Another snippet of old Irish life from Mrs Robb, a little chapter in her Recipes from the Farm Kitchen…
Kate was old and never considered it necessary to wash except, when trying to tether the goats, she would slip and tumble in to the overflowing stream at the side of the old lonan. She always looked the same, face lined with fine pencil like marks running between the folds of her skin. These marks, plus coarse woollen stockings and old canvas shoes seemed to blend together, both in summer and winter.
She was never ill even a cold unknown, and she kept in her layers of old tatty clothes with a few hens roosting on the end of the iron bedstead. Nothing about her life was sacred, anyone who liked to listen could hear her case history. How many children she had, who their fathers were, and how they had got on in their places they ‘wrought in’.
“Have you been a widow long?” I asked her one day during an intimate conversation. She looked at me, her eyes wide with surprise, “Why, is he dead? he went of twelve year ago and I never heard tell of him since.”
When visitors came to the district, they found Kate’s bland expression a most fascinating feature. Few people ever accepted her philosophy but her absolute confident faith in every farmer’s willingness to comply with her request for a few spuds, a wee can of buttermilk, or a turnip, left them full of amazement at the simple cheeky method of getting food for the asking.
I haven’t been able to find out what a ‘lonan’ is
Lois Elsden 