The Kindness of Strangers

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Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

The Kindness of Strangers

August 28, 2008

The West's Awake by Cormac MacConnell

COMING home from the Puck Fair in Killorglin, myself and our car Ruby were going down a road somewhere south of Listowel when suddenly the road dipped and we hit a small flash flood at about 60 miles an hour.

There was spray and steam and a sudden shock, and it was as much as I could do to keep Ruby on the road as we ploughed through it. I should have expected the flood because the rain was falling heavily on top of Kerry the whole weekend, so heavily that even King Puck above on his platform looked chilled to the bone.

It drove us all indoors, and sure indoors in the pubs was great and we forgot about the rain altogether with the craic and the madness of it all. But I should have expected the flood, and I could not complain when poor Ruby sputtered and died stone dead on me after she passed through the flood.

It must have been the best part of two feet deep. Anyway she died.

I’m very fond of Ruby. She’s 15 years old now but she’s German by breed, a venerable silver Merc with the classic matronly lines.

I know her well and I left her alone to catch her breath again after the shock. I reckoned she would have been hot under the bonnet when attacked by the water and would burn it away herself if given the chance.

So I lit a cigarette and left the ignition switch strictly alone. And I was actually drowsing off when the window was tapped sharply.

There was an older couple leaning down outside to look in at me. They looked a bit concerned.

I got out. The man asked me if I was alright. Had I been hurt?

I said I was as sound as a bell, nothing wrong with me at all. I got a bit of a shock, I said, when I hit the flood, but there was no harm done.

The old car, I said, would dry herself off in a couple of minutes, but I was very grateful to them for coming out to check on me. Thanks very much.

The old lady asked me if I’d like to come in and sit down and have a cup of tea for myself. The man nodded, looking sharply at me all the time.

It was raining just a bit and, truth to tell, I was beginning to get the shakes just a little bit and so I said I’d love to come in for a cup of tea. Their neat slated house was just across the road.

The old lady led the way and I was in the middle. And I was recovering by the second.

We were hardly inside the door when the man asked me if I was the man that wrote bits for the Irish Examiner. I looked like the photograph over the words. I confessed that I was the same man.

He was pleased he had recognized me. He said that I was a rare boyo altogether, I’d make a story out of very little.

His wife said she used to read funny bits I wrote in the Irish Press years ago. They’d always read the Press until it died.

They sat me into the chair beside the stove and told me they were Con and Marie, and I wasn’t the first one to get caught in the floods that gathered in the hollow outside their gate after heavy rain. One time, said Con, a French fellow was going too fast altogether. He went into the field, the car overturned and he was killed stone dead.

Marie put up the tea on a tray with cups and saucers, milk and sugar, and three slices of fruit cake. The tea was as strong and feisty as any of the spirits I’d imbibed in Killorglin.

We don’t drink as much tea as we used to any more, snatching more instant coffees along our days, and when you taste a good cup of tea you relish it hugely and promise yourself you’ll go back to pots of it.

It was lovely. So were they.

I told them about being in Puck Fair. They said they had been there only twice in their lives, once when they were courting and once in later years with a car load of their children. It had just happened that way.

I asked how many children they had raised, and Marie replied they had 11; 10 living, one dead from pneumonia at the age of six. She had been a little girl.

Five of their children are now living in Ireland, two locally, the others in Dublin and the rest are scattered all over the world. One is as far away as New Zealand.

It must have been very hard to raise so many children in harder times than these, I said. There was not much cash ever, said Con, but they had the farm so they never went hungry either.

And, said his wife, there are things about big families that people do not know nowadays. The clothes pass down the line from one to another, including the Communion and Confirmation dresses for the girls, and, by the time the youngest ones arrive the older ones are well able to look after them.

“The older ones raise the young ones for you, that’s a fact.”

Their house, I think, has only three bedrooms and is small generally. Con was always handy and built bunk beds in all the rooms, three-tiered in one room where the boys were. The boys loved the bunk beds and they were playhouses on wet days like this one. They had their own spuds, vegetables, hens and killed two pigs every winter. They had plenty.

Marie, he said, was a knitter and was also “ a pure terror” on the sewing machine.

They were in close touch, they said, with all their children bar one. They did not give me his name, but he was 22 in the same November he went to the States. He wrote letters for a couple of years, but then they stopped and now he has not been in touch for a long time.

They think he will be eventually, hopefully before one of them dies. He was a bit wild before he left, but there was not a bad bone in him.

They are private people. They asked me not to mention their surname or address if I was writing anything about them in the Examiner or the Voice or anywhere else. I promised I would not, but if your name is Mairtin and you emigrated on your 22nd birthday and your parents are Con and Marie in Kerry and you have nine siblings then it is surely time to write just one letter.

Even a postcard will do. It will make them very happy.

They left me out to Ruby again. Marie gave me the kind of hug that only mothers who have said goodbye many times can give. I shook Con’s hand.

Lovely old Ruby started at the second turn of the key and I saw them waving in the mirror as I went on down the road home.

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