My Irish Aunties

The period around St. Patrick’s Day is the time in which we prove, “There are only two types of people in the world: the Irish, and those that wished they were.”
In 1902, my grandfather Millar left his father’s farm, traveled to Londonderry and there disembarked upon the Caledonia for the US. He was twenty years old, dapper, but very small, and had five US dollars in his pocket. I often wonder if how scared and lonely he must have felt leaving his family and a farm he would, as the eldest son, have inherited. He would never mention how he felt, although in response to my question as to why he left, he replied, “I was out plowing one day and realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life looking up the ass of a horse.”
Upon arrival he somehow got himself to the home of some distant relatives, successful tobacco farmers in the Connecticut River valley. Instead of welcoming, they were not impressed with having a poor immigrant show up on their doorstep and convinced him that Springfield, Massachusetts was the place he should be as the Presbyterian (He was an Orangeman) Church would take care of people like him. So they put him on a train and off he went.
He eventually found a job, ending up working for Spaulding Sporting Goods, designing and manufacturing golf clubs. One of his designs, using a drop forge, was called “The Chicopee Putter.”
In time he sent for two of his sisters, who followed him over. The elder, Mary, settled in Boston and became a registered nurse at Mass. General. The younger, Eveline, still in her teens, lived with him, my grandmother and their new baby, while working in a flower shop. In 1917, word came from Ireland that their mother was dying of cancer. So my grandfather accompanied them to the pier in Boston where their last view of him was disappearing from site in a snow storm as they sailed for home despite the dangers from German submarines.
I grew up knowing I had a family in Ireland, and once in a while we, or my grandfather would receive a Christmas card from these mysterious people across the sea. In 1966, when I went to Germany to study, I decided I would have to visit these people and see just what they were like, as my father’s side of the family seemed fairly lacking in distant relatives.
Mary had married and due to the hard economic times in Ireland, moved to England where her husband found employment operating a farm owned by Oxford University. On spring break I flew in from Frankfurt to Southend on Sea, and in going through British customs put her address as my destination on my forms. The customs agent asked who she was. I will never forget what happened next. When I told him she was my aunt, he swung his rubber stamp down on my passport and said, “Welcome home, son.”
Mary lived in a thatched roof cottage with a flag stone floor in a village called Waterperry. To get there, I had to travel to Oxford and then take a bus to a small town called, Wheatley. Arriving there, I learned I had missed the twice weekly bus to Waterperry, but the friendly agent told me how to get there: two miles across freshly plowed April muddy fields in the gathering dusk. By the time I came over the hill and the village was below me, it was late afternoon, and I was covered with mud. I thought I had walked into the village of the damned: it was a ghost town. I could hear window shutters flapping in the breeze and feel eyes on me from behind curtains. I walked to the end of the village when I finally encountered a farmer, right out of a James Herriot story. With his directions I knocked on the door of the house to be greeted by a pixie in coke bottle classes. As I had missed the bus, she thought I wasn’t coming, and gathered me up in tears. She apologized that the co-eds she had invited out from Oxford to entertain me had been forced to leave. We sat by her fire drinking cider, while I recited what everyone in the family was up to and then she asked me how the Boston Braves were doing. I had to tell her they were now in Milwaukee and the Red Sox were the only game in town. When bed time came, she tucked me in, even though I was 21. Her stories will be another post.
A month later, taking advantage of a student strike against increased cafeteria prices in Germany, I flew to Belfast, and was greeted by the younger generation, and taken off to see Aunts Grace and Eveline.
Grace lived in a farm house on the top of a hill, which was appropriately called, “The Hill.” I was forewarned so when she bolted from the house, I was not surprised. She had not come to the states, and I was the first of the American family she had seen since my uncle in World War II. Although, small in size like Mary, with the same twinkling eyes, she was a dynamo. She had a heart condition, which despite her doctor’s frantic urgings, did not stop her from chopping firewood. She was up at first light with her sons, James and Edward, for the daily milking, preparing them a breakfast which would fill an army. Not being a morning person, I could not explain to her that I could not force down steak, eggs, and oatmeal at 7 in the morning. I was more a gag down a glass of orange juice person.
Eveline lived on the farm, on which my grandfather had been raised. She regaled me of stories of early Springfield MA, and we tried to track down information on “Uncle Archie,” who, my grandfather claimed, had come to the US, fought in the Civil War, was discharged totally fed up with America and went home. There were vague memories of his “blue peaked cap” in a chest somewhere, the that was all.
I was taken from place to place, “which would be of interest because your grandfather went there,” and met people whom he had known, most of whom forgot the generational gap and referred to me as “Jimmy Millar’s boy.” The experience gave me a feeling of pride, to know the good people I had come from, but also gave me a sense of loss. In meeting my Irish “aunties,” I realized, perhaps selfishly, that I had been deprived a life time of extra grandmothers, who probably would have spoiled me when I was little.
I see in my daughters’ eyes, the twinkling blue and the infectious smiles they all had, and although they are gone now, and I only saw them that one time (I did see Eveline once later) I love them as if I had always been with them. I’m damned proud of my Irish family, and, yes, when St. Patrick’s Day comes around, I’m going to proudly say, “There’s only two types of people in the world: the Irish and those that wished they were.”