Do You Remember?, page 12
My most knowledgeable sister appointed herself as presenter on these occasions. To prove how accomplished she was as a concert impresario she liked to give little footnotes to her audience in advance of a performance. Gentle persuasion was used to encourage reluctant visitors to come forward, but where siblings were concerned her choice of words was not of a delicate nature. Tact was not her strong point and her introduction was delivered with a blunt instrument: before I made my appearance she invariably informed the audience that the crow of the family was about to come on stage! In later years I got great satisfaction in reminding her of her lack of sensitivity and its longterm damage to my musical self-esteem!
The magazine Ireland’s Own was a great source of new songs – one of us would learn the words and then teach it to the others. Sometimes we learnt a song from the radio, and when a song that we were endeavouring to learn came on air there was an echoing shout around the house to round up the potential Pavarottis. Each one of us picked up different lines until finally we linked the whole thing together; it was a case of joining the dots. If we had missing bits we filled in our own version until we learnt what the original composer had in mind.
In those days most people sang as they worked and milking the cows was the time when warblers tested their skills. The cow stalls were the practising pad for many potential performers and the bovine listeners were a tolerant audience. Young lads working with us on the farm had their own repertoire and often after supper played a melodeon or piano accordion as well. Others were into recitations and ‘Famous Dan McGrew’ often made an appearance in our kitchen in the evenings – I was always fascinated by ‘the girl called Lou’ who I figured was up to no good down at the back of the bar. Another recitation often recited was ‘The Road Downhill’, and I was intrigued by the oft-repeated line: ‘the road downhill was an easy road and that was the road we went’.
The rendering of these recitations was usually given with a performance where the scene was acted out in our kitchen, different accents assumed and voice lowered and raised to produce the desired effect. These recitations were performed to an appreciative audience. Many of the favourites originated in Oregon in the USA, as emigration over the years brought songs and recitations back and forth across the Atlantic.
The gramophone was the greatest source of songs we learned. We would simply lift up the heavy ‘horn’ carrying the needle that ran around the grooves of the record, and set it back down again and again until we finally got a grip on the whole song, scratching many records in the process. This abuse of the records drove my father into a litany of complaints, so we waited until he was out of earshot and our learning curve would begin when his cap disappeared down the hilly field to the river. The preservation of his records was nothing compared to our thirst to be the next Vera Lynn, sweetheart of the forces, and to sing:
We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when
But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.
Christmas was the time when new records were purchased. That was my father’s job but no matter what he bought we were delighted, mainly because we had nothing against which to compare his choice. The gramophone was brought from the parlour into the kitchen for the twelve days of Christmas and it seldom fell silent. A new box of His Master’s Voice brass needles kept it in voice and the wind-up handle restored flagging energy when the record slowed or worst of all faded away altogether. Over-winding was a disaster and could prove fatal or cause a gramophone heart attack, requiring major surgery. If the gramophone got such an attack we feared that our father could follow up with another one. But over the years we became adept gramophone handlers and treated it with the utmost respect. The records were kept in the deep drawer of the sideboard in the parlour, but over Christmas took their chances on the side table in the kitchen. These records were made from bakelite and were easily scratched and broken, so each record had its own jacket to avoid this happening. They were quite expensive by the standards of the time. John McCormack was the man of the day and he poured out ‘Bless This House’, ‘The Fairy Tree’, ‘She Moved through the Fair’ and many others. Another favourite was Fr Sydney McEwan, who sang ‘Flowers of Fairest’ to celebrate the Queen of the May. The powerful voice of Richard Tauber declared ‘We re in love with you, my heart and I’, while Joseph Locke gave a rousing performance of ‘Goodbye from the White Horse Inn’. One of my favourites was the beautiful song ‘Can I Forget You’ and for the life of me I cannot now remember the name of the wonderful tenor who sang it. Maybe you remember?
Mario Lanza was another heart throb who invited us to ‘Be My Love’. My mother’s favourite was ‘Cruising Down the River’, and later ‘Irene, Good Night’ took over in her affections, and we waltzed around the kitchen to that one. We loved ‘The Laughing Policeman’, who laughed uproariously and whose laugh was so infectious that we just had to join in. We also had jigs, reels and hornpipes and, of course, waltzes. ‘Over the Waves’, ‘The Blue Danube’ and ‘The Vilette’ were favourites, but when one of my sisters tried to teach me how to waltz she informed me that I had three left legs!
The radio was a constant source of musical entertainment with programmes like ‘Hospital’s Requests’ and ‘Around the Fire’, where Seán Ó Síocháin always got an attentive audience for his rendering of the song ‘The Boys of Bár na Sráide’. The sponsored programmes played a wide variety of records that kept us up to date on musical trends. Here we were introduced to Harry Lauder, whose rich Scottish accent gave great gusto to his songs, and Guy Mitchell sang about an exotic female who ‘Wore Red Feathers’, and then he met ‘One of the Roving Kind’. Of course, when Elvis came on air, he rocked our whole musical world – we were definitely moving away from Delia Murphy and her spinning wheel!
Chapter 20
Bring Blossoms the Fairest
In our town, come midsummer, the procession took centre stage. There was no need to announce it or go over the details because everybody knew what the procession was all about. It was the Corpus Christi procession, which took place in early June, but because May had just made its exit it had a big spattering of that month incorporated into it. June was the month of the Sacred Heart, but May was his mother’s month, and with the long tradition of the Irish Mammy there was no way she was going to be side-lined, so they both got even billing.
Because we did not live in town, flags and banners did not flutter from our house. It was the one day of the year when I wished we could have a house transplant. To be part of all the fever of painting and decorating that preceded the procession was to me the height of excitement, and as my aunt did live in town we became a mobile Mrs Mop team for her the week before the big event. My mother was the Mrs Beeton of the family, the wonderful cook, but unlike her townie sister was not into ‘house beautiful’. However, she was very aware of her shortcomings in the housecleaning department and so at every opportunity that presented itself she sent her daughters to any local good housekeeping school that became available – and my aunt ran the ‘crème de la crème’ of such institutions. We became her clean team for the week prior to Procession Sunday. We vigorously wielded Vim and Ajax around her bathroom – and a bathroom to us was a great novelty as we did not have one at home; we were still making do with the tin bath in front of the kitchen fire or a large bowl in the bedroom, or swimming in the river in summer. So a bath that looked like a long white swimming pool was an object of complete fascination. The only time we saw such an abundance of water was in the river – to us it seemed like an awful lot of water to wash just one person. Of course, the reason we were cleaning the bathroom at all when the procession only passed by the front door, was due to my aunt’s ingenuity in the utilisation of an available work force!
When the inside of the house was scrubbed to perfection our hour came to really show off and we attacked the outside. It might have been painted the previous week by Paddy Bán, who was the local painter and decorator and meticulously stripped down all the sash windows and varnished the door with a final wobbly stroke known as graining. But if it was not the year for Paddy, we issued forth with buckets of water and brushes to wash down and prepare the way for the Lord to pass by the house. Once the scrub-down was done, it was window-cleaning time and here perfection was achieved with paraffin oil and newspapers until the glass was shimmering. After all, if the whole parish was to walk by, peering in as they went, we were not going to have Our Lady and the Sacred Heart inside unable to peer back out at them.
Then the night before the big event the real action that we had been waiting for began. Into the window to the right of the front door went a large statue of the Sacred Heart, and into the one on the left went a big picture of his mother. Around them went vases of flowers. At first the best vases came forth, but once we got to the upstairs windows we were often reduced to jam jars. Some houses did not do upstairs windows but our enthusiasm stretched above and beyond the bounds of normality. Up there the statue supply diminished to the lower orders, with St Theresa, St Bernadette and St Philomena – who, though we did not know it then, was an endangered species. Then a chipped St Patrick got an outing, and a dusty St Martin and a battered St Francis. These were representatives from the world stage of saints, so we could not be accused of being nationalistic or racist. Because we had never seen a black person, St Martin was a source of special wonder, and we concluded he must have come from a scorching hot country because no matter how long we stayed out in the sun we only made it to a deep brown.
Once all the windows were done, we paraded up and down in front of the house admiring our handiwork. Doing the windows was the dressing of the stage and now it was curtain-up time. All along the street men with ladders were erecting bunting across from one side to the other. There was no house across the street from my aunt’s so we missed out on that bit of excitement, but we made up for it by helping the neighbours – at least that’s what we thought we were doing, though the neighbours might have had another name for it. Some houses flew flags out the windows and any dodgy-looking area – like broken down gates or collapsed walls – had red and white, or blue and white material draped across them. There was a good face slapped on everything. The whole town was out and it was a case of all hands on deck! We had only one Protestant man living in town, and he was the local electrician and had long ladders, so he was roped in to help as well.
Arriving in the town on the morning of the procession was like arriving at a carnival, only far better and more festive. We were always early because we’d have badgered my mother into speeding up as we wanted to walk around and view the windows before Mass. We would see them all later on the procession around the town too, but that would only be a passing glimpse and we wanted to have a good long look. All these windows told a story. The pictures and statues of the house were in the windows and the flowers told the story of the garden behind. We looked forward to seeing Mike O’Brien’s early roses and Maggie Jones’s lovely lupins, and we remembered who had special pictures and ornamental statues. It was as if the interiors and gardens of the houses were peeping out through the windows and doors.
When my father had the pony and trap tied up safely in Denny Ben’s backyard we headed for the church, but en route did a thorough inspection of windows. Some houses had open doorways too, with statues draped in veils at the entrance, and in order to get in and out people had to side-step around the arrangement. A windy day was a disaster as flower vases and statues took a tumble.
On procession day Mass was a bit of a prelude to the main event. We were eager to get out and get going.
A banner bearer, with two escorts holding the flying ribbons, lined up at the bottom of the church yard. He was the pace setter for the procession. A fast gallop was not desirable, but neither was a snail-paced crawl.
After a certain amount of confusion the children were sorted by the teachers into rows of four. You were dressed in your Sunday best and the little boys were in their nice new suits; if you were lucky enough to have got your First Holy Communion that year you had a special position further back. The women came next and then the men. Both men and women were heralded by banner bearers flying the flag of their confraternity guild. After them came the brass brand and after that the choir in full chant. Introducing a flash of blue and white came the Children of Mary in flowing blue cloaks and white veils, and then the First Holy Communion children, the girls delighted with the opportunity of this second outing in their lovely white dresses and veils. They carried little baskets of flower petals to be strewn on the ground in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Finally came the priests in flowing gold-embroidered vestments, and the robe of the main celebrant partly embraced the base of the monstrance that he was carrying under a richly embroidered canopy borne by four parish stalwarts.
Along the way the bearer of each confraternity emblem gave out the rosary and sang hymns with their own guild. But it was difficult to draw a line between where praying finished and singing began – and some people found it difficult to resist a chat with a neighbour, or a farmer might need to check the size of someone’s creamery cheque. But, all in all, a certain effort was made to observe the set procedure, even though sometimes singing and praying did get mixed up.
Proper formation was supposed to take place in the church yard, but it took the full length of the High Street, which led down from the church, before any sense of law and order began to set in. The plan was that all processed in rows of four – but try telling that to an absent-minded woman who ambled along, adding to and subtracting from rows as she meandered. Or try straightening out a few young fellows hell-bent on selecting the team for the next All-Ireland final. It was the job of each confraternity leader to keep their flock in order, but some flocks were less orderly than others.
After coming down High Street we turned the corner into New Street and then back to the West End, where we made a U-turn and then the procession doubled back on itself and it was possible to spot some of our neighbours and to see who had got a new hat for the procession. Then back up New Street and left at the cross and there the two Miss Gillmans, who sold smashing ice cream, would have erected a wonderful blue May altar. Over the Scarteen Road and another U-turn at the dispensary, and then left at the Cross and along Church Street, so called because there, on a raised green, was a gem of an old Protestant church, beside it the graveyard where the bones of Sarah Curran, beloved of Robert Emmet, rest. This little church was the jewel in the crown of our town, later to be desecrated by the removal of its elegant steeple. We passed the barracks where four guards and a sergeant served and which had a glowing garden along the front. We would all note that the sergeant’s wife had done a lovely job with the flowers and that the bank could have made a bigger effort – but, then, the manager’s wife was not long in town so probably did not understand the importance of the procession! Then right again and in through the convent gate and up the long, winding tree-lined avenue to the impressive old building that was once the home of the Aldworth family, whose daughter, Lady Mary, was the only female member of the Freemasons. This was a male-only secret organisation, but having hidden in a wardrobe she was privy to one of their meetings, and when she was discovered there was no choice but to give her membership! Later, the building became the property of the St Joseph’s order of nuns.
If we thought that we had the town looking good, it was nothing compared to the convent. At the top of the wide limestone steps that led up to the enormous front door was a high altar adorned with brass candelabra full of lit candles. Floating down over it from overhead windows were billowing chiffon drapes, which gave the impression of multi-coloured clouds pouring down from heaven. One year the candles set fire to the drapes when a breeze blew them in the wrong direction. The nuns were probably not too happy, but it certainly added to the drama of the occasion. We slowly formed a half-moon shape around the steps and overflowed back onto the front lawns. Then the priests under the canopy arrived and Benediction was celebrated from the high altar, the smell of incense from swinging thuribles filled the air and the choir chanted out the ‘Tantum Ergo’. The Latin chants were beyond us, but once they launched into hymns like ‘Hail Queen of Heaven’ we were into familiar territory and sang at full volume, especially ‘Faith of our Fathers’.
When the convent performance was over we headed back to our own church with a vague sense of anti-climax that was eased slightly as we passed the home of Rory Sheehan, whose front garden was always ablaze with roses that draped out over the wall. We would sniff them as we passed by. Back in our own church there were a few vacant seats as some people had decided that enough was enough and abandoned the procession before it ended. Then the band thundered up the aisle and disbanded in front of the altar, while the choir took over and sang us through another Benediction. When quietness descended the monstrance was placed on the altar and silent adoration known as the Quarantore began.
