Learning Lessons

Recovering from a surprise bug and unable to do any more than read, (no great penance, needless to say), I found Liam O'Flaherty's 'Famine', which was on my shelves for some time and I always meant to read. I read it in two days and must tell you, it is an amazing, a stunning, a riveting piece of work. There are so many parts of it I would like to tell you about, but they are too many, and I really don't want to spoil the discovery for anyone who gives it a go. I urge anyone who wants a meaningful novel to read, get this book. It is a story told against the background of the Irish Famine, also known as The Great Hunger. The Famine was always given a capital letter when written about, and with reason, for it was an event written into all our psyches, albeit some are unaware of it. I would go so far as to say that it may well be at the back of the country's troubles today, for the way the country behaved during the so-called 'boom' which ended catastrophically in 2008 was definitely not the way a population unscarred by massive want or hunger would behave.

Critics who were quoted on the back cover of the book said that Mary was the heroine, and indeed she was, but underneath it all, Brian, her father-in-law, is the most memorable character. All the characters, however, are well-drawn and rounded figures. It is a horror story all the greater because it describes real times in the life of this small island, from which everyone suffered, at the very least psychologically. Most of the suffering though was physical also, living skeletons walked the roads, eating whatever the countryside provided; those who could got away to England or America.

I never can understand the wide spaces of road edges and the fields lying empty of cultivation or stock which one sees when travelling around the Irish countryside. And not too far from our local town, there are paddocks of ragwort seeding themselves everywhere. Years ago there were warning notices in the post office against ragwort and its dangers for horses and other animals. Nowadays, no-one seems to care. Surely with a history such as ours, empty or poisonous fields cry out to heaven. There is no reason for us not to be totally self-sufficient as far as food is concerned with the land and water we have. As global warming, for whatever reason, continues, others will come and show us how to use our fields.

This book about the Famine was all the more real for me because I've been digging into family history recently, and learned that a great great grandmother who died of post-famine fever was carried to Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin on a wheelbarrow by her husband for burial, because no workers would risk going near the body. Another great great grandfather who was a teacher died in Co. Carlow at the time, with his wife and two young children. Everyone was affected in one way or another. This book was written within ninety years of the horror, in 1937, and the copy I have is a paperback edition dated 1979 and published by Wolfhound Press.

Liam O'Flaherty wrote among other novels one called 'The Informer' which was turned into a film by John Ford, who was actually a cousin of his. I would think that 'Famine' would make an awe-inspiring film too, giving plenty of work to extras. The most momentous parts of the book are very visual:

What more can I say! If you can at all, do read this book.

Lots of people say they would love to garden, but they don't have time, or a big enough garden, or the know-how. Well, the latter is easily acquired from books, and also now from the world wide web, obviously. If you don't feel you have the space, and you are short of time because you must work for your bread as well as run a home and pay for the baby minder, (I'm not going to talk about that weird state of affairs just now), and you think a houseplant or two would bring dust and pests into your house (not necessarily the case but it is a widely-held view), get yourself a little sink or fish box, or make a concrete tub, stand it at your back door, fill it with good well-drained soil and grit, and buy some tiny plants. 'Collins Guide to Alpines' , by Anna N. Griffith, published by Collins London in 1972 is the type of book you need now. It gives the names of rock plants which are not in the main hard to find, tells you the type of soil they like to live in, whether they mind getting too wet or not, and when they will flower. When you find these tiny plants you will fall in love with them. The first year you garden this way, you will buy many so-called tiny plants which will take off and become giants; blame the nursery and move them to a border or give them away, and start again. Research and experience will teach you the names of the plants which will stay small. Seed sellers such as www.chilternseeds.co.uk will have seeds of many teeny plants which can be sown outside in your little garden. Or you may want to have another box just for seedlings. Eventually, you may want another sink or trough...but you will not have to walk far to tend your garden, and the plants will not have to be cossetted. You have a whole new interest in life as long as you can keep your plants out of reach of the family dog which was supposed to be the size of a Yorkshire terrier but is daily showing more resemblance to a St. Bernard. You may have to dissuade the family cat from sunning herself on the more cushiony plants, but a few sprinkles of water should do the trick. The library should have books on sink and trough gardening; rock gardening in the title is not always a good bet, as some people have monstrous sized rock gardens with five foot shrubs in them and rocks like the foothills of mountains. Books on trough gardening, though, unmistakeably deal with tiny plants which can be relied upon to stay within the stated limits. And if you ever want to garden in a larger way, all you learn in taking care of your miniature plants will easily transfer to their bigger brethern. Go for it!

'Teach Yourself To Learn A Language' is one of the famous Teach Yourself books, in this case written by P.J.T. Glendening, and published by The English Universities Press Ltd., London in 1963. Inside you will find sensible instructions on what you must do before you proceed to study your language of choice. It gives examples of the type of survey of a language which should be made before you start. The languages surveyed for this purpose are Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindustani, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. I have found it a wonderful book, which inspires you with confidence in your ability to learn a language.

Irish people have the idea that they are bad at languages. Partly to blame for this is the poor teaching of their own native tongue, well, nowadays, their second native tongue, for we are almost all accomplished speakers of our first language, Hiberno-English. I recall a mature student in UCD telling me that she had just discovered that Irish had genders, Masculine and Feminine, the existence of which she was aware in other languages such as French, but no-one had ever mentioned it concerning Irish. I think that is a sin. What kind of language teaching can lead to that ignorance and confusion? There always seems to have been a school of thought in Ireland that we can learn the Irish language in a kind of osmosis because it is lodged somewhere in our Irish brains, just waiting to come out. But the teaching of languages in Ireland generally is a disgrace. The first thing which should be taught in schools is linguistics. I recall two first-year students in UCD whose first tongues were German and Spanish respectively, who had studied linguistics from the age of seven in Germany and Spain. They got Firsts in their first year university courses, while the Irish struggled with this peculiar discipline. Of course they triumphed later in their further language studies, one in Arabic and Hebrew, the other in English and Portuguese. The former was fluent also in English, Norwegian and Italian as well as of course in her native German.

You don't need me to tell you that we now have a high percentage of young people unemployed. The agencies which are delivering re-education such as Information Technology to these young people ignore the acquisition of foreign languages totally. Yet look on any job recruitment site online and key in that you can speak a language such as German, Italian, Russian and so forth, and you will be inundated with job opportunities just waiting to be filled. The fact that many require a degree should be no problem to our highly-educated populace. Try, for example, http://ie.jobrapido.com/ and put any language in the search box, and give your e-mail address. Day after day you will receive notice of jobs in Dublin or countrywide which are waiting to be filled by anyone who can speak just one foreign tongue. Any government worth its salt should be offering retraining in languages to the young unemployed, even if they only hope to export them to Europe, of which we are supposed to be so much a part. Pshaw! That's what I say. It's time to get real here! You too can learn a language. It's a set of rules which you learn to follow, and a vocabulary which you will acquire if you dedicate yourself to it. Every day people learn new words; the fact that these new words are not English, should make no difference. You can do it!