THE SUGAR TRAIN

Juggling, Not Smuggling, and a Satellite (Poetic Prose)

THE SUGAR TRAIN

Juggling, not Smuggling, and a Satellite.

I remember climbing the wire fence at the back of our house so I could see the train travelling beside the river a few fields away, the same fence my mother bade us climb one night, waking us up, to see the Northern Lights, a rare sighting, that was bright over the North of Ireland. 

I loved the sound of the train whistling through that valley, its long plume of smoke snaking along the top of the carriages.  I tried to see the people sitting inside, imagining them staring out of windows, eyes wide, at all the farms dotted in the countryside, and maybe seeing me frantically holding and swaying on the wire with one hand and waving as high as possible to them all, not quite tall enough to see without my perch.  I hoped that Hammy Grey’s hens would not get run over on the track. I would search for wee banty chickens or silkies in the air.  They lived in a henhouse down there.

            The train was heading towards Bundoran Junction on the Irvinestown Road not far from the village where I precariously hugged the fence.  Bundoran itself was a seaside town thirty miles away, but the Junction was beside us.  My mother told me that many a stranger or a tourist looking for Bundoran would mistakenly get off at Bundoran Junction, only to find they were in a rural area dotted with farms and tiny villages, one shop and such like and they had a fright to see not a seaside in sight.  

            We always travelled on the train during the Parish Annual Summer Excursion to Bundoran.  I hated the gap between the platform so low and the train so high, that dark hole big enough to swallow me up.  The giant machine seemed to breathe, making me cry.

            A lovely, perfumed neighbour who smelled of Pond’s Vanishing Cream, was called Daisy Orr, dressed in a primrose yellow frock, and she held my hand and helped me onto the train, so that my mother was free to carry my brother and sister into the carriage.  I didn’t know that Orr was Daisy’s surname, and thought that maybe her mother, for some reason, never made up her mind about her name, that maybe she meant Daisy OR Lily or Diana, so she ended up being plain Daisy Orr.

            There was a narrow hallway on the train, a long corridor beside all the compartments.  The ticket-man came in and punched holes in our tickets.  I thought that was unfair.  I liked my ticket whole.

            My mother told me a story about when she was a little girl travelling on the same train to Bundoran.  She was so happy that my Granny, her mother, bought her a present, her very first ball, at the seaside.  Granny also bought a flag for her brother and a doll for her sister.  On the way back on the same train my mother was playing with the ball when her brother opened the window to wave his flag.  The ball bounced out of the window never to be seen again.  My mother never forgot the loss of that first ball, swept away by the wind, and now I have never forgotten it either because she told me she wept all the way home.  I couldn’t bear the thought of Mammy crying at any age.

            I loved and feared the train with its great hissing puffs of steam, clacking iron wheels and chuffing sounds, the piercing whistle of the guard at the back waiting for all the doors to close, and the endless lines of thick wooden sleepers that carried the rails round the countryside to the sea.

I remember the rhyme: Augher, Clogher, Fivemiletown, Sixmilecross, and a seven mile round.  I was told it had to do with the train, for by road, it was far more than seven miles from one to the other.

My mother told me stories of the olden days, when women were bold near the end of the war and just after, when rations were rife, causing much strife, and they had to travel far to find sugar and bread and all things left unsaid.  This was austerity.   Sugar was needed to jar, bottle, and tin foods, to pickle in times of scarcity.  Cooking oil from frying rashers was stashed for glycerine for the Army.  Surely not for constipation?  Something to do with bomb-making, I’m told.  Poor pigs, if they only knew what their behinds could do!  The mind boggles in consternation.

The family lived in the North and the Free State was neutral in the South.  They were all rationed but one later than the other.  Luckily the Steam train, the Bundoran Express, came all the way from the city of Belfast through to Bundoran Junction just up the road, and then onto near Pettigo, through Ballyshannon, the oldest town in Ireland, where there used to be a salmon leap on the Assaroe Falls, and past Finner Irish Army camp all the way to Bundoran.  Tall tales of salmon almost six feet long, they said, leapt those Assaroe Falls!  I’d believe it, for Daddy and Uncle Ernie caught a thirty pound, three- or four-footer, and they weren’t wrong, not a word of a lie.  No fishing was allowed out of season, and they kept to the rule, the reason being that the salmon were going home from the Atlantic to the river, to breed and then die.  They never ate salmon with a red stripe on the back, a changeling should not be put in the fisherman’s sack.

 “The thirty pounders fed the Murphys for a month,” says he!

“Are you sure that wasn’t a pike?” says I.

“Aw, your head’s cut, Deannie,” says he, “sure, you only eat pike less than a foot long, for they eat the water rats, you see.”

  The War rationing prohibited sugar to eight ounces, butter to one ounce, one egg once a week, two if you were pregnant or vegetarian, hardly any wheat flour and at one point, no meat.  Ah, but they were given tips that throughout the rationing there would always be fish and chips! 

The train crossed the border a couple of times and of course the customs at Belleek and Pettigo hampered many a one with fear in their hearts, but young girls and their mothers with large families could cope with hope, so were not deterred by that.  Stitchers all, they sewed pockets galore in their petticoats for no customs official would dare make a search there.   They might empty a big coat pocket or two, but underneath that there might be another cardigan and coat unseen and below that petticoats with many a strange seam. 

The husbands and sons would go to the pubs for ‘a few’, and the wives shopped in Bundoran for butter and sugar, sweets, and beets.  There used to be four sugar beet farms in the South.  At the rear of the shops, while the men drank their whiskeys and beers in the pubs, the ladies bought what they could, filling petticoat pockets to the brim and caring not if they were no longer trim.

Later, the train, on the side of the track not seen, things like butter and bags of sugar might be hung from the outside windows and handles of doors on that side to keep cool.  There would be anguish for it not to be seen, hearts racing, not to have confiscations, women facing trouble or even banned from train-travel ever again.

This was not smuggling, but juggling, by the rich, the middle-rich and the poor, all working together to keep the wolf away from the door.  Ancestral memories of the potato famine were still real to them and not lore.

“When we were young as courting girls or newly married, we rode bicycles across the border and never worried, skinny in our coats and hats on the way over, pedalling past customs officials, smiling, and waving to them all.  We bought mats and rugs that were cheaper with no tax added on, wound them round us, covering them, looking expectant with child, beneath our big coats.  We would clock the officers for their time to change guard and then pedal back in the dusk, big chunky lassies on our bikes, puffing and panting, taking a risk.  One time, they hadn’t changed guard, and we were shocked to see the same guys, but they must have known, gave us smiles and sly looks and turned blind eyes.”

There were things in the North they couldn’t get in the South, so it worked both ways, especially after the war when orange juice and cod-liver oil was available, a vitamin ration to children, and family allowance was given in Ulster, but the sufferance now in Ireland was Southern,  then the sugar women helped the ones who helped them and the Bundoran Express was still running, this time the coats and petticoats were filled with goods to take there.

Despite the neutrality, the North Strand of Dublin was blitzed from the air, by the Luftwaffe that had flown off course, accidental diversion by Intelligence it was said, and a dairy complex in the country was destroyed.  Hardship grew there, for thousands of soldier volunteers from Eire who fought to save the world from invasion, were later blamed for desertion and lost pensions, all army rights taken away.  Ten thousand overall died in the War, from Ireland alone.

I remember my father bringing home a dome from Belfast, a huge thick glass thing with two steel sliding windows. 

“What is it, Daddy?”

“A satellite,” says he, with a wink, and we didn’t question it at all, didn’t link it with a past war.   We crawled into it, played in it with neighbour’s kids, sunned ourselves inside, and loved it, imaginations going wild.  We were sure it was a satellite that fell from up high and came from the top of the sky.

It was hoisted at last onto a circular sheet of zinc.  Dad created a door.  My mother grew tomatoes under it, cucumbers, scallions, and strawberries, then started off seedlings for gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes.  It was a greenhouse and much more.

Recently in England, in the town, there was a local fly-past over St. Mary’s in Thame.  It happens nearly every year to honour the veterans and the memorial in London that Robin and others put there.  This time the local Mayor had died and, not a Spitfire, but a rare Lancaster flew past at last, circling the town.  I ran out hearing the drumming sensation and loud noise of the craft, and saw a glass dome aloft, then squealed to the next generation, pointing above, and they looked at me in wonder as if I were mad.  “It’s the satellite!  Our satellite!  My mother’s satellite!”  Knowing the truth, I was so glad at first and then sad. 

Only then did I realize it was the rear gunner’s turret of a Lancaster that my father had brought home, obviously the ‘satellite’ that really came down from high in the sky, but near Belfast?...  And I thought about that, but now, alas, no father to ask.  I did wonder why and still do, thinking of the hours of play we had, and the tomatoes we ate, knowing our beloved ‘satellite’ was part of the War fate, hoping that inside it and outside it, no-one did die.

DWINA ***