Patrick Comerford
This was a bumper summer for fruit, with the extra sunshine and rain at the right time giving bumper crops of apples and pears. Most of this year's blackberries are gone by now, but there are still some blackberries coming to full fruit along Mill Lane in Stony Stratford. I I wonder, though, how many people will reach up to pick them and taste them after today, Michaelmas (29 September).
In Irish, sméar dubh or the definite form sméar dhubh is the word for blackberry, and it translates literally as ‘black berry’: smear is the base word for ‘berry’, while dubh means black.
Smearagan is another but less common term for blackberry, while the words dris and dris-choille refer to brambles and blackberry bushes.
The phrase sméar dubh translates directly as ‘black berry’. But when I first heard it as a young boy I imagined – with childish humour – how descriptive the phrase was, thinking how often and how easily I smeared my face and mouth and hands black while picking and eating blackberries on the brambles and hedgerows by the lanes around my grandmother’s farm near Cappoquin in Co Waterford.
A well-known belief states that blackberries should not be picked after Michaelmas Day on 29 September because it is believed the devil spits on them after this date.
I remember too the way the phrase ‘Blackmouth’ was used a derogatory label for Presbyterians, especially in parts of Northern Ireland. It goes back to the times in the 18th and 17th century, when Presbyterians were seen as political radicals due to their opposition to the established Church and monarchy.
Before that, in Tudor and Stuart England, a ‘blackmouth’ was a railer, a slanderer, a foulmouthed or malicious person. In the north of England it later referred to a seditious person, and was even used occasionally in the sense of Blackleg.
Some say the phrase was used in Ulster for fugitive Presbyterians or Covenanters eating blackberries as sustenance while they hid, staining their lips and tongues black, although others relate it to their refusal to take the ‘Black Oath’ in 1639.
In Scotland, ‘Blackneb’ emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a label to denote a person who had sympathies with French revolutionaries.
The phrase ‘Blackmouth’ gained prominence in Ulster once again at the end of the 18th century as an insult, used in a contemptuous way to demean Presbyterians who supported the United Irish rebellion in 1798. Many Presbyterians were seen as politically disaffected and radical and were suspected of being a threat to church and state in Ireland. They were reviled and accused of republican sympathies and revolutionary activities, and the epithet came to be applied to the whole Presbyterian community.
Sadly, as my friend and former Irish Times colleague Andy Pollak observes in a blog posting earlier today, much of Presbyterian Ulster has, ‘unfortunately … become … right-wing, fundamentalist, separatist and Orange.’
As I was looking at those blackberries along Mill Lane in Stony Stratford at the weekend, I was brought back to childhood memories of West Waterford, and how we were told as children that Michaelmas Day is the last day for picking blackberries.
According to folklore, when the Archangel Michael expelled the Devil from Heaven on this day, he fell into a blackberry bush, cursed the brambles he had fallen into, and continues to spit on them after this day. It is a superstition shared across these islands, from Achill to Lichfield, and from Wexford to Essex and Cambridge.
In his poem ‘Trebetherick,’ the late John Betjeman seems to link ripening blackberries and the closing in of the autumn days with old age and the approach of death:
Thick with sloe and blackberry, uneven in the light,
Lonely round the hedge, the heavy meadow was remote,
The oldest part of Cornwall was the wood as black as night,
And the pheasant and the rabbit lay torn open at the throat.
Betjeman had spent much of his childhood in Trebetherick, and he died there on 19 May 1984, at the age of 77. But the former poet laureate had a more benign view of blackberries on a visit to the Isle of Man, when he described ‘wandering down your late-September lanes when dew-hung cobwebs glisten in the gorse and blackberries shine, waiting to be picked.’
In his poem ‘At the chiming of light upon sleep,’ first drafted on this day 79 years ago [29 September 1946], the poet Philip Larkin links Michaelmas and a lost paradise with the chances and opportunities that he failed to take in his youth.
In contrast to Larkin’s dejection, I was reminded earlier today of a well-known story in Orthodox piety:
The devil appeared to three monks and said to them: ‘If I gave you power to change something from the past, what would you change?’
The first monk replied with great fervour: ‘I would prevent you from making Adam and Eve fall into sin so that humanity could not turn away from God.’
The second monk pondered awhile and then said: ‘I would keep you far from God so that you condemn yourself eternally.’
The third monk was the simplest. Instead of responding, he fell to his knees, made the sign of the cross and prayed: ‘Lord, free me from the temptation of what could be and was not’.
The devil cried out, shuddered in pain, and vanished.
The other two, surprised, asked: ‘Brother, why have you responded like this?’
He replied: ‘First, we must never dialogue with the devil. Second, Nobody in the world has the power to change the past. Third: satan’s interest was not to prove our virtue, but to trap us in the past, so that we neglect the present, the only time God gives us his grace and we can cooperate with him to fulfil his will.’
Of all the demons, he continued, the one that catches the most people and prevents us from being happy is that of ‘what could have been and was not’. The past is left to the mercy of God and the future to his Providence. Only the present is in our hands. ‘Live in God, in the moment.’
I was listening yesterday to Morning Worship broadcast from Lichfield Cathedral on BBC Radio 4. The theme was drawn from the Nicene Creed – ‘Maker of all that is, seen and unseen’ – and Canon Gregory Platten reminded us of what it means to believe in God as Creator in a world facing climate change, extinction, and disconnection from nature.
The ripening blackberries along Mill Lane in Stony Stratford these days are yet another reminder that Michaelmas today is a day to allow my mind to wander back to childhood memories, and a time for contemplation and unstructured prayers, but to think less of lost opportunities not taken in youth and more about giving thanks for the beauty of the creation and taking responsibility for it.
