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ONE IRISH SUMMER by Jean Morris

Claremorris is a small town surrounded by peat bog in County Mayo, Eire. At the time of my sojourn it was a dull place, the major source of entertainment, for the young men at least, being the fish and chip shop. The fish was fried and served by teenage girls from outside Claremorris, as local parents would not allow their daughters to work in such a den of iniquity (they might meet young men, you see!). Far more respectable were the many pubs, most of which were owned by Cormac, proprietor of the nearby stable. This stable, where I worked, housed a show jumping yard and riding school. The town was usually quiet, sometimes rowdy, but always good-humoured. The year after I left, gunshots were heard in the town square, where I lived, as police and soldiers routed out an IRA hideout.

The stable was a ten-minute walk from the same town square. Our days began at the inefficient but extremely civilized hour of nine o’clock and, invariably, our first task was to find the school horses. They escaped from their fields with such regularity that no one in the county was surprised to meet them happily trotting down the road – town or country. Only once did their absence cause concern. I had scrambled up the indoor arena roof to the ridge with a pair of binoculars to scan the hills and hollows for the missing beasts and seen none. We scoured the county by car, checking the horses’ regular haunts. Nothing. After about three hours they calmly emerged from behind a clump of trees a mere quarter mile from the stable. They had clearly studied the art of camouflage!

Mare and foal planning tomorrow's escape!

These school horses, characters all, were the best I have ever had the honour of working with. A plain, shaggy collection of escape artists, they were willing, well schooled, honest and worth their weight in rubies. Perhaps it was their daily Guinness, extracted from the depths of the barrels in Cormac’s pubs and stored in whisky bottles in the feed room, which kept them fresh and happy! The students were characterized by their linguistic variations and their sartorial oddities. A family chatted amongst themselves in a language vaguely Germanic. It was Irish. They asked me to teach them in French, which I used, with a minute scattering of Italian learned eight years previously in college, to instruct the many European visitors. I picked up some useful Irish. "A good shkelping" sounds so much more effective than a "smack with a whip"! Riding attire ranged from the bare feet of a group of young French tourists, through shorts and frilly tops, to the white dog collar and clerical black of Father Malone, Catholic priest.

Cormac, not content with pubs and horses, organized weekly car and farm equipment auctions. As the vehicles for sale were parked in the indoor arena, it was necessary to school the horses around tractors, harrows and other large and spiky agricultural implements. These merely added to the challenge of chickens, sheep, a couple of cows and a toddler, all of whom had free access to the area.

He also held a horse auction – a memorable event.

Two days prior to the auction an honest and solid young Irish hunter type called Skylab arrived at the stable for schooling. Freshly pulled out of a boggy field, started but very green, he was nevertheless willing to try to the best of his youthful ability. Some basic flat work and an introduction to jumping were all we had time for.

Auction day arrived. To my Anglo-Saxon mind, it was utter chaos. My first task was to rescue two bog ponies (tiny hairy creatures of indeterminate ancestry), who were thoroughly enmeshed in long lead ropes, from the confines of a rickety old trailer. Their owner, having created the problem, refused to cope and left the scene of mayhem for a drink. I cautiously entered the trailer, persuaded the frightened ponies that kicking me and biting each other didn’t help the situation in the least and disentangled them. The three of us emerged, shaken but undamaged.

The horses for sale displayed their talents in a small gravelled enclosure with a jump in the middle. Within minutes of my arrival on Skylab, the archetypal Irish dealer, dressed in a battered trilby and tattered raincoat tied with string around the waist and wielding a substantial and knobbly cane, pushed the single bar up to four feet and told me to jump it. Feeling completely out of our depth (Skylab’s maximum jumping effort to date was about two feet), but not wishing to argue with The Cane, Skylab and I headed for the obstacle. I think we both closed our eyes as we took off, but we made it to the other side – taking the pole with us. The Irishman spat in disgust and replaced the pole. Wondering what we had done to deserve this, we tried again, marginally more successfully. The dealer poked Skylab sharply in the ribs a couple of times with The Cane, seemed to be satisfied with the resulting indignant grunts and successfully bid on him.

In addition to teaching, I also schooled some of the jumpers. Rosie, a small, excitable Thoroughbred, was my mount whilst being shown how to tackle four foot high, solid Irish banks. The idea is to jump quietly onto the bank, pause briefly to check the landing, then pop down the other side. No one had explained this to Rosie, who took off at a gallop, enthusiastically flew the bank and bolted on the other side. All rather more flamboyant than I would have liked! One day, Rosie and I were working peacefully in a field, when, with a shriek of uncontrollable passion, Charlie the Connemara stallion leapt over the fence and tried to seduce Rosie. She resisted his determined overtures by bucking, squealing and kicking.

Summer on the west coast of Eire

He retaliated by kicking her in the ribs – just where my leg had been half a second earlier. I urged Rosie to a gallop and we skidded into the indoor arena, with Charlie bellowing at our heels. Cormac’s two teenaged children, attracted by the noise, waved broomsticks in Charlie’s face and distracted him long enough for me to get Rosie safely in her stall.

Charlie, a handsome fellow whose healthy libido was clearly unsatisfied by the scruffy little bog mares who periodically visited him, was determined to round up a herd of his own. I arrived one morning to be greeted by a 10 year old Dublin girl, who was staying nearby for the summer. Pale and thin, in frayed hand-me-downs, she looked as if she had stepped out of a particularly socially significant Dickens’ novel.

"Charlie’s in with the school horses," she said, "and Mannix is trying to protect them but Charlie keeps attacking him and I’ve got some of the mares into another field, but I can’t stop him!"

Poor Mannix, a middle-aged gelding, was doing his best to save his ladies from the rude advances of young Charlie, and was getting battered in the process. Between us, the courageous little city girl and I managed to separate the mares, catch the unrepentant and over-excited stallion and secure him in another field.

After about six weeks in residence, I had a crashing fall from the unpredictable show jumper Little John. A shooting pain up my spine when I tried to move kept me on the arena dirt until loaded on to a frighteningly old and decayed door, for transport to the tack room. I was taken by ambulance, with police escort, to the county hospital. My back was X-rayed and I was deposited in the ward. Pain immobilized my legs and right arm, my family was 3000 miles away and a third opinion was being sought. I had also taken half the arena footing with me in my breeches, so I was in a rather distressed and dirty condition when I heard someone praying. I opened my eyes and beheld a minister. "This is it," I thought, "the last rites." The minister finished his prayer, gave me a kindly look and said, "And what happened to you, me darlin’?"

What happened was nothing worse than severe soft tissue damage. Daily, nuns, priests and ministers came to visit the patients. The Catholic priest was herded from my bed by the ward sister. "She’s P", she hissed, and the priest hurried away! The nuns compelled all the C’s to take communion, regardless of their state of health. My friendly minister was less demanding, offering a comforting chat every day.

Donkeys in the morning mist on top of Croagh Patrick Pilgrims descending Croagh Patrick

Shortly after my release from hospital, I was invited to join the annual pilgrimage up Croagh Patrick. St. Patrick sat on top of this steep and barren mountain for forty days, thereby ridding Ireland of snakes. While many people simply go for the "crack" (i.e. "for the fun of it"), devout pilgrims, some lame or blind, climb the rocky slope barefoot and queue in the chilly mist for a blessing in the chapel at the summit.  One entrepreneurial type herded his laden donkeys to the chapel and sold lemonade at exorbitant prices – a fine mix of the sacred and the secular. In spite of my participation in the pilgrimage, I could not ride for the rest of the summer, but continued teaching and assisting at shows. One day we headed out in the decrepit truck, five of us in the cab, four horses in the back and a large stallion in a trailer attached behind. The passenger door of the cab did not latch, so the person nearest (we took turns) held it closed. The truck punctured a tire. Later, the trailer bounced off the hitch. We arrived at the show just a little late. On the return journey, we collected two more ponies and a load of lumber, which was stacked precariously between the six equines. Inevitably, a horse fell amongst the lumber. Her groom went back to restore and maintain order until a desperate pounding on the communicating window caused us to pull over. The mare had fallen a second time and the groom wanted out. We made it home, and because this was Eire, no one was even scratched! TOP OF PAGE Text and photographs © Jean Morris Reproduction of either the text or photographs is prohibited without express permission of copyright owner.