Making a show of yourself

To understand the Irish way of life it is necessary to know what ‘making a show of yourself’ means. I have been asked countless times why we Irish appear so reticent in the ‘chapel’ and so exuberant at a football match or in the pub following a few drinks. The fact that we do not ‘celebrate’ when we attend liturgies appears out of character to those who are looking on at us as cultural outsiders. Part of the explanation is our national horror of ‘making a show of ourselves’.

It has been said that the big sin of native Gaelic culture was to put your head over the social parapet. An immediate cry of ‘Who does he think he is?’ would inevitably go up. It is an attitude that has rooted itself in our way of life; that is hard-wired into each of us who is culturally assembled in Ireland. Instead of admiring the volunteer who agrees to be spokesperson for the group or encouraging shy individuals to take their place or have their say at the communal meeting, the cultural consensus is to round on them with mockery, satire and verbal fire. ‘Slagging the life out of them’ is the contemporary name of the sport and ‘having a hard neck’ is the only legitimate defence.

‘Would ye look at yer man? He’s in everything but the crib’. The foolhardy person who ventures into public view generally knows the social price that he or she may pay. Another generation used to say “He is in everything but the Women’s Sodality” and if the boot or shoe was on a feminine foot; “She is in everything but the Men’s Confraternity”. Even venturing a seat further up the chapel could leave someone open to this kind of ridicule. As the changes in the liturgy took hold following the Second Vatican Council and lay-people began to read the Lesson or to distribute Communion at Mass, the floodgates were opened for those who wished to take a shot at the brave souls who risked the history of their past generations being hung out to dry. The ‘back of the chapel’ attitude dies hard.

‘He is making a holy show of himself’ can mean many things, from indulging in mildly embarrassing behaviour to the downright scandalous. It is only a little less serious than ‘making a show of all of us’. This latter term, ‘all of us’ generally means the family, whose honour and public reputation is thought to be in danger from the public ‘show’ that is being exhibited. Any kind of behaviour that does not conform to the expectations of the family and the village can be construed as ‘making a show’. Making an ‘eejit’ of yourself moves the action up the scale of offensiveness and implies gross stupidity, whether of a permanent or passing kind.

In Italy, ‘making a show’ is the name of the social game. The Italian idea of ‘La Bella Figura’ involves drawing positive attention to oneself by ‘cutting a dash’ as an exact English person might say. The Nigerians whom we now encounter daily in Ireland generally have no problems with ‘making a show’ of themselves either. The manner and flamboyance of their Sunday dress calls unapologetic attention to themselves and they have no problem in taking the front seats at a public event; participating fully in the life of a group or giving full and vigorous expression to their emotions in public.

There is a deep fear in the Irish psyche of ‘losing the run of yourself’. This usually means getting over-emotional or losing control of oneself. It is a trait we share with our nearest neighbours to the East. There is often a certain stiffness to our physical expressions. Africans complain that we come to church and sit like un-moving statues. Even when our physical movements are expressed stylistically, in Irish dance for example, they retain a certain stiffness or rigidity. We are not given to extravagant physical gestures like kissing both cheeks of an acquaintance that we have unexpectedly but happily met in a public square. The Irish person who tries to introduce such Continental habits in the village will find that the recipients of his greetings will feel ‘mortified’; struck socially dead by the antics of someone who is, ‘making a total show of themselves’.

Is it any wonder that poor Brian Cowan tried to shield his face from public view when the tactile Monsieur Sarkozy held his hand tenderly in public recently and then kissed Ireland’s honour not once but twice, on both substantial cheeks, in full view of the media and of the whole mortified country?

The dream lives on

As the World Youth Festival in Australia unfolded recently, the images of exuberant young people gathering around the aged but still dynamic Pope Benedict XVI inevitably reminded me of my own days of youth and the gathering that took place in Galway in 1979 during the visit to Ireland of the Pope’s immediate predecessor. The world has changed greatly in the intervening time and the once youthful participants in the Galway rally at Ballybrit Racecourse are now middle-aged or thereabouts. The adult organisers and leaders of the event are mostly dead by now and another generation has taken the place of those youth who sheltered under tarpaulins that misty, damp September morning as they waited for the famous red helicopter to arrive.

Something else has died in the meantime too. The idealism and the innocence that marks adolescence are often casualties of the process of growing up and learning the art of compromise. The discovery that parents and parent-figures are not perfect comes painfully but inevitably. We live with a God who, according to the poet Patrick Kavanagh, ‘delights in disillusionment’. Almost all of the institutions that we took for granted in our youth have taken a battering in the intervening years. Perhaps most painful of all has been the steady erosion of self-sacrificing idealism and the heroism of gesture that often went with it.

There was an increase in students coming forward to study for the priesthood immediately following the Pope’s visit. I was one of those who were said to have ‘followed the Pope into Maynooth’. When I entered there in September 1980, memories of the Galway Visit were especially fresh. ‘Young people of Ireland; I love you’ was regularly intoned, imitating the Pope’s Slavic accent. The Central European accent was then very foreign to our ears. Jokers imitated the Pope’s dramatic gesture of prostrating and kissing the soil as he entered a new country. My own journey into vocation and into Maynooth was only indirectly because of the visit, yet perhaps it was providential.

On my way home from Galway with my friend, we stopped to eat and rest a little. I bought a daily paper and discovered that the Parish Priest in my own parish had died. He was one of the old-style parish priests; gentle enough in presentation but infallible in pronouncement. I knew him through my aunt who kept house for him and he had challenged me a few times to consider priesthood. In the course of attending his funeral and thinking on his life, I arrived by a circuitous route back to my adolescent dream of becoming a priest. Following a few interviews and almost one year of secrecy and subterfuge later, I was packing my bags for the seminary.

Pádraig Pearse, in a poem called ‘The Fool,’ wrote movingly of his sense of destiny and of vocation. He did not use the word ‘vocation’ but he describes the high idealism and the challenge of the revolutionary or the vocationer who stakes his or her life on ‘impossible’ dreams. He wrote: ‘I have squandered the splendid years that the Lord God gave to my youth / In attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil… I have squandered the splendid years / Lord, if I had the years I would squander them over again, / Aye, fling them from me!’

Pearse foresaw the criticism that idealism attracts from cynics and from the compromised. He knew that a certain reckless foolishness is often part of the heroic gesture. The poem continues, “The lawyers have sat in council, the men with the keen, long faces, / And said, ‘This man is a fool,’ and others have said, ‘He blasphemeth;’ /

And the wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life / In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things, / To a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold… / O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true? / What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell / In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?”

I watch the Australia-bound pilgrims and the youth of another century, another continent, being powerfully challenged by the words of one whose idealism survived the personal trauma of World War Two and the words of another idealist of the early last century come to mind. Tom Kettle’s particular form of foolishness and idealism led him to opt for participation in World War One. Just days after the birth of his daughter and days before his own death at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he wrote a poem to his, as yet unseen, baby daughter. It includes these lines; ‘So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, /And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor, / Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, / Died not for Flag, nor King, nor Emperor, / But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed, / And for the Secret Scripture of the poor’.

Days of wine and roses

‘The price of a pint is going up again,’ one old codger would announce. ‘So long as it doesn’t get scarce,’ would be the inevitable reply, shot back in a manner suggesting that he was the first one to think up such a witty response. It seemed that people could live with a culture of scarcity so long as it did not involve essentials like alcohol. In recent weeks I find myself cutting out unnecessary trips by car and making the most of each journey. The old culture of scarcity has kicked in again in a conscious way. The motivation for this has been the rising price of a tank-full of petrol for my modest Volkswagen Golf. I’m thrifty by nature and as country people say, I “didn’t lick the pot for that”.

A generation has grown up in a culture of abundance and people are wondering how they might cope if the economic rug is pulled out from under our feet. There is a set of survival skills that have not necessarily been passed on because of the relative plenty of recent decades. There has been an absence of struggle to fulfil the basic aims of life and there is a subsequent lack of satisfaction and of ability to cope in difficult circumstances. One employer told me recently that he cannot find tradesmen who are problem-solvers. Difficulties are passed over to the next person or on to the next level of management rather than tackled and sorted out. This inability or unwillingness to solve problems in the work-place is replicated in the family life of those reared in the culture of abundance, he said. That is why, he reckoned, we have a high suicide rate, especially among young males and an increased rate of relationship and family breakdown. Those who struggle together develop bonds that are not as easily broken.

There is a set of skills and habits that has not been passed on to those reared on abundance. They have also been spared much of the humiliation that sometimes came with the saving and recycling ways of other times. There are very few children or young adults now who have worn hand-me-downs. The days of ‘first up – best dressed’ have long passed. I remember once wearing pre-worn trousers that had been patched at the knee. By the time the hand-down trousers reached me, the patch was somewhere between my knee and my ankle. I needed to eat ‘another bag of flour’ as people used to say, before I stretched enough to ‘let the trousers down’ and bring the patch back to its original position on the knee. The irony of pre-stressed jeans and torn designer trousers on sale in contemporary high-street shops at premium prices does not escape me.

Some of my own frugality was learned from a pair of unmarried aunts whom we often visited or stayed with. They had been ‘in service’ all of their lives and their housekeeping skills were as formidable as the parish priests that they ended up working for. Their meagre ‘carbon footprints’ were more than offset by their recycling skills and ‘green’ credentials. They were eco-warriors before their time. Both were naturally thin and tall and their spare-ness spilled over into diet and food-preparation. They would live ‘on the clippings of tin’ and they could make a filling meal out of meagre food resources. One of them used to knit woolly jumpers for her nephews and when we had ground holes in the elbows, unravelled the cuffs and used the back of the sleeves as handkerchiefs for runny noses, these pullovers would be taken back for washing and unwinding. The woollen thread would then be re-used for making multi-patterned rugs for the floor.

My father had inherited the thrift-gene as well. In our youth he used to make clothes for us on an old Singer sewing machine. Another of our aunts was resident in Donegal at the time and she used to wear heavy tweed coats. She was a cigarette smoker, rarely taking the ‘Gallagher’s untipped’ from her mouth while she worked. This gave her shock of white hair a yellow fringe and the falling ash from her cigarette used to occasionally burn holes in the lapels of her coat. My father would take the spoiled coat, cut out a new pattern and make a smaller school-going coat from it for us. He also cut our hair with hand-held clippers. This was something of an ordeal as no matter how well the clippers were oiled, they nipped the hair on the neck and pulled lumps out when they got clogged. Still, it saved going to the barber shop where more than the clippers were ‘well oiled’. I used this cost-cutting measure later in boarding school when, as students, we trimmed our own hair with razor-blades held firmly behind combs with our thumbs. This was immediately after asking our parents for extra pocket-money for haircuts.

Grandmother, on the other side of the family, was famously thrifty. Her bed-sheets were made from flour-bags and the bed-cover was patch-work quilt. Heavy coats were used as extra bed-covering on winter nights. Every scrap of fabric was used up and made to look beautiful in the process. At night she sewed lace-work to earn extra cash. Even her recreation was productive. Like my paternal aunts, she had no problems with obesity though she was familiar with concepts like ‘hot-dogs’ from her time in America during the ‘roaring twenties’. There was little problem with refuse. Anything edible was re-cycled using inventive ways of presenting old food in new guises. What became inedible for the family was passed on as food for the animals or fowl outside. ‘Wilful waste makes woeful want’ was the ‘mission statement’ in her kitchen.

How horrified they all would be to see people paying a small fortune for plastic bottles full of water or to hear that the price of a tank-full of petrol now costs the price of a small farm. The people of the developing world are similarly scandalised by our decadent lifestyles and aside from any economic shocks that we might be in for, there is the awesome possibility that they will rise up some day and judge us for our greed and for the extraordinary ‘wastefulness’ of our society, as the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, described it recently.

Growing old is not for sissies

‘Aye - There’s raisons for everything and currants for bread’. Another nugget of wisdom was fired after me as I edged out the narrow back-door, while making my rounds of the sick and housebound for the First Friday. I had been trying to reassure my monthly friend that the postponement of her medical appointment might be for good reason. Conversations with the elderly often veer on to medical matters and occasionally the roles and titles of ‘Father’ and ‘Doctor’ get confused. The last time I visited her she had asked me, with typically forthright humour, to say a ‘selfish Mass’ for her. I knew what she meant and I appreciated the spiritual insight that she showed as she knowingly tried to twist God’s arm to her medical advantage.

It was raining heavily and I sprinted from porch to car to porch again, sheltering with hunched shoulders under umbrella or porch-way as I waited for the mobile elderly to make their measured way to their front doors. ‘Old age is not for sissies’ said the late American actress Bette Davis. Her quip has been paraphrased as a best-selling book titled ‘Growing old is not for sissies’. The lady with the quick-fire wisdom whom I had just visited was certainly no ‘sissy’. In fact, I suspect that she thought I was a bit of a ‘sissy’ myself because of the lady’s umbrella that I was unwittingly carrying. ‘I know what to buy you for Christmas’, she had joked earlier. A man’s umbrella was what I lacked, she helpfully told me. There was no time to explain to her that umbrellas and myself part company easily so I recycle them by borrowing brollies that people leave behind in the chapel. I then leave them behind me somewhere else, perpetuating the cycle for as long as the umbrella lasts.

Americans, usually the most politically correct of peoples, have a medical term for those whom we call the housebound. They refer to those who are confined indoors by illness or age as ‘shut-ins’. Whatever about the terminology, the reality for many elderly is an existence that is largely confined to the four walls of their house or even their room. The priest who ministers to his parishioners monthly may be one of a small group of callers who visit them regularly. Being privileged to live at the heart of a parish, a pastoral priest often has the latest in local news, knowing who is ill or in hospital or what is happening locally and we can often help to keep people in touch with the community of which they were once an active part. The monthly chore of visitation is not something that is necessarily looked forward to, yet I always conclude it with a certain satisfaction and sometimes with an all-pervading sense of sadness. The stale odours and the stickiness of the sick-room and the physical flakiness that sometimes goes with neglect can permeate and linger for a while following the final house-call. The thought of what might lie ahead for any of us who are fortunate to reach old age can be disconcerting. More reassuring are their interjections in my favour when they observe me from the pillar of great age and tell me, ‘sure you’re only a gasan’!

There are characters whom I have met over the course of the years of First Friday visitation who remain vivid in my memory. The crotchety, complaining ones, contemptuous of all that is modernity, are generally easily forgotten. It is largely the quirky characters who have retained their sense of humour that live on in the memory. Others remain fixed in my recollection because of their long-suffering or their interesting life-stories. When I linger on the routine that often confines the elderly, it makes me acutely conscious of the freedom that is mine and the independence and opportunities that I enjoy. There is a freedom of an internal kind, though, that the still-active may not have mastered. The process of ageing sometimes frees up the elderly from the inhibitions and the neuroses of adult living. They occasionally reach the stage of ‘not-caring in the right not-caring way’ as Patrick Kavanagh once described it. I suppose it is the lure of attachment to status and success, so common in the generative years, that are shed and the detachment of childhood that is regained in the process of letting go. It is the honesty that comes with this shedding that can be most engaging.

‘And where are ye from?’ an elderly witch-like lady who was on my First Friday list once asked me. She had the sharp features, the long, lank hair, the gap-toothedness and the high-pitched, cracking voice of a broom-stick driver but she was most amusing, kind and informative. ‘Crossmaglen’, I proudly informed her, knowing that there was a certain negative prestige in being able to say that I came from ‘bandit country’. ‘Oh’, she exclaimed as she cackled long and shrill, ‘I suppose you never go home’. That put me in my box, as the saying goes.

Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

Who remembers rainy summers? It’s curious how the tedium of bad-weather summers is forgotten or glossed over as we reminisce on times past. In the Tír na nÓg of our youth the sun was always shining during the holidays. The days were long and warm and filled with all kinds of inventive good fun. What is there to remember about a day spent staring close up at the rain streaming down the misted, narrow windows of childhood? Only traumatic times or the bright fun-filled moments get caught in the fragile web of memory. The ordinary and the tedious; all that is now labelled ‘boring’ by a demanding generation, gets lost in recollection. It is as if it was not worth the space on the disc of our human Random Access Memory.

One of the summer chores of a country child was helping with the savin’ of the hay while the sun shone. All hands, even young hands, were welcome in any harvest-field. Hay-making, of necessity, took place during a period of good weather. It was a delicate and worrisome task for the concerned adults. The hay had to be cut at a carefully chosen time. Weather conditions needed to be warm and breezy with the promise of a few days more of good drying conditions. Turning hay by hand with a pitchfork was a tedious but skilled task. It required a deft and skilful turn of the wrist while wielding a fork-full of heavy, moisture-laden, hay-in-the-making. The narrow line of cut-grass had to be flicked over like a fringe so that the moist layer underneath could be exposed to the sun. In the turning over, a whole new under-world of frogs, worms and insects was exposed. If the hay had been cut mechanically, there was the possibility of finding animal or bird casualties. Corncrakes’ nests were often destroyed by the blades or wheels of reaping machines.

If weather conditions were favourable, the hay was turned a few times, manually or by machine. It was then combed into fluffed-up rows of bristling dry stalks to await the devouring mouth of the baler. In especially bad weather, a farmer might have to abandon his hay until the weather changed or even lose his crop altogether. Some farmers of the old school took up their pitch-forks and whisked the endangered hay into ‘laps’. These small whorls of hay looked like croissants and were deftly shaped so as to run off the rainwater that threatened the crop. Another emergency procedure was to pile the dried hay into small hay-cocks with the added protection of a covering of jute-bags.

The arrival of the baler signalled the beginning of the end of a farmer’s hay-worries. These dangerous gobblers of hay and straw were generally hired, with their driver, from local contractors and were paid by the number of bales excreted. These were ‘stooked’ or stood up in tripod-like formation until they could be loaded on to a flat trailer and transported to a hay-shed. They were fiendishly hard to manage. Bales of the traditional kind were small but dense and heavy. The bands of baling-twine that held them tightly together were taut and hard to grip. The cut-hay was sharp and occasionally prickly as well where a stray thistle had managed to become part of the harvest. The skin immediately below the harvester’s fingernails was inevitably peeled back by the end of a day ‘at the bales’ and the underside of the farmer’s famously sun-tanned arm looked like a pin-cushion, pierced by the spiky ends of the hay-stalks on the side of the bales.

The chance of a ride atop a trailer-load of bales was much prized by holiday-bound children. It was a potentially dangerous trip as bales were an unstable cargo and bale-builders were of mixed ability. Driving a tractor at funereal pace through an open field was often allowed to the young too as all adult hands took to lifting and building the bales on to the trailer. First lessons in driving were often received during hay-making. A feeling of inclusion and of belonging to the adult world was enhanced as all hands helped with the hay-harvest. There was, in the North, an unofficial deadline of having the hay in by ‘The Twelfth’. It was not as if we were going anywhere on the day but rather a parody of the concerns of our more Northern neighbours.

The era of hay-making is all but over. Our mechanised age has speeded up the process and largely beaten the weather-worries as tall, green-cabbed harvesters spit out their large spools of rolled-up hay and silage. It’s a common and ugly sight now to see black polythene balls of fodder, seemingly abandoned by all but the crows, in the corners of our fields. In removing the excess labour, the risk of crop-failure and the awkwardness of the oblong bale, we have also removed the camaraderie of the hay-field, the harvest-sense of satisfaction on the part of the successful farmer and the adventure-fest that often marked the start of the summer holidays for a country child.