More School

We had two rooms at the school for classes. Even though we had four classes in each room the teachers treated them as two classes. The Master would give one group some excercise to complete and teach the other group. When anyone was finished the exercise, they were invited to "sit in" on the other group. When I was in the younger group I loved to sit in on the older class. The Master would sit on a desk at the front so he could hear us and we could hear him without having to speak very loudly. We would have considered the Master the smartest man in the village but he made no secret of the fact that a neighbour of his was much smarter than him. The only reason the neighbour was not as educated was because his family could not afford it. This neighbour, and his wife, wrote poems about local events. Usually about important hurling matches but not only.
We had a herd of dairy cows, about 8 usually, sometimes 12. Mom and Dad milked them by hand. We kids used to bring the buckets of milk across the yard and pour it into churns. The churns were kept in a half barrel of cold water. The water came from a plastic pipe which in turn was supplied from a well on a hill in the field beside the house. We don't use the well anymore but it had the sweetest water I ever tasted. Dad would bring the churns down the lane to the road where a neighbour with a tractor and trailer would collect them . The neighbour would help Dad lift the 15 gallon (almost 70 litres) churns into the trailer. Dad has a story about lifting them by himself into a horses cart once! The usual neighbour was not going to the creamery in the village one morning. Another neighbour was passing with his horse and cart and churn. Dad asked him if he could put his churn in the cart. The neighbour make no comment, so Dad lifted the churn and put it in. The neighbour still made no remark but Dad went with him to the creamery.
I remember the sound of milk against the galvanised buckets as Mom and Dad milked the cows. I remember rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I emptied the buckets early on Summer mornings. I remember looking at the mice running along the top of the wall in the cow shed silhouetted against the rays of the rising sun. That world only exists now in my memory.