Barefoot in Mullyneeny: A Boy’s Journey Towards Belonging

Something tells me I am needed, at the front to fight the foe.

See the soldier boys are marching, and I can no longer stay,

Hark, I hear the bugle calling, Goodbye Dolly Gray.

I had heard my mother singing it to herself and I had no trouble picking it up. I gave a spirited rendition, and when I saw the other children tapping their feet in time to the music, I figured that the sixpence was as good as mine. I finished, and flushed with success, I sat down in triumph. Alas, pride goes before a fall. The teacher looked at me witheringly.

‘A most unsuitable song,’ she said. ‘That is a British army marching song, next child to sing please,’ and added in an undertone to the big girls, ‘what else would you expect from a policeman’s son?’

When I told my mother, she laughed and said, ‘She’s right. It is a British army marching song. Next time you better sing “Wrap the Green Flag Round Me Boys”.’

And the remarkable thing is that I could have done so easily, because in our house, when I was growing up, we were ‘exposed to a wide range of musical experience’, as the teaching manuals have it. My mother had what seemed a limitless repertoire, ranging from Irish traditional music to Victorian music hall and Moore’s Melodies, and from hit tunes of the Forties to light opera, and the singing of Tauber, Gigli and above all, John McCormack, who was revered by my parents as a musical deity.

Music was almost a way of life. One of my earliest memories is of my mother, playing the piano and singing in her fine round voice, ‘I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls’.

Once a week, a lady used to arrive at our house on a bicycle to teach us the piano. The sole purpose of this seemed to be to pass music exams, and enjoyment did not enter into it. Studies, scales major and minor, in similar or contrary motion, sight-reading and ear tests were the order of the day. I cordially hated these lessons, and instead of practising, spent my time picking out tunes by ear, much to the teacher’s displeasure. One day, as I came into the room for my lesson, she said, ‘Don’t look over. What chord is this?’

She played a chord on the piano. ‘A flat,’ I replied

‘What note is this?’ she asked, and played a note near the top of the piano.

‘F sharp,’ I replied without hesitation.

‘You have perfect pitch,’ she said. ‘You should be doing far better.’

Full of pride, I told the boys in school, but I would have been better not to, because one of them told the teacher that I had used bad language and said she was a ‘perfect bitch’, and I was put standing out on the floor for the rest of the day.

However, my musical interest increased, and I dug out every songbook in the house and learned the words as well as the notes. One that sticks in my mind was ‘The Bridle Hanging on the Wall’, about a man whose favourite horse had died.

There’s a bridle hanging on the wallThere’s a saddle in the empty stallNo more he’ll answer to my callThere’s a bridle hanging on the wall.

I must have been a soppy kind of child, because I used to have tears in my eyes when I sang this and just wallowed in the sentimentality. Looking back, the only excuse I can have for this mawkish behaviour is that I myself had known and ridden a neighbour’s beautiful white horse which had died under tragic circumstances.

I remember about this time making my stage debut, singing at a parochial concert. During the holy season of Lent, no dancing was permitted by the Church, and the principal entertainments were the parish concerts. The parish priest had a simple plan of action for these affairs. He would come out on to the stage, look down at the audience, and call somebody up to perform. Refusing was not an option. ‘Paddy Gunn, come up and play the accordion,’ he would say. ‘John McManus, come up and play the fiddle.’

One night he called out, ‘Janey Maguire for a song.’ And Janey, from a well-known musical family, came up and sang ‘By Killarney’s Lakes and Fells’, and received warm applause. After a few more items, the priest called out, ‘Ownie Maguire for a song.’ Ownie was Janey’s brother, and he sang ‘By Killarney’s Lakes and Fells’, and received slightly more tepid applause.

Later on, Alsie Maguire from the same family was called upon and when she sang the same song, the audience were getting restive and there were a few shouts. There were six Maguires and they all sang ‘By Killarney’s Lakes and Fells’. As soon as the last one started the first line, the audience, who were by now expecting it, yelled, shouted and cheered wildly. The parish priest, who was both tone-deaf and naïve, was highly gratified by the reception.

Sometimes members of the local dance band would perform as guest artistes and I used to look in awe at these celebrities, with drum kit, double bass, saxophones and with microphones powered by a car battery. There was much arranging of wires and stands and loudspeakers on the stage, all watched with the greatest of interest by us, the audience. Then we heard a crackling sound through the speakers, and a band member came out on the stage, tapped the microphone, and said into it, ‘Hello, hello.’

We responded, ‘Hello, hello,’ as good manners dictated, so that there was instant dialogue across the footlights.

I thought that this band was the pinnacle of sophistication, and when they started their programme, with the leader saying in a slightly American accent, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the music of the Starlight dance band,’ and when they described the songs as ‘numbers’, and used the word ‘entitled’, I thought, ‘This is really showbusiness.’

‘We’d like to play a number entitled “South of the Border down Mexico Way”,’ they would say. And the singer wasn’t a singer, but a ‘crooner’. They sat down behind music stands with sheet music on them, and SL painted on the front. ‘And here is our crooner John to sing for you our next number, “Cruising Down the River”.’ The drummer counted aloud in waltz time, ‘With a one two three, two two three,’ and they started.

I was in heaven.

Mrs Malaprop and Daughter (#ulink_4fcaccb0-8536-5173-a1e1-83cbee2687e5)

It all started when the woman was getting married. She lived on a poor hungry farm on the side of the mountain in the Thirties. Money was scarce in the household and everybody in the family was trying, as they say, to pull the divil by the tail. But, poor as they were, for them the most important thing in life was to keep up appearances opposite the neighbours. Now in those days, very few people in the country would have had cars, just the doctor, the parish priest and the local big shopkeeper. If you had a car at a wedding, it was indeed a grand affair, but if you had two cars, then it was the talk of the countryside.

On the morning of her wedding, there was a light fall of snow on the ground. She got out the wheelbarrow and pushed it backwards and forwards over the snow to leave wheel tracks, so that the neighbours would think that she had cars at the wedding. Ever after that, instead of Margaret, her real name, she was known in the countryside as Maggie the Barrow.

The offspring of the union was first a boy and then a girl, who arrived many years afterwards. ‘The shakin’s of the bag,’ as the local miller described it. The poor husband, a decent hardworking man, died shortly afterwards, from shock, some said. Others said that it was from constant harassment about his accent, his appearance and his language.

When a like-minded woman friend had said to her one day, ‘I heard your husband in the shop the other day saying that he was going for a cartload of “dung”. I am surprised that you allow him to use such coarse language,’ she had replied, ‘If you only knew the trouble I had getting him to call it that!’

Sadly for her, the boy turned out to be a wastrel, a lazy, slothful drunkard. She had a dreadful job covering up his misdeeds, and she was delighted when he announced that he was going to America. It was a time of emigration, and Enniskillen railway station was often the scene of harrowing farewells. When she saw how lonely all the other women were, parting with their children, she thought that she had better put on some sort of show, so she started lamenting.

‘Oh now, amn’t I the sad and broken woman today with my fine son going from me across the ocean to Amerikay…’ But like all of us when we don’t mean something, she was inclined to overdo it. ‘…and who will cut the turf for me, and win the hay for me and plant the crop for me, now that my pride and joy is leaving!’

And when she went on just a bit too long, the son, sitting in the railway carriage listening, got up and walked back on to the platform and said, ‘Ah sure, if you think that much of me, Mother, I won’t go at all.’

And he went down the town and into the first public house and drank all the money that his mother had given him for his passage. Everyone’s patience wears out, and shortly afterwards, a couple of his uncles, big mountainy men, had a quiet chat with him and he left rather hurriedly for England. His mother announced that he had gone across the ocean to the town of England to take up a very good job. Meanwhile, her daughter Biddy had arrived at our school, and it was clear from the outset that she was following in her mother’s footsteps and that she too had pretensions to refinement.

The first we knew of it was when she informed everybody that her name was not Biddy but Brigid. The mistress was a spiteful kind of a woman and called her Biddy at every opportunity, but the master was a more understanding man and decreed that she should be called Brigid, so Brigid it was. But unofficially, and out of her hearing, all the boys called her ‘Biddy the Barrow’. She had by now adopted a sort of falsetto voice and had done her best to iron out the local accent that we all possessed.

One day the master gave us a composition entitled ‘A Day Out’ and we had to read aloud our finished efforts. We stumbled through them as best we could. One boy’s day out was when he took the cow to the bull; another boy took the horse to the forge to get shod; a girl went picking blackberries with her friends. Now someone had obviously told Brigid that you didn’t say runnin’ and jumpin’ and walkin’. You pronounced your—ings. You said walking, and running and jumping.

When it came to her turn, she stood up and in her ghastly falsetto voice she read, ‘We went for the day to Bundoring. We passed through Enniskilling and we had mutting for tea.’

Strangely enough nobody laughed although one boy muttered rather unkindly that the only time she saw Bundoran (a seaside resort frequented by well-off people) was on a map and that it was far from mutton that she was reared, and another wondered where did she park the barrow when she was having the tea.

But it was after she left school that her sayings became legendary. She went into the shop and asked for, ‘Ay pound of morgarine and a half a pound of biscakes please.’ When a local man moved away from the area to live in the town, she said that he was ‘presiding on the outerskirts of Enniskilling’.

She announced grandly in the shop, when her uncle bought a new car, that he had purchased a Ford Concertina. (Somebody added that she had also declared that it had reversing lights front and back, but this last part was apocryphal.) However she did talk about looking out at the scenery through the windowscreen.

When the grants became available for farmers to replace their wooden gates with metal ones, she sailed into the same shop and asked if they had any tubercular steel gates. And when that shop was converted into a supermarket she declared, ‘There’s no money in the country since they opened the Common Market.’

But her finest hour came during the height of the troubles. There was always army activity in our area, particularly on the mountain where she lived because it actually straddled the border. One morning she came down to the shop and announced, ‘The security forces were busy last night. They threw an accordion round the entire mountain.’

Altar Altercation (#ulink_4e22ce0f-2686-5f85-afbf-a16fac9b801b)

I always thought that the Latin Mass was much more exciting for altar boys than the modern equivalent. The priest had his back to you and couldn’t really see what went on behind him. There was always competition among the altar boys to see who would kneel on the right-hand side of the altar because that was where the action was. The boy serving right, as it was called, would be the first to walk out on to the altar, he would go up and change the missal from one side of the altar to the other before the gospel, he would ring the bell at the more solemn parts of the Mass, and at the offertory he served the wine and water to the priest.

The boy serving left had nothing to do except at communion time when he would hold the paten under the chins of the communicants as the priest put the sacred host on their tongues. In the sacristy before Mass there would be arguments and frequently fisticuffs to decide who was serving right. It reached such a pitch that the priest made a rule that whoever was in first would serve right. But then boys started coming earlier and earlier until once a boy arrived to serve eleven o’clock Mass as the people were coming out of the half-past-eight Mass. So the law was amended; no boy should arrive earlier than half an hour before Mass began.

One Sunday I set off to serve Mass. My partner that day was Gerry. He was a wiry little fellow whose father was a veteran of the First World War and had a wooden leg. He was a noted fighting man and all the neighbours were afraid of him.

As I was coming up the road to the chapel I saw Gerry coming down. He saw me and we both started to run. Neck and neck we ran over the chapel lane and in the gate. We couldn’t run inside the chapel because there were early worshippers there but we walked briskly side by side up the aisle, genuflected together at the altar rails and jammed in the vestry door, neither of us giving an inch. We each claimed to have been in first. While the priest was vesting, we wrestled behind his back and eventually I got myself in pole position.

The routine was that the boy serving right would walk out first and stop when he came to his position. The other boy would walk past him over to the left. This time when I stopped, Gerry planted his two hands in my back and gave me a violent push so that I staggered over to the left side of the altar leaving him in sole possession of the field. When he went up to change the missal I moved over to the right. When he came back he knelt beside me so that the two of us were on the same side. I grabbed the beater for the bell and went over to the left.