Let the Busy World be Hushed: But for the tin kettle!
Fr Jason Murphy's tells another simple love story in his own inimitable way in this week's Let the Busy World Be Hushed...
He sat in the semi darkness at the kitchen table as the long summer evenings turned to the shorter days of Fall, watching ‘Ear to the Ground’ on the television as she sat through the glass door in the front room reading from a novel by the dying light of the window.
Sixty four years as man and wife in this the townland of his fore fathers, four families of Cahills who walked the road from Cornaseer to Corlurgan school when he was but a boy, now the only Cahill to remain. Four families who descended from the one man of means, generations back, whose lands and wealth were subdivided by each generation that followed.
His mother, Molly Brady from Banaho, who married into one of those four families, died at just 33 years of age in 1945 from Emphysema and left her young husband bereft with four small children, the eldest being just eight years - Maggie, Jimmy, Betty and Tommy. Only faint memories remain of the love they had known in those early years, not even a snap of her to remind.
As he tried several times to turn the television off with the remote control, he told of how his father was threatened with losing them but for an old woman who came in to housekeep to make the thing look half right. His hands, as he fiddled with the remote, showed the track of hard work from laying stone upon stone for more years now than he can remember and, to occupy his days, he still carts stone from headlands in fields yonder with the transport box to finish walls around the house that he didn’t have time to do when he was busy.
On hearing the voices she laid down her book upon the arm of the chair and made her way in to the kitchen, “ah it's yourself that’s in it... I’m glad to see ya”, all of 90 years of age but not looking a day over 70 as she talked on times past and the fun that was had at festivals in Pat Morgan’s hayshed above in Drumavaddy, Bridie the Canon and Nancy Morgan and the spakes out of James Patrick “the crack in the gable of the house that you could see the lights of Granard through”.
“De ya mind the night that Gloria sang above in the hayshed, ‘one day at a time Sweet Jesus’, God we had odious fun?!” And so it was we whiled the hours away telling one yarn after another; the Thompsons, Willy, Jenny and Paddy below in Denbawn and Willy that cut hair and couldn’t bring himself to charge and put up the notice within the room ‘All haircuts will be sixpence in the future’.
We recalled the night that the good boys around blocked up the windows as the three brothers lay asleep, wondering how it could still be night the next morning and the poe full to the brim until Jenny got up to empty it and opened the front to the full light of day.
“Ya’ll take a half wan?”
“No, I’ll not, not with the driving.”
“Ah sure what harm will it do ya,” as she made the tea and cut up a swiss roll. She was one of four Smith sisters that hailed from the townland of Creamfield - Sue, Anna, Peggy and Kitty. After school she had gone to work in the kitchens of St Felim’s Hospital in Cavan like many’s the young girl from around.
Jimmy was working with the council as they took on casual labourers when there was a run of work and, in the summer of 1957, was set to sink a hole with a pick and shovel along with a gang of men in the back yard of St Felim’s Hospital for the diesel tank that they had intended to put under ground. In the end, it was never put in and the hole had to be filled in again.
One morning at breaktime, before they started to refill the hole, the foreman sent him over to the back door of the kitchen to get the tin kettle boiled for the tea and, there upon knocking, the door was answered by the young Anna Smith whom he had seen going up the chapel with her sisters at mass above in Drumavaddy.
While the kettle was boiling, Anna brought him in and showed him their cooking facilities for the whole hospital, until the steam started to rise and it was time for him to return to the yard with the boiling kettle but not before he had asked her out to a dance in the townhall of Cavan. They danced in the Townhall, Drumcrow and at Carnivals round and about until they married of an Easter Monday in 1961 and there began their life in Cornaseer.
And so it is all these years later as the days shorten and Summer turns to Autumn, and the leaves turn to gold that they that they live contentedly along the road that leads to Kilnaleck, at ease in each other’s company, the boy that lost a mother’s love at just seven years of age and who found another love that would last a lifetime for the want of the tin kettle a boiling in the summer of long ago.
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