Nowadays when I go into my father’s old carpentry shed, I am met by silence and a jumble of discarded or worn-out things covered in cobwebs and faded sawdust where once everything was precise and purposeful. I remember my first visit as a very young child, the smell of wood beyond the barn-style door, the gleaming implements hanging from wall-laths, the plain statements of planks of timber waiting to take on the uses my father had in mind for them.
Sometimes, amid the twilight and the dust, I seem to become again that small child full of wonder standing knee-high to the thick-legged oak bench where he sawed and planed. I rewind to summer swallows flitting in and out, and fancy I can still hear the honeybees that hived high in the rafters. I see a stream of shavings gather in what my father called “the well of the bench”, and how he would brush them off with a decisive hand, and forget them even as they rippled in thick tangles about his feet and ankles.
All through my childhood the shed was a very busy and noisy place. The huge electric bandsaw where hurleys were “ribbed” from planks of ash still stands. The yowling sound of its start-up and the scratchy yet oddly jaunty song that followed always provoked a curse from our neighbours – “Devil mend that blashted contraption of his” – for the power required to turn the bandsaw caused their house lights and TV sets to go on the blink.
Still they came to watch and chat while he planed the hurleys to a smooth, supple finish, or crafted household furniture, or fitted felloes to the wheels of horse carts. At one time he made coffins but found this disconcerting and never had the heart to charge the family of the deceased for them.
Right from the foundation of his sawmill and workshop in the late 1930s to the autumn of 1978 when he lost his life in an accident while felling ash trees for hurleys, it was timber, timber, always timber. “Move with rather than against, run true to the grain.” So he told my brothers and myself, gradually introducing us to the work. We learned to hit the nail on the head, to measure with a hinged and foldable two-foot “rule”, and to mark wood for cutting using an oval pencil. We graduated to the smoothing plane and spokeshave, stepped into rhythm at the much-scarred bench, eventually got to use tendon saw, chisel and auger.
Or at least my brothers did. They were naturals. But, try as I might, I couldn’t quite manage it. My hand was “heavy” – I planed too hard, unintentionally flouting his most fundamental advice to “leave the timber slightly proud” since, “once removed, it can never be put back”. I failed to adequately “sight the wood”, to recognise the spirals in the grain and to avoid the heart quakes that weaken it. And though I recognised that where a knot in the timber might enhance the look of a tabletop, it would ruin the bas of a hurley, I still had difficulty in fluently catching the swerve of the grain when “patterning” planks for the saw.
Eventually my father accepted that I wasn’t cut out to be a carpenter. But the language he used while talking woodcraft, or praising or berating his assemblage of madcap, half-obsolescent machines, triggered something in my head. I found it poetic.
So that, years later, when I had left home to train as a teacher and started to find my voice as a poet, I began to scribble down expressions he used: “the resonance of a machine”, “the spokeshave able to see around corners”, “the plane a sweeper of the board”. I got my grounding in aesthetics from forest and sawmill and carpentry shop as surely as I did from the books I read.
My father lost his life at the job he loved. After grieving with my family and slowly coming to terms with the grief, I celebrated his life, wanting in a very real sense to “retrieve” it, and to sing as well of the loving but restrained dance between him and my mother, the wetland Callows of my childhood, the neighbours who lived round about us in rural east Galway, their zest and their wonderfully colloquial speech. In so doing, almost without being aware of it, I became in my own fashion a craftsman.
The Hurley-maker’s Son by Patrick Deeley is published by Doubleday Ireland, at £14.99
[ Read George O’Brien’s Irish Times review of The Hurley-maker’s SonOpens in new window ]
