Dear Mikey,
More information arrived today about JN He came from Ballybrack, (sounds like I am the right track) and he enlisted in Waterford in the Royal Garrison Artillery regiment. He was a gunner in the 1st Trench Mortar Bty, and his service number was 3373. Was that also your Regiment? The records show he was aged 23 when he died of his wounds at Flanders. Did you take part in that battle and was that where you lost your leg?
‘I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or young John Neill was it slow and obscene?’
I now know that J is buried in the Adinkerke Military Cemetery in Belgium, which is situated a couple of miles inland from Koksijde and about 20 miles east of Dunkirk.
I wonder, now, if you ever went back there in later years, just to say a proper goodbye? It must have been awful in those trenches; Dante’s Inferno endlessly repeating itself; missiles and gas raining down day in day out; the trenches themselves little better than cess pits when the weather was bad. I read somewhere that by early1915 there was one continuous line of trenches over 400 miles long stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea. There was no way round, was there? You could only go forward or back.
I wonder if mother knew of her father’s last resting place, and if she ever visited him there? She was never out of Ireland in my living memory, but I do recall her saying she spent 6 months in London before she married father. Perhaps she made the journey then.
If I can establish that he was definitely my mother’s father then I plan to visit the cemetery. I will say a prayer for all of you.
Your grand nephew
Tom
Dear Mother,
I have often wondered what you really thought of me. I was far from an ideal son and I guess I treated you shabbily all your life. I was always a bad apple, wasn’t I? Always looking for ways of making a dishonest shilling. Even cheating you on the odd occasion when you sent me shopping to Kilmac on a Saturday morning; short-changing you on the pieces of meat purchased from Nicky Flynn, the butcher. Before returning home, I would gorge myself on sweets and lemonade with the shilling saved. But you always seemed to know and walloped me black and blue as a consequence.
Then there was that Christmas when I got caught shop-lifting in Woolworths in Waterford; I had expected to be locked up but all I had was a severe ticking off from the floorwalker, who frog-marched me outside, made me empty my pockets and pay for everything in full view of all the passers by. Perhaps Christmas Eve in the cells would have been more productive.
I remember my childhood as a happy one; those long summer days during the school holidays spent searching for birds’ nests, catching bees in jam-jars, hunting for frogs in the pond in Kelly’s field and playing cowboys and Indians in the palm groves nearby. The highlight was the annual visit to Tramore on the 25th of August, when we ate ice cream and chips till we were sick, watched tattooed men on motor cycles riding the wall of death in the amusement arcade, and jeered and cheered as the Donkey Derby took place on the beach nearby. Our donkey, Neddy, won it one year, do you remember? John was riding him, and you gave me a shilling to put on him with a fat bookie called Nat. When he won at ten to one I was over the moon – and hooked.
It was my only bet that year. Well, I was only about 12! I didn’t start to bet with any regularity until I was 16 or older, and you weren’t even aware of it.
I don’t suppose you ever set foot in a betting shop in your life. It wasn’t the kind of thing that country women did in your day. Like going to the pub. You might sneak a quick bottle of ‘stout’ in the front bar of Kent’s grocery store while you were doing your shopping, but that didn’t count.
I suppose one of the reasons that women never went in betting shops way back then was because they didn’t have the money to. They depended on the size of their husband’s pay packet on a Friday to maybe siphon a few shillings away for themselves. Some. like yourself, picked blackberries during the summer, and reared turkeys for the Xmas market.
We were all roped in for the blackberry picking – well it was school-holiday time – and we were duly dispatched to the firleds with an assortment of buckets and basins, to help fill the barrels that awaited collection by the blackberry man. You weren’t adverse to a little ‘doctoring’ before he arrived as I recall; payment was by weight and you increased it by adding water to the barrels.
Your Christmas money came from the sale of the turkeys you had reared, and they were purchased by a fat man who arrived out from Town in a covered truck. The truck was full of squawking turkeys, to which yours were added after they had been weighed. This was accomplished by tying their legs together and hanging them, upside down, on a pair of brass scales that hung from the back door. Do you remember how you were always pulling at the scales – as if you didn’t entirely belive the reading theyu gave? I suppose some of your proceeds found their way into the bookies satchel in Dungarvan.
You had your own logic for the Grand National or the Derby – that wasn’t gambling. Do you remember? Every year you spent the morning of the race looking at the list of runners, calling out the names of the ones that took your fancy, asking us what we thought. Sundew, Mr What, Oxo, Esb, Nicholas Silver, Merryman…the names still stick in my mind.
When you had a short list of three or four you wrote the names on a bit of paper, wrapped your few shillings in it and sprinkled it with Holy water, before giving to me to pass on to Lar Kent in Kilmac.
It took me some time to figure out that Lar was a bookies runner as well as a bank messenger. There was no betting shop in the village and Lar used to collect all the local bets then make his mid-day dash to Dungarvan to place them and collect his commission.
At first I thought he was collecting money to deposit in the various banks, (it says something that there were three banks in the village and most of us with not a pot to p… in!) there being a vague notion in my mind that linked bookies runners to bank messengers, and I was so naïve that when I first saw the sign TURF ACCOUNTANT over a particular shop I couldn’t understand why all the people going in never came out with bags of turf on their shoulders.
By the time Kilmore won the National in 1962 I had long shed such naivety. And the fact that I had two shillings each way on it at 28/1 was more of a misfortune than I ever anticipated. In hindsight, I should have quit then when I was ahead.
Your loving son
Tom
Dear Mother
I remember when you got fat. I suppose I was about thirteen at the time. Father was on short time at the Tannery and there was talk that it might close down altogether. I could hear you whispering in bed at night (the walls weren’t very well sound-proofed) that he might have to go to England to find work. The land of small shovels and big money I heard somebody say outside Mass one Sunday morning; ‘better than Ireland’ was father’s reply, ‘big shovels and no bloody money!’
Anyway, you had started to get fat and I couldn’t figure out why. Then you took to your bed and Grandma and Aunt Kathleen came calling. Grandma hardly ever visited, although Grenan was no more than a few miles away, so I knew it was serious.
They arrived in Grandma’s ass and trap; grandma dressed from head to foot in black, her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. I never remember seeing her dressed differently; black seemed to be her favorite color, but then maybe the loss of your father all those years ago had something to do with it. An expression I read somewhere comes to mind ‘misery hung about her like a shroud’. But perhaps that’s unfair; all the older women dressed in black in those days.
They were soon cosseted in your bedroom, and after a while the doctor arrived. I knew then it was some sort of sickness, but after a few days you had recovered. And when you were up and about again you weren’t fat anymore.
I must have put the incident out of my mind because it was many years later before I recalled it and realized that your ‘sickness’ had been a miscarriage. And I also remembered father going across the fields after work that day, carrying a shovel and a sack filled with something. I must have assumed it was a dead animal, perhaps a kitten or a Bonham, that he was burying.
It must have been a hard time for you, but if you were sad I never recall you showing it. But then, I was pre-occupied with other, more exciting matters. Was Tannery really going to close down? And would we actually be heading off to England if it did? I remember lying in bed at night, praying to Saint Christopher’s ‘miraculous’ medal that it would happen, and that we could all go to London and live in a house that would have hot water, electricity and a television.
I was sick of having to read my John Mack Brown comics and my Zane Gray books by candlelight; sick of having to go to one of the houses at the end of the boreen to watch an hour’s television once a week. All we had was the wireless – and father controlled the output from that. The Angelus and the news at six o clock as soon as he came home from the Tannery; The School Around The Corner or The Clithero Kid later on, and that was about it. Whenever I tried to listen to Radio Luxemburg it was ‘don’t be wasting the battery with that rubbish’.
Ah yes, the batteries; do you remember the batteries? It had to have one wet one and one dry one before it worked. The dry one lasted for about three months, but the wet one had to be recharged about once every two weeks, so we needed a spare one. This had to be recharged at Battyes; Oh yes, it was an expensive hobby having a wireless in those days.
Sunday afternoons were the best times; then we could listen to a hurling or football match courtesy of Michael O’Hehir, his excitement far outweighing ours on most occasions.
Although I believe even Michael came out second best when Waterford won the Al-Ireland in 1959. I don’t even believe you were there; you were probably visiting your mother as normal that Sunday, and so missed father dancing about the kitchen like a lunatic and shouting the praises of Tom Cheasty and Joe Harney. That night the whole countryside was lit up; bonfires were burning in every village and cross-roads in the county. And why not – it wasn’t very often that we were All-Ireland champions.
Your loving son
Tom
More information arrived today about JN He came from Ballybrack, (sounds like I am the right track) and he enlisted in Waterford in the Royal Garrison Artillery regiment. He was a gunner in the 1st Trench Mortar Bty, and his service number was 3373. Was that also your Regiment? The records show he was aged 23 when he died of his wounds at Flanders. Did you take part in that battle and was that where you lost your leg?
‘I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or young John Neill was it slow and obscene?’
I now know that J is buried in the Adinkerke Military Cemetery in Belgium, which is situated a couple of miles inland from Koksijde and about 20 miles east of Dunkirk.
I wonder, now, if you ever went back there in later years, just to say a proper goodbye? It must have been awful in those trenches; Dante’s Inferno endlessly repeating itself; missiles and gas raining down day in day out; the trenches themselves little better than cess pits when the weather was bad. I read somewhere that by early1915 there was one continuous line of trenches over 400 miles long stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea. There was no way round, was there? You could only go forward or back.
I wonder if mother knew of her father’s last resting place, and if she ever visited him there? She was never out of Ireland in my living memory, but I do recall her saying she spent 6 months in London before she married father. Perhaps she made the journey then.
If I can establish that he was definitely my mother’s father then I plan to visit the cemetery. I will say a prayer for all of you.
Your grand nephew
Tom
Dear Mother,
I have often wondered what you really thought of me. I was far from an ideal son and I guess I treated you shabbily all your life. I was always a bad apple, wasn’t I? Always looking for ways of making a dishonest shilling. Even cheating you on the odd occasion when you sent me shopping to Kilmac on a Saturday morning; short-changing you on the pieces of meat purchased from Nicky Flynn, the butcher. Before returning home, I would gorge myself on sweets and lemonade with the shilling saved. But you always seemed to know and walloped me black and blue as a consequence.
Then there was that Christmas when I got caught shop-lifting in Woolworths in Waterford; I had expected to be locked up but all I had was a severe ticking off from the floorwalker, who frog-marched me outside, made me empty my pockets and pay for everything in full view of all the passers by. Perhaps Christmas Eve in the cells would have been more productive.
I remember my childhood as a happy one; those long summer days during the school holidays spent searching for birds’ nests, catching bees in jam-jars, hunting for frogs in the pond in Kelly’s field and playing cowboys and Indians in the palm groves nearby. The highlight was the annual visit to Tramore on the 25th of August, when we ate ice cream and chips till we were sick, watched tattooed men on motor cycles riding the wall of death in the amusement arcade, and jeered and cheered as the Donkey Derby took place on the beach nearby. Our donkey, Neddy, won it one year, do you remember? John was riding him, and you gave me a shilling to put on him with a fat bookie called Nat. When he won at ten to one I was over the moon – and hooked.
It was my only bet that year. Well, I was only about 12! I didn’t start to bet with any regularity until I was 16 or older, and you weren’t even aware of it.
I don’t suppose you ever set foot in a betting shop in your life. It wasn’t the kind of thing that country women did in your day. Like going to the pub. You might sneak a quick bottle of ‘stout’ in the front bar of Kent’s grocery store while you were doing your shopping, but that didn’t count.
I suppose one of the reasons that women never went in betting shops way back then was because they didn’t have the money to. They depended on the size of their husband’s pay packet on a Friday to maybe siphon a few shillings away for themselves. Some. like yourself, picked blackberries during the summer, and reared turkeys for the Xmas market.
We were all roped in for the blackberry picking – well it was school-holiday time – and we were duly dispatched to the firleds with an assortment of buckets and basins, to help fill the barrels that awaited collection by the blackberry man. You weren’t adverse to a little ‘doctoring’ before he arrived as I recall; payment was by weight and you increased it by adding water to the barrels.
Your Christmas money came from the sale of the turkeys you had reared, and they were purchased by a fat man who arrived out from Town in a covered truck. The truck was full of squawking turkeys, to which yours were added after they had been weighed. This was accomplished by tying their legs together and hanging them, upside down, on a pair of brass scales that hung from the back door. Do you remember how you were always pulling at the scales – as if you didn’t entirely belive the reading theyu gave? I suppose some of your proceeds found their way into the bookies satchel in Dungarvan.
You had your own logic for the Grand National or the Derby – that wasn’t gambling. Do you remember? Every year you spent the morning of the race looking at the list of runners, calling out the names of the ones that took your fancy, asking us what we thought. Sundew, Mr What, Oxo, Esb, Nicholas Silver, Merryman…the names still stick in my mind.
When you had a short list of three or four you wrote the names on a bit of paper, wrapped your few shillings in it and sprinkled it with Holy water, before giving to me to pass on to Lar Kent in Kilmac.
It took me some time to figure out that Lar was a bookies runner as well as a bank messenger. There was no betting shop in the village and Lar used to collect all the local bets then make his mid-day dash to Dungarvan to place them and collect his commission.
At first I thought he was collecting money to deposit in the various banks, (it says something that there were three banks in the village and most of us with not a pot to p… in!) there being a vague notion in my mind that linked bookies runners to bank messengers, and I was so naïve that when I first saw the sign TURF ACCOUNTANT over a particular shop I couldn’t understand why all the people going in never came out with bags of turf on their shoulders.
By the time Kilmore won the National in 1962 I had long shed such naivety. And the fact that I had two shillings each way on it at 28/1 was more of a misfortune than I ever anticipated. In hindsight, I should have quit then when I was ahead.
Your loving son
Tom
Dear Mother
I remember when you got fat. I suppose I was about thirteen at the time. Father was on short time at the Tannery and there was talk that it might close down altogether. I could hear you whispering in bed at night (the walls weren’t very well sound-proofed) that he might have to go to England to find work. The land of small shovels and big money I heard somebody say outside Mass one Sunday morning; ‘better than Ireland’ was father’s reply, ‘big shovels and no bloody money!’
Anyway, you had started to get fat and I couldn’t figure out why. Then you took to your bed and Grandma and Aunt Kathleen came calling. Grandma hardly ever visited, although Grenan was no more than a few miles away, so I knew it was serious.
They arrived in Grandma’s ass and trap; grandma dressed from head to foot in black, her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. I never remember seeing her dressed differently; black seemed to be her favorite color, but then maybe the loss of your father all those years ago had something to do with it. An expression I read somewhere comes to mind ‘misery hung about her like a shroud’. But perhaps that’s unfair; all the older women dressed in black in those days.
They were soon cosseted in your bedroom, and after a while the doctor arrived. I knew then it was some sort of sickness, but after a few days you had recovered. And when you were up and about again you weren’t fat anymore.
I must have put the incident out of my mind because it was many years later before I recalled it and realized that your ‘sickness’ had been a miscarriage. And I also remembered father going across the fields after work that day, carrying a shovel and a sack filled with something. I must have assumed it was a dead animal, perhaps a kitten or a Bonham, that he was burying.
It must have been a hard time for you, but if you were sad I never recall you showing it. But then, I was pre-occupied with other, more exciting matters. Was Tannery really going to close down? And would we actually be heading off to England if it did? I remember lying in bed at night, praying to Saint Christopher’s ‘miraculous’ medal that it would happen, and that we could all go to London and live in a house that would have hot water, electricity and a television.
I was sick of having to read my John Mack Brown comics and my Zane Gray books by candlelight; sick of having to go to one of the houses at the end of the boreen to watch an hour’s television once a week. All we had was the wireless – and father controlled the output from that. The Angelus and the news at six o clock as soon as he came home from the Tannery; The School Around The Corner or The Clithero Kid later on, and that was about it. Whenever I tried to listen to Radio Luxemburg it was ‘don’t be wasting the battery with that rubbish’.
Ah yes, the batteries; do you remember the batteries? It had to have one wet one and one dry one before it worked. The dry one lasted for about three months, but the wet one had to be recharged about once every two weeks, so we needed a spare one. This had to be recharged at Battyes; Oh yes, it was an expensive hobby having a wireless in those days.
Sunday afternoons were the best times; then we could listen to a hurling or football match courtesy of Michael O’Hehir, his excitement far outweighing ours on most occasions.
Although I believe even Michael came out second best when Waterford won the Al-Ireland in 1959. I don’t even believe you were there; you were probably visiting your mother as normal that Sunday, and so missed father dancing about the kitchen like a lunatic and shouting the praises of Tom Cheasty and Joe Harney. That night the whole countryside was lit up; bonfires were burning in every village and cross-roads in the county. And why not – it wasn’t very often that we were All-Ireland champions.
Your loving son
Tom
posted by tomobrien at 1:17 PM
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