Part 1 - EARLY DAYS

Frank Hemstead, Senior (second from right) with his mother (in front) and family.

Catherine Bermingham, Elizabeth Hemstead (nee Nally) and Frank Hemstead, Junior.

In any case soldiers had an advantage over local farmers when it came to getting a woman, because no man could marry in the early part of the century unless he had a roof over his head. Out in the country fellows had to wait until their mothers and fathers died before they got the farm. Of course the odd one married and brought a wife in on the floor; sometimes this worked, but against that there was often hell to pay with the mother-in-law. In any event it seems my mother was happy to marry a soldier from London who had the means of supporting her.

Some people think my father was a Black and Tan, one of the crowd they let out of the prisons in England in 1921 to fight Sinn Féin. In fact he was an ordinary conscript who was sent here when Ireland was in a boiling position coming up to 1916 and the Easter Rising. I don't know how much action he saw but when the war ended in the November following my birth he was free to look for a job in Athlone. He was a cabinetmaker by trade, though on my birth certificate he's down as a piano maker. The only place he could find work was in Burgess' department store where they used to make furniture. However, my father said that the money on offer at the time wouldn't have kept him in cigarettes.

So the three of us went to London to live in Fanshaw Street in Shoreditch. Soon afterwards my mother was pregnant with another son who was stillborn and she died of a haemorrhage. When this sad news reached Clonbonny my grandmother declared that I'd have to be brought home otherwise I'd be put into an orphanage or, as she said, "they'll put poor Frank in some auld Bird's Nest". So my granny sent my uncle off to London to bring me home. Now I'm full of admiration for that man, who had never been a mile from the cradle; he had to cross England, find his way to London and pick up a child in arms of just a year and eight months.

 

There is just one place which I associate with the famine, the Bloody Gap, it's a narrow passage for horses up in Knockinea. Maybe it was part of the road from Killomeenahan to Clonmacnoise. Killomeenahan is a graveyard and a monastery out there on the Castledaly road. Anyway, it seems a lot of sheep were killed there when fellows were hungry. They went there and pulled up sheep, killed them and skinned them.

Then there was the hatred the people had of the Indian meal, which was sold during the famine when the people had no spuds. I heard them talking about a Kieran Nally who was able to buy a ton of Indian meal; he hung it out of the rafters for fear any fellow would steal it. But the people can't have been too badly off if one of them could buy half a ton of meal. Of course along the Shannon they were better off than upland people because they had auld muzzleloaders and "hapes" of birds and fish.

In any event the Nallys had to move to marginal land down between the bog and the river Shannon. It seems this happened under an Act of George III (1738-1820) by which the peasantry could lease up to 50 acres of unproductive virgin bog. After this move my mother's forebears had just seven Irish acres which was subject to flooding. They lived their lives subject to the whim of the river; sometimes the water rose and sometimes it went back, leaving behind the smell of rotting vegetation.

Here on this marginal land in Clonbonny Lower the Nallys and a number of other families lived in simple three-bedroom houses where often six or seven children slept in the loft. The ruins of some of these houses can still be seen today.

The two Nally families which first of all arrived at the Shannon were upland people, and it must have taken them about three generations to master boats and get used to the river. They had no stones and no way of bringing stones as there was no road into the place. At first they had to build sod-wall cabins which they roofed with sally poles and thatched with reeds. Later, they drew stones anywhere they could find them and built stone houses.

These stone houses had little or nothing in the way of foundations; so when the walls started to crack and fall out, the people used to break the edges of the floors and fill under the walls with stones. Then the walls were propped from the outside and pushed in again. The stones and sand used to build the houses were found along the riverbank and brought in by boat. These stones were black and they used to sweat; luckily there was plenty of turf to keep the houses dry. The roofs were built of larch and when they were ready a "scraw", about 12 feet long by 2 feet wide, was cut and rolled up on the bog. Then a pole was pushed through the middle of the scraw and it was carried up onto the roofs. When the scraw was in position the first coat of thatch was sewn in.

After a few generations, my mother's branch of the Nally family moved up from the river when they got nine Irish acres a bit further to the north. Here they built the thatched cottage I live in to this day. I was reared here with my granny, Mary Nally, nee Feeney, my two aunts Mary and Margaret and two uncles Tom and John. My other uncle, Mick, left home and joined the Gardaí. I had a very happy childhood and my granny and my aunts and uncles all thought the world of me. This house seemed bigger then and I remember how I loved all the life about the place. There was a big turf fire and we always had plenty of stirabout because we always kept bags of oaten meal in the corner by a stool. We put on the stirabout at about six o'clock in the evening and we left it cooking until ten in the evening. When it was ready we forked it into big mugs of cow's milk or "new milk" as we called it. Some of the older people preferred to add sour milk or buttermilk. Big mugs were all the go then as we used to say "a second cup was never as good as the first."

We were a hardy race and the only disease around here was consumption or TB; or as we used to call it "the decline." People who got consumption developed a cough and a spit and then their lungs wasted away. You'd hear people say of someone "Oh the poor auld craythur sure he died of the decline." It was much the same as lung cancer today. In any event my relations were tall, plain country people - there was no such thing as five-foot women around here and my aunts reached five feet ten or five feet eleven. My uncles slept in the settle bed in the kitchen and my granny and my two aunts slept up in the loft, or the "little room" as we used to call it. There was also a parlour which we kept for special occasions like the stations or the arrival of some important visitor.

You could say I was brought up in a female environment as my uncles were out working most of the time. When I was up to four or five years old my aunts and my granny used to say "Who's good?" and I'd say "Granny is good," or "Auntie is good." and then they'd say, "Well are you going to give me a kiss?" Later on when I started going to school we got away from the kissing.

From an early age I had a great liking for nature and birds and animals from poultry up to cattle. I milked and fed the calves and the fowl and when I heard a hen cackling I'd run out and bring in the eggs, that was my special job around here. I was always about the place and one of my earliest recollections is seeing three men asleep in our barn; I think they were the boys on the run the time of The Troubles.

 

MY GRANDMOTHER

I remember my grandmother as a white-haired, long-faced blue-eyed old woman. She was very lively and she could carry a "cleeve" of turf from the bog until she was into her 80s; she lived to be 90. She used oaten meal and water to clean her hands and I can still see her rubbing her hands and the oaten meal falling to the floor.

She was the product of a hedge school and most of the wisdom I picked up came from her. That was the system in the country - the grandmother looked after the children - she taught them their religion, fairy stories, nursery rhymes and all that sort of thing. She taught things which I never forgot, and I can quote her to this day. The teachers in those hedge schools must have been brilliant men; in my estimation they were on par with, or they'd lose, the professors of today. My granny said the hedge-school masters were all educated in Europe; so I was thinking they were "spoiled priests," the product of Louvain in Belgium, Paris, Rome or some of those Franciscan colleges on the Continent. I believe the hedge school was out near Dick O'Brien's land and the hedge-school master was called Toy; I can't remember his first name.

My grandmother used to tell about the hens going to Scotland. You see when the hens wake up in the morning they chat away for a while and then they say, "We're going to Scotland today"; so the next thing when they're just ready to start they say, "Wait now till we get the breakfast, the grub." But when they have the grub eaten they still don't go but every morning they're supposed to be going. My granny used to say about a man who was supposed to go somewhere or do something "Oh, he's like the hens going to Scotland."

There were no poultry instructors going the time I was reared up, but there's very little about poultry diseases that my granny didn't understand. As a result I'm able to judge a pullet from a cock at a week or a fortnight old. The same thing applies to turkeys. And I'm able to "sex an egg," that is I'm able to tell a male from a female egg by working a thread and a brass pin. I also learned about white scour, gapes and coccidiosis, which is a liver disease in fowl. When a chicken has gapes he has a worm in his neck - usually picked up from a dunghill. You can use powder or get a hair from a horse's tail to cure the problem. You double the hair and put it into the hole in the middle of the chicken's tongue. When you twist the hair you bring out your gape, this little bit of a transparent worm.

The 'Dog Tag' of Frank Hempstead's father, who was conscripted into the British army at the time of the First World War and posted to the military barracks of Athlone, where he met his wife, Elizabeth Nally from Clonbonny.

Granny also taught me all of Aesop's fables and she had sayings like: "A man without learning and dressed in fine clothes is like a gold ring in a dirty pig's nose. If you lie down with dogs you'll get up with fleas. There never was a gatherer but he was followed by a scatterer. From ragged britches to ragged britches in three generations." She told me that from the 21st December, the shortest day in the year, until the 1st January the day lengthens by a "cock's step in the dunghill." I never understood what she meant until about three years ago when I was reading Stan Gebler Davis, God bless his soul, in the Sunday Independent. Some country person told him that a cock step in the dunghill is equal to two minutes - however you work that out I don't know! Maybe it's to do with the shadow cast by the sun. I suppose you could say that shadows get that bit shorter each day as the sun rises - perhaps shorter by the length of a cock's step in the dunghill.

Granny was dead against borrowing and she used to say, "If you borrow a sum of money and you're able to pay back both the principal and interest then there was no need for you to borrow in the first place." She didn't die until I was 26, so she had a great influence on my life.

 

CLOTHING

Any clothes which were not made at home were made by the tailors in town but there was no such thing as well fitting clothes. My granny wore a red flannel petticoat like most of the old women around and when she was going to town she wore a cape, a little bonnet with ostrich feathers on top and a ribbon round her neck. Her cape had a few buttons and it was clasped at the throat. Granny, like the other women around here, had button boots for important occasions and strong leather boots for everyday use. For everyday use my aunts wore blouses with long skirts and bag aprons which were made from canvas bags; for state occasions they wore white or chequered aprons.

The men all wore caps and my grandfather wore a hard hat; the only time you'd see a man in his bare head was when he was eating a bit. One of my uncles wore a bushy moustache and the other uncle had the Hitler style moustache - however he hit on that before Hitler was heard tell of I don't know! They both wore hobnailed boots with tips on the heels and two rows of hobnails down the middle. In later years they also had light boots which they had an awful job to keep shining for Sundays.

Suits were usually made from blue serge and Athlone Woollen Mills had a reputation for making the best blue serge in Ireland; brown serge was also made there. All the men wore heavy tweed topcoats. Shirts had studs front and back for attaching collars and they were usually made of cotton. The men bought a few collars at a time, none of which matched their shirts. I even saw rubber collars which were cleaned in a basin of water. I remember my grandfather wearing a collar with a piece in front that fitted down over his chest. Of course good clothes were swapped for old patched clothes after Mass on Sunday.

The boys wore short trousers and "gansies"; gansies were like shirts made of wool with two or three buttons on the top. The girls wore pinafores. It was the era when everything was patched and the women could keep a set of clothes going for years and years with a needle and thread. Petticoats were almost gone in my time but I heard my uncle saying he wore the petticoat, and wore it till he was 16 years of age.

Like their elders, children took off their good clothes after school and the boys put on their fathers' old waistcoats which were patched at the back with flour bag material. Of course children's clothes were handed down from one to the other.

 

BUTTER MAKING

We had five cows which the women milked by hand; the milk was gathered in pails and then strained into large earthenware crocks. It was allowed to set for two days so that the cream came to the top. Then the cream was skimmed off with a saucer and put into a different crock where it was covered with a muslin cloth and left to "ripen". The following day the same thing happened until there was a crock of almost pure cream ready for churning. We had a big wooden churn and a thermometer to check that the cream was at 63 or 65 degrees before churning commenced. Then one person took the dash and the others waited their turn. I took the dash as soon as I was able to stand on a chair and give a "dreas". If a visitor "come" into the house someone would ask "Will you give us a dreas?" But you didn't have to ask country people as they always gave five or six strokes on entering a house. Tuesdays and Fridays were our churning days.

When the butter was taken out of the churn it was washed and teased. Then it was made up in "keelers" which are low tubs the breath of a barrel. As there were no such things as refrigerators in those days I had the job of hauling spring water from the well to harden and make up the butter. We used wooden patties and wooden prints of strawberries, thistles and leaves to line and decorate a "print" of butter. Then we put the prints on wooden plates which we called trenchers; indeed we used to say of someone who was fond of his food "he's a good trencherman." Finally when the butter was ready it was weighed on a homemade scales and laid out on a white cloth in a butter basket. We washed and scoured the churns and "keelers" with salt and boiling water; sometimes we put nettles in boiling water and used nettle water.

On Saturday mornings crowds of countrywomen used to stand under the castle in the market square of Athlone with baskets of butter and eggs at their feet. When the price of butter and eggs was decided each morning the news travelled round the town until it reached the shopkeepers and they then sent their "gossoons" to the market. The townspeople used to come along and check the flavour and the salt content of the butter by scraping it up with a sixpenny piece.

 

CHILDREN AND SCHOOLING

When country children were hungry between meals they used to eat a cut of bread and jam or a cut of bread with butter and sugar. They'd take a bite or two and then they'd run out and play around in the clay and then maybe take a few bites. If you passed kids on the road all you'd see would be the whites of their two eyes because they were so black. I think they were immunising themselves through imbibing all sort of bacteria. They were hardly ever washed except for a Saturday night when they might get a rub of a towel.

Children looked forward to the 1st of May when they were allowed to take off their boots and walk barefoot to school. I remember after a week or a fortnight walking on the gravel road the soles of my feet were as hard as the welts on my hands and I could run at my best speed along the road. I often came down heavily and I used to get black with blue blood. I got stone bruises by times and I'd have to walk on my toes for a week or so. I got so used to taking thorns out my feet that I didn't pass any remarks on them. When I ran through the fields I watched out for the different types of nettles: the common nettle, the sea nettle and the blind nettle. The blind nettle grows in tillage and has a kind of sticky knob which prods or gnaws you and the sea nettle is like the ordinary stinging nettle.

We got out at three o'clock and on our way home from school, especially at harvest time, we had a woeful regard for fruit of all kinds. I don't know what you could leave it down to because we knew our dinners were waiting for us at home.

Every house in the townsland had an orchard and we used to spend until five o'clock filling our pockets with apples, sloes and nuts. We combed the hedgerows for beechnuts, crab apples, plumbs, damson and vetches, which are like little peas. We knew all the places where we could get a "lock" of the wild strawberries and in the Autumn we picked blackberries and wild raspberries on the bog. We had a special liking for "frohan"; those little blue berries they call bilberries today.

I went to Clonbonny National School at about five years of age with my two cuts of bread and butter or my two cuts of bread and jam. This was the first time I got to know children of my own age. Ours was a one-roomed school so the lads in first and second class could hear all that was taking place in fifth and sixth class. We had the greatest teacher of all time, a Miss Mary Ghent. I'd put her on a par with, and I'd say she'd lose, any secondary teacher today. She was one of the old style National School teachers; a round faced smiling woman with glasses who spoke very precisely. She was very genteel and I'd say she was turning grey, as there was no dyed hair in those days. She started off coming out here on a bike and then she came in a pony and trap; at the finish up she came out with Travers, a taxi man who lived at the Milestone in Athlone.

It amazed me how she went through so many subjects: English, History, Geography, Science, Religion, Dancing, Singing, and above all Recitation. She instilled in me a great love of recitation and I can still see her reciting away to this day.

I remember one in particular, "The Exiles' Return." It went like this: