This is a subscriber-only article
Coming back to Barryroe Show is the nearest to West Cork that you can find. Although I was born in Cork City, I grew up near there in Lislee and Courtmacsherry.
My father, John Daly, first met my mum when he came down to Courtmacsherry as a boy scout.
When he was posted to North Africa with the RAF during WWII, she moved to the family farm in Lislee. I was born in 1942 and didn’t see my dad until after the war.
All my memories are of growing up in Lislee and this is why it’s really important to me.
My uncles, Tommy and John Donovan, were like fathers to me. Tommy was an amazing man, a man of principle.
I think we do still have people like him today and that’s why I find it so interesting to go around Barryroe Show and meet everyone.
He would tell me: “Don’t bow to anyone in this world but God. You look people in the eye, you smile and you give them their due.”
I’ve always believed that it costs nothing to be polite and it gets you a long way.
I remember topping and tailing sugar beet as a six-year-old. The sugar beet was taken by horse and cart or donkey, anything that could move, to the train in Courtmacsherry.
Growing up I had a donkey called Peter, the pig was Paddy and the dog was Carlow.
Tommy was very well known for his horses and on Sunday he would round us up and go to the beach, me on the donkey and the racehorses.
Tommy thought it was a good way to train young horses because even if they bucked their lad off, they weren’t hurt falling into the water.
New adventures
It was Tommy’s idea to hold races when the regatta was on. They’d have a donkey race when the tide was right and then he started the horse racing where the Tommy Donovan Cup was presented.
Tessy [Tom and John’s sister] was a good baker. I entered Irish dancing and singing competitions at Barryroe, I remember winning a little tea set one year, and she would enter her baking.
I would often sit on the back step of their farmhouse on a Sunday afternoon with my dog Carlow. You’d hear it first and suddenly there it was; the Mauritania or the Queen Elizabeth II coming round the Old Head of Kinsale.
After the war my dad worked in the creamery, but then went back to England. I didn’t leave to go to England until I was 13. Tommy gave me a 10 shilling note, ‘in case you don’t like it and want to come home’.
We left on the back of a horse and cart, then got the bus from Bandon. I had my brothers Michael (five) and Conor (two) with me and Dad met us in Fishguard, before we got the train to London. London was still in a mess, the bombs had flattened everything, but we were going to Stevenage. The day before I was in Courtmacsherry and now here I was in a new town.
There were a lot of jobs for a lot of people after the war. My dad had many war stories, he fought with Montgomery in El Alamein and Tobruk and then got a job with British Aerospace as a draughtsman. He was only 49 when he died.
We had weekly dances when I was a student nurse at Hammersmith and because I belonged to the Young Farmers Club in Stevenage, I organised a group of hefty farmers in their tweeds to come to the dance.
‘See, all these lovely ladies here. They love dancing, go and ask them,’ I said. There were a couple of matches made.
Nursing
After Montgomery presented our nursing medals when we graduated at Hammersmith, my mother said ‘Where is he? I’ve got to thank him because he brought my husband back from the war’.
And there she was, sitting at the table chatting to him.
When I qualified, I assisted at the very first kidney transplant and open heart surgery, both were carried out at Hammersmith.
I left nursing when I got married at 21. I met Paul, who was a quantity surveyor, at a wedding where he was the best man and we were married by the following year. My aunts in Lislevane said: ‘We’d have found you a farmer.’
After my family was raised, I returned to nursing as I felt I hadn’t given enough back.
So I worked with young nurses, they taught me and I taught them, I do believe that you don’t need a degree to be a nurse.
I have three daughters: Johanna, my little Irish redhead Eleanor, who’s the spitting image of the Donovans, and Nancy, the youngest.
They’re all mad keen on Ireland and we would go over in a caravan to Lislee in the summertime.
Neither John or Tommy got married and my girls were the grandchildren they never had. Sadly both my uncles were killed in a house fire on St Valentines Day in 1999.
YOLO
When I was nursing, I saw so many folks who said: ‘If only I had done that trip or forgave that person or had that bit of fun’ that I say to my lot: ‘I never, ever want to hear you say ‘if only’.
Get out out there and do it, you only have one life. Don’t waste it.’
Nancy worked in Dallas so we drove Route 66 and sat at the Grand Canyon in the snow.
Another time we drove from LA to New York, stopped in Kentucky where we got a necktie from the Museum of the Horse for Tommy, he was absolutely thrilled.
I’ve been to Australia on my own. I walked around Uluru and then it rained, so they called me the Rain Lady.
‘You’re very lucky,’ said a local. Flew to Fiji with Jo, they didn’t know where Ireland was until I mentioned rugby, so I got a map out and they couldn’t believe how small it was.
Grand Old Opry
We went to the Grand Old Opry in Nashville, passed the studio where Johnny Cash played with Elvis, then took Amtrak to New Orleans where I had some jambalaya.
I’m a huge country and western and piped bands fan. I go to Scotland for the world piped band championships and Brian Wilson OBE, the world champion drum major, is a great friend.
There’s a lovely photo of Pope Benedict and Mark, my nephew and rector at Oscott College seminary, where the Pope stayed when he visited England. Mark rang in a panic: ‘The Pope has asked if he can have apple pie, you make a lovely apple pie.’
So I gave him Tessy’s recipe, made with sweet pastry and a little drop of cider in the apple and that’s what the Pope had.
I’m a great showjumping fan and Nick Skelton follower since he was with Ted Edgar.
I went to the London Olympics for three days; Tom Daley won gold, Usain Bolt won gold and then Nick won gold each day.
I loved David Broome, he used to go to my first cousin Richard Kingston’s dad to buy his horses.
They’re all absolutely wonderful memories, I should have written them all down.
Ailish Crisp was in conversation with Susan Finnerty.
RINGSIDE STORIES: The lifeblood of agricultural shows
SHARING OPTIONS: