Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland

by Katharine Tynan

A HOME IN DONEGAL.

The freedom of the people with their superiors is often a stumbling-block to the stranger; while to the Irish man or woman the division between classes in England will seem strange and unnatural—inhuman almost. “That’s an elegant new trousers you have on, Master John,” I heard an apple-woman by the kerb say to a young gentleman. The intimacy is not at all presumptuous; very far from it. Indeed, Irish people coming to live in England often blunder into treating their inferiors with the easy intimacy of the life at home, only to find that it is neither desired nor expected.

Irish servants of the old class were retainers and very much devoted to the families they lived with. The conditions were strange and difficult to those not accustomed to them. You would find a family of the gentry of the lowest Low Church on terms of tender affection with its Papistical servants and with the neighbouring peasants. They would have told you as abstract facts that Home Rule would mean the massacre of the Protestants, and that already their lands and properties were partitioned in the secret councils of whatever League happened to be uppermost at the moment. It would be an article of their creed that the priests were accountable for all the troubles of Ireland. They would have consented generally to the axiom that no Irish Papist told the truth. Yet they would always exempt their own servants, and perhaps their own tenants, and would fly at you as being anti-Irish if you suggested a flaw in the Irish character, or even an excellency in the English, which is almost as bad, if not quite. There are families of Irish gentlefolk come down in the world whose servants, having feasted with them, starve with them. One such servant I knew who managed the whole finances of the family, and laid out the few coins to the greatest advantage, allotting the supplies with a carefulness which must have been bitter to her Irish heart. If the family lived too well at the beginning of the week, it must go hungry at the end.

In an Irish house the young ladies and gentlemen are very often found in the kitchen, not in pursuit of the housewifely virtues, but for social reasons. The kitchen-fire is the best “to have a heat by.” The cook will rake out the ashes and make the fire bright for Master Rody or Miss Sheila to warm their feet by; and in the kitchen Irish children of the gentle class get filled to the lips with the peculiarly awful ghost-stories of the Celt, with old songs and charms and folklore of one sort or another; sometimes, too, with old legends and stories which make young rebels of the children of the garrison and perhaps old rebels as well. There is no nurse so warm and comfortable as a good Irish nurse, as the little children of the Irish nobility and gentry—invading or planted families, very often—found, drawing life from an Irish breast, and wrapped up in a comfortable Irish embrace from all ghosts and hobgoblins.

I remember the young daughter of very Evangelical gentlepeople in Ireland who used to spend her Sunday afternoons, with the full knowledge of her parents, seated on the kitchen-table reading Papistical newspapers to the servants, whom she adored, and who adored her with at least an equal warmth. Her gold watch was the gift of one old servant; and on the eve of her marriage to a London curate she found pinned to her pincushion an envelope containing a five-pound note—“For my darling Miss Biddy, from Mary Anne.”

It has always seemed to me that the tie is closer and tenderer between the Irish Catholic servant and the Protestant gentry than when the employers are also of the old religion. It is certain that in the burning of Scullabogue Barn, and at the Bridge of Wexford, during the Rebellion, Catholic servants perished with their Protestant employers.

The tender concern that may be shown for you by an Irish person of whom you ask the way will stir you to wonderment. “Is it permissible to walk on the sea-wall?” a friend of mine asked of an Irish policeman. “Sure it is; but I wouldn’t do it if I was you. It ’ud be terrible cowld,” was the reply. “I wouldn’t walk it if I was you,” you may be answered when you ask how far a place is; “you wouldn’t be killin’ yourself—now, would you?”

When ladies first rode the bicycle in Ireland they excited different emotions, according to the character of the looker-on. “What would the blessed saints in heaven think of you?” the old women used to call out; but one old man had only compassion for the female cyclist. “God help yez,” he said; “’tis killin’ yourselves yez’ll be with them little wheely things, bad luck to them!”

You will find the soft, insinuating ways in a shop when you make a purchase or mean to make one. “It looks lovely on you,” a shop-assistant will say, with an air of being dispassionate. “Can you send this home to-night?” you ask, having concluded your purchase. “Sure, why not?” If you are English-born and bred, you will be at a loss to say why not.

A policeman in Dublin will direct you: “You take that turn over there, an’ you go along till you meet a turn on your left, but you’ll take no notice of that; you’ll keep straight on, and there’ll be another turn, but you’ll take no notice of that. An’ after that, you’ll come to a third turn, an’ you’ll take notice of that, for that’s the street you’re after.”