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

9th March 2oo6

Dear Mother,
Peggy was your favourite niece, wasn’t she? She spent a lot of time at our house when we were growing up, looking after us, pushing the younger ones around in the purple and silver pram, and then, when she married herself, pushing the same pram up Ballyhussa boreen with her own children in it. She wasn’t that much older than me, probably no more than five years, but for some reason I always associated her with your generation. Why did she marry Mattie? Was it because she had to? Because it seems to me looking back on it now that they were never a married couple in any real sense of the word. They were never together – or if they were it was only when staggering home together from the pub in Carroll’s Cross. If he wasn’t there she was there, and visa versa; they never seemed to spend any time at home together looking after the children.
You must have seen the writing on the wall for the marriage from a long way off. Was that why you hatched the plan to get Peggy the house? So that she could leave Mattie and have a place of her own in which to rear her family? There was no fear of me; I was newly married and living in England now.
The first part of the plan worked fine. And my loss was Peggy’s gain. Incidentally, you were right when you said I would never have lived there anyway. I would have sold it before the ink on the agreement was dry.
But the second part of the plan backfired badly didn’t it? Because separating Peggy from Mattie didn’t stop her drinking; in fact nothing has ever stopped Peggy from drinking.
It didn’t make her a better mother either, did it? At some point it dawned on you that you weren’t going to change her for the better, because as time passed you distanced yourself from her, so that your expression ‘walking the road with the tinkers’, could just as easily have applied to her as to the many others you disapproved of.
Your loving son
Tom

Dear grand-uncle Mikey,
When you marched off to war in the spring of 1915 did you know what you were fighting for? Or did you care? Was it purely on economic grounds – at least the British Army would feed you and keep you and put a few shillings in your pocket at the end of each week – or did you have an overwhelming desire to kill Germans? But perhaps it never even entered your head that you might end up in the green fields of France, a part of the greatest military slaughtering exercise that ever took place?
You certainly never thought you would lose a leg in it, or that your friend, JN, would lose his life there. I still don’t know where you enlisted or with what regiment, but I imagine the place was either Waterford city or Clonmel and the regiment either the Royal Munster Fusiliers or the Royal Irish Regiment. Was it a spur of the moment decision? Did one of you say to the other – ‘come on, let’s join up, there’s nothing to do around this place?’ Was that how it was? And how did your sister feel about J going away? Or did J not know her then? Maybe it was later – when you were home on leave – that he met her? You see how many questions there are? The only people who know the answers for sure are all dead now so I can only guess what they might be.
I wish you were still around in 1973, when an Australian singer called Eric Bogle was so moved by a visit to the WW1 memorials in France that he wrote a song called ‘The Green Fields of France’. It begins:
Well, how do you do young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while neath the warm summer sun
I’ve been working all day and I’m nearly done
I see by your graveside you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in nineteen sixteen
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or young Willie McBride was it slow and obscene
Chorus:
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly
Did they sound the dead march as they lowered you down
And did the band play the Last Post and chorus
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest.
There is more in the same vein but I am sure you get my drift. I first heard it sung by a group called the Fury Brothers. You would have liked the Furies; saloon bar musicians with voices like a load of gravel sliding down a chute. The eldest brother, Finbarr I think his name is, played your favorite instrument, the melodeon. You told me many times you carried yours around with you during the war, strapped to your back. And showed me the dent in it which had prevented a lump of shrapnel from injuring or killing you. I wonder if it was true, or if you made stories up for goggle-eyed young boys like John and myself ?
I still remember the one you told about the ‘Big Push’ of 1917 – November I believe it was – when one of your comrades took out a German machine-gun nest with a grenade using the road bowling technique he had perfected bowling the roads in his native Cork. You said he had saved many of you from being slaughtered that day, and that he had subsequently been awarded the Military Cross.
I wonder now if you knew John Condon from Waterford, who is widely acknowledged as the youngest soldier ever to enlist in the British Army? He must have stood out because he was only 12 years of age when he enlisted, and still only 14 years old when he died during a gas attack in 1915. His burial plot in France is now a shrine, and one of the most visited of all the graves. A shrine to what, I wonder – the folly of youth?

Your grand nephew
Tom



Dear father,
The Sunday night you died you had been dancing with my mother - a slow waltz I expect – when your heart gave up, and you died right there on the dance floor, in full view of all your friends and neighbors.
I, who had been drinking heavily some seventy miles away, learned of it when I was awakened in the early hours of the following morning by a member of the local Gardai. I can still recall it; fuzzy-headed from the effects of the alcohol, and wondering what kind of country it was that had the police waking up people in the middle of the night to tell them their father is dead.
Later, sobered up, and in the cold reality of daylight, I realized that however little we had said to each other in the past there was no chance of expanding on it now – or ever again.
You were always the silent type; I wouldn’t say you were secretive but you were definitely silent. This poem is for you

The Night the Music Died
He lay in the box quite comfortably
His waxen face staring into infinity
Looking much better in death than he had ever done in life.
And all I could do was peer at him through slatted fingers
From the back of the room.
The ever-present smell of tanning and leather aprons was absent now
More than forty seeping years of it
Scrubbed away one last time.

The moped which was a natural progression
From pedal-power when his legs gave out,
Lay discarded in the coal-house.
No driver you see; And mother still had her shopping to do.
He dug turf, cut down young Sally trees,
And turned over his bit of stony ground
Endlessly.
In summer he clipped sheep slowly
With a machine bought by post from Clery’s.
Carefully stowing it away in its box when the shearing was done.

The chalk pipes he sucked on,
Their stems held together with blood pricked from his thumb,
And his three bottles of Sunday night Guinness
Standing corked still under the counter
Were redundant now.
Who would dance a half-set with her now
My mother enquired of no one in particular.
The smoky saloon bar stunned that the music had felled him,
Knocked him to the floor in the middle of the tune.
He lay there with a smile on his face
Knowing it was over.
And I never got to know what was on his mind.

Later, we put him in the ground
And sadness trickled down me like dust through my fingers.
And afterwards, everybody stood around
Saying what a great man he was.
Slapping the back of my overcoat
Sure he gave forty years to that tannery
And what did it give him? I wanted to shout to the throng.
A gold watch and a tin tray
And both had his name spelled wrong.

Your loving son
Tom

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

letter to my mother and other dead relatives

The following series of letters are a voyage of discovery, about myself as well as my family and relations. The first letter is self-explanatory; resluting from the discovery that my (long-lost) aunt had died intestate. The others follow on as a result of this. I should say here that the story is as yet unfinished; I don't know yet how it will all turn out.

8th March 2006

LETTERS TO MY MOTHER AND OTHER DEAD RELATIVES

Dear Mother,
We never had much to say to each other when you were alive. I suppose that had a lot to do with you being grounded in the tranquility of rural County Waterford, while I misspent my youth on the mean streets of that area often referred to as County Kilburn. Even when we did speak it was only in platitudes; nothing of importance was ever touched upon. Mainly, I assumed, because nothing of importance had ever happened in our family’s history. So the chances of you surprising me from beyond the grave were very remote indeed.
It began with enquiries about your favourite son, John. Telephone calls to friends and neighbours, even to the Parish Priest. Nosing around, you would call it. Eventually the caller phoned John himself, which is how I became involved.
Apparently we were the beneficiaries of a legacy. A substantial sum of money was laying in Government coffers, the trail of which led back to our paternal grandfather, Tom, and we were the next in line. Nobody ever spoke about grandpa Tom; Why was that? And now that I think of it, why is grandpa buried in one parish and grandma in another? And why did father scrupulously care for grandma’s grave, and not grandpa’s?
But back to the legacy. There was a catch - there always is - the caller required us to sign a contract giving him 33% of the estate before revealing details to us. As I happened to consider that excessive for a ‘finders fee’ I began my own investigations on the internet.
As far as I could see, the only family member who it could possibly be was Aunt Margaret. When I had last seen her ten years ago, she was already an old woman, living in poverty in Lewisham. (I know you always said she had loads of money, but if you had seen how she lived then you would have changed your mind)
Anyway, after several hours of queries to Ask Jeeves and co, I came across a government website called http://www.bonavacantia.co.uk/ I typed in a name and there it was in black and white! Margaret O’B…. Lewisham, died intestate 2005. Estate £XX,000 How well you knew her!
But of course you didn’t really. Nobody did. Not even my father – her own brother. He never spoke about her. Why was that? She left Waterford in 1947 and was never seen by any member of the family again, apart from myself. Oh, I know you wrote her the occasional letter and she sent parcels of used clothes to you. ‘Her cast-offs’, you called them, before burning the lot. What was it that caused her to go away and never come back?
She came to visit me in Kilburn shortly after Karen was born – was that your doing, giving her my address? – and we kept in contact until I moved away from the area. She liked the idea of having a niece, but I found her a strange, secretive woman.
When I last saw her she was housebound, living in a dingy council estate in Deptford. And given to calling me ‘Captain - because I don’t think she remembered who I was any more. After that I forgot about her.
To establish claim to the estate I have had to furnish various documents; birth, marriage, death etc. Which is how I learned that my father and Aunt Margaret weren’t the only children born to my grandparents. There were three other children, John, James and Catherine. What happened to those uncles and aunt? Father never spoke of them. They are not still alive as far as I can establish, but neither have I yet ascertained where and how they died and where they are buried.
But you, mother dear, served up the biggest surprise of all. On your marriage certificate, it says FATHER UNKNOWN. Why, in my childhood, did I never realize that your mother was unmarried? Or query the fact that your father had never been around. Oh, there was a man about the house – your mother’s brother Mikey – and maybe I subconsciously associated him with being your father. Mikey, with his wooden leg -he had lost the real one fighting with the British Army in Flanders – lives on in my memory, and I can still recall trying to remove my leg as he did his, and wondering why I couldn’t. I almost wish now that he had been your father.
I have since learned that you did know your father. He was a friend of Mikey’s who had also joined the British Army, but had been killed in the same battle that had seen my grand-uncle lose his leg. Killed before he could make an honest woman of your mother.
Killed before he could respectably be put down on your wedding certificate as your father.
You never spoke about any of this. Not to me, anyhow. Was this what made you melancholy in your later years? The thought of your mother living all her life in her little thatched cottage in Grenan, the man she loved lying in an unmarked grave, lost forever in those green fields of France?
I think it’s sad that I find you more interesting dead than I ever did when you were alive.
Your loving son,
Tom