Barefoot in Mullyneeny: A Boy’s Journey Towards Belonging - Bryan Gallagher

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the heroes of my stories. Their influences have shaped my awareness in so many ways: the gentle cadences of their way of speaking, and the lyricism of dialogue found nowhere else in the world; their courage in the face of adversity; their kindness and humanity, their wit and humour, the sturdiness with which they retain their folk culture; and of course their wonderful music. I spent my childhood among these people and I have never really left. It is my feeling that among the fields and the streets where you grew up, there your spirit will always live.

      And there you will leave it when you die.

       Bryan Gallagher, April 2005

       The Map of Ireland

      The sacrament of Confirmation is for ever associated in my mind with the town of Ballyhooley in County Cork. Not that I’m from Ballyhooley. I’m not from anywhere else on the south coast either. But I just cannot think, Bishop, Confirmation, without seeing the bottom half of that old school map—Carrantuohill and Dingle, Cahirciveen, the Blaskets and Courtmacsherry.

      This has all to do with my primary school teacher many years ago. One of her methods of punishment was to put me standing out on the floor facing the wall where hung a map of Ireland. I often spent the best part of the day there. I can still remember the colours of the counties; Cork was pink, Tipperary was yellow, Queen’s County was green and King’s County was brown. I didn’t know so much about the North, because you were supposed to look straight in front of you, and I was only a wee boy. But I occasionally stole a glimpse at my own beloved Lough Erne or Cushendall in the green glens of Antrim, far away, almost at the ceiling.

      The year before my own confirmation, I was an altar boy at the ceremony. The bishop intoned the names of all the candidates.

      ‘Con McManus.’

      ‘Present.’

      ‘John Maguire.’

      ‘Present.’

      And then on and on, until he came by mistake to my name. How my name came to be there I don’t know, but it brought everything to a halt. There was a flurry of white clerical robes, great whisperings in the episcopal ear. And then canonical fingers pointing from all directions at me. I knelt in a state of trepidation akin to what the cat often felt on wet evenings before my mother gave it a boot out the door.

      And then he called me over.

      Over I went.

      And he smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it is not the want of knowledge, it is the want of years.’ He shook hands with me, and that was it.

      Next day I breezed into school with the air of one who has acquired some degree of greatness. But she was waiting for me.

      ‘How many of you were at Confirmation yesterday?’ she asked. All hands went up. ‘Anybody notice anything wrong?’ Nobody had. ‘On the altar?’ she prompted. Still nothing.

      ‘What should you do,’ she said slowly, ‘when you shake hands with the bishop?’

      ‘Kiss his ring,’ we replied. And then a strange and awful feeling came on me.

      ‘How many children saw a boy from this class shaking hands with the bishop yesterday?’

      Everybody had.

      ‘And did he kiss his lordship’s ring?’

      ‘No Miss.’

      ‘No indeed,’ she said venomously, ‘no. Disgracing me opposite the whole parish.’

      It was back to the corner. Face the wall. Ah well…Waterford is green…Ballyhooley is in Cork…Another long morning.

       The Cobbler

      I was six years old when I first met Jimmy the shoemaker. We had just moved to the area and I was sent up to his workshop with a pair of shoes to be soled and heeled

      ‘Come in,’ he said as I hesitated at the door.

      He worked in a small shed right alongside the road with a window of small dirty panes through which, as he told me himself, he could see out but nobody could see in. In any case, passers-by would have had to bend down to look inside, because the shop was on a lower level than the road. From inside you could see their feet and legs only, and Jimmy once told me he could identify most people by the sound of their footsteps.

      ‘Your father has the best step of any man in this country’, he said to me. ‘On a frosty night I could hear him coming half a mile away, quick and light in the hob-nailed boots’.

      Huge shiny sides of leather were stacked along one wall, shoes in pairs, leather belts, harnesses hung on the other. A pot-bellied stove stood in the middle of the floor which he fed occasionally with off-cuts of leather or sods of turf from a pile at the back. The smoke had an exotic smell. A selection of knives sat on a shelf, blades curved or straight. I had never been in such an exciting place.

      ‘What’s your name?’ he asked me on that first day.

      ‘Bryan,’ I replied.

      ‘Bryan O’Linn had no britches to wearHe bought a sheepskin for to make him a pairThe hairy side out and the skinny side inThere’s luck in odd numbers said Bryan o’Linn.’

      He said.

      And for all the years that I knew him, this was the name he called me.

      I watched him at work, a shoe upside-down on the last before him, taking a handful of tacks from a box and putting them into his mouth, pushing them singly out through his lips ready to be taken in his left hand and hammered into the leather sole with his right. He worked with lightning speed.

      Over the years I came to know him better. He had a reputation for being irascible and acid-tongued, but for some reason he seemed to like me and we had a sort of mutual respect. Sometimes when I went in, he would greet me with a line of poetry that he remembered from his schooldays.

      ‘To be or not to be: that is the question,’ he would say, and then he would always add, ‘But what the hell’s the answer?’

      Sometimes he would get things slightly wrong:

      ‘The curlew tolls the knell of parting day,The loving herd winds slowly o’er the lea…’

      But I never told him that he wasn’t quite accurate, because even though I was a schoolboy, I could see that he just loved language and the sound of words. If he liked you, he would stop work, take out his pipe, carve off a piece of plug tobacco with one of his razor-sharp knives, tease the tobacco in his hands, fill and light his pipe, spit in the fire, and talk.

      ‘How is it,’ he said one day, that there’s no poets nowadays?’ And then he recited for me ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’:

      ‘Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried…’ He rolled the ‘r’s luxuriously over his tongue as he spoke, ‘And he lay like a warrior taking his rest, with his martial cloak around him.’

      Word-perfect this time, right down to the last line:

       ‘We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone, but we left him alone with his glory.’

      He was also the local barber and on Saturday nights, in the dim light of an oil lamp, the shed would be full of men waiting to get their hair cut. His tongue was sometimes venomous about his customers.

      ‘Phil McCaughey came in last night,’ he said about one man who was slightly stooped and had a reputation for meanness, ‘he came in with more humps on him than a bag of turf, that boy would skin a flea for sixpence.’

      Of

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