A friend from Patrick Kavanagh Country has texted his delight at seeing the poet quoted in a salubrious neighbourhood of this newspaper – Matt Williams’s rugby column – last weekend.
The Australian-born Williams was writing about his work with a French underage rugby team but looked to Inniskeen and the “wonderful” Kavanagh for a metaphor about drawing from tradition as a basis for creativity.
Hence his quotation, from the poem Father Mat: “On the stem of memory imaginations blossom”.
Noting that Kavanagh was a stranger to the oval-ball game, my friend comments that seeing his imagination blossom in a rugby column is “a far cry from ‘Gut Yer Man’.”
Escape artist — Harry Houdini in Ireland
A Game of Two Calves (and several cows): Frank McNally on Patrick Kavanagh’s imagination, mysterious street names, and a bovine legend
Detour de Force – Frank McNally on William Bulfin’s unwitting side-trip into literary history
Barroom Bard – Frank McNally on the fictional Mr Dooley, whose thoughts were once required reading in the White House
Gut Yer Man, for the uninitiated, was Kavanagh’s 1950 essay about the savage beauty of Gaelic football in south Monaghan, as remembered from his youth.
Its title quoted a standard piece of advice from the sidelines to a defender, urging that his opposite number be marked closely (and often literally, to the point of requiring stitches afterwards).
So dangerous was the sport considered that Monaghan mothers of the time, including Kavanagh’s, were often conscientious objectors to their sons’ involvement.
Hence a curious phrase – ancient yet still current in Inniskeen then – also used in the essay, describing the fear of a typical matriarch that her beloved boy would “come back to her a “limither for life”.
A “limither” was a man who could live only by begging, Kavanagh explained. It derived from “limiter”: a phrase used in the Middle Ages for mendicant friars who were licensed to beg within a prescribed area.
***
Despite watching Sunday’s Ireland-Bulgaria football match myself and having witnessed the incident, I still did a double-take when reading Ken Early’s account of a “curious interlude” during that game, in which the referee “pulled a calf”.
I blame my upbringing on a farm, where I pulled many calves over the years. Mind you, it was usually a two or three-man job. Unlike the referee, you wouldn’t have thought of pulling a calf on your own back then.
But with help or otherwise, I never heard of anyone pulling one during a football match, even in Inniskeen. If that had ever happened, Kavanagh would surely have mentioned it.
Instead, the most notorious recorded incident of his goal-keeping career was when he deserted his post once to buy an ice-cream and conceded a goal before returning.
Yes, all right, reader, I know that the thing the Ireland-Bulgaria referee pulled was a muscle of the calf kind. But you know what they say. On the stem of memory . . .
***
Walking through the part of Dublin known as The Tenters the other night, by a pure but now convenient coincidence, I noticed the charming street name “Cow Parlour”.
It rang a bell – possibly a cow bell – relating to some long past controversy. And sure enough, looking it up, I was reminded that back in the 1970s, this was the subject of a debate in City Hall, and ultimately of a plebiscite aimed at changing the name.
The problem, apparently, was residents’ embarrassment. “For example,” one newspaper reported, “when they go into a hospital the doctor asks them where they live; and when they say in the Cow Parlour, he starts to laugh.”
City bylaws, however, required “four-sevenths” of a street’s population to vote for change. And there were only two households on this street, which voted in opposite directions. The status quo remained.
The funny thing is that, despite the official Irish translation, Parlús na mBó, the name may have nothing to do with cows. An alternative theory is that, like “The Tenters” itself, it derives instead form the area’s history of textile manufacture, and the many Huguenot weavers who once lived there.
Thus the suggestion that Cow Parlour is a corruption of the French “Coupeur d’ourlet” (“Hem cutter”). Which sounds at least as plausible as Parlús na mBó. But where the stem of memory ends and the blossom of imagination begins on this, I’m not sure.
***
While we’re at it, I might as well mention that this weekend sees us embark once again on Laethanta na Bó Riabhai: the Days of the Brindled Cow.
This is the Irish version of a wider European tradition whereby March, which used to be shorter, is said to have borrowed three days from April. Hence the sudden cold spell that sometimes descends around now, retarding the onset of spring.
No animals are harmed in the legend’s English version: “March borrows time from April/Three days – and they are ill/The first is frost, the second snow/And the third is cold as it can blow.”
But in Ireland, all roads (literally, via bóther and bóithrín) lead back to the bovine. So in the Irish version, any bad weather is blamed on a brindled, anthropomorphic cow, who from the supposed safety of April, loudly criticised March and boasted of having survived it.
Alas, the cow had counted her chickens – it was a mixed farm – too soon. An offended March promptly borrowed three days form April and announced an extension of opening hours.
The first day of violent weather knocked the cow over. The second killed her. The third bleached her bones.
