by Eamon Kelly
English children were being evacuated from their homes in the big cities and some of them found their way to Ireland. In the first-year boys we had Tony Swatton from London. Tony’s sallow complexion and his being in long trousers before his time marked him out from the other boys. The Irish in the language class was too advanced for a beginner. To keep him occupied he joined the first year for woodwork in my room. He had a particular flair for drawing and loved copying pictures or designs which I gave him. In the Capuchin Annual of the day, Richard King had illustrated Patrick Pearse’s poem, ‘Mise Éire’, surmounted with the stylised face of the beautiful Mother Ireland, and a design to enclose the words of the poem. Tony copied it to perfection, his lettering faultless, but where the name Padraig Mac Piarais was at the end, he penned ‘Tony Swatton’. Years afterwards I was in Edinburgh and in a city art gallery. About to enter one room I noticed a group of navy ratings around a picture. They were being lectured on the finer points of the painting by able seaman Tony Swatton. I retraced my steps, glad he didn’t see me but delighted to know that Tony hadn’t lost his interest in art.
Practical subjects have such an appeal for students at a Vocational School that they rush into the room at the start of the class, and when the bell goes at the end they are lazy to leave. The girls loved the kitchen classroom where cookery and sewing were taught, the boys the garden where they learned about growing things and how to keep bees. They were happy too in my classroom where they worked at the bench and learned to make things with their hands. Their academic subjects were not neglected. They studied Irish, English, Maths and Civics. They did a play with Muiris Mac Gearailt for the end of term, when those who could dance danced and the musical ones sang or played the fiddle.
As well as the huge garden there was a playing field attached to the school where the boys played football. Muiris Mac Gearailt was the games master and, Waterville being on the edge of the Ballinskelligs Gaeltacht, Irish was the language of the pitch. A field away the cable station was still tapping out its messages to distant shores. The ‘graphers’, as the operators were called, were principally English, and on a fine day they donned their whites and played cricket. In the still air you could hear cries of ‘Howzat?’ and ‘Well held, sir!’ mingling with shouts of, ‘Buail é!’ (‘Kick it!’) and ‘Téir isteach fé!’ (‘Go in under it!’).
Across the road from where Muiris and I lodged was the Butler Arms Hotel. On nights when we didn’t have a class or at weekends we sometimes adjourned there for a drink. There was a lower bar, as it was called, opening on to the main street, where the natives were served. We went there and talked in Irish to the few who still knew the language, but as often as not we entered by the gate through the gravelled front to the upper bar within the hotel proper. The surroundings here were more luxurious and the drinks priced accordingly. Even in winter there were guests; some permanent residents included retired colonels and ex-British military men enjoying the quiet of neutral Ireland. In the daytime they fished in Lough Currane. I often saw them set out suitably dressed for the occasion, their gillies walking ten paces ahead carrying the fishing tackle. This apartheid was strictly observed until they sat in the boat. There was a tiled space by the reception desk where, in the evenings, the anglers laid out their catch in neat rows: fish with their mouths open and eyes glazed for all to see and admire. If they were left there too long the place smelled like Billingsgate.
In the winter of 1943 there was an occurrence in nearby Lohar which set the whole parish agog. A man was found dead in his cowhouse. He had passed out under a cow’s head and the animal was thought to have gored him. But there was something about the wound that made the police suspicious. An autopsy showed that the victim had been shot at close range. The dead man, O’Sullivan, nicknamed Cá Bhfuil Sé, was married but childless and his wife’s nephew, O’Shea, lived in the house. Relations were said not to be so good between the two men. Suspicion fell on the nephew and on a friend of his called Brennan. The guards in their investigations found it very difficult to get information about the murder out of the local people. They talked Irish among themselves to confuse their questioners. It was common knowledge that one man heard a shot at a certain time on the night of the crime. The police were wise to this but left it until the end to interrogate him. When the individual was finally asked the question, ‘And at what exact time did you hear the shot?’ He looked at his questioner in blank amazement and said, ‘Fhot shat!’
They were a tight-lipped community. A local shopkeeper, lowering the lid over his left eye, told me that a man working in a field overlooking the Cow and Calf Islands, near the Bull Rock, was asked by a guard, ‘What islands are they?’ ‘God, I don’t know,’ the man said, gazing at them in astonishment, ‘they weren’t there at all this morning!’
During the investigations detectives and high-ranking gardai stayed in the Butler Arms Hotel. They were so long there and the food was so good that their cheeks filled out and they had to loosen their belts. On seeing these well-fed sleuths trooping out after breakfast one morning, one ex-colonel exclaimed to a friend, ‘Swelling wisably!’ Finally the nephew, O’Shea, was charged with the murder, as was his friend Brennan. At O’Shea’s trial in Dublin a local witness giving evidence was asked by the judge to speak up. While the witness was still in the box, the lawyers put their heads together to discuss a point of law, whereupon the witness shouted, ‘Speak up, I can’t hear ye!’
The prosecution failed to make a case and O’Shea was acquitted. Brennan was subsequently charged with the same murder but was also found not guilty. The murder weapon was never found but as was remarked at the time, ‘Who in his right mind would go looking for a gun in a church?’
How did the victim come by the name Cá Bhfuil Sé? It seems O’Sullivan was a blow-in from beyond Sneem. Before he left his native place he had, as they put it there, ‘taken a girl off her road’. When he went back to a wake some twelve months later someone told the young lady that he was in the crowded kitchen. She rushed about excitedly shouting, ‘Cá bhfuil sé? Cá bhfuil sé?’ (‘Where is he?’).
LISTOWEL
You got your wits sharpened in Listowel, where I went after a few years in Waterville. Vocal dexterity was an absolute necessity to parry the raillery of tavern or highway. It wasn’t unknown to hear two men, oblivious of the crowds, taunting each other in high good humour across a busy street. There could be a sting too, if your sparring partner thought of taking you down a peg. I was often told to go back to the RMC. To the assembled populace this might be something Royal, Magnificent and Cornucopian. But no. It simply meant the Remote Mountainy Coomb where I first saw the light of day. The people of the parish of Prior in the diocese of Ardfert and Aghadoe were so knowledgeable that it was held that a week spent there was as good as a year at school. Listowel is like that. A year spent there is as good as three at a university.
It is a place of books and ballads, of drama and dance and walks by the Cows’ Lawn and around Gurtinard to clear the head. It is a place where the people take a lively interest in the world and a livelier interest in his wife. Ears are forever cocked for the sound that comes on the breeze, and eyes are always peeled for the unusual happening. It is a place never to fall asleep on your feet or someone will build a nest in that unlistening ear. Listowel people love their town as the poets Aogán and Eoghan Ruadh loved Sliabh Luachra. Bryan MacMahon wrote lovingly about the place and his ballad about the Feale, the river named after a goddess, is a favourite song of singer Garry McMahon. John B. Keane describes the town as ‘my native beautiful Listowel, serenaded night and day by the gentle waters of the River Feale; Listowel where life is leisurely and beauty leads the field, where first love never dies and the tall streets hide the gentle lovingness, the heartbreak and the moods, great and small of all the gentle souls of a great and good community’ (Irish Times interview with Eileen Battersby, 4 April 1996).
It was a lucky day for me the day D. W. Quinlan, CEO, directed my footsteps there to take
over the post of manual instructor in the technical school. Had I missed out on Listowel, God only knows into what forsaken rural or urban byway I would have walked. One of the first people I met there was Bryan MacMahon. Bryan had a lending library, and taking out a book I gave my name, Éamon Kelly. ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘didn’t I hear that name called out on the wireless the other night?’ Well, it so happened that he did. Austin Clarke had a poetry competition on the radio and I had entered a poem describing my work as an itinerant teacher of woodwork. I didn’t get a prize, but like the mongrel at the dog show, I was highly commended. That gave Bryan a handle on me.
At this time he was becoming well known as a short story writer, and I can still recall his joy on opening the slightly off-white wartime pages of The Bell magazine and seeing in print his prize-winning story, ‘The Ring’. ‘The Good Dead in the Green Hills’ was another story of this time about a rambling house in Gleann a’ Phúca where the last storyteller was ensconced as the radio pulled his audience away from him. We often met two doors down from his house in Dan Flavin’s bookshop. We sat in Dan’s kitchen and heard him recite again for us ‘The Sally Ring’ by Patrick Kelly. ‘The only thing he wrote, blast you!’
Within the Ring o’ Sallies
I’ll build a house o’ stone
A little house and white with lime
And thatched with sedge o’ yestertime
And live me all alone
Within the Ring o’ Sallies
Where I was sometime known.
Bryan’s consuming interest then was the Listowel Drama Group, over which he presided and whose plays he directed. I had been on stage a few times in Waterville and my happiness knew no bounds when he invited me to join the Drama Group. Our rehearsals were in the scouts’ hall in Market Street, where I made the acquaintance of the dapper Timothy ‘Fitzmarshal’ Cotter, who trod the boards with distinction. John Flaherty was another wonderful actor, as were Brendan Carroll and Bill Kearney whom I had met earlier in Ballybunion. Other talented people were Kevin Donovan, Mary Cronin, Marie Keane-Stack and Vera McElligott.
Our writers in residence were Bryan Michael O’Connor, which was the quill name of Bryan MacMahon, Michael Kennelly and Paddy O’Connor. They gave us material which was our own to tease out and put together on the floor. It was the perfect theatrical activity of writer and actor working hand in hand, and we had remarkable local success with titles like Fledged and Flown and The Cobweb’s Glory, which last I found the confidence to direct myself. Next came Bryan MacMahon’s own play The Bugle in the Blood. For this production I wore three hats, those of set designer, director and actor. Tim Danaher did the lighting, and empty biscuit tins with hundred-watt bulbs inside were our footlights.
I played the part of the strongman, Circus Jack. I had to wear long sleeves so that my unmuscular arms weren’t seen when I lifted a cartwheel to balance it on my chin. My memory holds one scene, kept fresh by recurrence, of this memorable play, in which Bill Kearney played the part of an Indian peddler who lodged in the house. He sat by the range in a darkened kitchen waiting for a chicken to cook. With the red glow of the fire on his sheet-draped figure he swayed a little as he sang, half to himself, a lonely Indian song. The lights in the kitchen had been lowered out of respect for the funeral of a hunger striker which would soon pass outside. Already the car lamps were making long ladders of light in the sky over Treen Hill.
When at last the measured beat of footsteps and the rhythmic purr of slow motor engines were heard in the street, the Indian’s song gave way to the pipes playing ‘The Flowers of the Forest’. Faintly the soul-stirring music faded in on the left of the stage monitor, rose to a climax and faded out on the right. A light reflection from each passing car lit the set for a while and then the Indian’s song was heard again.
Bryan’s play had a successful run at the Abbey Theatre. Along with Sigerson Clifford his name was added to that of George Fitzmaurice as playwrights representing the Kingdom. Bríd Ní Loinsigh, the Kerry actress, played the part of the mother and Jack McGowran sang the Indian song.
I was every day of thirty-five years when I took the part of Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World. But I was thin and spare and a Kerry cap – Christy came from there – covered a receding hairline. Characters in the play talked of Christy as ‘a small low fellow, dark and dirty, an ugly young streeler with a murderous gob on him!’, though in the love scene Pegeen Mike tells Christy that he is ‘a fine handsome young fellow with a noble brow!’ If nature hadn’t supplied some of these attributes I could fake them. Dress might make the man! John Flaherty, a tailor in real life, made a jockey’s colourful coat and knee-breeches with suitable headgear for me to wear at the races ‘on the sands below’. I strutted the stage in this finery to see if I could ever give the impression of ‘a young gaffer who’d capsize the stars!’
The Playboy of the Western World is nowhere without his sidekick, Pegeen Mike. Maura O’Sullivan, new to the company, and who had been described as a breath of fresh air by adjudicator Mícheál Mac Liammóir when we took The King of Friday’s Men to the Kerry Drama Festival, was cast in the part. From the first reading she was simply glorious and went on to win the best actress award in Limerick. Maura and I threw our whole being into the playing. We gloried in Synge’s beautiful language, so in keeping with the rise and fall of the lilting Kerry speech in lines like:
Pegeen:And it’s that kind of a poacher’s love you’d make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?
Christy:It’s little you’ll think if my love’s a poacher’s or an earl’s itself, when you’ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome on His golden chair.
Pegeen:That’ll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or talk at all.
Christy:Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we’re astray in Erris when Good Friday’s by, drinking a sup from a well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back to your necklace in the flowers of the earth.
Pegeen:I’d be nice so, is it?
Synge’s words would coax the birds from the trees, and Pegeen’s speeches wove a mesh of love to capture Christy Mahon’s heart. Love that was make-believe on the stage became real in every waking hour. Marriage was proposed and with her father’s blessing I married Maura in Killarney’s tall cathedral. We went to live in a house in the Bridge Road in Listowel, but not for long. The Playboy won many awards. It was broadcast from Radio Éireann when radio was a power in the land, and if you walked down Church Street in Listowel that Sunday night Synge’s gallous language came floating from every casement. Maura and I were asked to do an audition for the Radio Éireann players. This we did. We were successful and came to live in Dublin.
Before I leave that hallowed ground I must tell of a man I met who made a lasting impression on me. He was Maura’s father Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, a Maths and Irish teacher in St Michael’s College. Mícheál came from a background in West Cork similar to my own, a place of rambling houses, endless talk and stories that went back to Conán Maol and the Giolla Deachair. He had grown up on a farm there during the last stages of the transition from spoken Irish to English. Like the Tailor Buckley of Gougane Barra, he knew the names in the old language of every flower, shrub and tree; every prominent rock and stream; every field and lake and the story behind them. Loch an Dá Bhó Dhéag, the Twelve-Cow Lake, was associated with an Ghlas Ghaibhneach, the celebrated grey cow of mythology. The field where she grazed and slept was forever more fertile. She gave an unending supply of milk for the needy, but the evil Balor stole her and sold her milk for profit. She escaped, and with her twelve daughters jumped into the Twelve-Cow Lake and left a greedy land behind her.
Mícheál carried in his head a now forgotten world. He drew m
e into this eldorado, where at night-time when stories were told in his father’s house, An Peacach ’s an Bás took the floor. The actor playing the part of Death took the scythe from the hedge outside and entered. The Sinner cowered on the settle, imploring the reaper to leave him for another while in this vale of tears. But Death persisted in his requisition and despite the Sinner’s pleas for mercy and those of his neighbours, Death won the argument and took the Sinner into the outer darkness.
That was followed by An Siota ’s a Mháthair where a patient mother tried to placate a gluttonous lump of a son who had her beggared providing him with food. The actors walked around the kitchen as if they were on a country road. The mother first, saying, ‘Téanam ort! Téanam ort! Téanam ort!’ (‘Come on! Come on! Come on!’). And he lagging behind like a snail going to Jerusalem, smelling the flowers, listening to the birds singing, picking blackberries and eating crab-apples until he was fit to burst. She threatened him that if he didn’t control the hunger demon in his belly, when he died he’d roast in hell. But if he ate in moderation and fasted during Lent, he’d go to heaven where he’d live in a splendid house with flower-bedecked fields in front and back, and the air forever filled with music and the swish of angels’ wings.
‘Wisha, Mother,’ he’d say, ‘if there’s nothing in heaven only angels and music what am I going to fill my belly with?’