I dedicate today’s song to my mother who died aged 64 years on 26th April 1986. Had mum lived on into old age, she would have been enjoying her 99th birthday today and would be no doubt downing as many free drinks of rum and blackcurrant as her seven children would have willingly bought her (national lockdown notwithstanding). They always say that the good die young, and family loyalty aside, they did not come any better than our dear Irish mum to her seven children, me, Mary, Eileen, Patrick, Peter, Michael, and Susan.
Other birthdays of friends and Facebook contacts I jointly dedicate my song to today include Lorraine Blair from Perth in Western Australia: Angie Boback from America: Heather Walley from Stoke-on-Trent, Steve Artist who lives in Bradford, and close friend, David Green from Mirfield in West Yorkshire. I wish you all the happiest of birthdays and hope that you all enjoy your special day.
There was never one day in my life as a child when I did not hear my mother sing, ‘The Isle of Innisfree’. It was her favourite song. This song was the background music and song to the 1952 film, ‘The Quiet Man’. This American romantic comedy directed by John Ford starred John Wayne as (character Sean Thornton) and Maureen 0’Hara (character Mary Kate Danaher) and Victor McLaglen (who played the part of Mary Kate Danaher’s bullying brother). Never did one Christmas pass by without all the Forde Family watching ‘The Quiet Man’. Both mum and dad loved this film, and so it was only natural that all seven of their children grew to love it also. We still watch it today in memory of our parents. This is for you, mum, and for all the others above who are blessed to share your birthday today.
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Everybody I know loves their mum to bits, and I am no exception to that rule. My mum gave birth to me, and she made me and my six brothers and sister what we are today. She could do no wrong in my eyes. Her influence on me was so pronounced, that from an early age, I willingly adopted her positive philosophy to life, along with her general belief that nobody is either better or worse than the person who stands alongside them. The mere fact that I have remained a committed Christian ever since my baptism (78 years ago) is due less to any religiosity on my part, and more out of deep respect for my mother’s intrinsic ‘goodness’ as a human being. I cannot possibly conceive of there being no God when good people like mum exist upon the earth in large number, and within reach of everybody. Only a supreme being could have created someone as good, as loving, and as mischievous as my mother.
Like Hovis brown bread, had you cut mum’s body up slice by slice, you would not have found any badness in it. She was good through and through. Her daily good acts identified her as being a woman filled with love towards her neighbours and Christian charity towards any needy person who crossed her path. She was an instant friend to the stranger and yet, despite all these admirable Christian qualities, mum possessed what some might call a healthy degree of religious scepticism and churchly irreverence; especially toward the parish priest who served Mass every Sunday at ‘Cleckheaton Roman Catholic Church’.
Mum would deliberately arrive at ‘Cleckheaton Catholic Church’ every week, ten minutes after the priest had started Sunday Mass. Then, after receiving Holy Communion at the altar rail, instead of returning to her pew at the back of the church, she would walk straight outside, where she would be smoking her second cigarette before the rest of the family came out of the church, ten minutes later. We never needed to ask mum why she always arrived late and left church early as she would regularly let it be known to my father whenever he complained about her lack of punctuality. Mum would simply tell my dad, “One hour a week is long enough, Paddy, to listen to you or any Irish priest!” The weekly service would always last 80 minutes, and that is why my mother always cut the priest short by 20 minutes and smoked a few cigarettes outside instead. The twenty minutes less than mum would give the weekly service, my father made up for. He would always be in his end pew (third row from the front LHS) to pray twenty minutes before the priest started Mass. Dad would also attend Mass on church Holy Days (which are obligatory attendance) whereas mum would only ever attend church on a Sunday unless Christmas Day fell midweek. She would attend a Saturday wedding if there was a meal, drinks, and dance reception to follow!
Mum and dad were opposite in most things. In fact, I cannot imagine how they ever got together in the first place, being so different in personalities. However, they must have had something going for them, and whatever it was, they kept it going for a long time because they parented seven children (of whom I am the oldest). Mum loved dancing but dad, despite displaying clever footwork dribbling and kicking a football around a soccer pitch every weekend in his early twenties (he played football for County Kilkenny, as well as playing for the Irish National Soccer Squad), when it came to dancing, mum said that dad had two left feet. She always complained that he never took her dancing and would only have a drink at Christmas. Mum had always been a chain smoker and she loved a drink. As for dad, his father had been an alcoholic. Dad never smoked, and only drank a token glass of sherry on Christmas Day. Mum’s heavy cigarette smoking irritated him so much that he constantly went around every room in the house opening the windows to clear the air, even in the middle of winter. Mum would shadow him, closing them all again, and calling dad a ‘fresh-air fiend’ in the process, along with a few choice Gaelic swear words I never learned.
There came a time after their seven children had grown and left the parental abode when dad started cutting the church lawn three afternoons weekly. He would peddle his bicycle four miles there and back to do so. He did this voluntary task for over ten years, and because he always declined priestly payment for his labour, my mum used to tell him he did it as a penance for all his wrongdoings. If cutting the church lawn 1500 times is enough to gain dad entrance into heaven, he will be sitting there alongside St. Patrick for sure (he was never English enough to accept St Peter as being God’s right-hand-man in preference to Celtic stock) .As for mum, unless 1500 cigarette cards or 10,000 Green Shield Stamps gained her entry through the Pearly Gates, I know that she will only have agreed to enter heaven, if she was allowed to arrive later than the rest of the party, and could nip outside for a quick fag whenever she wanted one and was entertained by regular dances which provided liberal access to a glass or two of rum and black currant.
The character traits I can remember most about my mother was her compassion, her charity, her generosity of spirit, her capacity never to hold grudges from one day to a new one, and her forgiving nature. Her most priceless quality, however, was her boundless love which she would liberally and unashamedly deliver to all and sundry. Not once in my entire life (until I left home), did my mother allow one day to pass without telling me that she loved me! Her last words to me each day before I went to bed, and the very first words she spoke to me on a morning when I got up were one and the same, ‘I love you, Billy’. Whenever I complained that we were poor or moaned for want of this or that which household finance could not furnish, she would instantly remind me, “Billy Forde, we may have no money to spare, but we are not poor. We have each other!” When mum died, there was no ‘material inheritance’ to bequeath to her children; she had spent it all on bingo, fags, and rum and black currant drinks. Along with dad, our parents did leave the seven of us an inheritance worth more than any amount of money or property. We were endowed with a wealth that can only be found in the dividend of love and family. The inheritance my parents left their seven children was six brothers and sisters, along with the most precious of memories that she loved each of us and told us so daily. By leaving us each other to rely on during times of need, we were never left feeling unloved or unwanted even during our lives after mum and dad died.
Mum was an intelligent woman, despite having to curtail her education and leave school early to help out at home as the oldest of seven children. It is a traditional role in all Irish households that when the firstborn is a female, the girl’s education is usually shortened as she becomes a second helper to her mother in the home and a little mum to all her siblings. My mother’s father had a weak heart that prevented him from doing any manual work, and this increased my mother’s family responsibilities in the parental abode.
My mother was a romantic through and through. She not only dreamed constantly, but she believed in her dreams, and always encouraged me to believe in mine too. Mum never hid her true feelings from my father or any of her family, friends, or neighbours. She was an open book, and whichever page you turned and stopped at, she was not unafraid to tell you what was on her mind. Mum gave an honest expression to her feelings at the moment of their birth, which meant she often acted before thinking. She was always willing to put her true self on parade while being forever resistant to march to the tune of another. Her natural disposition was being a ‘rebel’, a Forde family trait that has been inherited by all seven of her children. Whereas dad would have been concerned with how the neighbours ever saw him, mum didn’t care. She was perfectly happy to always display her natural disposition, even if it meant being prepared to accept any embarrassment in the event of any shortfall. In short, she loved life to the full, and the living of it was far too precious for her to ever let it slip by without her hanging on to its coat tail.
When my father and all my younger siblings were in bed on a night, I would often stay up chatting with mum past midnight as she ironed and darned, and got ready for the next morning’s round of motherly chores. This was my most precious time of day that I will always cherish the memory of. We would talk about all manner of things, and not once did my mother refuse to tell me anything I ever asked of her. We shared a relationship that held no embarrassment and could be entirely open with each other. I now realise just how special and rare such a relationship is between a parent and a child, especially between a mother and her firstborn son.
I once recall asking my mother a question about the circumstances of my birth. It was a question that most boys would simply never dream of asking and most mothers would instantly shy away from answering. All my mates on the estate knew the place where they had been born, but I was the only 11-year-old boy I ever knew of, whose mum (when directly asked by her son) told him precisely the location ‘where he was conceived’. When I asked mum where was the special place chosen by her and dad, she said that it was in a farmer’s field by the ‘Metal Man’ in Tramore, County Waterford. I always revisit this famous tourist site each time I return to Ireland, and unfortunately which the public cannot get officially close to anymore. The ‘Metal Man’ stands on one of three pillars near Newtown Cove, Tramore, Waterford and is a maritime beacon constructed through Lloyds of London at the behest of the Admiralty after the tragic loss of 360 lives after HMS Seahorse sank after becoming grounded at Brownstown Head in bad weather in 1816. Being a student of British and Irish History all my life, it pleases me to think that the ‘Metal Man’ assisted my birth into the world, as well as preventing the premature departure of so many seafarers over the past two hundred years.
If any dishonesty resided in my mother, it lay in the many Irish tales she would tell me from the old country. These were stories steeped in Irish superstition and were stretched as far as the truth could be credited. I have not the slightest doubt that my becoming an author of over sixty books in later life was a direct consequence of my mother’s vivid imagination which she passed to me.
After I had written and had published over fifty books for children, young persons, and adults, I gave up writing books for a few years. Then, after I married my wife, Sheila, she persuaded me to take up the pen again. So, I decided to take the kernel of some of the stories my mother had told me as I grew up, and after wrapping them in the clothes of Irish myth and a shroud of rustic superstition, I embellished them with a touch of Irish artistic licence. I wrote an additional fourteen romantic books between 2011 and 2017. These Irish stories were written and published under the umbrella title, ‘Tales from Portlaw’. Portlaw is a sacred place in my heart. It is the Irish village where I was born in the front room of my maternal grandparent’s house, Willie and Mary Fanning.
All these ‘Tales from Portlaw’ books can be bought from Amazon or any established publisher in either hardback or e-book format, with all profits going to charitable causes in perpetuity (over £200,000 profit given to charity from the sales of my books between 1990-2005). Or, if you would like to read any of these fourteen romantic novels FOR FREE, please access my website: www.fordefables.co.uk
and the section: http://www.fordefables.co.uk/tales-from-portlaw.html
Of all the things my mum would do daily as she completed her housework would be to sing Irish songs. The only English songs she ever sang were Vera Lynn’s songs. She would have been extremely proud of her oldest child had she known that I would become good friends with Vera Lynn for thirty years before Dame Vera died. Mum was a wonderful woman, who was also blessed with being beautiful in her prime. And yet, despite her love of singing, mum could not sing for toffee. She could not hold a note any longer than she could refrain from giving a beggar her last shilling. I never heard her sing one verse of a song without forgetting the lines or mixing up the words, and then making up her own words instead to fill in. Mum sang all day long, every day of her life, and like the late comedian and pianist, Lez Dawson, she always sang all the right notes, but unfortunately, in the wrong order.
After berating my mother for her poor singing one day, mum taught me one of the most important lessons she ever taught me as a child. Mum said, “Tell me, show me where it is written, Billy Forde, (she would always add my surname whenever she was angry with me) that only ‘good singers’ are allowed to sing?” I could not. Then, she added, “And until you can, get out of my way, boyo, because I’ve got lots of work left to do and lots more songs still to sing!” My mother then asked me if I knew why birds sing? I replied, “Because they are birds of course!”. Her smiling reply was, “Because, Billy boy, they have a song to sing!”
In her reply, my mum was telling me that we all have a 'song to sing’; the song of life, and we each sing our songs in different ways by using whatever talent we possess. Some of us paint, some sculpt, some people write, and some express their talent through dance. My father played football and in later life, he hewed coal from the pit face. Others are stonemasons, and some fashion designers or dressmakers, and some cobble boots and shoes, or weave and tailor cloth. Our greatest talent of all is to love, share with and be a good friend of another! My mother’s song of life involved being a good person in everything she did,
When I started my daily singing practice over two years ago, to increase the amount of oxygen in my blood and improve my lung capacity, the very first song I sung I dedicated to my mother. It was the song of my childhood that my mother sang to me every day of her life. I sing that same song today in dedication to all birthday celebrants and in memory of a mum whom I dearly loved and have missed every day since her death in 1986. If it was within my power, Mum, I would make the anniversary of your birth a national holiday, like so many good people before you.
My mother loved this song, and she loved the land of her birth, the Emerald Isle, a country where I too was born and shall have part of my ashes spread on home soil. Like my mum, going back to Ireland for me is like going back home. As soon as I see the Irish shoreline, my heart falls back in love with my country we emigrated from when I was a boy of three years old. But it is only when I am travelling the Portlaw road from County Waterford and catch sight of the Bridge that is positioned at the bottom of the village of Portlaw where I was born, do I feel ‘back home’. My spirits rise, and my soul rejoices in restorative excitement as we cross the Bridge, and I instantly feel warm inside.
As for the ‘Isle of Innisfree’, I recently looked up to see if there was such a place or whether it was a form of mythical Brigadoon. I understand that it is an uninhabited island within Lough Gill, in County Sligo, Ireland, near where Yeats the poet spent his summers as a child. I will certainly check it out when we next tour Ireland. Love you, Mum, from Billy, Mary, Eileen, Patrick, Peter, Michael, and Susan.
Love and peace
Bill xxx