The greatest story ever told ... in Killaloe
This would have been well before they were written down in any fashion and maybe sanitised for the masses that followed. They claim that stories, even the greatest stories ever told, lose nothing in the telling but I would argue that maybe they do sometimes. I would suggest that is maybe another pure truth.
On that basis, for what it is worth, I am offering today an Irishman’s version of one of those greatest stories ever told, the one which is the true foundation of the seasonal celebration into which we are being plunged again.
Can I humbly suggest that this variant of the story— from the point of view of a laterally maligned involved party, neither saint, king, nor angel, but a simple villager earning his living as best he can, a farmer too we know — contains elements of truths removed for whatever reason from the official version.
So now read on please: “It was the wife’s idea to start up a B&B business to bring in the cash that you can never raise enough of, from a small farm when you have bad land and a big family. Most of the time I stay out on the farm, working away on the hills with the sheep and cattle, slaving day and night, but I do be called in to help out in busy times like elections and State occasions when the crowds flood in looking for beds and food, and then she does put me on the door to screen the crowds looking for bed and breakfast. I would be no good in the kitchen or anywhere else under the roof in all fairness. But I do my best on the door and I’m not bad at it either.
“I remember this occasion well, at the butt end of the year, it was an election or a census or something of that order and the town was crammed.You could fill ten times as many rooms as we had that night, so you could afford to be canny and cute so you’d avoid any chancey characters that might skip away in the dawn without paying ... that happens often of course ... and I make no apologies at all to this day for deciding on sight I did not like the cut of the old beardie lad looking for a room along with a slip of a girleen that looked young enough to be his daughter.
“She was heavily pregnant too, I saw at once, a lovely simple country girl with a gentle face on her, and I judged her to be his daughter even though he said it was the wife, He was wild excited too at the time, but to me they were trouble from Day One on a night I did not need trouble so I refused them a room even though I had two left at the time. I did say, mind you, that I might be able to arrange something if he paid in advance ... that’s an old trick that works well ... but he would have none of that. I’d say he was short enough of coinage too.
“He argued a bit with me, he got thick enough actually, he was a big burly lad too, but I stood my ground and said in the end I had no room and he and the wife should go elsewhere. There was a queue building up behind them at the time as well.
“It was messy enough because there were tears running down the girleen’s face and you could see she was very close to her time as well. But I had a job to do and all I wanted was to see the back of the two of them and maybe I got a bit thick myself as well because he annoyed me.
“That was the way things stood that night, stressed enough, until my wife Ruth came out of the kitchen because she heard the raised voices and was wondering what was the trouble.
“Ruth is one of the Simons from down the street and she’s as sharp as a tack, took it all in with one glance, and it was her that told the beardie lad he could use the byre for shelter for Herself until he found another B&B and it was her showed them out the back and down to the old shed. When she came back within she told me she’d advised them they might get a bed at her sister’s place later and she’d do her best for them in that regard ... she has a good heart has Ruth ... but she whispered to me she reckoned there’d be a babby born below In the byre with the ass and the old cow for company long before morning. That’s what she told me.
“There’s a lot of talk around here about what happened later. I won’t go into that because I had to go up the hills to tend the sheep, after we filled the rooms, and I was not there.
“But I do know there was some class of a lightning storm in the foothills at the dawning and I do know I had to look after two flocks of sheep as well as my own that night, because the Levi brothers just took off down the village because of some excitement surrounding the birth of a strange babby in our byre. There were all kinds of pisheogues going round when I got back home from the hills the next evening but I don’t pass any heed on that kind of stuff. I did see the babby before he was taken away on the Wednesday. He was a healthy looking babby and I’d guess he survived being born in our byre. I don’t know whether he did or not.
“The beardie lad was still cross with me when they were leaving. He did not say goodbye or look me straight between the two eyes. The girleen, though, was smiling, she was over the moon. She had the makings of a great mother I’d say ...”
Maybe that kind of treatment was given to one of the greatest stories ever told when the event happened. When you are thinking about that can I take the opportunity of sending the connected seasonal greetings of serenity and peace to every man, woman and child indeed, of the most wholesome of the many readership families I have been involved with in all this working life.
