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Irish Tales for St. Patrick's Day
In 1996 I moved to Ireland and established a Bed & Breakfast in Lough Gur, County Limerick, where I lived for eight years. One of my fondest memories of my time there involves an elderly neighbor named Johnnie Coffee, a native of neighboring County Tipperary. Johnnie used to enjoy telling us charming stories of his childhood, so one afternoon while building a patio for us, he stopped during a tea break and told me these tales, which are timely due to St. Patick's day approaching: Johnnie Coffey was from the parish of Oola, in East County Limerick, near the Tipperary border. His family home was about two miles outside the village. When Johnny was a young lad of 12 or 13, he and his friends would often raid the apple orchards on the way home from school. Of course they were always careful not to be noticed while they were stealing the apples. One day, they were surprised by a noise of someone coming along the road, and Johnnie dove into the hedgerows. He then went quickly home, taking care that he was not noticed. Just after he reached his property, a man came along with a cap in his hand and said, “Would a J. Coffey be living here?” Apparently, his school cap (which had to have a name written inside of it) had fallen off when he ran to the hedgerows. I asked Johnnie if the man gave out to him, and he said, “Not nearly as bad as my mother & father did later that night.” Another time Johnnie Coffey and his friends would often raid apples from an orchard that had a wall on one side of it; they would climb up and over the wall and take as many apples as they could. They were always quiet so as not to be discovered in the middle of their mischief. One day, the farmer whose land they were on, put a wire on the other side of the wall, about 10 inches or so up from the ground, and the boys took no notice of it. What they didn’t know was that the wire ran along the wall and then into the house of the farmer, who had put a bell on the end of the wire inside his kitchen. The boys had tied ropes around their pant legs, so that they could stuff their pants with many apples. When they heard the farmer approaching with his dog, they tried to scale the wall and escape, but their pants were so full of apples that they couldn’t run away, and were caught. That was the last time they raided that particular orchard. In the village of Oola there was a man who would give the lads a haircut for only sixpence; he wasn’t a proper barber at all, but he could do the job. He cut hair only at night, and he had to have someone hold a candle over the lad’s head, since there was no electricity back then. Usually, the person holding the candle tipped it sideways, so the hot wax ran down onto the head of the lad whose hair was being cut. One day Johnnie Coffey thought he’d play a trick on the man. Johnnie told him that his uncle, who lived in America, was a stout man like himself, and had sent Johnnie a suit of clothes that were much too big for him. Johnnie asked the barber would he like the suit of clothes, and the man said, sure he would indeed. So Johnnie said he’d bring the clothes by the next day. After he left, some of Johnnie’s friends went to the barber and said, “Have nothing to do with those clothes -- they were stolen from some poor soul.” So the next morning, Johnnie got on his bicycle and was bringing the milk from his father’s farm to the creamery, and stopped off at the barber’s with a bag. The barber said, “I’ll be having nothing to do with those, since they are stolen.” Johnnie replied that they were not stolen at all, and left the bag on the man’s table. He then went on his usual route to the creamery, and meanwhile the barber went up to the barracks to get the Guards to investigate the “theft.” The chief inspector went back to the village and passed Johnnie Coffey riding his bike, on his way home, and Johnnie wondered why the Guard didn’t salute (wave) back to him. When the Guard got to the barber’s place, they opened the bag, and instead of a suit of clothes they found a pile of hay. Johnnie had to find someone else to cut his hair after that. A Farmer had a sow that was almost ready to give birth to her litter. He was busy saving hay, so he got a young lad to sit and watch the sow one evening, and told him to run and get him in the field if anything happened. At about 11 o’clock, the farmer came back to the shed and said to the lad, let’s move her into the barn. Just then, a piglet dropped out, and the sow gobbled it up, much to the farmer’s dismay! He was lamenting what had just happened, and the young lad said, “Take no notice of that.....they’ve been coming and going like that all evening.” (story from Johnnie Coffey) In the parish of Oola, near the Limerick-Tipperary border, an old woman with a donkey and cart used to ramble around selling dishes and bowls to the local residents. One day, the old woman called to the Coffey house, and left her donkey and cart at the gate while she went inside to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Coffey. Johnnie Coffey and a couple of his friends went to the gate and untied the donkey from the cart; then they put the cart on one side of the gate, and the donkey on the other side, and joined them up again. When the woman came outside, she and Mrs. Coffey couldn’t figure out how the donkey got that way, outside, while the cart was inside the gate. I asked Johnnie if he got in trouble over it, and he said, oh yes....when his father was told, he took his big leather belt off his pants, and Johnnie said if you were near the door, you could run outside like the wind and maybe you’d escape a beating until later. One day Johnnie Coffey was asked by a local farmer if he’d place a bet for him at the betting office, since it wouldn’t do to be seen betting in those days. This man had received a tip from a relation in England about a horse running later that day. He gave Johnnie a Pound coin -- a fortune in those days -- and also gave Johnnie two-pence for running it to the betting office. Johnnie decided that he’d use his own two pence to bet on the horse, and placed a bet each way. The horse won, with odds of 19 to 1. Johnnie collected his windfall, unable to believe his good fortune. On his way home he passed the sweet store and asked the proprietor for a bagful of candy; the sweets were wrapped up in newspaper and Johnnie had to find a safe place to hide them, since he could tell no one about his lucky bet. He went to a crossroads and found a large stone, and laid out all his candies. He ate as many as he could until he was almost sick, then placed the rest of them back in the paper, and hid them under that stone. Every day for a long while after that, Johnnie Coffey visited that crossroads, and each time he would enjoy his treasure hidden under the rock.
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