The Parish Read Online Free

wanted?” and so decided to do an article.
    Over the twenty-four years,
Candlelight
has served many purposes. After the first edition, one woman told us, “You know something: that Christmas magazine has somehow brought us all together under the one umbrella.” She had a very good point as it keeps those of us within the parish aware of what is going on because everyone is free to write and tell their own story, and it keeps people long gone from the parish in touch with their home place.
    The real treasures are the old school photographs; people are fascinated by them. Sometimes there might be only one such photograph in the parish, and when we publish it everyone enjoys a trip down memory lane. From the Twin we got one of these photos that had been taken about sixty years earlier, and not only did we get the photograph but we also got a detailed description of the day it was taken. Apparently that morning before going to school the Twin, who always possessed a sense of occasion, had wanted to put on his good suit for the photo call but his mother would not allow him. “And there now,” he proclaimed six decades later, “wasn’t she wrong because I’d be looking much better now in my new suit.”
    The photograph, like all black and white photographs of the time, was crystal clear, but it was unframed and the folder holding it a bit battered around the edges. After that Christmas we had the photograph framed to preserve it for the Twin, who hung it up in his front hall where it was admired by all his callers. After he died, I went to his auction to buy the photograph for the local school. It was in a box with other odds and ends and I took note of the number. However, just before it came under the hammer, I went back to check on the box, only to discover that the photograph was gone. Somebody had taken it. It takes all kinds of people to make up a parish!
    Candlelight
records things that would otherwise be lost and often, when a contributor dies, their family is glad to have their
Candlelight
articles, some written many years previously. New families are now coming to live around the parish and
Candlelight
fills them in on the history of their chosen place. It also gives new writing talent a sounding platform; one of our original writers is now with
The Irish Times
and another with the
Irish Examiner
. We are not claiming that we contributed in any way to their success, but it makes us feel good to think that they started with us.
    Some of our writers now have their names written in the golden book and to browse though the back numbers is to realise how much our parish has changed over the last twenty-four years. The cow shed that was behind Jeremiah’s carpenter shop is now the Private Collector Art Gallery, selling original Irish art at prices that in Jeremiah’s time could have bought out the entire village.
    Over those years, some writers came to us from the most unexpected places. Having read my book,
The Village
, one man wrote to me from England. His mother had been one of thetravelling people and she had called to all the houses on the road from Innishannon to Kinsale. Later he was taken into care as his father had got into difficulties, and the young lad spent his childhood in the orphanage of St Patrick’s Upton in our parish. At the age of sixteen, he went to work with a local farmer and one night, coming home from a fair in Bandon, the farmer and himself had visited Mrs Hawkins behind her butcher’s shop in our village. There, he wrote, he got the biggest and the first steak that he had ever seen. He went on to tell how he had left Ireland and gone to work down the coalmines in England. There was a scheme prevailing at the time whereby your fare was paid and in return you went to work down the mines. When he got out of the coalmines, he became a long-distance lorry driver and did well.
    His letter was articulate and well written, with no trace of bitterness. He had experienced a life style that very few