Don’t talk back to me about poverty. I remember a time when there was nothing anywhere. Only the very few had more than enough to eat. Only half the population had barely enough. The rest were simply hungry and broke. One of the saddest memories of my youth was the national school. The teachers were, for the most part, caring but often caring with too much force. The sad part of school was the hunger of small boys who came from impoverished backgrounds. I remember when I was first elevated to the upper classes, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh, I was approached by the smallest scholar on the upper floor.
‘Keane!’ he called listlessly, ‘any chance you’d bring us a cut of bread and jam.’
This was during the morning break. Every so often I would bring him something to eat. He died from diphtheria in the late 1930s. He was a lovely soul. His emaciated face is still with me. He had a voice like a lark and a spirit that was pure and free but he was no match for poverty and indifference.
At the time there was a saying ‘he’s out of all books now’ which meant that the garsún in question would have gone through all the classes in the national school, first book, second book, third book and so on. ‘He’s out of all books now,’ the mother of an aspirant would say proudly to a prospective employer as she tendered him for the inspection of a grocer or a hardware merchant or a draper.
I knew another boy in that school at the top of Church Street in my native Listowel who confided in me once that he had never eaten an egg, not even at Easter. When I looked at him in astonishment he declared that he had eaten the half of an egg all right on occasion, and sometimes a quarter of an egg and sometimes the cap of an egg but a whole egg never. Other things I remember about this boy were: (1) He never wore shoes; (2) He never wore an overcoat; (3) He never wore underclothes; (4) He always wore a smile.
There was a crude joke circulating at the time about a poor widow who was sometimes given to grandiose actions. She had seven children. Each morning she would boil an egg and distribute it between the seven before they went to school. The egg, of course, would be soft boiled so that the yolk could be spread over the faces of the offspring in order to give the impression at school that there were eggs galore at home. The reason I recall these incidents is to highlight the degrading, debilitating poverty forced upon a long-suffering people and to show how infinitely better-off we are in the new millennium. I know there’s still poverty at home but it’s nothing like what it was. I know because I was there and I saw it. Outspoken people would ask in anger if this was what Irish patriots went out for. Other folk would ask was this what Pearse and Connolly died for. You will find many historians who will tell you that there were no real solutions to the horrific problems of the last millennium on its countdown to its last gasp.
Surely, the Holocaust need never have happened. The story, however, could have been worse and the megalomaniac Hitler might have succeeded. I wish I could say that the Holocaust was the final chapter in man’s inhumanity to man. Alas more recently we have had the Serbian conflict and the barbarity of East Timor and there will be more because, as the old woman said when her husband threw her out into the cold of winter, that is the nature of the bashte.
The bashte in question is the raging animal inside us which has to be subdued every hour. If the dear and gentle reader finds me in a reflective mood he must make allowance for the fact that I haven’t touched alcoholic drink for several days in a bid to improve my lot and answer my correspondence. Writing on an empty stomach is dehydrating so I propose presently to take up my glass and empty it before it’s too late. There’s a time to drink and a time to drive but never at the same time.
The simple truth at the end of the day is that the people of this country never had it so good but like all people in such a position they don’t know when they’re well off. They lose weight so that they can put it on again. I decided that I was not going to walk into the new millennium nor was I going to run or gallop or tiptoe. Instead, I was going to dive in and fervently hope that I surfaced in another world surrounded by friends who were my enemies and without that accursed pain in my back.
There’s a man in this town who goes to bed in the early afternoon of Christmas Eve and does not rise until the following night. He does it, he once told me, because he doesn’t want to be happy. He mistrusts happiness because it always fizzles out on him and leaves him sick and sorry. Now I’m a man who wishes to be happy and a man who wishes happiness on everybody and this, remember, is the very same man who has hurled wild abuse at innocent football referees merely doing their job. Towards the end of the last millennium I desisted from abusing referees because of age and reduced voice power.
In my probe into that part of the millennium through which I have lived I recall a confrontation I had with a teacher in my final year in the national school. Our catechism told us that the world was four thousand years old and when I questioned this with another boy we were told that we were guttersnipes. Then, not long after, in the secondary school there was a priest who was also a teacher. If you mentioned to him the name of Charles Darwin he would strike you with his walking stick and if he hadn’t a walking stick he had an equally damaging fist.
Were there no solutions then to the evil procedures which governed us? I believe that the first place to look for a solution to injustice and inhumanity is deep within one’s own heart or better still look to the Sermon on the Mount according to Matthew beginning with:
Happy are the poor in spirit:
Theirs is the kingdom of heaven
Happy are the peacemakers:
They shall be called sons of God
Happy are those who are persecuted in the cause of right:
Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
As I look around me I don’t despair. The good in us marginally outweighs the evil so there is hope for the future and here to cheer you up is a quote from St Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians: ‘Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and for thy frequent infirmities’ and as my late and great friend Roger O’Sullivan used to say, ‘What profit it a man to gain the whole world and be wet in his shoes’. A sobering thought my friends, a sobering thought, but one that reminds us that we should look for the antidote of humour when we are threatened with evil.