Memories of Bardons

I'm writing this in Bardons pub, the winter-comforting fire behind me recalling a lot of the childhood that I spent here when it was home to the family which was probably the closest friends to us Byrnes.

Where the fireplace is was then the focal point in the sitting room and, long before the advent of central heating, the sanctuary against winter.

It was also a place of some penance. As Byrne kids coming down to play with the Bardon kids after tea it was also where we had to take part in the nightly family rosary.

We'd kneel against chairs and couches, facing the walls and away from each other, reciting or answering the decades of the prayer. It seemed to us a long affair, against the play stuff that we'd come down to do. A rosary prayer is not many minutes, but minutes not playing is endless time to children.

Other things about Bardons bring more memories. From where I'm sitting as I write I can look across to an area originally beside a bottle store where we used to make pocket money helping to put labels on the Bardons Guinness bottles.

Every pub used to bottle its own stout then, using a siphon arrangement which could fill six bottles at a time in rotation. They were corked using a small simple machine too. And the St James's Gate brewer provided printed labels to each pub with its own name as the bottler.

Putting the labels on was a primitive operation. We'd smear a slow setting glue on a plywood board. Then the labels, which came in bundles tied with string, were individually folded in the middle with the edges folded out so that they could be placed in lines across the board.

When we had a board full, we'd sit beside the wooden cases of the newly-bottled beer, already corked. We had perfected a technique of picking up a bottle, lifting a sticky label, and pushing it around the curve of the bottle with forefinger and thumb. The final move was a palm-slap smoothing of the label.

We could earn that pocket money in Bardons, but not at home. Our pub had a more modern setup, a machine loaded with the stack of labels. Pulling a lever with the bottle inserted in a particular place did the glue and placing bit. Hand-corking of the bottles was also gone, as we had a 'crown cap' machine. So the Bardons pocket money opportunity, paid by every dozen bottles labeled, was an important economic lifeline to us small Byrnes.

Such is not available to today's generations of young Kilcullenites. Maybe they're missing out. Or maybe the Celtic Tiger made such innocent junior earnings no longer important.

But it allowed us to earn the wherewithal to buy a few more sweets, and TK lemonades, than we could otherwise have managed.

So look at the label on that bottle of Guinness, and think of another time.