Memories of the old Darley School
Times Past with Jonathan Smyth.
‘Rain, rain, go to Spain, and never come back again,’ we once heard the children chant in the playground of our childhood days. Rain starts off many conversations here in Ireland, but we do not have it so bad when compared some countries. Of course, we may not always have it too good either, especially with all the predictions around what scientists call ‘climate change'.
But thankfully, we aren't living in Mawsynram, in Northeastern India, where we would have a climate even more shocking to worry about. You see, Mawsynram is officially now the wettest place on earth with a robust annual rainfall of 12 metres, that is, 39 feet 37 inches. The previous record holder was the Indian town of Cherrapunji, famed for its 12 months of rain and a yearly average of 11.43 metres (38 feet). But it is not a total washout, since they have a thriving tourist industry built around beautiful scenery and the most stunning flora and fauna, which overall provides a highly recommended visual feast that is well worth crossing continents to see.
In Ireland, the average rainfall per annum is currently around 1.23 metres, that is, four feet. Nevertheless, parts of the country have in recent decades experienced the side effects of increased storms and deluges, even though the pitter patter of watery precipitation is a constant yet necessary feature of our climate.
Joy of rain
From water springs life and without it things would get ‘shocking horrid’ as one man in Cootehill put it to me the other day. Even Christ uses water as an analogy when he calls upon those who thirst spiritually to drink of the living waters. In Cavan, courtesy of the ice age, we thankfully have never had a shortage of crystal waters and as a lake county have derived much in the way of tourism from our luxurious green scenery. When I lived in England, to some of the people I spoke to, Cavan was a mecca for fishing and place from where brought away happy memories.
When I began national school at the Darley in the 1970s, I remember chilly winter days on which showers incessantly beat down on the glass of the old school’s windows. To my childhood imagination it sounded as though the boots of several thousand soldiers marched, as hour after hour, it drummed on. In the sounds, I conjured up tunes and other pretend happenings while the smell of paraffin emanated from the heater that warmed the classroom. The musicality of heavy rain, or a broken spout in a storm, still carries its own musicality that brings me back to long-forgotten memories.
Farm
Often, out on the farm when the rain ceased, there were puddles on the laneways, and it must have been about 1976 and at the age of three I remember splashing in water filled tracks when walking with my father up the lane to part of the farm in Co Monaghan and the particular memory surrounds a pair of dark red wellies, at that time, my favourite boots. There were dry days too, but they weren’t as much fun for the wellies.
In farming, needless to say, there is a needed reverence for the seasons, the rain is as important as having dry weather during the harvesting months. A wet month during the silage season spelt delay and drudgery for farmworkers. The single-cut forage harvester heavily spat out the rain soaked grass into the trailer and as teenagers during our school holidays we enjoyed working on the pit, levelling out the fresh cut grass by a pitchfork, or the ‘graipe’ as we called it. Very wet grass was torture and never an easy task to spread when it lay sodden in tight heaps deposited by the tractor doing the buckraking.
Endurance, by putting the shoulder to the wheel and getting on with it, saw you through and by summer's end the biceps were good and strong to prove you’d worked. Some summers were scorchers for silage making and in the ones that were not, we intermittently stood under shed roofs till the clouds dissipated, and the deluge moved on. Sometimes, there would be great discussion and recollections of days gone by amongst the shelter-seeking workers.
Rainfall, they say, was first measured in the fourth century BC by somebody unknown in India. Another person in Palestine was said to do the same in the second century BC. But those were probably just crude measurements compared to later standards. It was not until the 17th century, in the age of Enlightenment that rainfall in Europe had been recorded properly.
Slane turf
Recently, I found a report on Cavan in the 1890s and it gave a breakdown of the amount of rainfall for each month from 1891 to 1896. In August 1891, the county was drenched by 7.70 inches of rain and then, in the month of May 1894, Cavan experienced a drenching of 6.30 inches. We are no strangers to the odd savage forecasts, for example, like the one in December 1970, when it was reported that the ‘persistent heavy rain’ that fell over the previous few months that year had caused ‘the collapse of several old thatched unoccupied houses around Corlough'.
In 1936, the river Inny burst its banks and flooded an eight mile stretch from Derrylea and on down to Clonkeefy, flooding fields of ‘oats, potatoes, meadow and grazing grass'.
Unfortunate colonies of cattle found themselves ‘marooned’ temporarily on islands while inhabitants around Derrylea and Kilnacrott were cornered into abandoning their swamped homes. The pound bridge was damaged having ejected its parapet when the strong currents struck. Elsewhere, the bogs around Castlerahan had large amounts of ‘slane turf in clamps’ which became submerged.
It is said, the highest annual rainfall recorded nationally was in 1960 at Ballaghbeama Gap, Co Kerry, where 3964.9mm (13 feet) rainfall was entered into the history annals. Worryingly, climate change experts now tell us that heavier rains will come in the years ahead if we do not look after our environment. Perhaps, we can get a few tips from the people of Mawsynram and Cherrapunji.
But let us hope our rains never reach those enormous proportions, otherwise, as Private Frazer from Dad's Army might say, ‘we’re doomed’. By then, I don't know how any of us could cope.