Those Early Years
I was born in Ireland on my parents’ farm, one mile distant from the town of Tramore; Tramore, in turn, being seven miles distant from the city of Waterford, in…
Location: Tramore, Waterford, Ireland
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Those Early Years” from When I Was a Boy in Ireland, by Alan Michael Buck, 1936.
I was born in Ireland on my parents’ farm, one mile distant from the town of Tramore; Tramore, in turn, being seven miles distant from the city of Waterford, in the southern province of Munster.
At an early age, I learned from my father who spoke Gaelic, that Tramore was so called because of the long stretch of smooth, golden sand lying between the two promontories of Tramore Bay, the name being a corruption of the Gaelic words, Triag mor, which means Big Strand.
It is with the Big Strand that I associate some of my happiest boyhood memories. Mother, Father, my brother Bobby, and I loved to walk on the Strand. Sometimes, we went as far as the Rabbit Burrow, a group of sand dunes overrun with rabbits over whose destiny, Gullamugus, the terrible gnome on horseback is said to preside. It is because of fear of Gullamugus that the people of Tramore will not kill or eat a Burrow rabbit: “Once upon a time,” they will tell you, “a man killed and ate a Burrow rabbit and he was not seen ever afterwards because Gullamugus, riding a powerful white stallion, caught up with him and took him prisoner.”
Our way to the Rabbit Burrow lay by the Women’s and Men’s bathing slips.
Bobby and I thought they were called slips because people were forever slipping on the slimy, green seaweed clinging to their already barnacle-encrusted cement floors. Mother corrected our wrong impression one day, however, telling us a slip was another name for a dock.
Both slips, as I remember them, were lined with heavy, wooden bathing boxes on wheels. When the tide ebbed, the boxes were wheeled from their slips across the sand to the water’s edge for the convenience of bathers.
An imaginary boundary line divided the two slips, since mixed bathing was not permitted. I recall listening once to a woman in charge of the Women’s Bathing Slip berating a man who swam across the boundary line into “female waters.” She was quite beside herself at the enormity of his offense and called him a blackguard and other names and threatened to set the peelers, as our police were then called, after him.
It was this same woman who, when Bobby and I, being very little, went bathing with Mother from the Women’s Slip, used to tell us she had just poured a kettle of hot water into the sea to make it warm for us.
Usually, on Sunday afternoons, we went driving in a pony and trap. Our favorite drive was to the Metal Man. We would start out after two o’clock dinner and while the pony jogged along at a slow trot, amuse ourselves noting the changes wrought by the passing seasons in our favorite “beauty spots.” One of these “beauty spots” I remember particularly well. We named it, appropriately enough, “the Nest,” for in summer it resembled a gigantic bird’s nest woven of sweetly perfumed, yellow flowering, prickly green furze bush. It had grown naturally into this formation on the summit of a grass-covered bank hardby a gravelled road that wandered casually along the edge of a red clay cliff to the Metal Man.
On one such drive, Father left us at the Metal Man while he drove to the nearby village of Fenner to inspect a horse he wished to buy.
The occasion lingers in my mind because it was on that day I first became conscious of my mother’s beauty and, becoming conscious of it, I also was frightened by it; frightened in the sense of being filled with a reverential awe.
She looked like a mermaid sitting there on the grass with my brother and me. She had taken off her hat and let down her waist-length ebon hair that it might become friendly with the sea breeze. Her eyelashes curled out from and above her half closed, brown eyes and a calm restful smile lingered on her full red lips as she listened to our childish prattle.
The Metal Man, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean from the tip of a rocky promontory, is as the name suggests, the figure of a man cast in metal. His iron clothes proclaim him a mariner. Atop a whitewashed stone pillar he stands, his right arm pointing out to sea, warning passing ships of the dangerous rocks beneath him.
On dark and stormy nights when harassed sailors are unable to see him over the foaming crests of mountainous, angrily see-sawing waves, the Metal Man, it is believed, recites a little rhyme in loud and sonorous tones that the sailors may hear him. Mother taught us the rhyme that afternoon when Father was in Fenner. I have never forgotten it. It is—
Keep out, keep out from me.
I am the rocks of Misery!
Many times, when visiting the Metal Man, we beheld the unusual sight of numerous young ladies busily hopping ’round the pillar on which the Metal Man stands.
At first, Bobby and I were vastly amused, believing them to be playing a variation of the game of “Beddies,” as hop-scotch is called in Tramore. But when Father explained their real purpose, we tempered our amusement with the desire that they might be successful in their endeavor.
“If the young ladies can hop around the pillar three times without letting their lifted foot touch ground, the Metal Man guarantees they will be married within a twelvemonth,” Father told us.
It is a difficult feat to accomplish. The pillar has a wide circumference and, the hopeful young ladies will tell you, it grows each time you round it. Also, at the base of the pillar, sharp stones were strewn. How they got there was considered something of a mystery, although Father claimed to have solved the mystery by taking Mike Dermody, a local cobbler who profited greatly by repairing the young ladies’ lacerated shoes, into consideration.
I remember a neighbor of ours who married a girl who had made the grade in the matter of hopping ’round the Metal Man. The girl, it seems, was possessed of a lashing tongue, a fact she concealed from her bridegroom until the honeymoon was over. The disillusioned bridegroom was heard to complain bitterly to Paddy Reilly, our stable boy, and his complaints were directed not against his bride but against the Metal Man.
“Paddy me boy,” said he, “will you be after telling me what we do be doing with a Metal Man when with one arm he pushes man out of danger and with the other he pushes him into it?”
“I take it, Tommy darlint, you’re meanin’ the holy sacrament of Matrimony,” Paddy made answer.
“I am that, Paddy. May the devil run away with the Metal Man this very night,” Tommy shamelessly decried.
There are two odors associated with my childhood, either of which is capable of carrying me back to my native land. I have named them my magic carpets.
The first of these odors is that of burning turf, an odor I came to love sitting by the open hearth in our roomy, red-flagged kitchen. It has a suggestion of the odor of burning leaves, but is a heavy, more penetrating odor. It passes beyond the nostrils into the brain and lingers there, druglike. I believe this odor to be responsible in part, for my leaning towards things beyond the Veil, things not of this world; fairies and the like.
A ghost story told while sitting ’round a turf fire is something more than a mere story. The ghost joins the company. His presence can be felt. Occasionally, a listener will make the Sign of the Cross and huddle closer to his neighbor. When he does, you may be quite sure, he has felt a supernatural being hover over him.
Yes, there is something eerie about the odor of burning turf and something wild and untamable too, a something which is so closely allied with the Irish nature as to be almost part of it!
The other odor, while less spiritual in its effect is, to me, as disturbing. Looking back, it seems I was born into this odor, the odor of horse. Talcum powder was useless against its strength, scented bath soap quailed and dissolved in its presence and sensitive people buried their noses in handkerchiefs at its approach. I have since come to look upon the odor as a sort of natural inheritance from my mother who loved horses and from my father who when he was a boy ran away from home to be a jockey. So well did he succeed that when Boss Croker, the American politician settled in Ireland, my father was his leading jockey, riding such great a horse as Orby to victory in the Liverpool cup in England, for his employer. Later Orby won the English Derby and it nearly broke my father’s heart that Boss Croker instead of giving him the mount, sent him to ride in America.
Truly, the odor of horse was instilled in my blood! I remember being in church one Sunday morning with Mother, Father and Bobby, all of us dressed in our Sunday best, and hearing an elderly lady in an adjoining pew sniff disdainfully and remark audibly to our great embarrassment: “Sure they might as well have come on horseback, wearing breeches and leggings.”
The riding of a horse, however, remains and always will remain one of my painful boyhood memories.
I was five years of age. Father had recently bought a highly bred chestnut hunter whose tremendous strength, great staying powers and jumping ability were obvious at a glance. So enthusiastic did I become about this horse that I was filled with an uncontrollable desire to ride him.
But father refused my request, saying such a horse was a man’s horse, that he would without doubt pull my puny arms from their sockets. Unconvinced, I sought out Paddy Beilly whose duties included grooming the horse.
“Faith,” Paddy protested, “you might as well think of riding the devil and he not wanting you on him, as riding that beast.”
“I wouldn’t mind riding the devil if only he had four legs which he hasn’t,” I boldly replied.
Coming from one so young, this remark amused Paddy and won him to my cause. After laughing heartily, he agreed to grant my wish, making me promise, however, not to take the horse outside the yard gates.
I broke my promise the moment Paddy’s back was turned and calmly piloted my mount out onto the drive and into the three acre field fronting the house. There I prodded him to action with heels scarcely reaching his sides. Alas, I got more action than I bargained for, for the horse broke into a brisk canter and coming to the stone wall bounding the field took it in his stride, leaving himself on one side, me on the other.
Several days later, limping and ill at ease, I again approached the stables. What Paddy would say was my chief concern. I came on him, sitting on a three legged milking stool in the cow house, whittling and whistling at one and the same time; ‘'That was a bad fall you took, alanna!” he greeted me.
“It was all of that, Paddy,” I nervously agreed.
“Puts me in mind of a fall I took meself a couple of years back,” Paddy ruminated, looking me straight in the eye.
“Tell me about it,” I prompted, seeking salve for my wounded pride.
“This was the way of it,” he complied.
“I was working for Jack Murphy of Dunmore at the time and nothing would do Jack but to enter a horse of his in a little bit of a race meeting down Ballyhack way in the county Wexford. When we got there, what do ye think happened, alanna?”
“Jack Murphy let you ride his horse instead of riding it himself,’' I guessed.
“Jack Murphy do the like of that! Divil the bit of him! Jack wouldn’t let the Archbishop himself throw leg across the critter.”
“Well, what then, Paddy?”
“They made me start the races, that’s what they did and let you listen to what happened. First off, they put me up on a scrawny looking nag to ride to the starting post. To look at him, you would not say he had the breath of life in him. But he had. Faith and indeed he had! When I dropped my cap by way of starting the first race, off he raced after the rest of the horses and he not knowing any better, and a full four furlongs he went with them before the excitement got the better of him and he flew the course, rolling over and over like a sack of ‘spuds’ for all the
world, and me under him the while. Now, what do you think of that, you who would be riding the devil himself had he four legs, no less?”
“Aw, I think you are only telling me that for the cod,” I said, knowing he was trying to set me at ease with him and knowing too, full well, the horse had yet to be foaled to throw the same Paddy Reilly.
Buck, Alan Michael. When I Was a Boy in Ireland. Lee and Shepard Co., 1936.
About TOTA
TOTA.world provides cultural information and sharing across the world to help you explore your Family’s Cultural History and create deep connections with the lives and cultures of your ancestors.
