Third book from PJ Cunningham

PJ Cunningham,  an author credited with keeping the rapidly-disappearing traditions of rural Ireland alive, has just published the third book in what is an acclaimed trilogy.

The short stories in the author and journalist’s A Fly Never Lit are formed from the events and characters of the author’s youth in Co Offaly, and form an incisive picture in what were dark decades in rural Ireland.

PJ Cunningham has been described by author and journalist Billy Keane as the man who is keeping the customs and practices of this disappearing Ireland alive as his father John B Keane had done for a previous generation.

A Fly Never Lit joins The Lie Of The Land, and The Long Acre, which was shortlisted for the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Of The Year in 2014.

“The stories in A Fly Never Lit are evocative of their time and the collection shines a sometimes harsh, sometimes soft light on family and community relationships as they juggle with legacies of loyalty and feuds handed down through generations,” said PJ.

“In this book, I have placed greater emphasis on observations of older people filling out their days in sometimes idiosyncratic, sometimes sad ways as they interact with their neighbours.

“For instance, in the title story, my mother plays a long-running game with a neighbour in the throes of dementia.

“The Man Next Door shows the resourcefulness of their next-door neighbour in raising money with the unwitting help of a bishop in Liverpool on the day after a Grand National – and how he used the same ploy with his confessor as he lay dying.”

Watching a calf being shot accidentally by cousins on a visit or being implicated in a big gorse fire elevates the tone of the anthology from bleak and terrifying to pages loaded with devilment and fun.

“My father was a traditional farmer from the horse and cart era who never changed up until his death in the mid 1970s,” said PJ.

“He was of the opinion that tractors cost money to buy and money to run while the mare only needed free grass and water to do the work around the farm.

“The old and new ways came together in an amusing way when one day we put a bet on with him to see if our Morris Minor car could pull a cock of hay in quicker than the mare to a reek we were making in a corner of one of our fields.

“Ireland back then was a more complicated place than we imagine now.

“It was inhabited with fairies and other supernaturals lurking in every dark corner and cohabiting side by side with the church as it wielded a powerful influence that permeated every strata of daily life.

“It was a world different than any previously experienced in Ireland as the emigrants of the forties and fifties began coming back in the summer time of the sixties with their first generation of English-Irish offspring.

“This opened a door into another world from the mouth of these visitors as I observed their fleeting integration from London, Birmingham or Northampton into a tight and closely-knit community in the Irish midlands.

“The strange thing is that those fortnightly annual friendships I made back then, have continued right through to this day in a number of cases.”

One of the most poignant stories in the collection, The Summer Invasion depicts the coming and going in those weeks, and in particular highlights the sadness surrounding the night before the emigrants reversed their boat journeys back to England from Dun Laoghaire.