Mrs Rae’s recollections: From Drumbar to Dumbarton
We continue this week with part two of the recollections of Nancy Rae as she fondly recalled a carefree childhood amongst the Cavan Drumlins. Life amongst the farm animals and the birds kept on the farm brought her back many happy memories which she wrote down.
When Nancy’s mother went into Bailieborough she expected her daughter would ensure that the hens remained seated on the eggs. ‘Mother,’ Nancy wrote, was always telling us to ‘watch the hens and to see that they went back to sit on the nests as the eggs would be wasted if they became cold for a long period of time.’ But, more often than not the hens did not return to the nest and there would be a row when her mother got home.
The arrival of the baby chicks was great fun, as Nancy put it, ‘I remember the chicks coming out of their shells and sometimes Mum had to break the shell to help let the chicken out. The chickens were lovely and fluffy when they were small.’ They also kept turkeys and ducks and quite often the hens sat on the duck eggs and Nancy could remember the innocent fun they had watching ‘the hens taking the ducklings down to the pond’ which in fact ‘had been a flax hole, where in the old days the flax was put.’ There were goslings as well, and a gander, but it was not her favourite childhood creature, and it often gave her many a good chase.
She enjoyed the lambs and calves, and talked about the cow that would chew stones and eat the washing off the clothesline. Nancy enjoyed feeding the calves with buckets of milk and described how she’d put her hand into the milk, then let the calf lick her hand to get the taste before putting the bucket up to its nose and away it’d go lapping it up. But there was also another farm animal that she did not like, and it was the pig. She wrote about how they often ate their own young.
In the summertime when the windows were left wide open, bats would fly in at night and you’d find them buzzing about your ears. Magpies could be a pest, she remembered, and sometimes they’d swoop, turn, and pick the little chick up; and then at night you had to get the hens into the hen house before the fox got them. The ducks and geese were equally at the mercy of becoming fodder for Mr fox.
Farming and news
Wood for the fire needed sawing, and Nancy and her brother Willie worked the saw together. Sometimes there were rows when Willie gave out to her for not holding the saw correctly. Nancy and her brother Willie could make ropes from hay which were useful to have about the farm. Farming can be unpredictable, and Nancy cited an incident when her brother Willie had been on top of a cart loaded with hay and called her to throw up the rope, to secure the load. But when she threw the rope up, it landed on the horse’s back and the fright caused it to bolt. Luckily, Willie was nimble enough to jump from the cart unhurt, and stop the horse before it entered the lane, leading to the road.
Nancy had a fondness for fruit grown in the garden. She wrote: ‘I remember the plum tree well, I loved plums before they ripened and the others knocked them down out of the tree, and they made me sick, but then when they were ripe, I could not eat them.’ She added, ‘my mother gave a lot of them away to the postman.’ But, wasting fruit was not something Nancy approved of, and she mentioned that the ‘Parrs had cooking apples which they would not give away,’ but instead, ‘would throw them out first.’
Her family like to read the local news in the weekly paper the Anglo-Celt while they got the Irish Independent for the national news. Nancy went into Bailieborough to buy the papers in Tommy Clarke’s shop. She usually brought a basket of eggs to Clarke’s too which he bought to sell to his customers.
Marriage
Charles spoke of how his parents met: ‘She met my father, William Rae when he came over to Cavan in, I believe, 1948. They met at Lisdonan Orange Hall and fell in love. Shortly after this, she got pneumonia and had to go to the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin. She recovered and went back to Scotland, marrying in 1950. Initially they lived with my grandparents in Bowling, a village near Dumbarton, but by 1953 they had moved down to Dumbarton, where she gave birth to a son, William, who only lived three days. Mum went into a coma, with pre-eclampsia, but fully recovered.’ He continued, ‘later, in 1958, she gave birth to me,( during this time she did some domestic work, but my father was the main breadwinner).’
In her writings, Nancy pointed out that William Rae had come from Scotland to visit the Montgomery family and during his stay he attended a dance where they both met for the first time. The day after, she happily recorded, how he came to see her and bought her sweets. When William went home to Scotland, they agreed to get engaged, and he sent a ring to Haddy who brought it to Nancy. In her account, Nancy recalled, that she then ‘went over to Scotland and worked in the Singer Sewing machine factory … I didn’t like it at all,’ she noted, adding that she got ‘pneumonia and went home (to Cavan) for a year … then came back here (Scotland) and married William on 22 December 1950 in Barclay church. Nancy and her husband lived a while with his family and then found a house in Bowling, a place Nancy did not find pleasant. They later moved to Dumbarton where Nancy found the locals to be ‘very friendly.’
Her husband William passed away in 1994, but she remained in good health till it became evident in 2016 that she had developed dementia. Charles looked after his mother when she became unwell, and recalled, ‘I cared for her at home till she passed away in November 2019.’ Charles concluded: ‘I must say that even though my mother left Cavan in the late 1940s, in a sense she never really left, and I grew up with these stories.’
I would like to say thank you to Charles Rae who works as a Librarian in Dumbarton, Scotland, for kindly granting me permission to share his mother’s reminiscences of her early life in Cavan during the 1930s and 1940s.
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