Alice Taylor: 'I felt I couldn’t complain because I had a garden and plenty of space'
Alice Taylor with her latest work, Books From the Attic. Picture: Denis Boyle
There is much to admire about Alice Taylor — her resilience through loss, especially of her beloved husband; her productivity, most especially during lockdown, when she finished one book and wrote another; the obvious joy and sustenance she gets from her place in the community of Innishannon and the nature that surrounds it.
She also deserves admiration for her determination to sort through the piles of dusty books lurking in her attic. While ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is the mantra of most people in this regard, Taylor tackled the issue head on and in the process, unearthed a treasure trove of books and memories from the past. Naturally, being a born storyteller, she wrote a book about it.
In Books from the Attic: Treasures from an Irish Childhood, Taylor writes of how, when her mother, Lena, husband, Gabriel and cousin Con, ‘climbed the library ladder to the heavenly book archives’, she became the custodian of the old school-books acquired by the family over decades. She says she was spurred on to write the book by her acute awareness of the passage of time and how she was the last person remaining with a connection to the books.
“It took me a long time, they were there for years. It kind of dawned on me that if I didn’t do something with them, how could I expect my crowd to do anything, they would have no nostalgic connection with them. I thought they might finish up in a skip. It was a bigger job than I anticipated.”
For Taylor, 82, books are far more than inanimate objects; when talking about what ones she decided to feature in the book, she likens them to children vying for attention.
“Once I got into them, the books kind of came alive. Every fella wanted to be in and every fella couldn’t get in. There was a bit of a struggle between myself and the books, every fella was striving for a patch. Fellas got in that I hadn’t planned to put in at all,” she laughs.
As Taylor was putting the finishing touches to the final manuscript of Books from the Attic, Covid arrived, along with the ensuing lockdown. Taylor, who stayed at home, found respite in her burgeoning spring garden, was approached to write another book, which was duly published under the title A Cocoon with a View.
“It was grand because I journal anyway. I found doing it entertaining, it was just what was going on in my life. Also, I was lucky with the cocooning first time around, because the weather was beautiful and I nearly took root in the garden. I felt I couldn’t complain because I had a garden and plenty of space, as opposed to being in a high-rise apartment. When I was cocooning, I read The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which put things in perspective.”
Taylor says that surveying the old schoolbooks, evoking memories of her childhood growing up on a farm near Newmarket, Co Cork and her schooling there, also memorably portrayed in the book that made her a household name, To School Through the Fields.
“I suppose you do go back into that world. The Kincora Reader was my first book and when I was going through it, I was back in the kitchen at home with Bill, my father’s relation who lived on the hill behind our house. He came to our house every night and taught us our lessons. He had the patience of Job. In the going back, I felt it deepened my appreciation of the values of that world,” she says.
“A lot of the books were falling asunder. It was just lovely to see the names of my sisters, to see my father’s lovely hand; back then they had lovely copperplate writing and he had my name written on the books.”
Taylor has six grand-children and wonders especially if they are being taught about nature and the environment in the same way as she was in school.
“The schoolbooks now are very superficial and transient. They are not learning about nature. We grew up with a great appreciation of the countryside and respect for the environment. That should be in the school books. We did a lot of poetry, the English poets, Shelley, Wordsworth and our own poets, Yeats, Pearse and all of those. And I loved Robert Louis Stevenson, he never became an adult, he was forever a child in his mind.”
Taylor attended secondary school, which was not a given for children growing up back then. “Lots of people couldn’t go because we lived three miles from the nearest town. If you had five or six children, you couldn’t afford to send them to boarding school.”
However, she says that the breadth of knowledge imparted in primary school was greater than now.
“It was a very condensed curriculum. I think the powers that be were aware that some of these children wouldn’t go beyond primary school. I remember my father saying they were taught gardening and science, and this was a little school way out in the country, it wasn’t even in a village, it was at the corner of a road, the same school we went to. The schoolbooks were fonts of knowledge. My father loved to quote Wordsworth — they had those poems and they never forgot them.”
Taylor says the value of learning poems by heart is immeasurable. “That comes into its own if you go come on a situation and you have no words with which to describe it, then into your mind runs two lines of a poem. The magic of that is that you and the poet are standing in the same footsteps, in the same mind. They are able to articulate what you are seeing now. There is a great richness in that.” With many of us seeking refuge in nostalgia and the written word, Books from the Attic is perfect for the times we find ourselves in, says Taylor.
“Sitting here, looking at my bookshelves, it makes you realise once you have a book on board, you are never alone really.”
- Books from the Attic: Treasures from an Irish Childhood, published by O’Brien Press, is out now.
“In farmhouses in rural Ireland, books weren’t falling in the door, I can assure you….I don’t even know how it came into the house but the first book I ever read was Oliver. I was so sorry for him. I read it and re-read it."
“We were about 40 miles from Cork city and going into Cork was like going to New York today. It was a voyage. I remember going to Woolworth’s and buying Jane Eyre. It cost 1/6. We used the money we earned from picking potatoes and thinning turnips. They were amazing women, the Brontës. I went to the Brontë Country, for an RTÉ documentary, I loved it.”
"I remember reading that in Ballybunion one sunny summer. I think a book you can read in one room, without any break, is a good book. I loved the television adaptation. Sometimes when they film a book, they ruin it, but they did a great job on that.”
