The Canal Bridge: A Novel of Ireland, Love, and the First World War

by Tom Phelan

  The children in the town call me Batty Bridgen, and most of them don’t know my name isn’t Bridgen, that in the beginning it was the Batty Bridge One. Batty Bridgen reminds me that the Aqueduct carrying the Canal across the Johnnies River came to be called the Dakeydocks, Ypres became Wipers, Ploeg-steert became Plugstreet, the auntie became Dante.

  “She never goes to Mass,” I’ve heard it whispered in shops.

  “She got him with the first stab.”

  “One prong came out each side of his spine.”

  “She lives with Protestants.”

  “She was a terrible one when she was young, always in fights and climbing trees.”

  “Mad.”

  The children cross the street when they see me coming. After all, it is true that I did kill a man and should have killed another before he killed my Matt. If I were a child and lived in a village with a man-killing woman, I’d avoid her too, maybe even have nightmares about her. The story of how Mick Gorman died has surely gathered moss over the years and my fearsomeness has grown with it. When Con and myself were small, Daddy used to frighten us with, “Boney will get you.” It’s Batty Bridgen the parents probably use now: “She’ll get you with her pitchfork in the night if you’re not good, in the front and out the back.”

  Batty Bridgen!

  “Redfingers Fitz” is what we called the woman who walked the Towpath every Monday morning to wash Missus Conway’s clothes.

  If you are different in a small community, your difference is dressed up in kindliness and rendered acceptable, just like all that dreadful leftover pig-stuff gets dressed up in a skin and is called a sausage. Francis of Assisi was saintly because he was batty. I’m batty because I’m feisty. It’s better to be saintly than batty, better to be a batty woman than a feisty one.

  I’m as feisty as ever I was, not afraid to say my piece when I think it needs saying. I’m still nearly six feet tall at seventy-four. I keep my long grey hair tied up in a bun, and that gives me more stature. Height in a woman is a great threat to men, and I have used mine to shrivel many an uppity man simply by looking down on him. I’m as thin as a whip, and I limp from a fall off my bike a long time ago; Ralphie Blake’s greyhound ran out of the ditch under the front wheel. Isn’t it a small world?

  Why do I keep coming here? they ask. And if I said it’s because the familiar chisel marks in the smoothness of the coping stones give me comfort, they’d ask why. Then I’d have to tell them a long story from years ago. So, I tell them I come down to the Bridge for a walk.

  Coming to the Bridge brings me back to the place where there was happiness and I was a part of it. When I run my fingers across the dressed stone of the parapet, remembrances of Con and Matthias and myself in our childhood bubble into my memory.

  The Bridge, too, was at the centre of my own love story almost sixty years ago, and I remember all the details, remember the ecstasy of Ali Baba’s Cave, the agony of separation when Matthias and Con left to join the army, Matt’s homecoming and his marriage proposal. Everyone should have a love story, even if it ends as painful as ours did. I suppose we take a fearful risk when we love, leave ourselves open to the possibility of terrible loss. Millions of girls had a loss like mine during the War—were told about the death in an army letter and then were left to imagine for the rest of their lives how the lover had died.

  Which was worse, I have wondered many times—not knowing and not being there or, like me and Matt, me having to watch his killing but being there, close enough for him to see my eyes and for me to see his and to be able to say with one gaze what it would take a poet a million words to say. That look between us as he hung impaled on the pine pole and I stood motionless, knowing I couldn’t help him, knowing he was dying and knowing too that the only way I could tell him how much I loved him was to stand there and look into his eyes, and his dying eyes telling me how much he loved me and how happy he was about every second we had loved each other. Oh, Matthias. Oh, Matthias, how much I loved you, love you still.

  Of the few minutes in the Machine Shed where everything happened, it is only those last moments with Matt that I have kept sharp and bright in my memory. But I can still dimly see in the shadowy background the frantic movements of shapes as everyone tried to stay alive. And the background shadows flit by as if that part of the night happened in two seconds. One man, Mick Gorman, ended up with the prongs of my pitchfork sticking out through his back, one each side of his spine. Matt killed two men, one with his hammer. The other was trying to run out to start the fire that would burn Enderly, but Matt caught up with him and tripped him and smashed his head into the pine pole. When the man fell to the ground, he fell on Matt’s feet. Matt was trapped for a few seconds, and when he freed himself and faced Johnjoe Lacy, the pointed end of the pickaxe in Lacy’s hands was already on its way. It went through the centre of Matt’s chest with such force and weight that, when the point came out through his back, it kept going and pinned Matthias to the pole. There was a huge gasp: I can still hear it, like a sigh, like a deep breath blown out too quickly.

  Johnjoe Lacy had been moving at such a rate that he stopped within a foot of Matt’s face. And Matthias’s hand came up clasping that long knife of his, the one he brought home from the War. Whether Matt directed his hand or whether his damaged nerves drove his arm, the point of the knife went into Lacy’s throat behind his chin and came out through the top of his head. And whether or not Matt meant to do it, the knife came back down and Johnjoe fell at Matt’s feet. And for a split second that lasted a century, we looked across a space of a few feet into each other’s eyes and there passed between us something that doesn’t have words, never could be dressed up in words.

  Matt’s eyes changed suddenly, and he began losing control of his neck. He tried to keep his head up, but it moved around like it was too heavy. In an instant, the life left his eyes, and his head fell onto his chest. His hair slid forward and hung down, almost covering his face. His right hand, still holding the long war knife, fell down by his side, and even when his knees buckled, he did not fall. And I ran to him like a whining bitch running to feed her pups, pushed the long hair aside, touched his face and kissed his eyes and whimpered his name and told him how much I loved him.

  Is my love story more romantic because when Matt died our love was the love of young lovers? The love in our love story has remained young and unspoiled and unstrained by the sadness and pain that the average couple has dealt to them or creates for each other during a long lifetime. One way or the other, everyone should have a love story, no matter how painful it might turn out in the end. Love is a sanctifying grace.

  The Canal is full of warm sanctifying grace, Matthias said that day I washed him under this Bridge after he walked home from the War.

  Today, the Canal is dried up; tall weeds are growing where the water used to be. Rusting bed frames and bent bikes and old tyres appear when the weeds shrivel up in wintertime. Of course, the bream, the carp, the roach, the rudd, the pike, the perch, the tench and the eels are all gone. The Towpath is overgrown by a virulent bush whose leaves are sticky and whose name no one knows. The gentler, water-dependent wildflowers have been evicted by the tougher dandelion, the ragwort, the thistle, the dock and, of course, the nettle. The royal swans and the red-legged, coal-black waterhens have flown away. The telephone wires are gone, and most of the poles have fallen, the rest leaning at angles. Where the Harbour was, there’s a scrap-metal yard, full of rusting hulks and noise, and old engine oil oozes out into the nearby fields.

  In many places, farmers have dug away the banks and built roads across the bed of the Canal; fields that were divided in 1827 have been reconnected. On the wealthier farms, bulldozers have levelled the banks for miles, and all traces of the Canal are gone, as if it never was. The children of Ballyrannel could never imagine the silent barges floating through the green fields, the bargemen hupping the horse and slowly moving in and out of the lives of the people who lived along the line, bringing news and messages
from Dublin. Mister Hayes told us about the shooting in the General Post Office in 1916, told us about the lads getting shot in Kilmainham.

  The Canal bridges are still standing; leading to nowhere, standing stark in the middle of fields, but someday soon a builder is going to discover the beauty of the coping stones.

  The Canal.

  The Canal was ours. It would always be there. Each of us knew that the other two dreamed about it when we were separated by the promise of India and then by the War. The Canal was everything we did with each other until the two lads went away; it was us knowing everything about each other; it was us happy, and we believed, without knowing we believed, that it would always be there. Before he went away, Con said that when he died, he wanted to be pushed out into the Canal in a burning boat like the Vikings. “A small rowing boat will do,” he said, “or even a cardboard box.” But now, the Canal is fading out of the fields and out of memory.

  The dead people who were once so important to us quickly become mere lines in a closed book when we who remember them pass from the scene. I still weep about the fire that killed Matt’s family. I still weep for the two young men who set off to see the world in 1913 but ended up scraping other men’s bodies off the floors of the abattoirs that were France and Belgium, as Missus Hodgkins would have said. Of course, the passing years have smoothed the jagged edges of the raw emotion of the times; no one can marinate in such agony for long.

  When I die, gone forever will be the pain created by the loss of Lionel and Con and Matt, and now Sarah and her husband, Phillip. There will only be knowledge. History books cannot pass on the pain endured, the anguish, the terror of the times. I suppose it’s good that they can’t. Even a headstone in a cemetery, leaned on and wept at for years, becomes just one more piece of cold granite when the final rememberer dies.

  The War and all the lads who died in it, who were crippled in it, will only be knowledge soon. There will be no one left to lean on the headstones to cry in sorrow. Twelve years ago, Cornelia and I found the cellar in Auchonvillers under a house calling itself The Laburnum English Tea Rooms. The owner charged us one franc each to visit the cellar where, she said, there was a carving on the wall for a man who’d been shot at dawn near the end of the War. At the bottom of the cellar steps I saw Matt’s carving. I sank to my knees and bent my forehead to the floor and I cried for the innocent childhood of the three of us, cried for brave Con, for brave Matt. There I was in the same cellar in France, on the same floor where Con had slept that last night of his life and Matt had loved him enough to place Knifey in his heart. Oh Sacred Heart of Jesus, the things we do for each other, to each other.

  And then in the small garden cemetery outside Ocean Villas, I rubbed my hands over Con’s headstone, told him how much I loved him, and whispered to him the Canal Song.

  And that’s why I come here, to move my fingers around the smooth coping stones on top of the Bridge, to love again, to hear again the Canal Song in childish voices slipping along the polished surface of the water.

  My side.

  Come to my side where the yellow cowslips are speckled red, where the small daisies dance in the breezy grass. Come to my side.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks are due to everyone who supplied information or otherwise assisted me during the writing and production of The Canal Bridge.

  In Ireland: David Coss, Dickie Fitzpatrick, Theresa Hourigan McDermott, Neville James, Bill Lawlor, Michael Phelan, Pádraig Scully, the staff of the Laois County Library, the Mountmellick Development Association, Tommy Lindsay of the War Memorial Gardens in Dublin. A big thank-you to Anne-Marie Hourigan Gunn for all her help and to Bernadette Keating for the cover photo of the canal bridge. My gratitude to the staff of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig.

  In England: Geoffrey Charrot, the staff of the National Archives in Kew.

  In France: Avril Williams of Auchonvillers.

  In the United States: Marie Braccia, Joan and Séamus Clarke, Dr. Jerome Ditkoff, Bob Keeler of Newsday, Dave Opatow and the staff of the Freeport Memorial Library, Lyn Swierski, Stan Drew of Golden Images, and John Leary of Attic Art. Thank you to the family of Angelica Stewart Charrot for the portrait used on the cover.

  To Anthony Farrell and the staff of Lilliput Press, my gratitude.

  I am most grateful to my agent, Tracy Brennan of Trace Literary Agency, and to my editor, Cal Barksdale, and his colleagues at Arcade.

  I also appreciate the assistance of the Ireland Fund of Monaco and the staff of the Princess Grace Irish Library.

  Special thanks to my wife, Patricia, for her help, suggestions and encouragement, and for sharing the sad trips to the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele, and many other sites where the bodies of the young soldiers of World War I are still being found.

  And finally, a salute to the members of the delegation from “the North,” whom we met at the Menin Gate in Ypres. You had come to Belgium to lay wreaths on soldiers’ graves and at the monuments erected in their memory. Young men you were, former members of the security forces in Ulster. You knew by my accent that I was from “the South,” and I told you about the men of Mountmellick. As we shook hands you told us that in the laying of wreaths you were honouring the dead, not because of where they had come from, but because of where they were.

  Glossary

  bad cess (to you): a curse; “bad success,” or, in other words, “bad luck to you.”

  be gob: by God!

  beastings: colostrum; cow’s thick, creamy yellow milk produced immediately after she gives birth.

  beating the bushes (to flush out birds): to earnestly search for something.

  beyant: beyond, over there.

  Blighty: affectionate name for England. In World War I, a blighty was a wound severe enough to retire a soldier home to England.

  bollicks: in many instances, refers to testicles. Often, a person with a thorny personality.

  Boney: Napoleon Bonaparte. In the minds of many people outside France, Napoleon was a bogeyman, and “Boney will get you,” was still a threat to misbehaving children long after Napoleon’s death.

  bot fly: flying insect that lays its eggs on horses; its larvae bore through the host’s hide, causing great pain.

  Bullseyes: a candy or sweet, black and white and round, tasting strongly of peppermint; a favorite with children who had one penny to spend.

  Burmese syrup: rubber.

  Canal Song: inspired by “Bailero,” one of the Songs of the Auvergne.

  catechism: book containing the principles of a religion, sometimes presented in the form of questions and answers.

  Catherine wheel: display of light spiraling out from a center.

  childers: children.

  chimleys: chimneys.

  cleanings: afterbirth of a cow.

  Clonmacnoise: monastic settlement on the banks of the Shannon in County Offaly, founded by St. Ciaran in 545.

  codding: kidding.

  Curragh: large tract of grassy, treeless land in County Kildare.

  died roaring: died in considerable pain due to a lack of painkillers.

  doul wan: that old one or the old one; a not-so-polite way of referring to a woman.

  draughts: the chains, ropes or leather straps by which an animal is attached to an agricultural implement or cart or trap; traces. See singletree.

  eat the face off: give a severe dressing-down.

  Easter 1916: rebellion centered on the occupation of the General Post Office in Dublin during Easter week in 1916. The rebellion was put down within a week.

  Enderly, the attempt to burn: between 1911 and 1926 more than 200,000 Protestants in southern Ireland were burned out, forced to move, or moved of their own will because of fear for their lives.

  fag: cigarette.

  Famine wall: wall usually built around the estates of landlords; the construction gave employment during the potato famines of the 1800s.

  Feis: ancient cultural event that has evolved into, mainly, Irish dancing comp
etitions.

  Fenians: Irish republican organization founded in the United States in 1858; members committed terrorist acts in England in an effort to remove British rule from Ireland.

  ferninst: fornent; across from.

  Fir Bolg: mythological early inhabitants of Ireland.

  Foden Disinfector: machine used to disinfect uniforms against lice.

  fornent: ferninst; across from.

  Franciscan scapular: two postage stamp–sized pieces of cloth, made of the same material as the Franciscan religious habit and worn on a string around the neck by the laity, with one piece on the back, the other on the front. The pieces of cloth contained religious texts or images. The scapular connected the wearer spiritually with the Franciscans.

  Frederick: principal character in The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan.

  George V: English king during World War I, George (1885-1936) was the grandson of Queen Victoria, as was Kaiser Wilhelm.

  gobshite: literally, nasal mucus; usually an annoying person.

  Ha’penny Bridge: cast-iron pedestrian bridge across the River Liffey in Dublin, built in 1816. The builder was given the right to charge a half-penny toll for a hundred years.

  Haig: Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who commanded the British Expeditionary Force from 1915 to the end. Under his command there were over two million British casualties, including tens of thousands of Irish soldiers.

  Haig’s claret: posted to Sudan in 1898, Field Marshal Haig had a camel fitted out to transport a supply of his favorite claret to Khartoum.

  hurley: piece of sporting equipment made of ash, distantly related to a field-hockey stick, used in the Irish game of hurling.

  hurling: ancient Gaelic game played with a hurley and ball. In modern times there are fifteen people on a team.

  Jack Dempsey: American boxer (1895-1983) who held the world heavyweight title for seven years.

  Kaiser Bill: derisive nickname for Wilhelm II (1859-1941), last emperor of Germany; a grandson of Queen Victoria, as was his enemy, George V of England.