Beyond the Breakwater

by Catherine Foley

  And in the end it was as good as any Enid Blyton novel – we had Miss Fiona Walton for English, Mr O’Driscoll for history, tobogganing during the snow and a head girl to lead us in grace before meals. I woke every morning to the sound of bells being rung up and down the dormitory aisles. After breakfast, we’d shiver on the avenue walk to our classrooms, the crunch of gravel cracking like ice underfoot in the eerie stillness of the morning. At night we’d gather in the refectory, deafening ourselves as we dragged our 200 stools from under the tables to sit as one for dinner.

  Still, nothing could compare with being home for Christmas. I sat at the kitchen table, watching my mother shake the flour loose and kneading the dough as she made brown bread – a knot in my stomach as I felt the days slip away. I tiptoed around in case it was a dream. My sisters in turn tiptoed around me. In a way I was like a stranger in their midst.

  All too quickly the Christmas holidays were over and I was back at school again, suspended in that strange school universe, adrift at night in a sea of echoing silence.

  By the start of the second term I knew all too well the daily rituals of boarding school, as well as the longing, loneliness and wishing that went with it. At bedtime in my little cubicle, even as I tried to damp down the waves of homesickness, a terrible tide of longing would sweep me along. The only relief for homesickness came on Sunday afternoons at exactly 3 p.m. when I would stand on the convent landing and focus all my attention on the public payphone.

  Its sudden explosion into life was terrifying but I’d pick up the receiver and hear my mother’s voice. Then a tightness would grip my chest and I’d lose the ability to speak, at first, but as tears streamed out of my eyes, I would give vent to the great river of loss that my twelve-year-old self could hardly understand.

  25

  Boys

  I began to notice boys at a young age. I’m not sure if it was out of innocent curiosity or because of the early onset of carnal desire. Anyway, two little boys from Liverpool, home on holidays in August, used to play near us on the breakwater in Passage East where we used to spend all our holidays when we lived in Waterford. Was it their blond hair, their strange accents, their athleticism or their smart clothes that caught my attention first? All I remember is that the sun shone when they appeared. I used to see their little legs and elbows going like pistons as I watched from a discreet distance.

  When I was about nine I remember being shy, being interested and wondering how I could get closer to these intriguing specimens of Liverpudlian boyhood. I recall watching them covertly from the storm wall that ran along by the cockle walk. Of course, this was an unspoken passion and, sadly, my presence remained unmarked by them. During this time I was also charged with keeping an eye on my two younger sisters and while I issued instructions to them about holding my hand when crossing to the shop, or asked them for another candy cigarette or jelly baby, I was all the while aware of the two golden-haired, brown-kneed gods who sat on high atop the breakwater, watching the tide turn and the waves break on the strand. My pulse seemed to quicken at the sight of them and my awareness of their proximity was acute.

  Then there was Jacko the Monkey. Of course my two siblings, to my great annoyance, had great fun teasing me about him. They would call to tell me he had just passed our house in Waterford, that he had looked in or that he had stopped to ask my mother a question. Jacko the Monkey, they would sing. I used to blush on having my barely expressed, barely formed interest so rudely unmasked. And my interest in this young man, who used to sell badges for the scouts, was so fleeting that he’s hardly worth a mention; it was only that a mention of his nickname or a sighting of his distant figure cycling up John’s Hill was enough to have my sisters in giggles.

  It was when I was at boarding school in Cork that I discovered Donny Osmond, a key figure in my development as a teenager. He was all the rage in the early 1970s. While I was there I had a photograph of this pouting, dark-haired singer surrounded by his large family in pride of place on my bedside table. I had the black and white photo in a little stand-alone picture frame.

  I recall the head nun coming to visit me in my cubicle once when I was sick in bed. She saw the picture and smiled indulgently.

  ‘Is that the family?’ she asked me gently.

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ I told her, glancing briefly at Donny and the rest of the Osmonds, not wanting to draw too much attention to this figure of desire. ‘And where are you?’ she asked me and so, to my embarrassment, I had to explain who he was.

  After I had spent two years at the boarding school in Cork, it closed – much to the disappointment of my younger sisters who thought they’d never get to experience for themselves the ‘joys’ of midnight feasts, tuck boxes and long weekends away from home. I came home to attend the all-girl Presentation Convent Secondary School. This involved more girls, more nuns and, consequently, there was a period when I worried that there was surely a dearth of similarly aged young men in the world, as I was not meeting any of them. I came to believe that none existed and I told myself that I should accept my fate.

  And thus it wasn’t until I grew up and learned to break the sound barrier that I spoke to these gods of allure, of maleness, of beauty. To me, boys are figures of romance and adventure. Boys in my eyes will always be mysterious, unknowable and distant. Thank heavens for their seeming indifference, perched high on a breakwater and gazing out to sea. Thank heavens for their difference, for their ability to remain aloof and fleeting, and for all their strange, otherworldly qualities.

  26

  Summer Songs

  The songs of the McGarrigles wafted out from the Yellow House all during the hot days in Ring in the summer of 1976. These Canadian sisters were singer-songwriters, who often sang about swimming – ‘when I did the backstroke and the butterfly and the old Australian crawl’; they sang about leaving and bidding farewell; they sang about the blues – ‘never having had the blues from whence I came but in New York state, I caught ’em’ – and their pure voices wrapped themselves around my heart ‘like a wheel out in mid ocean’.

  Our cousin Donal Musgrave and his family came on holiday to Ring that year. He, his wife Shirley and their two children, Katie and Darragh, rented the Yellow House, which stood overlooking the cove and was perched at the very edge of the cliff. Even as we lolled on the grass on the slope underneath the Yellow House and looked down onto the stony inlet of the cove which nestles under Helvick Head, we could hear the McGarrigles singing. And from the start I loved their songs.

  The house was a former hunting lodge belonging to the Villiers Stuart family, which dated back to the eighteenth century. It was said to be haunted but the Musgraves weren’t afraid of any ghosts. No matter how many warning, big-eyed glances we’d give them, they settled in happily, braving those rooms we found cold and creepy. They never seemed to notice the chill you’d feel when you stood for a moment in a corner.

  They were planning to stay for a month. On arrival, they draped their togs along the banisters of the minstrel’s gallery and put all their Wellingtons and fishing rods, their buckets and spades along the wall near the wainscoting. They were our sophisticated city cousins, and all through that summer of 1976 when I heard the McGarrigles playing on their stereo, my breath caught in my throat and I stood rooted to the spot, looking out over the deep green depths of the little stony strand beneath, listening to the plaintive notes of ‘Go, leave, don’t come back, no more am I for the taking, but I can’t say that my heart’s not aching, it’s breaking in two’.

  I had come of age listening to the sean-nós and all the great songs of loneliness, loss and deportation, such as ‘Na Conneries’, ‘Sliabh Geal gCua’ and ‘A Chumaraigh Aoibheann Ó’. But that summer the McGarrigles blew like a fresh summer breeze across my bow and I was buoyed up and rocked away over the waves to a bright, sunlit place where I could be sixteen and trembling, fresh and new. They helped me find my own voice. Their harmonies wedded themselves to my ear, the pitch and timbre of their voices m
atched my own exactly. I bought my own tape and wore it out listening to them.

  My mother loved the light, airy swing of ‘Foolish You’ – ‘Sad and foolish that’s how I feel, don’t you know how fortune favours few, fortune’s blind, as blind as you my dear, what a pity, oh foolish you’. Sing that for me, she’d say and away I’d go, like Kate and Anna McGarrigle, singing with my heart until my voice caught as I reached a top note.

  I filled our kitchen with the cool summer sounds of their songs until they became part of our repertoire, sisters like us, who were ‘like interlocking pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of life’, as one of their songs described.

  ‘Talk to me of Mendocino’ was so strange and ethereal sounding. Where was Mendocino? I hardly know still, but it cast a spell, like ‘My Town’, which told of someone who ‘had to leave it and head south where the climate is kind’. Or ‘Go Leave’ and its description of a heart that was ‘breaking in two’. It was the instruments they played that beguiled as much as their voices – there was a banjo, symbols, a tambourine, a harmonium, a mandolin and a melodeon. As they drew out those long notes like a piece of string, those old-fashioned instruments resonated and harkened back to years before when my father had played the melodeon, or the tremolo of my mother’s plucking when she picked out the notes of ‘The Croppy Boy’ on her mandolin.

  I loved their harmonies, their swerving changes of key and their notes that dipped and rose like rearing horses. The McGarrigles sounded like they came from a family who sang old-fashioned hymns and parlour songs and gathered around an organ in the wilds of Quebec.

  Such pathos and such words in both English and French held me in thrall. Their singing sounded unbounded and raw, and implicit in their songs and the way they sang them was the story of their own flight from home to find their feet.

  27

  Swan Song

  There was a hum of conversation in Murray’s when we went in on that particular morning, a buzz of excitement, mar bhí cuairteoirí tagtha – as visitors had arrived. These visitors had attracted musicians from the area to gather in the pub. Expectation of the great entertainment that was to come was in the air. Raconteurs were vying with each other to take centre stage; tin whistles, bodhráns and fiddles were ready to burst forth and laughter rose in bubbles with local fishermen mixing with the visiting revellers.

  It was my father’s habit to go to the pub for a drink on a Sunday morning before dinner. I was with him on this occasion. He chatted to some friends at the counter so I left him and sat staring out the window at the overcast day. The sea was a rumpled sheet of pale jade moving silently across the bay.

  As it happens, I found myself sitting next to the great musician and piper Séamus Ennis. He had a slow, graceful manner. I was also aware of his towering reputation as a collector of folklore. I knew that he was a lover of sean-nós and that he was a gifted performer himself. He was greatly admired in our Gaeltacht area, but I was a teenager at the time so I stayed quiet on the edge of the company.

  He was gracious when he sat down beside me to say hello. He was in a black suit and he wore spectacles. He had a high forehead and hollow cheeks. His unbelievably long, pale fingers rested on the stops of the uilleann pipes, which were strapped to his shoulder and arm.

  I was struck by the kindness and attractiveness in his face.

  He spoke with a low, gravelly voice. His eyes were full of wonder and barely concealed merriment. He was compelling and he spoke in clear, tuneful Irish. As a collector of béaloideas, i.e. folklore, who had cycled and driven to cottages all over the country from the 1940s onwards, he was an old hand at putting people of all ages at their ease.

  Had I ever heard of the story of the dying swan, he asked me. The swan is known to sing only once in its life, he said. She sings when she is about to die, he explained. He watched my reaction.

  It seemed as if no one else in the pub was listening when he spoke to me. The tragedy and beauty of the fable gripped me instantly. ‘The swan sings “Cuimhe cí, cuimhe có”,’ he said. ‘Have you heard it?’ I shook my head. He sang it softly then. ‘Cuimhe cí, cuimhe có, cuimhe có. That’s the sound a swan makes at the end,’ he explained.

  His voice, a deep bass tremolo was musical, low and evocative. He sang those notes of requiem slowly and, like a whisper, they went into my ear and stirred my imagination. It was a lament by a swan whose nest has been plundered. In my mind’s eye I could see the ageing swan somewhere on a darkening lake, gliding through lonely reeds and then coming to the bank to climb ashore cumbersomely, her head stooped low as she prepared to die.

  Ennis and myself sat side by side on a bench in Murray’s, the sea behind us, the mountains in the distance reaching up through the clouds: the view, timeless and serene, in keeping with the swan’s last notes. And with the fierce intensity of feeling that all teenagers experience, I was both fascinated and horrified by this beautifully sad image of death.

  Then, giving resonance and depth to his voice, he played the dying notes of the air on the pipes, and their low breathy drone added to the terrible grief of the dying swan as she laid her head down to leave the world in all its beauty.

  I came across a recording of Séamus Ennis recently on YouTube where he is playing a reel that was composed by his father, James Ennis, around 1913. It’s called ‘The Morning Thrush’. He says a thrush that sang on a tree outside the window inspired his father, and that he himself then heard a thrush at home and he could hear some of the phrases his father had composed in the bird’s singing. I continue to search but have so far failed to find a recording of him playing or singing ‘Cuimhe cí, cuimhe có’.

  The diaries Séamus Ennis kept when he worked for the Irish Folklore Commission between 1942 and 1946 are published in a book called Mise an Fear Ceoil by Cló Iar-Chonnacht. The author, Ríonach Uí Ogáin, includes plenty of insights and stories. ‘Tá scéilíní ann faoina chlisteacht, faoina cheol agus faoina dhathúlacht’ – there are stories there about his intelligence, about his music and about his attractiveness, she writes.

  Although I’ve never heard ‘Cuimhe cí, cuimhe có’ since, the few moments I spent with him that day have stayed in my memory, clear as a bell – like a perfect note.

  28

  My Aunts

  My two aunts, Sheila and Gile, often sat at our fireplace, sipping tea delicately from china cups. They would take long draws from their cigarettes and regale us with anecdotes and conversation. One story sparked off another.

  They told us stories of long ago, of family escapades in Ferrybank where they grew up, of old beaux and dances, of summer nights at the traditional céilí dances in Ring where they spent their holidays, and other stories that had stayed with them over the years. They used to tell us stories both about and against themselves, about trips they’d made to Rome or people they’d met in Lourdes.

  Once in a while one of them would excuse herself to ‘spend a penny’, as they euphemistically described a trip to the bathroom. In the meantime, the other aunt would carry on with the anecdotes, not missing a beat.

  We loved to sit around the fire, listening to them, entranced by their conversation and their turn of phrase. And they loved to hold court. The room would fill with smoke, the taste of tannin hung in the air and the walls were warm to the touch. Once Sheila had finished, Gile would take up the thread and their talk of days gone by would continue. When they got up to go, we’d all heave ourselves up, wishing they didn’t have to go, and we’d accompany them outside to their car, a sporty little coupé.

  My aunts were authorities on everything. I usually sat on the hearth as close to the heat as possible, like a cat purring, with my knees under my chin, listening to them. My two sisters usually sat as close to them as possible also, on the mat or on the arm of a chair. We drew in close to listen and egg them on, ready to provide the required ‘What happened then?’ when the moment demanded it. They could just as easily comment on what we wore, or ask how we were doing at school. But such was our addiction to
their company that we were prepared to take that risk and put up with such inquisitions.

  Perhaps it was their certainty about everything that we liked. There were no half measures or shades of grey. They had rules and there were no prevarications or hesitations. As long as they stayed by the fire drinking tea, talking to us, lecturing us even, we’d listen, waiting to jump in order to replenish their tea and keep their stories going. Their arrival heralded a break from the daily routine.

  It was like that the day I made the fatal mistake of letting it slip that I was not going across to the nightly céilí in the local hall. They were not at all pleased with this but I was in my mid-teens at the time and not inclined to attend these dances of public embarrassment and bewilderment.

  ‘Would you like another hot drop?’ I asked them, hoping to distract them from my non-appearances at the céilí. Sheila held out her cup, like a queen who was happy to indulge me. She waited while I poured. It acted as a pause in the dramatic yarn she was in the midst of telling. We all waited quietly, hanging on her every word and exhalation of smoke.