The one time while I was at the master’s side of the partition when he became very angry was when we were studying for confirmation. The religious doctrine we had to learn was much harder than that for holy communion. Reams of the catechism had to be got off by heart. Our not too supple tongues had to get around words like consanguinity. ‘Big rocks of words,’ our elders used to say, ‘that you wouldn’t break in a county council stone crusher!’
QWhat else is forbidden by the sixth commandment?
AAll lascivious looks and touches, idleness and bad company; all excesses of eating and drinking and whatever may tend to inflame the passions.
God help us! All we ever saw in flames was a furze bush! My mother held the book for me and listened to my answers, and was as liable to lose her temper as the master if I got them wrong. I didn’t mind her getting mad with me and anyway she didn’t slap as the master did. There was no explanation from the master or my mother as to what the words we didn’t understand meant. I had only to guess what was implied by, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.’
The men had a story in our rambling house when they heard me mention that commandment. It seems a young lad who had been away for a long time with his uncle in county Limerick missed out on the sacrament of confirmation. When the lack was discovered he was almost twenty and even though of a wild and obstreperous nature he was sent back to school where he sat with boys nearly half his age learning his catechism. On the appointed day the bishop came to the church to confirm the children. He walked down the aisle not yet in his full canonicals and questioned a class as they sat, school by school, in the body of the church. The bishop couldn’t help noticing a grown man sitting in the middle of the children and he consulted with the parish priest who was at his side. In whispered tones he was told of the circumstances. The bishop commenced to question the young man and he gave a good enough account of himself until he was asked what was forbidden by the ninth commandment. ‘Thou shalt not converse with thy neighbour’s wife,’ he said. The bishop smiled and gave the correct answer. And then in an effort to make the meaning plain he said, ‘Would it be correct for you to fall in love with your neighbour’s wife?’ ‘Why should I do a thing like that, my lord,’ the young man said, ‘and the country full of young lovely girls!’
Well, our day came to go under the bishop’s hand. The priest came to the school, examined us and gave each one of us a ticket. We were seated school by school in the lofty cathedral, the teacher responsible for the tuition standing or kneeling with each group. Surpliced priests walked among us asking questions here and there. Then the bishop came out of the sacristy followed by two young priests. They remained behind the altar rails, one of them holding the bishop’s mitre and the other his crozier. The bishop had a surplice over a red soutane and a big cross on a gold chain hung from his neck. When he came nearer we saw the huge ring with a red diamond bulging from it on his right hand; the sign, we were told, of his authority. The bishop paused and asked a few questions of a school and if the answering was good he passed on to the next class. But when he came to a school where the answering was indifferent he stayed and questioned them thoroughly and then spoke to the parish priest, as if voicing his disappointment at the quality of the religious instruction. Small as we were, we had pity for that school’s master standing there as red as a turkeycock.
I thought the bishop was going to pass by our school but no, he paused and looked straight at me. I began to shake, I was so nervous. He asked a question but it was the boy beside me who answered it. He moved on. The question was about perjury. Perjury was a reserved sin in our diocese. Maybe that was why I got tongue-tied. A while earlier I had been before the court as a witness in a lawsuit between two neighbours over a right of way. One party had erected a gate in the passageway to which the other party objected. I used to help drive the objector’s cattle and said in court that the gate was always closed against us, which wasn’t exactly true. There were a few, very few times when it was open, but I didn’t tell the court that because it would weaken my party’s case. I would have been as well off telling the truth because we lost the lawsuit and the gate is still there.
How well now the bishop wanted to ask me about perjury. My heart missed a beat. I hadn’t confessed that transgression and I was going to receive the sacrament of confirmation with my soul in a state of sin. A small consolation came to comfort me. I remembered the judge had said that day in court that I was too young to be sworn in. ‘Where will you go, my boy,’ the judge asked me, ‘if you tell a lie?’ ‘To hell, my lord,’ I told him. I was becoming easier in my mind now because I couldn’t have committed perjury if I wasn’t sworn in. It was just a lie. Bad enough, God knows, but I would make an act of contrition with a firm purpose to sum up enough courage to tell the priest about it the next time I went to confession. I said an act of contrition then and I put my whole heart into it.
The candles were lit on the altar, the choir sang and the priests helped the bishop to finish his vesting. The mitre was given to him, he took it in both hands, looked into it and put it on his head. Then he put his hand round to make sure that the two broad ribbons that fell from the mitre hadn’t gone down inside his chasuble. He took the crozier in his left hand, drew himself up rooster-like to his full height and stood as still as eternity for a moment in all his finery; it was an impressive sight. If I ever became a priest I’d want to end up as a bishop.
We went to the altar rails school by school and knelt down. Almost everyone had new clothes. My suit was navy blue and made by Con the tailor. The bishop approached along the line, preceded by a priest holding a vessel with holy oils or chrism into which the bishop dipped the thumb of his right hand. He made the Sign of the Cross on my forehead. Holding his hand over me he pronounced the words of the sacrament and gave me a light slap with his open palm on the cheek. I looked up at him and he eyed me back. I didn’t flinch. My mother always told me to look the world in the eye. ‘Make no excuses for yourself,’ she said. ‘You are as good as anyone else.’ Words which echoed what the master made us learn by heart from Ó Cadhlaigh’s ‘Slighe an Eolais’ (The way of knowledge):
Is gael mise agus mise im Ghael,
Ni thuigim gur náir dom é
Ni chasfainn mo chúl le fearaibh an tsaoil;
Is ní fearr d’fhear cach ná mé.
(I am Irish and Irish I am,
Of that I am not ashamed.
I would not turn my back
To the men of the world,
And there is no man
Better than I am!)
Walking back to my place I thought to myself not alone was I as good as the next but after confirmation I was a strong and perfect Christian, provided of course that God accepted the act of contrition in place of my bad confession. God is good, I always heard, and he has a good mother. I prayed to her now as my own mother had told me do and asked her to intercede for me with her divine son, and for all the family.
Now that I was confirmed I knew that my days at school were numbered. I’d leave when I was fourteen and follow the trade of my father and grandfather. Already during the school holidays I was helping my father in the workshop, keeping a car shaft steady while he was mortising it for the cross laths or turning the handle of the grindstone. I tried my hand at planing and sawing or drilling deep holes in wood with the auger or bit and brace. At night on the kitchen table I’d rewrite, so that we’d have a copy, the long list of materials down to the last nail, when my father was engaged to do the carpentry work of a new house. Masons built the house in stonework and my father made the doors and windows, staircase and partitions. He put on the roof and slated it and put down the timber floors. Away from school in the summertime I loved getting on the roof and helping to nail the slate laths to the rafters. Nothing gave me more pleasure than clouting two-inch wire nails into timber. When the last lath was on, I’d walk on the inch-and-a-quarter ridge board, with my hands out like an acrobat on a tightrope from chimney stack to chimney stack. My father would nearly have a heart attack watching me but he wouldn’t shout in case I’d fall.
In a short time my father was allowing me to cut the ‘bird’s mouth’ on the heel of a rafter where it fits over the wall plate, or letting me chisel out the chase in the string boards of the staircase to receive the step and the riser. The rough preliminary work I would do like Michelangelo’s apprentice and my father would finish it himself. He had the name of being a great man at his trade and it was a joy to watch him working and a pleasure to see him when a job was finished, the staircase for instance, complete with balusters, handrail, newel post and bull-nosed step, and the way he would stand back from it, his head a little to one side, admiring his handiwork. I looked forward to the time when school would be over and I could be with him every day.
The master’s father, a stately old man with a King Edward beard, lived in the school residence. Now and again he came to the school and looked us over with a practised eye, picking out the boys with the brains. He had a tub trap highly polished, and with yellow stripes on the shafts and on the spokes of the wheels. This classy contraption was drawn not by a high stepping horse or pony but by a jennet, a stubborn and cantankerous animal who’d kick the stars and often left the marks of his hind hooves on the under carriage of the trap. One morning on our way to school we met the master’s father in the trap. As he passed us he lifted the whip crop and said, ‘Good morning, boys!’ To which we all answered, ‘Good morning, Master!’ The jennet must have taken exception to this greeting and as the gate of Mick Horgan’s field was open the jennet suddenly wheeled across the road, almost knocking us down and dashed into the field. The old man stood up in the trap and, tugging at the reins, tried to bring him to a halt but it was no good. The jennet galloped three rounds of the field, making a strange neighing sound, with his tail stuck above the front board of the trap. Then he ran out the gate again and continued on his journey. We would have cheered that morning at what looked like a one-jennet chariot race but we knew the story would go back to our own master and we’d never hear the end of it.
Sometimes when the master’s father came to the school he would say to his son. ‘I want two boys to come to the house and clean out the jennet’s droppings.’ We were afraid of the jennet but still if picked out we would go gladly because it could kill maybe an hour away from lessons. One day I was selected with a boy from Ballaugh. We plodded after the old man over to the house. He showed us the shed where the jennet was stabled and gave us a fork and coarse brush to clean out from him. We thought it strange that he didn’t take the jennet out of the shed while we were cleaning it. Maybe he forgot. We opened the door of the shed and went in. The jennet was tied with a rope running from a halter to a ring in the wall beside his manger. When he saw us he bared his teeth and put both his ears lying along his neck, a sure sign that he had evil on his mind. He threw a few kicks in our direction and collected himself up near the manger. We availed of this opportunity to clean and brush the droppings on to the dunghill outside. We put in fresh straw, going as close to him as we dared. As we made for the door he let fly with the hind hooves. Mercy of God that he didn’t brain us. We told the old man that the job was done. He came and looked and was satisfied and gave us sixpence each. When we came back to class the master asked us how we had got on and the boy from Ballaugh, hoping that the master might be talkative, as he sometimes was, asked him why jennets were so cross. The master thought it had to do with their not being a definite species. He took off his glasses and began to polish the lens with his handkerchief, a sure sign that he might spend some time on the subject.
The jennet was a crossbreed, he said, and so was the mule. In the case of the jennet the mother was a horse and the father was a donkey, and it was the other way around for the mule. He paused for a moment as if he wasn’t too sure of that statement. These hybrids, he explained, did not breed again, which was just as well as there were enough strange looking animals in the world. They were very rough, stubborn, bad tempered creatures, but were great workers and lived longer than either of their parents. The jennet and mule were in great demand during the Boer War for pulling small cannons over rough ground and when they became scarce large donkeys were used for the same purpose. Then with a half-smile as he warmed to his subject he told us that it was announced in the British House of Commons that an army representative was coming to Ireland to buy as many large donkeys as he could find. Our local MP, seeing an opportunity for farmers to make money, asked that the representative come to Kerry. Spanish donkeys were rounded up in readiness for the sale but the army man never turned up. Very disappointed, the MP asked in the Commons why he hadn’t come, to be told that he got his full needs of large donkeys in the midlands and Connemara. ‘He made a mistake,’ the MP said, ‘he should have come south for the biggest asses in Ireland are in Kerry!’ We all laughed, ending in a hee-haw. The master looked at us for a while and then, getting serious, said, ‘Maybe that MP was right!’