13th March 2006
Dear Mikey
I will call you Mikey if I may - It seems a bit daft calling you ‘grand uncle Mikey’ every time we speak. I have had information from sources in Cork about a JN from Kilmacthomas who died from his wounds in Flanders in August 1917 and I am now awaiting further information from them. I wonder if he will turn out to be my mother’s father?
My brother John (I am sure you remember John, everybody says he looked the spitting image of you when you were young) tells me he lived up the Portlaw road, five minutes walk from Carroll’s Cross – in which case you would almost have been next door neighbors.
I don’t suppose you would recognize ‘The Cross’ now. The pub is still standing, although the old building has been swallowed whole by the new additions. The old rickety stairs still survives inside, and the ring-board underneath. The open fire still presides; and the hob where you used to sit warming your ’large bottles’, spitting brown globs of chewed tobacco onto the red turf-bricks, watching as they hissed and bubbled for ages before being consumed, and where you sometimes played half-sets and polkas on your melodeon. You called your melodeon Julia; ‘me and Julia have been together for more years than I care to remember’, you used to say, lovingly. I wonder who the real Julia was?
The Creamery has gone too, as has the railway station. And the fields alongside the Bog Road, which saw sheep-dipping and traveling shows amongst their varied occupants in the past, are now the site of a Cold Store. Parts of Europe’s ever-growing butter and beef mountains are stored in vast warehouses in those once-thistly acres - courtesy of the EEC. But of course you wouldn’t know anything about the EEC, although what you fought for in WW1 – if you ever knew what you were fighting for, or indeed cared – may have had some bearing on its formation.
And the New Line is busy all day long now with traffic hurtling between Waterford and Cork and every point north, south, east and west on the compass. I remember the time when cars were rarer than steak dinners around the place; the horse and cart, the bicycle and shanks mare were the favored means of transport. Only parish priests had cars – and big farmers.
And what still remains of Queally’s hill sees a constant stream of ready-mix lorries depleting still further the ozone layer that you never knew or cared about.
I suppose you remember my father drawing loads of stones from there in our ass and cart when I was young. Maybe you helped us fill up for all I know. Why he had to come to Carroll’s Cross for stones I don’t know; we had plenty of them up our own boreen and in the fields and groves nearby, but maybe it was an excuse nip into the pub for a few ‘large bottles’. I can’t remember what he wanted them for now; I suppose it must have been for building one of the outhouses. Or for the new outside toilet that he was constructing.
Toilets were a luxury in those days as far as I could see. I didn’t know anyone who had one – outside or inside. We couldn’t have an inside one anyway because we had no running water. We didn’t have much of anything then; no running water, no electricity, no car, you name it we didn’t have it.
Father had got around the lack of running water by building a tank on top of the roof of the new toilet. This got filled either by rain, or by drawing water from the well in our ass and cart. I suppose we must have felt like Kings or Queens when the new toilets were eventually finished; it beat into a cocked hat going across the fields with a newspaper or toilet roll under your arm.
your grand nephew
Tom
Dear Mikey.
I expect there was a big hooley in Carroll’s Cross the night before ye left for Waterford to join the Royal Garrison Artillery. I now know that JN was a gunner – was that your rank too? What made you pick the RGA? Was it the notion of operating those big battering rams of guns? I see that your unit was the Ist Trench Mortar Battery, so I guess you must have been in fox-holes, lobbing mortars across no-mans land, hoping to splatter the misfortunates on the receiving end all over the French countryside. How much damage could those 14lb-ers do to captive recipients cowering in their already-dug graves? But I guess that wasn’t your concern; your main priority was top stay alive and healthy enough to man the guns to enable them continue their bombardment
When did you find out about the Easter Rising of 1916? I expect you were in one of your ‘fox-holes’ when it all kicked off? I have often wondered since if you would have taken up arms against the British had you been around. Don’t you think it’s ironic that you were killing Germans for the English at the time that they were pounding the bejaysus out of a few hundred republicans behind the barricades at the GPO and at Bolands Mills in Dublin? And probably with similar guns to the ones you were manning.
Eighteen thousand men and a gunboat up the Liffey to put down what some have since described as a ‘minor disturbance of the peace’. How did you feel when they lined up Pearce, Connolly and the rest of them against the walls of Kilmainham goal and shot them in cold blood?
And then a few years later the civil war started, you must have been asked to take sides again. Who were you for? Collins or De Valera?. You must have been in demand, even minus one leg, because you knew about shooting and killing – which is more than many of the others did. Were you a trained killer, Mikey? Did the British Army show you how to kill your fellow human beings without mercy, and without any feeling of emotion? I suppose they must have.
But tell me, you must have felt some emotion when Michaels Collins was ambushed by his own countrymen at Beal Na Blath?
‘Twas on an August morning, all in the morning hours
I went to take the morning air all in the month of flowers
And there I saw a maiden and heard her mournful cry
Oh what will mend my broken heart, I’ve lost my Laughing Boy
That’s a sad song about Michael Collins - and I am sure you have sung a few verses of it yourself in your time. Do you think it true what they say about us; that all our wars are merry and all our songs are sad?
Your grand nephew
Tom
Dear Mikey
I will call you Mikey if I may - It seems a bit daft calling you ‘grand uncle Mikey’ every time we speak. I have had information from sources in Cork about a JN from Kilmacthomas who died from his wounds in Flanders in August 1917 and I am now awaiting further information from them. I wonder if he will turn out to be my mother’s father?
My brother John (I am sure you remember John, everybody says he looked the spitting image of you when you were young) tells me he lived up the Portlaw road, five minutes walk from Carroll’s Cross – in which case you would almost have been next door neighbors.
I don’t suppose you would recognize ‘The Cross’ now. The pub is still standing, although the old building has been swallowed whole by the new additions. The old rickety stairs still survives inside, and the ring-board underneath. The open fire still presides; and the hob where you used to sit warming your ’large bottles’, spitting brown globs of chewed tobacco onto the red turf-bricks, watching as they hissed and bubbled for ages before being consumed, and where you sometimes played half-sets and polkas on your melodeon. You called your melodeon Julia; ‘me and Julia have been together for more years than I care to remember’, you used to say, lovingly. I wonder who the real Julia was?
The Creamery has gone too, as has the railway station. And the fields alongside the Bog Road, which saw sheep-dipping and traveling shows amongst their varied occupants in the past, are now the site of a Cold Store. Parts of Europe’s ever-growing butter and beef mountains are stored in vast warehouses in those once-thistly acres - courtesy of the EEC. But of course you wouldn’t know anything about the EEC, although what you fought for in WW1 – if you ever knew what you were fighting for, or indeed cared – may have had some bearing on its formation.
And the New Line is busy all day long now with traffic hurtling between Waterford and Cork and every point north, south, east and west on the compass. I remember the time when cars were rarer than steak dinners around the place; the horse and cart, the bicycle and shanks mare were the favored means of transport. Only parish priests had cars – and big farmers.
And what still remains of Queally’s hill sees a constant stream of ready-mix lorries depleting still further the ozone layer that you never knew or cared about.
I suppose you remember my father drawing loads of stones from there in our ass and cart when I was young. Maybe you helped us fill up for all I know. Why he had to come to Carroll’s Cross for stones I don’t know; we had plenty of them up our own boreen and in the fields and groves nearby, but maybe it was an excuse nip into the pub for a few ‘large bottles’. I can’t remember what he wanted them for now; I suppose it must have been for building one of the outhouses. Or for the new outside toilet that he was constructing.
Toilets were a luxury in those days as far as I could see. I didn’t know anyone who had one – outside or inside. We couldn’t have an inside one anyway because we had no running water. We didn’t have much of anything then; no running water, no electricity, no car, you name it we didn’t have it.
Father had got around the lack of running water by building a tank on top of the roof of the new toilet. This got filled either by rain, or by drawing water from the well in our ass and cart. I suppose we must have felt like Kings or Queens when the new toilets were eventually finished; it beat into a cocked hat going across the fields with a newspaper or toilet roll under your arm.
your grand nephew
Tom
Dear Mikey.
I expect there was a big hooley in Carroll’s Cross the night before ye left for Waterford to join the Royal Garrison Artillery. I now know that JN was a gunner – was that your rank too? What made you pick the RGA? Was it the notion of operating those big battering rams of guns? I see that your unit was the Ist Trench Mortar Battery, so I guess you must have been in fox-holes, lobbing mortars across no-mans land, hoping to splatter the misfortunates on the receiving end all over the French countryside. How much damage could those 14lb-ers do to captive recipients cowering in their already-dug graves? But I guess that wasn’t your concern; your main priority was top stay alive and healthy enough to man the guns to enable them continue their bombardment
When did you find out about the Easter Rising of 1916? I expect you were in one of your ‘fox-holes’ when it all kicked off? I have often wondered since if you would have taken up arms against the British had you been around. Don’t you think it’s ironic that you were killing Germans for the English at the time that they were pounding the bejaysus out of a few hundred republicans behind the barricades at the GPO and at Bolands Mills in Dublin? And probably with similar guns to the ones you were manning.
Eighteen thousand men and a gunboat up the Liffey to put down what some have since described as a ‘minor disturbance of the peace’. How did you feel when they lined up Pearce, Connolly and the rest of them against the walls of Kilmainham goal and shot them in cold blood?
And then a few years later the civil war started, you must have been asked to take sides again. Who were you for? Collins or De Valera?. You must have been in demand, even minus one leg, because you knew about shooting and killing – which is more than many of the others did. Were you a trained killer, Mikey? Did the British Army show you how to kill your fellow human beings without mercy, and without any feeling of emotion? I suppose they must have.
But tell me, you must have felt some emotion when Michaels Collins was ambushed by his own countrymen at Beal Na Blath?
‘Twas on an August morning, all in the morning hours
I went to take the morning air all in the month of flowers
And there I saw a maiden and heard her mournful cry
Oh what will mend my broken heart, I’ve lost my Laughing Boy
That’s a sad song about Michael Collins - and I am sure you have sung a few verses of it yourself in your time. Do you think it true what they say about us; that all our wars are merry and all our songs are sad?
Your grand nephew
Tom
posted by tomobrien at 12:20 PM
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