SNIPPET: "People who lived in our small farming community must have thought that my mother produced her offspring as a source of continuous cheap labour for their benefit. We were the largest family in the area, so requests for our help were always coming in, especially at school holiday time. In spring, when the fields were ploughed and harrowed and made ready for the usual crops to be sown - wheat, corn and barley - our first job would be to replenish the "mala mors," or big bags, which the sower wore around his waist with the appropriate seeds. The bags of seed would be filled from the large barrels of grain kept in the granary and brought to a convenient spot by the headland in the field where the fresh soil was waiting to receive and nurture it. It was a joyful sight; a biblical scene. Man sowing the seed, throwing hope into the air, hoping that when it fell, that the God-given earth and a combination of the elements would yield a good harvest in due course. Harrowing would again he repeated to cover the seed and then the back-breaking task of picking the stones would begin: stones which the plough and harrow had unearthed from their slumbering where they had lain for centuries. These would be collected and added to the dry-stone walls which marked the boundaries between fields. The "Fear Breaga" or False Man, would then be made, and with due pomp and ceremony he would be placed in the middle of the field to keep his vigil frightening the birds. We would change his location from time to time, hoping to deceive the cunning crows. They would eventually realize he was harmless and mockingly post their own sentries on his outstretched arms while his friends feasted on our grain. When the birds became too daring, a blast from the shotgun would provide victims to hang on the "Fear Breaga." The crows would then sit on the fences screaming vengeance at the perpetrators of such an abominable act, and that scene would be repeated throughout the villages until the fields put on the mantle of green, giving hope for the future harvest and rewards for man's labour." -- Excerpt, Marrie WALSH, "An Irish Country Childhood, A Bygone Age Remembered," (Blake/London 2004). Mary Kate FERGUSON, b. 1929, grew up as part of an idyllic community in the beautiful County Mayo. Marrie emigrated to England in the winter of 1946, where she met and married Tom WALSH, also from the West of Ireland. It took a visit to the first Irish Women Writers Workshop in 1988 to encourage her to write. Marrie moved back to the village community she had left many years earlier. Her memoir is dedicated to her late husband, Tom.