Against the Tide Read Online Free PDF Page B

good turf — coal black, heavy and stone-hard in a well-filled high creel cart. It burned long and gave out great heat.
No one wanted the light auburn turf that burned quickly with little heat.
    The practice was for farmers to parade the streets with their loads. Some might stand in the broad market place in front of St Mary’s Church, or just under the castle, near Custume Bridge.
The purchaser went from one to the next, trying to beat down the price. The bargaining began as soon as my father was satisfied that he had the best turf. It was a sad picture, two desperately poor
heads of families each trying to outwit the other for a matter of pence. Such were the imperatives of our competitive society; the farmers could not afford to agree among themselves on a fair
price. The price usually was between five and seven shillings a load.
    With the deal made, the farmer wearily turned his tired horse into the short narrow lane up a slight hill that led to the yard at the back of our house. It needed skill and care to turn off the
main street with the delicate load. The steel pins that held the tailgate in were knocked out, the belly band under the horse unshackled, the shafts of the cart tipped up and the black turf bricks
tumbled out of the cart and through the gate. My father fed the turf into canvas sacks to be carried by us into the turf house. We were prepared for the worst that winter could do to us; at least
we’d be warm.
    Out of all these memories looms the day my father bought a young kid goat. The austere spare lines of the body, the angular head with its amber slit eyes, the sharp spikes for ears and the
emergent horns: to me a kid goat has all the fineness and purity of a Dresden figure. We treasured the new pet, troubled by the plaintive cries for its mother which we were unable to still.
    Then came the shock which blacked out all feeling. This lovely creature was not meant to be our pet but was to be butchered by our father and eaten by the rest of us. Any remaining figment of
childhood innocence was at an end. My father prepared to cut its throat, skin it, and eat it. Loyally, we gathered for the butchering ceremony at the blackened brass tap in the corner of the yard.
Memories crowded back of the old red hen. The infant-like scream from the kid goat strangled in its own blood seared my ears. I remember nothing more. In the end, though hungry, none of us ate
it.
    Outside St Mary’s Catholic Church there is a spacious square with the national school and the secondary school, both run by the Marist Brothers, on one side, and the red ticket dispensary
on a raised site directly opposite. In front of the dispensary on this raised site, visiting politicians would speak. Astride my father’s shoulders, I first heard Eamon de Valera speaking
there on one of his visits to Athlone in the twenties. I could remember the man, so distinctive was he; I understood nothing of what he said.
    Directly below was a recessed site under the high wall, and with the low wall into Kane’s field on one side and the main road on the other, here would sit the stone-breaker, a small
black-haired moustached man with a hungry sullen-looking face. It was his job to sit there all day in all weathers, and break stones. He rarely looked up from his work, which no doubt was assessed
on ‘piece’ rates, and had a can of cold tea and a bread sandwich wrapped in paper beside him. Over his eyes he wore a pair of black fine wire mesh protective goggles. All day his
hammers busily cracked and broke the stones, big hammers for the rocks, and small gracefully shaped light-handled hammers chosen to suit the size of the stones as they were broken down. He was like
a mammoth snail, moving his sack seat inch by inch back along the heap of newly quarried granite rocks continually fed to him by horse and cart. There was no satisfying the appetite of the
newly-made roads. Behind him stretched a three-inch high and three-inch wide miniature