OLD CUSTOMS
"Put a green cross beneath the roof on the eve of good Saint Bride
And you'll have luck within the house for long past Lammastide;
Put a green cross above the door--'tis hard to keep it green,
But 'twill bring good luck and happiness for long past Hallow E'en
The green cross holds Saint Brigid's spell, and long the spell
endures,
And 'twill bring blessings on the head of you and all that's
yours."
--From _The Song of Simple People_.
Once a year, on Saint Bride's Eve, my father came home from his day's
work, carrying a load of green rushes on his shoulders. At the door he
would stand for a moment with his feet on the threshold and say these
words:
"Saint Bride sends her blessings to all within. Give her welcome."
Inside my mother would answer, "Welcome she is," and at these words my
father would loosen the shoulder-knot and throw his burden on the floor.
Then he made crosses from the rushes, wonderful crosses they were. It
was said that my father was the best at that kind of work in all the
countryside. When made, they were placed in various parts of the house
and farm. They were hung up in our home, over the lintel of the door,
the picture of the Holy Family, the beds, the potato pile and the
fireplace. One was placed over the spring well, one in the pig-sty, and
one over the roof-tree of the byre. By doing this the blessing of Saint
Bride remained in the house for the whole of the following year. I
liked to watch my father plaiting the crosses, but I could never make
one myself.
When my mother churned milk she lifted the first butter that formed on
the top of the cream and placed it against the wall outside the door. It
was left there for the fairy folk when they roamed through the country
at midnight. They would not harm those who gave them an offering in that
manner, but the people who forgot them would have illness among their
cattle through all the length of the year.
If my father met a red-haired woman when he was going to the market he
would turn home. To meet a red-haired woman on the high-road is very
unlucky.
It is a bad market where there are more women than men. "Two women and a
goose make a market," is the saying among the Glenmornan folk.
If my mother chanced to overturn the milk which she had drawn from the
cow, she would say these words: "Our loss go with it. Them that it goes
to need it more than we do." One day I asked her who were the people to
whom it went. "The gentle folk," she told me. These were the fairies.
You very seldom hear persons called by their surname in Glenmornan.
Every second person you meet there is either a Boyle or an O'Donnell.
You want to ask a question about Hugh O'Donnell. "Is it Patrick's Hugh
or Mickey's Hugh or Sean's Hugh?" you will be asked. So too in the Glen
you never say _Mrs._ when speaking of a married woman. It is just
"Farley's Brigid" or "Patrick's Norah" or "Cormac's Ellen," as the case
may be. There was one woman in Glenmornan who had a little boy of about
my age, and she seldom spoke to anybody on the road to chapel or market.
Everyone seemed to avoid her, and the old people called her "that
woman," and they often spoke about her doings. She had never a man of
her own, they said. Of course I didn't understand these things, but I
knew there was a great difference in being called somebody's Mary or
Norah instead of "that woman."
On St. Stephen's Day the Glenmornan boys beat the bushes and killed as
many wrens as they could lay their hands on. The wren is a bad bird, for
it betrayed St. Stephen to the Jews when they wanted to put him to
death. The saint hid in a clump of bushes, but the wrens made such a
chatter and clatter that the Jews, when passing, stopped to see what
annoyed the birds, and found the saint hiding in the undergrowth. No
wonder then that the Glenmornan people have a grudge against the wren!
Kissing is almost unknown in the place where I was born and bred. Judas
betrayed the Son of God with a kiss, which proves beyond a doubt that
kissing is of the devil's making. It is no harm to kiss the dead in
Glenmornan, for no one can do any harm to the dead.
Once I got bitten by a dog. The animal snapped a piece of flesh from my
leg and ate it when he got out of the way. When I came into my own house
my father and mother were awfully frightened. If three hairs of the dog
that bit me were not placed against the sore I would go mad before seven
moons had faded. Oiney Dinchy, who owned the dog, would not give me
three hairs because I was unfortunate enough to be stealing apples when
the dog rushed at me. For all that it mattered to Oiney, I might go as
mad as a March hare. The priest, when informed of the trouble, blessed
salt which he told my father to place on the wound. My father did so,
but the salt pained me so much that I rushed screaming from the house.
The next door neighbours ran into their homes and closed their doors
when they heard me scream. Two little girls were coming to our house for
the loan of a half-bottle of holy water for a sick cow, and when they
saw me rush out they fled hurriedly, shrieking that I was already mad
from the bite of Oiney Dinchy's dog. When Oiney heard this he got
frightened and he gave my father three hairs of the dog with a civil
hand. I placed them on my sore, the dog was hung by a rope from the
branch of a tree, and the madness was kept away from me. I hear that
nowadays in Glenmornan the people never apply the holy salt to the bite
of a dog. Thus do old customs change.
The six-hand reel is a favourite Glenmornan dance, but in my time a new
parish priest came along who did not approve of dancing. "The six-hand
reel is a circle, the centre of which is the devil," said he, and called
a house in which a dance was held the "Devil's Station." He told the
people to cease dancing, but they would not listen to him. "When we get
a new parish priest we don't want a new God," they said. "The old God
who allowed dancing is good enough for us." The priest put the seven
curses on the people who said these words. I only know three of the
seven curses.
May you have one leg and it to be halting.
May you have one eye and it to be squinting
May you have one tooth and it to be aching.
The second curse fell on one man--old Oiney Dinchy, who had a light foot
on a good floor. When tying a restive cow in the byre, the animal caught
Oiney in the ball of one eye with the point of its horn, and Oiney could
only see through the other eye afterwards. The people when they saw this
feared the new parish priest, but they never took any heed to the new
God, and up to this day there are many good six-hand reelers in
Glenmornan. And the priest is dead.
The parish priest who came in his place was a little pot-bellied man
with white shiny false teeth, who smoked ninepenny cigars and who always
travelled first-class in a railway train. Everybody feared him because
he put curses on most of the people in Glenmornan; and usually on the
people whom I thought best in the world. Those whom I did not like at
all became great friends of the priest. I always left the high-road when
I saw him coming. His name was Father Devaney, and he was eternally
looking for money from the people, who, although very poor, always paid
when the priest commanded them. If they did not they would go to hell as
soon as they died. So Father Devaney said.
A stranger in Glenmornan should never talk about crows. The people of
the Glen are nicknamed the "Crow Chasers," because once in the bad days,
the days of the potato failure, they chased for ten long hours a crow
that had stolen a potato, and took back the potato at night in triumph.
This has been cast up in their teeth ever since, and it is an ill day
for a stranger when he talks about crows to the Glenmornan people.
Courtship is unknown in Glenmornan. When a young man takes it in his
head to marry, he goes out in company with a friend and a bottle of
whisky and looks for a woman. If one refuses, the young man looks for
another and another until the bottle of whisky is consumed. The friend
talks to the girl's father and lays great stress upon the merits of the
would-be husband, who meanwhile pleads his suit with the girl. Sometimes
a young man empties a dozen bottles of whisky before he can persuade a
woman to marry him.
In my own house we had flesh meat to dinner four times each year, on St.
Patrick's Day, Easter Sunday, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day. If the
harvest had been a good one we took bacon with our potatoes at the
ingathering of the hay. Ours was a hay harvest; we grew very little
corn.
Of all the seasons of the year I liked the harvest-time best. Looking
from the door of my father's house I had the whole of Glenmornan under
my eyes. Far down the Glen the road wound in and out, now on one side of
the river and now on the other, running away to the end of Ireland, and
for all that I knew, maybe to the end of the world itself.
The river came from the hills, tumbling over rocks in showers of fine
white mist and forming into deep pools beneath, where it rested calmly
after its mad race. Here the trout leaped all day, and turned the placid
surface into millions of petulant ripples which broke like waves under
the hazel bushes that shaded the banks. In the fords further along the
heavy milch cows stood belly-deep in the stream, seeking relief from the
madness that the heat and the gad-flies put into their blood.
The young cattle grazed on the braes, keeping well in the shadow of the
cliffs, while from the hill above the mountain-sheep followed one
another in single file, as is their wont, down to the lower and sweeter
pastures.
The mowers were winding their scythes in long heavy sweeps through the
meadow in the bottomlands, and rows of mown hay lay behind them. Even
where I stood, far up, I could hear the sharp swish of their scythes as
they cut through the bottom grass.
The young maidens, their legs bare well above their knees, tramped linen
at the brookside and laughed merrily at every joke that passed between
them.
The neighbours spoke to one another across the march ditches, and their
talk was of the weather and the progress of the harvest.
The farmer boy could be seen going to the moor for a load of peat, his
creel swinging in a careless way across his shoulders and his hands deep
in his trousers' pockets. He was barefooted, and the brown moss was all
over the calves of his legs. He was thinking of something as he walked
along and he looked well in his torn shirt and old hat. Many a time I
wondered what were the thoughts which filled his mind.
Now and again a traveller passed along the road, looking very tired as
he dragged his legs after him. His hob-nailed boots made a rasping sound
on the grey gravel, and it was hard to tell where he was going.
One day a drover passed along, driving his herd of wild-eyed, panting
bullocks before him. He was a little man and he carried a heavy cudgel
of a stick in his hands. I went out to the road to see him passing and
also to speak to him if he took any notice of a little fellow.
"God's blessing be on every beast under your care," I said, repeating
the words which my mother always said to the drovers which she met. "Is
it any harm to ask you where you are going?"
"I'm goin' to the fair of 'Derry," said he.
"Is 'Derry fair as big as the fair of Greenanore, good man?"
He laughed at my question, and I could see his teeth black with tobacco
juice. "Greenanore!" he exclaimed. "'Derry fair is a million times
bigger."
Of course I didn't believe him, for had I not been at the harvest-fair
of Greenanore myself, and I thought that there could be nothing greater
in all the seven corners of the world. But it was in my world and I knew
more of the bigger as the years went on.
In those days the world, to me, meant something intangible, which lay
beyond the farthest blue line of mountains which could be seen from
Glenmornan Hill. And those mountains were ever so far away! How many
snug little houses, white under their coatings of cockle lime, how many
wooden bridges spanning hurrying streams, and how many grey roads
crossing brown moors lay between Glenmornan Hill and the last blue line
of mountain tops that looked over into the world for which I longed with
all the wistfulness of youth, I did not know.