Fit as a fiddle - at 90

Jim Ryan, a native of Portroe who celebrated his 90th birthday last month, says he is delighted to have reached such a grand old age and be able to look back on the long life he has cherished.

Chatting with him in the little kitchen of his cottage on a hill above the village in the townland of Cloneybrien, one has to marvel at how this happy looking man has entered old age while exuding the demeanour of a healthy individual 30 years his junior.

Advancing years can take away the youthful power of the voice, yet every sentence uttered by Jim is delivered with a boom and projection one would certainly not expect from a man just a decade short of 100. He’s full of life.

His legs and arms are untypically muscular and he retains a certain twinkle in his eyes - a kind of vibrant radiance that appears to have its sights set on many more years of good living yet to be enjoyed.

“I’m hanging on for dear life; but I’m certainly now walking the plank,” he laughs with black humour, as he contemplates just how long more he’ll be in the land of the living. “As my father used to say, ‘how long will it be to the end of that plank?’.”

YOUTHFUL DEMEANOUR

What is it that makes Jim appear so much younger than 90? “I think it was the way we were brought up here in Portroe in the 1930s and 1940s,” he speculates. “We didn’t have much money back then, but we had plenty of our own food from our farm, and we were well nourished. And I kept fit as a fiddle because I used to run around the hills here like a greyhound in my bare feet all the time when I was a child doing jobs for my father and mother.”

sweet tooth

Asked if his long life might be down to a healthy diet, he reveals quite the opposite. “I love my sweet stuff and they all say ‘look at him eating all that rubbish’,” - before asserting with rogue defiance: “But I’m still existing on the rubbish.”

Jim admits that he’s a demon for sugar, and could eat an entire apple tart in one sitting. His love for all things sweet is borne out when he goes to the fridge during the course of the interview to get out milk for a cup of tea. Peeping out at us from the top shelf I spot a cream-laden swiss roll waiting to be devoured by the single occupant of the house!

“I worked hard all my life, so I am able to burn it all off,” he says, justifying his love for sweets of all kinds.

Yet, he likes nutritious food too, and appears to still have the constitution of a ravenous teenager. “I had four gigot chops on the pan the other day and someone came in and he said to me, ‘you’re not going to eat all them?’ I said to him, ‘just sit there and watch’.”

Most of his life Jim has enjoyed robust good health, but last month he was admitted to hospital with abdominal pains caused by gallstones.

Teresa Freeman, his sister who joins us for the interview, interjects to gently remind him that medics had put him on a diet. Is he managing to stick to it, one wonders? “Deed and I am not - them and their diets,” he snaps with a good humoured, yet outright dismissal. It’s hard to argue with his viewpoint. How can you preach healthy lifestyle to a man who has remained sturdy and mentally bright as a spark into his ninth decade?

FOND MEMORIES

Jim has fond memories of growing up as a child on the hillsides above Portroe. He was one of 10 children, five girls and five boys, he the youngest boy, and now of which only three survive, himself and two sisters, Teresa and Philomena, who live locally.

Jim lives in the cottage where he grew up in Cloneybrien. He extended the dwelling in recent decades, but when he was young it consisted of just two bedrooms, a parlour and a kitchen.Living in such a tiny house with 11 other people was a bit of a crowded situation. “Me and my four brothers used to sleep in one bed, and there were times when I would walk up in the middle of the night with a smelly toe in my nose,” he laughs.

The family had 52 acres of land, and while money was scarce the Ryans were self-sufficient in food that came from a herd of three cows, a handful of pigs, a flock of poultry and a vegetable garden.

His father worked in the Slate Quarries in the adjoining townland of Corbally as a skilled slate cutter – that job to this day locally identifying all his immediate clan who are known in the parish and beyond as ‘the Ryan Cutters’.

Jim went to national school in nearby Killoran until he left at 14. That school has been closed since 1970 and now operates as the local community centre. “Back in those days you didn’t have time to be doing homework,” he recalls.

“When I got home from school I was running across the fields to the well for a bucket or two of water, or I might have to weed the potato drills.

“We were always busy: In summer we would have to go off up the hills to the bog to save the turf and bring it home. There was always work to be done and from April onwards I went around in my bare feet because we had to save our shoes for Sunday.”

After leaving school he joined his father working at the Slate Quarries, an industry which at its peak, he says, employed over 300 men. Later he went on to work in Kenny’s shop in Portroe, an establishment which sold everything from building materials, hardware, groceries and had a bar and petrol pumps. In a later job with a local family he learned the art of making Poitín. “There was huge demand for it,” he says. “We used to brew it in 40 gallon drums.”

Desptie his brewing skills, he was never tempted to have a shot of the illicit drink himself, and has, in fact, been a pioneer all his life. “I hated the smell of it,” he says of the Poitín.

RABBIT MONEY

Apart from formal employment he says he and his brothers earned good money from hunting and selling wild rabbits, abundant in the locality and providing food for many families in former years.

He later worked in a local sawmills in Portroe and as a miner in Silvermines, before taking the emigrant boat to the UK in 1957, joining his late brother Christopher in Huddersfield, where together they built up a good construction business and where, as a talented hurler, he won several league and championship medals with the Huddersfield and Yorkshire division.

While there he met his future wife, Hazel, who sadly died in January last year after almost 61 years of happy union. Their marriage resulted in a family of two girls, an air hostess and a teacher based in the UK, and a boy, now based in Dublin working in the electronics sector. Jim says he is also blessed to have eight grandchildren and four great grandchildren.

In all, he  spent a total of 40 years in the UK before returning with his late wife in 1997 to occupy the old family home.

In his time back in Cloneybrien he has spearheaded a campaign to have a huge cross erected on the top of Cloneybrien, substituting a former cross that fell during a thunder storm in the 1940s, his efforts prompting a letter of appreciation from the former Pope, Benedict. He also led in the work to upgrade the local group water scheme.

Despite his advancing years, Jim is still big into fitness, swimming an hour to complete 40 lengths of the pool in the Abbey Court Hotel almost every day and exercising on a gym bike while watching television at home.

Many people have told him he should be dead years ago as one of his regular jobs while in the UK as a young man involved crushing asbestos, the dust from which can cause a lethal form of cancer.

“I’ve been very lucky and I’m feeling great,” he says, grateful to be so well at 90, and to be still active on the traditional dancing and local singers circle scenes.