Throwback Thursday: At 15, mum sent me on a solo trip to Europe

We simply had to find out how Joe Terry got on when he made the move back to his native Cork on the Innisfallen (see last week’s Throwback Thursday). How did he and his bride find life here after the bright lights of London?

“Well, I had the job, but at that time, a flat in Cork city could not be had for love nor money,” recalls Joe. Plus ça change!

“We purchased a mobile home and located it in a corner of a field,” he continues. “Life was simple: a globe-type oil lamp for lighting, a gas bottle to provide fuel for a radiant room heater and cooking; idyllic, you might say... until the baby came along.

“It was no fun drawing buckets of water 200 yards, for drinking, cooking and washing nappies. We had no TV, but we did have the company of Millie, our budgie, and, in time, Trixie, our beloved dog who arrived months later in a crate at Kent railway station.

“She had been quarantined in London as a foot and mouth disease precaution. But she survived!”

Joe says: “Life was fine for Millie, in as much as it can be for a cage bird. A Department of Agriculture veterinary inspector paid weekly visits in our early days, to ensure she was not carrying a foot and mouth or bird flu type virus. They had to be careful.

“Other settling-in hurdles to my new life in Ireland were to be cleared too. I visited the tax office in Patrick Street to get my affairs in order, but the condescending clerk had me bamboozled, to the extent that when I left the office and went out on to the street, I didn’t know if I should go left, right or cross the busy thoroughfare.”

Joe, who had left his home near Ballybrannigan Strand Gap in the parish of Cloyne at 18 for England, summed up his initial feelings on his return to the auld sod: “Ireland of a thousand welcomes... but it did get better, and I never regretted moving back.”

Joe mentions that he recently purchased this writer’s Brehon Laws: The Ancient Wisdom Of Ireland (O’Brien Press, 2020.)

“Reading it, I noted the esteem in which women were held, their importance, and consequential legal protection under Brehon law. Reading further had me thinking of where I was born, on a 92-acre farm, and how it compared to the wealthy farmer in ancient Ireland, known as a bo-aire.”

‘Bo-aire’? Why is he so called? Because it is from cows his rank as an ‘aire ‘ and his honour-price are derived. He has land of the value of twice seven ‘cumhals.’ He has a house of 27ft, with a back-house, (kitchen) of 15ft; a share in a mill in which his family may grind, and his visitors. He has a kiln, a barn, a sheep-house, a calf-house, a pig-sty. These are the seven houses from which each ‘bo-aire ‘ is rated. He has 12 cows ; half the means of ploughing, a working horse and a riding steed. Twelve cows are his proportionate stock… [Crith Gablach]

Joe continues: “In my own case, in addition to the main dwelling and outbuildings, what I knew as ‘the tenants’ house’ was used for storing agricultural machinery, including a claw-wheeled Fordson tractor and a converted corn reaper-and-binder that was originally drawn through the fields by a pair of horses.

He was born in 1942 and adds: “Before my time, I’ve been told, the tenants’ house had a thatched roof and a large open fireplace. Perhaps this tenant house is a remnant of that ancient period.”

Well, it really is nice to see somebody actually considering his own upbringing and comparing it to that of the days when Brehon Law, rather than Anglo-Saxon dictates, held power in our country. Your family farm wasn’t that far removed from those times, was it, Joe?

Meanwhile, reader David O’Sullivan was inspired by recent Throwback Thursdays to write of his own early education.

“My first school was St Catherine’s by Highfield, from babies to the end of first class. Then the boys were dispatched elsewhere, and it became a girls’ school until 6th class, when they were shipped off to Mount Mercy.

“My only memory from there was learning the Mass to be an altar boy. The poor nun, trying to teach a five-year-old boy the Latin Mass! And just after I learned the whole thing, what did they do but change it? So all for nothing.

“I do remember one tricky job for the altar boy. We had to move the bible and stand from one side of the altar down to the lower level, genuflect, and bring it back up and place it on the altar, on the other side.

“That was a 20 lb book and brass stand for a five- or six-year-old. The nuns were looking on from their pews waiting for the fall. (I am sure they had money on it!)

“Sure enough, I did drop the whole thing, and I was lucky the priest was nice. But the nun took my ear off as it delayed the Mass by five minutes while he found all the pages again!

David resumes his school recollections: “Off to Josies (St Joseph’s ) on the Dyke ( it was still an open ditch then) at six or seven years old. There was no car to drive you, it was the No.5 bus which came every 10/15 minutes in the morning.

“If I missed it, I had to run to Dennehy’s Cross to catch the No 8 at the post office. That bus used to be about every five minutes. It cost 2d on the way down and 1d home at lunch time. The ride took about 20 minutes.

“At lunch time you raced home, 20 minutes on the bus , ran the rest of the way, wolfed down the dinner, ran back to the bus, and 20 minutes back to school, the one-hour lunch break gone. Then home after school at 3pm for 2d again. Total bus cost, 6d a day.

“If you fell into temptation and bought a gobstopper at Lucy’s, across from Josies school, for a ha’penny, you had to walk halfway up the Donovan’s Road to the 1½d fare zone.

“The times our money would fall and roll into the storm sewer, and I would have to run home to get more money and a good rollicking!

“I did this from seven years old to 11, which is when I went to school in Kerry for three months to learn Irish.

“Nowadays, my mother would be jailed for allowing her child to get the bus at that age…”

Well, you weren’t the only one so to do, David. Jean McClement, from the tender age of five, took the bus solo every week from Blackrock into Cork city to ballet classes at Joan Denise Moriarty’s studio on Emmet Place.

“It never occurred to me, or indeed to my mother, that there was anything unusual in that,” says Jean, who has further early adventures to relate.

“At the age of 15, my mother delivered me to the Innisfallen on my own, to send me to work in a hotel on the Dutch/German border, for the summer.

“I had to travel to Swansea, then the train to London, London to Dover, ferry to Ostend, train to Osnabruck, and then local, rural, train to a town called Ankum.

I was living in the hotel, with the family who owned it - they had a daughter my age and I had the time of my life and had to be dragged back to go back to school in September.

“My mother did have some connection to the family that owned the hotel, so in her defence I presume she did check that I wasn’t being sold into sex slavery!

“I stayed overnight in London with mum’s sister, Bernie, who was nursing there, and she delivered me to the Dover train, but I distinctly remember having to find her house myself, having arrived on the train from Swansea.

“My other clear memory is of arriving in Aachen, which to my 15-year-old eyes, was a MASSIVE station, and having to find the Osnabruck train, with very, very, limited German (God bless Mrs Griffin, the St Angela’s German teacher!).

“I can’t remember having to buy tickets which I probably would - it being all different currencies in those days, no simple ‘tapping’ of a card.”

Jean concludes: “In hindsight, I’d say my poor, unfortunate mother was desperate for ‘childcare’ and didn’t want me running wild in Cork - out of sight, out of mind.

“My journey back to Ostend in September was, I suppose, equally hairy. The hotel owner (Herr Schmidt) simply canvassed the long-distance lorry drivers until he found one willing to take a passenger... Completely innocent really - you know, I think there was a sort of protection in being utterly unaware of the potential dangers.

“It simply wouldn’t have dawned on 15-year- old me that I was in any kind of danger, and my memory of the lorry driver is of a much older man (he was probably about 30!) who ‘minded’ me - I stayed in a truckers’ hotel (in my own room) and he delivered me to the ferry the following day - zero drama.”

Well if that doesn’t bate Banagher, Jean, I don’t know what does!

Cue modern mothers all over Ireland, dropping their Throwback Thursday to the floor and fainting away…

“And yet, I remember travelling on a boat from Cork to Glasgow myself back around the same time, and the cattle drovers making sure I had a comfy corner to curl up in below decks. Was everybody nicer then, or have we just become too fearful?

David O’Sullivan continues his memories.

“My first three months of 6th class (last national school year) were spent in the west of the Dingle Peninsula, learning Irish. I went there from September to Christmas, staying in a small village of not more than four houses, I think it was Bally Currane (checked on Google earth, it’s still the same).

“There was one ‘rich’ farmer in the village, deemed so as he had a MF135 and a TV for the one RTÉ station. There was a phone about a mile away at the local shop.

“Everybody had to walk to Mass and to get groceries each week . We were about two miles from the base of St Brendan’s Mountain, or Mount Brandon as it is also known.

“Because I was fortunate enough to have a bike, I could cycle into Dingle, about eight miles away, so a big enough trip. Yet despite the exercise, those three months added a stone to my body weight from all the buttered spuds!

“The school master would write a topic for an Irish essay on the board each day and we would spend the first two hours doing that while he read the Irish Times.

Then, at 11, he would teach a little ‘matts’ until lunch.

“After lunch he would be exhausted from his day’s work, and we would be given a topic for an English essay until the school bus came to take us home, while he finished the crossword in the Irish Times.

“I was back in the city and ended that year, my 6th class, in the new school in Bishopstown.”

I simply love that account of a teacher’s day, David. Was it a shock getting back to genuine classes and genuine work? Must have been!

Send us your own memories! Email jokerrigan1@gmail.com or leave a comment on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/echolivecork.