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland (known as the Tuatha Dé Danann and Fir Bolg) but the most recent research points to much later construction and possibly to the Early Medieval period. These fairy forts and other prehistoric tumuli have always had mythic and faintly occult associations. Seen in Irish folklore as the dwelling places of fairies, elves and non-Christian spiritual entities, country people have a host of superstitions about them. Our neighbour from the nearby townland of Clonee, Ned Kelly, was a firm believer in this occult demi-monde and told many a tale about spells falling on individuals who had somehow transgressed the realm of these shadowy, ethereal neighbouring folk. He also had a fund of tales about strange music, sightings and sounds around fairy forts and especially of cattle being ‘elf-shot’ (falling victim to some mysterious diseases). My grandmother seemed to give some credence to these beliefs and had an address to the fairies that she was fond of repeating:

For aye for guide

Very good neighbours but keep your backs to us

When she delivered this cryptic entreaty she always looked out the window in the direction of the back garden leading me to wonder if therein might reside a colony of these mythical ‘little folk’.

On the subject of giving credence to things suspect I guess that I should mention here Old Moore’s Almanac. Old Moore’s Almanac was to be found each December in, I believe, every house in the neighbourhood. Printed on the cheapest of paper and bound in an equally cheap gloss paper cover, the cover always green in colour if I remember correctly, it purported to give predictions for the year ahead—predictions of world events, political changes and sporting triumphs and disasters plus the calendar for the year ahead… and useful information for Moneyvriece such as tide tables! The predictions were a laugh; more ambiguous than the Delphic oracle, but even then, never correctly predicting anything. In Moneyvriece we never took Old Moore seriously and I don’t suppose any of our neighbours did either. Although I grew up to be not in the least superstitious, I did as a boy fall into this local enculturation about fairy forts. For example when cutting hazel wands to make fishing rods or cutting branches of holly for Christmas decorations I would never cut anything from the Well Field fort. I’m not too sure if even today I would want to interfere with ‘lonely trees’ or fairy forts—some things die hard and it’s more not wanting to offend tradition than anything else. But, as I said, I have no time for superstitions or anything faintly aligned. Astrology, palmistry, belief in reincarnation, tea leaf reading, spiritualism, numerology, feng shui and other assorted flim-flam get short shrift from me. They get double short shrift in my work as a priest if mentioned to me by any of the Faithful. I make no bones about the dangers of surrendering God-given free will to the dominance of such craziness.

Let’s go back to our Clonee neighbour Ned Kelly for a moment. Ned settled on his farm in Clonee around the same time as my grandfather had bought the Moneyvriece farm (1912). He raised a large family on that Clonee hillside farm. He was the proverbial larger-than-life character and had always a fund of tales—and an equally large fund of tales told about him. One tale I treasure. It was about how he found his wife.

When Ned was a young man—he lived near the village of Trillick in County Tyrone I believe—and thought it time to marry, he went about seeking a suitable young lady. Ned, never the conventional type, went about things in his own idiosyncratic way. He had heard that a local farmer—by the surname of Higgins if I’m not mistaken—had three young daughters that, as a solicitous father, he wished to see married off and settled down. One night Ned visited the farmer and expressed his interest in marrying one of the daughters. By this time of night the three girls were upstairs in bed. Undaunted Ned said he would like to meet them. Mr Higgins took him upstairs with a hurricane lamp to light the way—no symbolism in this, the hurricane lamp, thankfully. The three young ladies were asleep on one large bed. They were woken up and asked by their father to sit up and greet their visitor.

Ned looked them over and within nano seconds said to the father, I’ll take the one in the middle. Does she come with a dowry? The father replied that, yes indeed, she came with a dowry and the matrimonial match was sealed there and then. Ned had himself a wife for lengthy life—he pre-deceased her by some years. Another example of an arranged marriage turning out better than a marriage that followed a lengthy courtship.

Johnny Beacom

Put him in a bag and shake him …

When Eddie got old enough I used to inveigle him to join me in my wandering adventures. Once—I was probably about three and a half and Eddie two and a half years old—we went down through the full length of the North Side fields and crawled through a culvert under the Tirmacspird Road (in my youth we always called this road the Drumquin Road but the modern-day cartographers have insisted it be called the Tirmacspird Road and who am I to disagree?) to watch the work on the construction of new neighbour Mick McVeigh’s bungalow. New neighbour? Well, not exactly. Mick had been born in Moneyvriece and after his marriage he went into exile in the townland of Edenaveigh whose high hill looked directly across at Moneyvriece. Mick’s father Joe, an expert carpenter who had in my maternal grandfather’s time worked on reconstructing our farmhouse home, still lived in the house on Moneyvriece Lane where Mick was born, and Mick’s brother Paddy lived with his family in a newly constructed bungalow just yards further along the lane. Mick, with his young family, was returning to the townland of his birth to live in the house Eddie and me had braved the claustrophobia of a long culvert to watch being built. We were spotted by the workmen of course and the matter was reported to our mother. More lectures and threats of appearing at a ‘juvenile court’. Now, whatever such an institution may have meant to us at the time it proved no deterrent and our exasperated mother no doubt resigned herself to having to deal with further straying away from the straight and narrow path—not that there were many straight and narrow pathways in Moneyvriece.

And apropos our exploits in the North Side fields, less adventurous perhaps but no less enjoyable was when Eddie and I made up a song and standing at the top of the North Side sang it as loud as we could in the direction of Johnny Beacom’s farm and homestead in the valley below. The song was made up of rhyming couplets but I can remember only the opening couplet which ran:

Johnny Beacom

Put him in a bag and shake him

Johnny Beacom had been in the army as a young man. He was a tall and physically powerful figure and when he spoke with his booming, stentorian voice he always sounded like he was shouting; yet Johnny was as gentle a man as any that ever walked Tirmacspird Road. After the army he had settled down to life as a bachelor farmer. He always wore a tweed flat cap, a cap that was always torn, with strands of Johnny’s salt and pepper-coloured hair showing through. In addition to his farming he drove a dray cart delivering the creamery milk cans provided by ourselves and the other local farmers to the creamery at Kesh. The cart was pulled by two enormous Clydesdale horses who seemed to know their own way along the Tirmacspird Road. Although ostensibly taciturn and serious-faced Johnny was not beyond a bit of mischief on his rounds. One Holy Saturday on his way back from the creamery, as he passed by Ellis’ house at the crest of a brae near Blackbog Chapel, he saw hanging outside the front door a goose plucked and dressed ready for Easter Sunday dinner. No one was around so Johnny whipped the goose onto the front of his cart and when he came to Lafferty’s house a few bends further along the road he hung it on the gate outside. Mrs Lafferty lived alone at this stage—her husband Barney had died a few years back and her children had left home. She found the goose and assumed it had been left as a present from either her son Joe or her son Owen. The goose apparently made a splendid Easter Sunday dinner and Johnny’s prank only came to light when Mrs Lafferty told neighbours about her Easter gift.

From the North Side fields Johnny Beacom’s dwelling, with its row of sad cemetery cypresses and its stately two storey stone-built barn (a barn known as Jack Caldwell’s barn where ceili dances used to take place in the 1930s), looked sedate and serene, but the first time I visited Johnny Beacom’s house—I figure I must have been about seven years old—I was astonished. His living quarters seemed more like one of the outhouses on our farm, with bags of cattle foodstuffs, creamery cans, old newspapers and pieces of farm machinery strewn haphazardly around. Johnny didn’t care, that was the way he lived and nothing wrong with that. Each to his own. What also impressed me was the large collection of clocks he had: two grandfather clocks and a whole array of pendulum wall clocks. All the clocks appeared to be set at different times and Johnny’s house was resonant with sporadic chiming and a constant loud ticking. The clinging image I have of Johnny is of him sitting back at peace in a worse-for-wear armchair with its horse hair stuffing protruding through various rips in the black leather fabric… Johnny smoking a huge briar pipe, almost invisible in the rising cloud of pipe smoke, chewing tobacco at the same time and seeming in peaceful synchronicity with the melodious harmony of the chiming and ticking clocks.

Johnny became somewhat reclusive into the late 1950s and rarely went anywhere other than to local shops. On the deaths of neighbours he might attend wakes but did not attend Church funeral services excusing himself by saying that he did not have proper Sunday-best suits. Not that in any case Johnny attended church. Like many of our other nearby neighbours, Eddie Ginn, Willie Ginn, Bobby Ginn, Arthur Patterson, Jim Ingram, Fred Curtis, Willard Ellis etc. Johnny was of the Protestant* persuasion but the door of the local Church of Ireland parish church at nearby Colaghty was never darkened by Johnny’s presence.

In late 1950s Johnny used to come up to our house for his New Year’s Day dinner. This annual visit, for reasons lost in the mists of north Fermanagh time, was then switched to Christmas Day. He always brought a bottle of whisky as a present—and always left with a bottle of whisky, John Jameson, his favourite, as his present from us. After dinner he used to sit and maybe offer a little laconic conversation but seemed most content to sit back and smoke his pipe and chew tobacco at the same time.

But nothing in God’s creation really ever stays the same for long including the direction of the journeys of our eternal souls and the makeup of our transient psyches and Johnny Beacom, externally at least, underwent a profound transformation in his retirement years. (As I typed this I realised how little meaning there is in an expression like ‘externally at least’. Nothing ‘least’ about it. All changes like this begin and have meaning in the soul. Nothing happens to a person only on the surface.) The house was renovated thoroughly throughout, plastered anew inside and out, new windows and doors installed, kitchen suites and bedroom suites fitted, everything freshly painted—even new net curtains hung and a washing machine installed! And Johnny himself newly attired for social occasions in a selection of casual jackets and best Sunday suits with black brogues so highly polished that looking down he could see his proud reflection in them.

I’m not sure if this late in life transformation extended to Johnny attending services in Colaghty Church of Ireland parish church. Probably not. But whether it did or not: Well done Johnny!

*

The term Protestant—the term itself —is as vexed as any issue around this subject. Originally it referred to the German princes who protested against the decision of the Diet of Speyer in 1529, which had denounced the Reformation. I think it best that I don’t get into arguments here about what constitutes Protestantism. Many in the Anglican Communion—which includes the Church of Ireland—resent being referred to as Protestant. But we will leave this aside as it necessitates delving into the minutiae of the Ninety-Five Theses, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles and abstruse arguments about Apostolic Succession.

Ederney …

Those early wanderings did not extend much outside the boundaries of Moneyvriece—short excursions into the neighbouring townlands of Clonee, Oghill, and Cahore took place but proper exploration of these faraway places I figured would be best left for a future date—or perhaps, more accurately, this figuring was done for me. In the meantime there was other exploring to be done, and first and foremost Ederney. Ederney… what’s in a name? The meaning of the name Ederney has never been clear. The name is said to come from ‘eadarnaidh’ the Gaelic word for ambush. Another theory on the derivation of the name is based on eader meaning between or middle. The most common spelling is eader, but it can be also spelled eder. It is therefore also claimed that Ederney is derived from eder neagh—in the middle of the nine (hills). No convincing evidence for either theory has ever been advanced.

I can remember clearly my first visit to Ederney village—well, it wasn’t my first visit as, although I of course don’t remember it, my mother had taken me there in my pram and as a toddler on many occasions and apparently the villagers said I looked like Churchill. Hardly original: all babies looked like Churchill! Anyhow, on my first remembered visit I recall being overwhelmed by how huge everything seemed—but without colour. Ederney was not even in aquatint, but in sepia. And why shouldn’t it? These were the years just after the war and privation was still everywhere. There were still ration books at home and Eddie and I had