Living in the Past: A Northern Irish Memoir by Arthur Magennis Page B

African general in the Boer war. This would be in the early thirties, so the Boer war would still be remembered. Peter died while I was very young. When somebody dies, the corpse is usually laid out on the bed in the room for two days and people call in to pay their respects. Peter was the first dead person I had seen and I remember it as quite a shock.
    When we came home from school, myself and my sisters were sent to the burial house, as it was called, and we were told to go to the bedside, kneel down and pray for the repose of his soul, which we dutifully did, but I think I just stared at the yellowish sallow face and bony hands with the rosary beads entwined round the fingers.
    All day long people came and went and then in the evening mostly men would come to the wake. Everyone would be offered refreshments: tea, whiskey, cigarettes. The corpse was not hidden away in a funeral parlour like it is now.
    Another death I remember was Felix, the Alsatian, which belonged to Captain and Mrs. Carson, for whom Eileen Hughes worked. He was very old and very much valued by them, as he had apparently saved the Captain’s life in China.
    One night when I went into Hughes’ there was a huge dog lying on his side on blankets in front of the fire. He was just skin and bones and Eileen was wiping away the phlegm from his mouth. The Carsons were on their summer vacation and Eileen was nursing the dog.
    This dog got everything, including spoonfuls of brandy, and all sorts of medicines were provided, but he didn’t last very long. Eileen looked after him like a child while regaling the ceilidhers with tales of his bravery.
    The following spring a large mobile kennel arrived in Hughes’ garden. It was placed facing the road with iron bars in the front and in it were four Alsatian pups. Eileen was now equipped with a new bicycle and a leather coat and all the accessories required by a dog handler. As the pups grew up they could see the road, and the noise they set up every time anyone went past was very bad. We used to bend down and tiptoe past, but it never worked. They were thoroughbreds for showing and had names like Ajax of Brushwood, which amazed me as I had never heard names like that for a dog.
    One wet afternoon, Eileen went past our house in her leather coat and on her new shiny bicycle with four pups on leads. How she ever got on the bike, I don’t know, but she came off into the hedge at our house. Nothing serious, but that was the last we saw of the bike.
    The dogs remained until the Carsons returned in the autumn and Eileen was given the largest of the litter, called Derry – a beautiful dog with a beautiful nature, but huge. She was also given a mini white smooth fox terrier bitch called Judy, who was about nine inches tall. The two pups were inseparable and looked so very funny running together, but the road became quiet and peaceful once more.
    Derry, as in the name Derrytresk, comes from the Irish word for oak, because that part of Ireland was once covered by forests of mostly oak and fir. This accounts for the number of fir tree and black oak roots found in the moss. Now that the land is drained this causes some inconvenience to the farmers who, if they wish to cultivate the land, must run the gauntlet of having a plough get stuck into a great root, damaging the agricultural implement and, maybe, the horse or, later on, the tractors.
    Some farmers got over this obstacle by using a piece of stick cut from the hedge to connect the plough to the horse or tractor, instead of the usual iron pin. When the sock of the plough struck a stump of the root, the wooden pin would break but the sock would get no harm.
    This procedure was all explained to my sister, Elizabeth, who was in charge of the shop one rainy night about eleven o’clock, when a woman called Susan McCann arrived with her little girl on a donkey and cart for supplies. She had come a long way from the lough shore and was very wet when Elizabeth opened the shop for