The Night Before Christmas by Alice Taylor

Author:Alice Taylor [Alice Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847177643
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2014-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

The Gates of Heaven

I SAT ON A LOW súgán chair beside Mrs Casey’s fire and watched her making her Christmas cake. The flames from her big turf fire curled up around the bottom of her black iron kettle, which was sending steam signals up the chimney and almost obliterating the crane overhead. Mrs Casey was getting the fire ready for her last Christmas baking session and she wanted it glowing and settled and the kettle boiling beside it so that she could make her tea without disturbing the bastable, which would shortly replace the kettle on the hangers over the fire.

Our house stood on the side of a hill looking down over a valley; a long, winding boreen sloped up to the old road above and Mrs Casey’s cottage was along that road. My father always referred to being “up at the road” when he called in to see Mrs Casey. We never passed her cottage on our way home from town without calling in to see her. Her family had grown up and gone; as she used to say herself: “the chickens have left the nest”. But she did not suffer from an entirely empty nest since we regarded her as a second mother who was always on hand to dish out both practical and philosophical advice. For me she had solved the problem of where babies came from; my mother had given me a limited explanation but, being thirsty for every minute detail, I had gone to Mrs Casey and she had given me a full, unabridged version. She loved children and men, and regarded women as sisters in the battle of survival and child-bearing. “Give a married woman her full title,” she used to say; “she has it earned.” She dealt with the two great realities of life – birth and death – because she both delivered the babies and also laid out the dead. A corner-stone in our daily lives, she was never known to anybody by any name other than Mrs Casey.

A small, creaking gate opened from the old road into the short, narrow pathway that led to her cottage. A high hedge arched over the pathway with a little opening on one side into her crowded garden, and a timber gate on the right led into her haggard, which was a hive of industry with a stall for two cows, a stable for the pony and a shed for hens and ducks. On her dresser in the kitchen during the summer there was always a big white enamel bucket full of eggs. As the weather grew colder the egg supply decreased and Mrs Casey had to threaten and coax her hens to continue laying and subscribe to her Christmas baking.

Her ample figure almost obliterated the light coming in through the small, deep window over the table where she was busy cracking eggs into a white basin. It was a big table which ran the length of the wall behind the door as you came into her kitchen.

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