Eamon Kelly by Eamon Kelly

Author:Eamon Kelly [Kelly, Éamon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-85635-859-0
Publisher: Mercier Press
Published: 2011-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

Tá an talamh comh maith san

As so go Cillmhaoile,

Go bhfásfadh garsún ann

Comh fada le stípil!

(The land is that good

From here to Killmoyley

That a young lad would grow there

As tall as a steeple!)

I had a junior class for boys of fourteen-plus each day, Monday to Friday at four o’clock. I taught them freehand and mechanical drawing and they learned to do woodwork exercises from drawings they had prepared beforehand. By the end of the course each student was able to take home a small medicine chest, a cutlery tray, book-ends, a toy wheelbarrow or a wall bracket to hold a Sacred Heart lamp. I had the weekends off and after a few pay cheques I bought myself a bicycle and cycled all the way to Killarney to see my parents. There was great excitement at home now. At Christmas time my brother Tim would be ordained a priest in Moyne Park, Tuam, county Galway. He had spent the years of his novitiate at Gerdingen-Bree in Belgium, and he would have been ordained in the summer, but he contracted tuberculosis and had to spend six months in a sanatorium. That he survived this dreadful disease pleased us all, but my mother more than anybody.

The ruined cathedral was near my lodgings in Ardfert and for anyone interested in craftwork there was much to be seen in the cut-stone window jambs and arches. The west doorway was Hiberno-Romanesque and in its heyday had beautiful carvings, but because they had been executed in red porous sandstone the weather of the centuries had softened and almost obliterated their definition. Around the ruin, and even within the walls, there was a graveyard with a few enormous tombs.

As they worked in class the men talked about a landlord’s tomb being desecrated by vandals in search of valuables buried with the dead. In olden times, they told me, a round tower stood sentinel beside the ruined church. Because soil had been drawn away from one side of it, the tower was blown down the night of the big wind, and tradition has it that it was so well built it remained on the ground in one piece like a fallen tree trunk. They said the round tower was broken up and the stones used to build the curved entrance into Crosbie’s, the landlord’s place. I picked up a lot of lore in Ardfert, made many friends and downed a few pints in Flaherty’s public house.

D. W. Quinlan, the chief executive officer, paid me a surprise visit in class one night and said that my next course would be in Causeway. ‘You’ll be in the courthouse, Mr Kelly,’ he said. I had visions of an imposing Grecian-type building with Ionic or at least Doric columns supporting a sculpture-filled tympanum. When I got there I found that the courthouse was a large room in a house, a one-time parlour off the grocery shop. The space was bare except for a few chairs, a rostrum and posts set into the floor with a rail on three sides to form a witness stand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.