You've all heard that the big slab in the grounds of Downpatrick Church of Ireland Cathedral is a very doubtful resting place for Saint Patrick. Francis Joseph Bigger, the man who early in this century helped restore many buildings, who encouraged and subsidised writers and musicians, had it put there, anyway. Maurice Hayes, who lived for years in Downpatrick, says that when he was young, the children would recite:
In Down one grave, Three saints do fill, Patrick, Brigid and Colmcille.
In his latest book, Black Pudding with Slim, Maurice repeats an account of the stone being hauled to its present destination and tells us that Arthur Pollock, son of Mrs Pollock, the verger, had a "wicked story that it was not Saint Patrick's grave at all, but the family grave of a barber who had made fun of a cathedral sexton by shaving off half his beard. In order to get his own back, the sexton took to pointing out the barber's family grave to strangers as the resting place of Saint Patrick. Then it became a place of pilgrimage, so that the barber cared not to be buried in it. Artie said the pilgrims began to carry-away bits of it as relics and the grave was getting dugout, so Bigger put the slab on it with PATRIC carved on the top."
He was told, also, that there was a door in the cathedral which could not be opened because when the Protestants stole the cathedral from the Catholics, the monks locked the door and threw the key into the waters of the Rougnal, halfway across to Inch Abbey. The door remained locked and another door at the other end of the cathedral had to be made. But if Catholics ever got the cathedral back, the key would float to the surface and be found and the door could then be opened again.
"It was good to know this," writes Maurice, until one day he found a little wicket gate in the middle of the great door lying wide open. "Peeping fearfully inside in case a dead and forgotten monk was letting himself out, I found old Mrs Pollock, the verger, Artie's mother, pottering about inside with buckets and mops.
A wonderful child's world of fantasy and fear, told with a straight face and complete understanding. And that's only in the first couple of score pages. And what's the "slim" of the title? Potato cakes from the griddle.