Reader Writes: secrets of the dunghill

The British Queens were already sprouted, the garden drills opened and the wheelbarrow half full with well-rotted manure when the graip became entangled in a head of white hair.

This happened some 75 years ago when I was in my mid-teens.

Terrified, I staggered to the kitchen which was about 500 yards away and tried to explain the find to my mother who had just finished peeling a basinful of Kerr’s Pinks and was “wetting a pot of tae”.

Seeing my uneasiness she accompanied me to the manure heap and looking at the object she alleviated my anxiety by explaining that the mass of hair was a discarded wig once worn by my late grandmother.

While my mother comforted me, my eldest brother Tommy had a good laugh.

The following month when Tommy was supposed to be mucking out the horse stable, I caught him trying to hide a newspaper. Later, in spite of searching the hay rack and under the feed box, I failed to find it.

By chance, a few Rhode Island hens while scratching the manure for oaten grains uncovered scraps of the paper.

Out of curiosity I jig-sawed some of the pieces together. It was a messy job! From the fragments I was able to figure out that they were from the then-banned News of the World. When confronted, my brother begged me not to tell our dad. It was a shared secret.

Distinctive odour

In the paddock the horse manure was but one of the constituents that made up the dunghill. It contained a mixture of dung from the heaps that accumulated outside the cowshed, piggery, hen house and the shed that housed store cattle over the winter.

Each manure pile had its own distinctive odour. The most pungent came from the pigsty. It was very noticeable when the crust that formed on the heap was disturbed or broken.

I had four brothers who were keen and enthusiastic footballers, often found in the paddock, practising their side-stepping, hand passing and solo running. They at times formed a quarter of the local club, known as “The Seáns”.

My involvement was collecting any balls that were misdirected. I still remember the time when I had to retrieve one that landed on the dunghill. I was quite young, still in short pants and as it was in the summer I was in my bare feet, not uncommon in the 1940s.

While fetching the ball one of my feet sank into the manure heap and came into contact with the carcase of a hen that had been buried two weeks previously. Feathers and skin became detached exposing a myriad of crawling white maggots with black eyes. I did not forget that in a hurry!

Part of the preparatory work when planning to grow a crop of potatoes was to make a dunghill in one of the headlands of the selected field. When the drills were opened, cartloads were taken from it and unloaded in the furrows in small heaps. In turn, they had to be scattered, usually with a graip.

Fragments of pottery frequently turned up, as did bones of rabbits and chickens, wishbones of the latter were looked out for but never found.

One unusual discovery was a small rusty spoon. When it was brought home and vimmed it turned up to be an Apostle spoon. Some opined that it was that of Judas and that it was deliberately thrown out with the dishwater.

My brother Patsy once uncovered a piece of pottery that had a Chinese character on it. He enthused about the probability of it originating from the Ming dynasty in faraway Cathay. Not wanting to spoil his excitement I kept quiet about the pottery factory that was in Arklow.

As I watched a cartwheel being buried in the dunghill with buckets of water being thrown on it, was I witnessing some ancient agrarian rite or ritual? I was in my sixth book (class) at the time and as I did not want my siblings to think that I was a right omadhaun. I expressed my concern to my dad.

He assured me that there were no pagan or sinister implications and that the wheel was buried for a very practical reason. Seemingly, in extreme hot weather it was important, imperative and prudent to prevent the wood in the wheels from cracking and shrinking, so causing the iron rim to become detached. It was one way in protecting the wheel.

Occasionally an extra pair of hands was needed to help out with the farm work. I recall the season when one such helper had the habit of going behind the dunghill; he went so often that everyone thought he had a urinary complaint. When reappearing, his favourite expression was, “I feel great after that”.

It was no wonder that he felt so good because months later when the dunghill was being carted away a small store of empty baby Powers bottles were discovered at the butts of the bushes behind it.

The rats, although they are fastidious animals, had burrowed into the manure mound. Their objective was the body of a stillborn calf and the cow’s afterbirth that were buried the previous week. In spite of the location, the lure was irresistible to them. Farmyards and rats were synonymous and in order to keep the vermin in check, traps were set and poison laid. The poison was Warfarin, I am now on prescription tablets that have some of the same ingredients!

Invoking memory

Recently when driving through lovely Leitrim, the smell of slurry being spread in the fields reminded me, not of the time when I worked on the farm at home, but when I worked in Bombay in 1957.

There, sacred cows wandered freely and defecated in the streets.

Before the relentless sun dried up the manure, swarms of buzzing flies gorged themselves on it. Dalites sweeping the streets created clouds of dust which were stifling and suffocating. Occasionally, monsoon showers scoured the thoroughfares. Incidentally, the dried cow-pats were mainly used as a fuel and not as a fertiliser.

Our grandson Dara was not overly impressed by the slurry smell. Holding his nose, he complained about the objectionable odour. Being a devotee of organic foods, he was only mollified when it was explained that slurry, being a liquid mixture of animals’ manure, was a natural fertiliser.

When my wife Rosemarie and I heard mutterings “You would think somebody would cloak it” we kept our counsel and saved our breath for another occasion. To cool our porridge?

Jim will be 90 in November and has lived most of his life in Dublin at the wholesale potato business. He comes from a farming background in Ardee, Co Louth. He spent some years in his young days working abroad in merchant banking in Sharjah and Singapore. He has been married to Rosemarie for 54 years and has three children. He only took up a bit of writing in his 80s.

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