For one of my birthdays we happened to be on the island of Skiathos, where part of the movie Mama Mia was made. The day before, I had even hiked up the hundreds of steps on the island of Skopelos, to where the wedding scene in the movie took place. All I can say is that Meryl Streep must have been a lot fitter than I am if she danced to the top as depicted in the movie. For by the time I reached the church on the summit I was somewhat out of breath.
When we sailed into Turkish waters with Georgie and her family on board I found that I fell in love all over again, both with the friendly and fun-loving people and the hidden bays and inlets where traders tied up to our boat to sell their wares. Later, we journeyed inland on local buses through the mountains and deep into the remote countryside where we stopped in small villages far away from tourists. In Cappadoccia we went hot-air-ballooning above the vineyards set within a maze of historic rock caves where Cappadoccians once lived, and in some cases still do.
Rob and I look forward to many years of sailing on Sea Dreams with family and friends to wherever a warm breeze may take us. In between these adventures, we are so lucky to have Tasmania to come home to, where Dibs, Gill and Eugene visit us often, as do Charlotte, Georgie and their families and Rob’s family too. We have now taken up bike riding and are once more enjoying exploring our state by land as well as by sea.
We are also enjoying discovering the Canberra district again where we spend part of the year, as Rob’s sister Wendy enjoys Rob and their brother Dick being close by to the nursing home she is in. In Canberra it is fun catching up with many friends and their wives, who have also become dear friends, from Rob’s time in the army dating back to 1962. Our apartment looks beyond verdant Glebe Park, now as I write in autumn, a spectacular sight of golden, rusts and oranges, to the Australian War Memorial. To our left are Ijong Street and the convent where I attended primary classes in Braddon. On our right is Duntroon where Rob was a cadet when Eugene first introduced him to me. We can even spy the spot where we shared our first kiss, not far from where I used to sit by the lake with Charlotte in her pram when Rob was in Vietnam.
How the wheel of time turns!
This year we are planning to return by boat to Papua New Guinea for our 50th wedding anniversary with Eric and Eileen and Sue and Don, who also had their honeymoon in Tapini, like we did in 1966. In the meantime I will visit Eugene, both in Brisbane and on his new farm at Mapleton in the Noosa hinterland, Dibs at Glendalough Park in South Gippsland, Gill in Tamworth and Viv at Cilwych in Wales.
Last time I was in Ireland to visit my mother I purchased a packet of shamrock seed from the gift shop up a leafy laneway outside Avoca in County Wicklow. I sent it home to Georgie to see if it would grow in her lush tropical garden at Trinity Beach. For surely, if shamrocks can grow in the hot humid climate of far north Queensland, anything can happen, including peace and climatic stability throughout the world for my five precious grandchildren and all other children, no matter what race, colour or creed.
Epilogue
It was early on a warm summer’s morning in Hobart when the phone rang. As soon as I heard Eugene’s voice I knew what had happened. Viv had just rung him to say my dear mother had sadly passed away, two days after her ninety-eighth birthday. Even though I knew she couldn’t go on much longer, it was still a dreadful shock to realise she had left us and gone to join my father in another world. I couldn’t believe that she would no longer be there to talk to each week; to visit and laugh with; to read my books to, and then seek her advice; to answer my questions about her life.
After I used to write up what she had told me I would read it back to her and hear her say: ‘No…no, darling. You got that bit wrong. This is how it happened.’
Her advice had been invaluable to me throughout the writing of this book, so specifically about our family. Her memories were of utmost importance to me. And now that she has gone, how I wish I had asked her more. Listened more.
I miss her being there, giving us her strong opinion, sometimes too sharp for comfort, particularly regarding how we presented ourselves.
‘Oh, but I so much preferred your hair the other way.’
Yet she left us peacefully. Only four hours before she died she’d been talking to Georgie on the phone from Queensland about the Irish elections. Two days before that, Viv had helped her celebrate her birthday with a glass of champagne. We had all rung her for her birthday and thought she sounded tired, but happy. She remembered each and every one of her grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, enquiring after them all.
Within thirty-six hours I was once again at Dublin Airport awaiting Eugene, who’d flown in to Ireland the day before. Together we drove down to Cloneen at Glendalough to reminisce and take a photo of each other by the Glendasin River. We tried not to be sad, remembering the happy times. After that we drove through Laragh and Rathdrum to the Woodenbridge Hotel where Viv was also staying.
It was the first time the three of us had been together for close to fifty years, although I’d seen Eugene just the week before in Hobart and Viv last year. After a quick lunch, Eugene and I went over to Asgard, where all the staff were devastated. And once again I sat with my mother. Although now I sat beside an open coffin talking to someone who could no long answer me back. She looked so peaceful, dressed in creams and blues and with her rosary beads intertwined between her delicate fingers next to her gold wedding ring, which to my knowledge she’d never taken off her finger since 1938. The small Vegemite koala I’d given my father when he was dying was tucked up beside her.
‘When I leave this world I want Vegemite Ted to come with me,’ she told me last time I was with her. ‘Your father left him behind. And I’d like that photo of your father amidst the flowerbeds at Ijong Street. It’s such a lovely photo of him.’
So my father, digging amongst the petunias, hollyhocks and rose bushes, was with her too, as she lay there with fleeting rays of autumn sunshine lighting up the room and providing a comforting warmth. Her unlined creamy skin was now so cold it gave me a dreadful shock when I touched it. In Ireland it seems the custom to have the deceased lie in state so those who wish may pay their last respects. In some ways I wanted to remember my mother as she had been. In other ways it was a poignant, if heartbreaking, way for me to say a final goodbye to her, as Eugene sat beside me, holding my hand.
After a moving service at Asgard, where I was flanked by the tearful Lila and Imelda, who had looked after my parents for so long at Cloneen, we took her back to Terryglass in Tipperary to be with my father by the shores of Lough Derg close to their beloved Drominagh, where I was born. It was a long drive up the busy M50 and then down the N9; through the rolling fields of Kildare, where racehorses grazed contentedly behind white post and rail fences; and down to the green fields of Tipperary, with Ned, the undertaker from Arklow, driving the glistening black hearse, his stiff bowler hat perched high on his head. Behind the hearse, Viv, Eugene and I sadly followed. It was close to four hours later when we drove through Terryglass, where the local folk stopped by the side of the road and dipped their hats in her honour. At the same time the church bells resounded through the village. This was my undoing.
When we pulled up at the front of the stone church we were greeted by my cousins, Alice and Anthony, his family and the wonderful sound of Helen Fox, the caretaker at Drominagh, singing Amazing Grace over the outside loudspeakers. It was one of the most beautiful and moving renditions I have ever heard.
Ned, bowler hat still proudly in place, together with his dapper offsider, carried my mother’s coffin inside the church and sat it before the altar. We then had a short service conducted by the parish priest, Father Michael. I was loathe to go, leaving my mother there alone, her coffin covered in white lilies, candles burning in tall candelabras; however, Viv had organised for us all to stay at Lisheen Castle in Thurles, also in Tipperary, about an hour’s drive away. As it was now getting late, very dark, and bitterly cold, I patted the coffin goodbye and headed to Viv’s car to drive with her
and Eugene through the dark country roads and byways to this magnificent turreted castle where Charlotte was waiting for us with a roaring fire throwing out a welcoming warmth. Later my nephew Andrew and his family from Wales and Viv’s two daughters Laragh and Dominee arrived.
We were lucky to have the run of this fully restored 18th century bastion, set in acres of thick woods and green fields, to ourselves. I know my mother would have been so happy to see us all gathered there together. We set up the huge oak table in the massive room off the kitchen and sat around it until the early hours of the morning, reminiscing about a wonderful woman who had touched our lives in so many different ways, even taking it in turns to sip from a bottle of her favourite Schooner Medium Dry Sherry, which we’d saved from her room at Asgard.
The next day we drove back to Terryglass for her funeral. It was so bitterly cold I literally had two sets of clothes on, as did Eugene, who was also sporting one of the black ties Ned’s beautiful daughter Finola had provided for the mourning party. Rugged up as we were it was obvious we were not as hardy as the relations living in the northern hemisphere. Although the Mass was immensely sad, it was also a beautiful memory, when young and elderly relations, friends, village folk, and a few men who’d once worked on Drominagh and Clonmoylan came to pay their respects. One of the mourners was Young Danny’s son from the lodge at Drominagh.
‘I remember when I was only about eight years old I had to put on a white shirt and tie one evening and go and help serve cocktails on the lawn of the big house,’ he told Eugene and me with a huge grin. ‘Your parents were indeed gentle folks and my father had a grand time working for them.’
Eugene gave a truly moving eulogy, which had everyone remembering a wonderful, if sometimes stubborn, lady. And Dibs and Gill, who couldn’t make the long journey from Australia, wrote of amusing memories, which Andrew read out. After the service Eugene and my cousins carried her coffin and laid her to rest next to my father overlooking Lough Derg. The wonderful Una, Jimmy, Andrea, Cecilia and Catherine from Asgard made the long trip down from Arklow for the funeral and then came for a true Irish wake at Drominagh, which Viv had organised. As I walked into Drominagh’s front hall, with a huge log fire burning brightly in the stone hearth in the corner, I could just imagine my mother and father all those years ago, standing there ready to head out for a hunt meet or dressed in their finery, welcoming guests into this dearly loved house. Just as Eugene, Viv and I were doing now.
For the first time I met a few of my cousins who’d travelled up from Cork and down from Dublin and Belfast. And I met again two of my parents’ greatest friends, including my godfather, Rickard Deasy’s beautiful widow, Sheila. I also talked to the truly elegant Pauline Hickey of Slevyre, whose father had admonished my grandmother so sternly for hiding the shooting guns at Drominagh during the 1920s’ Civil War, telling her in no uncertain terms. ‘You could all have been shot to smithereens.’
The following morning, with slightly throbbing heads, Eugene, Charlotte and I visited Eugene and Jenny’s friend, Garech, at his magnificent family estate, Luggala, built in 1787 in the Wicklow Hills, which has been in the Guinness family since 1937 when Ernest Guinness bought it for his daughter, Oonagh. Thereafter it became the home of literati, painters, actors, scholars, hangers-on, toffs, painters and poets. In recent years it has been used as a location for the movies Zardoz, Braveheart and Excalibur, and even more recently, it was the setting for the historical TV drama series, The Vikings. As we drove up the wonderful tree-lined avenue, past running brooks and the glorious lake set against a backdrop of soaring mountains, even our pulsating heads couldn’t dim our impressions of this incredible ‘Gothic’ home in one of the most stunning settings I’ve ever seen. After a delicious lunch with Garech, served around the ancient dining room table with all of the best silver, we continued on to the Woodenbridge Hotel, where the genial proprietor, Billy, who’d sent a beautiful bunch of flowers for the funeral, had a roaring fire and a glass of Guinness waiting to welcome us back.
The day after, I boarded the ferry from Roslare to Wales with Viv, whilst Eugene returned to Australia. Viv and Tim had now moved into the main centuries-old farmhouse at Cilwych, where Tim had spent his youth. The restoration Viv and Tim carried out had been a huge job; however, they have created a superb home for all the family to enjoy. A week later, I bade farewell to Viv at Cilwych and drove up through the almost mystical mountains of Snowdonia to my nephew Andrew and his family in north Wales before catching the ferry at Hollyhead to traverse the Irish Sea once more. For just on a week I stayed in Tipperary where I tended my parents’ graves and sat with them for a time. I also took the opportunity to visit old childhood haunts, including Clonmoylan, where I was welcomed with open arms and later led into the kitchen (heated by the same Aga stove, which I had warmed my bottom on in the 1950s), for a steaming cup of tea and a piece of cake. Afterwards, I strolled down to the lake and gazed across to Friar’s Island where years ago the herd of wild goats lived. Although it was freezing cold, I dipped my toes in the lake and remembered how my father used to push me around in the ‘bog cart’ with the older ones screaming in delight. It was all I could do to drag myself away and drive back down the tree-lined avenue and on to the road to Powers Cross where Viv used to ride her bicycle along to the shop at aged five. She wouldn’t do that now, as it’s a bustling road leading down to the picnic grounds and holiday cottages by the lake.
From Tipperary I wound my way through the countryside to Kilcullen near the Curragh and savoured the familiar smell of horses filling the air. Here I visited an old friend of Dibs from her Mount Anville school days in Dublin. She and her family have a thriving horse stud next door to the Aga Khan’s sprawling estate, (reminding me of my mother’s outings with his eminent father at the Savoy in the 1930s). Then I treated myself to a stay at the famous K Club at Kildare, where I walked with my memories for hours around the golf course, sat by the tranquil ponds covered in water lilies and watched the fish jumping in the river.
The next day, as I flew out of Dublin and over the green and gold patchwork fields, I made myself a firm promise: I would return to the land of my birth whenever possible, even though I no longer have the tug of my dear mother’s heart strings pulling me to her side.
However, Ireland will always be there. Waiting. Calling me back.
Besides, graves need visitors and tending – and memories must be refreshed.
Acknowledgements
First of all I would like to thank my siblings, Deborah Scott (Dibs), Gillian Rosewarne (Gill), Eugene Esmonde (Eug) and Vivienne Cresswell (Viv). For without them this story would not be.
To Rob, and our beautiful daughters, Charlotte (who came up with the wonderful name for my book) and Georgie for their love and support. This story is also theirs.
To Hubie, Ru, Joseph, Eleanor, and Ferdi for giving me more pleasure as a grandmother than I could ever have imagined.
And a special thanks to Rosie Dub for her initial input when I first thought of writing this book. To Ormé Harris for her expertise and patience with helping me get this manuscript up to scratch, whilst I was on our yacht in Greece and she in Victoria. To Luke Harris for making this book look as good as it does. Also to Dennis Jones of Dennis Jones and Associates for his support and advice over the many years Rob and I have been publishing our books.
To our many friends who have added so much to my life.
And finally to my parents, Owen James and Eira Margaret Antonia (Toni) Esmonde for their memories and for making me who I am today.
References
Eugene Esmonde, VC, DSO by Chaz Bowyer
Channel Dash by Terrence Robertson
The Way Things Happened by Owen Esmonde
Discussions with my mother: Eira Margaret Antonia Esmonde and my siblings, Dibs, Gill, Eugene and Viv.
My own memories, although others may sometimes remember events slightly differently.
And, of course, Charlotte, Georgie and especially Rob, whose patien
ce with my constant questioning about our life has been almost endless.
Also By The Author
Rosemary’s previous books are: From the Sea, Beyond the Shore, Sea Dreams in the Western Mediterranean and Sea Dreams in the Adriatic, which she wrote and photographed with her husband, Rob.
They are currently compiling their third book on the Mediterranean, 50 Romantic Havens in the Mediterranean. Rosemary has also published a novel, Bird of Paradise set in 1960s Papua New Guinea.
This book and the ones above are available in selected bookstores
or www.ballynastraghbooks.com
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 35