Alice Taylor: 'A community keeps a village alive; you have to be prepared to get involved'
Alice Taylor at the spot where she has breakfast in her at Innishannon Co. Cork . Picture; Eddie O'Hare
As the saying goes, if you want something done, ask a busy woman. When I chat to the writer Alice Taylor, she has spent the morning posting out copies of Innishannon Candlelight, an annual festive publication celebrating the Co Cork village where she has lived most of her adult life. The magazine, which she has been involved in producing for 40 years, is just one of the many activities that keep the 85-year-old busy, from gardening to the Tidy Towns, and of course the books which she produces at a prolific rate.
“I am retired and I am supposed to have nothing to do but I am very involved in everything that goes on here. This morning, I spent my time wrapping up copies of Candlelight for a lady in America who has a travel agency. She was driving through Innishannon a good couple of years ago and she was intrigued by Candlelight. She brought back a copy to America and since then, every Christmas, I post out 14 copies for her friends," says Taylor.
Apparently the Americans all read it and then before Christmas they have a dinner where they discuss it. "A lot of people write for Candlelight whose ancestors left the village so I sent all of them a copy too. When I was all done with those this morning, I was thinking, I’m running a mail order business. I do love it though.”
While Taylor likes to be occupied, she also recognises the importance of taking time out to reflect and replenish, something she celebrates in her latest book, Come Sit Awhile, her 30th. It features a selection of reflective writing and she says it is a more personal work than some of her other more observational books.
“I think it was the book I always wanted to write — I put more of myself into it. The different little prayers and poems are my coping mechanism,” she says. “Isn’t it amazing how life has accelerated? We are all swept forward in it, you can almost get carried away in the flood.”
Underpinning all of Taylor’s impressive body of work in the 35 years since her memoir To School Through the Fields became a publishing phenomenon, is the importance of community and connection — a message that has never been more pertinent in a society that has become further atomised since the pandemic.
“We took community for granted before, it was just there, but now we have to be conscious of preserving it. It is a community that keeps a village alive and you have to be prepared to get involved. If you move into a small village or town or indeed anywhere, if you stay behind your closed door and don’t come out and participate, well, you will be left there. It can be very lonely if you are on your own. It is all about reaching out and connection,” she says.
Writing is one of the many ways that Taylor stays connected with the community and the world beyond. She has also lent a hand to a new children’s book co-written with her daughter, Lena Angland. Called Ellie and The Fairy Door, it draws on the stories and fairy folklore that Taylor passed on to her five children who in turn have passed it on to theirs.
“There was a fairy fort on the farm that I grew up on, just beside the house. We spent all our time playing there, it would be covered in bluebells in the spring. We were convinced that the fairies slept in the big mounds. It had a special aura about it. When my children were small, I used to tell them bedtime stories about the fairies and the fort. There was a well beside it and we drew the water from it, we called it the fairy well. I remember my father was in the hospital once to get a cataract removed, and he asked us to bring up water from the fairy well. It came straight up from the bowels of the earth.”
It is clear that the nature which has surrounded Taylor, from her childhood on the farm near Newmarket, Co Cork, to life with her late husband Gabriel running a guesthouse, post office and shop in Innishannon, has provided much solace and comfort.
“I find walking great. A friend of mine used to say that walking releases the happy hormones and I think that’s true. Or to go to the wood, there’s comfort in trees as well. And the garden — you could go out into the garden like a briar and start digging and pruning, and without an effort on your part, you would come in afterwards and think ‘I’m better’. Nature is very healing. In a way, we are blessed in Ireland, wherever you are living, you are not too far from a wood or a river.” While ‘keep moving’ could be Taylor’s motto, Come Sit Awhile emphasises the importance of taking time out to tap into our creativity and imagination.
“I am very enthusiastic about the power of books and poems, it’s immense really. If you’re not feeling great, you could read poetry when you couldn’t read prose. It could have been written centuries ago but you and the poet are joined together, which is amazing.”
Is she working on something at the moment? "Yes, aren’t I always,” she laughs. “Life would be very dull without it. A lot of writing is done in your head before you sit down at all. I love the excitement of that, it gives a vibrancy to life. Our creativity is the most valuable gift we have. People who think it is just writing and painting — sure it is baking and knitting and everything, there is a great sense of satisfaction when you get something done that you have been labouring on.”
- Come Sit Awhile by Alice Taylor, published by O’Brien Press, is out now
When Alice Taylor wrote her memoir To School Through the Fields, little could she have foreseen how it would capture the public imagination, becoming the biggest selling book ever published in Ireland and making her a household name when it was released in 1988. Here she recalls its publication.
“When I did To School Through the Fields, I never expected it would hit the jackpot the way it did. I wanted to record that way of life because my children went back down to the farm where I had grown up and it was completely different, with tractors, phones, electricity, all of that. I used to tell them about the way it was and I think they thought I was making it up. I was saying ‘my God, it’s only one generation and the whole world has changed in that one generation’.
"But I think when people read it, they didn’t read my story, they read their own story. When the publisher said to me about going on the Late Late Show, I said Gay Byrne would know nothing about this world. But Gay said to me, ‘I do know what you were talking about, when I grew up in Dublin, I was looking out at green fields and they’re gone’. Everywhere had changed. When it was translated into Japanese, I remember asking the translator what would the Japanese have in common with the book and she said, ‘oh, we changed too’.
"It is good to record it the way it is, not whether it is better or worse but to know the way it was. In a way, we dismiss that world as being old-fashioned or backward but there was a lot of wisdom in it as well.”
