by Brian Dillon
“It was my legs the Blessed Virgin freed first … I could feel clear as anything the irons that bound them sliding over my skin, like broken chains. … Then the weight that was always stifling, here, in my left side, rose up my body. … But it went right past my throat, I had it in my mouth and I spat it out as hard as I could. … That was it, my illness was gone – flown away.”
Was this the sort of seizure my mother, her deepest hopes encouraged by the narratives bequeathed by previous visitors to this place, had imagined? By the time she went there, such vivid imagery (nineteenth-century cures are typically described in these physical terms: the miracle is often symbolically a sort of childbirth) was less common, and the distinction between the sick and the healthy had even begun to be elided in favour of a less dramatic emphasis on spiritual community. Still, that original hope, the possibility of a sudden cure, must have been alive beneath my mother’s devotion to the public ritual of pilgrimage. On her return, I recall, she sometimes spoke about her fellow pilgrims. I pictured them arrayed in wheelchairs, in beds, attended by spouses and nurses, awaiting their immersion in the waters. I always imagined Lourdes as a tiny village, like the village of my mother’s own childhood. I am quite certain that in the years during which my mother travelled to Lourdes, I never once saw a photograph of the town, or heard her describe the place itself, its landscape, the grotto itself or the basilica which I now know to have been the place of her hopeful worship. The Lourdes that loomed in my mind was a hamlet as crudely built as the story of its original apparitions suggested.
I had imagined Lourdes on an intimate scale, and the slides which lie before me now reveal, as I raise each one to the light, portions of that miniature landscape into which I had inserted my mother’s ailing body. For example, in a photograph captioned simply ‘Piscines’, two assistants are lowering an old man into the water. The space in which his immersion takes place is surprisingly austere: bordered by tiled walls to which are attached metal bannisters which the two attendants grip as they lower their charge into a central stone-lined pool. The scene has the look, to my unbelieving eye, of an interment, and the ritual seems quite unaltered from that depicted in an engraving I have seen from 1880, in which all that piety adds to the spectacle is a priest’s hand raised in blessing and an unlikely shaft of divine light descending from the ceiling to illuminate the face of the pilgrim (a face still sufficiently obscure that its expression might as easily denote bodily discomfort as spiritual ecstasy). For the most part, in these photographs, the pilgrims appear in crowds of stretchers and wheelchairs, their anonymous backs to the camera, ‘assisting’ (as the French has it) at several sorts of worship. They are blessed in harsh sunlight in front of the Parvis du Rosaire, and circle the brightly lit concelebrants in the Basilique St Pie X. One imagines them gazing up at the numerous statues depicted here: a towering Virgin, an ecstatic Bernadette, a monstrous Calvary. The place I had imagined as a meekly devout enclave is in fact a virtual metropolis, dedicated, in its open spaces and cavernous interiors, to a kind of miraculous industry. With its wide avenues, and its administrative machinery devoted to moving masses of people from one place of worship to another, Lourdes, in fact, looks remarkably of a piece with the secular modernity to which it was ostensibly opposed in the nineteenth century.
None of those panoramic views or busy interiors held as much fascination, however, as did a singularly detailed photograph which I found among them. It shows, according to its title, simply ‘Fontaines’. A regular stone wall is punctuated by a sparse row of brass plaques which on closer inspection reveal themselves as taps. From one of these, in this unaccountably alarming picture, a young woman is filling a small, Virgin-shaped bottle. On the wall on which she leans, four more of these receptacles balance in miniature repetition of the apparition itself. But what holds me in this image is the woman herself: photographed from behind, the slimmest expanse of her face is visible; her thick dark hair and pale blue cardigan are, according to a hallucinatory certainty which I know to be illusory but which grips me tighter the longer I look at this photo, those of my mother. To be precise, these details are exactly those of a photograph of my mother taken in the early 1960s.
She is photographed at the right-hand edge of a group of young women (they are perhaps the friends with whom she shared a flat before she married a few years later). As ever, she addresses the camera somewhat less directly, though more self-assuredly, than her companions. Like the woman in the slide, she wears a dark skirt and a pale blue top: both women have pushed their sleeves back to reveal a thin golden watch strap. The woman in the slide is not my mother and yet, as if for the first time, the congruence of dress, coiffure and jewellery situates my mother, the woman in this photograph I have looked at so many times, in another, unexpected place. The longer I compare these two images, the more I am convinced, despite myself, that they are exact contemporaries, that what I am seeing is the miraculous apparition of my mother at the shrine at Lourdes: a place I am sure she did not visit till at least a decade later. It is the strangest sort of anachronism: my mother, as a young woman, transported into her own future. For a moment I am convinced that on the sideboard behind my mother (my real mother) there must be some clue to this journey which I know she has not made. I have examined this photograph – and another taken minutes earlier or later – and although the background of this very ordinary 1960s interior is scattered with several mementoes, some of them clearly of a pious nature (a card depicting a Madonna and child, a calendar pinned to the wall which shows a robed figure who might be the Pope), I can find no trace of a visit to Lourdes. In sum, the coincidence affirms nothing, but persists in its curious attraction of the two disparate images into the same space: that of a memory I do not possess but have imagined countless times.
The shrine at Lourdes is there, however, in a photograph taken around the same time, in which my mother and one of her sisters (who looks ill at ease in her horn-rimmed glasses and new suit, as if she has just followed my mother to the city) appear alongside two older women whom I cannot identify. The room is old-fashioned, even slightly dingy: a dark smudge along the pale brownish wall connects the group at the centre of the picture to the edge of the frame. On a table behind and to the left of them, a small stack of what might be prayer books partially obscures a ‘Child of Prague’ identical to the plaster figure whose nocturnal migration I had once found so disturbing. But the detail I have never noticed until now, and which unexpectedly links this image of my mother to her later hopes of a miraculous intervention, is to be found on the wall, a few inches to the right of my mother’s head. Framed in pale wood (on which an illegible inscription encloses the whole image) is a representation of rolling countryside and rising masonry which can only be a view of the Lourdes basilica. The church is unmistakable, with its central spire and two smaller, flanking towers. It stands isolated at the centre of a crudely montaged landscape. The town itself has been excised completely. (In a photograph from the slide album, taken from the same vantage point, the photographer has done nothing to crop out of view the several tall buildings to the left, nor to pretend that the basilica itself is unconnected, by at least three radiating roads or pathways, to the further buildings in the foreground.) Above and to the right of the basilica, thickly outlined in white, are two abutting arches, one twice the height of its neighbour. Here, hovering high over Lourdes and its environs, are the kneeling figure of Bernadette herself and, towering above her, the famed apparition – a thin streak of blue and white – that has drawn pilgrims to this spot for a century and a half.
This is not the last link in the chain of images and objects which leads me back from my memory of my mother’s trips to Lourdes to the past significance of the town for my family. I had always imagined that Lourdes was a part only of my mother’s set of personal and religious emblems. It was tied to her illness, to the sense that her faith in its consoling iconography and her real hope of finding a cure there had been passed on in the course of her own family
’s history of pilgrimage and prayer. I had not expected to find that it meant anything to my father; in fact I would have said that he viewed such traditional aspects of Irish Catholicism with some scepticism. His religious faith always seemed more bound up with private contemplation than public and communal displays of belief or hope. I could not have predicted that I should one day, while going though the few papers of his that I still possess, come across a second poem of his: a text which suggests that at some point the shrine at Lourdes was as significant for him as for my mother. The three stanzas appear to have been typed with the same typewriter as the poem devoted to the sinking of the Red Bank in 1969. The same yellowing paper bears my father’s name at the bottom right-hand corner. The poem, which is, it turns out, also a prayer, is simply entitled ‘Our Lady of Lourdes’. As a poem, it is, if anything, even less stylistically ambitious than the other. I might instead have said that it is less accomplished, but I realize I have no way of knowing what effect my father was after here. The first stanza sets a tone so plainly and uninflectedly pious that I can scarcely imagine he had anything in mind beyond an unadorned expression of devotion to the shrine and its luminous visitor: ‘Bernadette Soubirous, / Handmaid of Mary. / Frail link with love divine / Seek balm for our healing. / Immaculate Conception / Be thou our Salvation.’ The lines are addressed first to Bernadette and then to Mary; the second and third stanzas deploy what I cannot help but read as a series of dismaying clichés: ‘still silence enfolds thee’; ‘firm faith upholds thee’; ‘Penance and prayer thy will, Our Highway to glory’. The thing is barely a poem at all, merely a rehearsal of devout convention. But it conjures for me now a level of belief I had not guessed at. I cannot conjecture that it means my father would also, as my mother set out for Lourdes, have hoped for the sort of intervention the place promised. There are no miracles in my father’s poem, and the ‘healing’ it imagines, I suspect, is more of the order of consolation than dramatic cure. But the poem connects him to my mother’s increasing desperation in ways I never suspected. For that reason, and although it risks no clear personal investment in the set of pious images it describes, it strikes me as more human, more subjective than his somewhat cold poetic response to the tragedy that took place in Galway Bay a few weeks after I was born.
¶ Seashore
Ballyheigue Beside the Sea is the title of a slim little book, thirty-two pages in extent, with which as a child I used to renew my acquaintance every summer. I remember that a copy of it sat on a window sill of my grandfather’s house, its jade-green cover faded by sunlight at the edges, but still vivid under the sturdier volumes from beneath which my brothers and I retrieved it each summer. Perhaps we were annually amazed to discover that the place that was so much a part of our own family holidays had a history deserving of record in a book. Copies of the book itself turned up, during the three weeks we spent each year near my mother’s birthplace in Kerry, all over the village: prominently displayed in the gloomy little post office, tucked beside the tills of several shops. We may even have owned a copy, though I have no recollection of actually seeing it at home in Dublin. It was part of the texture of our holiday, as unchanging as the coastline and the single street that led from the beach through the village to a shrine to the Virgin Mary at the top: a sort of provincial replica of Lourdes, complete with artificial grotto but quite lacking a history of apparitions. Instead, as the book records, it was said that two women, late for Mass at the church further out of the village, had once been amazed to discover that from this spot they could, miraculously, hear every word the priest intoned, two miles away.
The copy of this book that I have recently acquired, and that sits before me now, has a bright orange cover which informs me that it is the third edition; it is, however, undated, and I have no way of knowing how long after my last visit to Ballyheigue it might have been printed (I have disallowed the unlikely possibility that this well-preserved copy predates my own acquaintance with the place). Between the title and the name of the local author – Joseph Moriarty, whom I now recall as the village postmaster – a rather cursory line drawing depicts a family group on the seashore: a scene in which I used to discern at the extreme right the outline of the cliffs that ran west from the village, here declining sharply to the horizon I imagined denoted the place where my mother was born and grew up. Even now, if I gaze long enough at this roughly delineated coast-line, I can trace the long walk out of the village and along the cliff-top, then up the steep boreen to the farm which was once my grandfather’s and which belonged, in the time I knew it, to one of my mother’s two brothers (he died the summer before her). The name of that place – Ballylongane – appears on the first page of the book, along with the names of twenty-three other townlands that surround the village proper, and I realize that I have never before seen that name written or printed and could not, until now, have ventured to spell it (as a child, I couldn’t even pronounce it, so impenetrable was the tangle of vowels and guessed-at consonants that I heard and consequently avoided attempting to replicate). I realize too that I must never actually have read this book, such is the profusion of legend that attaches to a village I have for years only recalled as framing the events of one particular summer. Of this history, I had only the dimmest knowledge. If I try to map the significant points in the topography surrounding my childhood memories of the place, they fit unexpectedly the contours of Joseph Moriarty’s account. I recall certain details of which I was sure as a child but which turn out to have been only half comprehended. I have had it in my head for the best part of three decades that a fleeing ship of the Spanish Armada had been wrecked on the rocks just west of the village, its crew lured to the castle above, poisoned, and the ship’s treasures stolen. The real nautical adventure for which the village is known turns out to be both more historically significant and just as melodramatic.
On 21 April, Good Friday, 1916, at around half past two in the morning, Roger Casement and two companions left a German U-boat out in the bay. Their small boat capsized and they swam ashore. Later, from prison, Casement wrote to his sister:
When I landed in Ireland that morning, swamped and swimming ashore on an unknown strand I was happy for the first time for over a year. Although I knew that this fate waited on me, I was for one brief spell happy and smiling once more. I cannot tell you what I felt. The sandhills were full of skylarks, rising in the dawn, the first I had heard for years – the first sound I heard through the surf was their song as I waded in through the breakers, and they kept rising all the time up to the old rath at Currahane [sic] … and all round were primroses and wild violets and the singing of the sky-larks in the air, and I was back in Ireland again.
Casement had fetched up at Banna Strand, just south of the village of Ballyheigue itself. Shortly after midnight, one James Moriarty (what relation, if any, to the author of the book in front of me, I do not know) had been checking his rabbit traps when he saw the submarine’s signal lights, but had no idea what he was looking at. Other locals spied three men on the road by the shore in the early morning, the abandoned boat and a cache of arms buried in the sand. None of this appears in Joseph Moriarty’s brief history of his village; nor was the story ever recounted in my hearing during the weeks (amounting to a total of a year, I calculate) I spent in Ballyheigue, though it was still certainly within living memory, not least that of my grandfather. I do not even recall the erection of a statue of Casement in the summer of 1984. Perhaps the events that followed immediately on Casement’s coming ashore had buried the tale till all who might have something to lose by its telling were dead. Casement had quickly been arrested, and plans by the local volunteers to spring him from the barracks at Tralee, 12 miles from Ballyheigue, came to nothing; such a daring raid would doubtless have risked revealing the secret of the coming rising. In all, Casement spent thirty-one hours in Kerry; accounts of the event note that he came ashore at Banna Strand, but often elide the existence of the two villages whose occupants played a part in the drama: Ballyheigue
at one end of the beach, Ardfert a few miles away at the other.
In the time I knew it, Ballyheigue was first of all a thriving holiday destination, then a rapidly fading relic of domestic tourism in a period when foreign holidays became the norm for many. Postcards from the 1970s, picturing the resort as idyllically remote, show a beach and village that are barely inhabited; within a decade they would actually start to look like this again. In the usual lurid view, courtesy of the John Hinde Studio, a couple of tiny colourful figures interrupt the blazing whiteness of the empty seashore. The reality, by the time I dashed excitedly down the same slope to the water, was rather different: in the mid-seventies, the long beach would have been thickly dotted for several hundred yards with holidaymakers. We always walked to the far end of the throng to find a secluded spot a little way back from the beach, where, in among the sand dunes, you could still imagine that the strand (it was never a ‘beach’ to us) was a secret, as it had been when my mother must have walked it as a child. Here, one was shielded even from the noise of the seashore: a tumult that would hit you again, like a gust of warm air, as you reached the top of a high dune and contemplated (but not for too long, in case you should lose your nerve) a spectacular leap back down to the populous foreshore. By the early eighties, the crowds had begun to thin out, and from the summer my mother died, I have no recollection at all of the hordes that once made of Ballyheigue a place of magical ease and garish busyness. It seemed, that summer, already to have outlived its meaning as part of the landscape of my childhood.
