Bank managing the turf.
When I was moving from our country town
to Dublin, I got lots of advice, most of it rooted in country living
and lore.
The best piece of advice was the bit I
got from my Uncle Mickie. He told me I would meet Quare Hawks in
Dublin.
You will meet a man up there who is so
sure of himself he thinks he knows everything. Well be sure he does
not! If you don't believe me, ask him how many floors of turf there
are in The Dale Tree Bog. He won't know that!
I came to learn that there were seven
floors of turf in the bog where Grandfather, then Mickey and Paddy
reaped their summer harvest so that when winter came they were snug
and secure and blessed with a shed full of dry turf to banish the
Winter cold, and heat the kitchen.
We had our Bank on the Kildare Bog, an
isthmus of that county nestling Laoghis and Offaly, near the town.
When the spring to summer weather had
reached a reasonable period of calm, and dry days rather that wet
weeks might beckon, we traveled by bike and all met and began our
harvesting season on our bank. The one Uncle Mickey told us we had
our investments in.
“We are investors each year”, he
said, “in a bank that has no big locked door, no money, no manager,
shareholders or funds. The only loan we will get is the loan of a
bog-barrow hidden in a drain. But the bank does hold a treasure we
can pan.”
The first jobs of the day were usually
mine: dig a safe in the wet side of the high bog and place the
sandwiches and the bottle of milk in there.
Then locate a wooden bog barrow, or
two, in drains along side turf banks and borrow them or recognize
them as your own: out on loan, and wheel them back to the work site.
Then place the wheels of bicycles that
might have myriad puncture repair patches on the tube, into another
wet drain, in case the patches lifted in the sunshine.
Then I could sit down, and watch the
work begin. Dad would have toppled the high bog into the water
filled bog-hole of last year’s crop, and cleaned the site.
After a bit of muscle stretching,
checking for a sharp blade, and a comment or two about the weather
“Thank God”. Uncle Paddy, Cutter, Uncle Mickie, Barrowman and Dad
as Catcher set up their conveyor belt of cutting and spreading.
Paddy was a turf cutting artist: with a
fluid slicing and swinging rhythm the wet brown top-cut turf sods
were created and tossed onto the bank of the cutting; then Dad
speared each sod with a short-pronged fork and tossed it towards the
flat bog-barrow; with a twist of his wrist the sod was released from
the fork to slap onto the surface and then as quick as a flash its
companion was tossed in beside it.
Row by row the load grew until Uncle
Mickey lifted the shafts and teased the wooden wheel from the grip of
the wet, mulched work area and pushed the barrow out into the dry
brown hollow and spilled each sod beneath the warm sun and the drying
bog wind.
As the cutting deepened the hard black
turf appeared, it was heavier, and adjustments were made to the piled
up rows on the barrow, otherwise barrow and man might sometimes
become bogged down in a patch of wet hollow and sometimes production
would have to be halted while spilled sods were reloaded.
Experienced barrow men would make sure
that this catastrophe would not happen, but a helping youngster:
covering for a break, with weak wrists and barrow shafts carried in
crooked elbows was likely to overturn his load easily.
When enough turf was cut and spread,
and the basement level of the floors of good turf was reached and the
hollow was covered with the sods: we had a short week or two of
weather defined rest, while the turf dried: then the real harvesting
began.
As I grew older and stronger I dreaded
being sent alone to the bog to work on the turf. I hated handling the
unending plot of turf because once you finished one job: you were
preparing the plot for another.
You had to turn the turf, by scrabbling
it over with your hands. On hard turf, this meant split nails, cuts
and grazes and painful blisters. Then a while later you had to stook
it into small piles so that it could catch the drying wind. Then you
had to barrow or donkey cart it out and build a clamp on the road.
When the roadside clamp had been built
and the lorry came for the transport home you had then to beedfork
heavy dry turf up onto the lorry, and when it was deposited outside
the house on the road you had to wheelbarrow it into the backyard,
throw it into the shed and then clamp a retaining wall of sods inside
the door.
You weren’t even finished then; all
Winter you had to break the brown sods for kindling; chop the hard
black sods and then carry buckets of turf into the house.
It's a pity Europe had no interest in
Turf Cutters then. It might have stopped what I came to regard as the
exploitation of child labor.
