INSIDE STORY: I didn't know what I didn't have

Damian McCarney

You can still trace the anguish in Monica Argue Bahm’s tanned face when she recalls her return to Cavan in 1986.
She had left County Cavan almost three decades earlier as a 14-year-old with her parents as they sought a new life in the States; an escape from the poverty of a small farm in the 1950s. Returning to her Fairtown home with her husband Joe, and two teenage daughters Cathy and Brigid, she had planned to regale them with the stories of her childhood.
“I was so anxious to show them the house. We parked the car and walked up the lane and the house wasn’t there. It was gone. It was gone. I had no idea. It was the most heartbreaking moment of my life.
“I walked around and picked up five stones. Went to the neighbours’, where there was no one living any more, and walked around their place and I found a Bovril bottle.”
Sitting by her sink in her kitchen near Savannah Georgia, the stones and discarded bottle serve as precious keepsakes for Monica and the stepping off point for her memoir ‘Five Stones in a Bovril Bottle - Growing up in Ireland in the 1950s’. It’s a nourishing Irish stew of childhood reminiscences, family photos, traditional songs, yarns, recipes from her youth (including plum jam roly poly), and prayers - even the Angelus makes an appearance.
“It was never meant to be a book,” explains Monica. “From when the girls were very little, I started making notes for them, so that when they were older they would know what my life was like. I would make notes here, there and everywhere and I eventually put them together on a computer. A friend, when I started this writing class, introduced me saying I was writing a book. I thought - oh no I’m not writing a book, but it seemed easier to put it in book form for the girls because you can now self publish. So we did that and the next thing I know I’m selling it!”
Five Stones took form as Monica harvested memories from each of the fields she wandered through back in 1986.
“It’s meant to be a real picture of what life was like here in Cavan in the 1940s and ’50s,” she explains.
‘Real’ often means gritty, like Angela’s Ashes. Monica wanted hers to be almost a rebuke to Frank McCourt’s protracted tale of woe.
“I thought - that’s not the Ireland I grew up in. That’s why this book is important. It was a good life. I didn’t know what I didn’t have - I had a wonderful childhood. Joe would say to me, ‘You had a deprived childhood’.
“No I didn’t, I had a wonderful childhood. I had acres I could roam through; I had a dog I could play with; I had a pig that I climbed on and rode; I had a horse I climbed on and rode. I had so much fun.”
Nonetheless poverty provided a harsh background to Monica’s fun-filled youth. Monica’s father, John Argue worked in land reclamation, draining fields, and was also a struggling farmer in his 50s when the potato crop failed.
“It rained a lot that summer and we got hardly enough potatoes to make seed potatoes with for the next year, and we were really poor - we had nothing much.”
John had siblings living in New York, including his twin sister Helen, and they convinced him to emigrate with his family:
“If he worked as hard in the States as he worked here then they would be better off.”
The decision was made. Monica was 14, and first went to live with aunt and uncle in New York for six months before joining her parents in New Jersey where her father worked as a gardener at Princeton University and her mother worked as a maid. In New Jersey she met her husband Joe where they spent much of their life, and also Pennsylvannia. They have lived near Savannah, Georgia for last 10 years to be near daughter Brigid and the grandkids.
Having spent the majority of her life in the States she regards herself as more American.
“Teenagers want to fit in. And so I became more American, I don’t think I did it consciously, I just didn’t work at being Irish.
“I almost think I felt I had to make a choice - that I couldn’t be both. I think it’s more in recent years that I have been able to get the two together.”
“I’m an American who happens to be Irish. Now I love the Irish part.”
How she managed the transition from life as a Cavan girl to an American mother will form the basis of her second memoir which is in its infancy - she already has a title: ‘From Mud to the Moon’.
“One of our daughters is a rocket scientist,” Monica says, explaining the lunar reference. “Our daughter works for NASA. So that’s the thing - to go from this, from being brought up in a thatch cabin in Fairtown, to go from that with no running water, or bathroom, and all of that to go to have a daughter who is designing the next craft that will go to the moon, so when you hear about The Orion taking off, being sent to the moon in a couple of years - that’s our daughter’s project. I mean what a stretch! To go from that,” she taps the book cover portraying her romanticised painting of her whitewashed thatched cottage, “to going to the launch of one of her projects.”

Five Stones in a Bovril Bottle has been nominated for an award at the Tybee Island Book Festival in Georgia. It’s available in Crannóg Bookstore in Cavan Town.