Most farmers in the Kyle district, Nell Leahy noted, had dairies. As a rule, a farmer with 60 acres kept up to 18 cows, while a farmer with 40 acres tended to confine his herd to about 14.
They fed their calves on the skim milk they took home from Callan creamery. In addition to rearing pigs for the Callan Bacon factory, farmers kept a few for themselves, to guarantee a regular supply of rashers, black and white puddings, meaty ribs, and the occasional pig’s head.
In May, mostly horse-drawn mowers mowed the unspoilt meadows of ripe grass around Callan, with the clampdown on spare parts for tractors keenly felt up to war’s end.
A day or two after cutting, the farmers turned the hay (weather permitting ), first into lines along the field, then forming it into small cocks with their pitchforks, then into larger “tram” cocks.
These were tied down with sugauns and remained in the field until the farmer was ready to cart it to his haybarn or build it into a rick to retain as winter fodder.
The story of corn harvesting had a special appeal for Nell, with its memories of threshing days in Kyle and the countryside around Callan.
Nell recalled an activity that provided a lucrative source of income for both farm families and quite a few “townies” in the war years. This was the catching of rabbits in the countryside. A huge market for the humble creature had opened in Britain.
Advertisements appeared in the Kilkenny People and Kilkenny Journal. “Rabbits wanted… in any quantity!” and “Earn good money… give us rabbits!” the ads declared, enticingly. Clover Meats in Waterford bought vast numbers of them.
With rabbits plentiful, men and boys stalked the fields around Callan and district, laying snares to grab the unsuspecting creatures. Lamps and traps were also used in killing them.
Butchers across the water paid handsomely for rabbit meat, which was not affected by rationing, and rabbit fur was used to line the uniforms of hard-pressed British fighter and bomber pilots.
The demand for rabbits persisted up to war’s end. Jimmy Walsh of Green Lane (and later Mill Street ) remembers seeing the Town Hall building on market days during the Emergency festooned with rabbit carcasses, displayed from floor to ceiling, inside the Green Street entrance.
Jimmy also recalled seeing the Bretts of Windgap busily shooting rabbits in 1942 in the Callan area. Day after day, he heard the crackle of a .22 rifle when he and his schoolmates went out to play in the countryside and he spotted Jackie Brett loosing off at the bunnies. The Bretts were ambitious, hard-working, business people and Jackie’s sons are today feted for their success as agricultural merchants.
Though it was a trying time for this creature originally introduced to Ireland by the Normans, a more direful fate awaited it after the war. Nell Leahy said she cursed the day the infamous and diabolical myxomatosis was deliberately inflicted on the rabbit population to control numbers.
Instead of facing the trap or snare, to serve as food in rural Ireland or be exported to Britain, they were doomed to die slowly from this man-made disease. “Nature should have been let take care of itself,” Nell opined.
The turnip field
Sean Holden learned at an early age that carpentry and plastering, at which he later excelled, were less labour intensive than working for farmers. Like almost every young lad in rural Ireland, Sean got his taste of the tough life that the farmers of that era had to endure. They didn’t have a choice.
It was either backbreaking work in the fields or the emigration boat. In the second year of the war, Sean and a few friends headed merrily out of Callan to a farm near Ballyline.
Sean’s father Lyda had told him that “thinning” was a great job and that it would make a man of any young fellow. Sean took this to mean that he was in for a pleasant surprise and an enjoyable few days helping his rustic country cousins. He and his mates arrived at the farm full of erroneous notions about farm life, thinking it was a bit of happy-go-lucky harmless fun.
They were quickly disillusioned: The farmer, a powerfully built man with bits of straw hanging from his mouth as he chewed it, along with a juicy chunk of tobacco, ordered Sean and the 30 or so other teenagers, including seven girls, to “get cracking” at the long drills of crops in the fields.
The farmer had several fields that needed attention. In one there were turnips, and it was to this that Sean was assigned. The other fields had sugar beet, and mangolds. It was a cold day, and Sean could not believe that he was required to get down on his hands and knees and start thinning the drills that, to his youthful trusting eyes, seemed to stretch to infinity.
But Sean gritted his teeth and moved slowly along each drill, humming to himself the rebel songs his father and the Christian Brothers had taught him. This kept his mind off the hardship and discomfort he felt as he acquired his first direct experience of agriculture.
Luckily for Sean, an amiable bubbly girl his own age was working her way along a drill parallel to his, and she made frequent gestures of support to him, winking, and occasionally throwing kisses across at him.
The youth blushed, as he thought this a bit cheeky at first, but he then found the courage to return some of the kisses, jokingly, on the light breeze that swept the seemingly endless turnip field.
The same breeze ruffled his own bush of red hair, tossing little grains of clay into his face as he progressed up and down the field, thinning furiously.
(From: Are We Invaded Yet? by John Fitzgerald )
To be continued…
