The Village (4 page)

J
ACKY WORKED ON
the assumption that most people were perfect, but his wife Peg waited for them to prove their worth. At a young age he had inherited the shop from his father, who had left many debts after him when he died. Jacky worked nights in Ford's factory in Cork and broke stones on the road with the County Council to pay off what was owed. After his sister Molly had married and moved with her husband to open a garage at the end of the village, he married Peg.

When her brother's young wife had died, Peg, because she had a great heart, cared for his children, and when she married Jacky she brought the youngest one, Gabriel, to live with them. He went to the village school and then to secondary school in Cork, cycling the fifteen miles sometimes with a book propped up on the handlebars in front of him, learning his poetry as he went along. The evenings were spent helping in the shop, where he did his lessons and learnt to speak fluent Irish, some from Irish-speaking customers but mostly from a man who came to give classes in the village hall.

Having finished school he helped Jacky and Peg to run the shop, taking over the post office accounts and the all-night telephone service. The post arrived at six in the morning and the telephone service continued around the clock, but though the hours were long Gabriel and Jacky had an amicable sharing arrangement and covered for each other. When the house
next-door to the shop came up for sale they bought it and extended the business.

The long, low shop nestled between the high gables of the houses on either side. Four windows stretched across the top storey and beneath them two square shop windows opened to the street, one filled with placards advertising tea and tobacco and the other incorporating a letter-box and green-edged post office notices. To the right of the windows stood bright red double doors with brass rails running across their glass panes, and a clacking brass latch which yielded only to those who understood it. The village people treated the old latch of the shop door gently, and it opened easily to their knowing touch, but it refused to co-operate with rough handling or the use of brute force. And if a persistent stranger drove open the two sides of the door there was a surprise in store, because a step down to the shop could cause a crash landing for those not familiar with it.

The shop was dark green and had white windows and a concrete floor. Under one window a long timber stool was the seating point for discussions about Gaelic football or hurling, or for simply “passing the time of day” as Jacky was wont to describe a pleasant conversation. On a warm day he put this stool outside the door, and people sat there to wait for the bus or to have a chat.

To the right of the shop a door led into Peg's front room. On the wall beside it hung a glass-fronted press with many shelves. This was the village medicine chest. In here were cures for all ills: if you were feeling liverish then Carter's Little Liver Pills were the lads for you, and if your toes were complaining then they should wear Carnation Corn Caps. Gripe Water kept baby quiet during the day and a Steedman's Powder closed him down for the night. Black bottles of iodine could make injuries look fatal, but it did wonders for men and horses. Another
dual-purpose medicine was Glauber Salts, guaranteed to keep you and your bonhams in good running order. Evil-smelling senna pods tasted so bad that they just had to be good for you, while water-coloured peroxide made open cuts fizz like a frothy pint but could also turn you into a blonde, if that was your fancy. A wide variety of aids including cascara and Epsom salts kept the bowels of the village regular and lubricants like Sloan's Liniment oiled creaking joints into motion.

As well as keeping the body fit, this corner also catered for the mind in the form of a lending library. Or if exercise in the great outdoors was what you needed you could buy a bicycle here, too: a man's model for £4 and a lady's for £3 10s. Beside the bikes was an empty tea-chest which Jacky put outside the door every night so that the newspaper delivery man could throw the Cork Examiner bundles into it in the early hours of a wet morning.

Next to the medicine press was the post office, fronted by a slatted timber counter on top of which stood a black iron scales with heavy pound weights for parcels and beside it a small brass scales with tiny ounces to weigh letters. On a deep ledge halfway up the counter a row of collection boxes pleaded the causes and imparted the blessings of numerous charities. Every week Jacky put a silver half-crown into each box. Many people used this ledge as a seat while reading the paper or waiting for a phone call or for the bus. At the end of the ledge a swinging door which allowed you behind the counter always stood open, except when the village children used it for swinging back and forth. In the post office stood a small switchboard with its little black trap doors and dangling leads. Beside it a miniature window with a lace curtain looked into Peg's sitting-room from where she could keep an eye on proceedings outside.

To the left of Peg's door the stairs of the house arched across the shop and shelves were arranged under it; in the deep recesses
were stacked bags of flour and sugar which had to be weighed out weekly. The sugar came in brown paper sacks and when they were empty Jacky cut them up for wrapping bread and the village children used the paper to cover their schoolbooks. Jacky had a little rostrum in one corner where he stood to do his accounts surrounded by stacks of red and black notebooks, soft covers for the weekly accounts, hard covers for the monthly, and a big brown ledger to cover longer periods. Around him timber shelves were packed with jars, tins and bottles; bananas hung off the low ceiling while boxes of tomatoes, apples and oranges sat on the red formica counter. Beneath the counter a long timber box held crusty basket, wellington and duck loaves. Beside it an old trunk provided storage space for the many differently sized paper bags for the weighing of biscuits, sweets, flour, sugar and tea. Stacked on the floor were cartons of Lux, Persil and Rinso, and timber boxes of red Lifebuoy and yellow Sunlight Soap.

Beside Jacky a door opened into the “oil house” where paraffin oil was piped in from a large drum in the backyard to fill the oil cans of the many customers who used oil heaters, cookers and primuses. On a shelf above the oil-tap was a drum of methylated spirits. Bags of chicken-mash were also stored here and on the shelves above them Jacky laid out his seed potatoes in flat boxes for early sprouting.

The shop was also the bus-stop for people coming and going from Cork and Bandon. While they waited people chatted and exchanged news, keeping an eye on the time on the post office clock which Jacky and Peg had received from the local GAA club, the Valley Rovers, when they married.

W
HILE SWIMMING IN
the impressionable and irresponsible seas of adolescence I dreamt of having seven children. The companionship of our large family had always been a source of great joy to me, so at a very young age the thought grew in the back of my mind, and there became firmly rooted, that it would be nice to have seven children. Side by side with that plan grew another, which was not to get married until the age of thirty-five. The fact that incorporating these two plans into my life would lead to hectic, action-packed middle years never dawned on me.

My heart, however, upset one plan when at the age of twenty Gabriel came along and turned on an extra light in my life. I decided that a fifteen-year wait might dim this light a little, so I did a U-turn on the thirty-five-year plan and got married, with the idea of having seven children still firmly in my head. Family planning and financial strategy never crossed my naïve mind, just rows of little girls in frilly dresses and little boys who behaved beautifully. They were going to be perfect children and I the perfect mother!

When we were children a favourite game we played in the grove behind our home was “shop”, so when I married Gabriel and moved into a real village shop and post office, it was like a transition from playing games to real life. To his aunt and uncle Gabriel was perfection itself, and I soon realised that his Aunty
Peg considered that she had me “on appro”. That was a term used by clothes shops when they allowed you take an item home to get the family’s opinion if you could not make up your mind on the spot about the purchase. One shop-owner told me that she had given a hat out one Saturday night on appro, only to see it perched on the head of a fashionable lady standing up for the gospel at Mass on Sunday and have it returned as unsuitable on the Monday morning. I don’t think that Aunty Peg had such a drastic strategy in mind for me, but I soon learned that to his aunt my husband was no ordinary mortal, and no matter what high ideas I had about myself, in her opinion I needed to live up to those ideas and more.

She was a well-built, confident woman, and was known to all in the village as Aunty Peg. She had lived in the parish all her life, had the measure of most people, and never hesitated to be honest and forthright in her opinion. She loved dogs, clothes and gardening, and was a great cook. Before I got married I was living in a flat where the staple diet was beans on toast, but I often came to her for Sunday lunch and was sustained by it for a week. She enjoyed cooking, and grew most of her own vegetables. Her apple cake was a feast of juicy apples in sweet pastry. She kept her eye on me during the first few months of marriage to make sure that things were up to scratch in the culinary department, and I was very much in awe of her superior knowledge.

Peg’s home was a rabbit-warren of little rooms divided by old walls three foot thick. Steep stairs twisted up into three bedrooms, but because there was no corridor we went through the first two bedrooms to get to the third. Steps led into the middle room where Jacky and Peg slept. So many holy pictures lined the walls that I sometimes thought I should whisper, it felt so like a convent. Peg, however, with her earthy language and liking for dashing hats, bore no resemblance to a reverend mother; Jacky, on the other hand, would have been quite at
home in a monastery. Peg was fond of rose-patterned carpets and lace curtains with pink flowers, so the bedrooms looked like miniature gardens, except that the prevailing smell was of camphor balls.

At the foot of the stairs a stone-floored room acted as a cold room for the shop. An enormous hand-operated bacon-slicer stood in the corner and boxes of Bandon butter kept cool on the floor. In here, too, was the telephone kiosk. Behind this the bathroom was made available to distressed ladies dashing in off the bus.

Peg’s main sitting-room had a roof partly made of glass which filled the room with light. In here Peg had a three-corner pine press and a large mahogany sideboard filled with ware and family mementoes. She was a great hoarder, and dusted and polished her collection of items daily.

To the front was another tiny room with no windows, where on a long leather sofa you could stretch out on a hot day and imagine that you were down a rabbit burrow, it was so cool and silent.

Next to this was the front sitting-room, the reception point for people who were to be impressed but not warmly welcomed into the bosom of the family. I always knew that the people Aunty Peg took in here were getting the grand treatment but not complete acceptance. It was her testing ground. In here was her china cabinet displaying all her best china, and the little room was packed with soft sofas and chairs and its walls covered with family photographs. Sitting in the deep recess of the window, you could watch through the lace curtains the activity on the street.

At the very back of the house, behind her main sitting-room, ran a long, narrow kitchen with low windows looking onto the garden. Outside the window Jacky’s rose garden grew so close it was almost as if the garden reached into the kitchen. Peg
loved flowers and filled the house with vases of them. On the morning of her wedding she had gone out into the garden of the cottage she lived in to pick her wedding bouquet, and she decorated the wedding table with wild flowers.

Gabriel and I shared a large hilly garden with Aunty Peg and Uncle Jacky and I used to love to go out there and watch Uncle Jacky at work. He gloried in his garden, making of it a wonderfully restful retreat, where hens scratched under old apple trees and rambling roses draped over wooden arches. He grew strawberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries and Aunty Peg made jam in a big wide preserving pan, selling the surplus in the shop or giving it away to her friends. There was no obvious plan to his garden: it was full of flowers, shrubs, trees and hidden, sheltered corners. He divided off sections with homemade fencing, some of which had sprouted surprisingly and grown into small trees. Trailing plants darned themselves through chicken wire and climbed up the tree trunks. For Jacky his garden was a love affair with nature, and he always took time to lean on his pike or sit on a stone to have a chat. He enjoyed the shop and loved to give some of what he had grown himself to his customers and neighbours. Aunty Peg took great pride in the garden and usually walked with visiting friends up the sloping pathway to cut flowers for them. The more she liked them the bigger the bunch she gave.

As a couple they were a good combination, because while Jacky was a sunshine person he needed the astuteness of Aunty Peg to survive in business. He bought eggs once from a local woman, and because he considered them too dear he sold them at a loss. Such practices were not conducive to a healthy balance of payments, but most of the time Aunty Peg succeeded in balancing his innocence with realism.

In my brand-new husband I discovered that Aunty Peg had reared a young man who was totally self-sufficient around
the house. Coming from a family where my father had never actually poured out a cup of tea for himself this was a great bonus. We had our own front door opening off the street into a long narrow hallway with a straight stairs on the left. The stairs led directly into the bathroom and to three small bedrooms over the shop. Downstairs, at the end of the hallway, a door opened into the shop and another into the sitting-room. A glass door led from the sitting-room into the kitchen, from which a door led into the garden.

Gabriel was involved in every organisation in the parish, which meant that he was out most nights. I resented this at first because he knew everybody while I knew hardly anyone, but I solved my problem by going into the shop with Jacky where I got to know all his old friends who came in late at night for a chat. There was George who was always full of fun and stories, Paddy from around the corner whose threshold of tolerance was very low, Jimmy who lived across the road, Peter who was a cattle jobber and Jim who lived in a shed. A great sense of companionship had built up between them over the years, and listening to their stories and jokes about this place so full of history gave me the feeling that I, too, could grow to love Innishannon.

Even so, when I entered this new family I walked gently for a few months in case I might do anything to disturb the peace. Despite this Aunty Peg sometimes let me know that I was far from perfect. This set me back a bit at first, until Uncle Jacky pointed out quietly that sometimes Peg had her bad days and then it was simply a case of bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. With this in mind, I learned to keep clear on such occasions. It was a system that had obviously worked well in previous years and it worked for me too. When storm clouds gathered we all kept our heads down until the sky had cleared. Then Peg was her old good-humoured self again and would
bend over backwards to remedy any upset she may have caused.

As we had an all-night telephone service in the post office somebody had to be continuously on call and this often meant jumping out of bed in the middle of the night to connect calls manually. Because there were very few phones in the locality, during the day the post office became a sort of social services depot. We held the farmers’ AI calls for the cattle breeding station, and the AI man collected them on his rounds. Some farmers just stood at the door of the shop and shouted in their calls: “Hereford: first time, noticed this morning.” One retired British colonel who had come to Ireland to farm had his own way of delivering his summonses. In a commanding military voice he would bellow across the counter: “Send out the man with the hard hat.” The first time I got this instruction I stood looking at him in wonder, but Gabriel unscrambled his code and after that I no longer needed an interpreter. An old lady with a man’s black hat pulled down over her ears was far more direct. She would shout at me: “Send out the bull.”

People left messages for the doctor when he was out on calls, and he would ring or come in to check if anyone was looking for him. Once when he had a home birth pending he rang just as his very pregnant patient was doing her shopping, so it was possible to assure him that all was proceeding according to plan. We held calls for Fr Mick the curate when he visited his mother. He was a very cheerful man who put his head in the door and sang out, “Alice, hold my calls”; then he would tell Gabriel, Jacky, and nearly everyone else in the village when he was going so that everybody thought it was someone else’s job to know where he was. If anyone wanted to contact a person in the village or indeed within a radius of a few miles, they rang the post office, and we became the bearers of a variety of tidings, joyful and sorrowful. It was a collection point for all kinds of messages, from day-old chicks to bags of hayseed.

Sunday was the big shopping day. The countrywomen handed in their message bags and shopping lists on their way to church, and Jacky had them packed and ready for collection on their return. The old people came on Friday for their pensions. They had been reared in hard times when there was no such thing as social welfare. Always very exact about their pension books, they had them safely buried in inside pockets or deep handbags. One day, a lady whose face was a portrait of contentment and serenity remarked, “I never had so much money in my life.” Another lady, who had reared a large family and worked hard all her life, burst into tears when she received a lump sum of back money due to her as a result of a delay in the processing of her pension. With tears streaming down her face she said, “What did I ever do to deserve this?” I admired the attitude to life of most of the old people, feeling sad only for the few who had grown bitter with old age.

One old lady fascinated me for a time. Once every week she came in to do her shopping. She handed her shopping bag over the counter to Jacky, and a long conversation commenced which included no mention of her messages. When he had her shopping bag full he wrote her list – which was the same each week – into her book, and she paid him for the previous week, an amount that never varied. It was a ritual the two of them habitually observed. When I asked Jacky why the little book was necessary he smiled and said, “That’s the way we have always done it, and she likes it that way.” His customers were always right simply because he knew them very well and understood them perfectly.

As a newcomer to the village I enjoyed getting to know the people, and the shop and post office was the ideal meeting-place because everybody came through there eventually. But it was the old people who gave me the flavour of the place. They were full of stories and unexpected comments. One gentle lady often
made delicate references to the times “when the gentry were here”. When I asked her one day why they had come here in the first place, she smiled sweetly before informing me acidly, “Because the pickings were good, my dear.” Another old man came in every morning to read the paper but never bought it. After spending about two hours sitting on the long stool inside the window and reading every detail in absolute silence, he then threw the paper on the counter and walked out the door saying, “There isn’t a bit in that bloody paper as usual.” But it was George who lived next door and was blessed with a great sense of fun that I enjoyed best of all.