Published by Ballynastragh Books
www.ballynastraghbooks.com
Email: [email protected]
ISBN: 9781925281682 (eBook)
Please refer to the National Library of Australia website for cataloguing in publication details.
Text and photographs copyright © 2016 Rosemary Esmonde Peterswald
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
Cover and internal design by Luke Harris, Working Type Studio, Victoria,
Australia www. working type. com.au
Editor: Ormé Harris
Cover Photo: Sitting on Clown with Eugene, Dibs, Viv and Gill holding Porky at Reidsdale.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Creator: Peterswald, Rosemary, author.
Title: Can my pony come too? : from an idyllic childhood home in Tipperary to a challenging new life in Australia / Rosemary Esmonde Peterswald.
ISBN: 9781925281682 (eBook)
Subjects: Peterswald, Rosemary.
Peterswald, Rosemary--Family.
Women--Australia--Biography.
Irish--Australia--Biography.
Immigrants--Australia--Biography.
Dewey Number: 920.720994
eBook distributed by
Port Campbell Press
www.portcampbellpress.com.au
eBook Conversion by Warren Broom
To my parents,
Owen and Antonia (Toni) Esmonde
When I think of these days I think also of other episodes and personalities. I think of Lieutenant-Commander Eugene Esmonde, VC, DSO…and other Irish heroes that I could easily recite, and then I must confess that bitterness by Britain against the Irish race dies in my heart.
—Winston Churchill…1945
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Till We Meet Again
Chapter 2 County Wicklow
Chapter 3 An Irish Family
Chapter 4 Drominagh
Chapter 5 An Irish Hero
Chapter 6 On the Shores of the Shannon
Chapter 7 Across the Lake at Clonmoylan
Chapter 8 A Time of the Raj
Chapter 9 Leaving for Down Under
Chapter 10 On the High Seas
Chapter 11 Arriving to the Unexpected
Chapter 12 Irish Bush Family at Reidsdale
Chapter 13 Moving to the National Capital
Chapter 14 Ijong Street…Not Drominagh but Ours
Chapter 15 The Reluctant Student, Rose Bay
Chapter 16 A Fortunate Meeting
Chapter 17 Falling in Love
Chapter 18 Leaving the Nest for Papua New Guinea
Chapter 19 A Tropical Wedding
Chapter 20 Tapini…and Life as a PIR Officer’s Wife
Chapter 21 A Settler’s Wife…Lae
Chapter 22 Back Home and Off to War
Photographs - Section 1
Photographs - Section 2 (Yachts)
Photographs - Section 3
Chapter 23 Waiting for the Returning Soldier
Chapter 24 Adjusting Again…Kapooka
Chapter 25 Wewak in the Sepik
Chapter 26 Home To Aus and a New Career
Chapter 27 Our Own Drominagh
Chapter 28 Ireland Revisited
Chapter 29 A New Life in Tassie
Chapter 30 She’ll be Apples at Koonya
Chapter 31 Overcoming Adversity…Hobart
Chapter 32 Finding Our Feet and Sea Legs
Chapter 33 Heading North on Reveille
Chapter 34 From Humble Beginnings…Starting Peterswalds
Chapter 35 The Next Generation and Oceania
Chapter 36 A Setback with a Silver Lining
Chapter 37 Sea Dreams in the Med
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
References
About the Author
Chapter 1
Til we Meet Again
It was summertime in Ireland with every hedgerow seemingly in bloom. There were golden haystacks in emerald fields and a warm west wind blew pollen through the air.
‘Not the sort of day for someone to die,’ my mother told me sadly over the phone from Cloneen, the ancient bluestone cottage in County Wicklow, where she and my father had lived for the past twenty-three years in the small village of Glendalough.
Yet it was on this August morning in 1993, with birds singing and squirrels foraging in his beloved garden meandering down to the Glendasin River that my father left us. When my mother rang, I was in the midst of an arctic winter on the small island of Tasmania, with a roaring 40s’ southerly gale battering our windowpanes and a log fire burning in the hearth.
My last precious weeks with him are etched clearly in my mind.
The Irish countryside was splashed with great dobs of yellow gorse and purple heather when I’d drive to Dublin from Cloneen to visit him in the stark hospital ward, where he lay in a bed of crisp white sheets staring vacantly at a desolate grey wall and a grim courtyard of weeds.
Each morning I would serve my mother breakfast in bed and then take off in my parents’ tiny red Fiat through the village of Glendalough and past the thatched-roofed gift shop which they ran in the 70s and 80s. Leaving Laragh and Anamoe villages, I would scuttle over the Avonmore River’s ancient bridge, passing the mansion of Daniel Day Lewis and a sprawling stone-walled estate belonging to the manager of U2, or so I’m told.
Ireland too is more interested in celebrities than in local identities. Mia Farrow lived close-by and was spotted in the antique shop. My father adored the elegant Dana Wynter, another local, who was still a great beauty into her sixties with her lustrous dark hair and unlined creamy skin. Even I would stop in my tracks as she floated by.
There was no hope for my father we were told. The inevitable would happen. I was here in Ireland to say goodbye. Sadness was my constant cohort, yet in some strange way, this short period was one of the most contented I’ve spent in my life. A time of reminiscing about my childhood, as I pushed on between ancient stone walls that meandered and climbed, twisting and turning below the shadowy outline of Sugarloaf Mountain, my father’s favourite, towering halfway to the clouds.
One morning, with the sun breaking through a thick grey mist, I stopped to let an elderly farmer, Dermott, cross the road with his flock of sheep. He had known my parents for many years and was, according to my mother, the salt of the earth until the demon drink turned him into the devil himself. Trudging slowly to my car, he leaned a gnarled wooden walking stick against the door and lit a well-worn pipe, as his dog, Ellie, herded the grateful flock into the abundant field of grass and daffodils, through the narrow opening in a stone wall.
Dermott tilted his somewhat tattered tweed cap in my direction. ‘Top of the morning to you, Teeny,’ he beamed, his wizened elfin face creasing into a thousand hard-earned wrinkles.
After my sister Deborah (Dibs) proclaimed that I was ‘teeny weeny’ when she first saw me, I have always been known as Teeny by my family. I was the fifth and last surviving child.
Dermott was keen to pass the time of day, as is typical of most Irishmen, particularly after a couple of pints. However, this morning he looked quite sober and he didn’t appear to be suffering any ill effects from the night before either.
I told him I was on the way to my father in hospital.
‘Will you be giving himself my best wishes?’ he said with a genuine warmth to his thick brogue. ‘And what would be the matter with Mr Esmonde that be keeping him in hospital for so long now?’
‘Ah! I thought as much. I’d not be wishing that on any person, let alone such a grand gentleman as he be. Would you be telling his good lady we all be thinking of her?’ And then with a wave and a ‘God be with you’, he followed his dog through the hole in the wall.
I pressed on through Roundwood (supposedly the highest village in all of Ireland), lined with ivy-covered cottages and cosy pubs with bright Guinness signs, which seemed to beckon me.
Ignoring their eager bidding, I drove on through many more miles of stone walls, patchwork fields and thick hedgerows, until I was negotiating the busy N11 highway junction at the small village of Kilmacanoge. Passing the Avoca Handweavers Mill, I skirted the seaside town of Bray, scooting past the tinkers ’ ramshackle campsite on the verge of the road.
The tinkers, now known as travellers, would be huddled in a tight group around a makeshift fireplace. Runny-nosed children with raggedy trousers held up by pieces of string played happily in the mud and a few clapped-out cars were carelessly strewn against the hedgerow. A little further on a piebald horse and a grey donkey were tied to a fence, and a couple of scrawny dogs loitered nearby.
Even though it was not a salubrious hospital where my father was dying, it was friendly. The nurses were curious about Tasmania, and although during the month I was visiting my father, most of the patients in his ward died, they seemed a happy lot on the whole.
Seamus, an elderly retired publican believed he was being entertained by fairies in the garden. When we obviously couldn’t see them, he suggested they had probably gone to Grafton Street to shop.
Maybe it was because of the medicine given to a dying man.
If so, I supposed there could be a worse fate in a long life as it drew to a close.
In any case my father and I assured him that he’d have a most enjoyable time in the evening when his friends returned. Now, seemingly satisfied, he smiled contentedly and nestled down for a sleep.
These times, as I sat by my father’s bed, were when I assured him: ‘Yes, you will be home soon and I’ll be there waiting for you.’
But he didn’t come home and I wasn’t there waiting for him.
In Ireland they often don’t believe in telling the dying they’re dying. Not like in Australia where everyone must know exactly what’s happening. I think I prefer the Irish way.
One morning I collected Father Doyle, the gregarious and elderly retired priest, who was a great friend of my parents.
As he drove with me he turned his jovial ruddy face beneath a healthy crop of snowy hair in my direction and pronounced: ‘Well to be sure now, Rosemary, what’s the point of telling the poor man he’s dying? Has the good soul not got enough on his plate just now – to be worrying himself about that?’
After morning tea with my father, I’d return through the mountains to Glendalough to collect my mother so she too could visit him. Sometimes we stopped for tea and scones in the grounds of the Avoca Handweavers Mill, browsing through the shelves crammed with items for the tourists to buy.
This once grand old home is today a thriving restaurant and gift shop, set amidst newly mown lawns and tall fir trees, and reached by driving over a stone bridge spanning a running brook. My mother adores sitting with a light lunch and a glass of wine under one of the bright umbrellas in the tranquil grounds rolling down to the brook, or searching for presents to send home to the great-grandchildren in Australia. Or she might, as she did last time we were there, strike up a conversation with another old-timer from Dublin, pulling apart the Irish rugby team, discussing the good old times, the troubles in the north, or the general appalling nature and performance of Irish politicians. In particular she disliked Bertie Ahern, the gregarious Taoiseach (Prime Minister) who at the time was scandalously living with his mistress, but still attending family functions with his long-suffering wife as he’d devotedly promised his elderly mother that, as a good Catholic boy, he’d never get a divorce.
But my mother was only concerned about his questionable financial dealings and policies, not his morals.
The drugs they pumped into my father made him not himself at all. He too started to see fairies in the courtyard. My sister, Viv, who had come over from Wales where she lives, ranted and raved until the doctor, a morose elongated string of a man with a grey overworked complexion, changed the dosage and also gave him back his half Valium a day, which he’d taken for years; ever since he’d frightened us when he’d suffered a near fatal heart attack on discovering a flock of stray sheep devouring his much loved garden of colourful shrubs and flowers at Cloneen.
The dour doctor seemed doubtful, but probably fearful of Viv’s fiery black eyes, and no doubt overcome with her great beauty, as most men are, changed the drugs anyway – ensuring that my father’s quick mind came back from where it was hiding. However, it was devastating to see this once strong and agile man lying listlessly on a hospital bed, as he fought courageously, rallying somewhere between life and death.
One freezing day he slipped into unconsciousness. I organised for my mother to be picked up and informed all of the family. The resident priest arrived to give the last rites. When my mother arrived, my father had regained consciousness, in fact was quite chirpy, giving her a beaming smile, thus proving me a liar.
Chapter 2
County Wicklow
Glendalough, as the name denotes, is the ‘Glen of the two lakes’.
It nestles in a valley surrounded by Derrybawn, Lugcluff, and Camaderry Mountains in a scene of serene beauty. From Dublin one enters the village from the east, passing the shoulder of the legendary Trooperstown Mountain before meandering through the small village of Laragh and then onto Glendalough itself. Glendalough today is a great tourist Mecca, particularly in the summer months when tourists make the streets almost impassable.
It was to Glendalough that the entrepreneurial St Kevin came as a young hermit in the 5th century, establishing himself in a cave on a cliff overlooking the upper and larger of the two lakes. After a while, he gathered quite a following, so it wasn’t long before a monastic settlement was established, eventually developing into a university instructing up to 3000 students from all over Europe, contributing to Ireland’s reputation as ‘The Land of Saints and Scholars’. Only the ruins of the stone buildings and of course St Kevin’s Tower itself, built as a lookout post and a refuge from marauding Danes, remains today, for sadly troops of spoilsport Englishmen did their utmost to destroy it all in 1398. There is also the cemetery where I’ve spent hours wandering amongst the graves. The crumbling remains of St Saviour’s Abbey, St Kevin’s Kitchen, a small cathedral, Our Lady’s church, and an arched gatehouse are still evident.
The year before he died my father took great delight in showing me through the fancy new Glendalough Visitor Centre, which sits under a tall arbour of oaks and horse chestnuts in a verdant field, in springtime a vivid canvas of wildflowers, tulips, and daffodils, before the small wooden bridge to the Bottom Lake. There is also the Upper Lake, reached by driving on past St Kevin’s Tower to the picnic grounds surrounding this vast stretch of water, the colours of which vary enormously from a sparkling blue on a warm summer’s day to an unwelcoming grey in the winter months. For hours we’d amble in the late twilight, along the shores of the Bottom Lake, as my father regaled me with stories of times gone by, for history was his forté.
When his legs began to let him down, I should have realised that his cancer had taken a firm hold.
Cloneen, over three hundred years old, was originally a forge for the mines, then a labourers’ cottage. Sitting snugly in the shadow of Camaderry Mountain, separating the two valleys at the very spot where they merge into one, a few hundred yards from the village of Glendalough, it had been the home of my parents since 1969 when they returned to Ireland from Australia. It nestles into the crook of a small stone-walled lane and perches on the side of the Glendasin River. In my parents’ day
a green door opened to a stone-flagged entrance hall leading to the cosy sitting room, with a picture window overlooking the garden rambling down to the river. A small desk in the sitting room was where my father, who was well into his eighties at the time, wrote his memoir, The Way Things Happened in a dozen exercise books, which I brought home to Australia. My sister, Gill, typed them up and my brother, Eugene, had them published for the family.
We all cried as we read them, only realising his great talent after he had died.
At the rear, through the dining room, was the sunny kitchen with a fuel stove and a much later addition of an electric oven. When lying in the old claw bath, with its antiquated hot water system gurgling happily in the corner, the window thrown open to the sound of the Glendasin River crashing over the moss-covered rocks below, I used to breathe in the crisp cool country air and feel utterly contented.
My father built a grotto on the Glendasin River at Cloneen for the battered statue of The Blessed Virgin Mary at whose faded and chipped feet we had recited the Rosary over many years, wherever we lived – especially in outback Australia. There had been no shrine for her before; not even at Drominagh, my father’s family home, a great Victorian mansion on the shores of Lough Derg in County Tipperary, my birthplace.
In Cloneen’s front garden, my father had turned a barren field into an oasis of wildflowers, begonias, fuscias, petunias and roses, amidst hedges of purple lavender and rosemary. A stone bird bath rested next to a slab table with a couple of tattered wicker chairs where my parents took their tea most summer days.
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 1