A Cage To Hold My Dreams
Niamh's Story
Courtship was a leisurely pursuit,
an innocent pastime
in the days when Tom and
Niamh walked out together.
For this was Ireland,
nineteen-twenties Ireland
where romance had to be as
transparent as a public holiday,
and affairs of the heart ran true
to ancient traditions
That Tom loved her was never in
doubt. He wanted to fatten
himself on her kisses, to feed off
her love until his waistline groaned
and his head spun.
His father was the village store-
keeper in Ballylogan, presiding over
a musty, crusty find-it-you-can buy-it
sort of shop, a mish-mash
of food jars and soap packets,
baking flour and vinegar, sealing
wax and cough medicine, garden
tools and coils of fencing
wire. Adverts for Cerebos salt and
Sunlight soap, Rinso and Robin starch,
Camp coffee and Lyons tuppeny fruit
pies competed for the eye inside
the shop.
Tom slept above it in a tiny room
that once held merchandise.
Niamh came from the hill country
around Sceichin, a bracken-clad hunk
of land with brooding hills, and mossy
glens and eloquent
skies, littered with dry-stone walls
and craggy rocks which gave the
impression that, in places, the
jagged bones of mother earth were
poking through its matt-green skin.
This was a land of strong beliefs,
of fiery passions and legendary conflicts,
of rough landscapes and
endless hardships, yet its people
were born with songs on their lips
and compassion in their veins.
Like the people of Sceichin, the terrain
had been shaped and weathered by
strrong winds and rain. A frothy,
tireless stream gurgled and splashed
and poked fun at the mossy banks
on either side, saying 'we're off
to the sea, so there !'
and then spun into tiny, impudent
waterfalls which plopped and skated
across the smooth boulders on its
way to the wider, lower expanses
of the river, where the laughter
suddenly stopped and
everything darkened and became
worrying and mysterious.
The house of her father, dug into
the hillside, with its white-washed
gable ends, thatched roof, alert
square-eyed windows keeping
a constant vigil across the valley,
and a yard-full of clucking hens
and baby chicks--all this was
an ideal retreat for someone near to
life's passing out parade, but for a
young girl eager to warm her hands
at the skin-blistering
banked-up, red-hot, coals of life,
Sceichin was a place to remember
with fondness, somewhere to talk
about after she had left it, not to
have waved in her face every
blessed dawn she opened her eyes.
This probably explains why Niamh
let herself be courted by Tom.
Good old Tom. Someone
other than her little sister Siobhan
to talk to. Solid, reliable, do-little,
reach-for-nowhere Tom.
Better than a soppy wet dog for
company, she probably thought,
although one or two people in the
village might have given her
an argument on that.
For some reason, which he never
explained, Niamh's father had no time
for politicians or salesmen
or for people who whistled badly
the Irish ballads that he loved.
But everyone liked him.
He was a good listener but hated
gossip. His skill with language, for a
self-educated man, was formidable.
He could recite Yeats and Milton and
Burns plus one or two gaelic poets
known only to himself and the
older farmers who toiled and tilled
the gentle slopes of the
Knockmealdowns.
More skilfully than any man around
him, he could repair a broken clock
and have it ticking again before
the little cogs and wheels knew that
they had been idle. Every Sunday
morning, head pressed between
trembling fingers, he promised God
to never again touch a drop
of the stuff but had turned his brain
into a giant marshmallow, but
vows made in distress and wicked
haste are thinner than a pie-crust,
and by the next morning,
he and the bottle of rye were again
the best of buddies, collapsing onto
each other like reunited lovers.
He quite liked Tom.
"The lad hasn't an ounce of harm in
him." he would say, adding ruefully,
"Or much else besides."
When Tom came for Sunday tea,
a ritual of courtship in rural Ireland,
Niamh's father shook his hand firmly
as if screwing in a light-bulb,
and led him to a settee which, could it
only speak, had more stories to tell
than half the novels in Dublin's
public library. He would offer Tom
drinks which even if he was dying of
thirst he wouldn't put to his own lips,
and make timid, time-wasting
conversation until Niamh appeared.
Understandably, he had
reservations about Tom becoming his
son-in-law. Nice lad though he was,
he was just a big, soft errand-boy, with
protruding ears and a sad-clown face,
riding around on a clumsy black bicycle,
brewing pots of tea
in the back room, making sure that
everything on display was labelled
correctly, that the jars of jam were
kept away from the potted meats.
Paid next to nothing his flinty,
penny-pinching father, Tom had little
hope of being able to spread his wings
beyond his little room over the shop.
Life at Sceichin held few surprises.
It followed every twist and bend of the
seasons like a dog at the heels of
its master. Harvest-time was
a testing one for the community as
a whole, who helped each other in turn,
arriving at dawn at the chosen
farmhouse, jovial and sunburnt,
shouldering their rakes and scythes,
their work-hardened hands ready for
action. At the end of the day,
when the sweat had dried or been
towelled off, when aching arms
were being rested, when sharp blades
which had done their work in the sun
like weapons in a medieval battle were
wiped clean and put away,
swathes of ripened corn lay stiff and
silent on the ground like the corpses of
a defeated army.
On windy days as soon as the corn fell,
it would be bundled and left to dry
and sweeten in the hot, swirling air.
At lunchtime, with the clear morning
sky beginning to glaze over,
Niamh's mother and some other
women would appear carrying jugs
of hot tea and ham and cheese
and bread and seedcake
and pastries and home-made jam.
Seated on the ground, some of them
puffing on their pipes, the men would
munch and drink and gossip about
nothing in particular, while a gang of
noisy, hungry sparrows,
taking advantage of the pause,
plundered the freshly-scythed grain,
snatching, scratching, pecking, and
cramming their tiny beaks with as
much as they could hold.
If storm clouds dipped overhead, low
enough to catch the scent of the
wildflowers, work would stop,
covers would be spread over the new
stooks and everyone would go home
and hope for a brighter tomorrow.
Sometimes while the harvest
was collected the women would
go bramble-picking. Niamh and
Siobhan loved these trips halfway up
the mountainside and would return
home after an exhausting, fun-filled
day with their lips and tongues
purple. Their mother would say,
"Honestly, girls, you should
put them in the baskets not in your
mouths." The impish Siobhan
would reply, "But Mam, I haven't
had many" and another lie joined
the growing list she would need
to mention the next time
she had a chat with Father Breen
in his claustrophobic confessional.
The fishmonger did his rounds on
Wednesday afternoons, as regularly
as clockwork so that the meatless
Friday could be kept to.
Niamh would see his van
come around the bend in the road
and rush indoors to tell her mother.
She was fascinated
by the sight of dead fresh fish, which
looked like they might be just asleep
and could start swimming and
splashing about again if someone
tickled their chins and
slipped them back in the water.
Mornings began with the welcome
aroma of bacon in the frying-pan.
Except for Fridays, of course.
It sneaked under doors and through
keyholes and up nostrils. Bacon and
crusty bread with lashings of butter
were Niamh's father's favourite start to
the day. On Sundays only the essential
work, like milking, securing the livestock,
was done. After Mass in the village
chapel, they would return
to a lunch of roast beef and yorkshire
puddings served piping hot with
potatoes, cabbage, grilled onions and
succulent home-made gravy.
Sometimes in a sudden cloudburst,
washing which had almost dried might
be overlooked until the last minute.
Niamh and her mother
would dash from the house as if it was
on fire, heads down, snatching at pegs
and sheets and towels, trying to stuff
them out of the rain before
the good work was undone. Birds
accustomed to these sudden squalls
would watch with amusement and a
speckled thrush might throw back his
head and toss a defiant song or two
up into the newly-rinsed air.
At night, with the curtains drawn
and a long draught-excluding,
padded snake laid full length behind
the door, everything became quiet
and still. Fingers of fire danced across
the ceiling to its own rythym.
The turf-fire set deep in the soot-
blackened throat of the chimney,
flickered and sizzled and spat out
a welcome to the regular parade of
night callers, neighbouring farmers
mostly, who each had a story to tell
about ghosts and fairies and ancient
heroes, and sometimes to
the accompanyment of a concertina
or fiddle, would sing a lovely old ballad,
perhaps Carrickfergus or
My Lagan Love guaranteed
to tug gently on the heartstrings
and make everyone think of happier
golden days gone by. When he had
an evening to himself, Niamh's father
would sit under a paraffin lamp,
spectacles half-way down his nose,
newspaper spread out in front
of him, tracing each word with his
finger, reading aloud about airships
and Al Capone, and shaking his head
at the wonder of it all.
One afternoon a prim young woman
stepped from the chugging, clanking
steam-train which paused briefly every
afternoon at four-fifteen--on the days
it ran, that is--at Dungarvan station.
It was Mary, Niamh's older
sister, on a visit home after spending
a year in London. The boat had been
crowded and she was tired and aching
from carrying a large suitcase,
but revived by her mother's wonderful
tea and home-baked scones, she
began to describe excitedly her new life
in the big city. Niamh listened, full of
interest, to Mary's description
of the shops and the clothes and the
crowds and the noise and the underground
railway and the big house where she
lived-in as a parlourmaid.
It was a far cry from Sceichin, but Mary
made it seem like the most amazing,
had-to-be-seen place on earth.
As a parlourmaid to a kindly, well-to-do
family in London--luckier than many
parlourmaids she readily admitted--she
had her own room and a wash-bowl
and jug and three different uniforms,
one each for the morning and
afternoon, and one for off-duty.
On her free afternoon she could stroll
across the park or feed the ducks
or stay indoors and read.
Mary said that London was crying out
for others to join the thousands of
Irish girls who had already left
home and settled happily in big
houses in the best parts of England.
Niamh decided immediately that she
would go to London, too, and knowing
that Mary was calm and wise beyond
her years, their mother agreed.
But then their father asked,
"What about Tom ?" Niamh stared into
the flickering fire. What, indeed, about
Tom. He would not want her to go. He
would find a hundred-and-one reasons
why she should stay. He was the son
of a grocer. He had a shop to inherit.
He would spend the rest of
his days worrying about tins of cocoa
and balls of string. He wasn't going
anywhere. How could he be
expected to understand ?
On Sunday, Tom cycled to the farm
for tea, as usual. Afterwards, as they
walked together in weakening
sunlight along the quiet boreen, Niamh
in her best frock and he in his slate-
grey, fashionable tweed cap and
carrying a cane, she delivered her
bombshell. Tom pretended not to mind
but behind the brave mask, she knew
that he was hurting badly,
and wished that she could think of
something to say that would ease his
pain and his deadful fear of losing her.
But nothing came to mind and
they finished the walk in stony silence.
The noisy, tough, wide-shouldered,
passionate, vibrant London which
Niamh saw for the first time was as
exciting as Mary had promised.
London held its head high,
as any great capital should, proud to be
what it was, proud of its history, proud
of its brown teeth and its strong pulse,
proud of the pain and the sweat
and the cunning that made up
its concrete soul. The 'twenties was
a historian's dream-time, squeezed
between military madness
and the slump that waited up ahead,
hidden in the shadows like an armed
robber, biding its time, checking its
weapons, waiting to leap out
and snatch whatever it could get its
slimy hands on, waiting to inflict pain, to
frighten or bludgeon people to death.
But that was some time into the future.
Before that, young Londoners and
others joining them, were determined
to have a good time, the best time
going. It was a time to dance
and go wild, to paint rainbows and play
games, to drink themselves stupid,
and fall madly in love.
London came alive as the young pinned
back the night's ears with their excited
chatter, spilling out of buses
and stairways while the subdued, grey
old Thames rolled along, hands plunged
deeply in her pockets, not bothering to
glance back after passing Greenwich.
Niamh could not have wished for more.
Shops beckoned seductively
behind bright lights. Ice cream vendors
threaded their tricycles between cars
and big double-decker buses whose
cheeky conductors made her laugh.
They loved to hear her laugh
for it was like the peal of small bells
mingling with the song of a nightingale
and it made everyone around
her smile and feel a little warmer
towards each other.
Niamh quickly found an employer who
would take her in. It was a rather grand
house in Wimbledon, with a shiny
brass nameplate and fancy wrought-iron
balconies around the windows,
and as luck would have it, only a few
streets from where Mary lived. There
was no time at all for homesickness.
Niamh was in no hurry to be reunited
with those damp, sullen skies over
Sceichin. She was in London to have fun
but also to work hard.
She awoke at five-thirty each morning
except on Sundays, started the boiler,
opened the downstairs curtains,
cleaned the grates, took up the morning
tea and prepared breakfast, all before
the gentle chimes of seven echoed
through the house.
While the parents breakfasted, Niamh
would help the children, laying out their
clean clothes, combing their hair,
and examining their teeth and gums.
On sunny afternoons she would
take them for walks and they would ask
how she got that strange accent, and
she would tell them about growing up
on a farm with dogs and horses
and geese and they would laugh and
clap their hands in amazement. She
spent her free Wednesday afternoons
in the park, or in bad weather with a
borrowed book, or an old
Reader's Digest which would become
her magic carpet, carrying her off to
exotic places which she had not heard
of before. Without knowing it,
Niamh had inherited her father's
appetite for knowledge and his love of
language.
Back in Ballylogan, Tom carried on
having Sunday lunch with Niamh's family.
As always, her father asked about
things that didn't matter, and Tom,
gave his answers, duly considered,
as if his life depended on them.
Later, before cycling home, where his
father waited impatiently with a long list
of tasks for the next morning,
Tom would walk along the boreen
where he and Niamh said their last
goodbye, a sad figure immersed in
thought, oblivious to the kindly,
outstretched hand of evening.
Her letters had become less frequent,
and there was never a mention of her
coming home, even for a short visit.
He knew in his heart
that he had lost her for ever.
Dungarvan, Co Waterford 150402
