Can You Hear the Sea? by Brenda Niall

Author:Brenda Niall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

It was said within the Gorman family that Aggie didn’t know how to bring up her boys. And more than once, she thought the family might be right. The worst offender was Pat: ‘the day young Pat started a fire’ was talked about for years. He and his cousin Jack O’Dwyer took tobacco from the box of cigars that was kept for visitors, got well out of sight in the long grass of an Auburn paddock just beyond the Galtee Park boundary fence, and rolled cigarettes for themselves. Absorbed in their first smoke, they set the grass alight and in a moment the fire was spreading across the paddock. The boys were aghast at what they’d done. It could have been much worse. Water carts were brought promptly by the Auburn men and the flames were soon extinguished. Then Aggie faced the problem: how to punish Pat for a country boy’s most serious crime? Jack O’Dwyer was given a beating by his father. Pat should have had no less. So far, Aggie had given almost no physical punishment. None for the girls, and for the boys only what she called a smack, which was a hard slap on the trouser seat with the back of her hairbrush.

A smack for lighting a grassfire would have been ridiculous. ‘Pat knows what he did,’ she said, and he was sorry. She had spoken to him. That was that. It wasn’t enough for the Gorman uncles, but they could only grumble about an Englishwoman who ‘didn’t know anything’. She didn’t allow her brothers-in-law, Will O’ Dwyer and E. J. Gorman, to intervene, or Edmond Gorman, even though the fire was in his paddock. Pat escaped the beating that would have been routine for the times.

Aggie didn’t impose many rules on her children, and they found their amusement in the daily work of the property. As long as they came in punctually for meals, their hands washed, looking clean and tidy, they could do as they pleased. If Aggie saw any of them fighting, she expelled them from the house, refusing to hear anything about whose fault it was. ‘Come back when you’re sorry,’ she said. She used deprivations as punishments too: no being read to, no card games, no charades. That meant punishing the innocent along with the guilty, but it seemed to work. Where possible she let the children settle their own differences and didn’t ask questions.

One day two-year-old Bill came in looking tearful, followed by Connie and Brendan, guilty and evasive. When the story was eventually told, Aggie felt that the older children had already had their punishment. Connie described the fright they’d had:

One of us had the bright idea of Bill being let down through the round hole at the top of a furphy [a water cart on wheels]. It usually had a heavy iron lid which we could lift without difficulty. Bill was only about two or maybe less, but walking and always with us. We let him down into it and he was quite happy but we got tired of the game and then tried to lift him out.

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