Beyond the Breakwater Read online

  Sometimes Mama would get us ready early in the morning for a trip to her home place in Passage East. She’d bundle us into the car and off we’d set. We’d watch every twist and turn of the old road from the rear seat. We knew all the landmarks along the way. As we headed out the Dunmore road we’d notice the brass cock weathervane on an old steeple. Once on the Cheekpoint road, we’d wait to see the old bridge at Jack Meade’s pub. When we saw the river, and the road began to hug the cliff in parts, twisting dramatically downhill towards the village at the mouth of the estuary, we’d try to keep our excitement in check until we saw Ballyhack across the river. We’d know then that we were drawing close. The sky overhead was always satin white and full of brightness, and we’d sit up eagerly in the car waiting to round the final bend in the road. ‘I see Gran’s house!’ one of us would pipe up, pipping the other two to the post. Like kittens scratching and mewling, we’d push and elbow each other in the car, as much a way of communicating as it was a way to establish a hierarchy.

  Gran kept empty cardboard boxes of Daz, Sweet Afton, salt, soap, old bottles of Jeyes Fluid and shoe polish for us and we’d play shop in her window, using matches for money. I, of course, was the shop owner. ‘Yes, thank you, that’s three pence, please. And here’s your change. A hay-penny.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Miriam would say.

  Then I’d call RoseAnn up.

  ‘Pretend you want to buy some rashers. Here’s your money … Oh, hello, Mrs Connors.’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Foley. Isn’t it very cold? Have you got any rashers?’

  ‘I have. That’s two shillings, please. Thank you.’

  Back at home in Lower Newtown, we’d wrap our dog, Jingle, in a doll’s blanket and put him in the pram as a substitute baby. He didn’t like it because it was quite difficult for him to jump out of the old pram with its high-nelly-style wheels and its hood that came up like the back of an old-fashioned carriage, but we tended to ignore his looks of puzzlement and fright from under the blanket.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Chester,’ Miriam would say, pushing the pram down the garden path.

  ‘Oh, isn’t he a lovely baby?’ I’d answer.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Foley. You’ll have to excuse me. I have to go and change his nappy,’ she’d say.

  ‘Oh, not at all, Mrs Chester. I understand. Is that what the smell is?’

  We often played beside a little hole in the hedge and talked to the two Sherry children who lived next door, passing cutlery and plastic cups and saucers to each other, inviting each other to pretend tea parties. The hole was low down in the hedge and satisfyingly circular, like the porthole in a ship.

  Mostly our play was make-believe but we did hairdressing for real. We all had long silky hair and we could plait it, clip it, part it and put rollers in it. Miriam in particular had lovely long, golden curls. We knew too that an appointment with the hairdresser was an event in our mother’s life, especially if it was with Séamus, who had an upstairs salon on the quay. His name was whispered in reverential tones, especially if a particularly severe or risqué hairdo was causing compliments and comments. ‘Who cut your hair? It’s terrific.’ He was a demigod in Waterford, deemed to be an artist with a pair of scissors, which he bore lightly and deftly. We all dreamed of being as skilled.

  Was that why Miriam and I went behind the couch with the scissors one day? Perhaps we had an inkling it was dangerous, but we hunkered down, hidden, and I set about re-styling her hair. I modelled myself on Séamus, confident and quick, a snip here and a tug there until I cut off curls galore and one long, blond ringlet in particular that hung down over her back. It slipped down onto the floor between our knees.

  Overcome with the startling consequence of these tiny snips, we stayed quiet until teatime. To make amends we set about polishing the edges of the floor around the room that were not covered by carpet. So industrious and thorough was I that I used the full tin of polish, much to my mother’s frustration. But this infringement was nothing compared to her shock when she saw Miriam’s shorn head of curls. They had to be trimmed severely back. Sadly, she never had long curls again – her hair has remained silky but straight to this day.

  3

  My Mother’s Mandolin

  Early nights in Waterford have merged into a general blur – apart from the night we broke my mother’s mandolin, an old instrument with reddened wood and a resonance that she loved. It remains clear in my mind still.

  We were breathless and hot from reckless jumping from bed to bed in our bedroom, flying across a great gap between the beds, as well as flying across the slippery linoleum-covered floor. The beds moved, shifting slightly each time as we landed. Earlier we had played with my mother’s mandolin but we’d discarded it and it lay there that bedtime, hidden in the bedclothes at the foot of one of the beds. Everything stopped, however, when a foot landed awkwardly on the mandolin’s neck and the old instrument broke in two.

  My mother used to pick out tunes on it. The rarity and fragility of those tremolo pickings made that fateful twang of the broken instrument all the more terrifying. The sound of the wood breaking in two was like a stab wound.

  We sat in our pyjamas, unsure what to do, until we heard Mama’s step on the stairs. Instinctively I ran to better hide the broken thing. It was like a wounded animal, whimpering, jangling and quivering still when I put it in the wardrobe and ran back to the bed. We got in under the covers and waited for Mama to come up and tuck us in.

  ‘Are ye asleep yet?’ she said as she came in.

  I felt seismic vibrations coming from the mandolin in the wardrobe – it was like a clanging bell demanding to be heard. She put the light out and came into the darkened room. If the light was left on, she would surely have seen the secret written plainly on my face. I felt myself blushing but I lay still in the semi-darkness when she came over to put the cold dab of holy water on each of our foreheads.

  ‘Night,’ she said.

  ‘Night, Mama,’ we sang like angels.

  That night stays with me still. The guilt of my duplicity is etched on my heart. I remember how it preyed on me during the night, eating into my heart, while the mandolin lay broken and accusing in the wardrobe, crying out to be discovered.

  I knew it would be like the whispered secret that surrounded the fabled King Labhraí Loingseach and his donkey’s ears. I’d learned his story at school, how no one was ever allowed to speak of King Labhraí’s donkey’s ears on pain of death and how his secret remained unspoken until the barber who cut the king’s hair – unable to keep the story to himself any longer – whispered the king’s secret into a yew tree. Of course, when the tree was cut down and shaped into a harp for the king’s bard, the music it played over and over again was a song about King Labhraí’s donkey ears. As with that story, the truth of the broken mandolin would come out eventually.

  Maybe our dread of the mandolin’s discovery in the wardrobe was worse than the actual event itself. A couple of nights later, my mother opened the wardrobe suspiciously, watching our reaction.

  ‘Have ye put something in here?’ she asked.

  Our faces had given the game away long before. She didn’t punish us at all. She didn’t even raise her voice.

  ‘It’s just one of those things,’ she said, tucking us in and telling us to go to sleep. And isn’t it strange that in all the years of adulthood and all the Christmases of plenty and generosity, I never thought to buy her a mandolin to replace the one we broke. And it’s sad to think that she never owned another instrument ever again.

  4

  My Grandmother, the Tailoress

  My maternal grandmother, Mary Ellen Walsh, was a tailoress who lived in Passage East all her life. She wore her grey hair tied back in a bun at the base of her head and had deep-set, dark-brown eyes – a link to her Corsican ancestors. She wore a navy wrap-around apron that had a pocket at the front in which she carried her beads, a few stray hairpins, sometimes the stub of a pencil or a spool of thread, and maybe a little ironed handkerchief.
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br />   Before I was born, Granny Walsh made beautiful taffeta dresses, camel-hair coats and tweed costumes for my mother. She did alterations and invisible mending, and she used patterns and photographs to make garments on request too.

  When we were small she made all our clothes for us – little summer dresses of apple green or speckled orange with broderie anglaise bodices and white Peter Pan collars. Our dresses were always decorated with pockets and bows, and with buttons and fasteners. She’d also often insert pleats or attach a belt at the back, just to entertain us, her youngest patrons.

  I remember how she started the Singer sewing machine by pressing down on the pedal underneath and then giving the wheel at her side a bit of a push. With nicely timed and precise movements, she’d crank up the machine and it would trundle into action, the needle ratcheting along. Then my grandmother’s highly controlled and beautifully intense dance would begin in earnest – her upper body curving over the machine as she swayed back and forth in time with the motion of the wheel and the foot pedal underneath. She was perfectly aligned to the machine and always had it work with clockwork-like co-ordination.

  The noise of the Singer had a rhythmic beat that carried a message of great conviction and certitude, both satisfying and mesmerising. It was like hearing an instrument of percussion or little hammer blows falling, cascading and tumbling down through the needle onto the fabric.

  In the midst of this mechanical mayhem, she’d sometimes give the wheel at her side an extra little encouraging lash of her hand to speed up the sewing and that’s when she’d travel into the stratosphere of sewing wizardry. And I’d sit spellbound in the room, caught up in the wonderful weave and weft of her world.

  With her head bent low and her hands over the dress, she’d be flying along, concentrating fiercely, united as one with the powerful engine, her needle jabbing in and out of the material. At such moments, she was completely focused, having to keep the seam in its correct place, the pressure up and the momentum going, pacing it, weaving it, all the parts moving in one great headlong rush. She was the seamstresses’ version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: as that 1970s book also involved the propulsion of a machine and provided the reader with an opportunity to look at life and examine the fundamental questions of existence.

  The Singer used to sound exhausted as it wound down, the frantic energy seeming to dissipate while my gran readjusted the fabric and fixed it under the needle. Then I’d see her thread the needle, holding her breath, her glasses halfway down her nose as she tried to hold the cotton between her thumb and forefinger and direct it through the eye. Then, it seemed as if she was doing battle with the eye of the needle and a dual of two wits ensued until she’d successfully threaded the needle and once again was able to bend the automaton to her will.

  After this temporary stop was over, she’d give the wheel a little push, press down on the foot pedal and away she’d go, her feet going hell for leather, up and down, up and down, the action gloriously steady and definite. Sometimes I used to climb in under her legs and wait for a chance to sit on the pedal and get a ride on its sea-saw plate.

  Now, when I cut through fabric or pull a piece of material flat on a table to consider its options, my deft hands flatten and fix, as if I already know what I’m going to do with the stuff. I realise then that I must be channelling my grandmother and her skill with a needle and thread.

  5

  Daddy Walsh

  I remember my grandfather’s hands, cupped one over the other and dry like rice-paper, and how he’d rub them together in anticipation of a visit to the pub with my father or a walk across the village for a chat with his friends, who paced slowly up and down the ‘Men’s Walk’, that particular spot in the village which was their own place and where they could meet to discuss affairs of state and other manly topics.

  My grandfather smoked Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. I still see him sitting at the kitchen table, picking stray strands of tobacco from the cigarette and tapping its top and tail against the packet, neatening it before his nicotine-stained fingers struck the match and a great flame burst forth.

  He’d hold the flaming match and the cigarette up close between his hand and mouth, sheltering it while he drew in the fire. He’d keep going until he heard the tobacco crackle. Then with a great flourish, he’d quench the flame and inhale. For my entertainment he’d make rings with the smoke, creating pock, pock sounds with his mouth as he released the smoke, and we’d watch the circles wafting off into the air. He’d remain still then, perhaps looking out to sea, resting his right hand on his knee, the cigarette between two fingers, smoke curling up from it.

  I was his first grandchild. When I was small, he’d take me in his arms and go to the high stone wall that bordered my grandparents’ back garden to look in the ivy for a toffee lollipop, which he said the fairies had left for me. I called him ‘Daddy Walsh’, a name that became one of the familiar, comforting and musical sounds of home, the Walsh spoken as if it was spelt with an ‘e’ in the middle. Welsh.

  Before he became a pilot on the River Suir, directing the boats up and down the estuary through the tricky currents and sand banks that lay between Dunmore East and the port of Waterford, he was a merchant seaman. He used to wear a black peaked cap, his matching black suit coat tight about his slight body, and so the uniformed sea captain on his packet of cigarettes always seemed so appropriate to my childish eyes. He wore the same cap and gold buttons; those sparkling blue eyes in the picture, with an old-fashioned sailing ship in the background, looked just like my Daddy Walsh.

  He was a meticulously neat and methodical man, a dapper dresser who wore long black trousers with deep turn-ups and creases down the middle. They were always voluminously wide, like a mariner’s trousers should be. The suits he wore were always black worn over a white shirt but I never saw him as a black-suited figure.

  It was rare to see him standing with his braces hanging down or without a tie on or with his starched collar untied. As he grew frail towards the end, I remember him coming downstairs like this once, almost unmanned by the necessity of looking for help. I stood on the second step of the stairs in order to reach up and put the little stud in at the back of his shirt, thereby securing the old-fashioned detachable collar. It was a shock to me that he could no longer do it for himself.

  I sometimes heard the scrape of the razor over his chin as he shaved. He wore black-laced shoes, which shone, buffed to a polished sheen. I remember his bushy eyebrows and how there was a sort of lop-sided tilt to his mouth when he smiled.

  I think he had a sense of fun. I remember a twinkle in his eye, a skip in his step and a wide, big-lipped grin that was full of humour and charm. He loved to intrigue and mystify us with a riddle or a puzzling word conundrum. He loved a game of cards, too, and I recall him splicing and knotting ropes and sculpting small bits of wood.

  He’d take me out to show me the village of Ballyhack across the river, Duncannon further down the coast and the Hook Head lighthouse off in the distance. Turning back, he’d show me Passage East itself, pointing out the Blind Quay, Canacanoe Hill, the remains of the fish factory and the cockle walk.

  I remember the ceremony of each of my grandfather’s acts, whether it was shaving, smoking or working with his ropes and wood. There was a delicate timing and deftness to each gesture; his movements were flowing and sure, like a dance. He didn’t rush – whether he was drinking his tea, peeling a potato, or putting the brake on my pram, each act was carefully executed, just as he must have been on the river, guiding schooners and tankers, tug boats and container ships up and down the estuary channel.

  This slowness was not to do with the stiff deliberate movements of his increasing age. It had to do with his being from another time, before phones, before television, before the dawn of modern technology. It was a time when semaphore – the art of signalling with flags – was still in use, when the chapel bell marking the time had a central place in daily lives. It was a time when Daddy Walsh, walk
ing up the hill to the neighbouring townland of Crooke, was a traveller traversing his kingdom of Passage East, going from its heart to one of its outposts.

  Days were more sacred and slower. Time was apportioned each day and those portions were rarely altered. There was Mass time, dinner time, tea time, supper time. As the tidal river ebbed and flowed, there was full tide, high tide, low tide and ‘it’s gone out’. The year had its parts too, divided into segments such as winter time, summer time, Easter time, Lent. There was the salmon season and the herring season – the late evenings, the bright mornings, the cold nights, the dark nights.

  When my grandfather left the house each day to stand in the shade of the Men’s Walk, it was a different world, a more ordered world. It was a time when to be taken for a walk by my grandfather was an occasion, a ritual to be recorded for posterity.

  6

  Passage

  Their words are in my head today,

  they echo back and forth

  lulling me into a half-remembered time,

  when I was four and younger

  in my pram

  outside on the footpath

  looking up at Canacanoe Hill.

  The breakwater, the chapel, Woodstown, Ballyhack,

  The Hooke, Crooke, Duncannon, Passage East.

  I see Gran’s house; I’m the first.

  Passage waited for us,

  The sky, streaked with lipstick,