by Eamon Kelly
Put him in the long boat till he’s sober,
Ear-ly in the morning.
Out of the classroom J. J. dropped his stern attitude and one night a student met him in a pub in the company of a professor from St Patrick’s Training College in Drumcondra. The professor was a fellow Corkman and they both came back to our digs. They were well in their cups and sang ‘The Banks’ and a snatch of:
The stench at Patrick’s Bridge is wicked,
How does Fr Mathew stick it?
Here’s up ‘em all, says the boys of Fair Hill!
J. J. played the cello. He gave us a short recital once in the storeroom after a sea shanty session. His assistant Nicky Hartnett played on a violin he had made himself. With the sound of music and song one day and hammering and sawing the next, we livened up the quiet atmosphere of the College of Art.
When the Free State government made Irish obligatory for technical school teachers, J. J. was sent to the Ballingeary Gaeltacht in west Cork to learn the language. A teacher accustomed to standing in front of a class finds it difficult to sit in one. The recitation of the Irish tenses bored J. J. and at the break he took his cello to a neighbouring meadow, and with his back to a haycock played a lugubrious tune much to the amusement of the cattle in the next field. Gradually they stopped their grazing and in ones and twos drifted towards the fence, where they stood enjoying the music to the accompaniment of much tail-wagging.
J. J. claimed that the Irish he learned on these visits stood him in good stead afterwards. A man called Lang came from Austria to teach woodcarving at the College of Art. He and J. J. became firm friends. Lang used to take part in the famous passion play at Oberammergau, which was performed periodically by the villagers in thanksgiving for being saved from the black plague of 1633. I think he played the role of Christ. He invited J. J. to Austria one year and J. J. was never done telling us about it. Because J. J. spoke English, the local people took him to be British, which offended him very much, and when he was asked to sing at a party, to put some sort of seal on his identity he decided he’d sing in Irish. But he knew no song in the language, so what he did was to put together all the phrases he had learned in Ballingeary and sing them to the air of ‘An Droimeann Donn Dílis’:
Tá an cat ar an urlár.
Tá sé fliuch, fan go fóill …
(The cat is on the floor. It is wet, wait a while …)
‘An Droimeann Donn Dílis’ is a haunting air and, being a good singer, J. J. brought down the house. The trouble was when he was asked to repeat the song he had difficulty in getting the Irish phrases in the same sequence.
We trainee teachers serving our new apprenticeship didn’t mix very much with the art students of the college, but we did go to their professors for special subjects. The Dutchman, Mr Romein, was one and we also went to Mr Golden who taught freehand and object drawing. I remember for our first lesson he arranged a number of two-and-a-half-foot cubes in a certain order in the middle of the floor and added his overcoat, soft hat and walking cane. Bit by bit we got over our initial tinkering and learned to use quick confident strokes to complete the picture. To be able to sketch freely on blackboard or on paper is an important asset for a craft teacher.
A man came in to teach us Irish and another to take us for maths, but the person we looked forward to most was an instructor from Bolton Street Technical School, who had been a cabinetmaker in James Hicks’ famous workshop in Pembroke Street. I have never forgotten the thrill of watching this man, Tom Mitchell was his name, make a mahogany drawer for a writing bureau. The precision with which he cut and fitted the dovetails was worthy of a watchmaker, the eye, brain and skilled fingers working in unison. He talked as he plied the dovetail saw, and related that James Hicks once had a commission to fashion a doll’s house for the King of Sweden’s daughter. When making the miniature furniture for the interior Hicks flattened a packing needle and sharpened it to cut the tiny dovetails for the drawers of the dressing table.
J. J. knew Hicks very well and, one time when the old man was ill, he went to see him only to find the patient sitting up in bed, a piece of mahogany between his knees, while with a spokeshave he fashioned a cabriole leg. The shavings curled from the spokeshave and spilled from the quilt on to the floor. In the midst of this highly inflammable material Hicks chain-smoked, the cigarette always in his mouth, and when he threw the spent butt into the grate the nicotine from constant smoking had turned the centre of his moustache to amber. J. J. had the same reverence for a craftsman as the Pope would have for a saint, and he took great pleasure in telling us that examples of Hicks’s work were in the National Museum.
Because of his arresting appearance J. J. didn’t escape the eye of the artist, and Seán O’Sullivan painted his portrait as J. J. posed in a súgán armchair he had designed and made himself. The picture used to hang in the Crawford School of Art in Cork, and very impressive he looked, warts and all. Remembering the conversations he had with the artist as he sat for his portrait, J. J. told us that Seán O’Sullivan was one day walking through Stephen’s Green. He was carrying a portable easel and a drawing pad. Suddenly he saw a scene he wished to capture. He hastily set up the easel, put on the drawing pad, and in a fury of creativity his hat blew off and sat upturned at his feet. As his pencil flew over the paper he was too engrossed to retrieve the hat. A gentleman in spats and morning dress paused and, seeing the upturned hat like a begging bowl, said, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself! An able-bodied man like you should be working!’
J. J. claimed that Dublin was awash with philistines, and so as to rescue us from that sad state he constantly guided our reading and sent us to good films and to the theatre. He said he didn’t want us to be the intellectual inferiors of BAs and BComms in our after-years of teaching in vocational schools. He made us aware of what was going on in the visual arts, and we had a private viewing of the Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition which was held annually in the college. He shepherded us upstairs to the exhibition hall before varnishing day. Having had a training in draughtsmanship and the application of colour, we had a fair appreciation of the pictures. We were often the first to see the paintings that Seán Keating and Maurice McGonigal brought out of Connemara.
To sharpen our wits J. J. encouraged debate, and warned us against wilting alone and going to seed on a diet of fried bread in a dull digs. My lodgings were in Adelaide Road, and with me were two students from Cork, one from Kerry and two from the west of Ireland. Willie Gannon, a Dublin student, left his parents’ house in the suburbs and joined us. The Adelaide Road address had once been the residence of Dr Douglas Hyde and sometimes circulars in his name sat on the hall table. The rooms were huge. There were three single beds in my room, and it was still large enough for a table in the centre where the two sharing with me and myself could study. Around it we learned to play a hand of bridge. The landlady, Mrs Harrison, had over a dozen lodgers under her care. They were all students except for one civil servant who occupied a single room at the top of the building. He came out on the landing every morning and shouted down the well of the stairs to the maid in the kitchen, ‘Annie, I’ll have tea, lightly browned toast and a boiled egg, please!’
As a digs it would have measured up to J. J.’s ideal of what a student’s lodgings should be. After we got to know the young men from the university, arguments often raged into the small hours, and those of us from rural parts had our horizons broadened in matters of sex, socialism and almost every aspect of human activity. At night in the sitting-room when it came to us trainee teachers versus the university students, Willie Gannon was our star turn. He had read widely and knew something about everything. One medic admitted that Gannon’s knowledge of medicine would get him through the first-year paper on the subject. He rattled off the parts of the body with the fluency of an Order of Malta first-aid man. At the slightest hint of indelicacy in Gannon’s enumeration the two female students who made up our company betook themselves to bed. Later when voices were raised in the he
at of debate, Ma Harrison would knock at the door and politely ask if we intended keeping everybody awake.
We affectionately called her ‘Ma’ but not to her face. She was like a mother to us and the only time she lost her temper was when some lout threw his empty cigarette packet into the lavatory bowl and blocked the system. We had a chronic medical student – he must have been thirty – and when he and his family went broke, it was said that Ma paid his fees and kept him gratis in the hope that he would pay her back when he qualified. He was still there when we left two years later. We thought that her love for him was a little more than motherly – she was still a young woman – because he spent much of his time in the family sections of the digs.
Mrs Harrison had a ramshackle country house in Shanganagh and any six who volunteered were welcome to spend the weekend there. When she knew who was going she bundled their bedclothes and night attire into the back seat of her old saloon car. One Saturday when I was walking down Merrion Square to get the Bray bus, Ma flew past with one leg of my pyjamas dangling out the side window. Because of the shortage of staff at Shanganagh we all helped in the kitchen under the direction of the senior medic who was always there. Once he accompanied us to the pub and, despite our country curiosity in such matters, he revealed nothing of his family background.
The open spaces around the house, the trees and the Wicklow Mountains to the south reminded me of home. With the busy routine at the college and the liveliness of the company in Adelaide Road, it was only now that I reflected on the life in Kerry which I had left so recently. I longed for the peace and even tenor of that time when life seemed to take its tempo from the slow gait of the cow chewing her cud as she walked home to be milked. I had the image too of the stonemason unhurriedly going to the heap of rubble, selecting a stone, eyeing it and dressing it, almost caressing it, with the hammer, before he placed it on the wall where it would sit in memory of him long after he had taken his rest in Killaha churchyard. That leisurely rhythm changed only when the sluggish stream grew to a torrent in a thunderstorm, or in the dance house on Sunday night when the music accelerated into the mad swing of the hornpipe. Then with a pang of regret I realised that that was all in the past – and a good job too maybe. Still, as I sleepily turned in my bed in Shanganagh and sagged into the foetal posture of slumber, I longed again for the times that were gone. I missed the company of the people I knew then, I missed the certainty of everything, I missed my family, and above all I missed my father and mother. At twenty-three I was too old for tears, but they weren’t far away as I escaped into the land of nod.
There I was happy again on my way to school or working as a young apprentice in my father’s workshop. Different aspects of my youthful past occupied my sleeping hours: the rounds on the pattern day, or walking in the inch by the glaishe with my love Jude on a Sunday evening fair. In time, back in Adelaide Road, my new lifestyle took over. When I slept, I stood in my dreams as a shantyman in the storeroom singing ‘Johnny Come Down to High-lo’ or ‘Oh, You New York Girls, Can’t You Dance the Polka?’
Of the twenty young men on our course all had started their working lives as carpenters or cabinetmakers. The skill in using tools they had acquired over five or six years at the bench was indispensable to their work as manual instructors. Practical experience in the handling of sharp tools was essential when it came to teaching young boys how to use these implements. Some of the men on the course had had a secondary education, but others like myself had left school at fourteen and depended on night classes at the tech to get to a standard sufficient to pass the scholarship examination. Those with a post-primary education liked to lord it over us, displaying their knowledge of Latin and Greek and quoting widely from Milton and Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin. But we who left school early were longer at the bench and that training was what mattered in the job ahead.
As well as the subjects of Woodwork, Drawing and Maths, we were expected to have a good knowledge of Irish. To improve that knowledge, at the end of our first year, we were sent for two months to the Gaeltacht of Carraroe in Galway. Two or three students stayed in each house and with our basic Irish, very basic in some cases, we managed to carry on the essential conversation of making our needs known. The local people had years of experience in dealing with the lá breás, as learners of the language were called. The phrase lá breá (fine day) was as much Irish as beginners could muster when they met a native speaker on the road. The family, as was expected of them, spoke only Irish to their visitors and went to a lot of trouble explaining words and phrases.
Two pounds ten shillings was our weekly scholarship allowance in Dublin, which was reduced to two pounds in Carraroe. The Department of Education believed it was cheaper to live in the country. A guinea went for our board and lodgings and the rest was ours to spend. The woman of the house washed our shirts, socks and underwear. Most young men smoked and a few of us drank the occasional pint, which if I remember cost eight old pence. We managed, and were able to afford to go on the odd outing.
One Sunday we went by hooker to the Aran Islands, Inis Mór to be exact. The hooker, a fishing vessel, was often used to bring turf to the islands. It was my first time in a boat as big as this, and it took a while before I got my sailor legs. We docked at Kilronan and set out on the long walk to Dún Aengus but were driven back by the rain. We took shelter in a public house, where most of the day was spent. A storm blew up and we thought we’d have to spend the night on the island. But the men in charge of the boat, having spent the day drinking, knew no fear and decided to set out for the mainland.
We were nervous enough going on board and those who enjoyed the trip standing on the deck coming over now crowded into the hold. There wasn’t room for everyone and I and many more remained on deck. It was plain sailing until we got out of the shelter of the island, then the sea rose mountainous high. The ship bounced on the brine like a cork, and when it was carried high on a mounting wave we could see a great valley of water below. We held on to anything we could grasp while the waves washed across the deck. As the ship swayed, Barbara McDonagh, a young teacher from the college, stood with her back to the mast, her arms enfolding it behind her. As she sang her dark hair streamed in the storm. The inland women screamed in the hold and huddled together as they prayed to God to bring them safely home. Barbara’s summer dress clung to the outline of her body as each successive wave washed over her. She was one with the mast as if sculpted, like a mascot on the prow of a viking longboat. Water spilled into the neck of my open shirt and ran down my body and into my shoes.
The skipper, showing his drink, shouted and argued with the men at the tiller, disputing which way the ship should go. In the gathering gloom there was a mighty shout. ‘Na carrigreacha! Na carrigreacha!’ (‘The rocks!’). The ship swerved and we could make out the sharp ridge of rock now visible, now covered by the surging sea. The wreck of the Hesperus came to mind, ‘impaled on the horns of an angry bull!’ Soon we saw the dark mass of land at both sides which meant we were in the bay leading to the pier. Gradually the water calmed and the frightened people emerged from the hold as we docked safely in the little harbour of Calladh Thaidhg. Those of us who had stayed on deck were drowned wet. The clothes stuck to our bodies as we walked the distance to our lodgings. My wardrobe was not very extensive but I was lucky enough to have a change of trousers, a dry shirt and a pullover. The sea air whetted our appetites and we were ravenous for our supper. Afterwards we set out for the Sunday night céilí in the college. With the help of an Irish dancing teacher we were already able to make a fair fist of ‘The Walls of Limerick’, ‘The Siege of Ennis’ and ‘The Haymaker’s Jig’. The dance steps came easy to me as I had plenty of practice at set dancing at home in Kerry.
Local girls as well as visitors came to the céilí, and Barbara, she of the mast, advised us to dance with the local girls. We’d be killing two birds with the same stone, she claimed – improving our dancing and perfecting our Irish. I asked Barbara what I should say to my partn
er if I felt like seeing her home. She told me. After a few dances I met up with a young lady who was warm, friendly and attractive. When ‘The Siege of Ennis’ was over and the ‘Soldier’s Song’ played, marking the end of the night, I summoned up enough courage to ask my partner, ‘Bhuil tú a’ dul ann?’ (Literally, ‘Are you going there?’) She drew herself up to her full height and said with what I thought was more than a modicum of disdain, ‘Bhí mé ann cheana!’ (‘I was there already!’), and flounced off.
It happened one time that we organised a céilí in the house where we stayed. The local people danced the Connemara set, where at the end of a figure all the dancers grasped each other around the waist and went into a wild spin, chasing the mad, galloping music until, exhausted, they came to a halt. In the pause after the dance a man came from the shadows, and with his eyes closed sang in the old way. His neighbours listened intently, their eyes fixed on the fire, the dresser, or on some object like the lamp, as the rise and fall of his voice searched out the nooks and crannies of the room. The soft words clothed in sweet melody flowed from the singer’s mouth to a humming accompaniment through his nose. It was lonely, eerie and enchanting. It was the cry of a young lover poisoned by a meal prepared by his sweetheart. The song was a conversation between him and his mother:
Cad a bhí agat dod dhinnéar a bhuachaillín Ó?
Sicín go raibh nimh ann a mhaithirín Ó,
Ó cóirigh mo leapaidh, tá mé breoite go leor.
What had you for your dinner my own darling boy?
A poisonous chicken. Oh, dress my bed soon,
I’ve a pain in my heart and I want to lie down.
An elderly man was called upon to dance. It was easy to see that as a performer he was held in high esteem.