Earthy memories of west Cork farm life

Damien Enright reviews a chronicle of an Ireland fast fading.

I HAVE just finished reading ‘Jack’s World’, published by Cork University Press, the story of the life and times of a west Cork farmer, a treasure of a book that held my attention from cover to cover.

In the hands of his nephew Seán Sheehan, a gifted and established writer, the diaries, notes, household bills and photographs which Jack Sheehan gathered and kept during his lifetime chronicle a world now gone, earthy and extraordinary to a reader in 21st century Ireland. Yet it was such a short time ago.

Jack Sheehan, born in 1920, died 2003, was the eldest of 11 children reared on an impoverished farm on the Sheep’s Head peninsula, surely one the most beautiful but difficult stations in which to make ends meet on 50-odd acres of poor land.

He stayed on the farm all his life, taking over when his father died, husbanding the fields, (he never married), knowing every bush and stone. His nephew notes that he was born in the last generation to know hunger. His own reminiscence recounts how he drained and brought back into tillage potato drills abandoned in Famine times.

Meticulous in his farming and routines, Jack kept diaries, bills and letters. There were others like him in rural Ireland — there still are — who although they never went beyond primary school grew up to love story and history and noted the day-to-day events of their own lives. Their parents’ encouragement, the culture they were reared in and their teachers’ zeal was responsible.

When they attended the village school they were called ‘scholars’ and indeed remained so all their lives, although their scholarship had to take second place to the plough. They were closely observant of the world around them and interested in news of the outside world.

Local history, as related by Jack, encompasses stories of and before his time. He recounts walking to the fair with a cow to sell, setting off on dark boreens at midnight and meeting neighbours with the same purpose on the road. By dawn, he is one of a confluence of small farmers driving their steaming cattle to Bantry fair.

As Jack mentions world events, Seán Sheehan fills in the broader context. History stirs and rumbles beyond Muntervary, the IRA in ambushes, Blue Shirts shouting from podiums in town squares, U-boats on the horizon, battle cruisers in Bantry Bay, all overlooked from where Jack ploughs the sloping fields with horses and drives the ass cart with milk to the creamery.

In 1934, the family rosary concluded by thanking General Franco for saving the world from communism.

The Church’s influence and the reasons for it are a topic taken up by Seán Sheehan, who has previously written on the subjects of anarchy, of Socrates and of Lenin.

“Jack’s middle-aged life passed largely in ignorance of what was happening in State-run institutions. The unwillingness (of Irish society at the time) to challenge the power of the priests was part of a broader disinclination to question the way things were. At some level of consciousness there was a sense of powerlessness, engendered by centuries of foreign rule.”

The pith of the book is Jack’s story; his nephew’s commentary is that of a historian, knowledgeable, fluent and well researched. He takes us into the history of the land the Sheehans had farmed for generations, the Neolithic farmers and copper miners of Mount Gabriel, the Elizabethan wars, the Napolenic incursion, the history of the embryonic State, the damage done to Bantry Bay by Gulf Oil.

Interleaved throughout the book are engaging black-and-white family photographs, some fuzzy but telling the story all the more authentically for that. Jack, himself handsome, had beautiful sisters, fresh as the fields and confident in their smiles, work-partners of the men they brought tea to in the hay meadows and whose wives they would later become.

Jack too is often pictured smiling, a confident man, full of fun and energy, standing with those sisters in the fields and before the house when they were 20 years old and their world was young.

This book is a must-read for farmers but is immensely readable for the non-farmer too. Seán Sheehan’s skill is that he contextualises his uncle’s account of his remote life with the story of the emerging Ireland and the century’s global events. Jack left a unique personal record and was blessed in having a nephew who could present it so well.

Jack’s World, Farming on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula, Cork University Press, €39