old tim and old joanie

Irish Jesuit Province

Old Tim and Old JoanieAuthor(s): John HannonSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 35, No. 407 (May, 1907), pp. 256-263Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20501147 .

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I256 ]

OLD TIM AND OLD JOANIE

I F you walked down the quiet street of our village any day in the younger 'sev'enties, you- would see, at almost any sun lit hour of the afternoon, a red-cheeked, old little Irish

woman standing in the narrow archway of Daly's'Aley. She wears a green plaid shawl, a full, pleated skirt, pinned up behind her waist, like a fishwife's,- -showing the-blue fpetticoat underneath, and has tufted -grey hair, surmoufited by a white frilled cap. This is Joan Regan, ":Choanie to Old Tim, " Old J oanie" to the neighbours.

:-Perhaps the companion of your walk is our village doctor. As he passes Daly's Alley, with its misleading official title of "Stafford Place," stamped deeply in a mortar panel over the entrance, he will drop the topics of the hour-Forster's Bill, French defeats, and Dickens's death-to call your attention to ,Joanie and the genders oflher pronouns.

"How is your husband to-day? says the doctor. "A-a-ah says Joanie, in sore grief, "'poor Tim! She is

very bad to-day, sir, poor Tim. She is bad entirly." Let us suppose that the good English doctor (who: had some

private means, and medicined the Irish poor for next to nothing, invites you up the alley, that he may have a look at ." poor Tim."

You go without fear, for Daly's Alley is not the Alsatia it has now become. Its proprietor is Irish, and so are its inhabitnats.

Moore's maiden of " Rich and Rare." would be as safe there, by day or night, as at home, but'she would have to mind where she stepped. An open kennel flows lazily in the centre of the court. .One of Old Tim's duties as; caretaker is: to keep this dubious

Styx in order with a broom and ten to one you will find him at his task. As you catch sight of the ESlightly-stooped, short figure, your first impression is: that it has propped from some

Gargantuan Christmas tree, or been swept from the'floor of a; giant's toy-shop. The face is that of Mr. Punch, as Dicky Doyle. has drawn: him. Of course the nose and chin are not quite so grotesquely pronounced, and Old Tim's expression is rather of cheerful simplicity than of joviality or shrewdness. None the less, Old Tim might well have posed as model to his brilliant contemporary and fellow-countryman, and his resemblance, to Punch was made absurdly complete by a blue cone-shaped cap with its point curving forward, and its tassel dangling over his nose.

The rest of him might have walked out of a coloured picture



OLD TIM AND OLD JOANIE 257

in a book of fairy tales. A blue jacket with bright brass buttons, yellow knee-breeches of Irish-cut, rainbow-hued woollen hose, half-shoes resembling brogues-there you have Tim's outer man inventoried. In this garb, or its fellow, he came to England, and it became him well. For, though most of his humour was of the unconscious kind, for twenty years and more Old Tim became the Triboulet, the Court jester-in-ordinary to our laughter-loving people. " Motley was his only wear," and he

was even married in it, just as he went to work and to Mass in it.

Your cicerone to the tranquil, unsavoury court, asks Old Tim how he is, and receives a patient answer. But you see for yourself how sorely the old man suffers. He has the " king's evil " on his neck and ear-the torturing and disfiguring affection for which Dr. Johnson was " touched" by Queen Anne, and countless others by Louis XIV--the Grand Monarque, however, taking superstition from the ceremony by saying to each sufferer: "Le Roy te touche, Dieu te guetrisse."

The doctor's word and your eyes assure you that much of Tim's purgatory is being put into each of his waking hours, but it is not for that that he seems so constrained in your pre sence. You are a stranger, and (shall we say ?) well-dressed, and therefore, to Tim's mind, a Saxon. Tim gets on very well

with English villagers whom he knows by sight; but, broadly (and also mildly) speaking, he loves not the Sassenach. He fidgets with his broom and looks severely at small boys of the

Alley who are making faces at him, and Picking pebbles against his door. The doctor smiles at you while the old man's head is turned and whispers a word about Tim's wonderful English.

Then he says aloud: " How is your wvife to-day ? " The old man's face clouds over. " Poor Choanie ? " he says. "He is

fery bad; oh, he iss so bad to-day." So you leave the court; but, hearing a skirmish as you

retreat, you turn round to find Old Tim scurrying lissom ly after his tormentors, his kaleidoscopic stockings twinkling over the ground at astonishing speed. He chevies the small fry into a corner, catches them, cuffs them; there are howls, doors open, Irish matrons come out, cuff their offspring lustily again, and threaten to tell their fathers. For Old Tim is well beloved, and the younger generation is growing up disrespectful to grey hair in this particular noisome slum of our cleanly village. As you regain the street, you find a couple of little girls, just out from the convent poor school, demurely asking J oanie-still sunning her old frame and breathing the sweeter air of the open road-how " poor Mr. Regan " is, for the fun of hearing her groan and



258 TUE IRISH MONTHLY

invert her genders: " 0-oh, she is very bad to-day; poor Tim, she is so bad."

* * * * * *

The promise last month was to give some account of Tim and Joanie's wonderful wooing and wedding. Those who deem that I am doing it Jedburgh justice-execution first, evidence afterwards-have ground for their opinion, but I have wished to give a pen-picture of the aged pair, for which my former canvas proved too small. Its central figure, Sister Eugene, was now more than ever their friend and constant helper, since Tim threw up the spade, and took to the light work mercifully found for him. I doubt if he got very much more for this than the free use of his cottage in the Alley; but, thank God, the old folks knew neither hunger nor the workhouse gate in England. One Famine was allowed to suffice for their trial.

Tim Regan and Joanie (whose maiden name I forget) were neighbours' children in Ireland. Of the same age, they were great friends from the beginning. For compression, I used the words " old sweetheart " in describing last month Old Joanie's pre-Famine relations to Tim, and the epithet may stand. Yet it was an unhurrying, happy-go-lucky, come-day-go-day sort of sweethearting. To begin with, each of them married somebody else, en premieres noces. No one familiar with the match

making traditions of rural Ireland a century ago will be surprised at this in the least. Allowance was usually made for strong aversions, but mere likes and dislikes seem for the most part to have been calmly brushed aside, with the full approval of the two folks most concerned. It was the same in Celtic Brit tany too, and in almost the same decade. I haven't her book by

me, but I am pretty sure that Madame de la Rochejaqueleine -the true wife who played a man's part in La Vendee with a well-loved husband-never set eyes on him till the banns were safely put up. Yet, as the song says, " the world went very

well then." Certainly the results of its marrying and giving in marriage in La Vendete and County Cork were none the worse because few pretty girls made " heroines " of themselves and novellettes of their lives by refusing the parti aimable, or the "dacent boy," selected by thoughtful parents.

So Joanie was placidly coupled to a husband other than Tim, and Tim philosophically took unto himself a wife other than Joanie. The first Mrs. Tim lived on till the eve of the bad times, and there was a son of the marriage, who was about eighteen when his mother died. Joanie's husband died a few months after the wedding. In due time Joanie became the mother o



OLD TIM AND OLD JOANIE 259

a baby-girl, whom I knew well as a middle-aged, married woman; she has now been dead some years. joanie put the child out to nurse, and went to service in a farmer's house.

All this is plain sailing. What may now puzzle romantic readers is why Tim did not marry Joanie when he was set free to do so, towards i847. I am afraid the reason will disappoint.

Old Tim and Old Joanie lacked that instinct of romance which is said to make the world go round, and certainly provides a livelihood for many deserving writers of fiction. Their affection for each other was lifelong and profound, but they were either too wise or too simple to look at marriage from a literary point of view.

Then came the Famine year, with all its fell work. The exodus followed, and Old Tim joined our particular party of emigrants, from the parishes of Kildorrery, Mitchelstown and Charleville, maybe caught up by them as they tramped south ward through Bandon, maybe foregathering casually with them on the quay at Cork; for, as I have said, he plied oar and net

when his spade was idle. Joanie remained in her place while Tim was driven to the

coffin-ships, and Tim's son, I think, but am not entirely sure, must have enlisted. At any rate he did something to cause a

life-long estrangement. Either he " took the gun " for the Sassenach, or he took soup from him. The latter alternative may be ruled out, turbulent as Pat Regan proved on his rare and unwelcome visits to the Alley, in later years, vainly en deavouring to extort shillings for drink from a sorely tried but unrelenting father.

" Call a pig at him, Choanie," Old Tim would say from within on these occasions, while Joanie parleyed without. " Yess, call a pig at him, Choanie. He hass no more manners no more pig." And then! Brr-rr! The limpid streams of comminatory Munster vernacular from all three made the stolid British brickwork ache to re-echo. The expressive tongue of the Gael was a vibrantly living language in the Daly's

Alley of the 'sixties. I am informed that Old Tim, whose English was slow and deliberate, was magnificently fluent in Irish on these occasions, and contrived to convey vehemently his full opinion of his son's behaviour here and prospects here after at considerable length, without once using an oath or a curse. Eventually Pat Regan would be blown by sheer oratory out of the Alley's narrow orifice, not to appear again for maybe a year or eighteen months, when the same scene would be en acted, to the puzzled glee of non-Irish-speaking children, and their elders' intelligent amusement and approval.



260 THE IRISH MONJTHLY

None of our people had " taken soup "; * Tim's son did not appear to strut his fitful hours upon the Alley stage till long after the bad times; for these reasons I conjecture that the recruiting sergeant secured him, and that nothing worse than the late Queen Victoria's shilling made a barrier 'twixt father and son.

After Kentish wanderings, when Tim and the neighbours found work in a Middlesex village, messages were sent home saying that the market gardens had room for Irish labour. Letters of like tenour from other orchard districts in the neigh bourhood effectually tapped the stream of North Cork emigra tion into the valley of the Thames. Word was brought by the " Grecians," as later emigrants to England came to be called by older refugees, that Joanie was in great distress. She had been cajoled by her master's daughter into aiding her to elope with a man whose suit, results proved, had been wisely rejected by the parents. As good as gold, as soft as butter, poor Joanie broke the trust both master and mistress reposed in her. She was wheedled into the scheme, and ended by doing all the lovers bade her, even to letting the girl's boxes and herself down from an upper window with cords. Next morning she was, of course, the first to suffer for what proved a luckless business to all con cerned. She was flung from her place, which must have been far from her native town, since everyone was merciless to her. She was denounced by all as a nefarious schemer. Poor Joanie was about as Machiavellian as a hen, but she could get no place, and famine still stalked the land, with death and fever in its train. Tim contrived to let her know his whereabouts, and, one fine day, Old Joanie and other women from Cork

walked into the village, to share the bread of exile. But the passage-money ? The fare from Cork to London

Docks on the crowded " coffin-ships "-rotten cattle boats like the ill-fated Ajax t-was then but half-a-crown.

* Three of them, however, were bom Protestants, and much respected. One soon became a Catholic ; another asked for a priest on his death-bed ; the third still lives, nominally a Protestant, but with an entirely Catholic

family of sons, daughters, and grandchildren. No one realised better than the unlettered old neighbours the distinction between culpable and invincible

ignorance. To the latter they were tolerance itself, even in some cases where

good Italian peasants would be crying: "

Fuoco, fuoco ! "

Instead of the

faggot they used their beads, and with better results. Coercion for the

heresiarch, by all means ; but for those born his dupes three centuries later, conciliation, consideration, conversion by example. What malicious twaddle it is for the English Yellow Press to call our people intolerant and cruel, sprung as they are from the only European race that never used torture to elicit evidence in its courts of law !

| The first batch of our people had bought places on the Ajax. For some reason they were not allowed to come aboard by the captain, and their



OLD TIM AND OLD JOANIE 26i

Joanie found shelter with her companions in some house of the Inish quarter, but not, I think, in Daly's Alley, where Tim

was thus early established, in tight lodgings vith other un married men.

And unmaried himself Old Tim remained for what the reader, is, perhaps, beginning to find an unconscionable time! Indeed, although Joanie found work in the gardens, the difficulty of

making ends meet was so great, with wages so low and bread so dear, that perhaps they would not have married at all had not the linguistic difficulty forced them together. Meanwhile they were the best friends and most inseparable gossips in the

world. One day, nearly two years after Joanie's arrival, Old Tim

was digging in a field vith other Irishmen. In the middle of the forenoon he glanced at the position of the sun, and then threw down his spade and walked towards the gate.

" Xhere are you going, Tim ? " cried one of his friends to him, in Irish.

" I am going," said Old Tim, " to get married." This was a dark saying, for the priest then lay sick unto

death. Also, by British law, no marriages might be celebrated in our tiny chapel.

The men tookit for one of Old Tim's drolleries. " Whom are you going to marry, Tim ? " they called as he

reached the gate. " Joanie, of course," replied Tim, from the other side of the

hedge. After dinner Tim was back at work as usual, handling his

spade and chatting away in Irish to his companions on either side.

" How did you get on this morning, Tim ? " asked one of them.

" I married Joanie," said Old Tim. And so he had, in the ivy-mantled old church by the river

which he and his wife knew so well, because our dead used to be taken there (as they continued to be until the passing of the Burials Act in my own time) but which was not a Catholic

passages were transferred to the next boat. The following morning they sailed close to the mast-tops that showed where so many fine Irish boys and

girls (the latter in the majority) lay drowned. My parents told me that all who perished in the Ajax were young people, and received Holy Communion in a body the morning they sailed?as did my father and mother, who. of course, would have shared their fate but for the captain's decision. The

decoying of Irish girls at the London docks was then so subtly and persis tently practised that I once heard an old Irishwoman say, with startling fervour : " Thank God the Ajax went down."



262 THE IRISH MONTHLY

church, at least since its rector, the Blessed John Hailes,* won the crown of martyrdom in I535, if we except the troublous years of Mary Tudor's reign.

How was the die cast? How came the hymeneal Rubicon to be forded thus ? Was it, as we wrote in our lIatin exercises, "by counsel or by chance"? I know not. Was Old Tim

misled, as was the late Mr. Matt Harris, M.P., of sterling memory, when he went to " Mass" at St. Alban's, High Holborn on Sunday, and would have sat the simulated ceremony out, had not his convert companion, Joseph Biggar, almost dragged him out at the Gospel, saying, " Matt, I'm horrified that a born Catholic like you can't tell the difference between 'Dominus vobiscum' and 'The Lord be with you,' as that parson in the vestments up there is bawling ?" Once again, I do not know and " not making you a short answer," as the old people used to say, I do not very much care. For Old Tim and Old Joanie had their knot tied in the temple of Rimmon as inevitably as they bowed their heads in it when one of the neighbours died, and soon afterwards old Father Wareing was gathered to his fathers, and his successor, young Father Weld, put everything right and blessed the pair of them.

But if you will be contented with a surmise, you may read mine for what it is worth. I think that this " Sassenach" marriage was stage-managed from start to finish by well-meaning Sassenachs of our village. And for this reason, with which I

may conclude my history of the strange wooing and stranger wedding of Tim and Joanie Regan, whose quaint little figures, however, must sometimnes flit through these pages again, if I am spared to continue this record of our exiles.

If English villagers had not piloted Old Tim and Old Joanie through the mysteries of an Anglican wedding, how would the following anecdote of the ceremony be current among them ?

Old Tim, says their tradition, came hot-foot from work in the blue coat, yellow knee-breeches and prismatic hose in which

we have seen him. Old Joanie met him " amid the cold Hic

Jacets of the dead " in the pathetically pretty churchyard, and followed so close behind him as he advanced to the altar that the Vicar did not see her enter. When Old Tim halted, facing

With him suffered the Blessed Richard Reynolds, chaplain of the

Brigittine Monastery in the same parish. No other village of our size gave one secular priest to the scaffold in Henry VIII's first persecution. Surely our having two priest-martyrs has much to do with the exceptionally kind treatment meted out by the villagers to their Catholic invaders of the '48-50.

The parish church became Catholic again for a space, of course, under Queen Mary, and has to this day a sepulchral cross erected by that well-meaning, unhappy lady, begging prayers for a nun-friend of hers, of the order to which B. Richard Reynolds ministered.



THE PLAINT OF AGE 263

the parson, Old Joanie halted too, symmetrically in his rear.

" Where is the bride ? " said the Vicar. " Pehind the small of my pack," observed Old Tim, laconi

cally. The bride tip-toed into view, like a little child playing bo

peep, and was soon entitled to call herself Mrs. Regan, according, to the laws and statutes of this realm, in no recorded case,

perhaps, more strangely made and provided. JOHN HANNON.

THE PLAINT OF AGE

ACROSS the silent years I hear your voice, O Youth of mine that left me long ago,

To keep the primrose path where all rejoice And Love's red roses glow.

I scarce had known 'twas you who called afar, Forgetting that grim Time left you the same

As when you thrust me from your conquering car, That day our parting came.

I girt my armour on, and forth I went Out on the rugged way that ends in night,

Divorced from joy, yet brave and confident In God's sustaining might.

Upon the shapeless mass that men call life, I chiselled through the noonday's torrid heat;

And now at evening, wearied with the strife, My task is incomplete.

Yet do I hope that ere my sands be run Those hands shall strike a still diviner chord,

For out of travail is the wisdom won That is our toil's reward.

Yea, out of travail is the purest gold Of our base natures brought into the light;

So shall our strivings blossom from the mould And live in death's despite.

WILLIAM O'NEILL.



old tim and old joanie

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