Soon my nudes will curl in a flame on a fire or perhaps some will stare out at me from an opaque recycling bag and I’ll see their recriminatory hues of yellows and orange in shredded flashes. After they’ve evaporated into nothingness, all those hours from that summer in Cork will be gone. Layers of my life will peel away and the torn parts of paintings from that winter in Limerick will peep through a clear plastic bag.
I remain inert now, waiting, wondering why I stood at an easel to paint. My paints are shut away. I don’t take them out. I am like the model in front of the two-bar heater, waiting for the time to pass, while others set out to draw, brushes at the ready.
68
The SS Kincora
Our painting of the SS Kincora remained unloved for years, hidden in the back room until RoseAnn and my mother took it to a restoration artist. When we saw the beautiful old oil painting come to life in all its glory, our curiosity was tweaked. What was the story behind this turn-of-the-century Steam Ship Kincora?
She was built in 1895 by Hawthorn, Leslie & Co, of Newcastle in England and owned by the Malcomsons of Waterford city. She plied her trade between Limerick and Liverpool, carrying general cargo, occasionally calling on the homeward or outward journey to Fenit or Galway. She was a fine 230-foot vessel, a steel screw steamer grossing nearly 1,000 tonnes. She had a 32-foot beam and a depth of 14.5 feet.
There is something tantalising about this modest painting. Perhaps it’s the fact that the Kincora was just a working coastal steamship, with one funnel and back-up sails, fore and aft: she’s not showy and her sturdy lines hint at the nature of the men who worked on board, ordinary decent men from Limerick, Waterford and Liverpool.
The artist, J. Bourne, who painted her was one of those painters who used to set up his easel at the end of the pier in Liverpool and paint the various ships that passed in or out in the hope of selling his work to captains who took pride in their vessels. Captain Edward Power, from Tramore in County Waterford, was captain of the Kincora. He must have liked the painting, purchased it from this pier-head painter and taken it home to hang on his wall. We don’t know how it came to be in our possession, but we thought it was possible Captain Power may have known our grandfather, who was a river pilot on the River Suir, and had given it to him at some stage.
As we continued to uncover her history, we learned that the Kincora was lost after only six years in service. On her last morning, she was steaming along off the south coast of Ireland, away from the port of Limerick on her way to Liverpool, carrying a cargo of hay and one paying passenger. It was not long after midnight, in the early hours of Thursday 8 August 1901, when she was passing the Tuskar Rock just off the coast of County Wexford. There was dense fog when the giant-sized ocean liner, the Oceanic, as if out of the blue, came across her bows. The White Star Line ship was on her way to New York with 1,200 passengers on board. In spite of both ships using their foghorns, a collision occurred with fatal results for the Kincora and seven of the crew.
There was just enough time for ropes and ladders to be thrown down to the little steamship. Some of the survivors used these to come aboard. Two lifeboats were also put out by the Oceanic. Fourteen men, including Captain Power and ten of his crew, two stowaways and the ship’s one paying passenger, a Mr J. Toppin from Limerick, were hauled aboard. Of the others, there was no trace.
One of those who perished was George Collins, a fire stoker, who went back down below in an act of heroism to turn off the boiler and prevent it from exploding. He left his wife and seven children destitute in Windmill Street in Limerick. But it’s believed his bravery prevented the Kincora from blowing up under the port bow of the Oceanic. Had that happened, she would have caused much greater damage.
Within seven minutes, the ship was gone. The Oceanic waited and searched until dawn. As the day came up the great liner continued on to Queenstown. Once she’d berthed, the surviving men were left ashore.
Three months later the Admiralty Court ruled, finding that both ships had been proceeding at immoderate and excessive speeds. No real blame was ever apportioned.
But, at home, we wondered about the drowned sailors and the broken ship that was lying on the seabed. Eventually, we convinced TG4 to commission a documentary about the ship and so RoseAnn began digging further. During her research one day, out of the blue, she learned that a body had been washed up along the coast of Wexford, just beside Fethard-on-Sea, some three weeks after the ship went down. She uncovered the inquest report. The coroner’s court had established that Charles Sacht, of Byron Street in Liverpool, was a member of the crew of the Kincora. We then learned that his family had never come over to claim his body. They never knew he was buried in Fethard-on-Sea until RoseAnn contacted them 100 years after the tragedy.
And so on a grey, overcast day we drove to the little village of Fethard-on-Sea and the picturesque church of St Mogue’s to meet the descendants of Charles Sacht when they travelled over from Liverpool to pay their respects. The rooks were swooping down over the headstones when we walked down to his unmarked grave. That’s where we stood, remembering the tragedy that took place on 8 August 1901 when the Kincora sank and seven men lost their lives.
69
Romance in the Air
It was dark and cold outside. Ice covered the roads and the sky was heavy with snow. Very few were out that night. There were just three men drinking at the counter in the Seanachie Bar, a place where I had worked when I was nineteen. The three bachelors were simply having a quiet drink in the dead of winter. RoseAnn and I sat at a table by the window. I ordered our drinks and we sat near the bar. Soon we were part of the company and they were talking to us.
One of them, a dark-eyed, thin man, sketched us a story of unrequited love. It was his own story but he brushed it off lightly, as if broken hearts were meant to be lived with and endured. He’d lost in love, he said. Thoughts of romance trembled on the air. I looked at this gaunt, lonely man and I recalled a couple I used to serve in the pub.
The two of them came in at 9 p.m. every week. Their whispered imprecations and concerned entreaties at the door always created a certain awed expectancy. Once they pushed through that heavy squeaking door heads began to turn to view their progress.
They were big people who moved slowly, cumbersomely even. Their bodies seemed to sway elegantly from side to side as they came down along the narrow bar, step by careful step. They seemed to mimic the great milking beasts of the farm where they spent their lives. Arriving at the counter, they would stand and wait for me to serve them. There was a definite aura of glee about the pair of them. Although well into their middle years, they were newly wed.
Her face would light up at the sight of me and she’d bend her head slightly to one side and smile with pleasure when I went to take their order. He would stand slightly behind her in the bar’s darkened passageway. He’d come close if she looked to him to furnish an answer. Even I, in my blinkered state of youthful indifference, could see he was a handsome man with a fine mouth, smiling eyes and a manly bearing. He always wore a suit and a dark trilby with a short trim. They looked well together.
Her voice, deep and velvet-like, would caress me. ‘Hello, Catherine. How are you?’ I remember her warmth and friendliness. And it was clear she had taken pains to dress up for the occasion – with a dab of rouge reddening her cheeks and a garish line of lipstick along her mouth. Usually, she sported a military-style suit and she sometimes wore a hat, its netting pulled forward jauntily over her forehead. A paste brooch often decorated her lapel.
With all the wisdom of my nineteen years, I used to view this woman and her soft-spoken husband in a slightly pitying way. I thought her innocent and simple. But I kept these preconceptions to myself. So when she put her handbag on the counter, her eyes twinkling at me full of the fun and excitement of being out together for a drink, I didn’t fully appreciate how happy she was in her newly married bliss or how beautiful and lovely she was.
She’d give me the order then: ‘A p
int of Guinness and a vodka and slimline tonic.’ And she’d chat to me while I got the drinks.
She leaned in close one night to tell me about their romance. I don’t think I believed her. Secretly I dismissed her story, thinking she was away with the fairies. But she told me how they’d lived on neighbouring farms until she wrote him a letter one day suggesting he call up to the house so they could talk about getting married. She asked a mutual neighbour to deliver the letter. That’s how she proposed to the shy farmer and he accepted.
‘I asked him to marry me,’ she said, watching my reaction. ‘I did,’ she said, seeing my disbelief, her great rheumy eyes reflecting the light that bounced off all the bottles ranged along the shelves. She wanted me to know how well it had all worked out.
I asked the men at the counter if they remembered this couple. They nodded. They are both gone now, they said. The dark-eyed, thin man remained still, saying nothing at all.
‘Do you know that she proposed to him?’ one of them asked me. ‘O, she wrote to him,’ the man continued. ‘She gave the letter to a neighbour who lived between the two of them. She wrote, asking him to call down to her so that they could discuss marriage.’
We all savoured the wonder of it.
‘And do you know,’ said the man at the counter, ‘the man who delivered the letter was a bachelor too and he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t asked him.’
There was a pause. The dark-eyed, thin man gave a cough before he spoke.
‘’Twas I brought it down to him,’ he said, quiet and shy with the admission. ‘That’s right, ’twas me,’ he said, nodding. ‘And she had no eyes for me at all.’
After a moment of silence, he laughed quietly. It seemed the passage of time had dulled the embarrassment he’d felt and he was able to look back at himself to a time when he had been younger, foolish and full of hope.
The rest of us sipped our drinks quietly, sensing his regret. We savoured the disclosure, knowing that he’d shared a secret with us. Love was in the air that night, as I recalled the couple who used to put on their finery to come to the pub for a drink, where they would twinkle in the gloaming, exuding happiness.
70
Following the Wren
My return to living at home full-time did throw up a couple of memorable opportunities. With the dawn of St Stephen’s Day one year, a mad impulse saw us dressing in a mish-mash of old clothes to ‘Follow the Wren’.
Our plan was to revive this old tradition, where grown-ups (and children, on occasion) took to the roads, paraded and sang their hearts out, purportedly with the intention of hunting a wren. In reality, though, we’d simply go from place to place, belt out a few songs, create a racket and generally have fun.
About seven of us gathered together that morning, all suitably attired and ready to march through the streets of any village we came across. We smeared paint on our faces and donned capes and shawls. One of us wore an oversized Crombie; another sported a fur. Between us we had a selection of musical instruments – namely, a bodhrán, a tin whistle and two African drums.
We left Ring and motored along narrow boreens going through the western recesses of County Waterford in search of all its hidden villages. We descended on any pub we came across, stopping in Grange, Kiely’s Cross, Tour, Aglish, Clashmore and Old Parish.
Weary drinkers in Clashmore were just recovering from the bedlam of their village’s annual hunt, the sound of braying horns and barking beagles dying away in the distance, when they were awoken from the mid-afternoon lull by us crashing in upon them. We sang like a marauding horde, helped along by our bodhrán, drums and tin whistle. They cast bleary eyes in our direction, gazing on us with looks of bemused tolerance when we launched into a raucous rendition of ‘Anois ar Theacht an tSamhraidh’, roaring out the chorus: ‘Oró, sé do bheatha abhaile, anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh’.
In Villierstown we put our instruments away to have a drink.
As darkness fell, we trekked over a track that skirted the Goish river and tried to find a fabled ancient stone that was said to be a relic with druidic powers. Did we hope to harness some of its pagan energy that Stephen’s night in the dark?
A lunar light washed over us as we went in single file up the glen. When we found the slab of ogham stone, the inky light of another world, na síoga agus teacht an fhir dhuibh – the world of the fairies and of the devil – pulled us in.
One girl, who was the poet amongst us, with her red hair flowing down her back, stepped up onto a stone, raised her hands aloft to the heavens and addressed the goddess of the earth. The power of the ancient druids seemed to flow into us and we breathed in the misty night air until it felt like a benediction.
Perhaps it was the hot whiskies we’d imbibed along the way but the night seemed to slow down and the moonlight was suddenly full of portent and potential. A sense of resolution and expectancy took hold of us. It began to feel as if we’d broken the back of the old year and were coasting towards a countdown and the dawn of a new year. In spite of the icy cold and the lateness of the hour, we were slow to pull away from that place.
71
Fairies on Woodstown Strand
We walked along Woodstown Strand:
It was twilight
when fairies flit from briar to bud.
Even as the sun went down and the evening grew chill
We slipped through a veil
And remembered how we played as children.
We heard the tide coming in,
And our feet going over tiny crunching shells
Sounded like voices from forty years before
rolling in off the waves.
And we became light like crystal
And easy in the breeze
Amazed at all our eyes could see
in the gloaming.
72
Graveyard
The grave is a riot of blooms: swathes of salvia, lavender, geraniums, fuchsia, hollyhocks and campanula wave endearingly in the sun when I walk up to the headstone with Deirdre Morrissey, a cousin from Dublin. I have to keep myself in check from opening my mobile phone and taking a picture to tweet.
We stop to reminisce and admire the flowers that cover the plot. I take joy in the lovely shrubs that we have growing there, not to mention the little birdbath and the terracotta box of African daisies and Roses of Sharon. I could so easily send an image of this out into cyber space such is my ease and familiarity with the place where my mother and father are now buried. My heart fills with warmth at the sight but I stop even as the delphiniums and daisies wink at me.
Maybe I’m too free and comfortable with these graves. Maybe I shouldn’t be feeling this cosiness in the cemetery, I think, as we walk on through the sunlit graveyard to visit another family plot. I point to the headstones of those neighbours that my cousin may remember and she is charmed by my intimate knowledge and lonely for her own family members who are buried in a sprawling cemetery in the city.
She finds it all a far cry from her own urban existence where, she says, tragedy is usually borne anonymously and there is no comparable outpouring of communal grief after death strikes. At the removal of a soul from a country parish it seems everyone is pained and moved to sympathise, each person lining up to shake the hands of grieving family members.
As the sun throws dappled light across the grass, I lead my cousin along the path up through the graves and I wonder if I am seeing this place through rose-tinted glasses. And yet, our lives revolve to a greater or lesser extent around this place of tranquillity and we are drawn back here again and again, reminded of how life ends and how we are left with an existential silence.
Here lie individuals who leave loneliness and a lifetime of memories in their wake. Here lies a neighbour who came home from Hollywood with his family every summer to while away his time down on the pier fishing and boating. Here lies a devoted family man, who was passionate about his greyhounds and the Friday night race meets in Youghal. The graveyard is rich with the detail and intr
icacies of stories that have woven their way into my life. I remember them all as we walk along the path, an old tree casting welcome shade over us.
We turn a corner and walk up towards the leafy resting place of the skipper who went down with his crew in a tragic maritime accident not so long ago. Here is the elegantly maintained grave of the beautiful young girl who died in a freak accident on her way home in her car one night.
The place is quiet. It feels peaceful and comforting to walk among the stones, even as the men dig a grave for the young man who has just been killed, cut down in a road accident in the prime of his life. On the morning of his funeral, cars will stretch along both sides of the road for half a mile and more.
Was it mad to lie on my mother’s grave when she was interred here first – three years before my father died – to see what she could see? Is it morbid or strange to feel such a connection with this place, where pain is public, where sorrow is a low caoineadh, where there are no answers? Yet sculpted stones record the dates and details of lives once lived. And as we walk I read the names and I remember who they were and where they lived and the knowledge of their lives buoys me up.
My cousin and I walk down to the gate. We sit in my car and drive home. I salute a neighbour who passes in his jeep. I watch a lorry ahead slow down to make the turn at the corner of Bóthar na Sop and Cnocán an Phaoraigh. I brake too to make the hill as we carry on home.
Beyond the Breakwater Page 20