Sometimes members of the local dance band would perform as guest artistes and I used to look in awe at these celebrities, with drum kit, double bass, saxophones and with microphones powered by a car battery. There was much arranging of wires and stands and loudspeakers on the stage, all watched with the greatest of interest by us, the audience. Then we heard a crackling sound through the speakers, and a band member came out on the stage, tapped the microphone, and said into it, ‘Hello, hello.’
We responded, ‘Hello, hello,’ as good manners dictated, so that there was instant dialogue across the footlights.
| Man: | Hello! |
| Audience: | Hello! |
| Man: | Testing! Testing! |
| Audience: | Testing, testing! |
| Man: | Testing, one, two, three. |
| Audience: | Testing, four, five, six. |
I thought that this band was the pinnacle of sophistication, and when they started their programme, with the leader saying in a slightly American accent, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the music of the Starlight dance band,’ and when they described the songs as ‘numbers’, and used the word ‘entitled’, I thought, ‘This is really showbusiness.’
‘We’d like to play a number entitled “South of the Border down Mexico Way”,’ they would say. And the singer wasn’t a singer, but a ‘crooner’. They sat down behind music stands with sheet music on them, and SL painted on the front. ‘And here is our crooner John to sing for you our next number, “Cruising Down the River”.’ The drummer counted aloud in waltz time, ‘With a one two three, two two three,’ and they started.
I was in heaven.
It all started when the woman was getting married. She lived on a poor hungry farm on the side of the mountain in the Thirties. Money was scarce in the household and everybody in the family was trying, as they say, to pull the divil by the tail. But, poor as they were, for them the most important thing in life was to keep up appearances opposite the neighbours. Now in those days, very few people in the country would have had cars, just the doctor, the parish priest and the local big shopkeeper. If you had a car at a wedding, it was indeed a grand affair, but if you had two cars, then it was the talk of the countryside.
On the morning of her wedding, there was a light fall of snow on the ground. She got out the wheelbarrow and pushed it backwards and forwards over the snow to leave wheel tracks, so that the neighbours would think that she had cars at the wedding. Ever after that, instead of Margaret, her real name, she was known in the countryside as Maggie the Barrow.
The offspring of the union was first a boy and then a girl, who arrived many years afterwards. ‘The shakin’s of the bag,’ as the local miller described it. The poor husband, a decent hardworking man, died shortly afterwards, from shock, some said. Others said that it was from constant harassment about his accent, his appearance and his language.
When a like-minded woman friend had said to her one day, ‘I heard your husband in the shop the other day saying that he was going for a cartload of “dung”. I am surprised that you allow him to use such coarse language,’ she had replied, ‘If you only knew the trouble I had getting him to call it that!’
Sadly for her, the boy turned out to be a wastrel, a lazy, slothful drunkard. She had a dreadful job covering up his misdeeds, and she was delighted when he announced that he was going to America. It was a time of emigration, and Enniskillen railway station was often the scene of harrowing farewells. When she saw how lonely all the other women were, parting with their children, she thought that she had better put on some sort of show, so she started lamenting.
‘Oh now, amn’t I the sad and broken woman today with my fine son going from me across the ocean to Amerikay…’ But like all of us when we don’t mean something, she was inclined to overdo it. ‘…and who will cut the turf for me, and win the hay for me and plant the crop for me, now that my pride and joy is leaving!’
And when she went on just a bit too long, the son, sitting in the railway carriage listening, got up and walked back on to the platform and said, ‘Ah sure, if you think that much of me, Mother, I won’t go at all.’
And he went down the town and into the first public house and drank all the money that his mother had given him for his passage. Everyone’s patience wears out, and shortly afterwards, a couple of his uncles, big mountainy men, had a quiet chat with him and he left rather hurriedly for England. His mother announced that he had gone across the ocean to the town of England to take up a very good job. Meanwhile, her daughter Biddy had arrived at our school, and it was clear from the outset that she was following in her mother’s footsteps and that she too had pretensions to refinement.
The first we knew of it was when she informed everybody that her name was not Biddy but Brigid. The mistress was a spiteful kind of a woman and called her Biddy at every opportunity, but the master was a more understanding man and decreed that she should be called Brigid, so Brigid it was. But unofficially, and out of her hearing, all the boys called her ‘Biddy the Barrow’. She had by now adopted a sort of falsetto voice and had done her best to iron out the local accent that we all possessed.
One day the master gave us a composition entitled ‘A Day Out’ and we had to read aloud our finished efforts. We stumbled through them as best we could. One boy’s day out was when he took the cow to the bull; another boy took the horse to the forge to get shod; a girl went picking blackberries with her friends. Now someone had obviously told Brigid that you didn’t say runnin’ and jumpin’ and walkin’. You pronounced your—ings. You said walking, and running and jumping.
When it came to her turn, she stood up and in her ghastly falsetto voice she read, ‘We went for the day to Bundoring. We passed through Enniskilling and we had mutting for tea.’
Strangely enough nobody laughed although one boy muttered rather unkindly that the only time she saw Bundoran (a seaside resort frequented by well-off people) was on a map and that it was far from mutton that she was reared, and another wondered where did she park the barrow when she was having the tea.
But it was after she left school that her sayings became legendary. She went into the shop and asked for, ‘Ay pound of morgarine and a half a pound of biscakes please.’ When a local man moved away from the area to live in the town, she said that he was ‘presiding on the outerskirts of Enniskilling’.
She announced grandly in the shop, when her uncle bought a new car, that he had purchased a Ford Concertina. (Somebody added that she had also declared that it had reversing lights front and back, but this last part was apocryphal.) However she did talk about looking out at the scenery through the windowscreen.
When the grants became available for farmers to replace their wooden gates with metal ones, she sailed into the same shop and asked if they had any tubercular steel gates. And when that shop was converted into a supermarket she declared, ‘There’s no money in the country since they opened the Common Market.’
But her finest hour came during the height of the troubles. There