Turn Up The Lamp

On market and fair days our little streets were crowded with farm horses and carts. In the big stable yards behind the public houses the dealers from outside the district sold their animals to the country men. We were much more interested in the horse sales than in the dealing that went on in cattle, sheep and pigs on display along the sides of the streets. The hand slapping, the offers, the walking away and the arguments in the stable yards were fiercer than elsewhere. I never knew why buyers opened horses’ mouths and looked in while the dealing went on. Between fairs we were always interested in the work of two clever horse trainers, or breakers, who trained young animals for saddle, cart or plough. One of the trainers, from Annalong, was a great favourite of mine. A small, tight man, just like a jockey, he was always neatly dressed in check cap and jacket, riding breeches, gleaming leggings and boots. When breaking in young animals he walked along the side of the street, the nervous animals prancing and side-stepping at the ends of long reins. He welcomed meeting groups of people, carts, bicycles and especially a chugging motor car or noisy motor cycle. It was good training for his young horse if, during his progress up the brae to the upper square, he met the big steam engine puffing and crunching into town with its load of bricks and timber.

After the fairs unsold horses were roped together and driven off on the long road journeys to other fairs or farms. Cattle that had been purchased by outside buyers were herded along the coast roads to the Greenore paddle steamer or the railway station fourteen miles away. The drovers with their strange accents were well known to all. They spent their lives walking the roads all over the counties, and were reputed to be tireless.

There was no more perfect place for watching the goings-on in the fair than the square, but nearly as important for me was the fact that, from the time I had enough teeth to deal with a caramel there was a sweet shop next door to our house. No sweet shop in my experience since has ever come up to the one in the square. It was not very big but it was packed. The mixture of smells that wafted out when you opened the door was nearly better than the treasure displayed on the shelves. There were gums, caramels in bright papers and unwrapped sugar sticks, golden sugary candy broken into lumps, paper packages with tubes of liquorice sticking out of the corners for sucking up the sharp-sweet powder, cubes of dark chocolate and chocolate bars in shiny coloured wrappers and boxes of chocolate with ribbons and pictures on the top. On the glass case on top of the counter rows of bottles of minerals were set out, some brown stoneware with spring tops, some blackish green and some clear glass with lemonade, yellow and bright, showing through.

Sunday mornings, likewise, are not a patch on those I spent just before starting school. There was hardly ever a soul to be seen on River Hill or Mountain Road half an hour before noon. When I went out on the little square of packed earth in front of our door to look around, even the street corners that usually had a few loungers were deserted. The ‘Big Meeting’ people would soon be walking up the hill to their place of worship; the second Mass people were well on their way on their two mile walk to Massforth, and the ‘Church ones’ (Church of Ireland) were being summoned from the belfry that could be seen from our door, projecting skywards above the three-pub rampart. The quick clanging bell from Christ church and the cawing of the host of rooks in the tall trees behind it are abiding memories of my summer Sunday mornings. I have to listen hard now for either bell or rooks even on the stillest day.

Bell or no bell, I always headed for Tessie’s half-glassed double door. The brass latch polished by a thousand thumbs was a fitting ‘open sesame’. The perfect aromatic blend of chewy things is with me still. Tessie always gave me my pick, a selection which invariably included a few butternuts, each a mouthful, thickly coated with the finest sugar and buttery enough to loosen a flood of mouth juices.

an extract from the memoir 'Turn Up the Lamp: Tales of a Mourne Childhood' by J.S. Doran, Between the Mountains and the Gantries, published by Appletree Press.