From Doughal to Shuic

It was the summer of 1960, I was five, and my mother and I went for a visit back home in Ireland. Her cousin, Auntie Bee, lived on a lovely wee farm deep in the heart of Randalstown, County Antrim. It was the absolute best farm ever, and I was - as they say - like a 'pig in shit', being a lover of all things country and rural.

I've been extremely fortunate to have had dogs - a lot of dogs - throughout my life. My first memory of them is when I was two-years-old, and I've had as many as five at a time.

So, it should come as no great surprise that, at the farm, I would fall madly in love with their black and white Border Collie, Rory. I was also quite in love with all the cows, pigs and chickens, but Rory was more at liberty to traverse the barnyard and investigate nooks and crannies and find things that were, of course, treasures. And so, it should also come as no great surprise, really, that one day, whilst flouncing about with Rory around the barn and general environs, I chanced to see what I thought was a big square black sidewalk. Beside the barn. It occurred to me that it was a very odd place for a big square black sidewalk, but Rory showed some interest in it so I decided to take a walk on the wild side and stepped onto – nay into - the potential rabbit hole. And I went down, down, down, in a ring of mire, of liquid pig mire.

To this day, I can smell it, I can taste it, I can feel it in my ears and eyes. It was liquid pig manure, and I nearly drowned in it. Rory, for his part, had buggered off, refusing to take any bit of blame for this eejit from Canada who didn’t know a pig doughal+ from a sidewalk.

Eventually, no doubt in tears of rage, I hauled myself out of it (it wasn’t shallow) and dragged myself onto dry and firma terra. I was furious, but alive. I was stinking, but breathing. I was swallowing pig manure, but living to see another day. And another day was a good thing. What was less than good was seeing my mother and her cousin, Bee, coming back from a walk and getting a glimpse of me in my finery…in my swinery.

Try to imagine my fury and sheer horror. Try to imagine my reaction when the first thing they did was burst into wild laughter at me, in my misfortune. In retrospect, I suspect I presented a rather humorous spectacle, what with all my clothes dripping porcine shite and its yet oozing out my ears and eyes and mouth. And a face on me like thunder. I think it was the face that set them off. And the more they laughed, the more enraged I became.

But we couldn’t laugh and rage forever. The clothes were irretrievable. My mother cut them from me. I was plunged into a standard farm issue bath and scrubbed, I’m sure with lye, to within an inch of my life. Then, insult to injury, didn’t I have a sprained arm, which Barney treated with not some mysterious unguent or potion specific and secret to farm folk, but a load of eel skins. That’s correct. Eel skins. Randalstown is near Lough Neagh which, in its turn, is famous for eel fishing. Imagine the average child having eel skins wrapped about her or his arm. Likely less than pleased. Now imagine a child, with a love of animals, who refused to eat or use them at all post-mortem, having a slew of eel folk strewn across her arm, then having it braced. Said child shrieked and yelled and cried and screamed and cursed for the fires of hell to descend on all involved. The doughal has lived large in my memory and did in that of everyone else involved, as a great tale. Sadly, all but I have gone on ahead.

And, my takeaway from this - which was but another link in my mishap-prone life - for all its elements and things going bassackwards, was how…HOW, in God’s name, could a mother look at her child in such a perilous and deeply unhappy and potentially injurious situation, and do nothing but laugh? That bothered me a lot…until 47 years later. And a little bit of Irish anomaly called “the shiuc”*.

+ pronounced “duck-el”, no doubt from “dunghill”; * pronounced "shuck ";and, though I don’t know its meaning in English, it’s every bit as bad as it sounds.

TO BE CONTINUED ...