THAT'S MEN:One man lived in our farmyard. I don't know why, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
MEN WHO take to the road and walk in search of work are never seen these days, but they were a feature of the landscape in the 1950s.
One of the last of these men walked up the road alongside our farm and asked my father for work. He had walked from Tipperary to Kildare with no success. My father offered him a few days’ work. He accepted, and stayed for years.
A neighbouring farm had an empty, derelict house. He moved into it and “fixed it up”, as they say, for himself.
Bill Hayes was a hard worker and a generous man. When he got his wages from my father, he would go off to Naas on his bicycle and come back with sweets for the children.
As he cycled out of the yard later, he would scatter fistfuls of sweets in glittering, multi-coloured wrappers up into the air for myself and my sister to catch before he went off to his house in the fields.
The story has a good ending: he eventually moved elsewhere in the parish, married and settled down. It was an extraordinary achievement for a farm worker at a time of scarcity in the country.
Other men passed through the farm also. Sometimes they would sleep in the hay shed overnight, having given my father an undertaking that they would not light cigarettes while they were lying in the hay. And they didn’t. Or if they did they managed not to set the place on fire.
One man lived in our farmyard. I don’t know why, or where he came from or went to. He was called the Beeman and he lived in a shed across the yard which he, too, had “fixed up”.
I have no memory of him whatsoever, but his shed, which later became a calf house, was known from that time on as the Beeman’s Hut.
Such men must have developed a capacity to be alone with their own thoughts for hours on end. That was in rural Ireland.
Today, men like the Beeman might be alone with their thoughts in a flat in the city. Perhaps he was better off in our yard.
Addendum: Blame nursery rhymes for the perception that the female of the species is interested in “sugar and spice and all things nice”, while males indulge themselves with “slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails”.
On the bus the other day, my attention was hijacked by a young lady whom I assume, with no evidence whatsoever, to be a student and who certainly contradicted the nursery rhyme as she delivered a monologue into her phone for the entire journey.
When I tuned in, she was describing a comedian who had taken something “disgusting” out of his pocket, but before I learned what that was, she was describing the practice during the Plague of blocking up the doors and windows of plague-stricken families so they couldn’t get out.
She moved seamlessly from that to a description of haggis, which she declared “disgusting” because it was made of offal.
At one time, the ingredients included brains but the latter had been banned due to the arrival of mad cow disease “or whatever”.
I tried to get back to reading, but she was impossible to ignore, and when I gave in and started listening again, she was explaining the question of decomposition and grave robbing.
Back in the day when thieves robbed graves to sell bodies to medical schools, she explained, relatives had to spend three weeks guarding their loved ones’ graves after burial.
It took three weeks for bodies to decompose sufficiently to be useless to the surgeons, hence the period of guarding the grave. This practice, she explained to her listener, was the original of the phrase “the graveyard shift”.
At this point I had arrived at my stop and was deprived of further revelations. Of what? Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails? I bet she has a story about that.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is free by email.