Beyond the Breakwater Read online

  Annie’s day started in the morning at about 7 a.m. She rarely missed Mass. After that, she began her work in the studio. Later, she got the dinner for her and at least five other members of her family – two sisters, two married brothers who worked in the city and her youngest brother, Billy, who lived at home with the girls. Carmel told us that Annie was a highly organised individual.

  The archive, which represents her continuous work over six decades, was kept together as a unit in Barker Street until she died in 1986. Today this photographic output stands as a testament to her creative talent and her steadfastness as an artist. It is kept in storage in Waterford’s City Archive.

  Carmel believes she projected her gentle, kind personality onto her sitters and that the photographs evoke Brophy’s own character because there’s ‘a gentleness, a quietness, a perfection’ in them. ‘She loved people and she loved meeting people. She had a great sense of humour and had a very pleasant lifestyle without being ostentatious. It was a moderate life.’ Carmel says her aunt liked an occasional flutter on the horses. She was always generous at Christmas time and always warm and kind.

  Some days during our filming it felt as if Brophy was standing nearby, pointing us in certain directions. When we stood in front of her house, where she had lived all her life, we looked across at an old disused jail that had been used by the army during the Second World War to store turf. Tragically in 1943, after days of heavy rainfall, the foundations of the old wall became unsound and it fell heavily on the opposite row of houses, all 120 tonnes of turf. Nine people were killed as a result of the landslip. Annie Brophy would have known all the victims. It must have been a terrible scene that morning. Seventeen other people were injured, one of whom later died. But Brophy, the ultimate professional, had the determination and focus to take her camera and tripod outside to photograph the scenes.

  On that March morning while filming the documentary, RoseAnn noticed a detail in the plaque on the wall that commemorates the tragedy. She called us over. Our cameraman Seamus Hayes, soundman Kieran Curtain and I stood in front of the jail wall. It took a moment for it to register – the incident had happened all those years ago on a Thursday, 4 March – and we happened to be standing on the very same spot, filming on a Thursday, 4 March.

  A shiver rang down my back and I felt that the guiding hand of Annie Brophy was stronger than ever.

  11

  Tall as a Mountain was He

  Sitting tight as a ball in the rattan chair, deep in the gloam of the dining room, I’d watch the story of Daniel Boone unfold on the small television. ‘With an eye like an eagle and as tall as a mountain was he,’ the theme song declared.

  I remember how in one episode of Daniel Boone, the eponymous pioneering hunter and woodsman of the early American frontier was tracking hunters through a fearsome canyon. The moon was full and danger lurked around each rock. There were whistles and shrieks at every step. The tension ratcheted up as Boone didn’t realise he was being stalked by a black panther, crouched on a rock overhead.

  At the very second when the cat was about to pounce, my father crept in behind me, gripped my shoulders and shouted, ‘Watch out!’

  My heart nearly stopped. I whirled around and berated my own dear Papa, crying tears of terror and relief.

  I loved being lost in make-believe; I loved wandering the mountains with the rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew!

  At that age, we slipped easily from states of extreme excitement into terror. We lived in fear of ‘the Bogeyman’, knowing that he would catch us if we didn’t get into bed and go to sleep quickly. He was behind the door in the dark. He was outside in the yard or in the scullery at night waiting in the corner ready to pounce on us.

  In my eyes, Gingee Jones, an old man who sometimes shuffled past our house, seemed to fit the bill of the Bogeyman. When he appeared, I’d run for my life, fright propelling me along the street or into the house. The poor man most likely only wandered the streets of our city looking to pick up work, but the mere hint of his emergence on the horizon was enough to send me racing.

  Sometimes if he passed when we were all out skipping, the neighbouring children and I would stop and crane our necks for a look. He wore a dirty coat that was full of holes and held together with safety pins. He pushed an old pram. Maybe he was a rag and bone man, who made a living by going from street to street, collecting unwanted items from houses along the way so that he could sell them on. Sometimes it felt as if we wished him there because the terror of his passing sent such a thrilling shiver down our backs and into our hearts. When, spectre-like, he’d move off down the hill, it was as if he’d just risen jangling and fierce from an old rusty bed. In the distance, to us on the footpath, he seemed to leave a silence in his wake. As he wandered off out of our sights, we’d remain quiet, peering around the corner to catch one last sight of him.

  Now in adulthood, I try to remember those forgotten times of waiting for the Bogeyman and watching Daniel Boone on television. It was a time when we called any kissing or romantic stuff seen on the television ‘darling business’. If we saw the heads of actors coming together in readiness for a steamy kiss, we’d exclaim: ‘Oh no, darling business!’ thereby alerting each other to the horrors about to unfold on the screen. We’d all turn away in disgust and squirm in our seats, hiding behind our fingers until it was over or – if it continued for too long – we’d run out of the room altogether. These exhibitions of amorous arousal caused us such exquisite embarrassment.

  Looking back, I also reach for glimpses of the mornings when the tinkling sound of my mother going to the drawer to get a bottle opener was like a beckoning bell. The sound of her opening her small bottle of Guinness, which she took to build herself up following years of illness with tuberculosis, would bring the three of us running up like goslings wanting a sup from her glass. We’d gather, our hands on her lap, waiting until she passed the glass to each of us for one long glorious mouthful of the black yeasty stuff. We’d smack our lips at the satisfaction of our voyage-long drought being slaked.

  I reach for the sound of my father massaging tobacco in the heel of his palm, pressing it fine with a ritualistic motion, and the sound of the spittle he’d create in the bowl of the pipe when the crackling and popping sounded. This always marked the end of the day for us.

  I reach for the soft sound of his hand along a piece of board as he wrote out the alphabet with a marker to teach me my letters before I went to school. I watch him write, crouching at my side, handsome, eager, transmitting that energy to me. Like Daniel Boone, with an eye like an eagle and as tall as a mountain was he.

  12

  Nuns

  Nuns populated my early school days in Waterford city. During my time living on Lower Newtown I attended St John of God National School. Lay teachers were few and far between, but nuns swept by me every day. They were ever-present in that pale speckle-tiled primary school of the mid-1960s, rustling at the top of the classroom in front of the blackboard, swirling round like great battleships ready to swoop down on any wrong-doer. They walked in black habits along cool corridors, beads and keys rattling and slapping against each other. They were always busy, regal, elegantly bustling. We pulled back out of their way, fearfully, instinctively, the polished sheen of that specially made half-inch-thick stick or ‘bata’ never too far from our minds.

  Nuns all smelled the same. When a nun in her gabardine rigging came up close in a classroom, the smell of the cloth, imbued with a rich mix of soap, starch, sweat, camphor balls, polish, incense and old refectory aromas, was overpowering. But a nun rarely came too near except on occasion in class when she might show you how to write an ‘r’ or a ‘q’. Then this personage would squeeze into the seat beside you and, taking your pen, demonstrate in best copperplate how to achieve the great curved letters.

  The pungent odour of that cloaked body mingling perhaps with a bouquet of fumes from her hidden undergarments could enclose and momentarily suffocate you. I
t could leave you dumb-founded, unable to answer even the simplest question.

  ‘How do you spell this, Catherine?’ she might ask in crystal clear, rurally accented syllables. Or, ‘Isn’t that right, Catherine?’ And the class would wait, while I, sitting in mystification, the colour rising up my cheeks, could only mumble, ‘Yes, sister’, smile and wait until she’d moved away. To be so near this musty-scented nun, who could wield a disciplinary thwack with great vigour, or wedge a pointed finger in between your shoulder blades, or firmly catch hold of your arm and propel you vigorously into a classroom, was more potent than the smell of chocolate or even cod liver oil.

  Seeing a nun up close was a truly fascinating and horrifying moment. With no hair visible except for an occasional facial sprout, the pasty-toned skin was a lunar landscape of mystery to us pupils. And I remember their complex, unreadable expressions, hinting at the private world they inhabited where women watched and counted, coveted and conspired, prayed and purloined to attain holiness and sanctity. They were worlds away, cloistered from the play areas where we skipped and ran.

  On our rare visits to the convent we were provided with a chance to peep into their world of polished surfaces, where reverberating bells and rushing skirts, stony-faced statues and hollow, scarifying whispers occupied wide corridors and stairways. The sound of their beads striking their keys made little irregular clicks that sounded like beetles when they moved.

  In class we pasted pictures of leaves, trees, doors, cows and thrushes into our copybooks. Using fat brushes dipped into jam jars, we painted globs of gloopy paste onto stiff paper.

  As I progressed through school, we learned to knit socks and gloves, to embroider tablemats and cushion covers and to sew hems and buttonholes, collars and pockets. We learned about Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Tuatha Dé Danann, about the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and about the rivers, mountains and towns of Ireland.

  We learned to walk in a procession and to file quietly into the assembly hall. We learned to pray and to rise or sit at our desks at the barest nod or look of command. We were told by the nuns how to sit, how to walk into a room, how to stand.

  One day in school, each of us shivered when word went round that a nun had died. She was to be waked in the convent that night. The thought of her lying on a table, icy cold to the touch, was palpable. Her ghostly presence fell on darkened cubicles like the shadow of a great bird of prey. We imagined her lying in the convent chapel, her body prostrate, rosary beads entwined around her fingers, her yellow skin sleek and shiny in death. She had us cowering in dimly lit stairwells, terrified we’d see her face in front of us.

  All through school, nuns remained a source of mystery and ridicule, reverence and revulsion. They were curiosities, not women, not mothers, not aunts but strange, mysterious, medieval beings that were never seen to bathe or undress or shake out their hair. In ages past, they’d been walled up in towers or convents never to emerge. Were these teaching nuns an offshoot, an aberration that strode into our classrooms to direct our eyes?

  Today, I wonder about nuns and how they were once omnipresent in our lives. I wonder where they have all gone and if they were just misunderstood. Might they actually have been benign beings, or were they really scary?

  13

  Jackie Kennedy in Woodstown

  I was eight years old when we came up from the strand in Woodstown one day in our sandals and swimsuits to catch a glimpse of Jackie Kennedy with her entourage as they rode by. We waited by the side of that country road, alongside other small groups of day-trippers, all dotted along the verge, standing patiently in the sun in the hope of seeing her. Perhaps my father’s absence added a certain sense of expectancy, of being light and lost.

  It was during the summer holidays, when my mother used to drive us as children out to Woodstown to spend the day on the strand. She’d pack sandwiches and a flask and take a blanket, towels and our swimsuits. She’d park the little green Mini near the Saratoga Bar and down we’d go onto the beach to spend the day splashing away, light and easy in the breeze, until my father came to join us in the evening, jumping on a bus after work to catch the last couple of rays of sun and a swim before we all headed home to our house in the city.

  The strand of fine sand and cockleshells in Woodstown, County Waterford is golden, a wide expanse stretching along the riverbank. The water at the mouth of the Suir estuary was always shallow, warm and sparkling. All those days were filled with buckets and shovels, cockle-picking and splashing. We’d flounce in and out of the waves, our swimsuit frills trickling tiny cascades of water down over our spindle-shank legs.

  While we waited to see Jackie Kennedy that day, my mother held my sisters’ hands in case they’d run out under a car. The sun beat down and the sand was hot underfoot, spilling in loose, golden grains onto the tar of the road all along the way. A man with a hailer passed along and warned everyone to keep back. He moved along briskly, having a friendly word here and there with some of the women further along the line, who were also waiting with their children. I jumped up and down, thrilled at the thought of seeing Jackie Kennedy. It was clear from the way the crowd was talking that she was the essence of glamour and fairytale romance.

  ‘Watch out for her now,’ my mother told us. ‘She’ll be along any minute.’

  I especially remember how it felt to be standing there, excited, expectant and warmed by the communal buzz of affection for Jackie and her two children: Caroline, who was nine, and John John, who was six. My heart went out to them when I learned they’d lost their father.

  The air seemed to tingle that day in 1967 as we waited to see her. There was a distinct touch of stardust in the air as we stood beside my mother to see the beautiful young widow who’d been marked by tragedy. The fizz of heat added greatly to the power of the moment. Our wait seemed endless until finally someone shouted, ‘Look, she’s coming,’ and the thrill of her arrival went through us. All heads peered down the road to catch a glimpse of her. Suddenly the place was full of the sound of horses’ hooves cantering over the stones.

  ‘Keep back, they’re coming close,’ my mother said, pulling us in. ‘Do you see her?’ she asked us. I looked, but the adults all around me combined with the gentle jostling that her arrival had caused, left me disorientated and confused.

  But there she was – one of the party, a slim woman, erect, her back tilting forward slightly as she trotted by on a dark horse. Had there been the flash of a smile? I couldn’t be sure. I waved but she passed like a streak across our day and it’s all a jumble now. I remember them trotting by in an explosion of noise down along the road, turning in at the main entrance gates of Woodstown House, across the road and down from the Saratoga.

  Within seconds the clamour of the riders had faded and they were gone.

  A general sigh of sated pleasure washed over us as we walked back along the path towards the steps down to the strand and our belongings. The day seemed different, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. The sand was cold and we stood, shivering, pulling on our cardigans, anxious to see our father, watching out in case he would not come.

  The dangers of not having him arrive now suddenly snapped at my heels. As I tried to fasten my buttons, I kept watch, checking to see him walk along so that he could greet us and bring us in for one last swim. And suddenly there he was.

  14

  The River Suir Runs Through It

  The bridge across the River Suir was once the main link between Waterford and the residents of Ferrybank on the other side. For those who lived in the village of Ferrybank, especially in the 1930s and 1940s when my father was growing up, all aspects of city life were on offer on the opposite side of the river.

  He and his brothers and sisters knew their bridge then as Redmond Bridge, an elegant Victorian-style construction that was opened in 1913. It would be over eighty years before this stylish bridge became unsafe and had to be replaced by a new concrete bridge known as Rice Bridge.

  My father was a teenager in the late 1
930s. He knew that Ferrybank stretch of river as well as anyone. His mother did all her shopping for the family in the city. He’d often seen her heading off, shopping bag hanging over her arm, as she aimed to buy shoes or a coat for one of them. He was one of twelve, so there was a constant flow of movement by her over and back to the city.

  Mitching from school one day and looking for somewhere to pass the time, my father ducked into the Dominican Church on the city side of the bridge. While he was kneeling at the altar rails, no doubt in contemplation of his sins as a reluctant student, he heard the patter of tiny heels coming up the aisle. Something familiar about the sound made him turn just in time to see his mother genuflect and kneel beside him. He slipped away in double-quick time, leaving her to say a prayer before continuing on her way into the city to do her shopping.

  In the 1930s my father and the other Foley brothers used to get a ferry across the river on their way to secondary school in the city, as the distance was shorter and the boat trip was more exciting than the bridge. They were taken across in big open rowing boats, each crewed by two men. The cost of a weekly ticket was three old pence.

  ‘All the moods of that great Waterford river were known to us,’ my father’s brother, Donal, wrote in his autobiography, Three Villages. ‘The waves could be near mountainous on the day when the river would be swept with an easterly breeze. During the late spring and all through summer,’ he continues, ‘it was an idyllic experience to cross that great expanse of dark green water as it lapped the quays, and looked south to the lush tree-lined banks, Cromwell’s Rock and Fitzgerald’s Island.’