Athea Hall Bingo
Will be holding a Charity Night for Down Syndrome on Friday, June 30th. All support would be appreciated.
The Way I See It
Congratulations to Nora Lynch who celebrated her 103rd birthday at her home in Glasha,
Athea, recently pictured with
Fr. Duggan.
Nora enjoys doing puzzles, listening to music, watching television and chatting to her wonderful friends, neighbours and carers.
By Domhnall de Barra
Instead of my usual ramblings, this week I include an article sent to me in an email by “athantelsibhe” . It was written by Kevin Danaher and was published by The Mercier Press in 1962. It is a great description of what life was like in the early part of the last century and it will bring back memories to most of us of a certain age. Times were hard back then but the people were resilient and always looked out for each other. We have come long way since then but we have also lost a lot.
The road ran past our gate, barely thirty yards from the front door. To the south it climbed over the hill where lay the bogs from which our turf came, to the small town and the railway station seven miles away. To the north it led to our own village, half a mile away, and there met other roads leading to all sorts of wonderful places, northwards to the Shannon, eastwards to the city and the plain of the Golden Vale, westwards to the great ocean.
In winter it was deep in mud but in summer its dust was kind to little bare feet. Summer and winter we travelled it on foot or on bicycles to school and to Mass and on holiday expeditions that led farther and farther away as legs grew longer and stronger. Many the warm summers day we helped cottiers’ children to herd a cow grazing the ‘long meadow’ – the grassy margin of the road – and felt the slow steady pulse of the countryside as it passed by. Older people walking, younger ones sailing past on bicycles, rails piled high with turf, carts full of clanking milk tankards, small herds of cattle on the way to a fair, children sent to the village for ‘messages’, occasionally a horseman or a tinker`s spring cart or a motor-car that raised clouds of dust.
When we were not yet as tall as a service rifle we had seen flying columns of the Republican Army marching past and wished we were a lot older. Twice or three times we hid in the dikes from a lorry load of Black and Tans – one of whose favourite recreations was the taking of pot-shots at ‘moving targets’, human or animal; poor men – they were monsters to us then, and only later did we realize that they were for the most part crazed with looted drink and with the fear of the swift vengeance that might at any moment speak a last word to them.
The road was our link with the world outside. Many of our people had travelled far on it, some never to return, some to come back to the quiet places. There was the man who stuck his spade in the potato ridge and climbed over the ditch to give directions to a bewildered foreigner in the fluent German he had learned in his twenty years in Milwaukee, and there were the two brothers who used to hold their private conversations in Maori. There was a man who had carried his pack over White Horse Pass on the trail to Klondyke and another who had marched through the Khyber Pass to Kabul and a very old man who had seen the approach of the relieving columns from his post on a roof in Lucknow. Another had laid telephone cables in Montevideo, another had dug gold in Kalgoorlie and another had punched cattle in Texas. The road linked us to many a distant corner of the world.
It was built in 1840 by men who were glad to get work at fourpence a day, some of them shoeless, some of them walking six miles to work in the morning`s dark; the grandmother of our next door neighbour down the road missed a cake of soda bread from the window sill one day, to find that it had been taken by a poor boy who had had no food before coming to work. ‘Only for the mercy of God it might have been one of my own’ she said ‘and take care would you pass the door again and you hungry, without coming in and eating whatever I have to give you’.
It carried the wedding party and the funeral. It saw the Wran boys and the cross-roads dance. It bore the whole stream of a community’s life. No wonder then, when I was asked to write for Biatas about country ways for country people, that my mind went back to the road and to the people who moved on it. Many of their ways begin to look strange to us now, more characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the modern world. They had their faults, God knows, but they were the faults of generosity. Some of them talked too much, a few drank too much, many were lacking in thrift, some had less than their due share of common sense. But they despised meanness and cruelty and treachery, and they never failed to give generously of what they had to those who had less than they.
The road is covered with shining tar macadam now, and cars, trucks and tractors roar along it. It is strung with telephone wires and electric cables and it is torn up at frequent although irregular intervals for the laying of water pipes. The pulse of life flows so much faster and the old ways are dying. And we who have seen both worlds may be allowed to recall the memories of the old ways and hope that the old virtues may survive.