BOTH TOUGH AND TRANQUIL: PHILIP CASEY’S RURAL CHILDHOOD IN NORTH WEXFORD
A FARM IN HOLLYFORT IS THE BACKDROP TO PHILIP’S TOUCHING MEMORY OF YOUTH
IN 1961 my parents brought a farm, Grove Mill, from a Mr Martin Gilbert. We had travelled all over Leinster, ferried around by Brian Kennedy, a third cousin of President Kennedy, and who looked the image of him, to replace a farm near Screen, several miles north of Wexford town, and had ended up in the same country.
So began my identification with Hollyfort, Monaseed, Annagh and Croghan which has lasted to this day.
Indeed I had dreamt of our new home below Hollyfort some years before:
I was eight when I dreamt of a dazzling whitewashed wall and a river between trees.
Three years later they were part of our new lives, and we saw the river wash green weed, and smoke from the cottage against the hill betray the direction of the breeze.
The genial owner of the farm by the river taught us to kill trout, before he and our father bargained; and we, in high spirits when the deal was done, ran back to the sparkling water to try our skill. When all three of us had tired we lay against a grassy brow, taking in the feverish blue of the mountain in mid-summer. In another month, we would float through the heat of wheatfields being razed by a hired machine, and roam the stubbled earth.
Settled into our first winter there, we watched the rain race across the fields from Annagh and Croghan. The earth had become hostile and bare, and we knew of the chill of loss as hill and mountain turned into stone.
Our new home was in a valley below the village of Hollyfort, and bordered on one side by the Bann, a river then rich in trout and in the spawning season, salmon. (Much later, I remember being in a hunting party for salmon in the dead of night. There was still a Garda barracks in Hollyfort and the guards were out on the river looking for poachers, which added to the thrill. A torch shone on the long easy body of the fish, a long spear plunged into the water and there was a great commotion until suddenly it was over.)
We loved that river, spending many happy hours there, and from the start I was enchanted by Croghan, later celebrated by James Liddy – although I wasn’t to know this for another decade – in poems like Blue Mountain, and later still, celebrated by myself.
Along with the raspberry-coloured hill of Annagh, it forms the Wicklow-Wexford border in that area, and through the gap between them, the Wicklow Gap, we could see the peak of Lugnaquilla on a clear day.
We started well. The farm had come with two fields of wheat, and we harvested a bumper crop with a dried combined harvester. It was the first time, in 1961, that I had seen such a splendid monster, which cut, threshed and bagged the wheat as it moved relentlessly on, crewed by only three men, whereas we had been used to over 30 men at threshings.
Later that year, two beautiful cows, bursting with milk, were purchased, along with a flock of hens. The following spring, the fields were re-sown with wheat, but in August there was a storm, and much of the crop was flattened. What still stood was cut by a binder.
The rest was cut laboriously by scythe, picked laboriously by hand and bound into sheaves. The sheaves were stood three or four together as stooks to dry.
Later thee were built into stacks, for all the world like the classical African hut, before eventually being brought to the haggard and a threshing machine. But the loss was great.
Then the hens failed and a cow died. Something happened in the other cow’s udder. It took a long time to recover from these disasters.
School was in Monaseed, a few miles from Hollyfort. At first we walked, as we had done to Screen; then there was a school bus, or more accurately a Cummer van which we crammed into, driven by Johnny Connell of Annagh, who brought ourselves, the Flynns, the Greenes, the Behans, Margaret O’Brien. The school was ruled by a wonderful Clareman called Chris Clancy, who kept discipline with a small rod fashioned from a local bush.
A lean, energetic man, some of his pupils towered over him, and when asked to extend their hands for punishment, lift them far above his reach, at which point he could no longer contain his laughter. To this day, I don’t know why he laughed so much when I knew the word ‘pedigree’.
Perhaps he had led us in prayers for peace during the Cuban Crisis, as I recall seeing a fire on a hill near Monaseed after school and thinking it was the beginning of the end of the world.
We were all very frightened. President Kennedy meant a lot to us. We had seen him on television, and his helicopter had flown over our house, en route to his ancestral home in New Ross.
When I heard Charles Mitchell announce on Radio Éireann that he was shot, I fell back into our wooden armchair with shock and grief.
Father Regan, who had a dazzling bungalow (one of the first), and drove a modest but zippy Prinz, combined with Mr Clancy to fashion the school Gaelic football and hurling teams, of which my brother John and I were members – John went on to play minor football for Wexford – and once, we went to the county sports championship (we never thought of it as ‘athletics’) in Wexford town.
As a team we didn’t do well, more from inexperience than lack of ability, but if memory serves me right, I came fourth in the high jump, despite a fiveinch surgical raise on my right boot.
In football, I remember we fielded an excellent team one brilliantly fine evening in Gorey against Kilenerin, our old rivals. It was a fine if low-scoring match, which I think we lost by the narrowest of margins.
About that time, Father Regan had generated a strong interest in drama in his half-parish. Monaseed had gone to the All Ireland Drama Festival in Athlone, its set painted by a young Gorey artist called Paul Funge.
On at least two occasions, Mr Clancy tutored us in a play – into which I’m afraid I injected some slapstick – and some sketches and songs which we performed in the Miles Byrne Hall.
The voice of the bass Martin Dempsey adorned one of those evenings, and I seem to recall that the audience liked my rendering of Thady Quill.
One of the sketches concerned 1798, and we dramatised the song The Croppy Boy. In rehearsals of I’ ll Tell Me Ma, one girl sang ‘She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the belly of Belfast city,’ to the hilarity of everyone and the mortification of herself.
The hall was packed; mammmies and daddies, grandads and grannies, great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, as Father Regan put it to us backstage, with a broad grin.
Perhaps it was the celebration of a new generation which this time around might have something to stay for.
Mr Tuohy, as he was known to us, was there around that time. He had a scooter initially, and later, when he had been to and returned from a stint in Askamore, my brother Peter remembers him driving a small car, packed with half a school team as Father Regan’s Prinz had been before it. He bought the boys treats after a match.
At home, life was by times tough and tranquil. The harder my parents worked – and I don’t think they were unique in this – the less money there
seemed to be. We were expected to work hard too, as were any country children.
Winters were particularly difficult and often miserable, rising in the wet or freezing dark to claw at a pit of turnips to feed the cows, before milking them and getting the cooled milk to the road for Jim Kavanagh of Monaseed to collect to bring to Inch Creamery on a trailer drawn by his grey Ferguson tractor, before Peter, John and myself set out to school. I suppose this and other labours made us strong.
At that time we still had an open fire and insulation was unheard of in the old, thick-walled farmhouse. There were few televisions in the countryside and old men came on visits to gossip and tell stories, hogging whatever heat came from the fire; but they were welcome as they passed the time and were often amusing,
Once, a man called Purcell had a stiff leg which he claimed he had injured while trying to set fire to the barracks in Hollyfort during the War of Independence. He said de Valera would be at his funeral and there would be a tricolour on his coffin.
Purcell told us of the infamous Hunger Gowan of Mount Nebo, just beyond Hollyfort on the Gorey road, who tortured and killed captured rebels in 1798 and was greatly feared. Getting drunk in Gorey, he made an oath: ‘To Hell or the Mount’.
Of course, according to the story, his horse reared at the bridge below the Mount and Gowan broke his neck. Early in the 20th century the Mount became Mount St Benedict, a Benedictine school under one Father Sweetman, who among other enterprises grew tobacco and sheltered Republicans on the run.
Seán McBride was one of several national figures educated there. Purcell claimed the Hunter was reincarnated as a swan on the lake, gazing in hatred at the Benedictine, who, along with his order would soon leave the Mount in their turn, to be replaced by Frank D’Arcy and his family.
The roof of Purcell’s once-solid farmhouse collapsed, and he lived in one room which was cluttered and dirty beyond description. Ill and obviously in pain from the open sores on his legs, pride eventually gave way to reality, allowing his relatives to place him in Dr Furlong’s Nursing Home in Wexford town, where he died.
De Valera was not present at his funeral, but he had asked my mother to promise there would be a tricolour on his coffin, and the Protestant undertaker respected that wish.
My mother bypassed Hollyfort and went to Annagh Post Office, run by Sarah Donohue, to collect her family allowance. Donohues had bored a well, boring 60 feet through rock, and installed a waterpump for us.
The well had been found by their hired diviner who carried a forked sally rod. As he stood over where the water was hidden 60 feet below, the rod came alive in his hands and pointed downwards.
An enduring friendship with the Donohues began after that, and we spent many happy evenings in their house. Mick was my age and he died in an accident on my 18th birthday.
Tapped water and flush toilets are taken for granted now, but they weren’t common in the countryside until the early to mid-sixties. Donohues did much to change that.
Sometimes I used to visit on my own, walking into Flynns, O’Briens, Greenes, Brennans, O’Neills, Buttles, D’Eaths, Bolgers, Fortunes, Behans, O’Tooles, Nobletts, Websters unannounced.
Pat Mordaunt came to visit us, telling us innocent tales, and like Purcell’s, his long legs blocked the fire. Billy Tomkins, who lived with his wife just across the Bann from us in a two-roomed cottage, was also a regular visitor – his legs were short.
His wife kept guinea-hens and a dog which bared its teeth at visitors. Billy said he had drunk his way through three farms. He said that farming was ‘the last car on the road’, and maybe he was right. We visited them whenever we could, and they spoiled us with tea and cakes.
Like Billy and his wife, several of our near neighbours and friends, such as the Websters and Nobletts, were Protestant, and one of the reasons the Northern divide puzzles me so much is that we never gave a thought to our religious difference.
Johnny Noblett, since dead, was my father’s best friend, and the Nobletts and their relations, the Hollingsworth, were loved in our house for their gaiety. The Harvest Festival dance, held in the old Church of Ireland school above Hollyfort, was probably the highlight of the year, and I have vivid memories of a merry Johnny dancing my mother around the floor with glee and abandon.
One or twice a week, my brothers and I crossed the footstick over the river and made our way through the bog to Donnelly’s to watch Bat Masterson or the Dick Powell Theatre. Even the youngest Donnelly was an adult then, but we were always welcome and spoiled.
It was tricky getting back across the bog in the dark, even though we knew it well. Every so often, the bog gas will o’the wisp would flare and distract us.
It was, of course, television which brought an end to casual visiting. It also ended the era of the travelling shows; Shakespeare, melodrama; talent contest; farce and variety – it was all grist to their mill, often on the same night.
Our mother warned us not to enter the talent contest, but around that time, Peter, John and myself were made about a trip from Dublin called The Bachelors, and had learned their songs in three part harmony, so it was impossible to resist.
What we didn’t know was that a Tannoy broadcast our lusty versions all over the locality, and to make matters worse, we won – or I won on a raffle ticket – an outsize ladies’ knickers. We also won a medal for our singing. Two of the actors, Eddie and Breda Clyne, settled in Hollyfort when their strolling players days were over.
ONE DAY when I was 14 and I was thinning turnips, my father asked me if I thought I’d be able for a series of operations to even the length of my legs. I said I would, and so began several long periods in Cappagh Hospital outside Finglas in Dublin, where, among other privileges, I was taught by the writer Eoghan Ó Tuairisc for a time, and met Wexford-born Paddy Doyle, who would later become internationally known as the author of The God Squad.
My old school mate from Monaseed, Tom Loughlin, was a patient in the same ward when he broke his leg so it was a Wexford stronghold for a while.
I spent several periods there through my teens, The second time I came home, in 1966, after a year in Cappagh, although I was shorter because of surgery, our kitchen seemed smaller than I remembered, perhaps because my brothers had grown so much.
I had learned three chords on the guitar, a skill I duly passed onto John and Peter, both of whom quickly surpassed me to become proficient players. It was the time of the ballad boom, and my brothers and I sang and played at local venues and further afield.
I could never remember the words, and had to stand at an angle to John – who had a prodigious memory for songs – and read his lips, a feat which produced an interesting harmony. Peter would later play in bands on a semi-professional basis, and John had the talent to do so, but my main interest, which I had begun in Cappagh, was in writing songs, which I composed badly with great east.
A boy of my age, Pat Mordaunt from Ballintlea, had visions of managing us to fame and fortune, and as his parents were both dead, we weren’t bothering anyone as we rehearsed for many hours into a tape recorder in his house. We sent a tape to Pye records, and the top man there liked one of my songs, but the tape was lost and that was the end of it.
Then one night on Radio Éireann, I heard a poetry programme which invited submissions. I immediately abandoned my songwriting career and wrote a purple, Freudian piece which thankfully was never broadcast and does not survive – I hope. I was most prolific, and fell victim to an English variety press which published some poems about Hollyfort, one an adolescent piece of angst called ‘The Despicable Village’ (obviously written during prolonged bad weather) which unfortunately some of my friends and neighbours still remember, and can even quote.
Seán Dwyer of the Guardian got wind of it and brought a photographer to our house, so my fame as a poet was sealed.
By now I was attending Gorey CBS Secondary, a small school ill-equipped in terms of facilities for the era of free education which had just dawned. In Cappagh, I had seen Minister Donnacha O’Malley stride through the wards to inform himself of the needs of long-term patients there.
I had no idea I would be a beneficiary of his vision, even if, as usual, the ideal did not match the reality. Nevertheless, when my brother John started secondary school he cycled to Gorey and had fees to pay. By the time I started, a few years late because of hospitalisation, we went by bus, we paid no fees and a few of our books, at least, were free.
Patrick Kavanagh was on the new syllabus, so I discovered that I wasn’t the only farmer’s son to have written about the ordinary life of the countryside. His father, too, had played the melodeon. Before discovering Kavanagh’s poetry, verse was a pastime, but he made me realise how much it meant to me, although it would be years before I tried to write it seriously.
We now had a phone, Hollyfort 42, and a TV, and if we were still milking cows by hand before we went to school and when we came home, times were happier, though it was still a hard slog.
In summer we had raspberries and strawberries, and van loads of teenagers from the town and district joined the neighbouring women and children to pick up the crop. They were paid by the pound.
After a day in the fields, we hitched the seven miles to Courtown to dance in the Tara Ballroom. Then we hitched back again, walking most of the way, as the sun was rising on another hard day’s work.
In 1972, my sister Karina was born. The previous year my brothers and I had gone to Dublin to live, after which my parents installed a milking machine and a tanker arrived to collect the milk for Inch Creamery. The EEC was upon us and we were struggling with the overnight inflations brought about by the change to decimal coinage.
The pint, which I had recently taken to with relish, was 19 new pence. On a visit home, my father told me that as none of us wanted to inherit the farm, he was no point in slaving his life away. It was a sad moment which was as inevitable as it was unexpected.
The farm was sold to the Donnelly brothers, Billy and Tim, who had been so kind to us as children, and my parents and sister moved to southeast of Gorey to a townland called Banogue, where they built a bungalow called after a Maori god, Rangitiki, and grew several acres of raspberries. In 1987, they moved to Kildare to be near their grandchildren, and so ended a 31-year sojourn on Wexford soil.
Since my family left, it’s difficult to get to Wexford very often. But you can’t walk away from your past. I visit whenever I can, usually staying with Mick Considine and his wife Mary Manley, who now live in Arklow, or Sean and Kay Halford in Gorey.
Both Mick and Sean often drive me through the north Wexford countryside which haunts our imagination – Croghan and White Heaps, Annagh, Cummer, Ballyellis, Monaseed and back to Hollyfort. I have now published three novels, and all of these places feature in at least one of them, and some of these feature in them all.
When I published my last book of poems, The Year of the Knife, in 1991, Kay Halford organised a special ‘Gorey Area Launch’, or GAL for short, in Barry Molumby’s Gallery in the Orchard, now unfortunately demolished.
My neighbours and friends from Hollyfort, Monaseed, Craanford, Gorey, Coolgreaney, Carnew, Enniscorthy, Ferns, Arklow and further afield packed to the gallery.
My family returned for the evening. A few from Hollyfort were seen to nudge each other when Hollyfort or Annagh or Croghan was mentioned in a poem. I was giving back to them when they had given to me and I was deeply moved.
I WROTE AN ADOLESCENT PIECE OF ANGST, ‘THE DESPICABLE VILLAGE’. IT IS REMEMBERED BY SOME