‘I had good days and bad… you take the rough with the smooth’

LOCAL LIVES, by Ciara O'Hara

Mick Brennan was born in Kilbride, Rochfortbridge, in 1932. The family lived “in a little two-bedroom thatched cottage”. “There wasn’t 11 of us all together… some of us might be transferred, to aunts and uncles,” explained Mick. “I had a sister, she was reared with my aunt, and she used to go to school in Rochfortbridge, and she used to pass me by on the road on a bicycle, and a pair of sandals and white socks on her, and I didn’t know she was my sister for years. She never lived at home.”

The middle child, Mick slept in a fold-out “settle bed” in the kitchen with his two brothers. The mattress was three bags of straw, “and there’d be fleas hopping around, and if you had horses as good, you’d win the Grand National every day! We got rid of the fleas, anyway, I think the goin’ was too rough for them!” laughed Mick.

Two of his eight sisters died in childhood. “One of them, I don’t know what she died from… but I remember the second girl that died. She was about six years old. She died from meningitis. She was the youngest of the whole lot of us… she got a shocking death, the poor girl. I remember the Camillians out in Killucan coming and praying over her. I remember my mother and a neighbour woman used to stay up all night… they wouldn’t go to bed because she’d be in pain, and sure there was very little medication that time, painkillers or anything. It was very hard on my mother”.

The surviving sisters went to the UK to become nurses because “that time, a girl couldn’t train to be a nurse in Ireland”. All Mick’s siblings have now passed on. The last one, a sister, died in a nursing home in Dublin during Covid, and Mick was unable to attend the funeral.

Mick’s parents, Sylvester and Catherine Brennan, were farmers. Mick remembers a couple “at home years ago” leaving the church after their wedding ceremony, and getting “up on the horse and trap… and they went home and the first thing they did was they went out to milk the cows. That was even before the wedding breakfast… there was no such thing as a honeymoon at that time”. He thinks his parents “went to Dublin for the day and back home again” on their wedding day. They were harvesting when news of WWII reached their farm. “My father was cutting oats with a scythe, and my mother was helping him make sheaves and tithes, and an uncle of mine came into the field to give them a hand, and he says to them, ‘The war is on… Hitler invaded Poland this morning,’ and that was September 1939. I always remembered it.”

Mick doesn’t recall hearing the war was over, only that “it ended, but sure it still went on” due to rationing. “Everything was rationed… no one had a car, only the parish priest, the guards didn’t even have a car, petrol was rationed. You were only allowed a half an ounce of tea in the week. Tobacco was rationed, clothes, you got a ration book with coupons in it and you allowed so many coupons for a suit of clothes, but you only got a suit every two years.”

During the severe winter of 1947, the ‘Big Snow’, there was no shamrock on Patrick’s Day. Even on May Day, “there was snow on the ground, in places!” “Animals died of the hunger… fodder was scarce… I remember a man coming to my father, and he begged him to give him a bag of hay for his cow, and he did, he gave it to him. Now, if the cow lived or died, I don’t know. It was after being a bad summer, and then the winter went on into the spring.”

His parents worked hard: “I don’t know how they used to manage.” Sylvester had 10 acres that “wasn’t great” land, and received another 11 from the Land Commission. “That put him on his feet. It was great to get 11 acres of land for nothing!” Catherine reared turkeys and sold them at Christmas. “The money went towards buying clothes for us. Santy Claus… oh, I heard all about him all right, because all you ever got from him was an orange, in your stocking, but sure somebody else probably bought the orange. It wasn’t my father or mother because they didn’t have the money.”

Though money was scarce, there were great neighbours. “There was a woman across the fields and she would come over to our house for a couple of spoonfuls of tea and maybe a bit of sugar, and we’d do the same. But now that’s all different now… if there was anything going on at our house, threshing or anything like that, well, the place would be full of men helping out. You wouldn’t get a man now for love or money!”

Mick’s aunt and uncle had a “huge” radio “half the size of the table”, recharged every fortnight “somewhere in Mullingar”.

“There was a big aerial over it, and it was tied to a big pole outside. On a Sunday, everyone in the parish, and the next parish, used to come to listen to Michael O’Hare broadcasting a football match from Croke Park… they’d be out in the yard, they’d push up the window, and you’d be able to hear this out in the whole yard. You weren’t allowed to speak when that was on. The match on Sunday was important; more important than going to Mass!”

The first film Mick ever saw was Hopalong Cassidy, in the old school hall in Rochfortbridge. “We’d be all shouting at yer man on the screen, ‘Watch yourself, he’s behind you!’. We used to think they could hear us!” Mick went to school in Rochfortbridge too, walking three and a half miles each way every day. There was no central heating and children brought clods of turf for the fire. “You had two slices of homemade brown bread and butter in your lunch bag, rolled up in the Westmeath Examiner… and a bottle of milk, and you ate that standing outside the back of the school.”

The schoolmaster was “a savage of a man called Michael Rowan”. If you misbehaved, he “beat the backside off you with a leather strap”. One day, a “gosson” fought back and gave the schoolmaster “a woeful beating… he was a big hardy lad”. Rowan left that evening for Dublin and never returned. “So then we had a master, Vincent Foley, a lovely man. He used to play cards with us and everything… kicking footballs out with us.” There was also a schoolmistress, “her father was a cobbler… we used to call her ‘auld wax arse’!”.

Most of Mick’s school pals are deceased, but he remembers them all. “There was one little lassie, and she’s still alive, she’s in Australia, Essie Lester… she’s a fortnight either older or younger than me, and I was talking to her no length ago on the phone. I know her brother Joe, and I was in with him one day and he put me on to her… and she’s still to the good. Some days, two or three of us mitched together, and we’d be going around fields, grabbing orchards… doing all the devilment!” If the guards found him, they returned him to school “on the bar of the bicycle”. “And I’d mitch again the next day!”

He worked seven days a week “for an auld farmer” when he left school just before turning 14. “He wasn’t nice… you had to go on a Sunday and milk cows and feed calves and feed pigs and everything.” Mick’s wages were “10 shillings a week and your dinner… it wasn’t much”. Then he went to Bord na Móna, working on one of the largest industrial railways in Europe, “the power station into Rhode. And I worked there for maybe two or three years. And then I went to Guinness.”

Mick worked in the cooperage of the St James’s Gate brewery, “making barrels and washing barrels and filling porter”. “They were lovely people… you were allowed two pints every day. They had their own bar there, and a fellow serving… and if you didn’t take your pint, you got tuppence… you got the money at Christmas. That time, there was five and a half thousand people working in Guinness… I think there’s not 500 of them now. It’s all computerised.”

One Christmas, Mick’s foreman came to him with three empty “Taylor Keith mineral bottles”. “And he said, ‘Mikey, I want you to do me a little job.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘I want you to fill them with export beer.’ Now the export beer was going to South Africa and was very strong because it lost its [potency] on the journey… he says, ‘Did you ever drink any of that export?’ ‘No,’ I said… ‘Well,’ he says, ‘a little wine glass full of that, at Christmas, would nearly have one fellow wobbling. It’s like poitín.’ Mick never touched porter of any description, opting instead for the tuppence a day.

At Bord na Móna, Mick earned £5 a week. His wages increased to £7.10 in Guinness. Digs on Conyngham Road cost “17 and 6 pence”. “They were lovely people, Kennedy was their name, from Limerick… they bought a Volkswagen car but none of them knew how to drive it. They asked me would I drive them up some Sunday to Carrickmacross to see the daughter. I agreed… and off we went.”

They were on a bumpy road and Mick’s landlady asked her husband why there were so many hills. “Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s where they had too much land, and they had to put it in heaps.’ She didn’t believe him, I don’t think!” Mick had taught himself how to drive. “There was no driving lessons… you drove from experience… the first thing I ever drove was a tractor.”

He met Jane Langan at “a dance in Killucan”. “You went to dances on your bicycle… there was no drink… a mineral bar, but sure, you didn’t have the money for the drink. Joe Cleary had the mineral bar in Killucan, and if he was doing bad business, he’d get on to the band to play ‘The Siege of Ennis’… you’d be dying with the thirst; the sweat would be running out of you after dancing The Siege of Ennis!”

Mick remembers cycling from Rochfortbridge to Athlone one Easter Sunday to watch a match. “We came out, and we got a bit to eat somewhere. There was six or seven of us… we went to a dance in some ballroom in Athlone.” The cocks were crowing as they cycled home the next morning, “and there was a carnival opening in Killucan on Easter Monday the following night, and we were there”.

He worked six days a week in Guinness, finishing at noon on Saturdays, driving home, dancing on Saturday night, and driving his parents to Mass Sunday morning. “I’d court Jane on a Sunday evening and I’d go back to Guinness then the Sunday night… you’d be going into work there at 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning.

“My father then began to fail, in that he went senile. My mother wasn’t able to mind him… and she couldn’t be left on her own… I didn’t know it until that time, when my uncle died, he made a will, and he left the [home] place to me after her death. They told me that she was my responsibility, so I had to come home. I regretted it at the time, but then I’ll tell you something. I got up one morning and I found her dead in the bed.”

Mick doesn’t know why he inherited his uncle’s farm. “I never asked him… he was long dead before I came to the use of it… I suppose he must have liked me, I don’t know. I was only about nine or 10 years old when he died. TB [tuberculosis] was rampant. He was in a sanatorium in Dun Laoghaire for three years, and he died in the finish up. There was nothing when I came home… it was tillage, tillage, tillage… the creamery was after starting in Mullingar and I decided that I’d sell milk to the creamery, but I had to go and build a shed… when I was building the shed, I fell and I broke my leg in two places and that was an end to that. I was in plaster for nine months, and I still have a steel plate in my leg.”

After Mick’s leg healed, he “went to work at the building with Alford’s in Tyrrellspass,” and stayed “a good while” until he “was sitting at home at the fire one Sunday, reading the Examiner”. “The Post and Telegraphs were looking for part-time workers and I applied.” Post and Telegraphs became Telecom Éireann and later Eircom. Mick farmed during the day and worked in Telecom at night. “I loved Telecom. Apart from the craic, it’s the characters you’d meet.” Mick remembers “a fellow one night looking for the AA”. They received a lot of calls for the AI station in Moate, where cattle were artificially inseminated and Mick thought that was the requested number. After 10 minutes, the man phoned back: “I broke down on the effing road. What good is a bloody bull to me?”

Another memorable call came from a lady in a coin box. You pressed ‘Button A’ to be put through, and ‘Button B’ to have your coins returned. “I kept shouting at her to press ‘Button A’… the next thing the line went dead.” When she called back, Mick asked why she hadn’t pressed ‘Button A’. “I couldn’t! Wasn’t me hat hanging on it.” There was a man “looking for a number down in Connemara… ‘He lives in the house the far side of the road up to the graveyard and you’ll know him well, he has buck teeth in the front of his mouth.’ You’d think I was going down to look at him!” Rose Cotter, who trained Mick and died this year, was particularly dedicated. “She would stay all night helping somebody… she was a great woman.”

Mick stayed with Telecom until Jane died of cancer in 1995. “She was 61, too young… I took early retirement after that because I’d only be working for the tax man.” Jane was originally from Petitswood. Her sister Elizabeth (Buckley) established the successful shop on Austin Friar Street that became Buckley’s SuperValu. In her latter years, Jane had a shop of her own on Dominick Street.

Previously, Jane worked for the council and as a supervisor in Woolworths, leaving to look after her mother. “There was no one else at home, only her brother Nicky… the girls were all married.” Jane’s mother was over 100 when she died. Jane looked after her for “about four years” but lived for only 13 years after her death. Jane’s father died on New Year’s Eve “sometime in the 1920s” leaving Jane’s mother with five children. She was almost evicted once, “not by the British government… her own government”. A sheriff arrived with a policeman, “and she said to him, ‘If I had the money, you wouldn’t have to be here. I’d have paid my rent.’ The policeman said to the sheriff, ‘Listen, get your men out of here. This woman has nothing, only five childer.’ So they left.” The rate collector was a man called Malachy Dardis from “Kinnegad, or around… he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pay your rates, and whenever you have it, give it to me… she never forgot it”.

Mick and Jane married in the Cathedral in Mullingar in the late 1960s. “A big wedding, I think there was 20 at it!” The wedding breakfast was in Harry’s in Kinnegad. The honeymoon was brief, just two days, because Jane’s mother was ill, but in later years, they frequently holidayed in west Cork. “We used to have a great time.”

Browsing in a west Cork craft shop, Mick once remarked, ‘I have cousins living somewhere around here in Castletownshend’. Jane mentioned it to the sales assistant. “She says, ‘I’m one of them!’ She was the daughter of the man who was my first cousin. She brought us down to the house that evening. We met the whole family!” Another time, after asking “a man clipping a hedge” for directions, they ended up drinking tea in his house, and exchanging Christmas cards annually, until one year Jane sent a card that “never got any return”. “He was probably dead.”

Mick’s sense of humour sometimes got him in trouble as a youngster, but he’s grateful for it now. “‘You sit down now and give up your comic remarks,’ my father used to say to me… well, I’ll tell you what, I often pity people who have no sense of humour, because it’s a gift. There’s too many people who look at life too serious.” He still has his farm. “That’s the last thing I’ll part with; I love the old farm.”

About his long life, he says: “There was ups and downs in it. I had my good days and my bad days. Well, that’s life anyway… you have to take the rough with the smooth… no one wants a whinger… and if you have problems, you’ve got to solve them yourself. That’s my opinion, anyway. My opinion could be different to anyone else’s, but how and ever, that’s my opinion.”