On Friday morning last, it popped up on my Facebook page (that I rarely visit) that this day was World Storytelling Day.
My head immediately flooded with stories that my mother used to tell us when we were children. Mostly, I remember sitting around an open fire. We did not have much money, and my father was away in England working, as there was no work to be had in Ireland.
Sitting by the fire, trying to eke out heat from the remaining coal and sticks. My mother use to wrapping potato skins in a damp newspaper and banking the back of the fire to keep it going for longer.
My mother was a Republican, and her father fought in 1916 and ended up, after the rising, in Frongoch concentration camp in Wales.
However, we still had a picture of the Queen Elizabeth hanging on our wall. At the time, I took it for granted. When I was older, I inquired as to why we had the picture of the Queen on our wall. Her reply was that the Queen gave your father a job when no one in Ireland could.
Hard times
When I was growing up, it was always hard times, not that I ever noticed, as my mother somehow managed to keep my sister and me well fed and warm.
Does anyone remember sheets made from flour sacks or old army (FCA) coats for bed blankets?
Now I realise that when we three were sitting close to the open fire seeking heat, and my mother Celia was telling us stories of her younger days, it served two purposes.
The stories reminded her of good times from her youth.
It was years later when I realised how lonely she must have been without my dad.
Harder Times
Every night she would relive her youth, which involved hard work from an early age, and going to dances. (She loved to dance).
Her father died when she was only a child, leaving her mother to raise seven children.
Also, there were always ghost stories!
The one I remember best, and curiously, the story my daughter remembers best, as in later life she told all her stories to my daughter.
When she was still a child, my mother was sent to live and work for an uncle a long way from her family home.
Ghost Story
“One morning, on her way back to the farm, driving the pony and trap up a long laneway after delivering milk to the shops in the nearby town, her attention was drawn to the local hearse approaching in the distance.
As the hearse approached, she could see the coachman whom she would have known and the four black horses with plumage on their harness.
When she got to a wider part of the lane, she pulled in to let the hearse pass – but it never did.
On approaching the farm gate, her uncle was waiting and opened it for her. She told him to keep an eye out, as the hearse was coming up the lane behind her.
He replied that the hearse driver must be lost, or new, as no one along the lane has died recently.
The following morning, the uncle whom my mother loved dropped dead while shaving himself to get ready to go to morning mass.”
Stories are what make us who we are.
