Another reject by - RTE Sunday Miscellany -

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.