Wee Hughie

He's gone to school, Wee Hughie,/An' him not four./Sure I saw the fright was in him/When he left the door./But he took a hand o 'Denny/An' a hand o' Dan,/Wi' Joe's owld coat upon him -/Och, the poor wee man!/He cut the quarest figure,/More stout nor thin;/An' trottin' right an' steady/Wi his toes turned in./I watched him to the corner/0' the big turf stack,/An' the more his feet went forrit,/Still his head turned back./He was lookin',/would I call him -/Och me heart was woe-/Sure it's lost I am without him,/But he be to go./I followed to the turnin'/When they passed it by,/God help him, he was cryin',/An', maybe, so was I.

That sentimental old poem by Elizabeth Shane summed up the feelings of many parents and pupils as school began for the first time or resumed after the summer break. Forty-six years ago I made that first journey to school on the day of my fourth birthday. Primary School was a small, two-teacher school in the heart of the countryside, in a place called Anamar. It has since become well-known as the birth-place of the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich. There were only thirty or so pupils enrolled at any given time during those early years. The youngest of us were driven there in the morning while some of the older pupils cycled. Many of us walked home in the evening. The journey home could be just as instructive as the school lessons. We learned a lot about the natural world as we explored the hedgerows and streams and we learned something of human nature too as we interacted on our homeward journey. Life got progressively more challenging as we moved up the ranks from P1 to P7. The last few years, for the chosen few, were spent cramming for the ‘11 plus’ exam.

Having passed the ‘11 plus’, I arrived at boarding school in Saint Colman’s College, Newry armed with a sheaf of government grants, my passport to ‘Grammar School’. I got off to a bad start by taking a detour to Daisy Hill Hospital on the night of my first full day there, suffering from appendicitis. I owe my life to a priest who had been expelled from Nigeria, where the Biafran war was then raging, and who was now teaching in a temporary capacity in the college. He was the only one who believed that my pain was anything more than travel sickness or homesickness. It was 1969 and the North was in turmoil. I arrived in hospital having made a detour through Bessbrook to avoid the burning buildings in Newry City centre that night.

I still remember my feelings of despondency as I made my way back to school over the next five or six years. Being a boarder, I travelled home every six weeks or so. Returning to school after a weekend break could be traumatic. I can still visualise the lights of Newry in the hollow as we drove down the Camlough Road on a Sunday night in my father’s Austin Cambridge car. I can still smell the lockers that used to hoard our apples and cheese and the ‘Marvel’ dried milk for our illegally secreted cereals. We also brought eggs, jam, and sugar to sweeten our daily diet.

Soon we settled back into routine and began counting down the days of another term. People ask me sometimes whether I think it was a good or a bad experience for a young student. We entered at eleven years of age. It was certainly deficient in terms of what might now be termed the inner life of a child. Little emotional or pastoral care was evident. What was available was well disguised. The emotional landscape was more desert than oasis. The benefits it did offer were discipline in life and in study and an ability to care for and organise yourself. It was a television-free routine, with none of the distractions of home or of the outside world. We spoke of the college as the ‘house’ but there was little sign of the comforts of home. I left the ‘house’ during the first term of my ‘A’ Levels, abandoning my studies of English, Irish and Spanish. I believed that I had turned my back on school for the last time.

Six years later I went back to education. I entered Maynooth only to discover that ‘Colman’s’ had been merely a pale imitation of the master pattern in Kildare. I was twenty two years of age and I was going back to school. The language of the ‘house’ remained but the terms of our course of education had changed. We read philosophy. Instead of compositions we submitted assignments. We had professors instead of teachers. We prepared theses instead of essays and we had seminars in place of study groups. There was still solemn silence at night time, in theory at least, but study was no longer communal. In secondary school we had two study periods each evening, ‘first steed’ and ‘second steed,’ together lasting over three hours. Now we were expected to study alone. At first I thought this university business might be beyond me but I soon realised that like most ‘mature students’ I was highly motivated and I soon fell into the routine of ‘Third Level’. I left six years later thinking that this was definitely the end of going back to school. Six years later I went back to school yet again. This time I studied full time during the summer months and part-time during the rest of the year for a period of three years. I experienced the trauma of unfinished assignments and ‘comprehensive’ exams all over again. I also knew the joy of learning as an adult.

Back to school is no longer the prerogative of the young and staying at school for much longer than in the past has become the norm. Primary school children generally love their schools and teachers. The fear and the emotional distance of the old ways are largely gone, unmissed and unmourned. There is a spring in Wee Hughie’s step nowadays as he sets out to school.

We're all Green Fools now

There has been a great and welcome revival of interest in Mother Nature during the last decade or so or in what we now call the environment. Motivated by fear of what we might be doing to destroy the creation that sustains us, people have reluctantly begun to examine their lifestyles. We have become aware of what is termed our ‘carbon foot-print’ or our individual contribution to the pollution of the atmosphere. Pollution at ground level continues to be a problem despite the best efforts of teachers and schools to persuade pupils to respect their surroundings and living area. The consumption of drugs or illegal substances is another unacknowledged form of pollution and disrespect for creation. As for acknowledging or dealing with the effects of the pollution that is to be found or in print or visual media, or the more general pollution of the human spirit; that day has not dawned yet.

Despite all this emphasis on the created world or environment, there is a radical disconnection with the cycle of the seasons and the rhythm of rural life. The flight from the land that comes with industrialisation has largely untied us from the seasonal markers by which our ancestors found their pilgrim way through life. It has also disconnected us from a profound sense of awe and mystery when faced with the natural world, as seen on a starry night, or during a summer thunderstorm, for example. The daily miracles of the soil, that turn rainwater into wine over the course of a harvest season, or that turn delicate-shelled eggs into powerful eagles in the span of a few months are seldom seen or reflected on by a generation that remains voluntarily chained to its favourite technology-toys.

One of the greatest markers of the season in this locality was what the Church calls the Feast of the Assumption or what was known commonly as ‘the fifteenth of August’. It may have had its origins in a Celtic harvest festival called Lúnasa which in turn was absorbed by the Christian tradition of Our Lady being the first to fully share in the harvest of redemption. It became a great marker of the natural cycle and of the social season and was celebrated with Patrúns and festivals all over the country. In the North, it took on the form of an alternative community celebration, being the Catholic counter-response to the Twelfth of July. Nationalist bands often paraded through Northern towns, indistinguishable from their Orange counterparts other than in their colour-code and Queen.

The village of Blackrock became as Mecca or Rome for the day for those who lived within striking distance. Many of its visitors would have fulfilled their sense of religious observance by attending Mass and by visiting the local shrine at Lady Well beforehand. They may even have attended the Patrún the night before when the water in the well was said to rise miraculously. Observing the Patrún was a fairly tame practice by then, though it had not tamed sufficiently to have the blessing of the local clergy that it once again enjoys.

Patrick Kavanagh wrote humourously and beautifully about the practice in his short story ‘Pilgrimage’, taken from ‘The Green Fool’. ‘Every year all the neighbours around me went there and carried home with them bottles of its sacred waters. These waters were used in times of sickness whether of human or beast. Some folk went barefoot and many went, wearing in their boots the traditional pea or pebble of self-torture…The horse-cart was filled with people, three seat-boards, which seated three fat women, the driver, two children and myself. One of the fat women suggested that there wasn’t sufficient room on the seat-board. Beside me was a pile of bottles of all sizes shapes and colours…The field of the Well belonged to the Protestant Rector and to get to the Well, there was no right of way. The Rector was a bit of a bigot, as was everybody else at the time for that matter. He locked the gate and to reach the Well, it was necessary to climb over a brambly hedge. Each briar wound inflicted on a woman’s face or leg meant a curse for the Rector’.

‘Like medieval pilgrims, some were going round on their bare knees making the Stations. Some others were doing a bit of courting under the pilgrim cloak. There was a rowdy element too, pegging clods at the prayers and shouting. A few knots of men were arguing politics. I overheard two fellows making a deal over a horse’. Kavanagh goes on to tell of “Bullah-Wullah’s” mother, who was a prominent character at the proceedings and of the feast that the nocturnal pilgrims enjoyed as the ceremonies ended as they proceeded home by moonlight. On return, he described the pilgrims as, ‘weary in body and mind but in soul, perhaps as fresh as rain-green grass. Our Lady was a real Lady and human. She was not displeased, I knew, because some who pilgrimed in Her name were doubters and some cynics and a lot of vulgar sightseers. She is kind and no doubt she enjoyed the comic twists in the pageant around Lady Well’.

Rain, rain, go to Spain

‘Rain, rain, go to Spain. Never show your face again’. We all remember chanting the rhyme, with the magical hope of childhood, even if we edit out the remembrance of rainy days in summers past. The incessant, holiday-time rain of this summer is weighing down the spirit of even the hardiest home-bird here in Ireland. Even the trees are dropping leaves prematurely, unable to carry the weight of so much surface water. The branches of the leafiest trees are bent towards the ground like an old person carrying the burden of many seasons, showers and years. The waxy ivy leaves, by comparison, are shining and confident looking, sparkling in the occasional shaft of sunlight from their parasitical anchors in old masonry walls or wrapped around passing tree-trunks.

The crows line up on the chapel roof during a lull in the rain. Their heads are bent low as if in prayer to the God below. Their sodden plumage dreeps off the most recent shower as they meet in conclave on the ridge-tiles. They fly off, feathers unloaded, sheltering and roosting in at the premature fall of darkness. A resident wood-pigeon, plump and purple-necked, the bishop of the bird-world, scoops up drinking water and maybe some solid food as well, in its pale beak from the now semi-permanent puddles that are keeping guard along the avenue. The blackbirds and their mottled cousins, the thrushes, move in quickly between the showers to graze the mown lawn for an easy catch. What they lose in time out during the downpours, they gain in the ready supply of baby-food available nearby following the rain.

The parish cat has hardly moved for the past two days from her favourite cushioned chair in the enclosed porch. Only a passing blue-bottle tempts her into hunting mode or the patter of bird-feet on the Perspex sheets above. Cats famously do not like water, whether it comes falling from above or is accidentally fallen into. The only washing she gets is carefully administered as she performs her feline ablutions after eating, tongue-bathing her fur and paw-wiping her cat-face. She snoozes between meals, dreaming fitful cat-dreams, then stretching out and yawning conspicuously afterwards.

The potato-farmer seems happy enough. His dreams, as he props himself up on a grave-stone, are of high yields and tubers filling out as the rainwater easily penetrates the furrows of his carefully cultivated field. ‘Happy the corpse it rains on’ says a passing funeral-goer as the mourners negotiate narrow graveyard pathways, made slippy by the rainwater and the melancholy human traffic they carry. ‘Have ye no say at all with the man above?’ asks a teasing acquaintance. The skies darken and off-load their latest cargo in sheets of driven rain as we encircle the earth-wound that is the opened grave. A mushroom of umbrellas shoots into action; their kaleidoscope of colours and advertising logos defying the greyness of life lived under a blanket of rain-clouds and exile in this ‘valley of tears’.

The village has gone into premature hibernation. Rain has stopped play in the public parks and even the most-pampered dogs go unwalked. A sullen, sodden blanket has been thrown over the place, smothering all outdoor activities and all effervescence of spirit within. The traffic moves more slowly as visibility narrows and rivers of rainwater wash the cigarette butts from the pavements. Radio advertisements continue to tell us how precious water is and warn us not to waste it by watering our lawns - as if! Despite the high humidity and the general balminess of the weather, sitting-room fires are kindled and stalled heating systems are sparked into roaring action again as coats and clothes are dried out in time for the next ‘wettin’. ‘Rain rain, go to Spain…’

The full text of the rhyme apparently is, ‘Rain rain go away, / Come again another day. / Little Johnny wants to play; / Rain, rain, go to Spain, / Never show your face again!’ The origins of the words lie in the story of the Spanish Armada. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) the English and the Spanish were in constant rivalry. This came to a head with the launching of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Spanish ships, about one hundred and thirty in number, set out to invade England. They were repelled by the English fleet under the command of Admiral Lord Howard and the Armada was defeated. Only about half of the original number of Spanish vessels returned to Spain. The attempt failed because of the less cumbersome English fleet and partly because of the rainy weather which helped to scatter the Spanish fleet. Thus the origins of our ‘rain rain, go to Spain’ lamenting and pleading as we pack the summer suitcases and the Irish Armada heads for sunny Spain.

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.