The Newspaper - John McCarthy
Long before the internet, before television, even before there was a radio in every house, there was the newspaper or as everyone knew it, the paper. Any assertion made at the shop in the pub or on a stroll through town was given the seal of truth by the statement, “I read it in the paper”. It didn’t matter which paper as we all knew who read what, but the traction given to any event great or small by a mention in the national or local press was undeniable.
In our house the paper came in three varieties; The Irish Press, The Sunday Press and The Kerryman. Each had its own particular charm. For me it was the Monday edition of The Press, particularly the sports pages. For my mother, The Sunday Press was the bee’s knees and both of us read the Kerryman from cover to cover every week.
The Sunday paper was picked up from Mike Sullivan after Mass. It was brought home and left on an old battered fireside chair in the front room till the dinner was cooked and eaten and the ware washed, dried and put back in the press. Only then would my mother sit down and with a pair of dodgy, sello-taped, de Valera specs perched on her nose, she would begin reading. The front page stories would get a few minutes, more if there was anything local or royal involved. A general skim through the middle pages would help catch up with the weeks happenings at home and abroad. The sports pages were ignored by and large and she would eventually arrive at the crossword and competition page.
On the top of this page there was the fashion competition. This consisted of a row of full length black and white pictures of mannequins in coats, costumes or summer dresses lettered from A to J and the idea was to pick out the most fashionable and list them in order on the grid underneath. This could take anything from 10 minutes to a half an hour and required total concentration on her part and total silence on ours. Decisions made, the entry form would be filled in and she would move down the page to the crossword.
This was a quick job done purely on an intuitive feel for how the compiler was, in my mother’s estimation, getting through any particular week. A letter or two would be helpfully inserted throughout the grid to assist with each clue. For example, the clue might be “a not very bright person” 4 letters, and already there for you would be C, L and two blanks. Could be clod, could be clot. Mother would read through the clues, close her eyes and suss out the mood like a tealeaf reader on a roll and confidently fill in the answer. She won a tenner once and we ate in a place where you pay for your dinner after you eat it for the first time in our lives. When she was finished, both competitions would be cut out along the dotted line, a postal order for a shilling attached and the two placed in an envelope addressed to the paper’s office in Dublin. They would be dispatched that same evening as we came home from the Sunday walk via the letterbox at the top of the street.
Then at the end of each month she sat at the plain deal table by the kitchen window, licked the tip of a fat puce pencil and circled a death notice or two in the latest issue of the Kerryman. When she was satisfied that any other important stuff had been likewise highlighted, she closed it and placed it front page down on the tabletop. Then she began the ceremony of folding and securing it so that it could be posted to Fr. Michael in Missouri. This process was a kind of mystical origami where she started with a full size 14 or 16 page news-paper and ended up with a neat compact block through which a small piece of white string was then drawn and tied in a series of secret pulls and knots for extra security. The completed package was about the size of a Sunday Missal.
Occasionally, a note would be enclosed enquiring after the good father’s health and adding a short opinion piece on the current state of the place. The blank white space above and just to the right of the paper’s masthead was always to the front and it was here that the full postal address of the recipient was written and the postage stamp and blue and white airmail sticker were affixed. Finally the letters SAG – St. Anthony Guide were printed in block capitals on the reverse side. Then whichever one of us was handy would be given the package and instructed to bring it around to the Post Office. It was inserted into the pitch black innards of the wide polished brass letter box marked “all other places” and eventually emerged from its journey through dark and light at the presbytery in St. Louis. There, the land disputes, local parish news and league results would be read and argued over as if that great city were no more than a town-land in the bailiwick of Ballyferriter.
Sure, the internet has done wonders to keep us connected but to be truly in touch, you need to get ink on your fingers, ink first smeared on typeset by the hands of a neighbours child.