St Patrick’s Day holds special significance. It means one thing to me: potatoes. St Patrick’s Day is when I plant the first seed potatoes of the year. Being half English and half Welsh each side of my family possessed their own idiosyncrasies and one of these concerned potatoes. For my English ancestors planted their potatoes at Easter whilst the Welsh contingent planted theirs on St Patrick’s Day.
There were other differences between relatives from English or Welsh extraction. Both sides were polar opposites when it came to alcohol, royalty and religion. The English ’liked a drink’ whereas the Welsh were teetotal. Hence one of Nan’s many sayings being, ’When the drink’s in, the wit’s out.’
Another difference related to attitudes towards royalty. The English Rymans were conservative with a very small c and royalist with an extremely large R. In contrast, the Welsh Northovers were socialist and republican. When Grampy Northover caught my Mum working on some embroidery to commemorate the birth of Prince Charles, he made her throw it away. This was all so confusing growing up. You didn’t know whether to stand for the national anthem or go and hurl missiles at Buckingham Palace.
When it came to religion, it was the Church of England versus Roman Catholicism. Both side seemed to regard the other as slightly alien. Attending a Catholic school, as Welsh Roman Catholics, my brother and I felt like third class citizens way behind children from Irish or Italian extraction. I have since discovered we are almost as Irish as they. For most of my Welsh ancestors, Wales was a stepping stone from the Emerald Isle into England. Back at school it might have been handy to know there were Horgans, Callaghans and Cullernes perched in our family tree.
So half of my family originate from economic migrants, the sort of people UKIP would no doubt want to keep out. When I was an angry young woman, listening to those very people discussing seemingly insignificant things like the price of apples, it made me incandescent; but I was wrong. In his final letter home in April 1940, eight days before losing his life in the icy Norwegian waters around Narvik, Grampy Ryman asks whether Gran managed to get on the garden at Easter to plant the seed potatoes. The big things in life will fall into place; it is the everyday and ordinary that really matters – like the price of apples and planting your seed potatoes at Easter and on St Patrick’s Day.
Jayne Ryman