A Man of the Soil

Further reflections on my Dad's leisure time activities. The first two photos are of my Dad in and beside his greenhouse with his oldest two grandchildren Heather (holding her nose because she hated the smell of the fertiliser in the greenhouse) and Paul (mocking my Dad's often serious face, though in this photo he is smiling as he often did in the garden. The third photo is from on of our visits to Claggan with the infamous Andy Davy in the centre of the picture, my Dad on the left with my brother Sam in his arms, my Mum beside him holding my arm, and my aunt Sylvia and cousin Philip Stevenson on the right.

As I said yesterday, during the winter, if not on overtime, my Dad spent work day evenings at meetings in the church or various Orange Halls. But he spent most Saturday afternoons or and spring/summer evenings and in his garden and garage. That was one of the big selling points for him of buying “Ivydene” because it was a semi-detached house on a corner site that allowed him to turn a large part of the back garden into a semi-allotment. My dad was not a “flowers and shrubs” gardener like my wife, but a mini-market gardener – expressing the frustrated farmer within him. There was a scrubby lawn and a few flowering plants in the garden – front borders with a couple of roses, orange lilies and sweet William (of course), crocuses along the edge of the lawn, everlasting sweetpea, wallflowers and nasturtiums that kept self-seeding and crocosmia under the hedge, that eventually stopped flowering because he never bothered to split them and thin them out. But all his efforts went into his “produce.” 

The first sign of spring for us was not so much the appearance of the crocuses but the delivery of a load of manure at the back gate. From an early age I was taught how to handle a grape fork and load the heavy steel wheelbarrow with this pungent stuff. Most was forked into drills carefully dug by my dad, though some was reserved to rot down further (I am sure our neighbours loved this time of year) and some was shoved into an old oil barrow with rainwater to produce a form of weird, foul smelling liquid fertiliser. 

Once the ground was prepared the produce for that year was put in the ground. There was always at least 4 rows of rhubarb, with the crowns dug up every autumn so the frost could get at the roots. Then there were potatoes (different varieties every year), there were always a couple of rows of peas (which rarely made it as far as the pot when ready as we ate them fresh from the pod, broad beans (which I never enjoyed as a kid, and the weird pods with their furry interiors freaked me out, but my mum loved them), carrots, parsnips, beetroot, turnips (though they were never a great success), different varieties of cabbage (though again they rarely thrived as there seemed to be an army of slugs and caterpillars ready to devour them), chives, shallots (he never really tried to grow onions, though we all loved them). He also had a couple of gooseberry bushes (I loathe gooseberries sadly) and in latter years grew industrial quantities of raspberries. Even with the local birds feasting on them he always seemed to have much more than any of the family could possibly want. 

He also made himself a greenhouse, welding an angle-iron frame and covering it with a semi translucent corrugated plastic that he had “procured” from somewhere (more on his procurement process tomorrow). In it he grew tomatoes and strawberries and a few other herbs, and one of my summer jobs was watering these and “pinching out” the suckers and the axillary buds that would draw away nutrients from the crop, which was usually very good. Having made his own greenhouse he also made one for my older brother and summer became a time of competition between the two as to who would produce more tomatoes. And my father never like to lose (again more of that anon).

The only time I ever knew my Dad to be completely disconcerted in a garden was in the manse garden at Glastry. There was an old Fuchsia forming an archway into the wilderness of a back garden, and in the spring after Owain, our first son, was born, my dad, who had recently retired, offered to come down and help me trim the Fuchsia and tidy up the old arch. Sally and I had been visiting a local woman who was having some difficulties, and we arrived back at the manse slightly later than arranged, driving around the side of the house to see, in place of the old Fuchsia hedge, an empty space. Sally, who was suffering from post-natal depression at the time, leapt out of the car and let out what might have been a Banshee howl... Causing my Dad, standing in the midst of the devastation to stop and stare, visibly shaken. He then rapidly packed up his tools, got into the car and sped away. Later we discovered that what had happened was that arriving before we had he had decided to make a start, and being somewhat unsubtle in his approach he had started to cut out some of the “dead wood” under the arch, resulting in the whole thing collapsing on him. His response was to cut his way out, resulting in a huge swathe being cut out of the hedge.   When she got over the shock and realised that it wasn’t deliberate Sally soon forgave him, and actually it probably did the old plant some good. Within a couple of years it was back to the same height and thickness but with a profusion of leaves and flowers around the restored archway. But, my dad sadly never volunteered to do any gardening for us again.

There is no doubt, however, that my Dad was happiest when he was out in the garden, or on his visits “up the country.” This meant a visit back to Cookstown in Co. Tyrone, going to the livestock market in the morning before heading out to visit relatives and old haunts. I and my brother enjoyed these visits as well, because we were allowed to roam free through the fields at the old family farm at Dunmore or across at Claggan where my namesake Andy Davy lived, although we repeatedly revealed our background as brownies, somewhat out of place in the country. On one occasion we startled a herd of cattle and they pursued us down a hill until we had to dive in through the side window of an old abandoned car, where we waited until they had got bored and moved on.

These visits invariably culminated in a large “high tea” with belly busting amounts of home baked goods unless we were visiting his Uncle Andy Davy, where my mum refused to eat. He lived in a house with no running water and no electricity, and had no sense of hygiene. He tended to wipe his plate with his old tweed cap, which, when it wasn’t on his head, sat behind him in his seat by the fire and in which a hen routinely roosted. He was also reputed to put his good “going to church on Sunday” shirt and suit on over his weekday shirt, before heading down the hill to Claggan Presbyterian, but I have no direct evidence of that. The rest I witnessed. Hence my mother’s reluctance to eat there, if it was ever offered. Even before she had tea she bleached the cups (having brought bleach, dishcloths and tea towels from home). He certainly had a strong constitution as he lived to a rare old age, finally succumbing to the flu in the early 1970s. But he was of that generation that had lived through the partition of Ireland, indeed he was reputed to know where some of the 1912 Mausers were buried on his land after the UVF gun running... My dad said they had often asked him where they were, particularly at the outset of the second world war, but he never told them... Maybe they are still buried somewhere in a field above Claggan Church.