An Irish Country Girl

  Ma and Da? She’d never heard them have an angry word. She’d once heard Ma say, “For every old slipper, there’s an old stocking to match it.” They were the living proof.

  Love, she decided, must be different for everybody, and sure hadn’t she plenty of time before she found out for sure?

  Maureen looked into the distance and sang gently to herself.

  I never will marry

  I’ll be no man’s wife

  I expect to stay single

  All the days of my life.

  Perhaps not quite true, but she was in no rush. No rush at all. She chuckled.

  “And what’s so funny?” Tiernan asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking about how much fun the fleadh’s going to be.”

  “Sure it’ll be like any other flah, lots of craic, lots going on, dancing, and”—he rubbed his hands—“I can’t wait for my go at the road bowling. There’s some new competition, a man from Clonakilty or thereabouts, who I’d like to get a match with.” He looked along the road. “I’ll find out about that soon, for the place we’re going’s only about four miles more from that farmhouse with the red roof.”

  “Four more miles?” Maureen said, as the sidecar jounced over a pothole and forced her to cling on. “My bottom’s going to be black-and-blue bouncing about like this.”

  “Ah, sure,” said Tiernan with a grin, “aren’t they grand colours anyhow? And four miles is nothing. We’ll be at the hooley in no time, and then the fun’ll begin.”

  20

  Four more miles. Tiernan might think covering the distance would take no time, but Maureen willed the horse to move faster. She remembered something Da’d say when they’d go for a walk together. “Make short the road now for me, Maureen.” He meant for her to chat with him and make the miles pass more quickly.

  Tiernan wasn’t always talkative, but in one way he was like most of the few men she knew. Ask about something that interested him and you’d get a sermon, the Law and the Prophets.

  “Tiernan, I should know more about the road bowls, seeing you were last year’s winner, but I don’t. Tell me about it? Maybe I’ll come and watch you.”

  Tiernan smiled and looked pleased. He leaned back on the wooden bench as if he were settling into a chair by the fire, hooked his thumbs around his braces, and said, “Well, now, Maureen girl. It’s not like your camogie that’s only been around a few years. Road bowling’s a very ancient sport. Some say the Celts played it four thousand years ago, and it’s got popular again in about the last two hundred years. Now it’s played here in the Free State in County Cork, and up in County Armagh in the north. I do hear that some fellahs have got the bowls going in Boston.”

  “Which Boston? In Kildare or Galway?”

  He laughed. “No. In America, lass. Massachusetts. Maybe one day we’ll have an international match there.”

  She squeezed his arm. “You get on the Irish team and I’ll definitely come and watch. I’d love to go to America.” She knew, she just knew, that teaching wouldn’t only give her a better wage; it would allow her to broaden her horizons, and why shouldn’t she want to see the world?

  “America, is it? I think it’ll be a long year or two before we play the Yanks. But you could go and see Art and Emer in Philadelphia. You could stay with them.”

  “Maybe I will. I miss my big brother, but I’ve things to do here first.” Her voice became serious. “Then maybe I will go after that, once I have the money.” She smiled at him. “But that’s to come. I still want to hear about the game. I like sports, you know that. Maybe if I fancy the sound of it, I’ll take it up too.”

  He frowned. “There’s no women at it yet.”

  “There will be. I could be the first, with a brother like you to teach me.”

  Tiernan smiled and shook his head.

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Right you are. There’s teams or single players, and they compete along a road course of two and a half miles.”

  “That’s a fair stretch of the legs.”

  “It is on a hot day like today. You can work up a thirst.” He winked.

  “Tiernan.” She shook her head at him.

  “Don’t you worry about me, Maureen. A fellah with a skinful can’t get his lofts right.”

  “Lofts?”

  “A loft is a throw. We bowl with a twenty-eight-ounce iron-and-steel cannonball called a bullet. The fellah with the least lofts over the distance wins. Or there’s another game where whoever gets farthest in twenty throws wins.”

  “Sounds like fun to play, but I can’t see myself watching it. Too slow. So I’ll not come today.”

  “You can suit yourself, but it is great gas and . . .”—he glanced at Malachy and lowered his voice—“and it does be fun to bet on, so.”

  Maureen smiled. “I heard Sinead giving off to him about that. Maybe she’ll not let him go with you at all.”

  Tiernan winked and, still speaking quietly, said, “Malachy has to come. He’s my helper. I’d not play without him.”

  “Helper?”

  “Aye. Each player has a wee team of his own. There’s the road shower, a fellah who picks the best line for the shot, and there’s a helper too. He goes ahead and stands in the road with his legs apart at the best spot to aim for with the next loft. There’s always quite a crowd at a match, and you’d not want to hit someone with the bullet, so the helper yells, ‘Faugh a ballagh!’ Clear the way!”

  “I think,” she said, looking around, “we could use one of those fellahs right now roaring, ‘Fawk a bollah!’ here. There seems to be a lot more folks about all of a sudden.”

  The traffic was heavy and Malachy slowed the horse to a walk, stopping when his way was blocked by sidecars, ponies and traps, and even the occasional motor car, a nasty smelly thing that scared the horses.

  Maureen saw one car that was made by the Austin Company over in England. And there was one of those funny-looking, open Morgan three-wheelers, driven by a young man wearing a cloth cap and sporting a Ronald Coleman moustache. He was a very flashy-looking lad, maybe from Cork City or even Dublin, she thought, and probably as a city fellah not to be trusted by a girl not yet eighteen. A spalpeen to be avoided at the céili. She might be thinking about teaching in a big city, but that was going to be later, when she was more able to deal with city folks and their ways.

  A horse-drawn caravan carried part of a family of travelling people. One man guided the horse by pulling its lead rope. Others tramped beside the vehicle, and four skinny mongrel dogs ran alongside. Although they referred to themselves as “Pavees,” not gypsies, in Irish they were called Lucht siúil, the walking people.

  Maureen jingled some change in her pocket, a few coins Da had given her for spending money. The gypsy women would tell fortunes later in the day. She might go and see one of them. Just for fun.

  Maureen inhaled. The warm air was redolent of horse sweat and flower perfume, car exhaust, and the tang of the nearby salt sea. Clonakilty was round a couple of corners and down in a valley. All she could see from here were the tops of two steeples. One, needle sharp, was the steeple of the Roman Catholic church; the other one, squat and square, was Anglican. Further out, the sun sparkled from the mudflats of Clonakilty’s tidal harbour.

  They weren’t going as far as the town. Everyone was converging on the fields near an ancient hill fort about a mile north, where the fair was already started, and the dance would be held later. There were folks on bicycles and tandems, women wheeling prams, and people on foot. A man smoking a dudeen led a chestnut gelding by a twisted rope halter. In Ireland wherever people congregated, there would be horse-trading.

  Malachy dismounted, opened a gate, and led his horse through. “This field belongs to a friend of mine. He’s letting me leave the car here. You ladies go back to the road and follow the crowd. It’s only about a quarter of a mile to the fields around the hill fort of Lios na gCon. Enjoy yourselves at the fair. We’ll be off to th
e bowling.”

  Sinead said, “We’ll be at Lish na Gun alright. Mind you what I told you now, Malachy Aherne. Pay heed, and do not you be leading Tiernan astray. Now help me down; then give Tiernan a hand with Finbar’s pram. Fidelma. Maureen. Off. Fidelma, take you the hamper.”

  Maureen, accepting Tiernan’s hand as she dismounted, felt like saluting her sister, not as she would a magpie, but as an outranked soldier to a senior.

  “Come on then,” Malachy said, as he and Tiernan lowered the pram to the ground, “let’s see to the horse.” He turned to Sinead. “We’ll be back by six in time for tea. We’ll meet you all at the bandstand.”

  “Six. No later, hear now. And none of the hard stuff either one of you,” she said. “Now, girls, let’s head down to the fair.”

  Sinead, pushing the pram, followed by Fidelma and Maureen, set off for the Lughnasa festivities and the céili to come in the fields around the hill fort. Maureen felt like running ahead but, as befitted a young lady, kept steady pace with her older sisters.

  While Fidelma helped Sinead find a shady spot for Finbar’s pram under the trees near the bandstand, Maureen wandered over to examine Lios na gCon, the hill fort of the hound. She wanted to get a good look at it and paid little attention to the throng around her.

  It was one of only three forts in this, the townland of Darrara. Forty-eight such structures surrounded Clonakilty.

  The road they had come down ran close to the back of the ancient structure. It was on the crest of a gentle hill and faced east. From where she stood on the north side, she could see how the little plain gradually became a slope that rolled down to two coppices separated by a gorse hedge at its foot. The bandstand was on this side of the earthworks.

  She moved closer to the outer circular ditch. These hill forts were all of the same pattern. They had a central flat area where, in olden times, a farmhouse and pens for the animals stood. When the protective ditch surrounding the living quarters was dug, the earth was used to build the rampart.

  Maureen had been taught that the forts and other constructions, like passage graves, dolmens, crannogs, and stone circles, could be found all over Ireland. The biggest passage grave was beside the River Boyne at Newgrange in County Meath.

  Miss Toner had explained that hill forts, mounds, and graves had been for human habitation or burial, while stone circles had religious functions for the Neolithic people. Maureen knew that hill forts had other purposes too. The mounds and hill forts were called sidthe and the faeries who lived in them the Sidhe, or Shee, the people of the mounds. The hill forts, like blackthorn trees, were special places for them.

  There’d be no sign of them today, but who knew what might happen tonight? Lugh of the Long Hand was one of their chief gods, and it was his festival, Lughnasa, that was being celebrated.

  Maureen strolled round the circle of Lios na gCon. She guessed it was probably a hundred yards in diameter. All that was left were the outer works, and even there much of the ditch had been filled in. She was disappointed that there wasn’t more to see.

  She reached the other side of the grassy mound and looked out across another field to the wall that surrounded the high Celtic crosses in the graveyard of the Darrara church. The ground was flat and everywhere she looked, “There were multitudes assembled,” just as she remembered from the song “The Galway Races.” The fair was in full, exuberant swing.

  People were on holiday, enjoying the sunshine and the soft summer day. Not every man wore his Sunday suit; some were in shirtsleeves, but every woman had on her best dress and sported a cloche hat like Maureen’s own. A few carried parasols.

  Little boys in short pants chased each other hither and yon and yelled in their high-pitched voices. They darted erratically over the grass while the swallows above jinked through the sky.

  Dogs barked. From the distance came the lowing of cattle. Maureen heard a donkey bray, harsh and grating, and looked across the road into the next field where a girl of about her own age was leading one of the little animals with a youngster on its back. She remembered being taken for a donkey ride herself when she was six or seven, and Ma telling her that every donkey had a cross on its back because one of its kind had brought Christ to his trial.

  She wandered past stalls selling cold drinks, candy floss, crúibins, gingerbread, toffee apples, yellow-man toffee, carrageen moss. She’d not waste her money on food.

  A group of kiddies sat on the grass in front of a tall, narrow, red-and-white-striped canvas structure. A square opening above a narrow shelf acted as a simple stage. The children were watching a Punch-and-Judy show, an entertainment that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years. The puppeteer was inside the small tent working the hand puppets and giving them their voices.

  Maureen stopped to watch, thinking back to being held on her father’s shoulders the first time she’d seen hunchbacked Punch in his jester’s motley, him with his great, hooked, papier-maché nose almost meeting his chin. She’d giggled and laughed and banged her little fists on Da’s head.

  “So you liked that, did you, muirnín?” her father had said when the show was over. “Did you know Punch-and-Judy shows have been going for three hundred years? A learned fellah once told me they started in Italy.”

  Punch was now beating the baby Judy held in her arms. He thumped with his stick and squawked in his raspy voice, “That’s the way to do it.”

  She’d loved the show when she was little, and even today in her nearly eighteen years, she laughed when Toby the dog growled at Punch. Imagine her father knowing it had started in Italy. She wanted to know things like that. Be a learned woman. Italy must be a colourful, boisterous sort of a place to invent such fun. Perhaps she would get the chance to go there one day, as well as to America. Once she’d earned and saved the money.

  She walked past musicians, pausing at each one to listen for a while—here two fiddlers, there a girl playing a melodeon, further on a man with a ceramic flute being accompanied by a girl playing the spoons and a bald-headed lad plunking a banjo. She didn’t see or hear a piper and for that she was grateful.

  She regretted she couldn’t play an instrument. When Ma told her about the sight, she’d mentioned music to help Maureen understand how some people were talented and most were not. Maureen had learnt she was not when Ma arranged for a harper to instruct her daughter. Maureen could sing a song, but had plucked the harp strings like a girl with two left hands.

  She threw a penny into the flautist’s cap on the ground and moved on to where the gypsies had parked their caravan near the graveyard wall.

  A man with grey hair to his shoulders, a single gold earring, and a face as wrinkled as a dry chamois leather sat at a table covered with small sheets of metal, hammers, pincers, solder, and an old soldering iron. He was a tinker waiting for folks to bring their pots and pans to be mended.

  A younger man wearing a red spotted bandanna stood at an upended crate. She noticed that one of his eyes had a dark brown triangle at the bottom of its green iris, and for a moment he stared at her.

  “God bless me,” she whispered.

  The travelling man put a pea under one of three walnut shells, then arranged and rearranged them, lifting a shell from time to time to reveal the pea. A knot of youths had gathered in front of him.

  His hands flashed, shifting the shells. “Roight now, oim on for taking bets at two to wun. Truppence wins youse sixpence, a shilling gets yuh a florin. All youse’ve to do is find the pea. One of youse at a toime now.”

  She didn’t recognise his accent. It certainly was not from County Cork. His hands stopped.

  “Will your honour have a go, sor?” He looked at a strapping fellow with cheeks the colour of red poppies, and he dressed in a shirt and moleskin trousers tied at the knees with leather thongs called nicky tams. “Where’s duh pea, do you tink?”

  “I know, for I’ve been watching you like a hawk, boyo.” The lad put down a silver thruppence and pointed at the middle shell. “It does be under that one the
re, so.”

  When it was lifted, there was no pea beneath. The youth groaned. His friends laughed at him, and the threepenny piece disappeared into the Pavee’s hand. Thruppence was a fair sum to lose.

  “Better luck next time, sor.” The pea was replaced with great ceremony, and the hands flashed again. “There’ll be no money paid if there’s no wagers laid. Who’s next? Step up now. Step up.”

  Maureen shook her head. A fool and his money are soon parted, she said to herself, and moved on until she came to a tent and a sign that said: Madame Rosita. Palms Read. Fortunes Told.

  Maureen shook her head and smiled. Why on earth would she waste money on someone who probably had no idea what the future held, but simply had a well-rehearsed line of patter? Da said some of the walking people would steal the cross off a donkey’s back. She rummaged in her handbag for one of the silver thruppennies he’d given her.

  She was seventeen, eighteen next month. She knew her own future stretched ahead to an invisible horizon. Ma had said not to worry about it, whatever was going to come would come, but Maureen was impatient to find out. She had her own clear ideas about what she wanted to happen. Would she get good enough marks next year to be the teacher she’d set her heart on being? Would she travel to America? The next question was more important for Fidelma, but Maureen was curious about herself too. Was love in her stars and, if so, when?

  Maybe, just maybe, Madame Rosita would be able to predict that Maureen’s dreams would come true. And if she couldn’t? Maureen chuckled and stepped forward.

  She’d not be wasting money, not like the eeejit at the shell game, she told herself as she lifted the tent flap. It was her thruppence to spend as she saw fit, and nobody would be robbing her.