Sunday's Short Story...Writer's group prompt.

Vicky said we should see how many times we could sing, "Rock around the clock". It was the end of the 1950s and we were in the domestic science rooms at school in Belfast.

There's a thought. Domestic.....were they planning that we should only end up as housewives?

Was learning to wash lettuce and make porridge really a science that our mothers hadn't already invited us to participate in?

My mother had regularly invited me into the kitchen for one science or another.  Washing up was well on it's way to a degree, if not an MSc by the time Vicky suggested this latest idea.

Elvis was hot news in 1956. Not that he or his music were played in my home nor I suspected...Vicky's.

Ungodly I think would have been the comment from my brother... older than me.

Anyway, I don't think I could have wound up my parent's gramaphone fast enough to keep a record playing long enough to be able to dance....that is gyrate...to the end of the song.

Can you remember the words?...one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock...oh you remember.

I was nervous. It was always difficult to say no to Vicky.

She wasn't exactly a bully, but let's just say extremely persuasive.  And I wanted to stay in with her as she also led the little gang of teenagers who gathered on the beach near where we both had family caravans.

Oh my...there's another tale to be told. The caravan.

Anyway I seccumbed to her hissing persuasion and chanted "Rock around the clock" quietly under my breath. My hesitancy was not only fear of being heard in the class...but also because I had already been in trouble with the headmistress.

Looking back now it seems ridiculous, but the wrong v-necked sweater from the wrong shop, the tilt of a beret on the back of the head rather than pulled well over the ears, or the length of hair touching the collar of the blazer, could get you hauled into her office for another lecture on "Unacceptable uniform".

I 've forgotten how many times we sang though Elvis's rock anthem. I would think Vicky with her uncanny ability to miss out on the lash of "miss's" whip like tongue, kept going the whole hour of the lesson. Then the bell would have brought me blessed relief.

The hour is imprinted deep in my memory bank. A bank that seems to have deposited some memories deep in a vault slammed the door and gone and lost the key.

Elvis's music and his Lemur-like hip gyrations were a turning point for a whole generation that was moving rapidly away from all the deprivations that period of our history brought with it.

And as the alternative in Ireland was either "Diddley da" music or Irish style country and western with those singing... slurring over both the words and melodies...Elvis and all that followed were a breath of fresh air.

A Poem for Thursday...Driving to Donegal

Driving to Donegal

River Bann in flood  cattle on the bank

cloud and blue patches in an Ulster sky

red barn roofs curved and corrugated

Enniskillen          Omagh              Derry

on the green road sign.   Driving west.

Telegraph wires strung out on drumlins

measuring the miles and the messages

ancient gaelic town lands   anglish form

politics noted in the colour of a flag

politics  black    green     blue     red

and white  with a bloody hand

woven together like fine Sunday linen.

Fecundity found in every hedge and tree

mother Ireland at her most fertile her

green hills swelling as ample breasts

each rowan     ash     willow and oak

hazelnuts beechnuts and acorns with

meadowsweet  knapweed  fireweed and

net fences twined about with red rosebuds

over   under   around the edges of gardens.

Geraldine Snape

Muckross On The Edge

 

A very special place for my sister..the artist Rosie McClelland and therefore for me.
This is my attempt to put those emotions into poetry.

Travelling tracks
on the high edge of Europe
to Kilcar and  Muckross
uber ancient rocks
jutting hard on navy waves
endless ocean.

The edge where
swooping  valleys leave
masculine sliabhs to
drop away to Amerikay
green rock pools
sustain
burnt orange lichen.

And
wind blown clumps of sea thyme
nestle
in stoney crevices
here.

Broad limestone pavements
worn flat by tide and time
yield
to white-flecked endless forces
skimmed
by long-winged gulls.

Muckross
hanging rocks
face ocean
have stories to tell
futures  to sell
to the mountain people.
Hard lives
on elemental edges
sedges and turf
not enough to keep them
by Port or Tellin.

There strangers in long boats came
stealing wives and children
took their lives
took them for service.

Of many kinds.

[@rosiemcclellandart ....sliabh pronounced...slieve]

Human

At twentyone I left the land
And travelled on the Irish Sea.
I reached a southern port
And taught the children
On the chalky hills.
They thought I was a foreigner

French perhaps.

At twentysix I travelled north
And settled in a smokey town,
Where words were old and beer
Was drunk on Friday nights
In crowded bars.
They thought I was a foreigner.

Scotch perhaps.

In troubled times I went back west
To where the planted people lived.
And dodged the bombs and
Feared the fires where city folk
Still walked and worked.
I felt I was a foreigner.

English perhaps.

Now forty years have come and gone.
And wars are fought and lives are lost,
And fights are won or
So they say though where
Or when I do not know.
And none of us are foreigners.

Human perhaps.

...this is my response to the prompt put up by Marina on DeVerse Poets Pub today.
I have posted this one before but the time seems right in so many ways world wide for it to  be part of DeVerse  this time.....thankyou Marina.

Poetic Elements

The elements I'm talking about are the elements you find the further west you go in Ireland....

Donegal and the roaring sea coming in from America...The Atlantic...
And the way it leads to poetry.

Well this is a very emotional week for us Irish.

From the era of post-Yeats when it seemed noone could surpass him and his mystical lines...
...suddenly came the farmer's son who gave us gave us earth...
                ...came Seamus Heaney....

... the digging...the tilling...the ploughing...the calloused hands that my father bore as he worked the soil when I was young....before my city mother persuaded him to give it up....

So first a Yeats gem....

TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND
Dance there upon the shore;
what need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead.
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind? 


and then Heaney in all his honesty...

The Peninsula
by Seamus Heaney
When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all around the peninsula,
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you're in the dark again.  Now recall
The glazed foreshore and silhoutted log.
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog.
And then drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this; things founded clean on their own shapes
Water and ground in their extremity.

                                  Muckross Rocks Donegal July 2013

I owe so much to these poets who encircled first my childhood ...and then my adult thinking.....

Thankyou.

The Story of Ballyferris....and all that Jazz.

Here comes another chapter of the ongoing story of a nowhere place of great significance.

Otilie Patterson and Derek Cathcart.

I was always encouraged by Derek Cathcart to sing. I was a young teenager sitting at the back of his tiny caravan in the coastal district of Ballyferris ,Co Down.
He sang the blues and black American Gospel to a tinny old guitar.
He was the sophisticated older member of that early seaside gang, who sang in the local pubs and bars... a thing unimaginable to me and my strict church upbringing...and therefore for me, all the more exotic and unattainable .
I mostly remember blues like ...Beale street ,St. Louis Blues or St James's Infirmary. Or country and western songs which are always very popular in Ireland.
I pestered mum and dad for a guitar of my own. I left adverts sitting around on the mantlepiece and the breakfast table.
"Almost new guitar for sale...very resonably priced".
 So it was with great rejoicings and merrymakings that I got my first guitar on my thirteenth birthday.
It's not hard to learn three chords from each of the major keys! So that's what I did... and not much more. But I got the reputation for entertaining my friends when we got together in our family caravan as the teenage years went by.
I don't know what happened to Derek...I lost touch with most of them from the smokey caravan. But I loved the music that he had introduced me to and when the other friends were revelling in Elvis, The Beatles and The Stones...I was listening to late night jazz and buying up Billy Holliday and Peggy Lee records.
I dabbled a bit in the university clubs and sang at some of the student balls and rag concerts and on one occasion was at the same glee club at Queen's in the 60s, as an older singer called Ottilie Patterson took the stage. Being young and arrogant , I can remember being quite scathing about her singing.
....Oh the foolishness of youth!
When she died last year, and I read through the obituary, it hit me like a ton of bricks....she was the inspiration for Derek and therefore myself all those years before in the late 50s.
She was born in Comber...and that's just a spit away from Ballyferris and the caravan. So I realised that Derek must have been following her and listening to her in the early 50s in the pubs and clubs where he himself then used to perform.
She married Chris Barber and sang with his band...but like so many singers, (including Adele) she struggled with a throat problem and eventually disappeared from the scene.

Chris Barber, centre, and his band in 1962, with Patterson, and Ian Wheeler on clarinet.

Thanks Otilie....thanks Derek...thanks for the memory....
...oh that could be a good song title....stop being silly Geraldine!

Patrick.

St. Patrick

Presumed facts.

Born in the Brit borderlands.

Father in the Roman Army.

Mother Brit.

Grandfather, priest in the early Orthodox Church.

Captured by bandits from Ireland.

Taken to Co.Antrim to be a minder of sheep.

Escaped after years by travelling west and getting a boat back to the Brit borderlands.

Dreamt that Ireland needed him.

Went back of his own free will.

Lived by the Orthodox calendar.

Travelled the land, freeing slaves, especially women.

Lived to his early hundreds.

Buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh City.

There never were snakes in Ireland ....but it's a good story....
and we like a good story in Ireland.

I painted this icon from imagination.

He's a western saint, there are no old icons of Patrick.

My father lived in Co. Armagh, so I thought about him as I designed it.

Though he had no beard, and his hair was blond and he looked more like a Viking than a Celt.

But every thing about his demeanour was of Armagh and of his pride in that place.

My favourite Irish song?

Well it has to be Van Morrison singing ...

"Be thou my vision".

Belt it out Van!

The Story of Ballyferris. Music at the Caravan.

Music at the Caravan

When we were all rather young, that is, before we became teenagers, a barn was set aside at Turkington’s caravan site, ( the one on the Millisle side of Hope’s) in which  caravanners could gather,  to have a bit of a concert . Well that was always such a good old sing song, and in the inimitable Irish way if you felt like it, you could get up and strut your stuff musically!. Noone  minded... if you got all  the notes ...even if they were not exactly in the right places!

I remember one of the regular favourites was... “Look over your shoulder, I’m walking behind”……now who on earth sang that? Does anyone remember?

Google tells me it was Eddie Fisher !

In the fifties in Ireland I don't remember singing many national folk songs. You would be more likely to hear a country and western being rendered..or mangled, depending on how it came out. But the enthusiasm was boundless.In fact my drama teacher was surprised when upon winning a prize at school I opted for a book of Irish "come-all-yees"...dad's name for Irish songs.

This was at the end of the fifties when Elvis broke into our world and thrilled us with songs such as   “ Teddy Bear” and “ Jail House Rock” and you know…. we kids wanted to rock it up in the Barn.
 I remember one day in particular... at the swings in Turkington's yard with Vicky another caravanner and close school friend....when we must have sung "Teddy bear" constantly all afternoon...and I mean...all afternoon!!

In  Ballywalter... in Lemon’s Café and Fish and Chip emporium..., we often gathered in the store room at the back of the shop to feed our money into their exotic juke box. Bill Haley, Little Richard and The Big Bopper fed our fertile minds and brought us dreams of faraway places and possibilities in distant lands. Could that be one of the reasons why so many  left Ireland for distant shores, as soon as  teenage years were behind them?

For me, even more important than all of this, was the scruffy caravan in Hope’s second field. A musical cooking pot full of enormous significance for my young enquiring soul.

The van was owned by Derek Cathcart.

He was much older that me, and in my young eyes... very worldly-wise. He played guitar and more than that,  played and sang regularly in local pubs. A fount of musical knowledge of a genre  I had never heard before.

I often waited until the other "van" kids were in his scruffy abode some early evening... before he sallied forth to the bright lights of Donaghadee, Millisle or even Ballywalter...and creep in to sit  at the back of the caravan... near the door. A thick smokey fug filled the space and  meant that you could hardly see to the opposite end... and I’m sure more than contributed to his throaty singing voice.

He sang the usual country and western songs of those days. Do you remember..."It wasn't God who made honky tonk angels" ? or Jim Reeves and "He'll have to go"? Oh my ...you  and I are old!!
More important to me however was the jazz that he sang... and in particular the blues  I heard for the first time in my life.

From Derek I learnt to sing "Beale Street Blues, St Louis Blues" and many many more.

One song in particular that I loved to hear him sing, was his rendition of "Miss Otis Regrets".
..I still sing it today.

I was probably only ten or twelve at the most when I first sat in that caravan, and I had already had quite a few years studying drama and music, but this new sound was something that entered my soul and  stayed with me ever since.

Though a  rough diamond, he was kindly. He seemed to recognise something in me and encouraged me to sing. I found that I had a natural inclination to harmonise and so when he launched into some blues piece, I would quietly sing along  absorbed in this wonderful world of music. More often than not I received an encouraging word  from him at the end. That did more for my confidence than all of the scales and classical pieces given to me by my singing teacher .

 I have a memory that once, in a lesson, she informed me that if I continued to sing in the lower register I would absolutely ruin my voice. Ooops!

Ah me what a great memory. Who could better that instruction with so much fun thown in. It was many years before I met any one else who had such confidence in my vocal abilities.

Thankyou Mr. Cathcart wherever you are.