The following was written by Sean Hutton, Poet / Writer,
who was at that time living in Bridlington, which is
situated on the East coast of North Humberside, England. The
article was first published in 1987 in 'Carlow Past and
Present, Vol. 1. Number 2.'
Sean Hutton taught history at Bridlington School. North
Humberside before he was appointed Executive Director of the
British Association for Irish Studies. He has published
several books of poetry in the Irish language,
Memory is a very devil to deal with. I realise that, with
regard to what I am about to write, a whole process of
sifting has been performed. It is a process which is
complicated, in my case, by the fact that, since the 1960s,
I have mostly lived out of Ireland, and have therefore
lacked, to a very large extent, those meetings and
conversations which would have refreshed my memory. The
process of remembering, or of trying to remember, is
assisted in this instance by a series of photographs, which
will, of course, further affect the structuring of these
reflections. I might also say that my own understanding of
aspects of the history of my mother's family depends very
much on her own very partial account.
My first photograph,
which is not the oldest, directs me to Carlow town and to
the house of my grandaunt Nan, who was the widow of James
Kelly, a member of the RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary). She
had a son and two daughters: Jay Kelly, a kindly man who
played the harmonica, and my 'aunts' Margie and Dilly.
Margie had very striking looks and played the piano, and
sang for a time in a band formed by her husband, Percy
McEvoy. Dilly was, I believe, one of my mother's dearest
friends. Both enjoyed dancing and once, when we lived in
Hacketstown, she came to stay with us when there was a
carnival, and she and my mother went dancing every night for
a week. The photograph was taken in the 1940s in the back
yard of my grandaunt's house in Staplestown Road: I am
sitting on my father's knee and my sister Eilis sits on my
mother's. What I had forgotten, until Dilly reminded me
recently, was that I was then given to attempting to jump
from windows in an effort to fly, and that I used to say,
"Don't make me be good; let me be bad."
The most wonderful thing about going to live in
Hacketstown in 1948 or 1949 was the discovery that I was
related to so many people. I remember a big lad coming up to
me one day and announcing that he was my cousin. I felt
terribly important being related to him. Then, when visiting
at Kealy's in the Main Street, I was introduced to a man
who, had he been wearing a bandanna, I would have taken for
a cowboy. This was my granduncle Tom. It was the same
wherever I went: introductions to new and unsuspected
relatives. Of course, in addition to my blood relations, I
had honorary uncles, aunts and cousins as well.
I'm not sure that it had actually been intended that we
should live in Hacketstown. I have the feeling that the
decision to stay was taken at the end of what was originally
planned as a visit. Whatever the ostensible reason for our
residence there, it was very much a question of my mother
returning to a place which had happy associations for her,
and where her family had been of consequence. During a
somewhat nomadic childhood she had spent regular and happy
holidays in the town, where her maternal grandfather, John
Hutton, had been a prosperous shopkeeper. Among various
papers which she carefully preserved was a yellowing notice,
which she showed me when I was a child. It listed the family
property which was to be auctioned following the bankruptcy
which brought down the whole house of cards.
The photographs which I have of my maternal grandfather
and grandmother, Jim Donoghue and Elizabeth Hutton, must
date from about the time of their marriage at the beginning
of the century. My grandfather was the son of an ex-DMP
(Dublin Metropolitan Police) man, who had taken a farm at
Moyne, Co Wicklow. His mother was a teacher, the sister of
Garrett Reilly, a Hacketstown publican-cum-shopkeeper. My
grandfather could remember the entertainments given at
Coolatin House for the children of the tenants on the
Fitzwilliam estates, of which he was one. My grandmother
could remember Hume-Dick of Humewood driving through
Hacketstown in his carriage, with liveried attendants,
throwing out money as largesse for the children - and the
priest, during the Land War, urging the people from the
pulpit not to let their children be pauperised in this
manner.
Hacketstown became a strongly Parnellite town (and
Redmondite after that): my grandfather adored Parnell and,
as a boy, he had travelled to Carlow on a sidecar in the
company of his uncle, as part of a demonstration to support
Parnell during the bitterly contested by-election of 1891
(which followed the 'Split' in the Irish Parliamentary Party
provoked by the issue of Parnell's relations with Mrs
O'Shea). He was apprenticed to serve his time in my
great-grandfather Hutton's shop in the Main Street and
eventually married his employer's daughter. He was a good
singer, a convivial person, a man who liked his drink.
However it came about, he spent most of his working life
labouring, finally working for Crampton's in Dublin. My
grandmother, who, if my mother's account is accurate,
carried a lot of responsibility for keeping the show on the
road, eventually had a big old Georgian house near the fire
station in Dorset Street in Dublin and kept boarders.
There is also a photograph of my granduncle Joe Hutton,
who was born in Tullow, Co Carlow, in 1868 and who died in
1917. He was a keen breeder of dogs and kept Imaal terriers.
His wife was Bridget Quinn from the Black Ditches near
Baltyboys in Co Wicklow. She and her sister Mary, who never
married, ran his pub, Hutton's on the bridge at Baltinglass,
following her husband's death. She was an intransigent
Republican who was burned out by the Black and Tans during
the War of Independence, and she later opposed De Valera's
entrance into the Dáil (the Irish Free State parliament). My
mother spent some time in Hutton's of Baltinglass as a young
woman and two photographs exist from that period. One shows
my mother, Mary Quinn and Mrs Hutton outside the public
house. The other shows my mother and Mrs Hutton in the
centre of what appears to be a wedding group. A figure in
the second row plays a melodeon.
The photograph which takes me back furthest into the past
is not the old est. It shows my great-grandmother, Mrs
Margaret Hutton (1845-1922), as a very old lady with three
of her five daughters. She was a Murphy from Tullow, Co
Carlow. Two of her daughters, Elizabeth and Nan, I have
mentioned already. The others were Maddie, who died of TB at
about the age of 26; Mary, who with her brother Joe, had
been set up in a pub in Baltinglass by her father; and Nell,
who never married. Mary subsequently married Dan Keogh,
whose family came from Clough and who himself had been to
America, and Joe went on to establish himself in a second
pub. Both Nell and Nan, the only ones I knew personally,
both trained as nurses and worked in Belfast for some time.
Nell, like her sisters, had a musical training and she used,
at one time, to play the organ in the Roman Catholic church
in Hacketstown. She had the reputation of being a bit odd,
and I was told that she would sometimes practice the popular
songs of the day on the church organ. Of Mrs Hutton's sons,
I had only been aware of one, Joe, until recently. But there
were three more: John and James, who emigrated to America
and who died there, and Paddy, who was retarded and who died
young.
When we went to Hacketstown first we lived in a room at
Hill's on the Green. Hill's was a substantial farm and Jim
Hill was an old Republican who carefully preserved an
immaculate tricolour which he would carry at the head of any
parade which took place in the town. At harvest time there
would be great scenes of activity in the haggard beside the
house, as the threshing took place and stacks of straw and
hay were constructed. Harvesting was a communal activity in
which neighbours helped, and in which they assisted in turn.
My father continued to work in Dublin and used to travel
to be with us at weekends. Until he got his first car, a
Baby Austin, he frequently made the journey by bicycle. As a
civil servant, he was in steady and comparatively well-paid
employment at a time when prospects were grim in the
countryside in general and workers were open to
victimisation, like one of my uncles who was sacked for
attempting to introduce a trade union in his employment. In
this way and others we were privileged. Of course the
Huttons' 'photo-empire' had collapsed by now. But all that
was recent enough for people to know who we were. The first
summer we were in the town my mother was asked to judge a
fancy dress competition, awarding the prize unknowingly to
the children of John Duffy, the head of a new dynasty.
I have two photos taken by my father in Hill's field in
that first year in Hacketstown which show myself and my
sister and a group of children from the Green. Among them
are Mary Byrne, the sister of my friend Bill Bertie, and May
Brien, whom I secretly considered the most beautiful girl in
the world. The second photograph looks out over the southern
foothills of the Wicklow mountains, including Shielstown
Hill. It was a special hill for me since my grandfather told
me of the occasion he had climbed it on an Easter morning
and had seen the rising sun dance for joy on the distant sea
at Christ's resurrection.
I also have a photograph taken at the corner of Kealy's
in the Main Street the day I was confirmed by the aged Dr
Keogh, bishop of Kildare and Leighlin. With me are two
friends, Simon Byrne and Paddy Dempsey. The laneway in the
photo led to the ball alley, beside which pitch-and-toss -
vigorously denounced from the altar - was played on Sunday
mornings. It also led to the Double-Ditch, which was a short
cut in and out of the town. On the other side of the lane
are the ruins of the outbuildings and bakery which extended
at the back of my great-grandfather's shop.
My great friend at that period, as I have mentioned, was
Bill Byrne, whose father was Bertie Byrne, a tailor who
worked from his house on the Green. There were so many
Byrnes in and around the town that families had to be
distinguished by a nickname - there were the Hitler Byrnes
and the Blueshirt Byrnes, for example - and my friend was
Bill Bertie. Bill's family bred dogs and he and his brothers
were great lampers and snarers of rabbits and setters of
nightlines. From him I learned to identify each bird's nest
by its formation and by the markings on the eggs. He also
taught me the names of many birds, plants and trees. Through
him I build up a whole new knowledge of nature which, to my
regret, I have since largely forgotten. Bill was a gentle
person who was a respecter of nature, and who would not
wantonly or cruelly destroy it.
Journeying out to the bog stick in my mind: when my
father was helping Bolgers cut the turf (later he was to say
to me, "I'm a countryman lost in the city"), or when I went
with Bill and his brothers to fetch turf home, loaded high
on an ass's cart. Likewise, a journey through the villages
to the east of Hacketstown in the cabin of one of Duffy's
delivery vans, driven by the father of another new friend I
had made, Matt Brien. Those early summers in Hacketstown
seem to me to have been extraordinarily fine and the memory
of them has been most often revived when travelling in rural
France when some feature of a sundrenched landscape jogs my
memory. In 1950, the Holy Year, we hired a hackney car,
owned by Mrs Paddy Roche - whose son, Father Willie, was on
the Missions - and driven by my mother's cousin, Addie
Donoghue. We visited the churches in the parish in order to
gain a plenary indulgence, travelling through outlying and
beautiful parts of the parish which I had not seen before.
Addie, as a Hackney driver, was not wholly reliable. On
another occasion when he was hired to drive us to Tullow, he
had evidently double booked. We took in a funeral on the way,
the mourners squeezing in beside us. As a postman, Addie was
equally idiosyncratic. When the weather was particularly
bad, he would not deliver to the outlying areas of his
round. Instead, he would wait outside the church on a Sunday
and slip the letters either to the people to whom they were
addressed or to some neighbour. A little man with a slightly
deformed arm, he had a sharp mind and a sharp tongue and was
eternally quoting Lord Haw-Haw: "...their s-s-stuttering
king and their b-b-bandy-legged queen..."
A visit which we made regularly was to my grand-aunt
Bridget, my maternal grand-father's sister, who lived under
the summit of Eagle Hill, from which there was a magnificent
view over Hacketstown and the countryside around. A photo
shows my sister and me with grandaunt Bridget's husband,
Mike Byrne, standing outside the door of the single-storied
farmhouse. A feature of the kitchen which fascinated me was
the bellows contraption which was fixed beside the open
fireplace. A wheel was turned by hand and this drove a belt
which operated a bellows beneath the hearth. In the garden
was an apple tree. We were always afraid to touch the apples
since granduncle Mike always claimed to have counted them.
Having lived for a couple of years on the green, we moved
outside the town to Rathnafishogue ('the [ring] fort of the
larks'), where we lived in a rented house. Fields rose
behind the house, beside which there was a small grove of
resinous conifers and an orchard. A stream ran through the
land, on which dams could be built, and there was one large
beech tree which could be climbed and built in. Some time
before the area was electrified we got a Tilly lamp to light
the kitchen. Until them we used candles and oil lamps to
light the house. Throughout our time the water was fetched
by bucket from the stream or the well, both of which were
close to the house. In the kitchen there was a large open
fireplace, with hobs and a crane which had adjustable
fittings. It was on this fire that my mother baked and
cooked throughout the period we lived in 'Fishogue.
Among the many visitors who were always very welcome in
our house was Charlie Carroll, a farmer who lived across the
river in the Borough. In the evening he would frequently
cross the river Derreen by the stepping stones to visit us.
He had a way with words and I loved listening to him,
whether he was telling a ghost story or some story
concerning poachers, or describing how, years before, he had
driven cattle to Rathdrum fair. He could captivate an
audience with his mastery of words.
At the top of our lane was a house where people gathered
to talk and play cards. This was Peter Byrne's. Peter Byrne
was an old-IRA man who was confined to a wheelchair. His
wife, on whom the bringing up of the family largely
devolved, was a good friend to us. When my grandfather came
down from Dublin to live with us, he loved to visit Peter
Byrne's in the evening. A photograph shows him with my
sister and with Marie and Lilly Byrne (now Mrs Donal
Kavanagh) at this time.
One of the photos from Rathnafishogue shows my sister and
me with two of our dogs: Tips, the cocker spaniel which Ted
Tynan, the Garda sergeant's son, gave her; and Winkie, the
wheaten terrier which my father bought from Bertie Byrne. I
can't remember to whom the donkey belonged, but the youth
standing beside it with us is Jack Foley. The Foleys were a
widely travelled family. Some of the children were born in
the United States. At this time they had one of the larger
farms in Rathnafishogue; later they had a shop in Tullow.
Jack had a droll way of telling a story.
Another photograph records one of my mother's
unsuccessful commercial ventures. This particular year she
raised a batch of turkeys for the Christmas market, spending
considerable amounts of money on feed for them. When she
took them to market to sell she was told that they had
crooked breasts, which reduced very much the price she got
for them. In the photo she is wearing the slacks she some
times even wore to church. When she reached the
Double-Ditch, she would sit down on the steps and roll the
slacks up under her coat so that they were no longer
visible.
Living by the river, we were well positioned to buy
salmon which poachers wished to sell without running the
risk of bringing them into Hacketstown. A photo shows Jackie
Tallon, who occasionally brought us salmon. One poacher, on
whom the Gardaí and bailiffs kept constant watch, was said
to dispose of his salmon by sending them in to town in
pairs, draped under his wife's gabardine. In Jackie Tallon's
company on this occasion was Dick Tutty, a joiner who was
verger of the Church of Ireland church. We kept a couple of
hives of bees in the orchard and Dick Tutty would come, with
his smoker and his veiled hat, to look after the bees and to
remove the honey. Another person who performed the same task
was Bill Kelly of the Green, who, if I remember rightly, had
a vast repertoire of anecdotes concerned with poaching.
A last photograph is the one reminder I have that we were
great cyclists in those years. It was taken on an occasion
when we had cycled to Tinahely, to the circus. With my
mother and sister and myself are Catherine and Ted Tynan,
two of the children of Sergeant Tynan who was stationed in
Hacketstown. By this time, we had moved back to Dublin, so
that my sister and myself could attend secondary school, but
we still had the house at Rathnafishogue, and still spent
our summers there.
When I think back on those years in Hacketstown now I
know I idealise, but certainly that time represents a
formative moment in my life that is still a point of
reference. It was, it seems now, a time of intense
happiness, as well as some equally intense unhappiness -
soon couple with confusion on the onset of the undirected
drives of early adolescence. In fact, it was probably, for
the most part, more ordinary than that. It was during those
years at Rathnafishogue, however, that I first began to take
conscious pleasure in listening to people who relished
words, part of a not yet fully registered realisation that
there is an art in their use.
Previously Published in
Carlow Past & Present, Vol 1 No 2. 1987/88.