10th March 2006
Dear Mother,
There weren’t too many occasions when I pleased you in life. My fault not yours, because we both know that I wasn’t what you would call ‘a dutiful son’. I probably pleased you when I got married, and when I gave you your first grandchild, but I think I pleased you most when I became an Altar boy.
I imagine you saw it as a kind of status symbol: because when other mothers boasted ‘my son is going to De La Salle College’, or ‘has a place in the Christian Brothers’, you could now reply ‘my son is an Altar boy’ with a certain amount of pride. And there weren’t that many of us in the vicinity – no more than a handful – which made it all the more gloat-worthy.
Even the Master acknowledged our special status; taking us up to church several times a week after school for rehearsals before letting us loose on our first Sunday. He took the part of the priest himself; although he didn’t ‘gown up’ for the role. But I guess the parish priest would have viewed as sacrilege somebody rummaging around in his wardrobe. Still, we were put through our paces until we had mastered our roles; bell-ringing, bringing him the water and the wine, and, of course, learning to chant the responses in the appropriate places. I can still recite chunks of Latin after all these years – and I still don’t know what they mean.
Being an Altar boy had its rewards; particularly when we ‘officiated’ at weddings, funerals and christenings where, afterwards, you could guarantee that several shiny half-crowns or even a ten shilling note would be pressed into your greasy little palm. Not that I depended entirely on these fairly infrequent occasions; I quickly discovered that the collections during Sunday Mass offered a steady source of income. I am sure you will recall that when the filled collection boxes were placed by the Altar rail it became our job to take them to the sacristy and transfer the money into the bags waiting there. Once inside, I found it quite an easy task to deflect some of the coins into my own pocket. Did it ever cross your mind that your very own ‘God’s little helper’ had become a thief?
Not all special occasions paid off, however. Do you remember the time that Peggy’s latest child was being baptized and she couldn’t come into the service because she hadn’t been churched? I always thought that being churched was the result of some serious transgression and for many years I wondered what Peggy had done. It wasn’t until much later that I learned it was a purification ceremony that the church carried out on women who had given birth. This is what I read. ‘The woman who has just had a child must first stand outside the church door and only when she has been solemnly purified by sprinkling with holy water and the prayers of the priest is she led back into the church’. Apparently it goes back to the middle ages when the church decided that women who had given birth were unclean and therefore had to be ‘cleansed’. I had often seen women before, dressed solemnly in black, kneeling in the vestibule at the back of the church after Mass, waiting for the priest to come and attend to them, but it never occurred to me that the church was punishing them for having children.
I still remember how ashamed you all looked when the priest said the baptism couldn’t take place until Peggy had been purified, and you all trooped away to Cullinanes to put down the half hour wait. I suppose you had ‘a small sherry to settle your nerves’.
I had to follow the priest about with the vessel of Holy water, while he placed a lighted candle in her hand, and recited the Gloria Patri and the Kyrie as well as the Our Father before sprinkling her with Holy Water and inviting her into the chapel with the words, ‘Enter into the temple of Go, that though mayest have eternal life’. However, he made sure she was veiled before letting her pass, and I have since read that women who refused to cover their heads were often ex-communicated. I think this was one of the few occasions where no shiny half-crown changed hands.
I never stopped to wonder at the time why there were no Altar girls. I suppose it was to do with the Church’s attitude to women even then, as exemplified in the ‘churching’.
Thank God things have changed a bit since my youth.
Your loving son
Tom
Dear Aunt Margaret
I find you the hardest to talk to because, in many ways, I know you the least. You were a very secretive woman; for many years even forbidding me to come and see you at your home, although you yourself were prepared to travel right across London to visit me. Why was that? Did you have a secret lover closeted away, as both Margaret and I jokingly suggested? When I finally did get to visit you it was years later – we had been back to live in Ireland and returned again in the interim – and I was only calling on you because you were unable to visit me.
I have to confess that I was surprised at the change those missing years had brought about; you had gone from being a lively elderly relative to one who was housebound and, if I am completely honest, not fully ‘compos-mentis’. Sometimes you remembered who I was; sometimes I was’ Captain’. Who this ‘Captain’ was I never fully fathomed; but he was firmly fixed in your mind as somebody glamorous and witty, of naval origin I deducted, and who, I suspect, was more than just a friend in those far off days of your youth.
However, it was the squalor that you lived in that I couldn’t understand. Surely you hadn’t lived in such penury all your life? Mother had always been telling me you had loads of money and that if I kept on the right side of you I might get some of it, but if she could see the state you lived in then she would have soon changed her mind. If you had been a man I could begin to understand, but the fact you were a woman made it ten times worse. You were living in a pig sty.
I realize now that you weren’t quite with it; I mean, I think senility had already set in and nobody realized it – or cared. You had the services of a home help every day and a nurse called once a week to change the dressings on your ulcerated legs, but in between you just shuffled about your couple of dingy rooms, lost in a world of your own
It was all a far cry from how my mother used to describe you when you were last home in the late 1940’s; ‘That Margaret goes round with her nose to the sky, airs and graces on her like she was the Queen of Sheeba. She even goes down to the Bungalow (our next door neighbors) to powder her nose because the mirror here is too small’.
I don’t think mother was too much taken with you; she certainly didn’t appreciate the bundles of clothes you occasionally sent; ‘sending us her cast-offs; they’re only fit for the fire!’ What happened to cause you to go away and never come back again?
You never spoke about my father, but then he never spoke about you so I guess you are two of a kind. I always thought there were only the two of you, so what happened to John, James and Catherine who, I now know, were also born to your father and mother? The parish records in Newtown holds birth records for all three, although there is no baptismal record for Catherine, so the presumption is she was still born. But both John and James were baptized, though there is no record of how and where they died. But died they must have, otherwise we would have heard about them and met them. Yet all my life there has never been a mention of them. Did you know them? Did you remember them? How could three persons be airbrushed out of a family just like that?
I would also like to know what kind of man grandpa Tom was. Did you get on with him, or was he the reason you left home? I have heard stories that he wasn’t a very pleasant man. He certainly wasn’t very popular in the area; but that is to be understood. He took work at Jamesey Wall’s farm when nobody else in the neighborhood would go within a ass’s roar of the place. But of course it was a ‘grab farm’ wasn’t it? Aand nobody local would there work there under such circumstances. He had come from Ballyduff, six or seven miles away, so could hardly be described as local, so maybe that was one reason for his unpopularity. I have heard stories of how others came from as far away as the Nire valley to work there during the busy times, marching along the road early in the morning as one solid body, banging their shovels and forks on the ground as they marched. Maybe it was because of the resentment to men like that – men like your father – that you left?
Your nephew
Tom
Dear Mother,
There weren’t too many occasions when I pleased you in life. My fault not yours, because we both know that I wasn’t what you would call ‘a dutiful son’. I probably pleased you when I got married, and when I gave you your first grandchild, but I think I pleased you most when I became an Altar boy.
I imagine you saw it as a kind of status symbol: because when other mothers boasted ‘my son is going to De La Salle College’, or ‘has a place in the Christian Brothers’, you could now reply ‘my son is an Altar boy’ with a certain amount of pride. And there weren’t that many of us in the vicinity – no more than a handful – which made it all the more gloat-worthy.
Even the Master acknowledged our special status; taking us up to church several times a week after school for rehearsals before letting us loose on our first Sunday. He took the part of the priest himself; although he didn’t ‘gown up’ for the role. But I guess the parish priest would have viewed as sacrilege somebody rummaging around in his wardrobe. Still, we were put through our paces until we had mastered our roles; bell-ringing, bringing him the water and the wine, and, of course, learning to chant the responses in the appropriate places. I can still recite chunks of Latin after all these years – and I still don’t know what they mean.
Being an Altar boy had its rewards; particularly when we ‘officiated’ at weddings, funerals and christenings where, afterwards, you could guarantee that several shiny half-crowns or even a ten shilling note would be pressed into your greasy little palm. Not that I depended entirely on these fairly infrequent occasions; I quickly discovered that the collections during Sunday Mass offered a steady source of income. I am sure you will recall that when the filled collection boxes were placed by the Altar rail it became our job to take them to the sacristy and transfer the money into the bags waiting there. Once inside, I found it quite an easy task to deflect some of the coins into my own pocket. Did it ever cross your mind that your very own ‘God’s little helper’ had become a thief?
Not all special occasions paid off, however. Do you remember the time that Peggy’s latest child was being baptized and she couldn’t come into the service because she hadn’t been churched? I always thought that being churched was the result of some serious transgression and for many years I wondered what Peggy had done. It wasn’t until much later that I learned it was a purification ceremony that the church carried out on women who had given birth. This is what I read. ‘The woman who has just had a child must first stand outside the church door and only when she has been solemnly purified by sprinkling with holy water and the prayers of the priest is she led back into the church’. Apparently it goes back to the middle ages when the church decided that women who had given birth were unclean and therefore had to be ‘cleansed’. I had often seen women before, dressed solemnly in black, kneeling in the vestibule at the back of the church after Mass, waiting for the priest to come and attend to them, but it never occurred to me that the church was punishing them for having children.
I still remember how ashamed you all looked when the priest said the baptism couldn’t take place until Peggy had been purified, and you all trooped away to Cullinanes to put down the half hour wait. I suppose you had ‘a small sherry to settle your nerves’.
I had to follow the priest about with the vessel of Holy water, while he placed a lighted candle in her hand, and recited the Gloria Patri and the Kyrie as well as the Our Father before sprinkling her with Holy Water and inviting her into the chapel with the words, ‘Enter into the temple of Go, that though mayest have eternal life’. However, he made sure she was veiled before letting her pass, and I have since read that women who refused to cover their heads were often ex-communicated. I think this was one of the few occasions where no shiny half-crown changed hands.
I never stopped to wonder at the time why there were no Altar girls. I suppose it was to do with the Church’s attitude to women even then, as exemplified in the ‘churching’.
Thank God things have changed a bit since my youth.
Your loving son
Tom
Dear Aunt Margaret
I find you the hardest to talk to because, in many ways, I know you the least. You were a very secretive woman; for many years even forbidding me to come and see you at your home, although you yourself were prepared to travel right across London to visit me. Why was that? Did you have a secret lover closeted away, as both Margaret and I jokingly suggested? When I finally did get to visit you it was years later – we had been back to live in Ireland and returned again in the interim – and I was only calling on you because you were unable to visit me.
I have to confess that I was surprised at the change those missing years had brought about; you had gone from being a lively elderly relative to one who was housebound and, if I am completely honest, not fully ‘compos-mentis’. Sometimes you remembered who I was; sometimes I was’ Captain’. Who this ‘Captain’ was I never fully fathomed; but he was firmly fixed in your mind as somebody glamorous and witty, of naval origin I deducted, and who, I suspect, was more than just a friend in those far off days of your youth.
However, it was the squalor that you lived in that I couldn’t understand. Surely you hadn’t lived in such penury all your life? Mother had always been telling me you had loads of money and that if I kept on the right side of you I might get some of it, but if she could see the state you lived in then she would have soon changed her mind. If you had been a man I could begin to understand, but the fact you were a woman made it ten times worse. You were living in a pig sty.
I realize now that you weren’t quite with it; I mean, I think senility had already set in and nobody realized it – or cared. You had the services of a home help every day and a nurse called once a week to change the dressings on your ulcerated legs, but in between you just shuffled about your couple of dingy rooms, lost in a world of your own
It was all a far cry from how my mother used to describe you when you were last home in the late 1940’s; ‘That Margaret goes round with her nose to the sky, airs and graces on her like she was the Queen of Sheeba. She even goes down to the Bungalow (our next door neighbors) to powder her nose because the mirror here is too small’.
I don’t think mother was too much taken with you; she certainly didn’t appreciate the bundles of clothes you occasionally sent; ‘sending us her cast-offs; they’re only fit for the fire!’ What happened to cause you to go away and never come back again?
You never spoke about my father, but then he never spoke about you so I guess you are two of a kind. I always thought there were only the two of you, so what happened to John, James and Catherine who, I now know, were also born to your father and mother? The parish records in Newtown holds birth records for all three, although there is no baptismal record for Catherine, so the presumption is she was still born. But both John and James were baptized, though there is no record of how and where they died. But died they must have, otherwise we would have heard about them and met them. Yet all my life there has never been a mention of them. Did you know them? Did you remember them? How could three persons be airbrushed out of a family just like that?
I would also like to know what kind of man grandpa Tom was. Did you get on with him, or was he the reason you left home? I have heard stories that he wasn’t a very pleasant man. He certainly wasn’t very popular in the area; but that is to be understood. He took work at Jamesey Wall’s farm when nobody else in the neighborhood would go within a ass’s roar of the place. But of course it was a ‘grab farm’ wasn’t it? Aand nobody local would there work there under such circumstances. He had come from Ballyduff, six or seven miles away, so could hardly be described as local, so maybe that was one reason for his unpopularity. I have heard stories of how others came from as far away as the Nire valley to work there during the busy times, marching along the road early in the morning as one solid body, banging their shovels and forks on the ground as they marched. Maybe it was because of the resentment to men like that – men like your father – that you left?
Your nephew
Tom
posted by tomobrien at 11:09 AM
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