Donkeys in farm life and folk cures

Donkeys in farm life and folk cures occupy two distinct but connected parts of the narrator’s rural childhood: the donkey as a familiar working companion, and the animal as part of a local ritual intended to cure whooping cough. The contrast is central to their place in the memoir. Donkeys are not simply background livestock; they shape everyday tasks and memories, and appear in a bodily ceremony where practical hope and religious language meet.

The whooping-cough cure

During a severe childhood illness, the narrator was kept apart from his mother for weeks in his grandmother’s room. His grandmother argued that the other children should not risk infection, while the narrator, distressed by the separation, called to his mother through the locked door. The remedy came after the first wave of the illness had passed, when a neighbour, Tommy Quinn, arrived very late at night with a jennet, mule, or donkey. The narrator was bundled in blankets and passed beneath the animal three times in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

The account preserves the uncertainty of the animal’s precise identity: the cure involved a mule or jennet or donkey, rather than a clearly specified breed. What is exact is the ceremony’s physical form and setting. It was a very cold night; frost shone on the hard ground, and stars filled the sky as the child was handed back and forth beneath the animal. The narrator believed the idea had come from his grandmother and that Tommy Quinn came after dark so the ritual would not be observed. The episode ends not with a claim of medical efficacy but with the child’s intense happiness at being restored to his mother and walking with her again on the lane to Lisacarn School.

The cure belongs to a household world in which religious observance organized ordinary time. Prayers were said in the morning, the Angelus bell stopped work and conversation at noon, and the day ended with the Rosary. In that setting, the invocation of the Trinity gave the animal ritual a recognizably Christian form, although the account presents it as a neighbourly folk remedy rather than an official church practice. The narrator’s memories of church ceremonies likewise emphasize the concrete forms through which faith was experienced: seasonal services, altar flowers, candles, processions, and communal prayer. The donkey cure shares that embodied character, but takes place at a back door on a cold night, within a family crisis rather than a church service.

The family jennet

A brown jennet became one of the family’s most enduring farm animals. It was already described as old when bought, and its brown coat showed much grey and white. Its temperament mattered as much as its strength: it had to be slow and quiet enough for a boy of eight to catch, harness, and manage. It remained with the family for eight or nine years, until it died in a snowstorm.

The jennet arrived with habits from its earlier life among tinkers. It was apparently addicted to smoke: whenever an outdoor fire was lit to burn weeds or branches, it squealed with pleasure and ran to stand with its nose above the fire. It might remain for hours hidden in the thick, white billowing smoke. This repeated behaviour makes the animal’s past visible in the routines of its new home, where the burning of farm waste could bring an old, distinctive pleasure.

Its reluctance to be harnessed supplied a different kind of recurring scene. At the sight of the bridle, the jennet would squeal and gallop to the farthest corner of the meadow. The boy could catch it only by bringing a can with a sprinkling of oats at the bottom. The animal’s habits therefore required patience and knowledge rather than simple command: work began with recognizing what would frighten it and what would tempt it back.

Work in the fields and on the road

The family jennet’s practical place in farm life was part of a wider landscape of animal work. During peat cutting near Corramahon, the narrator and his father walked through a plot of mud turf with the jennet and borrowed donkeys, while workmen hauled water from a boghole and poured it over the mud. The people and animals trampled the mixture into a black paste, which was then shaped with flat spades into rows and cross-rows and left to dry in wind and sun. The donkeys belonged to the physical labour of transforming wet ground into fuel, alongside the ropes, buckets, feet, and spades required for the task.

At home, the jennet also lived among the family’s other animals, including cattle, Goats, and Domestic fowl. Its distinctiveness lay in the particular ways it responded to people and objects: fire drew it close, while a bridle sent it racing away. On journeys, a roadside creamery can could bring it to a halt. The narrator had to climb down and rattle the can before it would move on. The can thus became as useful as the oats when dealing with the animal, a small but precise example of how daily work depended on learning an individual creature’s habits.

Vulnerability and remembered animal life

The memoir also recalls the more exposed lives of donkeys beyond the family farm. Under the Noxious Weeds Act, local police work included offences such as allowing certain weeds to grow, but their duties also brought abandoned, old, and starving animals to the barracks. They waited among the three circular flowerbeds on the lawn until the Burnhouse lorry collected them. Once loaded, they were killed with a humane killer. The account distinguishes the sound of their deaths from those of larger animals: horses fell with a heavy thud, while donkeys, so light, crumpled silently to the lorry floor like leaves.

That brief comparison changes the scale of the remembered farm scenes. The family jennet’s smoke-seeking, evasions, and can-rattling are vivid because the narrator knew its particular ways over many years; the abandoned animals appear as a group, reduced to the quietness of their final movement. Set beside the cure and the long domestic companionship of the brown jennet, this recollection gives donkeys several roles in the memoir: participants in work, recipients of human care or neglect, and creatures whose distinctive behaviour could remain sharply present in childhood memory.