Where Angels Fear to Tread

The weir lies a scant half-mile below the bridge where the road crosses into the village. Nobody swims there now, though when my father was a young man, many years ago, he and his friends spent their summers there, much as my friends and I spent the long hot summers of the mid-seventies in or beside the river from dawn to dusk. We were strong swimmers all, by the time we reached thirteen or fourteen. Many times over the years on my walks to the lock, I envied him the cool, green overhung pool just below the weir, where he told me they swam and dived. There is nothing like the caress of cool, dark river water on sun-scorched freckled skin. The silent relief of plunging under the smooth surface, then the kick and push back to break through again to the sunlit blue sky overhead. I never got to swim in that spot, which seemed to me the essence all riverside summers. Stilly greeny, an eternal homage to Kavanagh's words.

Nobody swims there, because in the still of a long, hot summer’s afternoon long ago, somebody died. He didn't drown at the weir, but in the shallow, safe stretch of canal that runs a short distance from the weir to the lock, full of lily-pads and dragon-flies on the days of high summer, with cool, oozy mud between the toes when you touch bottom. He died in a sluice just above the lock gates, a small opening where the overflow from the canal surges into the river below.

I quizzed my reluctant father repeatedly about it in my teens: for a strong swimmer, nothing terrifies or inflames the imagination more than the prospect of drowning, the horror of being stuck, thrashing, far below, the silent, unheard screams for help. The boy was a younger brother of a chap my father’s age, probably trying to impress with his daredevilry. His brother and another older boy went in to look for him when he failed to surface. I couldn't tell you if my father was there or not. Like many a wise swimmer, at a guess I would say he avoided swimming in spots where there was an obvious danger. One of the saddest things about drownings is that they always and inevitably seem to find the weaker, the less experienced. Good swimmers, you see, evaluate, assess, and ask questions before they venture in, out of healthy respect for water and its power. There may have been a dare; my father always seemed unaccountably angry about the whole thing, as if it should never have happened. Nobody swims through a sluice gate and lives to tell the tale.

They must have laid him out on the rough concrete of the sluice, cold from the river in the sun’s heat, ferried him back across the canal, and carried him up the endless half-mile to the bridge. In those days, the early days of the Second World War, there were few if any phones. Perhaps someone ran for the doctor, from the dispensary in the village, just over the bridge. It was to no avail.

Nobody swims at the weir, ever, though two generations have passed. We swam as children above the bridge, at a shallow spot where my father and his long-grown friends made steps for us out of concrete-filled sacks, where there was a life-ring and finally life-saving classes in the hot summers of my teens. Now that spot has fallen into disuse too, the river dredged for the convenience of visiting barges and cabin cruisers.

Nobody swims at the weir, except my friend Seamus, now in his seventies, perhaps too young to have first-hand memory of the tragedy. I try to make my annual swimmer’s pilgrimage to the Barrow, though I head upriver and swim down to the bridge. Of late I’ve grown too busy, and maybe too cautious. This summer, the river was in spate most of the time, too dangerous for any swimmer. When Seamus swims, it is in the slow deep, black river water on the upper side of the weir, once or twice a summer even now, under the watchful guardian eye of his wife. But never the canal.

On the threshold....

My boy started secondary school this week. It seems an eternity since he started primary, and at the same time, not long at all. Starting primary is tied into memories of my marriage breakdown, and the additional difficulty of trying to ease the change from preschool to school for a chap whose Dad had just left. Tough times to start; I learned to cut and run at the first sign of tears, with the reassurance that I knew he stopped as soon as I disappeared from view…sound advice for clingy mums. Sometimes they need you less than you need them. At five, he’d recently changed from an angelic (in looks only) pale blonde to the dirty blonde he still is. Every year brought change; different teachers, different issues.  He manfully dealt with an older bully by getting his besties together and telling the bully that they’d ALL deal with him if he didn’t lay off . The bully was in 6th class, my son and his friends in 4^th at the most. I heard nothing till it was all over, but had observed the silences and reluctance in the previous weeks. I’m still a little awe-struck at how they dealt with it. 

We’ve been through interminable quizzes, swimming galas, school tours, tonsillitis, S-Tens, and ripped trousers on a weekly basis, like mothers and sons up and down the country. And mud aplenty, because it rains a lot here, and little boys pay no heed.

And now he’s a young man, and the start of secondary marks that threshold for many boys like him. For me, it’s unbearably poignant. And no doubt the same for legions of Irish mammies, for that is what I have become. He passed me out height-wise just before his twelfth birthday. Admittedly I’m on the small side, but now he’s grown six inches in nine months. He’s 5’9”, his voice has broken to a deep bass, and he still takes teddies to bed. But not to school. He’s full of enthusiasm for his new school, and I’m bursting with happiness at his eyes-wide–open interest in all his new subjects. Who knew? His science teacher had him from day one. I can tell that there’s quiet awe of his music-teacher. He wants a school jersey so he can play on the school team. All of this brings a lump to my throat, and memories of my own teens in the late '70s spring to mind unbidden. It’s an eternity, and no time at all, since I took the same steps, since life was suddenly filled with the same boundless potential. So much has changed, but so much remains the same, for him, at this threshold. Since then I’ve travelled on, through college, emigration, return, professional recognition, marriage, children, bereavement, personal trauma. But life, for me, turns on moments like this.

Dancing Queen

Dancing Queen

Once upon a time when the world was young, or at least when it seemed so, but in reality circa 1977, I went on holiday to Rosslare Strand. To be more accurate. my parents brought my three younger siblings and me on our annual two-week holiday. We had only come lately to the idea of such an extended vacation. Four children under twelve for two weeks in cramped surroundings does not a holiday make. 1977 was one of the golden summers, surpassed only by 1976 in its length and splendour. We had a tiny six-berth caravan, bought the year before by my put-upon father instead of the roomier and newer model I had approved. My father paid a lot of attention to me, for a young lady of my tender years. It accounts for much of what has transpired over the course of my adult life. To cut a long story short, it was bought for a knockdown sum, though to my analytical eye, the alternative was better return for money. It was lovingly restored to use: mildew scrubbed off, repainted in and out, giving it an oddly matt appearance. He remade the damaged bits of the internal shelving, while my mother made new curtains to replace the faded and frayed originals. To be honest, given her lifelong proclivity for lame ducks, the whole thing was probably her idea. He did say, at a much later juncture, that she always got her own way.

To describe it as a six-berth was a kindness: it was, if four of the six were persons of small stature and/or all good friends. It was a barely feasible proposition by the summer after we’d bought it, due to my burgeoning adolescence and reluctance to share personal space with two pre-pubertal brothers and a youngest sister. Things were bad enough the previous year when they discovered that I’d been issued, at twelve, with my first bra. It was from Dunne’s Stores in Enniscorthy, purchased en route, white with lace, 32A, a veritable miracle. I had to petition my largely oblivious mother for it. In her defence, we’re not much given to cleavage in my family; it took me, following in my mother’s footsteps, till the grand old age of forty, and two babies, to develop anything one could justifiably describe as such. I remember her saying precisely that to me in later years, about herself, when we had become friends, as well as mother and daughter. I was a teenage sylph, brimming with raging hormones but without much by way of external display. That summer, I was, and remain, just shy of five feet three inches. Whereas now I have what my precocious schoolfriend Susan, would have described as “a wobble and a wiggle” which I rejoice in occasionally deploying to maximum effect, (for which you must forgive me; it arrived late, and the sand in the glass is running low), I was gamine, and if my hair was cropped, occasionally mistaken for a boy. To your average pubescent lady-in-waiting, there is no greater insult. My hair that year was chin-length, having learnt my lesson the hard way the previous summer.  In the couple of remaining photographs, I am gloriously grown-up, ahead of my peers, with a bubble of confidence that nobody had taken care to burst for the time being. I’m posed against a sea-worn concrete bulwark with my brothers, light-years ahead of them, resplendent in bikini-top and shorts, sewn by my industrious mother, arms carefully-folded immediately under, and propping up, my incipient bosom. There is another photograph of me taken that Autumn by my late and mutually-adoring father, no doubt marvelling at his having produced a woman-child in such short order.

That summer, I struck up a friendship with a boy who hailed, I think, from Enniscorthy. His name was Donal, but I couldn't be sure, so many years later. He was small, that is, about my height, with almost-black hair and freckles. My tastes regarding dark-haired men have never really changed. The recollection of that makes me smile. Just how early do we form preferences? He could handle a kayak well, was funny and clever. I suffered boys, as confirmed fools, badly: I was always tops in every subject, and not easily impressed. But he never tried to show off; he just did his thing, and talked sense. I had a rotten craft, a fibreglass kayak my father had actually made, after he and a bunch of his friends got together and bought moulds and materials. It had knife-sharp edges that sliced your shins open, and overturned if you looked sideways at it. Donal had a proper boat, and very likely a proper caravan too, or even a mobile home. Our canoe caused my father, who was a gentleman in any sense that matters, to swear vocally and expressively every time he fell out, which was more or less every time a slight swell passed beneath the boat, He’d built it for himself, as he never failed to remind us, but his six-foot height was too much for it, and though still reasonably athletic and a water-lover, he spent more time out of it than in. And we spent more time in it than he, to his intense annoyance.

Our collective parents, previously strangers, observed in amusement; the mutual attraction did not pass unnoticed. Two weeks passed quickly. The sun shone. We went to see Jaws in the local scout hut. I had charge of my younger brothers, while my long-suffering parents escaped to the cabaret across the road. The last night, there was a barbeque on the beach. Finally, a chance to be alone, without prying parental eyes, and the chance of…what? Never been kissed, and nowhere near sixteen. I hardly remember what I wore, selected from the extensive wardrobe I had packed over three days, to cover all eventualities, few of them ever likely to materialise. I do remember somebody playing Dancing Queen, and I was her, though nowhere near seventeen (ah! those were the days). See that girl, young and sweet. The barbeque started at eight, and I was there bang on time. I avoided, with circumspection, anything connected with seafood, having not yet developed a taste. The sun went down fast, it being mid-August by then, as the engineering works my dad managed took builder’s holidays. The sand was icy-cold to bare feet, and I regretted my decision to wear shorts. It meant that, to keep hypothermia at bay, I eventually had to don my horrid, navy, fake-fur-trimmed parka, and hide my blue sun-top, my pride and joy, which displayed, to minimal effect, what little there was. Whatever happened to sun-tops? Did they defer inevitably to toplessness? After an hour, a burger, and a minor dispute about my entitlement to attend, as non-residents of the caravan-park (long story), in desperation I plucked up the courage to enquire as to his whereabouts. It took me some time, in the dark away from the immediate vicinity of the bonfire, to find another, nameless child I recognised. I’ve never been one for names. I summoned all my courage - never forget how hard it is for teenager to actually get something OUT- and asked, excruciated “Where’s Donal?”. “Donal who?” the reply came back. My heart sank. My last hope. “Donal from Enniscorthy, the guy with the red kayak”. “Oh yeah”. Hope leapt, flamed bright, brighter than the bonfire. “He went home earlier today”. Straws to cling on: “You sure?” “Yeah, saw him earlier, but he’s off”.

I don't know where I was that afternoon, but evidently not on the beach. We never got to say goodbye, or exchange addresses. I would have been perfectly capable of penning faithful and yearning teenage missives on a regular basis, and for all I know, so would he, but it was not to be. Wherever you are, Donal, and whatever you became, thanks for the memories.