Eye on the Past 741

Christmas always brings with it surprises. Pleasant or otherwise they are an almost essential part of the festive season as people renew contact with family, friends and acquaintances. My surprise, and it was surely that, while admittedly a pleasant one, was to partake of Scotland's national dish a few days after the last of the turkey had gone. Haggis is, we are told, a fine example of the Scots woman's ability to create a gourmet dish from the humblest of ingredients. A gourmet dish might seem a somewhat inflated description for the stomach lining of a sheep which is stuffed with the inners of the same animal, seasoned with oatmeal, onions, peppers and a myriad of undeclared seasonings. Boiled, for how long I don't know, before it took pride of place in the centre of the kitchen table where the native Scottish woman plunged a knife into what Robbie Burns called the “Great Chieftan 'o the puddin-race”. At the same time she recites the first verse of Burn's “Address to the Haggis”.

“Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face
Great chieftan o the puddin'-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang's my arm.”

We Irish never quite made such a praiseworthy item out of our national dish, the potato, but if we had, it's doubtful if we could have mustered the same disciplined approach to the festivities surrounding a potatoes meal as have our Celtic neighbours, the Scots, while they partake of their Haggis dinner. It was my first Haggis and presumably the first time that Coneyboro paid host to the time honoured Scottish dinner of Haggis, bashed neaps and chappit tatties. All in all it was a wonderful experience.


On St. Stephen's Day the Wren Boys made a reappearance on the streets of Athy for the first time since Johnny Lynch and his friends from Shrewleen gave up playing the wren almost forty years ago. It was great to see the musicians, singers and dancers all dressed down for the day, recreating a Christmas tradition with which those of my generation and earlier were familiar as we grew up in Athy in the 1950's. What was missing however was the Wren Boys song, “The Wren, The Wren, the King of All Birds”. Maybe the absence on the day of a caged wren (real or otherwise) was the reason. In these politically correct days it would be unacceptable for a wren to be caught and brought around in a cage as was done in the old days as an incentive to the householder to hand over some coins to ensure the wren's eventual release. I am told that in one part of Connemara the Wren Boys always had a live wren in a jam jar as they went from house to house and they must have timed their arrival at Fermoyle Lodge as the last call of the day for they knew that John Spellman as he had done for the previous forty years or so would demand the release of the birds before the Wren Boys left his house. Where a wren could not be caught to fulfill the needs of the Wren Boys a potato sufficed and when suitably adorned with feathers more than adequately filled the bird's cage or the jam jar to create the caged bird illusion as the Wren Boys travelled from door to door. The Athy Wren boys and girls were organised by Aidan McHugh from amongst the gym club's Gaisce Group. The youngsters and the not so young involved on the day did a wonderful job, recreating something we were familiar with nearly half a century ago.

Book launches in the last days of the year are to say the least very unusual but such was the time in which it fell for the late Michael Delaney's book “Are you coming home now? - Memoirs of Old Kilkea” to be launched. His friend John Clynch of the High Cross Inn provided the venue for Michael's family and friends to gather together for what was the second launch of the book which Michael completed just days before he died on 27th May last. Michael's sisters Jean and Pauline travelled from England and Dublin to attend the launch and Jean mentioned to me Michael's fascination with the traditional customs and ceremonies associated with some of the English towns. It was an interest which saw him visit in the company of his sister Jean many of the towns in the South West of England to see at first hand cultures and traditions which if examined closely are not too far removed from many of our own.

Michael's book which should be bought and read by everyone in South Kildare is a lovely re-telling of the folk history of Kilkea as collected or remembered by him over the years. The book is a wonderful mixture of text and pictures, of fact and fiction but everywhere can be seen the native son's love for his own place. He may not have been a native son by birth, having spent the first three years of his life across the River Barrow in County Laois, but Kilkea was embedded in his heart of hearts, despite Michael having spent the last thirty five years of his life in County Kerry. Michael Delaney had walked the fields and the boreens around Kilkea, he knew the faces as he passed but more importantly he listened to the older people of the area and encouraged them to talk of the decades now gone when work was hard and living in the Irish countryside was tough.

Danny Sheehy, a friend of Michaels whom I met in the High Cross Inn, had launched the book in “Tig Kruger” in Dun Chaoin a week before Christmas. He e-mailed me a copy of the address he gave on that night and I was particularly moved by his description of Michael's last visit to his beloved Kilkea. The occasion was the funeral of an old neighbour, Ann O'Brien, and Danny accompanied Michael on the long journey which was made on the last day of January. After the funeral Michael called to a few neighbours, visited the Moone High Cross and the village of Ballitore before setting off on the long journey back to Dun Chaoin. He talked as he drove of the history of South Kildare, the Fitzgerald's of Kilkea Castle and of the labouring tradition of South Kildare. When he left the Silvermines behind him and was out of sight of the Midlands he stopped talking. Michael Delaney did not speak for the last eighty miles of the journey on what was his last visit to his native Kilkea. He knew that his life was slipping away, and yet he found the energy and the will to complete the work with which his name will always be associated – his memoirs of Kilkea.

Michael Delaney's death was a great loss for his family and friends but also for historical research without which the people and events of the past cannot be properly or adequately documented. With his all too premature passing we have been deprived of many more works of historical interest but still he has left his friends and neighbours in Kilkea this final offering. “Are you going home now? - Memories of Old Kilkea” which is a fitting tribute to a scholarly local historian.

Christmas Time in Athy / Bob Morrisson

Two letters received during the week brought me back to the Athy of 50 years ago and to the days when life seemed so much simpler and less complicated than it is today. The first letter was from a Coneyboro resident who wrote of memories of Christmas past.

“The night we brought our Christmas grocery list to Frank O’Brien’s was a great family occasion. All my teenage life, our family did the weekly shopping in O’Brien’s and each Friday, Mr. O’Brien would be seen delivering the weekly groceries and firing. But come Christmas our shopping list was special in more ways than one. I can still remember and sometimes still feel the excitement and magic of walking into O’Brien’s shop on that special night. Surrounded by Christmas everywhere, boxes of Cadbury’s chocolates, selection boxes, Christmas cakes and puddings and Santa’s smiling face on the Tayto boxes high up on the shelves. To me this was part of the Christmas magic for a young boy”.

My own recollections of Christmas when I was a young lad living in Offaly Street was of Duthie’s Santa Claus, the excitement of window shopping in Duke Street, the festive goose or turkey for Christmas dinner, and the eerie calmness of a Christmas day afternoon in the local streets. The nodding Santa in Duthie’s shop window placed in position some weeks before Christmas day was for us youngsters the start of the Christmas season. The winter evenings closed in early and the darkness descended on the quiet streets necessitating the advancement of the public lighting up time to an hour or so before tea time. It was that time which marked the schoolboys’ free time between the closing of the school for the day and incarceration at home following tea to “do our exercise”. In those innocent days “doing your exercise” had nothing to do with physical training, but rather an acknowledgment that we had to sit down at the kitchen table and learn the prescribed poem in Irish or English for the following day and perhaps agonise over an English or Irish essay.

The darkness of the November evenings were but sparsely illuminated by the old fashioned public lighting of the time but this merely added to the sense of adventure to the wanderings of the young fellows who walked up one side of Duke Street as far as Glynn’s Corner returning on the opposite footpath.

The shop windows all suitably decorated for the Christmas offered a hint of excitement to come when the long anticipated day dawned. We enjoyed peering into the shop windows and soaking up the atmosphere of a town where town and country folk came together in a mixum-gatherum of indistinguishable class and creed. Shaw’s of course, provided the biggest attraction with a number of shop windows, one of which always featured toys. A number of the smaller shops also stacked some Christmas toys while Duthie’s jewellery provided the Christmas window shopping show piece, the nodding Santa.

In those days, I can remember the long build up to Christmas each year. Maybe its only the anticipation of a young mind but everywhere then seemed to take on a christmassy feeling at the start of November. Displays in shop windows were changed, toys were taken out of storage and given pride and place where they could encourage little minds to prompt big dad’s and mam’s. The toys never seemed to change from year to year unlike today when the latest book or film inevitably spawns a plethora of gadgets in its wake.

Can anyone remember from fifty years ago any toy other than the gun and holster and if exceptionally lucky a cowboy suit for a boy and a doll and a pram for a girl. They were the basic and it has to be said the most desirable toys for young children then even if jigsaws, small paint boxes, snakes and ladders and other party games were sometimes also part of the usual Christmas fare. I am very aware now although I wasn’t then that for many local children even a gun or a doll was not to be had on Christmas Day. The very real poverty of the 1950’s, a poverty which saw children go to school barefooted and sometimes without a bite to eat for breakfast is now mercifully behind us.

The second letter I got last week was from an old friend and former neighbour who brought to my attention the recent death of Bob Morrisson. I remember Bob Morrisson who in the 1950’s worked in Shaw’s and lived in St. Patrick’s Avenue. He was a familiar figure as he walked briskly through Offaly Street each day on his way to and from work. His name was familiar to anyone who shopped in Shaw’s at the time and who in Athy of fifty years ago did not do that. Almost every local household involved in the rural electrification scheme of the 1940’s and 1950’s would have done business with Shaw’s for the new fangled cookers and other electrical equipment on offer at that time. Bob Morrisson was the man who with the proprietor Sam Shaw ran the sales campaign which Shaw’s of Athy put on in conjunction with the rural electrification scheme. He transferred to Waterford in the early 1960’s as Manager of Shaw’s Department Store in that City and died last week at an advanced age.

While I was writing on Bob Morrisson, I was reminded of these years when most if not every shop in the town gave tick or credit to their customers. I can recall my own mother having a book for Shaw’s wherein the goods bought and the instalments paid each month were faithfully recorded. I can also recall how a similar arrangement operated with the family grocer who in our case was Myles Whelan of Duke Street and later still Jim Fennin. This, of course, had the attraction, so far as the shopkeeper was concerned, of maintaining customer loyalty, something which is not very obvious today. The changes in shopping habits over the years and the discarding of the book in favour of cash sales has probably brought some benefit to the shopkeeper. I wonder to what extent the cash only sales concept has contributed to the loss of business to individual shops or indeed to our town of Athy as shoppers become more mobile , more demanding in terms of quality and service.

While I am writing of Athy in 1950’s its appropriate that I should mention that this week a group of school lads from the local Christian Brothers school of that time have agreed to have a class reunion in the town of the weekend of the 20/22 September next. Some of those not now so young fellows live as far apart as Australia, China, America and other far flung places, with just a few of us still here in the town. If anyone reading this knows of someone who was school with the likes of Mick Robinson, Teddy Kelly, Ted Wynne, Brendan McKenna et al, would you pass on word of a class reunion in September and ask them to contact me.

Happy Christmas to all my readers.