There was a time in the far-off days of simple pleasures when my husband, Mike, my daughter, Anna, and I regularly enjoyed long, lazy holidays on farms and by the sea in Ireland.
Our favourite farm was in the Irish Midlands a few miles outside Abbeyleix, near where my parents were born and where they returned to when I was 10. Harry, the farmer, and his son looked after the farm while his wife ran a guest house, helped by her sister. She was a superb cook and a first-rate homemaker. She had gone to Abbeyleix from Northern Ireland to teach Mathematics at a private school in the town and had met and married Harry who had also recently arrived to take over the farm he'd inherited from an uncle.
The highlight of each day was the evening meal, followed by a gathering in the drawing room to enjoy lively conversation over coffee. There was no television and the evenings were too dark to go rambling along the lonely country lanes. Anyway, we'd have been really active during the day so it was a relief to sit down and chat with not a care in the world. It was a restful haven from the stresses of our normal working lives.
Harry was a great storyteller and practical joker. No matter how often he played jokes on us, we were caught out afresh time and time again.
One evening we were in the middle of dinner when he came rushing in, apparently agitated, gasping, 'Which of you guests has a white 1100? Someone has slashed all the tyres and I'll need to call the police before I ask the garage to send someone out.'
Two of us owned up to having a white 1100, a young lady civil servant who was relaxing for a few days from the stresses of her job and myself. We jumped up from the table and raced out to the car park, horrified by images of the slashed tyres and wondering which of us was the unfortunate victim. Neither car had been touched. What a relief! For a moment panic had seized us as the normal tranquillity of those parts of the world was temporarily ruffled. Back inside, Harry was waiting to savour our reaction and we both realised he was having fun at our expense. There was a time when I didn't like being the butt of anyone's jokes but I'd learnt that the best way to cope was to join in the laughter against myself, not easy but worth working at. We allowed him his moments of merriment!
Another afternoon we arrived back from our day's excursions to find Harry waiting in the garden for us, again appearing agitated and upset. The warning bells didn't sound even when he greeted us with the news that the wife was in a real flap because Rusty, the dog, had gone off with the joint of meat so there was a crisis in the kitchen over what to do for dinner. We fell for it, hook, line and sinker, offering to drive into town, five miles away, to buy a replacement joint. I don't think I was worrying so much about not having meat for dinner, more that the wife was in such a state! We didn't half feel embarrassed at being taken for a ride for the second time in a week but we were beginning to cop on whenever he appeared with a new tale, 'beginning' being the operative word!
A family from Surrey arrived on a two-day visit on their way south while we were there. The father was a rather stern, unsmiling, remote character, the picture of correctness, and his wife and two daughters were quiet and uncommunicative. There was no prize for guessing whose word held sway in that household! They passively joined the after-dinner coffee session in the drawing room where we all sat around in a circle in the fading light.
Harry took centre stage and began a new, breathless tale of horror. He recalled a day some months previously when his wife received a packet of powder in the post from America, which she opened and assumed to be a sample of the latest brand of powdered soup. After all, the Americans had all these amazing things like instant tea, instant coffee and packet soups which made life so easy for the cook and which tasted superior to the real product and which certainly wouldn't reach the shelves of Irish shops for many a long year.
She decided to test the soup on her guests. There was an English family staying there at the time and they remarked on how delicious the soup was and were surprised to hear it was produced from a packet. They'd never before tasted soup like it, even in England. 'Oho', I thought. 'Another tall tale and this time it's not directed specifically at me!'
I glanced at my fellow guests and noticed their expressions of boredom with a hint of disdain at having to sit and listen to such idle chatter about the merits of American instant meals. Their boredom, however, rapidly turned to disgust as the tale developed. The day after the soup episode, Harry went on, his wife had a letter from a cousin in America, hoping her uncle's ashes had arrived safely.It was neither the time nor the place to have told such a tasteless tale. Although I knew that it was no more than Harry's idea of fun, I felt distinctly queasy. One of my main weaknesses is a fastidiousness which leaves my stomach heaving at the slightest provocation so I rushed out into the chill night air to recover. Not many would appreciate that kind of humour and certainly not our friends from Surrey. I was never sure what Harry's wife thought of these tales but I expect she was well used to listening to them. She was a shy kind of person and more of a listener than a talker.
I do recall one occasion, however, when she had cause to reprimand him. He was fooling about on the stairs, making the children laugh and getting them really worked up and excited before their bedtime. There happened to be an American couple staying there at the time and they had a 10-year old son who was getting really high. I was amazed to hear the mother call out, 'Come here, young man. You need to take some medication to calm you down.'
It was the first time I'd heard the terms 'hyperactivity' and 'medication' and the idea of doping your children to quieten them down shocked me to the core. Since then I have met other parents with children who are hyperactive but who wouldn't dream of administering any form of drug to them. Rather, they look at possible triggers, like food additives. Meeting people from so many different backgrounds and cultures enriches one's own life and broadens one's knowledge and experience.
I think Harry weighed up his guests and then derived his fun from aggravating a situation as if he was holding a mirror before us so that we could recognise how we appeared to others. Still, he had a heart of gold. Each afternoon he would invite all the children to pile into his old car and he'd drive them to the little shop down the road and let them choose whatever sweets or chocolate or icecreams they fancied. This was their daily treat during our stay at the farm. He also played games with them and made them laugh, seeming like a little child himself.
He loved to talk about past guests, such as the brother of an archbishop who had stayed there with his wife and daughter, and Lord George Brown and his wife who broke their journey on their way from the ferry in Dublin to visit James Callaghan in his West Cork home. These guests brought light into his remote part of the world.
On our last visit to the farm Harry was suffering from bone cancer and was in considerable pain and discomfort but he made an effort to chat and be his old cheerful self although there was no attempt to pull our legs at that stage. After his death the guest house closed down.
It's been many a long year since I enjoyed a relaxing holiday. Nowadays it seems as if we must always be on the move. It's as if we realise that the years are closing in on us and there isn't time to achieve all we want to do. Some days when the pace of life becomes really hectic, I look back to the past and long to be able to stand still once more and let my mind go blank and my body slow down while I listen to humorous tales.
Alas! The age of story-telling has gone and has been replaced with sophisticated computers, television, noise and invasion of privacy. Taking time out to reminisce and write another chapter of my real life story is my main relaxation these days. Even bridge, which I used to enjoy as a social game, is now for me highly competitive and anything but relaxing. I wonder if there are farm guest houses now where you can go out in the fields in the morning to gather baskets of wild mushrooms which end up that night as cordon bleu meals, and where you can sit and listen to tales from the farm, far from the stresses and strains of your ordinary life.