The Village (7 page)

A
T LAST THE
curtains were hanging, the carpets had been laid and the dining-room was ready for action. My sisters had come to my rescue and helped by making the curtains and cleaning up after the builders. As we washed and polished, some of the neighbours dropped in to help. One lady, however, came not to help but to examine everything in great detail. She gushed effusively about how beautiful the whole place looked, but as she was going out the front door she met Mike and, raising her eyes to heaven, remarked, “Those doors upstairs look like cat’s shit!” For months afterwards every time I looked at those doors her judgement of my colour sense made me smile. The doors were actually sunshine yellow and as Gabriel had wanted a darker shade her comment amused him highly.

We had been so lucky with the people who had worked with us and, in the midst of all the mud and long hours, there had been a great sense of comradeship and enjoyment. As he finished off the painting on the last day Mike laughed and said to me, “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if one day you pressed a light switch here and water came out through the bulb.”

As I walked around our guest-house that night I felt a glow of satisfaction. Double glass doors led into the front hallway from where a door on the left led into the residents’ lounge and one on the right opened into the dining-room. At the end
of the hallway was an open office with a window into the yard and garden. Beyond it the kitchen looked out onto the street. Upstairs there were six bedrooms on the first floor and two attic bedrooms above them. Everything was in readiness for guests. We had aimed to be finished in time for the tourist season and had succeeded. But the money we owed did not bear thinking about. An underlying apprehension mingled with my sense of satisfaction. Would it all work out? As I stood there wondering about the future the phone rang. It was Mrs Matchette, the wife of our local clergyman.

“I want to congratulate you and Gabriel and wish you every success,” she said. “I feel that it’s going to succeed beyond all your expectations.”

Her phone call warmed my heart. She and her husband were two of the best-loved people in our village, and when in later years the rectory was sold and their church was serviced from the next parish our community lost a valuable dimension. Her words, coming as they did at a very opportune moment, were a great comfort and I never forgot them.

Margaret, who lived across the road, came to help me run the place while her sister took over the post office switchboard. We had to capitalize on every potential source of income and began serving meals to non-residents. It was very hard work but it had its lighter side. An old bachelor who lived alone on a hilly farm – but spent very little time there as he preferred the life of the pub – came every day for his lunch. One day when Margaret was serving him he demanded, “Did you cook this?”

“I did,” she answered.

“I’m on the look-out for a wife,” he told her. “Would you be interested?” At least he left her under no illusion as to his motivation.

Margaret and I got on very well together and had many moments of panic and laughter. Neither of us were very good at
making brown bread so her mother came across the road every morning to turn out rows of crusty brown loaves. Margaret had previously worked in a hotel, and everything that the nuns had taught me in Drishane about household management was put into practice, too. At night we fell into bed exhausted – when we had a bed to fall into. We slept in the guest-house in case any of the residents might need something during the night, and simply took whatever room was vacant when our bedtime came. Often, however, they were all occupied, so then we slept on couches in the lounge.

Most of our guests were English, some French and German, and we had a scattering of Americans. We knew very little about catering but what we lacked in expertise we made up for in dedication and enthusiasm. We were so delighted to see our guests that we treated them all like visiting royalty. I felt so responsible for the success of their holidays that I almost felt accountable for the weather! Whatever they needed, we came up with it. We chatted with them late into the night, planned their driving routes, fixed their fishing tackle and dug for worms in the garden with them.

One morning a handsome German produced a strange-looking implement out of the boot of his car, drove it into our lawn and straight away worms shot up through the surface. I had never before seen worms evicted in this way and I protested. Even worms deserved a fair chance.

For the first time in my life I came up against the English custom of early morning tea. How anybody could wake themselves up at an ungodly hour to have a cup of tea when breakfast was not until an hour later baffled me. I was always so exhausted in the morning that I fell out of bed with my eyes shut. I discussed the practice one evening with a charming English gentleman who informed me in plummy tones: “It’s one of our more civilised traits.” I resisted telling him that I considered it
barbaric. However, it had its lighter moments. One jolly old boy used to pretend to be asleep as you entered with the tea-tray, and then would try to whip you into bed beside him if he got half a chance. We became expert at assessing our guests and anticipating different problems. I found it especially interesting to meet the people who had booked their rooms in January and February and had given us the incentive then to keep going. They had not known, of course, that they had been booked into non-existent rooms.

Many of the guests went deep-sea fishing in Kinsale and sometimes brought home some weird-looking fish. A huge, ugly cod with a large, gaping mouth stared, glassy-eyed out of the laundry basket in the corner of our kitchen for a whole evening, while the owner made regular pilgrimages to admire it and assure himself that he had really caught it. One middle-aged couple came for a night and stayed for a week. He was beautifully turned out in well-cut tweeds and had shining new fishing tackle. Every day she sat in the garden contentedly reading while he went to the river to try his luck. Finally, on the last day of his holiday, he caught a trout. He was ecstatic with delight. Now, the trout was a miniature, but to our man it was Moby Dick. That evening his patient wife bore it aloft between two disdainful fingers into the kitchen and announced: “Behold this fish, my dear, and look well at it. This sprat has cost every penny of five hundred pounds, if you add up all the equipment my husband felt was necessary for this holiday. I am holding the most expensive trout in the history of fishing.” Later that evening I presented him with his five-hundred pound trout for dinner. Everybody in the dining-room gathered around the table to view his wonderful catch. He ate it with a look of such intense pleasure on his face that you could see it had made his holiday.

While some of the guests were quite content to walk through
the local woods or fish in the river, many used Innishannon as a base from which to tour West Cork and Kerry. They came home in the evenings delighted with the quiet roads and people’s willingness to take time to talk.

Of the eight bedrooms we had in operation the two attic ones on the top floor had low ceilings. One day as I was booking in a fast-talking little man he cocked an eye up at the ceiling and asked, “Any reduction for head-room up here, luv?” The six rooms on the first floor had double beds but when the necessity arose we converted them to twin-bedded accommodation. On many mornings we hauled beds up and down stairs and along corridors and became expert at angling them around corners. If the guests who had booked the twin-bedded room turned out to be a young couple I concluded that some of the passion had gone out of their relationship. This was not the case with one honeymoon couple whom I, with great lack of perception, booked into a room which had a new and very squeaky bed. I was earnestly requested the following morning for a silent one.

Two slightly eccentric gentlemen stayed with us for two weeks. One of them carried a black handbag over his arm which contained an amazing assortment of odds and ends he had picked up in junk shops. When the large teapot was brought into the lounge for the nightly tea he would always take it from me with a flourish and announce grandly, “Shall I be Mummy and pour, darling?” Afterwards he insisted on coming into the kitchen to wash-up. We were very sorry when the time came for them to go, because they were two lovable old boys.

We provided dinner and packed lunches as well as bed and breakfast. The day began with early-morning teas at about 7.30 and finished with late-night supper in the lounge when the guests came together to discuss their day and to compare notes. They would talk at their ease and sometimes we did not get to bed until the early hours of the morning. We did our own laundry,
which made for hours of ironing, until one wonderful English lady actually took over the ironing and did it every day. She came and stayed for six weeks because she loved Innishannon, and brought with her two teenage granddaughters who became very much part of village life. They loved the village so well – and the two local boyfriends they had found – that when the time came to go home they cried all that morning. Margaret and I cried, too, as we waved them off. In the midst of all the tears Mrs Wigmore said, “Alice, my dear, you are not supposed to cry after your guests!” But she was much more than a guest. She came every summer afterwards, bringing over in different years her entire family of children and grandchildren. Her ancestors had come from one of the big houses outside the village which had changed hands years previously, so in many ways she was coming back to her roots.

That first summer proved that tourism was growing and that there was an opening in our small village for a large guest-house. Many nights we had to turn people away as we had no rooms for them. Unaware that we had gone ahead despite them, Bord Fáilte finally gave us the go-ahead to start building about a month after we had opened our doors.

The locals took a lively interest in our guest-house. One day as I was chatting with an old man at the front door, a young lady in a very brief “hot pants” passed in. His eyes followed her.

“Wouldn’t she take years off you?” he said with a smile on his face.

Lizzy May, however, had a different view of the situation. “Since you opened that guest-house,” she told me, “you don’t know what you might see on the street!”

But our house was only one part of the changes in village life which were being brought about by many factors. Television had arrived and had immediately broadened our horizons. The emigrants of the thirties, forties and fifties were returning,
bringing back different ideas and attitudes. People had begun to go abroad more on holidays, and they came home with critical comparative appraisals. All this was conducive to self-assessment, and in the process it was inevitable that other aspects of village life would change.

I
N THE PUBS
men escaped from work, the worries of life and from women. They sat around the fire on porter barrels and long timber benches, aiming an occasional long-distance spit onto the red-hot sods of turf. The smoke of Woodbine cigarettes and pipe tobacco curled upwards and blended the dim interiors together in a deepening shade of nicotine yellow.

In there land was bought and sold and matches were made. Crusty bachelors found solace in the companionship of their married brethren, with an eye perhaps to changing their single state if their friends had daughters or sisters of marriageable age. Hiring agreements with farm workers were sometimes cemented, and horses and dogs changed hands amidst great bargaining. In an effort to broaden the minds of the less well-informed, the newspaper might be read aloud by any man who considered himself the most enlightened of the gathering. But this task became more difficult as the day lengthened into night and the merriment of his companions increased. Long-forgotten poems learned in old schoolbooks were remembered and intoned aloud, and recitations such as “Dangerous Dan McGrew” and “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God” were belted out to appreciative applause. Singers sat on the counter to hold command of their audience, and brought tears to already watering eyes with keening versions of “Mother Machree”. Hob-nail boots pounded on the stone floor to a rousing rendition
of “O’Donnell Abú” or “Kelly the Boy from Killane”.

Travelling knights of the road related their tales of wandering to the group around the fire or sometimes played plaintive tunes on battered fiddles. Occasionally, if the night was bad and the publican in good humour, they were allowed to sleep by the fire – but their name had to be good and they had to promise to behave themselves. A good name merited drink “on the slate” but if the slate was not cleared regularly no credit was given.

In a quiet corner card games were played with deadly seriousness. The arguments which occasionally ensued were sometimes settled with a fist-fight on the stone floor, or finished on the street outside with opposing factions shouting on the participants. The pubs were officially closed after Mass on Sundays, but that posed no problem to the regular clientele, who gained access by means of a special knock which let the publican know that a good customer was thirsty.

Always in the pub was Andy, a man who lived on his wits. He celebrated with the winners and cried with the losers in every situation. Because Andy had a great thirst he had mastered the art of satisfying it by exploiting every available source of revenue. One evening I got on the bus in Cork and Batt, a well-heeled conservative teetotaller from the village, sat beside me. At the last minute a breathless Andy dashed onto the bus and gasped to Batt in desperation, “I’ve no money for the fare!”

Batt put his hand in his pocket, saying, “I wouldn’t give you this for drink, but the bus fare is different.”

As soon as Andy had the money pocketed he said, “Thanks Batt, old skin,” and jumped off the bus.

Batt smiled wryly at me. “Wouldn’t you think I’d have known better than to fall for that after all these years.” On the journey home we chatted about Andy.

“We went to school together,” Batt told me, “and Andy was always able to get out of tight corners. I remember one day the
master was doling out slaps to a long row of us. Andy was next in line for the punishment when a knock came to the door. The master suspended operations to answer it. When he came back to resume hostilities Andy stood there with his palm under his oxters, jumping in agony from one leg to the other. He had a crucified expression on his face. The master assumed that he had got his portion of slaps and passed on to the next fellow.” Batt smiled at the memory. I realised that he bore no malice whatever to Andy for pulling a fast one on him; it was probably just one of many over the years.

When Andy was reduced to desperation he did odd jobs and one of them was to collect messages from Jacky’s for a local farmer. The list was written into a little notebook. One week the farmer added to the list: “Cash for Andy – five shillings,” which Jacky handed over to him. On his way for the messages the following week Andy called into Jim for the use of a pen. This was an unusual request coming from Andy, but when enquiries accompanied the pen Jim was told it was “None of your business.” When the farmer came to pay his bill at the end of the month he discovered that Andy had written “Cash for Andy” on the end of every list and Jacky had innocently paid over the money.

Andy was a schemer of considerable imagination. His sister in America had made arrangements with a Bandon publican who was also an undertaker that when her elderly father died she would cover all funeral expenses. One day Andy called to the pub with the news that the old man had passed away. They were naturally sympathetic and gave him a few consoling drinks, and he took home a supply for the wake, too. Later that evening, when he came out to make the funeral arrangements, the undertaker met Andy’s father walking down the road. In an attempt to make amends for his misdeeds, Andy would sometimes offer to help out on the premises, but his good intentions did not often meet
with success. One day he was helping Jeremiah to tap a keg but persisted in hitting it in the wrong place. Jeremiah got impatient and put his thumb on the exact spot. “Will you hit it right there you bloody fool!” he shouted in exasperation. Before Jeremiah had time to take away his finger, Andy made a direct hit down on top of his nail.

It was not uncommon for a publican to branch out into other kinds of business, and the publican might also be the local undertaker or hardware merchant. One pub in the village dabbled in the jewellery business, and had on hand a tray of wedding and engagement rings to oil the wheels of matrimony. An old lady once showed me her wedding and engagement rings which she had bought herself years previously. The engagement ring had cost one pound and the wedding ring ten shillings.

“Bought them myself,” she assured me. “Himself would never have got round to it. And didn’t they serve us as well as if they had cost a fortune?”

On the whole few women entered pubs. Only those whom maturity had clothed in an impenetrable cloak of respectability made their way into the public house. They gathered in the snug, smelling of snuff and exchanging gossip over glasses of port wine or little drops of whiskey. But they never admitted to going into the pub and their business was handled very discreetly. One Saturday evening Madge came into Jacky’s after her sojourn in the snug down the road. As the shopping progressed she, in her happy state, forgot that under her shawl she had a bottle of porter for consumption at home. It slipped and crashed to the floor, where it spread out in a black cloud edged with white froth before disappearing down through the crevices between the stones. For a split second there was an embarrassed silence. Then a neighbour, who was delighted at Madge’s discomfort, stooped down to pick up the cork, and handed it to Madge saying, “Here’s the cork, Madge; maybe
the smell will keep you going.”

While most pubs had snugs where intimate groups could gather, the good publican would also open his kitchen to his better customers, who might even at times join the family for a meal. One family said the rosary every evening before the pub got busy, kneeling round the kitchen with the door open to the bar. Meanwhile, the village children gathered around the front door of the pub to listen, but they were not motivated by religious zeal. The grandfather of the house gave out the rosary in a loud, booming voice, but his prayers had turns of phrase not found in church liturgy. “Hail Mary full of grace – Sarah, there is somebody in the bar – The Lord is with thee – Tommy, will you kneel up straight? – Blessed art thou amongst woman – Will you stop whispering, Bridie – And blessed is the fruit of thy womb – How can I pray with all these distractions? – Jesus.”

The village men gathered at the corner every evening, and “after the cows” they were joined by men from the farms. When the corner became too cold they returned to their pub to continue the topic under discussion. They had not far to go as each pub was within spitting distance of the corner. But with the advent of change secretive snugs were eradicated and the dark, smoky corners were cleared away. The old pubs became fresh, clean-smelling and brightly lit lounge bars with carpets on the floor. Here pipe-smoking men bathed in the natural aromas of the farmyard and exuberant young fellows looking for the craic had to watch their manners. They were joined by young couples and women out together who sat on soft padded stools around teak tables with beer-mats to absorb the drips. The outside toilets with the dangling iron chains were replaced by a “ladies” and “gents” off the lounge and another set off the public bar. To entertain the new customers came paid musicians, and people even dressed up now to go to the pub.

Andy, who had propped up many a pub counter in his day,
protested in our shop. “My bum can’t get comfortable on those bloody small soft seats. I was used to a porter keg. You can’t curse and you can’t spit in there now. What’s left in life if you can’t do that much?”

But in every changing scene there is always one who remains untouched. In our village it was Kate. She was a plump, round-faced lady, and the air and floor in Kate’s had always been spotless because nobody dared to curse or spit in there. No carpet covered Kate’s stone floor and no bright lights disturbed the soothing atmosphere of her small pub. People looking for a quiet drink retired there, where nobody was allowed to get too merry as their indulgence was strictly supervised. It was the teenage gathering point and their behaviour while on the premises was impeccable, because Kate ran her pub like a sacristy. After her six o’clock tea every evening she set her alarm-clock to go off at closing time. When it rang out loud and clear there was no such thing as “one for the road”: her clientele filed out quietly and unquestioningly.

The decor of the village pubs had changed, but the families who owned them remained the same. They still treated the customers who frequented them with great generosity and kindness, often driving an old man home after closing time. Some of these men lived alone in poor conditions, and the pubs provided a warm resting place for them. One of the people to whom the pub provided a welcome refuge was Jim, who lived near by in a shed.