Margaret Newman: Greenmount, Cures, Working Life,

Margaret Newman: Greenmount, Cures, Working Life,

Life History:

Margaret (born circa 1920) grew up in Greenmount, near The Lough. There were 4 in the family; her father had passed away and her mother, Kate, went out to work.
She got cocoa and buns at her primary school. She tells a story about finding out that American tourists visited St Fin Barre’s Cathedral and gave money to people so she went there to collect some even though it was a Protestant church.
Because her mother worked she and her sister did chores around the house.
When she was 14 she got a job cleaning a house; she describes the work involved. She then got a job in McKechnie’s cleaners. She talks about going dancing during the Second World War, and Cork city in a blackout.
She talks about how people behaved in her time and how they behave today.
She tells a story about an elderly woman who put a hot poker into a jug of porter and drank it as a cure. The woman’s husband made herbal cures.
She remembers walks around Cork, and where lovers used to meet. She talks about minding children, and children’s behaviour today.
She tells a funny story about going into a mausoleum in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral.
She talks about her mother, who was a caring and charitable woman.
She used to make Christmas puddings and Chester cakes (also known as Donkey’s Gudge).

Note: This is one of 4 interviews conducted with Margaret.

5 August 2010

CFP_SR00407_newman_2010

Cork, Ireland, 1920s-2000s

Interviews with Margaret Newman:
CFP00408; CFP00411; CFP00412:

Cork Folklore Project Audio Archive

Cork Folklore Project

English

Sound

1 .wav File

88min 49sec

Farrancleary, Cork

.wav

24bit / 48kHz

The following is a short extract from the interview transcript, copyright of the Cork Folklore Project. If you wish to access further archival material for this interview or other interviews please contact CFP, folklorearchive@gmail.com

M N: That’s Daly’s bridge yes. But it was the Shaky Bridge when it was – ya right. Then my other used to kill us because if we went up farther and went over Sunday’s Well Bridge you were looking at the mental hospital. But we never knew it as the mental hospital. Twas the madhouse and me mother said ‘Where did ye go for a walk?’ Now there’d be four of us together like. Eh, we were out in the madhouse road. ‘Where’s that?’ And we’d tell her and she’d say ‘ye, that’s very, don’t be saying them things. That’s the mental home’ she said ‘that’s for unfortunate’ she said, that’s you know she’d be telling us all that stuff. And we, we used to call it the madhouse. ‘And where’d ye go for a walk?’ ‘The madhouse road.’ And then you’d see couples and normally they’d be inside in a ditch and there was a load of em on the side of the road and we used to call em confession boxes. [Laughter] That’s what we used to call ‘em, confession boxes. The fellas’ and the girls would be sitting on the on the – the edge and they might be leaning back and you could see the, the print of the two and we used to call them confessions. Honest to god, we were a terror. But then again we never done any wrong to anybody. You know, we didn’t – we just didn’t and you didn’t curse or anything. That was all. Or if you took the double holy name you’d get a smack into the mouth if you did that.