Beyond the Breakwater

by Catherine Foley

  MERCIER PRESS

  3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd

  Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.

  www.mercierpress.ie

  www.twitter.com/IrishPublisher

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  © Catherine Foley, 2018

  ISBN: 978 1 78117 546 0

  Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 547 7

  Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 548 4

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  In memory of my parents

  Ena and Joe Foley,

  and with gratitude to my sisters

  RoseAnn and Miriam.

  Preface

  When we lived in Waterford city I was a quiet little girl who wore frocks, sandals and white socks. My fringe fell like a curtain over my forehead. I stood quietly to listen when spoken to. I kept my feet together and, if we had visitors, I sat with my hands together in my lap. I remember playing with my dolls behind my mother’s chair in the kitchen, or having fun in the garden with my two young sisters, until I got a bit older and I was tempted out by the neighbouring children who skipped and hopscotched on our street’s large slate footpaths.

  We lived on an elegant street known as Lower Newtown, in one of its terraced three-storey Edwardian houses. These were tall and dour, peering over lower houses across the street. The People’s Park was out of sight but it wasn’t far away. From the attic in our house we could see slated roofs, terracotta chimney pots, church spires and turreted towers. In the back garden we were pencilled in by laurel hedges and tiled passageways, stone steps and wrought-iron railings.

  On the street, chalk was used to mark out boxes on the footpath: we’d hop away all morning, going from box number one to three to five to nine, then turning to go again. If it rained, the boxes washed away and we were called in. The grey sky would turn to navy and the drops would pour steadily onto the city. After the rain, boys and girls ran out and once again chased each other from gateway to gateway, step to step, corner to corner.

  On sunny days, we had tea-sets to play with in the garden and we chatted through a hole in the hedge with the neighbours. We poured imaginary tea for each other, passing little blue cups and make-believe sandwiches back and forth.

  ‘Oh, do have another one.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly.’

  Where did those mimicking voices of urbanity and civility come from? Like others living near us, we had private piano and elocution lessons.

  My mother and father went out each Saturday night to meet friends, dressing up and standing at the hall door to say goodnight to us. Often in the care of our grandfather, we watched them from the landing, starry-eyed with love and longing to be taken along.

  When we still lived in the city we got a black-and-white television. It banished the sounds of the wind that I used to hear whistling and shrieking through the hallway just outside the dining room. The television inured us to the cold. It drew us in, distracting us from the starry sky outside that arched over the long, narrow gardens in parallel rows at the back of our houses. Once the television was turned on, our eyes grew round, our breathing stilled and we became quieter. We no longer looked outside at the darkening evening. We settled into chairs and watched silently as the cleverness and magic of it unfolded. We started to tune in to its messages of movement and speech, attracted by the flickering screen where characters such as a cartoon duck called Daithí Lacha held us in thrall; where an animated pair from Poland named Lolek and Bolek popped and paraded like match-sticks in front of our mesmerised eyes; and where Daniel Boone, the American frontiersman of the eponymous action adventure series, kept us tense and separate from everything around us.

  At weekends, we’d leave the city behind us and drive south along the river to my mother’s home place some eight miles away. Passage East, on the banks of the Suir, was where my grandparents lived and to us it seemed as if it was always filled with sunshine, fuelled by freedom and peopled by giants. While we were there we became part of the village’s tightly knit fishing community. We knew every laneway and square. We’d be taken down to the strand to play and on our way we’d run along the cockle walk and out along the breakwater to look at the boats going out to sea, or coming home with their catch at the end of the day. Families depended on those catches and I still remember the constant questions that returning fishermen were asked: did ye catch any salmon today, what time is high tide, or are ye going out again today? Those days in Passage East helped shape my understanding of what it meant to live by the sea. At the end of our visit, we’d say our goodbyes and pile into our Mini and my mother, who learned to drive before my father, would drive us back to the city.

  Then, one day, my two aunts arrived with an idea for my parents, one that would change my family’s life forever. Their car pulled up outside our house in Lower Newtown, where we were playing outside, acting like raggedy urchins. We all stopped to stare at the posh car as the two women we hardly knew went through our gate to knock at our door. Once inside and settled, they suggested to my father that he should consider moving the family to the Ring Peninsula – or its Irish translation, An Rinn – a place that he and his siblings loved as they’d spent all their summer holidays there as children because it had been their father’s wish that they learn Irish. So each year they rented a cottage, settled in and immersed themselves in the life of the Gaeltacht community. As well as learning to speak Irish like the local people, they also formed lifelong bonds with many of them, and they fell in love with the music, the traditions and the freedom they had. To them Ring was Shangri-La, Tír na nÓg and Paradise all rolled into one.

  My aunts knew that my father had almost had a stroke and that he’d been given a warning by his doctor to change his high-pressure job as a manager in Stanley’s Waterford Iron Foundry, the doctor arguing that he needed something less stressful. So, after much discussion, my parents agreed to sell our house in Waterford and move to this Irish-speaking area in the furthest corner of the county, a lush promontory of land that juts out into the sea. We all looked on this move as a great new adventure. By this time my grandparents in Passage East had passed away, so we didn’t feel like we were leaving anyone behind. Us children had no sense of fear or trepidation and my mother was happy once she was with my father and we were all together as a family.

  Overnight, we went from a city to a rural environment, from gazing hungrily at the television to a place where everyone’s house was imbued with the shadows and smells of long ago. We left our urban, convent-educated, nine-to-five sensibility – a routine where Dada came home to his dinner each day from the foundry – to, instead, living a life of earthy complexity, one where we embraced an archaic and anarchic lifestyle.

  In Ring I felt the ground shift underneath me. After the prism of our black-and-white television, everything was suddenly in glorious technicolour. As we settled in the village of Baile na nGall, I saw a neighbour running awkwardly through a field of cow-dung after his cows; I saw wild boys jumping off the pier into the sea in an explosion of exuberance and devilment; and I heard Irish words and phrases that plucked on heart strings I never knew existed. I felt myself slip towards wildness, towards strangeness and volatility.

  Ever since, I’ve been trying to reconcile the two worlds of my youth: the powerful pull of my early childhood years in the city, and my
teenage years in a different, more starkly beautiful landscape with a different culture and a different language, where life is deeply felt and steeped in the poetry of the past.

  Life in Ring undoubtedly captured me whole. Every summer, there was beauty in every direction – white daisies speckled the fields, blue sky and sea stretched like music off into limitless air and boats moved over the sea, fluttering into and out of our range like butterflies. Black bobbing heads in the waves were seals coming up to say hello. Green ferns waved on hillsides; furze glinted in sunlight. The roads that wound upwards from our house, winding around bends and corners, spellbound us into a trance-like silence.

  When autumn came in An Rinn we became watchful of time, of leaves falling, night coming, bells ringing, cows sloping, cars revving, feet shuffling, dogs barking and fires crackling. At Halloween we used to smear paint across our faces and dress up in old clothes to go walking along the boreens, knocking on doors in search of thrills and money. We were frightened out of our wits by the sounds and shadows we heard and saw along the way in the depths of those late October nights. We felt and sensed our way along the roads, going with our hearts in our mouths, tripping over our grown-up overcoats and skirts, blinded by gold poster paints in our eyes and hysterical with fear of the unexpected. Those nights were full of screams and flight up to the point when we staggered home, still blind and feeling our way, trembling and exhilarated in turn by terror or delight.

  Through all the seasons music wafted in from the sitting room to our kitchen when visiting friends, aunts or uncles and sometimes our father sang verses or snippets of Irish songs, old notes that echoed down the centuries.

  For me, the pull of the city, combined with my mother’s place of Passage East, has always tugged away with and against the powerful draw of An Rinn and the ancient world that the Irish language represents. Even after my travels as an adult and my time away, my mind still returns to the same questions – am I part of an ongoing tradition, or was I a blank slate ready to be written on like the slates of my street in Waterford? Am I a mariner? A fisherwoman? A Gaeilgeoir? Am I a traditionalist who is earth-rooted and bound to an ancient, dying language, or am I civilised and sanitised by modernity and the progress of time? Am I here or am I there? Which side of the divide do I cross to? Or am I perhaps a bridge between the two?

  An airy day often gets me thinking about the passing of time and those who have passed away. After the death of my parents, the gnawing loss and loneliness often leaves me with a sense of something missing. But when I sit on a wall in the evening light if I’m out for a walk, I sometimes think back and I feel closer to them. I hope the stories contained in this book, which track the arc of my life through the prism of my memories – first as a child, then as a teenager and finally as an adult – will make you smile, and possibly rekindle some memories of your own from an earlier time.

  Waterford City

  &

  Passage East

  1

  Games We Used To Play

  To get to our street of Lower Newtown from the city centre you had to pass over the Pill, a small tributary of the River Suir. You’d go up towards the old infirmary and on to the top of John’s Hill. Then you’d turn left onto Percy Terrace and down you came to Lower Newtown. We lived across from Christ Church National School, which we all referred to merely as the ‘Protestant school’.

  Our street was made up of young families mixed in with some elderly neighbours. We played with all the neighbouring children, but especially the Chesters and the Keanes. Games always started out in a nice, civilised fashion. If someone had a bit of chalk and a couple of stones we’d play hopscotch along the footpath, or if we had two small bouncy balls, we’d play a game up against a wall, each of us taking turns to throw the balls against the wall, all the time singing out our verses as quickly as we could in time to the smack of the ball:

  Dash it, Mrs Brown, Dash it Mrs Brown,

  Dashey, dashey, dashey, dashey,

  Dashey, Mrs Brown.

  Over, Mrs Brown, Over Mrs Brown,

  Over, over, over, over,

  Over, Mrs Brown.

  Under, Mrs Brown, Under Mrs Brown …

  Whoever played had to maintain a certain rhythm and have good hand–eye co-ordination, moving deftly to catch one ball and throw the other until one of the balls dropped. The rest of us would wait, biding our time until an opening appeared. Then we’d step in quickly for a turn.

  When it was my turn, I’d jump into the space and have a go. All eyes watched jealously, waiting to see when or how soon I’d drop the balls. When I did, the next girl was ready to push me out. ‘I’m next,’ she’d cry and elbow me away.

  We had plenty of verses to accompany this game against the wall. Sometimes we’d all sing together like a Greek chorus gathered around the main player. Sometimes the ball juggler alone would recite the lines:

  When I am dead

  And in my grave

  And all my bones are rotten,

  These two balls will tell you my age

  When I am quite forgotten.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,

  And now I’m on my second game.

  And that was how the day would tick by. There was always an audience when we played with a skipping rope. The group would stand in a tight circle and chant out the rhyme, sometimes clapping out the beat too in a taut countdown. Everyone counted the successful skips.

  I look back on those days in Waterford through the zoetrope of time and I remember how we were, when all you longed to do was to jump into the middle and skip to the growing beat of the pack and the elegant belt of the rope.

  Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, tip the ground,

  Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn all around.

  Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, tie your shoe,

  Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, I love you.

  Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, pick up sticks,

  Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, switch off the lights.

  The stakes were high, the rhyme ruled and you were sure to trip if you lost the pulse. Breathless, we’d jump with the arc of the rope swinging over us and with the space underneath our feet getting tighter. As the rope went faster, it slapped down like a metronome against the stones on the road.

  The most difficult and best part was when a few of us skipped together as one, jumping over the rope and ducking our heads under, our bodies held in together, our feet pulled up as the rope swung over us. When as many of us as could fit – eight sometimes or even more – all jumped together under the one arc, singing the chant, breathless, the great slap of our feet together on the footpath and the jostling of elbows was magnificent.

  In Waterford our streets rang with the drumbeat of half-truths, messages and hidden taboos. Our games were threaded with snippets of adult stories – something that was likely repeated throughout the country. Even the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem on an album they recorded in Carnegie Hall in 1963 sang about the chants they used to sing in Carrick-on-Suir as children:

  Ahem, ahem, me mother’s gone to church.

  She told me not the play with you

  Because you’re in the dirt.

  It isn’t because you’re dirty,

  It’s not because you’re clean,

  It’s because you have the whooping cough

  And eat margarine.

  Although only children, we in Lower Newtown were cruel sometimes, viscerally caught up in the pack dynamics of our street games. It was out and out war when enmity between one patch and another erupted. One night, after being assailed by a marauding horde from Alphonsus Road, we faced the group down in the laneway behind Percy Terrace, moving as one tribal and territorial unit towards them. Some of us threw stones to repel them. We were living viragoes, unafraid and shaking with excitement. It was the same principal as skipping; you couldn’t miss the beat. You stepped up when your turn came.

  My ankle was pumping blood when I got home that evening. When my mother opened the front door, I pract
ically fainted into her arms with the excitement and the fright of our skirmish. I still bear the tiny scar from that stone on my ankle today and it reminds me of how I once was, territorial and driven by the beat of balls and feet and a skipping rope.

  2

  At Play

  The scarlet quilt often slid off the brass bed and when it did it was like an invitation to play. We were mesmerised by that silky coverlet when it slithered off soundlessly and fell to the floor.

  That quilt had all the grandeur and elegance of a ceremonial robe and when it was draped around our shoulders we could become anything. Pretending to say Mass was one of the games we played when we were small. We played it upstairs in the attic. No one heard our nonsense talk or our cries of pain when I pinched a leg or an arm, or was pinched myself.

  Once draped in the quilt, the magic began in earnest. I, being the eldest – aged about seven at the time – generally took the lead, while my younger sisters, Miriam and RoseAnn, became my minions. ‘Go down on your knees,’ I’d instruct. ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,’ I’d then intone, standing in front of my kneeling congregation. Generally, they kept their heads bowed and stayed silent like penitential sinners.

  I’d hold aloft the silver cup my father had won some years before for rowing. The cup was a perfect stand-in for the chalice at Mass, heavily ornamented and engraved. Lowering it to the dressing table, I’d pass out imaginary Holy Communion wafers, moving gravely from one to the other. ‘Body of Christ,’ I’d say as I put my fingers on their protruding tongues. ‘Amen,’ Miriam would say before bowing her head and blessing herself in perfect imitation of all the parishioners we’d seen do it at Mass. ‘Amen,’ RoseAnn would repeat as she followed the synchronised movements. We’d stay up in the attic playing like that until our mother called us for our tea.