by Eamon Kelly
It is heart-warming the avidity with which men take to carpentry. There is a longing in all of us to make, to create. The way they admired the revealed grain when a sawn board was planed. They would take it up and smell the lath that came from the jack plane and fondly crush the shavings in their hands. The countryside around Ballybunion is bare of trees and the students fell in love with the different timbers they met with in the course of their work. When we talked of sycamore, ash, elm or oak, I showed them illustrations of the trees from which the wood came, or drew the oak leaf and acorn on the board, a small seedling carrying in its womb a baby king.
We remembered talk of ancient times when trees grew almost down to the seashore and Ireland was a great woodland, where squirrels could travel from Antrim to Cork without touching the ground. I cited the poet’s lament for the fallen forest. ‘Cad a dhéanfaimíd feasta gan adhmad/Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár’ (‘What’ll we do now without timber/The last of the forests is down’).
I made many friends in Ballybunion. I almost became an alcoholic in that place. When the class was over at night I went with Jackie Beasley on a pub crawl, as much for the craic, as they say now, as for the booze. After-hours drinking was part and parcel of the nightlife there, a legacy of the high season when the Irish seaside resorts were packed with roisterers. Holidaymakers were confined to Ireland because of the war. Publicans were anxious to keep the beer flowing. In one establishment if we dawdled over our pints the proprietress would admonish us with a ‘Gentlemen, your conversation is interfering with your drinking!’ The pubs were often raided after closing time but the guards didn’t always prosecute. I remember one night Jackie Beasley and myself standing inside the window curtains until the sergeant had cleared the bar. When he left we emerged, called for another drink and resumed the argument which had been so rudely interrupted.
It was in Ballybunion I met Bill Kearney, an army sergeant in charge of training the Local Defence Force. We both stayed in Beasley’s when he visited the place. His night-time course of training ended about the same time as my class, and he, Jackie Beasley and I often had a few scoops. Bill was a fine singer, his favourite being ‘Santa Lucia’, and you could hear a pin drop when he sang. When I followed with a Tan war ballad the assembled clientèle shouted, ‘Will you shut up, or do you want to bring the guards down on top of us!’ Bill enrolled me in the LDF, but because of my night classes I was excused from training. I had a feeling he put me down as being connected with intelligence! I did attend one church parade. I borrowed a uniform and fell in – the very last man in the line. After a while the drill sergeant bellowed, ‘Will the second last man in the rank change step.’ The order was for me, but how was I to know that a latecomer had fallen in behind me.
Jackie Beasley and I were detailed to stand guard one night over the LDF arms depot in a room in the barracks. We had only to cross the road. We took up duty at midnight and Jackie gave me a rifle. I wasn’t too sure which end the bullet came out, but I sat there, the rifle between my knees, the muzzle pointing towards the ceiling. A civic guard slept in the room directly overhead. Before retiring he looked in on us, regarding me with a little suspicion and noting the direction in which the gun was pointing. He closed the door and a short time afterwards we heard movement upstairs. It turned out that he was taking the sandbags from the windows and putting them under his bed.
Ted Houlihan was the local officer commanding the LDF and his strategy in case of an invasion during the hours of darkness was to ring the church bell to call out the troops. When we were all in our cups one night in Gabrielle’s hostelry, the son of a prominent citizen and a comrade in arms thought it would be a damn fine lark to ring the bell just to see how many would come out. Though our reasoning powers were sadly undermined by alcohol, Bill Kearney, Jackie Beasley and I persuaded him against taking such an action, which would bring us into conflict with the law and the Church. He seemed to agree but later that night as I was going to bed the bell rang out loud and clear. He had done it! I expected an immediate commotion with voices raised in the street. No. There was a deadly silence. Then the sound of doors opening in the house. Steps on the stairs and on the road outside. The fumes of the alcohol were rising to my brain. I had drunk too much that night. I became drowsy and lay back in the bed. Bacchus rolled me into the arms of Morpheus, who lolled me into a deep sleep where a tolling bell tore cracks in the silken fabric of the sky. Bright streaks ran down to earth as if made by fork lightning.
I was in the open space outside Riverview with Jackie Beasley and Bill Kearney. We were getting our rifles out of the armoury in the guards’ barracks. Everyone was talking. Rumour had legs. Ballybunion was full of Germans. Hitler was seen drinking with Lord Haw Haw in JD’s and Bridie skimming the froth off the pint with a white-handled knife. We’d meet the enemy, we bragged. We’d meet him on the beach. As we marched down the street, window sashes were thrown up and women in their chemises cheered us on to battle. Pat Crowley’s band left the ballroom and played ‘The Minstrel Boy’, leading us on to the Castle Green.
Standing behind the ruined walls of O’Connor’s stronghold we peered nervously in the direction of the strand. Blessed hour! What was this? In the moonlight we saw that there was nothing to battle against but the waves of the incoming tide. We cheered and let off a volley into the night air. From the sober element came a call for silence. A sound was heard high up in the sky. We listened, but it wasn’t the Luftwaffe, just the gabhairín rua – the jacksnipe – crying for his lost lover. The band struck up a wartime ditty, and I woke up singing:
Bless ’em all! Bless ’em all!
The long and the short and the tall.
Bless de Valera and Seán McEntee,
They gave us brown bread
And a half ounce of tea …
In the morning the talk of the town was the ringing of the church bell. The clergy at Mass likened it to a sacrilege, and the Local Defence people were livid at bringing part-time soldiers on to the street. If real danger ever came, what would be the use of ringing the church bell? In time the name of the campanologist got out. We in the know never opened our beaks. He himself must have boasted in his cups. But when it transpired that he was the son of a rich burgher closely affiliated to the powers that be, no word was said.
When I had courses in the nearby villages of Asdee and Lisselton I still lodged in Beasley’s of Ballybunion. I was there in June when the holiday season was getting under way. Pat Crowley and his band were in residence and the strains of their music came from the ballroom a little after eight in the evenings. I perfected the old-time waltzing I had learned in the Teachers’ Club in Dublin. Before each dance in the ballroom, soap flakes were scattered generously on the floor, which made us glide over it like sailing ships on a still ocean. One night I saw a svelte, lissom creature, divine and beautiful, and I summoned up enough courage to ask her to dance. She accepted my invitation and when the music struck up she moved with grace and rhythm. With my heart in my mouth and schooling myself to take care of my accent I was about to utter some pleasantry when she said, ‘Isn’t de floor awful skeety!’ My Killarney patois wasn’t entirely out of place that night.
Local people of the old school never wet themselves in the brine except maybe to take a hot sea bath. Ted Houlihan who lived down on the brink of the tide told me over a pint one night in Mrs Scanlan’s that he was only once in the sea and that was twenty-five miles away in Ballyheigue. On fine Sundays in summer, Ballybunion beaches were black with people. I was a poor swimmer but had enough courage to dash into the huge incoming waves where the legs were taken from under me and I was carried inshore and deposited on the sand. It was an exhilarating experience being rolled about in the water as the waves broke and crashed on the shore with the sound of thunder.
Ballybunion had two bathing places, the men’s strand and the women’s strand, and largely the sexes kept to these places from force of habit going back to the days of Victorian prudery. But the way of youth is to tu
rn its back on the customs of the old, and now there was an outcry by the powers that be against mixed bathing. Brendan Behan on hearing of it said the next thing to be banned would be mixed dancing. The parish priest, a man of his time, paraded the beaches after last Mass on Sundays, and people on seeing him approach repaired to their respective places. One Sunday he accosted a middle-aged man and a young girl coming in from the sea. He admonished them for bathing together. The gentleman told him that he had been teaching his daughter to swim.
In Beasley’s lodging house they talked of the day when a busload of visitors arrived from somewhere inland. Ignorant of local custom they trooped gaily down to the men’s strand. The ladies, when they didn’t see any other ladies about, drifted towards the women’s beach. All but one; she sat among the men and was preparing to divest and take to the water when the PP arrived. Politely he requested her to move away. Very politely she told him that the man sitting next to her was her husband and that her place was at his side. The rules would have to be observed, she was told. Getting a little bolder, she said wasn’t it a queer pass when husband and wife couldn’t enjoy a day at the seaside together. Her husband, who was embarrassed at the attention the scene was attracting, collected up their belongings and said, ‘Come on away, Mary, if he finds out we’re sleeping together we’ll be excommunicated!’
After Ballybunion and Asdee my travels brought me to Tarbert and Moyvane, where I had to call on the parish priest Fr Danny O’Sullivan to get permission to use the parochial hall. The housekeeper showed me into the parlour, and in an adjoining room there were people talking. This lasted for some time and when they left Fr O’Sullivan came into the parlour with a soda siphon hanging from one hand and a whiskey decanter in the other. When he saw me he swung them both behind his back, making a loud clatter. Thinking he had some damage done he turned them around quickly, examined them and put them on the sideboard.
I explained my business. The hall would be all right. He had let it to the Vocational Committee previously. I thanked him and was about to go when he eyed me up and down and said abruptly, ‘Where are you from?’ My parents, I told him, were born in the parish of Rathmore, but I was brought up near Killarney. That interested him. Rathmore was his native village, where his people owned the well known public house, the Southern Star. I told him a little more about my family. The men were carpenters, I said. He remembered my grandfather, Brian Kelly, and often saw him lift his elbow in the Southern Star.
‘A little dram,’ he continued indicating the siphon and the decanter, ‘helps to drive a bargain’ and he mentioned that his visitors were arranging for a wedding, part of which proceedings was deciding the amount of the marriage offering. The offering is calculated on so much per cow, he said, and fixing me with a doleful eye he sighed, ‘Farmers have many cows when they want a new creamery but very few when it’s money for a marriage offering!’ Then he said with a smile, ‘A little drop of Robin Redbreast softens their hearts and I made a good bargain.’
Having explained away the presence of the siphon and the decanter he asked another abrupt question: ‘Were you in Ballybunion?’ I told him I had spent a few months there. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the good man who was parish priest in Ballybunion when I was a young curate told me that he was once discussing a marriage offering with a farmer. Five pounds is all he could get out of the man, so he went to the sideboard and produced the bottle. After a glass of whiskey the farmer went up two pounds ten shillings. He filled the glass again and the man went up to ten pounds! The next day the parish priest was walking in the village and there was a publican standing at his door. “Tell me, John,” the priest said, “how much are you getting for your whiskey?” “Ten pence a glass, Father!” the publican said. “Ah John, you are a poor salesman!” the priest laughed. “I got two pounds ten a glass for mine last night.’’’
There was one last question. ‘Have you brothers?’
‘I have,’ I told him. ‘Four, and one of them will be ordained at Christmas time.’
He reached for the decanter and poured a stiff one for himself and a modicum for me.
IN THE MAIL CAR TO WATERVILLE
Around this time a letter came from the CEO to say that my post as itinerant teacher would end at the summer holidays, and in September I would take up duty as manual instructor at the Vocational School in Waterville. The only way of getting from my home to Waterville was by mail car, in which there was room for maybe a half dozen passengers. It passed by our place at the unearthly hour of 6.30 a.m. and I would be in Waterville before the school opened on the first morning in September 1941. I was the only passenger for ages. We drove by the Robber’s Den, where the Black Rogue of Glenflesk had a school for thieves. Some of these emigrated and their descendants, for all we know, could have been implicated in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in Clarke Street, Chicago. Through the Roughty Valley we went, by Kilgarvan and Kenmare and then on to Sneem where John Millington Synge’s blue bull came from.
The mail car was filling up now and there wasn’t really room for a party of three young girls at Lohar. The driver asked me if I’d take one of them on my knee. I did, and this made for a little hilarity among the others. She was a frolicsome damsel, very shy at first on having to sit on a strange man’s lap. I was a little embarrassed myself at all the attention we were getting from the passengers, the driver saying what a fine match we’d make. ‘Hold on to him, girl, maybe he has money!’ She had to hold on to me because of the bumping of the car on the rough road – an altogether refreshing experience. Ballinskelligs Bay came into view and I asked her if she had ever been to the Skelligs Rock.
‘She might have to go there yet,’ one of her friends remarked, ‘if she isn’t married before Shrove Tuesday!’
The young lady was echoing the stories of her father’s fireside. The monks on Skelligs Rock monastery didn’t recognise the Gregorian calendar of 1582 and Shrove Tuesday fell eleven days later. People who weren’t wed by the Shrove Tuesday deadline before Lent on the mainland, could go to Skelligs and be spliced on the Rock. At home when I was a youngster if people eligible for marriage hadn’t taken the plunge before Lent, their names, often matched with the most unlikely candidates, were penned in rhyme and pushed under the doors of the laggards on Shrove Tuesday night. The document was called the ‘Skelligs List’.
We were in Waterville and the young lady, giving me a playful ‘dunt’ of her elbow, eased herself and her belongings off my lap and alighted. I went to the lodging house I had booked. Muiris Mac Gearailt, the teacher of Irish and Maths, was staying there. Having made the acquaintance of mine host and his wife, I had a cup of tea with Muiris, then together we went to the school to meet the other two teachers, P. B. Breathnach, the headmaster, who taught Rural Science and English, and Maura Thompson, the Domestic Economy instructress. Maura knew J. J. O’Connor, my old teacher in the College of Art, which gave us something to talk about. I was told that the headmaster was a stickler for discipline. He had a goodly amount of white in a flashing eye which made him stern of demeanour, but he turned out to be witty and had a wicked sense of humour.
He had to work hard to keep up the numbers in a catchment area which was but a narrow inhabited corridor between sea and mountains on the road between Sneem and Cahirciveen. He and the school became known beyond the village because of a scheme he initiated to bring boarders from beyond cycling distance. The students lodged in the village from Monday to Friday and had a system of bringing their week’s food supplies, which the landladies cooked for them. Making second-level technical education available to those who would otherwise have been deprived of it brought P. B. Breathnach to the notice of the press, and Keys Von Hoek, the popular columnist, visited us and devoted his entire article to the school in the much reduced wartime Irish Independent.
My first class on the morning I arrived was freehand drawing with the senior Domestic Science ladies. I made off my classroom and put out the drawing boards, pencils and drawing pins. As the young women wer
e taking their places I went to the blackboard with a ‘Dia’s Muire dhíbh ar maidin’ (‘Good morning, everyone’) to write a few notes on the rules of perspective. I turned around to face the class and there in the second row was the young woman who had been sitting on my lap in the mail car.
I must have lit up like benediction for a titter went through the class. Shades of my first evening in Ardfert; but they had been men. I suddenly realised that with these young women I was in entirely different territory. I had to think of something quick. I drew a duck, comical but recognisable, on the board. There is something mildly ridiculous about a duck, and I told them that when God had finished making the animals at the creation of the world the angels asked Him to make a duck. ‘For goodness sake,’ they said to Him, ‘give us a laugh!’
‘He made a duck … well a pair, and when they waddled away’ – I did a waddle – ‘the angels went into kinks of laughter,’ and so did the class. I drew a rooster as if in conversation with the duck and said, ‘A cock made fun of a duck and mocked him about his droll waddle and the way he is always nodding his head. “I’m as good as you any day,” the duck said, “and to prove it I challenge you to a race!” “Game ball,” says the cock. “But I’ll have to pick the place,” says the duck. “All right,” says the cock, “but I’ll have to pick the time.” “Come on!” says the duck. “I’ll race you across the river!” “OK,” says the cock, “when there’s ice on it!”’
The two stories worked. The students’ laughter and mine restored my confidence. I was in control. I could look them in the eye, even the mail car lady, and the class went ahead in great style. I gradually got into the swing of teaching in a school as opposed to my itinerant courses, and once I had my syllabus made out for each class I grew to enjoy the work. There was a war and there were shortages but we never saw a hungry day. The newspapers, which came in late in the afternoon, were down to seven pages. In the digs a crackling radio brought stories of the fighting, and sometimes the voice of Lord Haw-Haw predicting a victory for Germany. But except for the occasional drone of planes high up in the skies, the hostilities could have been a thousand miles away.