"Ordinary people recalling everyday events are the makers of oral history." Clothes and bed clothes made out of flour bags cricket hopping and chirping around the turf first walking four miles to school and back the awful smell of flax and the drudgery of the flax holes the making of poteen the curing of the bacon hiring fairs bringing the farm horses to the blacksmith. A kaleidoscope of country life, spanning almost the whole of the century, a talking history, all transferred to type in a small book Pain and Pleasure, Rathmoyle Reminiscences.
Ten people met weekly through out the autumn of 1986 to share their recollections. Names are given only at the beginning, but each paragraph is an individual speaking for himself or herself. "There was often a small hole beside the fire and it was called a borhul. It usually had a curtain over it. I saw in one house there were two banty hens, one sitting each side of the fire. They sat there, laid eggs and reared their young ones in these borhuls beside the fire. Banties are very easily petted animals . . . I had four brothers and one sister and we all grew up in a little house that you couldn't have kept two goats in, it was so tiny. But it was homely. It had two rooms a bedroom and a living room and mummy put a bed in the hall to try to accommodate us. She had this thing called a settle bed. It was like a big box and it opened up and had a big loose chaff mattress in it. All the boys crawled into that bed.
When they thresh the corn, the chaff comes off the hulls and it makes a very warm, cosy bed.
I had hare soup and rabbit soup. My brothers snared before they went to England. They snared rabbits and my mother made soup of them. It was nice with plenty of vegetables in it . . . We had the first bathroom in our district. There was a toilet there as well. We had the first inside toilet in the district. It was about 1917. News went around the country that we had a lavatory (we didn't call it a lavatory. We gave it a rougher name than that). I can still remember a neighbour going past our house and she held her nose and turned her shoulder to the house just because she learned we did our stuff inside the house. Therefore it must smell Poteen, I've never seen it made but I've tasted it many a time. And they wouldn't give it to you out of their house. It would be pushed under a hedge so many yards up the road. On Flax the dam water would kill the fish in the rivers. But you couldn't even use the fish. The taste of the rotting flax was in them. . . . The poor house was the sort of place you didn't speak about. You didn't acknowledge that you'd even seen one hardly in school there were peat fires . . . The master would say tell your father we're out of peat to whoever's turn it was and they would bring up a load next day. Edited by Faith Gibson. Published by Northern Health and Social Services Board, Causeway Unit of Management. 85 pages. No price given.