Trafford Publishing: How Green Was My Ireland?

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How Green Was My Ireland?

by Eilish (Connolly) Hiebert

259 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0369; ISBN 1-55212-967-5; US$23.00, C$25.95, EUR19.00, £13.00

Through ancient Celtic designs and myths, a woman looks back from Canada at the simplicity and complexity of a little girl's life in a charming Irish village.

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about the book      about the author      reviews      sample excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book

Celtic designs come alive on pottery to carry this charming story through the mists and myths of time. As life moves from ancient Ireland, through an idyllic childhood in a fictitious village, to modern-day Canada, these stories and characters come together with insight and humour that will warm your heart and strike a human chord - wherever you're from.

About the Author

Author Éilish (Connolly) Hiebert, raised in Ireland, has had a checkered career, from teaching, to music, to international development, to cross-cultural work to writing and editing. Éilish lives with her husband Murray in Calgary, Canada and edits the business books Murray writes. Éilish and Murray have two grown sons, Paul and Quinn.

Reviews

"The story engagingly captures and celebrates moments and impressions in the life of one truly animated individual. The author's sister, Therese Milis, has illustrated this book with delightful depictions of everyday life in rural Ireland."
from Sharon Greer, the www.celtic-connection.com (March 2002)
"Weaving through a fictional tapestry of wonderful stories, vivd characters, Celtic mythology, religion and colonialism, Eilisch Hiebert's How Green Was My Ireland? moves from suburban Calgary family life to a girl's child-eye view of everyday village life in 1950s Northern Ireland."
from Lisa Milis, the Irish Cultural Society newsletter
"The reader of this novel is immersed in the charm of Irish village life and is brought back, from time to time, to modern day Calgary where the author remains connected to her roots as she strives to bring Celtic designs to life on pottery."
from Patti Beatch, the Haysboro Horn (March 2002)

Sample Excerpt - Chapters One and Two

In Celtic Knots

The woman sat painstakingly carving Celtic knotting designs into the surface of a freshly made clay pot:
        over-under,
        inside-outside,
        turn left-turn right,
        up-over,
        down-under ...
She usually found contentment and peace working with clay, carving into the not-yet-firm elliptical surfaces, transforming them from smooth to decorative, imagining how they'd look fired and glazed. But she felt the old, familiar frustration beginning to mount inside her as her eyes, hands, even her very soul, began to be drawn into this design she was carving. As a moth to a flame, she was drawn to these ancient designs, exquisite from a distance, looking so incredibly beautiful and straightforward, illustrated in the various books scattered around her studio.
"But just try getting inside them," she said aloud drily. "No wonder it was a bunch of celibate monks working in silent monasteries who had time to design these," she thought "working in the middle of nowhere in the Middle Ages, with no telephones nor computers, no kids roaring in and out, no getting ready for work."
Ails had lovingly shaped on the wheel the sturdy, squat, three-legged pot, drying it under plastic to optimum carving condition. But she hadn't planned out the design and measured it, the way she'd learned to do it on paper in a design class. This was a curved surface. This was clay. This should work, shouldn't it? Copying the design from the paper beside the pot, Ails carved carefully. It worked for a little while. But she could feel it going wrong before she could even see it. If she concentrated on the overall proportions, she inevitably lost the interior of the design; conversely, if she concentrated on the interior details, the overall design got lost. She jabbed the carving tool into the clay in frustration as she watched the proportions of her planned design go hopelessly haywire - yet again.
"What's the matter with me?" she thought. "If drawing these designs drives me crazy, how come I keep doing them?"
Deep down somewhere, though, she knew.
Looking out of her studio window at the huge expanse of blue Canadian prairie sky, Ails breathed deeply, content to be where she was, able to do what she was doing with such freedom, yet inexplicably drawn like a magnet to these infuriating designs, indelibly carved in her mind's eye, flowing and meandering in and out, over and under. She had begun to think of these designs as a metaphor for her emigrant relationship with her former birth country, Ireland ‹ a country so beautiful as a whole, at a distance ‹ so ancient and complex. When she had been there in its mantle of safety, humour, music and ancient beliefs, it had indeed been such a wondrous place that she wondered how anyone could ever leave it. Yet, once she left, it was like stepping out from a postage-stamp view to a bird's eye view of a larger world, of which this little island was only a part. Like these frustrating designs, once she tried to re-enter its beauty and charm, she ran into a maze of almost geometrically controlled, complex, contained systems, requiring acute attention to detail, precision and cultural cues. At one time, Ails instinctively knew how it all worked, knotted together perfectly, where each behaviour was contingent upon the next one, or the last one. Just like growing up in her skin from babyhood, she had absorbed how to read cues and behave correspondingly. But that was while she was still enfolded. That was a long time ago.
"Am I screwed up, or what?" she asked herself, throwing the three-legged pot aside, nearly damaging it in her frustration. How many times had she done this on different pots, different shapes, with different clay?
But she'd go back to it. She knew she would.
As she got up and walked over to her studio window, her eyes were drawn again to the sky she loved outside, almost frighteningly huge, free, and untrammeled. As her eye muscles relaxed, unfocused and gazed deeper into that sky, she saw another sky, in another place, what seemed like eons ago.

Monument Parade Day

Ails awoke to a heavy sky, laden with thick, dark, clouds, where it felt like the sky was coming down on top of her. "Perfect," she said to herself in awesome anticipation. "Couldn't be better!" She replaced the curtain. Slowly and carefully, so as not to wake her sleeping sister, Ails lay back down under the blankets, stretching her toes into the corner of the bed near the window. She had awoken as usual to the sound of the cock crowing, after what seemed like only a few minutes since the 'ting, ting' of the blacksmith's hammer down the yard had lulled her to sleep. It had taken her a few seconds to figure out the strange feeling of apprehensive excitement coursing through her waking body. Then it hit her - the Annual Altnamore Monument Parade was today.
"Perfect day for it," thought Ails. The mood was just right. The Monument Parade Day wasn't like the monthly village Fair Day, where senses were high with the activity and hustle and bustle of buying and selling and bargaining. No, the Monument was different. When she had looked out through the lace curtains, it was a Monument Day sky - grey and heavy and foreboding, like the monument itself, like the faces, and the menacing clack-clack-clack of the boots that marched there.
She manoeuvered herself gingerly so she could stretch over to look further up the hill, but her sleeping sister lifted her tousled head and said "Will you stop pullin' all the blankets off me!" Darn, she hated that! Now she'd have to get up, for she was no longer alone. She knew her sister would start yapping and wake up the whole house.
Ails got up quietly and slipped on her blouse, plaid skirt and cardigan and her woollen knee socks and crept along the landing and down the steep, dark brown wooden stairs carrying her shoes. She was getting pretty good at stepping between the creaking boards. Even in the semi-darkness she could measure from one creak to the other and avoid each one gingerly. She got halfway down and sat down in the cubicle of velvet darkness, framed by the light which formed a thin line around the wooden door at the bottom of the stairs. This was the time when she could travel alone in her imagination to her secret place and dream, before the house started to stir. As soon as she opened the door into the hall at the bottom of the stairs, Ails knew that Lizzie would wake and come clucking down the stairs, pretending she'd been awake for hours. It seemed such a threat to Lizzie for anyone to be up before she was, judging from the trouble she took to prove she had been awake earlier:
"Ach, that damn rooster of McCann's had me up before the 'screach' of dawn, but then I never was one for sleepin' in anyway. Lyin' in me bed half the day would be a terrible waste."
Ails knew perfectly well that Lizzie was usually peeved if Ails was up out of bed before she was. She could just see Lizzie's beady brown nuts of eyes glancing at her with annoyance, in between clearing out the ashes, as if to say "You're a right nuisance of a chile, always up snooping around before it's time for you to be up."
Sitting on the dark stairs, Ails was jolted from her quiet reverie by the splash of Lizzie's pee in the chamber pot across the landing. Sure enough, Lizzie was up. Ails quietly opened the door, wincing as it creaked and yawned. She slipped on her shoes before stepping on the cold cement floor of the hall leading to Lizzie's kitchen. Oh, good, there were still a few dying embers on the hearth. She loved to poke them down and watch the white ash float around the delicate sculptures that were once crumpled cigarette packets, bits of scrunched up paper, and chocolate bar wrappers. Lizzie's ceilidhers were up late the night before, singing, storytelling and cardplaying, She knew, from the amount of embers in the grate, and only three turf left in the creel. Ails knew exactly how to light the fire and put the kettle of water on the crook, but, of course, the one time that she had done that, Lizzie was furious. Somehow she had infringed on Lizzie's territory, so Ails sat quietly making a magic kingdom with the poker in the ashes beside the sturdy, squat, three-legged sooty black pot that hung on the crook. She stirred when she heard the thump, thump of shoes on the stairs. Lizzie thumped in, bringing her cloud of resentment with her.
"Oh, I heard you getting up. There's no need for you to be up out of your bed this early in the Easter holidays, you know," said Lizzie; then quickly, her eyes registering that she suddenly remembered about the Monument,
"Excitement about the Monument, I suppose?" She pushed Ails aside, dumped the kingdom of ashes in a newspaper and sent Ails outside to empty them in the ash pile out the back, telling her to refill the creel with turf.
The fresh, cold, damp air enveloped Ails. She filled the creel with brown, dry, brittle turf from the stack in the shed, savouring the damp smells and sights of the morning, the raindrops hanging from the nettles and glistening on the moss of the wall. Ails felt at peace, at home, and safe there. Her eyes travelled contentedly around the higgledy-piggedly stone wall enclosing the yard behind the house, where Ails's family rented rooms from Lizzie. Lizzie had been left the big rambling house in her Aunt Nelly's will. Nelly, 'with neither chick nor chile of her own' according to Lizzie, had 'sent for' Lizzie to come in from the country and live there when Nelly's husband died, leaving Nelly widowed and alone. Ails's eyes moved on down to stop at the stone forge at the bottom of the sloping yard, where the horses lined up outside the stone wall, waiting to be shod by Fergie, the blacksmith, who also rented the building from Lizzie. The seeping, damp air snapped Ails's reverie. She shivered in the mist and hurried in with the creel of turf.
No doubt about it, Lizzie was a wizard with a fire. Three turf, matches and a bit of paper and she had a cheery fire dancing in the kitchen. She was cutting the bread in thick slices.
"Ya want the Protestant end or the Catholic end?"
"Dunno why she even asks," thought Ails, knowing that Lizzie always wanted the crescent shaped 'Catholic' crust to curl into the top of her cup and dip in her tea, so Ails selected the 'Protestant' end, the square, close-grained bottom half of the slice of plain loaf bread.
"We'll need to be gettin' ready soon for the Monument," said Lizzie, running out to the window to watch the first marchers gathering outside Callaghans' flour storage shed. Ails joined Lizzie, who was leaning on the windowsill with her mug of steaming tea and the bread and butter in her hand, with her bum stuck out. They peered through the curtains. Everybody knew Lizzie watched the entire goings-on of the street from her house. Usually she was well hidden, but today was different. Faces were blatantly peering out of windows everywhere.
"I s'pose yer father'll not be goin' again this year?" asked Lizzie, with a rasp of disapproval.
"I dunno. I asked him. He didn't say." Ails knew he wasn't going, but she didn't want to listen to Lizzie's tirade about her father reading English newspapers "an' him an Irishman, for God's sake. . ." and how he thought Churchill was a great man, and "what in God's name had Churchill ever done for Ireland? Just-answer-me-that," and so on and so on. It was easier for Ails to say "I dunno."
Ails was wondering how to get to the Monument. Her father didn't like her to go. When she asked him why they didn't learn anything about the Monument and related events in school, he had just answered cynically. "Irish history is complete turmoil, child, and you don't want to be growing up bigoted." Ails wondered vaguely what 'bigoted' meant, but she was too busy planning her getaway to pursue it, and anyway, her father was quietly intent on reading the newspaper, with the bowl of his big curved pipe resting on his chest.
As long as she kept out of everybody's way and didn't get expressly forbidden to go, she could always say she had to run after her sister who had wanted to follow the band.
Now if she could just sneak out quietly and join the excitement ...she heard the stairs creaking. It was her mother with the baby, waving her tiny arms, all dewy eyed and gurgly. Good, she wouldn't have to take the baby out to settle her down or anything. Her mother was singing softly. She'd be sitting in the rocking chair playing with the baby and her father would be reading quietly. Things were pretty lax during the Easter holidays.
"You goin' out to play, love?" asked her mother. "Can you take Fiona with you and mind her in the crowds?"
"Ach, mammy, do I have to?"
"Now, she's younger than you. Remember, you're a big girl now."
"Awright then," sighed Ails, conveniently remembering that Fiona was her excuse for the Monument. "I'll be outside."
Ails slipped out the front door and into the street. There were bicycles leaning on every wall. Serious-faced men and women proudly displayed paper Easter lilies with the green, white and orange colours of the Irish flag. They were on lapels of Sunday suits and coats, and stuck into the seams of caps. Red, work-worn hands grasped tall tricolour flags and beat drums and played tin whistles and fiddles - which kept slipping out of tune. Seamus Callaghan was pompously shouting orders and getting everyone in line.
"That big galoot," said Lizzie, "thinks his own farts don't smell." But today, everyone was uncharacteristically attentive to Seamus's orders. Today in Altnamore the atmosphere was different - deadly serious. The band struck up. The marchers defiantly eyed the two village policemen standing apprehensively at the corner. The policemen were ostracized because they were Protestants, and seen to be enforcing British authority in Northern Ireland. Today, they were particularly conspicuous, casting nervous glances at the marchers, and shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other in their shiny, black policeman boots.
"Wait for meeeeee!" Ails was mortified as her sister came running across the cobblestones and stared in wonder at the gathering parade.
"Pest, nuisance, pest! Have to bring you everywhere," muttered Ails. She spotted Jinny and Maura and Brigid, free as birds, wearing their lilies. Ails had no Easter lily, and she was stuck with her yappy sister, Fiona.
The drum roll sounded. The procession started to move lugubriously forward. The drum beat a slow, menacing rhythm as the marchers began to move in orderly, stony silence. Were these the same people who laughed and sang and told stories in Lizzie's kitchen, who bartered and shouted and gossiped and got drunk on the Fair Day? It was hard to believe, thought Ails, as she moved along, dumbstruck, pulled by a force which she didn't understand, which hung like lead in the air.
They marched in a slow cumbersome parade down past the big stone Celtic cross at the corner, then further down, past the Rocks, which didn't even look like the Rocks where Ails and her friends usually played. A few very old people were standing erect on top of the Rocks, wrinkled faces in a stony trance, hands held over black aprons, bony frames held proudly, leaning on whittled walking sticks. Even the chickens and ducks knew to move out of the way. The band was now playing the rousing rebel marches you never learnt in school. Even her father had to admit liking those rousing songs, but had told Ails and Fiona that the government didn't allow them to be sung in schools.
Suddenly the Monument was in view - a random load of grey granite blocks, piled shapelessly and precariously on top on one another, waiting endlessly to be arranged into a real monument. Ails looked up at the unlikely silhouette, sticking shapelessly up into the grey sky, ominous grey clouds hanging over it. The whole parade filed stonily into the Monument field and stood on the stubble - freshly cut with a scythe by Mickey James the day before. Usually when Ails and Maura and Brigid and Pat and Shamie and Jinny and the rest played 'Monument' throughout the year, they had to trample down the overgrown grass first. Today the grass looked like Mickey James's short, sprickly haircut. Everyone looked dogged and serious.
There was a speech in Gaelic by an important man from the 'Free State' - the name given to the 26 independent counties of Ireland. He reminded the sombre crowd - as if they didn't already know - that Altnamore village was part of one of the six counties under British rule since 1921. Then there was a two-minute silence while all eyes were focused on the Monument. The scene was compelling. Ails could feel something beyond everyday Altnamore life. "The Dan" Coyle held himself upright and had a strange, dogged, grim look in his eyes. Jinny said The Dan was "all for his country." He had been held on a dreaded 'prison ship' bound for 'Botany Bay,' Sydney Australia, where Britain sent her prisoners ‹ forever. Somehow, though, The Dan had ended up in a jail in England. His mother died while he was in jail. When he was released, he came home and spat in a Protestant policeman's face, saying "Yiz killed me mother!" Jinny said The Dan was a 'real nationalist - no doubt about it.' All the old men had the same look as The Dan, and even the younger ones looked proudly and defiantly up at the Monument while the drum beat slowly. Even Old Bella Coyle stood erect and silent alongside The Dan, her brother. Her grey straggly hair was tied up with a huge green, white and yellow ribbon, the colour of the flag of the free 26 counties part of Ireland. Bella's strange amber eyes were fixed on the shapeless Monument.
The coarse grass growing up through the bumps in the gravel hurt Ails's feet, but she didn't dare move. Nobody said anything. The tension in the air was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The required two minutes of silence seemed like an eternity. Then The Dan Coyle starting speaking loudly and menacingly about St. Columba prophesying a war of many years. He rhymed off a list of names of men killed in the rebellion against English rule of all of Ireland, after which Ireland was divided, six counties only remaining under British rule. The list of dead men started with Daniel O'Connell and Padraig Pearse, and ending with "while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland, unfree, can never be at peace." Ails knew this piece off by heart because when they were playing 'Monument,' she had to beat the drum while Pat Doran said that speech. 'The Soldiers' Song' started up. It was the national anthem of the free part of Ireland, a symbol of rebellion, and they sang it in Gaelic. Ails knew all the words like a parrot, they way she knew her prayers in Gaelic. She had no idea what the Gaelic words said. But all she had to do was look at the faces of the singers to know this was a deadly serious, burning issue. 'God Save the King' was supposed to be the national anthem of that part of Ireland under British rule, but you'd never know that in Altnamore. It was never heard there. The last words of the rebel, nationalist, free state anthem were belted out "Shaw live connie oran a laoch!"
Ails was relieved. It was over. The air rang with the fervour of the singing and the dogged resolve reiterated in the final crescendo.
As if on cue, just at that moment a downpour started. The tension burst. Umbrellas went up and everyone started up the road into the town straggling in groups of twos and threes, talking and exchanging greetings for the first time today, it seemed. The old Altnamore atmosphere was back, if somewhat subdued.
Wasn't that just great?" said Jinny, as she and Maura and Brigid joined Ails.
"Powerful indeed," added Maura. Ails looked at their wilting paper green, white and orange Easter lilies and vowed that next year she would have a lily. They all traipsed up the town, where everyone had scattered into various pubs. They went in through the door of Heaney's pub, unnoticed in the commotion, and settled in their usual hiding place under the stairs, surrounded by hundreds of corks and the pungent smell of stout. They listened in fascination to old stories, retold yearly, about the time when the I.R.A. was in full operation. They heard how, years ago, the Black and Tans, a particularly savage corps of British soldiers, raided houses and shot people; how P.J. McFarlane ran down out of the town, hiding behind ditches and in bogs and in 'safe people's' houses and barns, eventually escaping to England, and living in permanent exile. Ails instinctively knew that these IRA men could be 'lifted' (arrested) at any time. She felt the tension of the serious work of rebellion against the lilting, bantering songs being sung in all the pubs and houses.
The two lone policemen stood beside the big stone Celtic cross, glancing nervously in the direction of any sudden sounds. Silhouetted against the heavy sky, they were like silent sentinels watching over the village. It didn't make them feel very secure to know that village life moved forward furtively, cannily, with an infuriating air of normality around them, through them, past them, in the rhythm it had kept for centuries, no matter how many policemen came and went from Altnamore village.
Later, when Ails sneaked out quietly to shoo her pest of a sister out to pee, the sounds of music, raucous singing and laughter drifted out of the pubs and houses into the early evening air. She wandered slowly homeward, up around the corner of Altnamore's long street, where she knew every house, and cobblestone, and the smoothest surfaces to play hopscotch and skipping.
Ails was suddenly very, very tired - almost weary - and confused, feeling an undercurrent of fear, mixed with merry, raucous songs, pent-up tension, and heroic, glorious stories.

Catalogue Information