As he again enjoys a trip abroad to his family's small Irish cottage, Bob Luhmann recalls memoris from his honeymoon with his wife in his parents' Irish cottage from November, through January, 1974.
As I wrote in chapter one of this story, my new wife and I took up residence in my folks’ cottage in Donegal, Ireland for our honeymoon from November, 1973 through January of 1974. They had bought the cottage the previous year with dreams of using it as a springboard to the rest of Europe. We were young, naïve, and idealistic to a fault. We had dreamt of landing jobs while we were there but quickly found from a very officious Irish official that the only jobs we could legally take were jobs that couldn’t be filled by an Irish citizen. We were to find many in Donegal had left either temporarily or permanently to find jobs elsewhere due to so few job opportunities at home. Since my short resume showed a few cook’s jobs and my wife’s some waitressing, we didn’t stand a chance. We did have the ability to spend our three months there living off the savings we had accumulated in our final months of working and by selling my motorcycle.
After we settled into the cottage, we created a daily routine. We had two sources of heat; a small one-bar electric heater, called an electric fire by our neighbors, and open fires in our fireplaces fueled by turf cut from the surrounding bogs. We would carry that little electric fire from room to room as we went from the kitchen/living room to what we called the parlor where we’d read until finally retiring to the bedroom. We became proficient at starting turf fires in enough time in each room so the next room in our circular pattern was at least somewhat warm and less damp.
We read the entire “Lord of The Rings” trilogy, “the Hobbit,” and “Dune” out loud to each other while taking turns working on a macramé hanging. My wife taught me the knots for macramé, a skill I retained for the time we were there but have long since forgotten. Our life took on routines a bit like Graham Nash’s tune, “Our House” as a soundtrack. Time went by slowly and deliberately while we figured out who we were with each other.
My folks had arranged a written agreement with a neighbor, Frank Curran, to be caretaker of the property in exchange for use of the 24 acres my folks owned to graze his cows. It was a fitting agreement as Frank had spent his childhood growing up on the farm, the youngest of six. As was tradition at the time, when Frank’s father died the farm eventually passed to his eldest son, Miley. However, when Miley died his wife couldn’t keep up with the farm financially and had to sell.
One of the wonderful things Frank did for us was supply us with turf. For those who don’t know, turf is peat imperceptibly inching its way toward becoming coal given a few thousand more years and some geological upheavals. We’re surrounded by peat bogs in this area as are many areas in Ireland. This naturally became the fuel of choice for those in the area after the native woodlands were deforested for agriculture and timber. However, that’s the shortened sanitized version.
One of the more sinister reasons for the Irish deforestation was due to Henry VIII’s Forest Act in 1543 in which he ordered the cutting of Irish trees for timber to meet the increasing demand for ships as the English were colonizing the world. Another even more sinister reason occured during Queen Elizabeth’s reign from 1560 through 1603, during which one of the bitter Irish rebellions against British rule took place. There was a proverb at the time that “The Irish will never be tamed while leaves are on the trees.” Consequently, Elizabeth stepped up Henry VIII’s policy of deforestation and ordered the cutting of all woodlands to deprive Irish insurgents of shelter.
With land ownership in our area comes a grant to a plot of a community bogland from which to cut turf for fuel. At one point, I begged Frank to take me out to those bogs to help collect the turf he’d cut from our grant. I bounced along in the trailer behind Frank’s tractor with a large turf basket as a companion as we rode out to the bogs. I watched Frank, all 5’7” and about 135 pounds on his 50-year-old wiry frame, fill the basket with turf, hoist it onto his back and bring it to the trailer where he dumped its contents. I was 22, a football player but a few short years earlier, and a sturdy 5’9” and about 175 pounds at the time. Possessing the cockiness of youth and owning more enthusiasm than brains, I thought there wouldn’t be anything to it. It was now my turn after Frank’s demonstration, so I began filling the basket with the bricks of turf. However, when I hoisted the turf basket over my shoulder onto my back, I promptly and unceremoniously fell onto my back with the turf basket beneath me! I had to have looked like a stranded upside-down turtle with legs and arms flailing about as I attempted to extricate myself from that extremely unflattering position.
At another point, we decided it would be nice and a show of appreciation to invite Frank and his wife, Mary to have dinner with us in our little honeymoon cottage. We decided to serve them spaghetti and meatballs, I suppose because it was different from the food they normally ate. Besides, who doesn’t like spaghetti and meatballs? Assembling the ingredients was not easy in pre-European Union Ireland. We should have had a clue because we had experienced what was available for fresh produce in the stores in our area of Donegal in the winter, which consisted entirely of onions, turnips, cabbage, carrots, and several varieties of potatoes. We ended up traveling 45 minutes to Letterkenny, the nearest small city to find pasta, canned tomatoes, and dried basil.
The big night arrived for a pair of newbies attempting to figure out how to entertain guests for the first time. One of the things we had to determine was how we should serve the spaghetti and meatballs. We found a large white ceramic bowl which had come with the cottage and scrubbed it clean. The bowl seemed to be perfectly sized for serving. After a salad for which we also found the ingredients in Letterkenny, I proudly brought out the bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and placed it on the table. After a bit of a silence, Mary spoke up, “Ye’d be using the chamber pot as a bowl there.” We, of course, were mortified, but Mary came to our rescue and graciously asked to be served.
We had some interesting interactions with Frank’s mother, Hannah, and his sister, Sarah, living in their wee cottage just down the road. Sarah was what I would call overly nervous. She had a difficult time calling us by our first names or even speaking directly to me at all. She kept addressing my wife as Mrs. Luhmann even though Sarah was about the same age as Judi’s mother. My wife asked her to please call her Judi, but because Sarah was constantly flustered, the best she could manage was “Mrs. Luhmann—Judi.”
There came a day when we heard a commotion outside. It was Sarah running up the road in distress shouting, “Mrs. Luhmann—Judi! Mrs. Luhmann—Judi! The Tinkers are coming! The Tinkers are coming!”
We had no idea what she meant. Were the Tinkers some invading barbarian horde coming to rape, pillage, and steal? Should we bolt the doors and windows and lock ourselves in the bathroom? No such extreme reactions were needed. The people previously referred to as Tinkers, a term no longer used in polite society, are most often referred to as Travellers in Ireland now. They used to often be seen in their homes of brightly painted wagons called Vardos pulled by a horse along roadways. They refer to themselves as Mincéirs or in Irish as, Lucht Siúil (“the walking people”). Because they often made their living working in metal and repairing pots and pans, they were referred to as Tinkers, a word originally identifying someone as a tin smith. They’ve been wrongly identified as Gypsies because the Travellers are also mostly an itinerant people like the Romani people, commonly referred to as Gypsies. However, Travellers don’t have the lineage of the Romani people. So, unless we were overly concerned Sarah’s frightful Tinkers were going to forcibly take our pots and pans and repair them, we really had nothing to worry about.
Hannah, Sarah, and Frank’s mother, was a different story. She was in her late eighties and still sharp as a tack. After an initial wariness and determining we posed no threat, Hannah began to embrace us and invited us “to come for potatoes” on a day at noon. Because we had learned that any dessert could be termed a “pudding” in Ireland, we thought we were being invited to an Irish lunch. It was exactly that, but not what we envisioned. We were asked to sit at her kitchen table where we found a large pot of steaming hot boiled potatoes, a large slab of butter and a saltshaker. Potatoes never tasted so good and we had a wonderful opportunity to listen to Hannah’s stories of the area and her youth.
Hannah had absolutely no use for the British especially after the thuggery of the Black and Tans in the 1920s. The Black and Tans were formed following the Easter Rising of 1916 and were named for their uniform colors which were actually a very dark green and tan. The vast majority were unemployed British soldiers who had fought in the First World War and were recruited as reinforcements into the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) during the subsequent Irish War of Independence. They were not trained to be constables doing ordinary police work and were noted for their brutality. They were placed there by the British government to keep the pesky Irish, whom the British elite viewed as uncivilized and increasingly dangerous, in line by whatever means necessary. They became notorious for reprisal attacks on civilians and their property while British army regulars were fighting a vicious guerilla war against the underground Irish Republican Army in the 1920s.
I loved my first months in Ireland, but all good things must eventually come to an end and my initial stay in Ireland ended as January ended in 1974 only to return to the culture shock of the United States. The economy was in a severe recession due to rocketing gas prices caused by OPEC flexing its economic muscle raising prices and embargoing oil exports, as well as heavy spending on the Vietnam War and a resultant Wall Street stock crash. The bright spot for the United States in 1974 was in August when justice was served as Richard Nixon was forced to resign.
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