We announce, with more than a little pride, that Paddy Kavanagh, famous Irish novelist and poet, is the latest contributor to this part of the Journal.
From his first book Ploughman and Other Poems (1936) to what I consider his best Tarry Flynn (1949), he has dealt with Irish country life from the standpoint of a man who has lived all sides of it.
Paddy was born in Co Monaghan 50 years ago on a small farm that was typical of the country. “I came to live in Dublin,” he says, “and have now begun to regret my utter folly in leaving the land just when land was beginning to pay – especially as I lived right beside the border.
In the years between he has seen all of Europe, America and even Mexico but now he has returned “to the place at first he flew” and finds the nest greatly distributed by the big feet of progress.
In the coming weeks he will be telling, in The Farmers’ Journal, just what he found and how he found and how he feels about it. Watch out for the perception wit and nostalgia that will appear under the famous Patrick Kavanagh by-line.
Farm Home Editor
December 22, 1962 - Patrick Kavanagh's piece 'Christmas and the Poor'.
Irish novelist and poet Patrick Kavanagh writes for ‘Farm Home’ in The Irish Farmers Journal
My birthplace revisited
Perhaps it is sentimentality. I regret the obvious passing of the old traditional Irish fair. Now it is marts with hard-faced auctioneers on a rostrum.
But looking back on my own experience, I remember how other people were similarly saddened when we threw out the settle-bed and the dresser. Life is ruthless as it moves along.
At the same time, I still feel that even in the midst of what may be progress, it ought to be possible to retain something of the old patterns and their spirit. I can no longer with any deep emotion return to the house in which I grew up because it has been modernised, a modern fireplace, cookers, everything.
Five-minute kettle
Ah, God be good to the lovely wheel bellows, and it is morning and I am lighting the fire – my right hand turning the wheel and my other gently pouring light slack over the bunch of paper. I remember I could have a kettle boiled in five minutes.
The tongs and the salt-box over the fireplace and the crooks and the crane were all individual things with personalities, something that enriched the imagination.
It may well be that the pattern is changing in a fundamental way, that is to say that farming is becoming a business simply and not a way of life. One man with a tractor engaged not in living by the land but in producing food.
Unearthly earth
This is undoubtedly an idea. Yet, I feel that when you are dealing with something so intimate with nature you cannot treat it materialistically. The earth may be food but it is also something else.
The grass, the trees and the streams and wells are forever telling us something eternal.
And wells! That’s another thing. My old home has now piped-in water. A spring was found right in front of the house, and when I saw it and remembered all the times I had carried a pair of tin cans a quarter of a mile from Meegan’s Well. I was reminded of Matthew Meers.
There was a man who had held a clock, his name was
Matthew Meers,
He wound it regularly everyday for four
and twenty years;
At length his precious timepiece proved an
eight-day clock to be
And a madder man than Matthew Meers
you wouldn’t wish to see.
Looking in
However, my madness was saved by the images in my mind of my walks to that well, of my mother and Mrs. Meers gossiping at it, and all of those things that happen to a man when his mind is on something else.
In a mere visit and by deliberate looking we do not see the heart of things.
It occurs to me now that the only wells that will survive in all their crystalline beauty, the sparkling water flagged over with the blossoming whitethorn overhanging are the Holy Wells.
These were my thoughts and feelings as I revisited my native place in Monaghan.
Hungry horses
No horses worth mentioning any more. Of course, a horse on a small farm was very uneconomic, he would eat as much as he’d give. My neighbour pointing to his tractor on the Sunday afternoon said: “Hasn’t to be fed or watered”. Ah yes! and that was food for more memories.
The railway line from Inniskeen to Carrickmacross is closed as well as the line from Dundalk to Enniskillen. And in my time these railways loomed large in our lives.
The Carrickmacross line had been built within living memory and one of my neighbours who only died in December 1956 had worked at the building of it. There were many myths attached to that railway.
The compensation disputes over land acquired for it and details of accidents which in the early days of railway – which was only yesterday – were as newsparthy as airplane accidents now.
Fasten belt
I remember my father and Sergent Bell of the R.I.C coming from Carrickmacross together and the sergeant telling my father the correct method to jump from a train when in danger, just as today you have to “fasten your seat belts” etc.
My father left the train at Essexford station and the sergeant went on to Inniskeen. There, the train being overloaded, overran the points and the sergeant jumped as he had expounded and broke his two legs.
As a rule, my father came on to Inniskeen for it and it was nearer than the other station and passing our house he would shove his bag of leather out the window.
I would be waiting outside to carry it up the road and even to this day, I can remember the smell of the little sacks in which the rivits and other small articles used by the shoemaker were enclosed.
So, times change and perhaps in the end nothing changes. We are poised in time: what has happened is not lost.
Harvesting
But something I am not sentimental about is the new methods of harvesting. I remember with anything but pleasure the cutting of the corn and myself helping to tie the sheaves. Lodged oats that would drag the sides out of a fella and the thistles.
I had to help with another farm to get our patch of oats cut. And a right slave driver the same man was. From eight o’clock in the morning till eight at night. And then harvestmen who were known as “gawthins” used to come up from Crossmaglen.
My slave driver employed many of those. If there was damp on the corn in the morning, he’d announce that they would not start until after dinner. Dinner would be around eleven and from then until nine, or later if he could manage it. What a half day.
IFJ February 26, 1977 - John B Keane's Bog Latin short story.
Irish playwright, novelist and essayist John b Keane writes for ‘Farm Home’ in The Irish Farmers Journal
Saturday, 26 February, 1977
John B Keane wrote in the Irish Farmers Journal during the 1970s. This extract also appeared in Is the Holy Ghost really a Kerryman?
Long ago in north Kerry there was a man by the name of Paddy Brolly. ‘He worked for two elderly brothers on a middling-sized farm, which was situated a mile and a half at the other side of Back-of-Beyond.
He lived in the farmhouse with the brothers and all got on well together. The motor-car and the telephone and the electric light were the chief reasons for the decline and fall of that happy and peaceful place known as the Back-of-Beyond and, sad to say, this is the first time its passing has ever been recorded in print.
Mentioned
Let us press on, however, and find out, why this man, Paddy Brolly, should be mentioned in our tale. Let me say that it was my intention at the outset to devote this treatise to Bog-Latin, a now-extinct language which flourished for a while in Irish country places, in spite of persecution by Church, State and several drunken schoolmasters.
However, I realised that no discourse on Bog-Latin could, be complete without mention of Brolly. He was a simple man, with minor aspirations.
A sufficiency of porter, meat and tobacco, with the odd hoult of a willing worn an, were his total ambitions. Yet it is widely believed that it was his demise which gave rise to the birth of Bog-Latin.
When Paddy Brolly died, the brothers who employed him sent for the priest. Instead of going themselves, they commissioned a fool to tell the priest that he was wanted to bury Paddy Brolly.
When the fool arrived at the presbytery, he told the priest that Paddy Brolly wanted to see him. “For what?” the priest asked. “He wants to see you because he’s dead,” said the fool, “and that’s why”.
No wonder then that the priest cleared the fool from his doorstep. When the fool arrived back, he told the brothers that the priest refused to come. “We’ll bury him ourselves,” said the older of the brothers.
“All we’re short of is Latin. We have the Holy Water, and we can lay him out in his Clydesdale” (name given to the navy blue Sunday suits of the period).
On the day of the funeral, there was a good attendance. When the coffin was lowered into the grave, a neighbour came forward and shook the Holy Water on top of it.
For good measure, she gave everyone within range a sprinkling also. The older of the two brothers stepped forward and said a few simple prayers.
Then he spoke through his nose what he believed to be good quality Latin. All the Latin he knew was what he picked up in dribs and drabs from the masses high and low and funerals down the years.
Respect
“Dominion no varum in, saecula saeculorum,” he opened. Members of the gathering looked at him with new-found respect.
Encouraged, he went on: “Domihus vobiscum in nomine patternum tatarara eternibus sanctibus terra firma. Adoremus temus cum spiritu sonctus amen.”
“Latine dictum,” said the scholar who happened to be in attendance. “Et cum spirtu tuo,” the older brother gave answer and, with that, the mourners went to the nearest pub to drown their sorrows.
After that Bog-Latin was in wide use and there was “sanctimussing” and “saccalarum-saccaloring” whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Christened
It was the clergy, incidentally, who christened it Bog-Latin. Those who used it simply called it “oremussing”. The seandaoine used to say that it broke out in people who should have been priests but were not for one reason or another.
Bog-Latin spread as far as America, but only a man with a west of Ireland accent was capable of uttering its nuances in the true traditional manner. Bog-Latin gave birth to quite a few phrases.
There was, for instance, “Bladder Barum” and a “coaxiorum”. The latter was widely used as a love potion. “BIadder Barum” was a send-the-fool-farther composition in the same league as the glass hammer and the round square.
Unique
Time past and many blessings sprung from this unique language. There was the blessing bestowed upon, young men and women emigrating to America, England and elsewhere, which went as follows: “Julia, Johanna, Manacka, Cassumboola junka”, and there was the blessing bestowed upon people who were afraid to go home late at night after wren-dances, hoolies and card gambles. Both’ hands were placed upon the head of the recipient and the following was intoned sanctimoniously: “In caporetis is taus is cocmaggeg is omnibus norstrum saculata”.
Over the years, the great sayings diluted and corrupted because no one went to the bother of compiling a Bog-Latin dictionary. The final blow came when a Yank by the name of Paddy Fongtu, came on holiday to the west.
His father had been a Paddy Enright, from Tubberclarig, but his mother was a Lily Fongtu, from Kwei Yang, China. He stayed with relations and one night, at a wren-dance, he over-heard a Bog-Latin blessing. Full of drink he insisted in giving a blessing of his own, which went like this:
Me ackey bo-bo. Velly good so-so. Me lika Lilya. She lika me. Me filiongkong. Fatty man come along Steali allabooli from Poo Chinee.
Changed
A Bronx-born pensioner, who happened to be in the vicinity, informed those present that what Paddy Fongtu had changed to so ceremoniously was no more than a children’s street-song in Chinatown, New York.
Thus, ended the great era of Bog-Latin, now alas heard no more and becoming less than a memory when once it held its own with the best.
Omnibus nostrum sacculata.
Read more
Memoir series: what’s your story?
John B Keane's ‘field’ is now growing spruce
We announce, with more than a little pride, that Paddy Kavanagh, famous Irish novelist and poet, is the latest contributor to this part of the Journal.
From his first book Ploughman and Other Poems (1936) to what I consider his best Tarry Flynn (1949), he has dealt with Irish country life from the standpoint of a man who has lived all sides of it.
Paddy was born in Co Monaghan 50 years ago on a small farm that was typical of the country. “I came to live in Dublin,” he says, “and have now begun to regret my utter folly in leaving the land just when land was beginning to pay – especially as I lived right beside the border.
In the years between he has seen all of Europe, America and even Mexico but now he has returned “to the place at first he flew” and finds the nest greatly distributed by the big feet of progress.
In the coming weeks he will be telling, in The Farmers’ Journal, just what he found and how he found and how he feels about it. Watch out for the perception wit and nostalgia that will appear under the famous Patrick Kavanagh by-line.
Farm Home Editor
December 22, 1962 - Patrick Kavanagh's piece 'Christmas and the Poor'.
Irish novelist and poet Patrick Kavanagh writes for ‘Farm Home’ in The Irish Farmers Journal
My birthplace revisited
Perhaps it is sentimentality. I regret the obvious passing of the old traditional Irish fair. Now it is marts with hard-faced auctioneers on a rostrum.
But looking back on my own experience, I remember how other people were similarly saddened when we threw out the settle-bed and the dresser. Life is ruthless as it moves along.
At the same time, I still feel that even in the midst of what may be progress, it ought to be possible to retain something of the old patterns and their spirit. I can no longer with any deep emotion return to the house in which I grew up because it has been modernised, a modern fireplace, cookers, everything.
Five-minute kettle
Ah, God be good to the lovely wheel bellows, and it is morning and I am lighting the fire – my right hand turning the wheel and my other gently pouring light slack over the bunch of paper. I remember I could have a kettle boiled in five minutes.
The tongs and the salt-box over the fireplace and the crooks and the crane were all individual things with personalities, something that enriched the imagination.
It may well be that the pattern is changing in a fundamental way, that is to say that farming is becoming a business simply and not a way of life. One man with a tractor engaged not in living by the land but in producing food.
Unearthly earth
This is undoubtedly an idea. Yet, I feel that when you are dealing with something so intimate with nature you cannot treat it materialistically. The earth may be food but it is also something else.
The grass, the trees and the streams and wells are forever telling us something eternal.
And wells! That’s another thing. My old home has now piped-in water. A spring was found right in front of the house, and when I saw it and remembered all the times I had carried a pair of tin cans a quarter of a mile from Meegan’s Well. I was reminded of Matthew Meers.
There was a man who had held a clock, his name was
Matthew Meers,
He wound it regularly everyday for four
and twenty years;
At length his precious timepiece proved an
eight-day clock to be
And a madder man than Matthew Meers
you wouldn’t wish to see.
Looking in
However, my madness was saved by the images in my mind of my walks to that well, of my mother and Mrs. Meers gossiping at it, and all of those things that happen to a man when his mind is on something else.
In a mere visit and by deliberate looking we do not see the heart of things.
It occurs to me now that the only wells that will survive in all their crystalline beauty, the sparkling water flagged over with the blossoming whitethorn overhanging are the Holy Wells.
These were my thoughts and feelings as I revisited my native place in Monaghan.
Hungry horses
No horses worth mentioning any more. Of course, a horse on a small farm was very uneconomic, he would eat as much as he’d give. My neighbour pointing to his tractor on the Sunday afternoon said: “Hasn’t to be fed or watered”. Ah yes! and that was food for more memories.
The railway line from Inniskeen to Carrickmacross is closed as well as the line from Dundalk to Enniskillen. And in my time these railways loomed large in our lives.
The Carrickmacross line had been built within living memory and one of my neighbours who only died in December 1956 had worked at the building of it. There were many myths attached to that railway.
The compensation disputes over land acquired for it and details of accidents which in the early days of railway – which was only yesterday – were as newsparthy as airplane accidents now.
Fasten belt
I remember my father and Sergent Bell of the R.I.C coming from Carrickmacross together and the sergeant telling my father the correct method to jump from a train when in danger, just as today you have to “fasten your seat belts” etc.
My father left the train at Essexford station and the sergeant went on to Inniskeen. There, the train being overloaded, overran the points and the sergeant jumped as he had expounded and broke his two legs.
As a rule, my father came on to Inniskeen for it and it was nearer than the other station and passing our house he would shove his bag of leather out the window.
I would be waiting outside to carry it up the road and even to this day, I can remember the smell of the little sacks in which the rivits and other small articles used by the shoemaker were enclosed.
So, times change and perhaps in the end nothing changes. We are poised in time: what has happened is not lost.
Harvesting
But something I am not sentimental about is the new methods of harvesting. I remember with anything but pleasure the cutting of the corn and myself helping to tie the sheaves. Lodged oats that would drag the sides out of a fella and the thistles.
I had to help with another farm to get our patch of oats cut. And a right slave driver the same man was. From eight o’clock in the morning till eight at night. And then harvestmen who were known as “gawthins” used to come up from Crossmaglen.
My slave driver employed many of those. If there was damp on the corn in the morning, he’d announce that they would not start until after dinner. Dinner would be around eleven and from then until nine, or later if he could manage it. What a half day.
IFJ February 26, 1977 - John B Keane's Bog Latin short story.
Irish playwright, novelist and essayist John b Keane writes for ‘Farm Home’ in The Irish Farmers Journal
Saturday, 26 February, 1977
John B Keane wrote in the Irish Farmers Journal during the 1970s. This extract also appeared in Is the Holy Ghost really a Kerryman?
Long ago in north Kerry there was a man by the name of Paddy Brolly. ‘He worked for two elderly brothers on a middling-sized farm, which was situated a mile and a half at the other side of Back-of-Beyond.
He lived in the farmhouse with the brothers and all got on well together. The motor-car and the telephone and the electric light were the chief reasons for the decline and fall of that happy and peaceful place known as the Back-of-Beyond and, sad to say, this is the first time its passing has ever been recorded in print.
Mentioned
Let us press on, however, and find out, why this man, Paddy Brolly, should be mentioned in our tale. Let me say that it was my intention at the outset to devote this treatise to Bog-Latin, a now-extinct language which flourished for a while in Irish country places, in spite of persecution by Church, State and several drunken schoolmasters.
However, I realised that no discourse on Bog-Latin could, be complete without mention of Brolly. He was a simple man, with minor aspirations.
A sufficiency of porter, meat and tobacco, with the odd hoult of a willing worn an, were his total ambitions. Yet it is widely believed that it was his demise which gave rise to the birth of Bog-Latin.
When Paddy Brolly died, the brothers who employed him sent for the priest. Instead of going themselves, they commissioned a fool to tell the priest that he was wanted to bury Paddy Brolly.
When the fool arrived at the presbytery, he told the priest that Paddy Brolly wanted to see him. “For what?” the priest asked. “He wants to see you because he’s dead,” said the fool, “and that’s why”.
No wonder then that the priest cleared the fool from his doorstep. When the fool arrived back, he told the brothers that the priest refused to come. “We’ll bury him ourselves,” said the older of the brothers.
“All we’re short of is Latin. We have the Holy Water, and we can lay him out in his Clydesdale” (name given to the navy blue Sunday suits of the period).
On the day of the funeral, there was a good attendance. When the coffin was lowered into the grave, a neighbour came forward and shook the Holy Water on top of it.
For good measure, she gave everyone within range a sprinkling also. The older of the two brothers stepped forward and said a few simple prayers.
Then he spoke through his nose what he believed to be good quality Latin. All the Latin he knew was what he picked up in dribs and drabs from the masses high and low and funerals down the years.
Respect
“Dominion no varum in, saecula saeculorum,” he opened. Members of the gathering looked at him with new-found respect.
Encouraged, he went on: “Domihus vobiscum in nomine patternum tatarara eternibus sanctibus terra firma. Adoremus temus cum spiritu sonctus amen.”
“Latine dictum,” said the scholar who happened to be in attendance. “Et cum spirtu tuo,” the older brother gave answer and, with that, the mourners went to the nearest pub to drown their sorrows.
After that Bog-Latin was in wide use and there was “sanctimussing” and “saccalarum-saccaloring” whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Christened
It was the clergy, incidentally, who christened it Bog-Latin. Those who used it simply called it “oremussing”. The seandaoine used to say that it broke out in people who should have been priests but were not for one reason or another.
Bog-Latin spread as far as America, but only a man with a west of Ireland accent was capable of uttering its nuances in the true traditional manner. Bog-Latin gave birth to quite a few phrases.
There was, for instance, “Bladder Barum” and a “coaxiorum”. The latter was widely used as a love potion. “BIadder Barum” was a send-the-fool-farther composition in the same league as the glass hammer and the round square.
Unique
Time past and many blessings sprung from this unique language. There was the blessing bestowed upon, young men and women emigrating to America, England and elsewhere, which went as follows: “Julia, Johanna, Manacka, Cassumboola junka”, and there was the blessing bestowed upon people who were afraid to go home late at night after wren-dances, hoolies and card gambles. Both’ hands were placed upon the head of the recipient and the following was intoned sanctimoniously: “In caporetis is taus is cocmaggeg is omnibus norstrum saculata”.
Over the years, the great sayings diluted and corrupted because no one went to the bother of compiling a Bog-Latin dictionary. The final blow came when a Yank by the name of Paddy Fongtu, came on holiday to the west.
His father had been a Paddy Enright, from Tubberclarig, but his mother was a Lily Fongtu, from Kwei Yang, China. He stayed with relations and one night, at a wren-dance, he over-heard a Bog-Latin blessing. Full of drink he insisted in giving a blessing of his own, which went like this:
Me ackey bo-bo. Velly good so-so. Me lika Lilya. She lika me. Me filiongkong. Fatty man come along Steali allabooli from Poo Chinee.
Changed
A Bronx-born pensioner, who happened to be in the vicinity, informed those present that what Paddy Fongtu had changed to so ceremoniously was no more than a children’s street-song in Chinatown, New York.
Thus, ended the great era of Bog-Latin, now alas heard no more and becoming less than a memory when once it held its own with the best.
Omnibus nostrum sacculata.
Read more
Memoir series: what’s your story?
John B Keane's ‘field’ is now growing spruce
This is a subscriber-only article
SHARING OPTIONS: