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

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