Beyond the Breakwater Page 7

  Due to a blow from a passing car once, he loathed all manner of vehicles – tractors, bread vans, estate cars, lorries, motor cycles – no moving machine was safe. As a locomotive approached, he’d spring into action, priming himself in readiness to give chase. We lived at a crossroads so Jingle never knew what direction the car was going to take when it reached our junction and so he’d begin turning early, wheeling again and again in readiness for his take-off up one of the roads or downhill towards the pier in hot pursuit of the vehicle. To the uninitiated, it looked as if he was just spinning like a top, chasing his tail to bite it. As the car braked or accelerated, he’d whirl in ever-tighter circles, with an ever-increasing degree of urgency and excitement, looking more and more like a whirling dervish spinning on a pin. Once the car had taken the bend, he’d accelerate up the road after them, warning them off our patch, barking and harrying the wheels of the car, engaged in a lecture of outrage.

  Although he particularly loathed cars, he also guarded against intruders who happened to walk onto our forecourt. My father had a small grocery shop so we had plenty of customers passing in and out, and mostly Jingle showed great forbearance, but there was the occasional customer who just seemed to rub him up the wrong way. Call it a clash of personalities, but there were those who loved to engage him in an angry exchange. Then we’d see him bare his crooked, gapped teeth and adopt his most ferocious pose with the hairs up on the back of his neck to emit a growl that grew in intensity.

  ‘Aaaaagh, go way out a’ that,’ the passing neighbour might say as he went down the road.

  A car got him in the end, though, and my father had to carry him in and bury him in the garden out the back. Afterwards, he stood at the sink for a while looking out the window across the bay towards the Comeraghs. Us girls didn’t stop our chatter until we saw his shoulders twitching and we noticed something was not quite right.

  ‘The poor hoor,’ my father cried, his hands lifting up to his eyes.

  It was only then I realised how he’d lost a friend, how they’d been together all through the years, two males, allies united, in a house full of women.

  21

  Joe

  We usually met on important family occasions in our aunts’ sitting room in Helvick, which was about two miles further along the road from us at the furthest point on the peninsula. As a treat, us girls would always have Barley’s lime cordial, while my mother would have some cherry brandy and my father and uncle had Guinness and some whiskey. My aunts only drank tea.

  We loved our visits to Helvick because we could listen to the adults talking about old times and, of course, we took part in the sing-song when it started.

  My Uncle Joe was usually called on to sing first because he loved to and because his voice was rich and melodious. He relished singing and he had a store of songs that he’d learned from listening to artists like Johnny Cash and Jim Reeves. Roger Whittaker’s ‘The Last Farewell’ was one of his favourites. After a swallow of Guinness to soothe his throat, he’d put his glass down carefully on the coffee table and compose himself. His face would take on a dreamy, serious expression. Then he’d lift his head and begin – his deep, rich voice filling the room with the music and the story:

  There’s a ship lies rigged and ready in the harbour,

  Tomorrow for old England she sails.

  We loved this song because it told a story. I especially enjoyed the chorus with its lilting, easy melody.

  For you are beaut-i-ful,

  And I have loved you dearly,

  More dearly than the spoken word can tell.

  We were hooked from the start of ‘The Last Farewell’. A ring of stout around his mouth was a sign that Joe was truly in the moment and it seemed to add to the piquancy of the words because there was a sadness about Joe that none of us young people could ever miss. And that none of us ever came close to understanding.

  We all joined in at the chorus, singing along with Joe. The fact that Uncle Joe was a merchant seaman and fisherman who had gone to sea as a young man, working on ocean liners and oil rigs and trawlers, seemed to give the song an added pathos. He had never married and I always felt that when he sang those songs of lost love, it was heartfelt in some way.

  There was a vulnerability and an incongruity about Joe that made me feel slightly embarrassed sometimes. The angelic quality of his voice and his open trusting eyes seemed to ask a question that sometimes left me feeling sad. As he sang, he’d lift his head up at certain parts, almost in sympathy with the fate of the tragic sailor, to check to see if we understood. Time slowed down as his voice filled the room.

  Joe had thick black eyebrows over dark-brown eyes that seemed to hold your gaze when he looked at you in moments of honest appraisal. He had a head of rich dark-brown hair, a strong jawline and a fine profile. He was handsome in a rough, masculine way. He smoked Major cigarettes and the tops of the fingers on his left hand were brown from years of holding the stubs in his hand.

  He walked with a limp, and one shoe was always built up by the cobbler to compensate for the shorter leg that had shrivelled when he was in his late teens. It was many years before we learned that this wastage of the bone could sometimes happen, in particular to young men, following intense physical activity. We knew Joe had cycled a lot and played a great deal of hurling as a young man, so we presumed that this was how it had happened. Because of this wastage, Joe sat in the armchair in his own characteristic way, with one leg outstretched and the shorter leg folded under him.

  Those times remain clear in my memory now: of Joe singing with emotion of other worlds and times. Looking out the window in Helvick, I remember the grey-green sea stretching off down the coastline to the east, towards Hook Head in the distance and the town of Dungarvan visible in the west. I can see the seagulls following in the wake of an occasional trawler.

  Joe seemed to favour songs about loneliness, about drinking and about disappointment. He loved songs by the American singer Jim Reeves. ‘I asked the man,’ he’d sing, ‘behind the bar, for the juke-box, and the music takes me back to Tennessee.’ He used to lift his shoulders in a semi-shrug as he sang the last line: ‘When they ask, who’s the fool in the cor-ner cry-ing, I say, little ole wine drinker me.’

  Now the words and the music of the songs he sang merge like a collage of melodies into one: the notes unfolding slowly in my head, Joe’s voice rising effortlessly. Unhurried, he’d pause like any singer if a long breath were required. He’d often close his eyes but sometimes he’d look into the near distance as he put his heart into the words.

  Years later, he lay in hospital smiling like a baby, his eyes clear like an infant staring out from a pram. His memory was gone and his words were all fragmented or lost, but the nurses were always kind to him and often asked to see photographs of him as a young man because they could see how handsome he must have been and they responded to an innocence in his eyes.

  He died in his late sixties in hospital. We buried him on an icy cold day in January. There were hailstones and yet the freezing air that day on the exposed coastal graveyard seemed right somehow.

  Like the words of the song of ‘The Last Farewell’, which Roger Whittaker sang in the 1970s, I felt he had gone away to a land full of endless sunshine and left the ‘rainy skies and gales’. On that last day in the cemetery, when I said goodbye to Uncle Joe, I remembered him singing ‘The Last Farewell’ in Helvick and all of a sudden the words came back to me as if he was there beside me, smiling.

  22

  Sheila

  I only heard my Auntie Sheila sing once and I remember the occasion clearly. It was wintertime. We had gathered together for her birthday. We’d been their neighbours in Ring for a few years at this point and a tradition to visit them on such occasions had already been established.

  We had cake and drinks and we gave her presents. The cold outside was kept at bay by heavy curtains and a fire burned away in the grate. All the wrapping paper from the presents was folded and put in a pile at her fee
t. Bubble bath, slippers and a new hot water bottle were ranged around her – valued gifts from her three nieces.

  We performed our party pieces from a selection that included ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ and ‘Drumcolliher’ by Percy French, as well as more up-to-date ones by the Clancys and others. We sang Irish songs too – ‘Buachaill ón Éirne’ and ‘A Chomaraigh Aoibhinn O’ – and my father with his halting rendition of ‘Dear Old Home’ brought a lump to my throat. We all joined in for the chorus: ‘Dear old home, far across the sea, day and night to thee I’m sadly yearning,’ and the words were so familiar to us: ‘how I long to see the dear old home again, the cottage down the little winding glen, I can see the roses climbing, I can hear the church bell chiming and I long to see the dear old home again.’

  The party was at a point when the energy was in danger of ebbing away unless somebody stepped in to provide an additional turn. In desperation our eyes turned to Auntie Sheila. Perhaps she’d play the violin, which she did on rare occasions. At first she was adamant that she would not. But then, after some persuasion, she seemed to relent somewhat and said she’d sing ‘Whispering Hope’, as she had come across the words in a newspaper cutting for just such an occasion.

  She put her cup of tea down, patted her hair, rummaged in her handbag and pulled out a wallet. After going through all the little pockets, she found the words and she stood to perform.

  There was a warm glow in the sitting room in Helvick as Sheila stood. Sheila’s sister, Gile, sat at the opposite side of the fireplace, sipping tea. The two of them loved to host any kind of a party and we loved going as they dressed up for the occasion – as did we – and we were given preferential treatment.

  Sheila stood near the lamp so that she could read the small print. She took a breath. The first tentative notes to emerge were flute-like in quality. I recall being afraid that stage fright would take hold of her.

  ‘Soft as the voice of an angel, breathing a lesson unheard,’ she sang. The sound of her voice was like a whisper, yet it somehow came out clear and sure. We didn’t make a sound as we listened.

  After years of smoking Silk Cut cigarettes, her voice was reedy and thin. As she reached for the high notes, her hand went up to her throat. She ran out of breath once or twice but still the notes came, shrill and pipe-like, as if blown in by the wind.

  I can still see Auntie Sheila, pale-skinned with blue-rinsed hair styled in soft waves over her head, standing there under the lamp. After being widowed at a young age, she had retired to Helvick. She never remarried.

  ‘Wait till the darkness is over, wait till the tempest is done,’ she sang. The magic stole over me and wove its spell. I continue to love this hymn.

  As we drove home to Baile na nGall that night, the words of ‘Whispering Hope’ stayed with us, and the trembling voice of Auntie Sheila singing about hope, cautioning us to wait till the tempest is over, became part of the night. The unfairness of her own fate, widowed at a young age, seemed to suit the song. The soothing quality in her voice, ‘soft like the voice of an angel’, seemed to echo through the darkness as we drove further and further away from Helvick.

  When the dark midnight is over

  Watch for the breaking of day.

  Whispering hope, o how gentle thy voice,

  Making my heart in its sorrow rejoice.

  23

  Harold

  Harold Kenneth Long, a native of Youghal, was married to my lovely Aunt Sheila. He was a much-loved only child, who grew up in a privileged Protestant home in Longville House in Co. Cork. He is buried in the grounds of St Mary’s Church in Youghal.

  I never knew him but over the years I’ve seen many photographs of him and of his parents. I often wonder what Harold was like in person. We have a photograph of him as a young man. He’s sitting on a Lilo – a type of inflated rubber mattress – on a beach. He looks relaxed and happy. He’s slim and pleasant looking. He may even have been handsome. He’s neatly dressed in a soft-buttoned shirt and creased trousers. He looks kind.

  Do I read too much into the remnants of his life that have come into my possession? Harold’s father wrote to Sheila in December 1942, introducing himself and ‘suggesting to adopt you as our only daughter and offer you all a daughter should have in our home’.

  Harold died before he and Sheila could have any children. He was only a young man in his thirties at the time of his death. They had been married only a few short years when he died tragically.

  He must have played the piano as I have some sheet music of his, dating from the 1920s. The sheets are dusty and faded but still so redolent of the gay twenties, that time between the wars when the Charleston and the two-step were in vogue. There’s ‘Panama Twilight’, words by Wilder D’Lea, music by Fisher Thompson, where ‘the orchids, dear, are blooming once again … In Old Panama I long to dwell. I want to see your smiles of love divine, kiss your lips and hear you say “you’re mine”, beneath the starry sky.’

  I imagine Harold as being very debonair and rather dashing, with a cravat, crisply pressed trousers and squeaking new leather shoes. He was a banker. I know he was a gardener, too, because he died from tetanus poisoning after pruning roses in their garden in Blackrock. His untimely demise might easily have been written into a Noël Coward play, such was its tragic and yet theatrically rapid onset.

  I wonder if he serenaded my Aunt Sheila during their courtship. Sheila played the piano and the violin. Did they ever play duets together, I wonder? It was a rare occurrence for Sheila to play in later life. It seemed to cause her distress even to think about taking the fiddle out of its case.

  There’s a drawing of a couple on the cover of another piece of sheet music that Harold owned. I gaze at their old-fashioned pose – the couple is gauche and fey, airy and fantastical. The song is about a girl called Mabel, entitled ‘Why Did I Kiss that Girl’. It’s a whimsical piece, with words by Lew Brown and music by Robert King and Ray Henderson. From the 1920s, it’s signed by Harold and dated 8 August 1924. Did he play this song in Longville as the summer sun threw dappled light across the terrace when the evening was coming in slowly over the bay? According to the song:

  Bashful Johnny Green just turned seventeen …

  Some dear friends he knew introduced him to Mabel at a dance

  She was very nice so he kissed her twice …

  In the morning, all his friends heard Bashful Johnny say,

  ‘O, why did I kiss that girl? Why oh why, oh why

  Why did I kiss that girl? I could almost cry

  I’m nervous, so nervous, I’m worried and blue

  And if her kiss did that what would her huggin’ do?’

  And so it continued, each line funnier than the last.

  I’ve inherited some of his books too, such as Dear Ducks, which is one of thirteen volumes about the fictional locale of Ballygullion in the Slievegullion region of County Down. Lynn Doyle, a banker in Dublin, wrote it. I think he and Harold must have been friends as they shared similar Anglo-Irish backgrounds and careers. The book is signed by Harold and dated 24 January 1934. His signature is tight and discrete. It’s careful and precise with small and neat letters.

  I wish I had known him, this man who loved books and played music. I’d like to ask him if he watched over Sheila all her life while she bided her time, waiting to join him. Perhaps I’m being fanciful.

  I turn the pages of Sheila’s old photograph albums, wanting to unearth another particle of information about Harold and his life. And I turn the pages of his books in the hope of catching a glimpse of his long ago youth.

  I wonder if he had a good voice. I spot a mark in the margin, or a dog-eared page and I wait for it to reveal something new to me. These remnants of another life leave me puzzling over them for a long time, until sometimes I catch a slipstream of intuition and ride it, letting my imagination run riot.

  24

  Boarding School

  It was my aunts who took me to Cork to have me fitted out in a brown gymslip for bo
arding school in Ardfoyle on the banks of the Lee. They paid for the blazer with the school crest on it too. They judged the effect, turning me around to study the cut of the uniform on my little twelve-year-old frame. They tightened the sash and fixed the pleats and I felt like an experiment as they lavished me with the best of everything, even treating me to tea in the Walter Raleigh Hotel in Youghal on our way home.

  I arrived home laden down with a great pile of parcels and bags. Of course my younger sisters were green with envy as I paraded around in my new uniform and gabardine coat. All belted up in the brown ensemble, I tightened the buckle, placed the school beret at a jaunty angle atop my head and swaggered around like Marlene Dietrich playing Mata Hari.

  As I counted the days until I’d be driven to my new school some sixty miles away, I sewed special name tags onto everything – a new pair of sheets, two new linen napkins, two new blankets, a Foxford rug and a little grey games skirt with a swish that I could easily see myself wearing when I went out with my first ever hockey stick onto the playing pitch. I’d be saying goodbye to the rough and tumble of camogie matches in the Gaeltacht. It would be a life of hockey games, sports mistresses and midnight feasts, just like in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers or St Clare’s. I started thinking about tuck boxes and I wondered if they’d have a sports’ hall, a belfry or a matron for when I was sent to the infirmary.

  My initials were carved into my own cutlery set and I got a heavy silver table-ring for my two new linen napkins. And Auntie Sheila gave me a great American suitcase with fading labels pasted on its sides, mementoes of her exotic honeymoon cruise to New York and other trips to Corfu and Rome. As I packed the case – with four new vests, eight pants, half a dozen brown knee-socks, the school tie, my new dressing gown, slippers and a toilet bag – I felt my own journey to faraway Cork and the boarding school was well on a par with such travels. My life would be spectacular, worth writing about in a novel, like the life of Jane Eyre, The Little Madeleine or Anne of Green Gables.