The Parish (2 page)

S
he beamed across the high counter of our village shop, her eyes dancing with anticipation, her face alive with excitement. In the subdued light of the small shop she glowed like an exotic poppy.

“My great great great great grandmother Kate Mullins was born here,” she began breathlessly, and as I struggled to keep up with all the greats she continued in an excited American accent, “She left here after the famine.”

Having sewn these seeds of information, she waited with wide-eyed expectation for her family tree to sprout up behind our counter. She was one of the hundreds of Americans who return each year to parishes all over Ireland to trace their roots.

“Do you know any more about her?” I prompted.

“That’s about everything,” she declared happily. “I’m just so delighted to have found her home place. I just knew that if I could find that, the rest would be easy,” she confidently concluded. Joyful anticipation oozed from every pore. How could this vibrant positive girl be told that roots buried for
over a hundred years did not sprout up on demand? They could require a lot of digging.

“Was it the parish or the village she came from?” I enquired tentatively, wanting to minimise the digging area.

“Oh!” she said in dismay, some of the delight draining from her face. “Is there a difference?”

“Well, it would help to limit possibilities,” I assured her, feeling guilty to have to cast a cloud over her perfect happiness.

“But this is such a tiny place,” she protested. “Everybody here must know everybody. This is Ireland!” She had obviously been reared on the American dream that Ireland was the promised land where she would be reconnected with her roots. In the face of her unbridled thirst for knowledge of her own people I felt a sense of responsibility. This girl was one of the descendants of the thousands of Irish who had been forced to emigrate and for years had sent home dollars that kept the roofs on family homes. Because I was reared in an old farmhouse where eight generations of the same family had lived, and from where many had been forced to emigrate, I had been taught that we owed them a huge debt of gratitude. My father, even if there was hay to be saved, had always taken time off from farming when the descendants of his ancestors came back to visit their home place.

At the other end of the counter Uncle Jacky, in a brown shop coat, was scooping sugar into paper bags and weighing it on the tall enamel scales where the wavering finger indicated when he had the bag full to its one-pound capacity. His roots went as far back as hers into the soil of Innishannon. Though he had overheard our conversation he had left me to my own resources. I was new to the village shop, having only recently married his nephew Gabriel, and Uncle Jacky was probably
letting me find out that there was more to running a village shop than just selling bread and jam. Now he walked over to us, easing his glasses to the top of his head, and stood thinking for a few minutes. With a face glowing with expectation, the American watched hopefully, waiting for him to pull the story of Kate Mullins out of his pocket. Uncle Jacky scratched his head, wrinkling up his face in deep concentration. This was going to take time. After all, we were travelling back over a hundred years. The young American struggled hard to keep silent.

“Mullins is not a local name,” he said thoughtfully, and the light waned in the vivacious face, but rose again as he continued: “though I think that I remember an old woman saying that there were Mullinses here a long time ago.”

“Oh, how wonderful!” she breathed, her face alight with delight.

“They could have lived up in Rathnaroughy.”

There was an impressed silence from the American and then, with a look of dazed pleasure on her face, she whispered, “Say that again and say it very, very slowly. I have never heard of such a beautiful-sounding place.”

“Now, I could be wrong,” Uncle Jacky said quickly before she got carried away by the sound of Rathnaroughy, but there was no holding this girl back.

“Rough … raw … rugby,” she drawled in ecstasy and Uncle Jacky winced in pain at the verbal assassination of this ancient Gaelic townland.

“The best thing to do now, girleen,” he advised her confidentially across the counter, “is to go down the village to the carpenter’s shop at the end of the street and the man there might be able to do a bit better than myself.”

“You’re a great guy,” she assured him, and, with a melting look that would have given a younger man bad thoughts, headed for the door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be right back!”

“Were you trying to get rid of her?” I asked Uncle Jacky in surprise because that would not be his style.

“No, no,” he assured me convincingly. “Jeremiah goes back much further than myself and if there was ever Mullinses here he’s her best chance. Then we’ll send her to Billy in the forge and between the three of us we’ll surely dig up something.”

He was right, and by evening, after much to and froing and joint consultations across our counter, and further inquiries, they had dug deeply and found a trail that had traced the story of Kate Mullins back to an old stone house at the other end of the street. It had taken up a lot of their time but for that day tracing the roots of this young American was their first priority. Billy had horses to be shod, Jeremiah had doors to be made, and Jacky had customers to be served, but all this could be intermingled through their genealogical research. Their commitment to helping this young American was impressive and it was easy to see that they felt duty bound to assist her in finding her roots. They did not articulate it but it was obvious to me that their generation, like my father, felt a responsibility to the children of those who had been forced to emigrate. Because they themselves had been able to remain at home they felt that they had a duty to keep the home fires burning for those who had been forced to leave.

Over the following years, Jacky, Jeremiah and Billy helped many visitors to trace their ancestors. It was interesting to see how from very few seeds they could trace a whole family tree. The key to their success was their knowledge of their own
place and their interest in and love of its people. In their desire to help they often called in others and sometimes the weaving of the full story involved a dozen or more people. Jeremiah Mawe was the oldest and the most knowledgeable and the day he died he took a big slice of our local history with him. For many years after his death, people were heard to comment “Jeremiah would have known that”. Then in 1977 Uncle Jacky died and the same thing applied. Soon the entire social history of our parish would be buried in the graveyard. Something needed to be done or our knowledge and sense of pride in our own place would disappear. The roots of any parish are necessary for the healthy well-being of its future. Like trees we need to be rooted in some corner of the universe; otherwise, when the storms of life erupt, we could be blown away.

In the early 1980s we held a history exhibition in the dressing rooms of the local hurling and football club. The aim of the exercise was to gather together all the folklore and history of the parish. We invited people to submit anything that they thought might be of parish interest, be it a story, poem or picture, and we asked the children to talk to their grandparents and write up the family history. The resulting collection was displayed in the dressing rooms and viewed with great interest by the people of the parish. Old family photographs, maps and family histories were on display, and a beautiful oil painting of the derelict houses at the eastern end of the village. Most of us up to then had regarded these old houses as an eyesore, but now we saw them through the eyes of artist Lia Walsh. It was the first time that many of us had seen Lia’s work as she had only just come to live in the parish, but as a result of the response to that picture she set up our first art class and for many of us opened the door into the
world of painting. It is this interlinking of people’s skills that forms the basis for a parish community.

At that history exhibition, the item that caused most interest was a detailed history of the village, written by Peg Santry. Peg had been a teenager working in one of the big houses outside the village when “the troubles”, as we call them, broke out. She was of a Catholic republican family but had an understanding and fondness for her Protestant Anglo-Irish employer and, like many others at the time, was caught on the horns of a dilemma. For this reason she was able to tell both sides of the story. She also knew everybody in the parish and, beginning with the first house at the top of the street, she wrote about each family in great detail. Most people when asked to write an article view it as a major undertaking, but Peg just put pen to paper and spilled out her story, which she called “My Innishannon Long Ago”. She began with the words of Katherine Tynan Hinkson’s poem, “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”:

Peg was a natural storyteller and people were fascinated by what she had written. We had only one copy of everything on display, including Peg’s story, and people had to queue up to read it. After each reading, long discussions took place. As we watched this happen, the germ of an idea took root. A magazine could be written by the people of the parish to record the past and present. Like many other parishes, ours is an old and historic place and every senior citizen who died was taking a little bit of the living history of the parish with
them. We decided to have our own Christmas magazine; it would be called
Candlelight
.

It was 1983 and we had never heard of desk-top publishing; computers were only for the chosen few. We did not have a bull’s notion about how to compile or publish a magazine, but we had a lot of enthusiasm, even though it was thickly laced with ignorance!

The following February, we went around and asked people to write. The immediate response was “What will I write about?” and the answer was always the same: “Feel free.” We wanted a magazine that would reflect all the different facets of the parish. Contributors were told that they had several months in which to write their articles. That was mistake number one! If people feel that they have plenty of time, they put things off.

One of the people we were most anxious to have on board was Jer, who was known in the parish as “the Twin”, and who over the years had thought up witty and entertaining poems about parish events. None of these were written down, but they were floating around at the back of the Twin’s head.

On the day of the Twin’s eightieth birthday, I met him in our shop.

“How are you?” I inquired.

“I’m good,” he told me enthusiastically. “And when you are good, you should say that you are good.”

“Any particular reason?” I asked.

“I’ve met an old girlfriend,” he said with a smile. “And tonight we’re going for a drink.”

“Well, isn’t that great,” I declared.

“There’s only one thing bothering me,” he said seriously.

“What’s that?”

“I wouldn’t want her now to think that this would go any further.”

At a time when most people of his age are busy counting their pills and watching their blood pressure, here was the Twin at eighty occupied with the possibility that an old girlfriend might lose the run of herself. He had never married, and his long life was full of romantic interludes, which he often recorded in verse. He remembered one particular girlfriend in song.

The Twin was interested in the whole
Candlelight
enterprise, and for that year and every year until he died he pulled a poem
from the back of his archival mind.

In many parishes there are people like the Twin who are fascinated by the stories of their own place and people and have the gift of putting them together in entertaining poems and stories. It is regrettable that sometimes their stories die with them.

In 1984, a parish magazine constituted a new venture and people were a bit apprehensive and loath to put pen to paper. So, with the deadline looming, I decided to write a few articles to have them in reserve to act as fillers if necessary. They were never needed because slowly articles began to come in from around the parish and some from further afield. We had contacted people who had left the parish, and some—including Con Murphy of GAA fame, who never forgot his roots—came good.

For that first edition most features came in handwritten, and Maureen, assisted by Mary, took on the task of typing them up. The next step was to get a cover, and here we were blessed with the genius of young Denis who lived up Bóthar na Sop and was studying architecture. He designed a classic cover with a perfect drawing of our village lit by a giant candle and guarded by flying cherubs. It was the ideal Christmas cover and perfectly suited to the name
Candlelight
. On the back cover we put an old photograph, from the Lawrence collection, of the western end of the village in the 1890s, a view which had, by 1984, almost totally changed. We found that all the expertise we required existed within the parish, and indeed this expertise can probably be found in most places.