Good-Bye good men and women

Good-Bye good men and women

Many Irish people grew up with ‘Africa’ magazine as the only glossy publication in the house. It used to be said that the spittle-wetted cover of ‘The Sacred Heart Messenger’ was used in times of scarcity as a source of alternative lipstick but it was no competitor to ‘Africa’ or to ‘The Far East’ for coverage of exotic places and happenings. The latter magazine is the publication of the Columban Fathers. Africa did not seem quite as far off as the ‘Far’ east and though we were not familiar with fellow Africans or with their various cultures, we felt allied to them somehow through the work and stories of our missionaries and through our regular penny-drops into the mite-box at school. ‘Darkest’ Africa was a whole new world and we were to the forefront in developing it.

Legions of Irish sisters, priests and brothers offered their lives in the service of the ‘missions’ up to and during the middle decades of the last century. It was an option for every educated and serious young Catholic at the time. Little Ireland was taking on the world, determined to share its faith and its enthusiasm for spreading that faith. We even took on the conversion of colossal China, through the early work of the Columban Fathers, while they were still known as ‘The Maynooth Mission to China’.

I took a walk today through the demesne of the Saint Patrick’s Missionary Society, as the Kiltegan priests are formally known. Its Irish headquarters or mother-house is located in a very beautiful, secluded rural setting in County Wicklow, near the eponymous village of Kiltegan. My guide told me that it was once the home of a very rich Member of Parliament. It later passed into the hands of a wealthy tea-merchant from Newry, John Hughes, who donated it to the fledgling Society. It is currently a busy complex of buildings from which the Society is administered and to which some elderly missionaries return.

My mission to Kiltegan was to bring some visitors from Africa; two Nigerian priests who had trained or worked alongside the now ailing Missionary Father whom we proposed to visit. His illness has made him obviously weak yet he was strong enough to engage us in a long discussion on the state of the church and the world, to listen to the latest news from Nigeria and to guide us around the complex.

We began in the dining area where a table had been thoughtfully marked ‘Reserved’ for us. The buildings in this area are light-filled, airy and spacious but the apparatus of institutional life somehow invades. We drank soup from metal soup-dishes and scraped butter from our individually wrapped butter-pieces onto our spuds. Memories of past institutions and of washed-up canteen-food flooded in.

Afterwards we took a walk to the community graveyard. It is a simple area with rows of military-style, small crosses marking the graves of fallen comrades. I joked about graveyards being full of ‘indispensable’ people but I could not dispel the chill that pervades cemeteries, even on a summer afternoon. My guide wanted to introduce me to each of the characters interred in their same-size plots and to the life-stories that brought their paths to cross in far-flung places. Silently I wondered what it must be like to walk a graveyard that awaits you or to be living on borrowed time. It used to be said that an unexpected shiver was the result of someone walking on your prospective grave. I shivered for my friend as we passed the next available plot.

Along the way we met other people whom we knew or with whom we had mutual acquaintances. Ireland is a land of connectedness and it is that inter-relationship of peoples that is most comforting to return to. My friend knew that he would not be returning to the active life that he once knew or to the culture in which he had immersed himself in Africa. Even parting with him after a short stay became poignant. There was an inevitable air of finality about our leave-taking. How do you say goodbye to a man who is slowly saying goodbye to the world?

There is the added sadness for these men in the student-empty seminary buildings that once buzzed with activity and idealistic young life. The centre of activity has moved continent now and the Society has taken the decision to admit African students. A few have been ordained already and there are many in the training process. The spirit has blown ‘where it wills’ and the Irish valleys bear no vocational fruit these days. The harvest is elsewhere and the labourers are no longer overwhelmingly European. Irish missionaries, with the influence and goodwill that they generated for us across the globe are a disappearing brand. The loss is our

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.