8thMarch2006

Dear Grandma Butler
I can say this now. I always thought Grenan wasn’t a very nice place to live in. Maybe it was to do with the landscape: the fields were hilly and stony, the land not very fertile, populated with as many thistles and other weeds as grass, and the cattle and sheep that grazed it always looking bony and ill-fed.
Or maybe it was to do with the people themselves, who, I always thought, left a lot to be desired as specimens of humankind. They always looked – you know – weasel-ish. Even mother was often heard to remark disparagingly about certain people who lived along that winding pot-holed goat track that masqueraded as a road; ‘oh, don’t talk to me about that lot! It’t out tramping the roads with the tinkers they should be’. This from somebody who was born there, and returned two or three times a week to see you long after she married and moved away the relative lush pastures that was Ballyhussa.
I suppose the hill had a lot to do with this impoverishment. Queallys Hill was undoubtedly a blot on the landscape; a rather large lump of limestone, eclipsing everything within its scraggy folds, good for neither man nor beast.
Apart from the rabbits that is. Rabbits loved that hill; loved its furze bushes, its blackthorns, its knobbly exterior, that all combined to make our lives difficult when we hunted them. And rabbit stew was very welcome when couldn’t afford cuts of beef or lamb at the butchers – a frequent occurrence it seemed to me in those days.
You kept a few goats, who considered the hill part of their demesne. And when mother came calling we were often dispatched to find them and bring them back so as we all ‘could have a sup of milk for the tea’.
Milking the goats could be quite an operation, particularly when the kid goats decided that they wanted their share of their mothers’ milk at the same time. And the ass also liked to get in on the act, so that there we often were, in the middle of your acre, attempting to milk a goat, surrounded by animals, and perhaps even turkeys and hens who had pecked their way to the periphery to see what was going on.
The hill has almost gone now, grandma. Thirty years is all it took. It was sold and turned into a quarry, and ever since they have been blowing it up bit by bit and mixing it up to make concrete. Who would have thought that something that looked immovable could disappear without trace?
I wonder if any part of it was ever Butlers? Because I now know that you weren’t as impoverished as I believed you to be. You owned twenty acres of land, attached to your cottage, which you disposed of during your lifetime, the proceeds of which I imagine went to keeping you solvent during a time when there was no pensions or social security.. Indeed, your brother, Tommy, owned a farm, as did your brother, Paddy, although it is said that Paddy drank his.
I wonder now if there was a larger farm, back in the mists of time, which might have been sub-divided, and which might have included some of the hill? Because the sale of the hill made a number of people wealthy, and I would hate to learn that some of it might have been the legacy that your brother Paddy squandered
Yes the hill has gone but your little cottage still stands. The one you told me would be mine. Do you remember those Sunday afternoons as we knelt by your turf fire, toasting bread on long forks, when you told me’ ‘this place will be yours when I am gone, Tom, boy’. I can still see my mother, beside us, nodding her head in agreement. But it never happened. And mother, closeted in your bedroom with ‘someone of importance’, during your final hours, had as much to do with that as you. Maybe even more. What was really said behind those closed doors? Did you even understand what it was all about?
Suffice to say that when the smoke from your turf fire turned to white, mother and the ‘person of importance’ emerged from your bedroom to announce you had left the house to my cousin Peggy.
Your loving grandson
tom