Dublin Folk Tales for Children Read online

  This book is dedicated to Niceol, with love.

  Special thanks to Zita, Deirdre, Gala, Eunice, Pamela, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and all the family and friends who have inspired me with stories and ideas.

  First published 2018

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  © Órla Mc Govern, 2018

  Illustrations © Gala Tomasso, 2018

  The right of Órla Mc Govern to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 7509 8671 7

  Typesetting and origination by The History Press

  Printed and bound by CPI Group Ltd

  eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

  Contents

  About Us

  Introduction

  1 Áine’s Spoon

  2 The Two Trees

  3 Mister Shh Shh

  4 The Little Flower

  5 The Dark Hole

  6 Mrs O’Flaherty’s Chimney

  7 Dalkey Danny

  8 Filou Filou

  9 G’wan Oura Dat

  10 Sugary Tea

  About Us

  Órla Mc Govern is a writer, storyteller and performer. She grew up in Dublin, travelled around the world for a bit, and now lives in Galway on the West Coast of Ireland. She loves making things up – stories, songs, plays, sometimes just dinner! Some of her favourite stories, she says, are the ones that are full of strange sounds and surprises. Just like some of her favourite people!

  Gala Tomasso studied Art & Design in England, Fine Art at the Burren College of Art in Clare, and Design in DIT Dublin. Originally from Scotland, she has had her roots in Galway for twenty-five years and currently lives in Connemara.

  Introduction

  Hello Readers! I hope you enjoy this book. It’s a collection of folk tales from Dublin.

  Some people wonder what the phrase ‘folk tales’ means. Well, the way I see it, the clue is right there in the words themselves. Folk tales are tales from folks, simple as that. Some stories might be quite old and passed on down through the years. Others might be new, and more again are a mix of both old and new. Folk tales can be stories inspired by a particular place, a particular person, a particular animal, or even a particular tree!

  I’m very fond of trees myself. In fact, there are a couple of tree stories in this book. I often think of tales and stories themselves as being a bit like trees. Over the years they grow and change. Two people might look at the same tree – one in spring, one in winter – and see it very differently, just as two people might tell the same story in very different ways.

  Sometimes bits of a story can ‘fall away’ (a bit like old branches and leaves from a tree). Sometimes, new bits pop up when people invent new parts (a bit like the fresh shoots in spring). Stories are there to be explored and climbed. Some stories may give fruit (another story)! And some may be a bit thorny, or even smelly!

  When we hear stories of our history, the roots are often the same, but you are never quite sure in which direction the branches will twist.

  This book is called Dublin Folk Tales for Children, so the stories in it are all connected to Dublin, and, of course, anyone can enjoy a good story, no matter what age they are.

  Dublin City is the place where I was born and where I grew up. The roots of these stories came to me from loads of places: my grandparents; neighbours; friends (thanks everyone); from reading books, and, of course, from my imagination.

  There are folk tale books from other towns and countries, too, and the funny thing is, you’ll often find two stories that are quite alike, even though they grew from very different places. I wonder why that is? Perhaps it’s because stories float about from place to place like little seeds and then take root?

  I’ve been asked to write this book in an ‘out loud’ storytelling style. What that means is that I’ve written the words a bit more like you might say them than (usually) write them.

  Some of the words may have strange spellings (I bet you can spot them) or ‘slang’ words, because they are written to sound like a person telling them out loud. There are a few stories that have sound effects in them too. It can be great fun to read these stories aloud. Try them out on your friends!

  You can read the words, and you can also try to see if you can just remember the stories, and tell them your own way. You might find a new shoot of leaves popping out of your story tree! Perhaps these stories will inspire you to make your own!

  Is there an interesting place or an animal or tree in your area that you would like to make a story about? Is it connected to something from history, or just your imagination? Give it a try. You can write a story, tell a story, or both! Does it sound different when you say it out loud?

  Have fun discovering all the different shoots, branches, leaves, fruit, and maybe even a few magical birds’ nests that you discover while growing your own stories.

  I hope I get to hear one or two!

  1

  A´ine’s Spoon

  Supposing I was to ask you, right this second, to shout out the name of a river in Dublin. Let’s try it! Are you ready? Okay. One, two, three – GO!

  Great! So how many of you shouted out ‘The River Liffey’? Quite a lot of you, I’d imagine, as to loads of people the Liffey is the best-known river in Dublin.

  Did anyone say a different river? Good for you!

  Well, did you know that there are about 130 different rivers in Dublin City and County? I didn’t until I looked it up some years ago!

  In olden days, there were a couple of rivers that were very important for the city. People used them to transport themselves and to transport goods and animals. But did you know that in the past, some other rivers were just as important and well known as the Liffey? One of these rivers is called the Poddle.

  Now, not far away from the banks of the Poddle, there lived a girl called Áine Ryan.

  Áine lived in a house full of music. Her Da played the fiddle and her Ma played the guitar. They played lots of different types of music, but they particularly liked to play Trad (that’s short for traditional) Irish music.

  Sometimes they’d go and play music with other people in pubs, cafés and halls. When people got together, they called it a ‘session’. They’d go to places like The Brazen Head, or Hughes’ Pub on the Quays. Sometimes, if it was on a Sunday in the daytime, Áine would go with them to listen to the music. Her Da would get her a juice and some crisps and she’d be delighted with herself.

  She loved to listen to all the different instruments playing together. Sometimes someone would sing a song without any instruments, just their voice, and everyone would ‘shhhhh’ so they could be heard.

  Áine’s Auntie Mary lent her a bodhrán to practise on. A bodhrán is the name for an Irish drum that you play with a stick called a ‘beater’. Some people play it with their hand, or a wooden stick, and some even use the bone of an animal!

  Áine was over the moon and wanted to play the bodhrán right away at a session, but her Da said she had to practise at home for a while before she could play it ‘properly’. Her Da sometimes rolled his e
yes at bodhrán players at sessions, and her Ma would elbow him and whisper, ‘Stop it, John,’ and throw him a smile.

  Áine’s Da thought people should learn to play the bodhrán well before playing in sessions, because it was a very loud instrument!

  Sometimes the musicians would visit Áine’s house to play. She loved that, as her Ma would bake buns for the visitors and Áine would be delighted with all the music in the house. She had a great life, and wouldn’t change a thing.

  Well, maybe one thing.

  The one ‘thing’ Áine would have changed was the presence of a boy who went to her school. His name was James Kavanagh. Now, if your name is James Kavanagh, don’t worry. It’s not you I mean. Probably.

  If you looked up ‘nasty’ in a dictionary, there was a picture of (this particular) James Kavanagh looking back at you (well not really, dictionaries don’t usually have pictures, and I’m just saying that to make the point that this James Kavanagh was NAAAAAASTY). He used to love being a bully and playing mean jokes on people.

  He would put thumb tacks on people’s chairs before they sat down (ouch)! He would write mean notes on pieces of paper and stick them on people’s backs (mean)! But the thing that Áine hated most of all was the ‘joke’ James would play on people at lunchtime. Well, do you know what, it wasn’t even a joke at all, because jokes are meant to be funny.

  This was not funny.

  If you had a nice bar of chocolate at lunch, James would grab it, lick it, rub it in his armpit (ewwwww!) and give it back to you. Of course at this point you wouldn’t want to eat it, because James had licked it and armpitted it (more ewwwww), so you would generally have to throw it in the bin.

  Áine hated this.

  Then one day, things got even worse. James not only performed his antics with food at lunchtime, but with other things too.

  Things like people’s pens, their rubbers, and stuff from their pencil cases. And he even found new ways to be disgusting. Sometimes after he had licked the thing, or armpitted it, he would stick it up his nose or in his ear and twist it (even more ewwww)!

  And sometimes he would do all of those things together. James really was a pest.

  But at the weekends things were different for Áine, at the weekends she was delighted, as she didn’t have to think about James Kavanagh and his ‘jokes’ for even one second. She didn’t live near him and she was very happy about that fact.

  One Saturday, a lovely day with the sun shining, Áine decided to go for a walk near her house, along the bank of the Poddle.

  She noticed there were workers out. They were ‘dredging’, or cleaning, the river, and there were big piles of clay from the riverbed on the banks. Some of them were a bit stinky as they had rotten weeds in them. Of course, dogs love stinky stuff, and Áine laughed to herself when she saw a dog digging and rolling around in one of the stinky piles. The dog’s owner wasn’t happy!

  ‘Come out, come out of that, Max!’ said the lady. ‘Bad dog, oh you smelly dog!’

  Of course Max was delighted with himself and trotted off, happy and stinky, behind his annoyed owner.

  Now, just as Áine passed by the pile of earth where Max was digging, she thought she spotted something shiny in the weeds.

  She walked over. Pheewww! It was stinky. She picked up the tiny thing that she had seen sparkling. What was it? Hmmm.

  Well, at first she thought it was a pin or a nail, but when she brushed off the dirt and looked at it more closely, do you know what? It looked like a tiny spoon! Yes, a spoon! Fancy that.

  Áine headed home and put the spoon under the tap in the kitchen to wash the rest of the dirt off it. It was a gorgeous little thing. It appeared to be made from silver, and had an unusual shape, with lovely little designs in the middle.

  Definitely a spoon!

  Who would have such a tiny spoon, though, and what would they use – WAIT! She knew what it was! It was a FAIRY spoon! Sure it was so tiny, who else could be able to use it? Not only that, but she thought it must be a musical fairy spoon.

  Now I should explain, in case you don’t know, that in Irish music, people often play an instrument called ‘the spoons’.

  You can buy a ready-made set of ‘spoons’ but sometimes, people used to use actual food spoons to play music. They were usually big soup spoons. In the olden days, they even used more bones!

  To play them, you would get two big spoons and hold them close together with a finger holding a gap in the middle of them, and you would bang them on your lap, or your other hand, or if you were feeling adventurous, your own head or arm or even someone else’s arm!

  ‘Clack, clicky-clack, clicky-clicky-clack, clicky-clicky-clack’, they’d go. They’re fun to play, you should try it yourself!

  Anyway, Áine was convinced that this teeny tiny spoon that she’d found was half of a fairy set of spoons.

  Instead of running out and telling her friends or her family, though, Áine decided to keep her new treasure a secret, just for a little while anyway. It made her feel special.

  That night she put the fairy spoon under her pillow for safekeeping, and fell asleep.

  A dream descended on her, and music filled the air. There she was in the land of Fairy. She was invited to sit in at a fairy session with her new bodhrán. There were six fairy fiddlers, and six fairy flute players, and they were all brilliant!

  Beside her, sitting on a stool, was the original owner of ‘her’ spoon (the fairy spoon player). He was brilliant too, a great musician, and he played his tiny spoons. ‘Clack, clicky-clack, clicky-clicky-clack, clicky-clicky-clack’, he played.

  She picked up the bodhrán and found that she was brilliant at playing it too! ‘Dum-tikka-tikka-dum-tikka-tikka-dum-tikka-tikka-dum!’

  When Áine woke up from her dream, she was in a great mood altogether. She took her fairy spoon from under her pillow, tucked it into her pencil case and headed off to school. She wasn’t going to let it out of her sight!

  She was in such a great mood that she nearly forgot all about James Kavanagh and his antics. But when lunchtime rolled around she remembered them very quickly.

  First James grabbed poor Mary Kelly’s Mars Bar and gave it the armpit treatment. He looked across the room to Áine and gave an awful laugh.

  ‘Lucky I’ve finished my lunch,’ Áine thought. There was nothing for James to ‘armpit’. But she was wrong. Just as lunch was finishing, didn’t James sneak up and grab Áine’s pencil case from the top of her bag.

  ‘Anything interesting for me in here today?’ jeered James. ‘Give it back, you bully!’ Áine said, trying to grab it from him – but he held it high in the air.

  ‘Oh what have we here?’ said James, pulling out Áine’s spoon from the bottom of the pencil case. ‘What’s this? Some kind of girrrrrrrrrrly jewellery yoke?’

  ‘Don’t touch that!’ she shouted, but it was too late.

  First James licked the top of the spoon, and then he put the whole spoon in his mouth and pretended to swallow it. Then he opened his mouth, and stuck his tongue out to show the spoon was still there on his tongue (ewww)! Then – then what did he do?

  Didn’t he put the spoon up his nose, and started twirrrrrrrling it around, as if he was making a ‘snotty candy floss’. Ewwww!

  ‘Oh I forgot a bit!’ said James. ‘The old armpit!’

  He was JUST about to stick it under his smelly armpit, when he felt a hand grab him on the shoulder.

  ‘Where did you get that, James Kavanagh?’ boomed a voice. It was the school principal, Mr Kelly.

  Everyone liked Mr Kelly but they were just a little bit afraid of him when he used his ‘big’ voice, because his ‘big’ voice usually meant someone was in trouble.

  Of course, James immediately tried to put the blame on Áine.

  ‘It’s not mine sir, it’s hers,’ he said, pointing to Áine. ‘She dropped it so she did, and I was just picking it up!’

  Mr Kelly took out a hanky from his pocket and used it to pick the fairy spoon from James�
�s hand.

  Áine watched as Mr Kelly carefully folded the handkerchief around the snotty, armpitty, licky spoon and put it in his own pocket. Oh no!

  ‘Both of you, up to my office ... NOW!’ said Mr Kelly, in a VERY big and boomy voice.

  Well, off went James and Áine to the office to wait outside, throwing each other dirty looks while they sat. When Mr Kelly was ready for them, in they went and sat down in front him. He was sitting behind his big desk and looked very serious. He had a big stack of books piled up in front of him.

  He fixed his eyes on James first. ‘Mr Kavanagh, are you sure this doesn’t belong to you?’ He held up the fairy spoon in his hanky.

  ‘N ... N ... No,’ spluttered James. ‘It belongs to Áine Ryan, sir.’

  Áine could feel herself sinking deeper into her chair.

  ‘Well, Áine,’ said Mr Kelly, ‘is this true?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ she said, honestly.

  ‘And where did you get it?’

  ‘I found it, sir.’

  ‘Where exactly did you find it?’

  Áine told Mr Kelly the whole story about walking on the bank of the Poddle, and the stinky piles of dirt from the bottom of the river, and Max the dog, and finding the fairy spoon.

  ‘What did you call it?’ said Mr Kelly.

  ‘Emm ... a fairy spoon?’

  Mr Kelly smiled, and almost laughed! Then he composed himself and tried to look serious.

  ‘Look at this, children,’ he said, and he opened a book and pointed at a big drawing on one of the pages. It was a drawing of the fairy spoon! Well, not exactly. The design on the middle was a little bit different, but they looked really alike.

  ‘This,’ said Mr Kelly, ‘is a Viking spoon.’

  Áine and James looked at each other, a bit confused.

  ‘But sir, I thought the Vikings were very tall people, and sure these two spoons are tiny,’ said Áine.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Mr Kelly, holding up the spoon. ‘It is tiny because it is a Viking EAR spoon.’