Beyond the Breakwater Read online

  Later, in the 1950s, my father worked in the railway station that is located on the Ferrybank side of the bridge. There, in its heyday, over 700 people were employed. Waterford had an allocation of fifty-three locomotives with lines running to Cork, Limerick, Dublin, New Ross and Rosslare. In excess of 500 wagons were handled each day in the large fan-shaped goods yard that was situated between Mount Misery and the river.

  Of an evening, my father would cycle from Ferrybank across the bridge to meet my mother on Meagher’s Quay in the city. Sparkling with vitality, he would race across, cycling over the river, on the mode of transport favoured by young men at the time, pushing against the traction of the bike’s thin rubber tyres on the tarred surface of the bridge. He must have been handsome and fresh like new-mown hay – stick-thin and all teeth, with a sharply drawn jaw, a brilliant smile and the creamy skin of a country-grown boy. He wore his hair short, oiled back with Brylcreem, and his wide trouser legs were kept tightly in place with bicycle clips.

  Traffic was light in those days. There were gentle ambient sounds: no electronic beeping or telephonic voices punctuated the air, only the bellowing of animals on the way to the mart and the screeching of trains into the station.

  It’s over 100 years now since the once-new bridge to span the river was nearing completion. The noise of pounding and hammering could be heard all along the quays as the great ferro-concrete edifice, the Redmond Bridge, was erected. It was completed in February 1913, at a total cost of £71,000. As it was named in his honour, Mr John Redmond MP, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, opened it.

  The day was a perfect occasion, according to local reports, apart from a ‘suffragette incident’, which an editorial in the Munster Express says caused a bit of a stir. It seems friends were welcoming Mr Redmond at the station, after his arrival from Dublin, when he was accosted by two ladies who alighted from the third-class carriage of the same train. One of them, said to be a Dublin woman, pushed her way towards him and said, ‘You are going to open a free bridge are you? Will you open a free bridge to votes for women?’ Mr Redmond just smiled, the newspaper reported. Local writer and retired train driver Jack O’Neill recalls this and many other forgotten incidents in his book, Waterford Through the Lens of Time.

  But the history of this bridge goes back even further, as the Redmond Bridge was not, in fact, the original bridge. Its first incarnation was built in 1793 and was named as The Timber Bridge, though it was known locally as ‘Timber Toes’.

  It operated as a toll bridge for over 100 years. In those days a coach and six horses cost three shillings to pass, a pedestrian with baggage was a penny, a pedestrian without baggage paid a half penny, twenty cattle was three shillings and, most telling of all, for all the mourners following a coffin at a funeral there was no charge. Perhaps this most of all captures the spirit of the people who lived along the Suir.

  15

  Geneva Barracks

  I have a black and white photograph of myself as a child with my mother kneeling in the grass beside me, smiling. We are at Geneva Barracks in Passage East at a summer fair that was held there. I am dressed as Little Red Riding Hood – in a kind of djellaba down to my sandalled feet. I have a basket on my arm but my tear-stained face shows what an unwilling participant I was in the fancy dress of the early 1960s. I can remember being afraid because I thought I was going to meet the wolf. But tear-stained or not, I came away with first prize in that year’s fancy dress competition.

  A few years later, my mother dressed my sister Miriam and I as Gabby and Statia, two aul’ ones from Tolka Row, RTÉ’s first soap opera about a community living on Dublin’s northside. Again my mother entered us into the fancy dress at Geneva Barracks. The two of us held hands as we paraded round the ring in our long dresses and little jaunty hats, the netting pulled forward to give that extra touch of verisimilitude. We jostled with the other contestants, all of us with cardboard signs hanging from our necks on strings declaring what characters we were supposed to be.

  I have photographs of those times when we posed in the lee of the derelict Geneva Barracks – my mother, my grandfather, my father, my sisters and me – different years, different photographs. I remember the swinging cots, the sandwiches and the cups of strong tea from wobbly tables in the field. I remember walking through the overgrown field, my father having to lift us over thistles and cow-dung. I remember in particular how we paraded around the ring in Geneva Barracks and the view of the Suir as it flowed down past Crooke and Duncannon, spreading out beneath us on the other side towards Hook Head and out to sea.

  Geneva Barracks was a settlement that was turned into a military barracks in the eighteenth century, following a decision by the group of Swiss settlers it was intended for not to live there. They’d been invited to come by Ireland’s governing Protestant Ascendancy, who had a plan to establish a colony of intellectuals and artists in the area. The idea was that this group of skilled people from Geneva would settle in Passage East. The site was acquired in 1783 and the renowned architect James Gandon was commissioned to design a series of buildings that would look out over the Waterford estuary. But the arrangement fell through and the Irish parliament instead decided to use the site as a military base. Soon the soldiers were installed and in time the barracks became a frightening and cruel holding centre, an internment camp. This is how it became the resting place of the Croppy Boy.

  ‘At Geneva Barracks that young man died,’ my mother used to sing. Even though the song was a dirge-like lament, we loved all ten verses of it and we’d slip easily into a kind of drowsy trance when my mother, who was a proud Passage woman, sang about the Croppy Boy. It was her party piece and though she was not a confident singer, none of us could resist the powerful and poignant pull of that song and the way she sang it with such grace and honesty.

  My mother usually sang this 1798 song at Christmas-time. A hush would fall on us when, after some coaxing, her timid tremolo would steal out across the room and we’d be hooked.

  Good men and true in this house who dwell

  To a stranger buachaill I pray you tell

  Is the Priest at home or may he be seen

  I would speak a word with Father Green.

  Her version is the one that was written by County Down man, William B. McBurney, who used the pseudonym Carroll Malone. It first appeared in 1845 in The Nation, the weekly nationalist newspaper. It tells the story of a young man who stops in a church on his way to fight in the 1798 rebellion. He goes into the confessional, to a cloaked figure, and kneels for the penitential rite. But the figure is a British soldier in disguise, a wolf in priest’s clothes. After the youth has completed his confession, the soldier reveals himself and proceeds to arrest the young man and take him to prison. The boy is later executed in Geneva Barracks.

  We thoroughly enjoyed those sing-songs, but there comes a time in life when the make-up of family get-togethers changes and so it happened with us. Once we’d left the 1970s behind us occasions to sing dwindled and after 1980 I don’t recall my mother ever singing ‘The Croppy Boy’ again.

  Some sing ‘The Parting Glass’, others sing ‘I Did It My Way’, but when we gathered around my mother’s grave just a handful of years ago, there was only one song my sisters and I could bring ourselves to sing. Miriam picked it out on the fiddle and we followed her. The pathos of those notes was never so heartbreaking. Today when I look at those old Geneva Barracks photographs from the 1960s, all I see is my mother’s beauty.

  16

  Feeding the Birds

  When you are small, it is difficult to stand still for a long time in the middle of a wintry garden. Tiny rustles carry in the frosty air, little rivulets of water gurgle down the path and ice cracks down at your toes.

  It is a fairly existential state, suspended in time, standing upright between frozen beds, holding breadcrumbs in your hands, arms stretched heavenwards, your fingers splayed, waiting for a ‘willie’ wagtail or a thrush to alight. I knew if I wobbled in any way I’d
frighten the birds away.

  Children are fascinated by all the sounds and movements around them. Heaven was in those moments when I listened to the surf of time, my conscious mind teetering on that precipice between expectation and imminent realisation, caught between those two states of being – of remaining still so that I could hear it all correctly and understand.

  It seemed an eternity passed while I waited in anticipation for those elusive birds to land. I do remember the howling undertow of failure lapping at the edges of my dream, the constant presence of aviary rejection. The idea that an occasional bird, a hungry chaffinch or a sparrow, might fly low after the frost and rest on my hand, or my head, or on the discarded terracotta chimney pot I’d used to create a little additional nest with twigs, was so appealing that I sometimes held my breath.

  In order to balance, I often had to vary my stance, especially if I was trying to stand on one leg in the hope that the birds would think I was a bare leafless tree. But that was harder, especially as the dog was a distraction when he bounded up the garden steps and tried to jump on me. The cat usually stayed on the windowsill, not interested in anything outside of her own feline sphere.

  There was a little robin, red-breasted against the cold sky, which hopped down close. I saw her little jerky head pinning me with her beady eye from a perch on our gutter. She watched me with an amused cockiness that caused my hand to shake and my eyes to feel as if they were about to come out on sticks as I tried to remain stock-still. She was quite near but too clever by far to come any closer. When the cat moved slowly across the top of the wall, she flew off like a blithe spirit, light and ephemeral.

  I heard my mother in the kitchen opening drawers, peeling potatoes, her syncopated movements a steady backdrop to my dance of stillness outside in the sleeping garden.

  ‘Don’t sit on those wet steps or you’ll get a cold up through your kidneys,’ she shouted.

  ‘No, Mama, I won’t,’ I shouted down, hoping my voice would not frighten the birds away and undo all the trust I had built up. Our garden was bordered on each side by tall laurel hedges. In winter, when the sun was low in the sky, it seemed long and narrow like a railway track, sparkling and raw in the frosty light.

  I can’t remember what my inspiration was for this act. Did I hear Julie Andrews singing ‘Feed the Birds’ on the radio, or perhaps I’d seen a painting of St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, in one of our books, the Lives of the Saints? I had seen my mother putting bread out for the birds but maybe it was Snow White I’d read about. Whatever my inspiration, it was a feat to remain so stationary under the sky in all its opaque cloudiness miles above.

  Once the cold or tiredness became too much I’d return to the house. Inside, the howling of the wind when it blew under the dining room door held me enthralled, listening to the whuuuoooo as the breeze sang under the door. Whuuuooooooo it went, rising again to a cry before dying away.

  I bent down close to the gap where the breeze was, between the saddle and the door, and listened to its music. It rose like an oboe in a minor key, leading an orchestra of sounds: the crackle of the fire in the grate, the rattle of the letter box and the creak of the kitchen door, all playing together.

  I had to listen carefully to their secret conversation. Whuuuooooo, sang the wind, reaching a pitch like a tornado, and then it came under the door like an exhalation, and died away and there was quiet, and I stayed still on my belly, my ear to the crack, waiting for it to blow again under the door, listening to its dying cry, and I wondered what it was saying to the house.

  And there I lay, suspended in a nether world of darkness and fire, of ice and cold, the world of winter, loving the wind and its whispering sigh – until the next day, recharged, I would once again race out to the back garden and attempt to coax the birds to feed from my outstretched hands.

  17

  Newfoundland

  The cold breeze that blows along the quays in Waterford city is legendary. It whips around Reginald’s Tower and gathers speed up along the river, taking no prisoners. Shoppers don’t dawdle. They rush along from the bridge to Kelly’s, carrying bags, their heads down to protect against the bitter cold. You’ll hear ‘’Twould cut you like a knife’, or ‘’Twould skin a brass monkey today’.

  It was the same in the early 1530s when the first ship sailed out from Waterford through the estuary to voyage across the Atlantic to Newfoundland in search of cod. Over the coming centuries, these strong winds were to guide hundreds of ships to the fishing grounds on the other side of the world. In time, at least half a million young men would leave the quays of Waterford to go to Newfoundland in North America to fish. I never knew this when I was at school in Waterford.

  In its heyday Waterford Port was one of the world’s busiest centres of trade and commerce in Europe. The Vikings were the first to discover the harbour’s excellent sheltered conditions. At high tide there was fifty feet of deep water in the river and you could sail fifty miles upstream.

  At the height of the cod trading industry, from the mid-1700s up to 1830, there were 200 sailing ships leaving the quays of Waterford each year, bound for Newfoundland. What a sight it must have been! They carried between 4,000 and 8,000 young men on board, all on contract to the city’s merchants. They usually went to fish off Newfoundland for a minimum of eight months. The clatter and ringing of schooners is palpable still in the air, only muted by time.

  According to Jack Burtchaell, a local historian who brings visitors on daily walking tours through Waterford city, the men who manned the cod boats generally went away for periods of up to twenty months. Before they left, the fleet was stocked with food, ropes, tack, clothes and all the other provisions needed for such protracted voyages. It was all brought on board along the waterfront in Waterford. The chandlers and merchants made a fortune. Then the ships would sail down the estuary some six or seven miles and moor off Passage East. They’d wait there for the river pilot and until the tides and winds were favourable, and then set off. It’s easy to imagine the sight today, as I stand on the Blind Quay in Passage East. The choppy white waters still run by the Spit Light Beacon, washing up against the breakwater and lashing the fishing vessels that plough the river.

  How did they manage the hunger and the cold, the chilblains and the wet during those months of fishing in icy waters? The cod, some as long and thick as a man’s leg, were split and dried on timber flakes. Salted cod with a shelf-life of twenty years was the most easily transported form of protein in those pre-refrigeration years, being flat and hard as wood. While the fishing and salting was in progress, the men entertained themselves on the frozen waters of Newfoundland by playing hurling and by faction fighting – ‘on an inter-county basis’, says Burtchaell with a twinkle in his eye. County and parochial rivalry was fierce in those distant days – it still is – and hurling, in particular, is a great and passionate sport. The fishermen who manned the fleets came from some of the great hurling counties – Waterford, Kilkenny, Tipperary and Wexford. The men from Wexford, also known as ‘Yellow Bellies’, used to meet on a certain street corner in the town of St John’s in Newfoundland. It’s known today as Yellow Belly Corner.

  Some argue that it was the crews of the cod fishing fleets playing hurling on the ice throughout the winter, which, in time, gave rise to one of Canada’s most popular sports, ice hockey. Burtchaell points out that in Irish the word for giving the ball a wallop is poc, the word now used to describe the puck in hockey.

  Waterford fishermen and mariners found much-needed employment in Newfoundland. Up to 35,000 people, drawn overwhelmingly from Waterford and its hinterland, settled in Newfoundland between 1800 and 1830. The first three Newfoundland bishops came from the Waterford area.

  Before the ships returned home to Waterford, the cod was salted and traded all over the world, from the Baltic Sea to Brazil, with the ships bringing goods back from these distant countries in turn. Then, when the men returned, ‘they’d hit the town like a hurricane. It was Mardi Gr
as (after nearly two years away) for two months,’ Burtchaell explains, relishing the idea. ‘They were broke by the third,’ he adds.

  This boom industry fuelled a building boom in Waterford. New houses owned by the wealthy merchant families were built. Roads were improved and the cultural and social life of the city developed.

  But by the mid-1800s, the fishing boom had begun to peter out and the market for cod, which had made wealthy men of the ship-owning merchants – the Fogartys, the Mullowneys, the Farrells, the Wyses, the Cashins and the Rices – had dried up.

  I wander into the Granville Hotel on the quay in Waterford. It’s still one of the oldest and most elegant establishments in the city. The building was built by the Newports, one of the city’s well-known merchant families. Thomas Meagher, whose family had emigrated to Newfoundland from south Tipperary in the late 1700s, returned home in 1819 and bought the house. His son, the patriot and soldier Thomas Francis Meagher, who grew up to become the famous Young Irelander, a decorated hero of the American Civil War and who was acting governor of Montana when he died in 1867, was born in this house in 1823. It was sold in 1825 to Charles Bianconi, the father of public transport in Ireland, who first established a hotel here.

  Burtchaell smiles as he recalls some of the people he has met in Newfoundland on his many visits – John Mannion, Professor of Geography at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, who was honoured at NUI Galway for his pioneering research into the historic area; the Porters, who came from Kilmacow and went to Newfoundland; and the octogenarian Ally O’Brien, who speaks and sounds as if he was ‘straight out of south Kilkenny. His people left in 1815. You’d swear he was from Ballyhale. It’s like a step back in time to visit his kitchen,’ says Burtchaell. ‘The range on one side, the Pope on the other.’