Communion calls on a Christmas Eve morning
In his column, Let the Busy World Be Hushed, Fr Jason Murphy recalls a rare character in Redhills and his Communion Calls on a Christmas Eve Past...
It was on a snowy Christmas eve that I drove in the lane to the little house in the townland of Drumcor between the villages of Redhills and Scothouse. The geese and turkeys that escaped the chop were running about the yard in the midst of fowl of all breeds. She was the first of my Holy Communion calls, one of many people, all of whom, bar one, have since taken the road for God.
As I knocked on the back door, I heard a dog yelping from within and an accompanying roar telling the dog to shut up and another roar that followed in a strong border accent telling me to ‘come ahead in for that wee dog’ll not touch ya.’
As I lifted the latch, the Terrier was still yelping fiercely and making attempts to bite at my heels but the roars continued from within telling him to shut up and there inside the scullery door tied to the tap of the kitchen sink I met with a pie bald bearded goat who turned his head nonchalantly to look at me and then carried on drinking from the sink.
‘Ya can untie that goat while you’re there and save me gettin’ up and let him out to the yard’, which duly I did, not sure who I feared most - the goat, the barking dog or the woman inside I had yet to meet.
As I entered the kitchen, there sitting up next the Smith and Wellstead cream enamelled range, in a red patterned jumper turned inside out, a plaid skirt well below the knee and her head covered in a woolly cap with her feet in green wellington boots resting on top of the range, was the bauld Babs Rudden. ‘Oh so you’re the curate in Killoughter … are you here about the dues?’, she asked bidding me to sit down.
I tentatively lowering myself into an armchair whose springs had seen better days and got my bearings as I glanced around the room that bore a look of time suspended somewhere 40 years ago with a dresser adorned with dusty cups, the table covered in an oil cloth with a radio on top, the aerial stretched high to hear the deaths, the sticks gathered in the corner next the range, beneath the stairs that led to the loft above.
The walls around were lined with chairs to welcome all ceilidhers from Drumcoondra and those from over Windy Harbour.
There was Johnny Browne from Newtown and Paddy Donohoe that told of all the craic in Connolly’s below in Scotshouse. Benny Reilly drove his tractor in the lane at such a speed that it hardly left second gear as Big McSherry from Bunnoe made the tea and Babs cut slices of the soda cake beneath her oxter.
Each got their slice of bread and lashings of jam and butter and a glass of poitin to wash it back as she sat down upon her throne, well used and worn, from all the years of holding court and heard of all the happenings from Antiduff in Ballyhaise to Killeevan in Co Monaghan and in every house back the road.
And there as the low light shone through the window on that Christmas eve morning, the dog fell into his slumber next the range and she told me of her family as if I should have known each of them of old - Alice who died in ‘44 and Matt in ‘46 and John (or Scud as he was better known), her life’s companion who died in Cavan ‘ospital’ some few years before.
She talked on the road of her childhood, oh so different to the road I traversed that day, for then it was a patchwork of little farmsteads.
The houses are now reduced to rubble where little remains of the big families that were reared there but for the few daffodils that in the Springtime appear to tell that some housewife, once upon a time, took the time to plant a few Spring bullbs in the winters of long ago.
The road now feels very lonesome along its many twists and turns as she looked into the middle distance out the window and talked on the Christmases of her childhood and the neighbours she recalled gathering in the early dark morning to walk, in a long line, the whinny hilltops and rushy bottoms with little lanterns in their hands, all to hear the priest read the Dawn mass.
Oh so very little remains of that time and place to remind, no one left to remember.... just houses now like Babs Rudden’s, standing dotted along the road, dying embers of a different world that once was known; excited children’s voices, now names upon a headstone, who once ran to find an apple and an orange and a few sweets wrapped in fancy paper in their father’s woollen sock in those Christmas mornings long ago.
But though their lives were simple, spent never very far from home, therein lay the elixir of their living, travelling just as far as Scothouse, the Post Office and shop in Redhills.
There was something quite extraordinary in her living that we have lost, the sense of contentedness to live our lives at home making do in the midst of the ordinariness instead of racing every road.
When she did venture out, Babs was to be seen in the cab of the tractor with her brother Scud at the wheel as they drove into Kelly’s of Redhills to buy the provisions of sugar, tea and flour, as John threw back a few double half ones in the time it took to say Jack Frost, that he said wouldn’t hit him until he landed on the street in Drumcor. Indeed, if he was at his leisure coming home from selling at the mart, he’d forget that he had left Babs without in the cattle trailer, often for hours, beating back the calves. In latter years she’d be seen crossing the Diamond in Clones with her cousin Vinny, an old woman in a woolly cap, turned down wellies and an overcoat turned inside out, at whom the fashionable used stop and stare but divil the damn did Babs care or her cousin who just smiled on. Bags of meal packed on to the link box of the tractor as they turned the road for home to feed the crows and pigeons and the few auld gone by laying hens before she’d milk the goat by hand to feed an orphaned calf.
And that’s why people loved her for she didn’t care a damn with the butter under her oxter to soften it for the tay. So as each Christmas passes and the likes of Babs become no more, I feel privileged that I knew the old woman in the wellingtons and in the woolly cap and can recall the beauty that lay behind the cracks, cracks that time and tide had wrought, a beauty hewn not of botox or rouge about the cheeks, but a beauty that welled from deep within that told of a life well lived for over ninety Christmases past, as the low light danced on the glistening rushes of the fields o’er Callowhill, a home that now stands so stilly silent without a goat, a goose or foul, as I lament in my not stopping as I pass by this Christmas Eve.
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