Beyond the Breakwater

by Catherine Foley

  Despite my best efforts, they turned their attention away from their story. The two of them eyed one another across the mat. Sheila’s eyes grew round and her eyebrows raised a fraction. Gile sucked in her lips in disapproval.

  ‘He won’t come down the chimney to you, you know!’ Aunty Sheila declared, her face scowling at the terrible fate that was in store for me should such a calamity as not going to the céilí become a regular occurrence. While she began to recount a story of moonlit nights on the way home from the céilí with boys they knew, I looked dolefully at the chimney in front of me and sheepishly agreed to go to the céilí from then on.

  Their visits are vignettes in my mind. I’ve clear memories of the two of them, sitting in the prime seats at either side of the fireside, regaling us with their wit and their wisdom, the room full of their presence.

  Today, we still sit around the fire, talking about the garden, about work, about shopping and whatever news is doing the rounds. We huddle around the fire and enjoy the shelter the house provides from the icy breeze outside. We are filled with a sense that this room has been at the centre of our lives for decades. We’ve spent evenings and nights putting more coal on the fire, plumping up the cushions and making ourselves comfortable, and often, when we think back, our circle resonates again with those conversations and oft-told stories and the fireside is peopled with vivid memories of my two aunts with their cups of tea and their cigarettes daintily held aloft.

  29

  The Boys from Bagenalstown

  After my return from boarding school, my parents decided they’d prefer to have my sisters and I at home with them; therefore, rather than look for another boarding school, they sent us all to the local Presentation Convent in Dungarvan, which had both a primary and a secondary school on the same site. From then on, at the beginning of the new school year, we were all kitted out in new navy uniforms and driven in for the start of school at 9 a.m.

  Winters took on a new routine during this time. Flooding on the road, drifts of snow, or cows on their way back to graze, as well as the vagaries of the battery in our old car, all conspired to delay us on different occasions on our journey to school.

  After the end of school each day, we’d pile into the car waiting at the school gate and head home, full of the day’s adventures. Our evenings were taken up with television, dinner, homework and bed. In school we moved from classrooms to science labs, from the assembly hall to stairwells and cloakrooms. We stood at our desks and said a prayer at the start of each class. We became familiar with the words of Shakespeare’s two heroines, Rosaline and Celia, in As You Like It. We read stories in Irish by writers such as Pádraig Ó Conaire and Pádraig Mac Piarais; we had isosceles triangles and myriad other mysteries of geometry explained to us. We studied European history and covered milestones such as the Second World War, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. We read poems by Yeats, Kavanagh and Keats. We learned by rote and sometimes by logic. We had a number of lay teachers but we also had several brilliant religious teachers, including Sr de Lourdes, Sr Mary of the Sacred Heart, Mother Margaret Mary, Sr Maria Gioretti, Sr Perpetua and Sr Gertrude.

  One evening I was recruited for the debating team by Sr de Lourdes. I didn’t realise at the time that the world was within the grasp of this debating team, that we were about to step out onto the public stage and that soon we’d be winning debating competitions and returning victorious to our school.

  In due course, it came to be and word was sent around that all classes were to gather in the assembly hall. We stood apart on the stage and saw the students file in. The noise as they shuffled in grew in intensity until the principal had no choice but to call everyone to order.

  ‘Settle down, girls,’ she instructed, her voice like a bell above the racket. ‘I have a special announcement.’ A hush descended on the school population. All eyes were upon us, smiling and grateful for the change of tempo in the school on a Thursday morning when any distraction from the humdrum daily grind of learning was welcomed by teachers and pupils alike.

  Now they looked up at us, the debating team, and after the principal announced news of our win, thunderous applause broke out. We’d come back as the provincial champions after beating the Ursulines, the convent girls from the city. We’d won the Junior Chamber Ireland Regional Debating Final. We were the toast of the school. A photographer from the local paper was waiting in the wings. We were front-page news that week in The Dungarvan Leader. The Dungarvan Observer and The Munster Express had the story as well.

  ‘Would you look at the cut of her hair,’ one girl said in a whisper within hearing of my youngest sister. Ignoring the disparaging reference to my untidy appearance, she quipped proudly, ‘That’s my sister.’

  Our next bout of debating would be against the boys of St Joseph’s Academy in Bagenalstown at the All-Ireland quarter-final. Strangely, we didn’t rate them at all. We viewed them as country boys, not equal to us sophisticates, girls from the Presentation Convent in West Waterford. We felt unbeatable in our navy skirts and blazers emblazoned with the school crest and our ties of silver and blue.

  In the heat of debate we were all eager protestations and declamatory statements. At full tilt, we’d hold our prompt cards out like tear-stained hankies and we’d plead our case: ‘Madam chairman, reverend sisters, friends, ladies and gentlemen, members of the opposition, I tell you the place of justice is a hallowed place.’

  We’d raise our arms in oratorical excess and hammer home our points. We knew how to frown dramatically – all scrunched-up eyebrows and lined foreheads – in order to achieve maximum expressions of shock and concern. We had the debating lingo down pat. We were praised in the local press for the ‘power of our logical aggression and teamwork’.

  Such was our ease that on the night of beating the much-feared girls’ debating team from Killarney in the Munster semi-final, one of my teammates, Sheila, mid-opening address, hardly missed a beat even when a little mouse ran across the stage. We, her fellow teammates, were equally still; such was the level of our commitment and concentration.

  ‘Madam chairman, reverend sisters, friends, ladies and gentlemen, members of the proposing team, I strongly oppose the motion that pollution is the price of progress.’

  Night after night, we’d stay back after school with Sr de Lourdes to hone our arguments and ready ourselves to do battle with the upcoming opposition. On the night of a debate, we’d bombard the audience with our brilliance.

  We had a strong sense that our fellow students and our teachers supported us. We were showered with compliments and idolatrous glances whenever we walked through the school. Teaching nuns stopped us to ask us questions about our progress.

  Our prowess on the debating floor was a whispered legend. We were the special ones, an elite bunch, famed for our intellects, our rapier wit and logic.

  The boys of Bagenalstown, we were sure, would be a piece of cake. We were half-embarrassed on their behalf at the cruel treatment they would receive at our hands, such was our self-belief.

  And so we travelled to Bagenalstown. They were dishevelled when they walked out, shy and stumbling even. We noted the curled-up edges of their off-white collars, and the way their ties hung loosely around their necks.

  We took our places and the debate began.

  We were smug at the start, but we quickly realised how stunningly brilliant they were as our polished gestures and words were batted away like stray balls on a tennis court. Their arguments pulverised us. They were mercurial and gauche, sharp and incisive. And as our arguments drew to an end, we were left winded, well and truly knocked off our perch by the boys from Bagenalstown, who ran away with the motion and ended our run of debating successes.

  As we drove home in the minibus that night, we feared we would never know those heights of idolatry or fame again.

  30

  Sisters

  Cream cheeks; thin, delicate thighs;

  pinched-at-you-looking eyes;

  Whinging
and writhing now and then,

  with a hot water bottle under the quilt.

  Then ‘Kitty, rub my back’.

  This is the silkiest time.

  Sitting on the pillow, my palm rubbing her back,

  pressing her better.

  Waiting.

  I rub fast, hard, as she tenses

  from the pain

  and the wincing shoots through to her shins.

  It eases.

  And quietens

  as both of us: you lying, I sitting,

  breathing, in thought, in time,

  wait at home under the skylight,

  still as the clouds that pass by.

  31

  The Pope’s Visit

  We left while it was still dark and wintry, piling into a minibus up on the Helvick Road. We were still half asleep – us three sisters with fellow teenagers of the parish all under the care of our local curate. Each of us had sandwiches and crisps and flasks of tea. My mother had made a banner using an old sheet and sewn a wide strip of yellow felt material as a border around its edge so we had the papal colours. She had the words An Rinn agus An Sean Phobal in Irish letters emblazoned in yellow in the centre. We were all going to see Pope John Paul II say Mass in Galway.

  In our excitement we had eaten our sandwiches by the time we drove into Clonmel. When the priest took his packed sandwiches out around Limerick, we noted the neatly packed, delicious-looking contents of his lunch box – the leg of a chicken, the ham sandwiches and two little queen cakes. We watched ravenously as he ate every mouthful, hoping he might offer us some, but of course he felt no such inclination.

  We were bone-tired by the time we got to Ballybrit. It was drizzling and damp. Once out of the minibus, we joined the hundreds of thousands and walked through mucky fields, guided by stewards until we were ushered into a corral. We were herded in with the Waterford and Lismore diocese to either lean against the rough wooden fencing that had been put in place or sit on the ground.

  The sky was grey, laden with rain, but the helicopters that flew over again and again and the warm-up acts kept us entertained. Bishop Eamonn Casey and Fr Michael Cleary kept the ball rolling, belting out chorus after chorus of ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ and ‘Totus Tuus’ until the music began to swell and the voices of some 280,000 were finally unleashed. Some of us slept until the main event, leaning on the wooden fencing or lying on our raincoats in between the mucky shoes and boots that trampled around us. Each delegation must have been clearly visible that day, stretching out across the field with a huge panoply of waving flags and white faces looking up to see the pope.

  Hours seemed to slip by until the main event began and we saw the man himself emerge onto the stage. He blessed us and waved through the mist. His vestments were blown all around him but his charisma kept us mesmerised.

  In hindsight I recall his all-embracing proclamation of ‘Young People of Ireland, I love you!’ He delivered it in that characteristically strong Polish accent and I realise that it must have come straight from his heart, bursting from him spontaneously in response to our youth, our innocence and our warm welcome. When he said, ‘Moladh go deo le Dia’ – praise be to God forever – us Gaelgóirí from Ring felt he was talking directly to us and we were completely smitten. We cheered him on and laughed at the lovely guttural effort he had made, roaring our approval with everyone else, applauding him when he smiled at the sea of drenched faces. There he was, a real man on a dais, and he had travelled to be with us.

  For months and even years afterwards, those two phrases – his Polish intonation intact – were often invoked, either at the top of the steps into our sitting room or at the table in our kitchen. ‘Moladh go deo le Dia’ or ‘Young People of Ireland I love you’. Although we spoke them in jest at such times, they were also uttered in fond remembrance of Pope John Paul’s style and personality.

  The cold is uppermost in my mind as I think back to that outdoor Mass in Galway when there were seventy-seven robed figures concelebrating together at the distant altar. We followed their marionette-like movements. The Mass seemed to happen like a pantomime at times. Prayers and blessings over the bread and wine were blown away on the wind, while we shivered and watched and the mute show continued, only punctuated a couple of times when the wind carried back an odd line or two.

  And on that day in Galway, we waved our banner, swaying to the strains of the hymns, and the creeping cynicism that had been settling into my brain and my person was washed away – for a time, at least. It was the embarrassing but exquisitely irresistible urge to weep that I remember too. I allowed tears to stream down my cheeks along with the thousands of others who were there when we sang ‘Totus Tuus’ and ‘Ag Críost an Síol’. And as happens after all the best outings of one’s youth, when we trudged back to the minibus we joined a long queue of buses and headed for home, tired but sated.

  32

  Nana Mouskouri

  There was a year in the seventies when Nana Mouskouri was famous around the world and we knew all of her songs. I used to sing the one about Little Jimmy Brown who lived in the mountains high above the valley. I sang it when I was called up to the mike at the top of the bus once as we wound our way home. We’d left the Presentation school gates early in the morning on a school trip to Kilkenny Castle and Dunmore Cave.

  My sister Miriam used to join in at the chorus and do the tolling bell as it marks out the stages of Little Jimmy Brown’s life. So she bonged away musically at the precise moments from her seat on the bus. Bong! Bong! she sang, until Mrs Radley, not understanding the significance of her a cappella singing, frowned and signalled energetically for her to stop. Blushing with embarrassment, Miriam clammed up like a crab, shot dagger-looks at our geography teacher and I sang on like a diva.

  When summer rolled in we became familiar with Nana Mouskouri’s famous dark brown, shoulder-length, centrally-parted and perfectly coiffed hair, as well as her thick black glasses, her kaftans, her strong Greek accent and her rural background. I learned how she was first discovered. It seemed she was at home helping in the kitchen in her village, singing her heart out, when a passing record producer overheard her magnificent voice. It must have sailed out softly through an open window on the evening breeze, stopping him in his tracks. Immediately, the story went, he went in to meet this virtuoso and offered to make her a star.

  The story of Nana’s discovery while singing in her mother’s kitchen struck a personal chord with me. It seemed magical and yet possible to me, especially when I was doing the washing up or hoovering and feeling that my days were full of Cinderella-like drudgery. I wanted to sing my heart out and experience the dizzy heights of universal adulation and admiration. I dreamed of being asked for encore after encore.

  There were skylights in all of the bedrooms in our house at home and those who passed along the road outside would pass underneath these windows. Although it was more usually frequented by Harty’s cows swaying and pushing as they made their way home to the farm to be milked in the evening, I held out hope that one day someone would pass and discover me.

  So, occasionally, when the hot days arrived and Grecian luck seemed abroad, the sky a blue dome with an odd cloud drifting by, I’d wander aimlessly upstairs to loll in my bedroom, organise my books and sing. Of course, I’d make sure the skylight was open. I’d sing softly at first in order to beguile any listeners who might be passing and then I would sing molto fortissimo to impress. At times I’d hum, so as to sound nonchalant and casual.

  On those summer days when all things seem connected and the world was full of possibility, my voice swelled out through the skylight, trilling and rising on each crescendo. I sang a selection of songs by the McGarrigles such as ‘Foolish You’, ‘The Summer I Went Swimming’ and ‘Heart Like a Wheel’. I sang ‘Buachaill ón Éirne’ and ‘Sliabh Geal gCua’, ‘An Chúillfhionn’ and ‘An Goirtín Eornan’. I imagined the music dropping like a blessing onto the fuchsia bushes along the road outside. I heard the cows munching
like a sweet counterpoint to my song and I was happy.

  One day, my father came in to the kitchen to tell me I’d received a compliment. He told me that a neighbour on his way home the evening before had heard me singing through the skylight and that he’d stopped to listen. He’d been very impressed, my father said. ‘He said you have a lovely voice.’

  I felt unmasked by the compliment and I blushed to think of him standing underneath the skylight listening. The man who’d heard me only lived up the road from us and he was not my idea of a wand-waving impresario. I was not at all excited by the compliment from this dark-haired man with an easy way about him, who’d wander by our house, the hint of a gleam in his eye. Suddenly, it seemed too foolish to sing in my bedroom any more, waiting to be discovered. I vowed to sing in the kitchen from then on and to forget about the skylights upstairs. I vowed to sing for my mother and myself alone. And whether the window in the kitchen was open to the world or not, I would hardly care at all, at all …

  33

  Mario Lanzo

  When we sang certain songs, my sisters and I turned into extravagant divas. In the back seat of the green Mini with my parents up front, we’d travel along, singing our lungs out, competing furiously for recognition. We’d warble away, jockeying quietly for the top slot. Often at the end of a performance, one of us might elbow the other and assert ownership in the deadliest of serious tones, ‘That’s my song!’

  We loved Percy French for his melodious tunes and his brilliant story lines. ‘Drumcolliher’ was given a frequent outing in the back of the car, each of us taking a verse and joining in at the chorus.