Nell Leahy explained to Donnacha O Dualing in one of her radio interviews that many marriages in the 1930s and 1940s were arranged. A date was set for the two to wed whether they liked it or not. Some matches proved successful, others disastrous.
Word of Mouth invitations to weddings were far more common than written ones, Nell stressed. There were precious few of the extravagant marriage ceremonies that have become the norm nowadays.
After an early morning wedding in the church, and breakfast in a hotel, celebrations for the happy couple would follow in a local pub or hall. Amateur, and mostly local, musicians would perform. The music might for some couples consist of one man playing a few favourite tunes on a tin whistle or squeezebox.
Relatives of the bride and groom would take turns singing, and everyone applauded them no matter how bad their singing was.
Nell smiled at the recollection of old time wedding singsongs and amateur soloists. “God sure some of them hadn’t a note in their heads. They’d stand up and God almighty a lot of them were worse than crows bawling on the rooftops in the morning. But it was the effort and the enthusiasm that counted, and the joy of the big day for the happy couple.”
The average honeymoon consisted of a trip to Dublin or Cork, or maybe just a drive to Kilkenny and an overnight stay in the Marble City. A trip abroad was a rare enough luxury that few could contemplate, let alone afford, Nell confirmed sadly.
The Emergency era wasn’t a good time get sick, Nell recalled ruefully. Partly due to the shortages occasioned by rationing, people had a lot of illnesses to contend with during the war, and the country didn’t have much in the way of cures for these…measles, whooping cough, mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever, polio, and perhaps the greatest scourge of all, TB.
With no antibiotics to treat illness, many succumbed to relatively minor ailments. A visit to the dentist was dreaded, Nell reflected darkly, as much a visit from the Gestapo was feared in Nazi occupied France or Poland.
Typhus, which had been virtually eradicated in the rest of Europe, made an unwelcome comeback in Ireland in the forties. The fact that lice spread the disease didn’t help, because the nasty critters thrived in a country that had almost completely run out of soap by mid-1942.
Memories of the famine were re-kindled by the return of typhus, and people wondered if a fate worse than getting dragged into the war awaited them. “My own grandparents talked of the Great Hunger”, Nell recalled, “and when these terrible ailments that struck down the people then were being written about in the papers and discussed on the wireless in the 1940s, a lot us were worried.”
Though there was plenty of farm produce available, the balanced diet we are familiar with nowadays was next to impossible to achieve then. The lack of citrus fruits and the squeeze on the availability of so many foods made healthy eating more difficult.
TB was the biggest health menace of all, with thousands dying from it during the war years. If you were ill and living in the countryside, Nell reminded Donnacha, you had to wait ages for the doctor to arrive, since he was unlikely to have a car on the road due to the chronic petrol shortage.
Nell Leahy was famed for her cures.With so many threats to the health and physical fitness of the nation, people understandably turned once again to the traditional cures that their forbears had relied on in a more primitive society.
Nell knew them off by heart and mentioned some of the more reliable ones:
If you had a cough, you boiled horse chestnut tree leaves in water for maybe a quarter of an hour. You took three teaspoonfuls per day for nine days, preferably in the mornings.
Lukewarm water with plenty of salt added was gargled to cure sore throats. This was done two or three times a day until relief was obtained. Blackcurrants boiled in milk worked equally well, or sometimes better, on your throat.
Fly spray wasn’t necessary if you wanted to keep flies out of your home and off your food. All you needed to do was plant spearmint in a pot or a box outside the entrance to a room or house.
The flies hated the whiff of it and kept away, but the spearmint had a correspondingly soothing effect on the human occupants of the house, even helping to cure insomnia when positioned near your bed.
A cure for diarrhoea that many people swore by, but that those inscrutable learned doctors didn’t always recommend; was a generous helping of brandy laced with port wine. You were advised not to attend any important social functions or to go cycling immediately after imbibing this cure.
Kidney trouble? Boil barley grain and lemon juice for a few hours in water, the wise ones counselled. A mouthful or two at breakfast and another dose before bed and your kidneys would be back to normal.
Lukewarm milk sprinkled with pepper and nutmeg eased or cured indigestion.
Whiskey, or a poultice made of whiskey and cloves, cured your toothache, or at least eased the pain.
If you had corns, you were advised to pick exactly nine ivy leaves, boil them in vinegar and apply a new leaf each day. After nine days the corn should be gone, you were assured…
From Are We Invaded Yet? by John Fitzgerald
To be continued…
