'A Harvest of Memories'

It's a good thing that Dick Jeffers has put in book form some of his memories and thoughts from living in rural Ireland from the 1930s.

Because many of the things and people he describes are no longer part of today's life. That makes 'A Harvest of Memories' a repository of precious treasures of heritage.



Which made it apt that he should launch his book last evening in the Kilcullen Heritage Centre, itself becoming an important place of preservation of local memories.

Although only about three years in the actual making as a book, 'Harvest' has been a lifetime in gestation. No more than the making of diamonds takes eons of geologic activity, absorbing and distilling the experiences of childhood through youth into the middle and golden years requires time more than any other resource.

Time, and also a curiosity about what's happening around you and who is doing what. A curiosity that in Dick Jeffers' early life would have been taken as normal, but perhaps today might earn a rebuff on the lines of 'mind your own business'.

Because, as he said himself at the launch, Dick Jeffers has always been part of a community. A kind of community that, whether in the old middle of a city or in the farming fields of rural Ireland, used to be synonymous with closeness, with everybody being expected to, and even welcome to, be involved with each other.

'A Harvest of Memories' includes, of course, a tribute to The Boss Man, his father, who in his own youth had been reared by families other than the one he was born into; a common thing when some children of large families were fostered to relations with more space and time to bring them up.

There are treatises which include the experience of growing up as a Protestant, an explanation of the 'Hungry Thirties' and the 'Dismal Fifties', and how entry into the EEC impacted at the front line of farming as opposed to the polished desks of Brussels.

Dick also essays on various components of farming life, from the Ferguson TE 20 tractor through reaping and binding and the sweat, dust and rat-killing involved in threshing.

Few of today's Celtic Tiger wives would know about Pin Money and its importance in the family economy; or the queen of the farmyard, Daisy the House Cow; or the tribulations of The Farm Labourer.

And this writer was prompted to recall when he read a chapter at the launch about the characters of Kilcullen, The Joult, The Trush, The Badger ... and The Gunner Ryan. The latter I remember as an old man living up the road from us and to whom we young Byrnes would bring dinners from time to time. But Dick's story is of a much more dapper and younger Gunner, prepared to entreat the Almighty and His Mother to cause rain so that he wouldn't have to accept a day's work.

At last night's function, Rose O'Donoghue of the Ballymore Bugle introduced the book. Dick Jeffers himself acknowledged the mentoring of Michael Ward, retired editor of the 'Bugle', and of Pastor Robert Dunlop, both of whom proofread and corrected the stories.

The cover and many of the illustrations in the book are the work of Ian Scott, Brannockstown.

'A Harvest of Memories' is available locally for 15 euros. We'll review it in more detail in due course.

A slide show of the launch is available here.

Brian Byrne.