The Village (12 page)

T
HE TIME HAD
come to open a new chapter in village shopping and close an old chapter in our lives. The traditional village shop was no longer able to meet the needs of our changing society. With our entry into the EEC the Irish economy had been boosted and land prices and wages had taken a jump. There was more money and confidence in circulation and people’s tastes were becoming more sophisticated. Increasing specialisation in land management meant that many farmers no longer found it viable to grow their own potatoes and vegetables or to keep their own hens. The days of the farmers killing their own pigs and growing their own cabbage to boil with the bacon were fast disappearing. Instead of producing for themselves they now joined the shopping queues.

The villagers had given up tilling their own ground and the hen-houses disappeared from the bottoms of gardens. Mass-production in specialised units made vegetables cheaper to buy than to grow. People no longer baked their own bread, and a huge selection of conveyor-belt bread and cakes came on the market. Instant and frozen foods began to take over from the slower traditional methods of cooking. There was more money available for luxuries and a bigger supply and display of well-packaged goods created needs we never knew we had. Because customers now paid cash at the check-out, instead of the old system where customers kept an account, goods could be sold
cheaper, which made for more satisfied customers.

People were leaving the village to shop in the new supermarkets in Cork so the time had come, we felt, to provide one at home. To do this would require a huge financial investment. Though we had recovered from our previous development we did not have anything like the resources needed to turn a small village shop into a large supermarket, with all the additional shelving and refrigeration that was necessary. When we had embarked on our first major bout of construction we had run right up against a credit squeeze at the banks; now, incredibly, the same thing happened again.

We went to the bank manager cap in hand and, after gloomy forecasts about how impossible it was to get loans, he promised to apply to head office and let us know the response in due course.

As soon as the baby was sleeping through the night and winter had disappeared over the horizon, we started work on the new supermarket. We had moved by now into the corner house, so we were finally ensconced under one roof. The corner house was no longer a guest-house though some of it was still in flats. As a home it was large and rambling, so everybody had more space – which was a big bonus when small boys were growing into leggy teenagers.

Taking down the old house was sad in many ways and stripping rooms where generations of a family had lived was a strange experience. Little family treasures materially worthless but sentimentally valuable could not be thrown away, and yet we could not keep everything. The walls that Aunty Peg and I had painted a rich red in preparation for Jacky’s home-coming; the small room in which he had slept when he could not climb the stairs; the fireplace beside which our first-born had taken his first step – these were all going. We were pulling down corners which stored many memories, but the one I regretted most
was Jacky’s rose garden where his rambling roses draped over wooden fences. It was the price that had to be paid for survival: the days of the small village shop were gone. But one tree that was in a very vulnerable position close to the back wall of the new building survived.

Years previously Jacky and I had looked down at that little holly tree and he had said, “In time to come, Alice, ye will extend back here because ye will have to. I will be gone then, but try to save this tree. It takes a holly tree a long time to grow, and it would be good if it survived.”

By the time we extended the tree had grown above my head and I was determined that it would survive. When Tony, who was levelling the site, manoeuvred his bulldozer around the tall holly he said to me in frustration. “Missus, this would be a lot easier but for your bloody tree!” But I remembered Jacky’s words and dug my heels in. A few years afterwards I had to dig them in again when a fussy hygiene inspector decided that the tree was too close to the door of the butchery department. He said to me, “I think that tree should go.” I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Over my dead body.”

During the months that it took to build the supermarket I sometimes thought that my dead body would be found in the foundations. But Gabriel had always been one to tackle large obstacles with single-minded determination, and we had learned a lot from our previous experience. We now knew that nobody delivered when they said they would and that if you thought that something was going to cost one hundred pounds it finished up costing two hundred and fifty. Luckily our old friends Jerry and Davey were back with us, and because they were great workers the walls rose around us as fast as if we had had twice the workforce. In front of a thick plastic sheet the old shop still functioned in a state of dusty chaos. Gabriel divided his energies between both departments and the children
helped after school and at weekends. They mixed concrete, drew blocks and measured lengths of timber under Jerry’s fast and impatient directions. It was a case of all hands on deck: even the baby sat in her pram and watched with interest.

Into the midst of all this muddy progress the bank dropped a bombshell. No loan. By then we had no back wall to the old shop and the roof had been taken off. It became my job to keep the bank manager quiet. I had my work cut out for me! One day as I sat outside his office, waiting to get a roasting about the condition of our account, I took out my notebook and wrote:

Is there anything more intimidating than sitting on a hard chair outside a bank manager’s office, waiting to be interrogated as to why your account is overdrawn? It is a warm, sunny Thursday morning and it should be a bright, happy day full of freedom. Instead I sit here bound by financial fetters. They are squeezing the relaxation and bounce out of me. Do I lack the confidence to see over these constricting pounds? Because this problem will pass. Money, or rather the lack of it, should not in anyone’s world be capable of such a belittling effect. Why do we have such financial boundaries in our world? Boundaries that tower above us, threatening to bury or at least to choke us with the dust that rises when they collapse. If it never happens we will have suffered in dread expectancy. Could it be …

And so I ended my speculation because the bank manager’s door opened. That note was a page from a chapter in my life when the bank manager was a regular correspondent and Saturdays and Sundays were days of peace because he could not ring. But sometimes you don’t realise how well-off you are until things get worse. A few weeks later the tax man decided to brighten up our lives with a demand for back tax from Jacky’s time, for an amount that, had he been alive, would certainly have given him a heart-attack.

We sat in a hollow surrounded by financial hills. If we sat too
long and thought about them they would bury us. All we could do was to keep our sights set on our goal, and know that one day we would rise above the problem. So began a long, slow financial climb.

Apart from the financial pressure it was a challenging, exciting time and it had its lighter moments. When the wall behind the post office had to be taken down we put everything pertaining to the post office counter into a large cardboard box. A sprightly, titled Englishman who lived locally came in and enquired in his beautiful accent, “I say, where is the post office gone?” I pointed to the cardboard box. “Well, my dear,” he said, peering into the box, “we have certainly got a post office that’s different. The Royal Mail never saw the likes of this!”

Gradually out of this confusion came order. The ceramic tile floor was laid, dangling electric wires were tidied up, refrigeration was installed and shelves were stacked with goods. At six o’ clock on the night before our official opening just one thing was missing: we had no front door and no windows. We promised to be the first supermarket in Ireland to be opened without a front door! They should have been fitted the previous week – “We’ll be there tomorrow,” the suppliers had promised faithfully – but now we had four holes in the wall and not a pane of glass to cover them. We were stocking shelves and time was ticking away, but still no windows and doors came. I made frantic phone calls, spitting fire and thunder. Finally at 10 p.m. they arrived. At 3 a.m. the fitters left. The windows were in, the front doors were swinging, but all were in need of a good cleaning. As I washed the windows at about four o’clock on a mellow October morning a lone motorist drove past. He slowed to a halt and reversed back. He had a good look at me, blessed himself, and drove away.

The official opening was performed by Jacky’s sister, Molly. She was the link between the old and the new because she
had been born in the original house where the supermarket now stood. All the village people gathered around the door, and the tiredness and tensions fell away from us as we stood there surrounded by our friends and neighbours who were all so pleased for us. We drank champagne and a wonderful feeling of euphoria stole over us. The supermarket was blessed by Fr Seamus. When he requested holy water I ran into the kitchen knowing that after the confusion of the previous months I would not be able to find any. I turned on the tap, filled a bottle, shook the salt-cellar into it and on my way back along the corridor asked the Lord to make it holy.

One final thing worried us. We did not want our supermarket to lose completely the atmosphere of the old village shop and become impersonally efficient. If this happened we would lose some of the flavour of our village life. But the village style filled the new surroundings just as it had the old. People chatted along the aisles and called greetings to their friends. In a small place, shopping was more than the acquiring of goods; it was an opportunity to meet the neighbours. These people’s personalities did not give much chance for standardisation to take hold. Some of the customers were wonderful company. One day I was chatting with a local man and he asked me where he could find the tea. “Stay where you are,” I said helpfully, “and I’ll get it for you. What kind do you want – Barry’s?”

“For God’s sake,” he answered, “you don’t expect me to drink Coalition tea!” Even tea could have a political flavour. Other goods were flavoured, too, by the accent people gave them. At the time we had in the butchery department cartons containing two small chickens each. A man who lived up the street came to buy a pair of these chickens but discovered there was only one left in the carton. He pointed at the lone chicken: “Where is the other little hoor gone?” he demanded.

So we settled down to run the supermarket and even though
the work was hard the customers made it interesting. We always appreciated the people who shopped with us and but for them another facet of village life would have died out. Some of the other shops in the village were owned by old people and remained unchanged, but when the owners died they closed down. One of these was the little sweet shop up the hill where Ellie and Nonie lived.

O
LD
M
RS
M
C
C
ARTHY
had been the chapel woman all her life, and when she died her daughter Nonie took over, regarding it as a family inheritance rather than a job. Nonie carried around in her head the history of the graveyard which surrounded the church. She knew who was buried in every corner, even those who had left no address or who lay beneath the small rock-like marking stones without inscriptions. These marking stones were the forerunner of headstones; people knew their family graves by measuring the distance of these rocks from each other, from the nearby church, or even from the nearest ditch.

She was a soft-spoken, stooped little lady who arranged weddings, funerals and christenings, and she was a reference book on all church events past and present. She did everything but say Mass and hear confessions – though with her in-depth knowledge of the parish she probably had a good idea of what went on in the confessionals as well. She did the church laundry and counted the collections. The village shops and pubs came to her for change, so the brown pennies collected on Sunday often found their way back during the following week to their original owners.

To supplement her income she looked after the dispensary, and she had a little sweet shop simply called “Nonie’s”, which was so small that it could be filled by just one customer. The
children on their way up and down to school popped in and out to her clutching their pennies. The cream-coloured counter topped with a piece of frayed brown lino was very high, and Nonie’s customers were very small, so she recognised them all by the tops of their heads. To the left of her slatted front door was one small window packed with jars and flat boxes of all kinds of sweets. The children pressed their faces against the glass while making their selections, their heads blocking the light and darkening the little shop. They squeezed inside and bartered at the counter, then left with strings of Black Jack hanging from their jaws and sticks of Peggy’s Leg clenched between their teeth like long white cigars. They bought hard penny-bars and fists of Cleeves toffees that gave hours of sticky sucking for one penny.

As she grew older Nonie became crippled with arthritis. Her older sister Ellie came back to look after her and to take over all her duties. But while small, frail Nonie seemed bowed beneath the weight of her responsibilities, Ellie was a big woman who took everything in her stride. Nonie regarded her church work as an inherited honour while to Ellie it was something that circumstances had thrust upon her. Nothing excited her. Christenings, funerals, weddings, parish priests and bishops all blew across her path, but she continued on her original course with calm determination.

As the years went by many new houses were built around the parish. Church and dispensary activity increased, making Ellie’s job busier. Nonie’s condition deteriorated so that she ended up in a wheelchair, but still Ellie carried on cheerfully. Though over eighty years of age she looked far younger, having about her none of the usual frailties of old age. She was tall, solid and upright, and had a pleasant, broad face crowned with a fine head of brown curly hair streaked with grey. The only thing to mark the passage of time was that she was very deaf, but
even this you would be totally unaware of if you did not know her well. She had the happy knack of guiding the conversation along her own lines; if you said something to her she nodded smilingly, and you never quite knew if she had heard you or not. She said very little but her expressions and nods were comments in themselves, and Ellie was the only person I ever knew who could carry on a conversation without opening her mouth. When something annoyed her, though, she was very forthright in her opinions. Though she was not one to display her emotions easily, her broad face glowed when the church was alive with flowers for a wedding. She loved fresh flowers, and at a funeral she would sigh at the sight of plastic wreaths.

She was aware of everything that went on in the village, but kept her own counsel. She lined up the children for First Holy Communion and kept the altar boys in their place. When the hearse came up the hill bringing a parishioner to the church, she stood in the front porch like a one-woman guard of honour and her altar boys stood ready to toll the bell. There was about her an absolute regularity and dependability. Every morning she went to open the church for early morning Mass. She never rushed but walked along at an even pace. After Mass she opened the sweet shop for the children on their way to school and later came down the hill to open the dispensary for the doctor. In between these trips she found time to look after Nonie.

She cared for the ailing Nonie with kindness but with great firmness. Nonie’s mind was inclined to wander but Ellie jerked her back to reality. Some evenings Nonie would have the table set for three when Ellie came in, and Ellie would demand: “Who’s that extra place for?”

“That’s for Jack,” Nonie would answer.

“For God’s sake,” Ellie would declare in exasperation, “Jack is above in the graveyard for the last twenty years: he’s hardly going to come down for his tea!”

Ellie’s firmness held Nonie in the real world for years when she might have slipped into confusion. Ellie was not one to pay lip-service to her duties but carried them out unswervingly because in her world life had its responsibilities and you looked after your own. Though advanced in years she carried a workload that would have exhausted a far younger woman. When I remarked to her on her amazing stamina she smiled in amusement and said matter-of-factly, “One day I will drop down stone cold dead, and that will be that.”

Fr Seamus had great respect for her, and of all the priests that she had worked with he was her favourite. Not, of course, that she ever said so; indeed she treated him like a wayward son. Once when he had arrived back from holidays she said to me: “He’s back now but I’m not going to pretend that he is by asking him if he enjoyed his holiday, because he did not think it worth his while to tell me that he was going.” He had told her all right, but she had not heard him.

From the time she took over the duties of chapel woman she never missed a morning opening the church on time. But one morning she was not there, and we knew that something had to be very wrong. She had got a very bad pain in her leg during the night and Fr Seamus had taken her into hospital. Her departure caused repercussions around the village. There was nobody to open the dispensary, the children were surprised to find their sweet shop closed, Nonie had no one to care for her and the parish was without someone to keep track of all the comings and goings to do with the church.

The doctor procured a bed for Nonie in the nearby cottage hospital until Ellie was back in circulation again. Two of the neighbours tidied the sisters’ house in preparation for their return. Fr Seamus had gone to see Ellie a few times that day and reported great progress, but later that night when he went in to see her she died quite suddenly. Because he had great affection
for the stalwart old lady who had soldiered with him for so many years, the Mass he said for her the following morning was a celebration of love and the church was filled with her presence. She and her family had been one of the mainstays of village life for many years, and with her going the door of the little sweet shop closed for good. The following day when we laid her to rest in her family plot behind the church, one of the wreaths placed there by her old friend Mrs Hawkins, who prayed in the other church in the village, bore a fitting epitaph for Ellie: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” Shortly afterwards Nonie died too. The tradition of the dedicated chapel woman who regarded her work as a vocation rather than a job had come to an end.