Beyond the Breakwater

by Catherine Foley

  That time, we left without unearthing any living link with Joe Martell or his family (due to a misunderstanding we had only trawled through one-third of the 1872 census, so we hadn’t even found his name) and yet we did feel as if we’d uncovered something. We both realised there was something odd about the place, the sun, the stone, the shade and the locals. In the old part of the town it struck us both very forcibly that there was something familiar about Corsica. In Le Vieux Port d’Ajaccio we walked the narrow streets and we knew what it reminded us of. The smells, the cool evenings, the shade-darkened corners, the sunlit concrete, even the faces of the people seemed to remind us of Passage, our childhood holiday idyll.

  Le Vieux Port d’Ajaccio was just like our mother’s village. It had the same sea-going vibe, the same breezy aspect, the same narrow, curved streets with their pockets of coolness and warmth. The yellow stones in the sunshine seemed white, reminiscent of the whitewashed houses in Passage.

  As we left, we were determined we’d return. It made us smile to think that our great-grandfather – the salty mariner who had run away to sea – had found a home away from home in Waterford. It seemed as if he had fulfilled his childhood dreams of going to sea and, rather than escaping, he had run towards his fate and made his home in Passage East.

  57

  Rome

  When RoseAnn and I visited Rome some years ago, we decided to visit our Aunt Máire’s grave. She’d been a teaching nun in Rome for many years, a member of the Sacred Heart of Mary Order. She had taught at the order’s school, Marymount. We wanted to pay our respects. We’d forego the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain until the second day of our visit and we’d search instead for the convent graveyard on the Via Nomentana.

  I remembered Auntie Máire as a soft-spoken woman with glasses and short grey hair. She was not without vanity as she would never allow her sister to claim that she was younger than her and she used to ask my mother to put a set in her hair with the electric rollers when she was home on her biannual holiday. She was usually dressed in various shades of navy or grey – always blouses, cardigans and sensible skirts – the days of the full habit and the wimple that she had worn in earlier decades were long gone at that stage.

  She had a steely quality about her too, a quiet steady look that I remember. It was the all-knowing look of someone who is used to teaching teenage girls. Generally, we kept out of her way for fear she might ask about our spiritual wellbeing or our religious intentions. But she used to bring us lovely presents – beach bags, sun hats and bracelets – all imbued with the summer colours of Roman stalls. She knew what we’d like. And yet, a sighting of Auntie Máire on the horizon could often occasion a mad dash out of view as we were convinced she might ask us if we’d ever considered the idea of entering the convent.

  Sr Alphonsus – or Sr Máire Foley as she was known in later years – had only been a teenager when she entered the convent. Born in 1913, she was barely sixteen when she left Ireland to join the Sacre Coeur Order in the United States. Family lore has it that she played the violin as the ship pulled away from the quay, her father, Dan Foley, waving her off. She was his third eldest. It was a life-changing step to take. She was not allowed home – even for her father’s funeral in 1937 – nor for many years after that.

  Her time in New York’s Tarrytown, where she made her First Profession of vows in 1933, was followed by a stint in California, then France and finally Italy, where she was based for many years, until her death in 1984 when she was seventy years of age. We knew she was a teacher and a principal at the order’s secondary school, where many famous people sent their children. And so we set out to find the convent and the little graveyard on Rome’s Via Nomentana.

  The streets were deserted as we headed off. It was a bank holiday in Italy that day and it was the middle of winter. We were delighted when we found that long, leafy boulevard. When we discovered a little stone church just off the boulevard we felt confident we were close, as there was a small cemetery behind it. We couldn’t be sure it was the correct place, of course, but with a high level of hope we walked between the slabs of stones, feeling like emissaries from old Erin’s Isle, bringing the family’s love to our exiled relative. The dry chill gave the tombs and the dusty railings, the crosses and little plinths an extra frisson of finality, but we were sure that if we could only identify her grave we’d be able to commune in some way with Auntie Máire’s soul.

  But there were no inscriptions that we could decipher. We could find no clues in the Italian wording or the Roman numerals on the little slabs. We didn’t know what else to do. Of course, we didn’t dare phone the convent on the Via Nomentana. After years of maintaining our distance from nuns, we had an inbuilt reluctance to engage with religious communities of any kind. So after an hour or two, we went back out through the little church onto the wide sloping thoroughfare of the Via Nomentana.

  The city was quiet in the twilight. There was a hush about the evening. It felt like a Sunday. Very few cars passed and we were tired after the time we’d spent wandering amongst the dead. We shivered, feeling the night was full of portent. We crossed the wide residential street and began the trek in the direction of the city centre.

  In the dimly lit gloom, we both looked back ruefully, sad that we hadn’t found Auntie Máire’s grave, and that’s when we saw her – the nun, as if floating above the hedge, her long wimple unmistakable, her silhouette lit within the domed awning of a fanlight. It seemed like an unnaturally large head.

  We gripped one another, terrified, and walked on quickly, not sure what we had seen. Was it a larger than life etching of a nun’s head in an alcove? Had it hovered there over the hedge? Had it followed us?

  As we passed, the ghostly vision seemed to disappear. All of a sudden it was gone out of view. It was as if she had been a figment of our imagination. (In hindsight I realise it was only a large etching of a nun’s wimpled head, framed and lit within the fanlight of a doorway.) But the momentary nature of her appearance spooked us and we started to run, as if for our lives. We ran until we were breathless. We ran the length of the Via Nomentana, terrified, and it would be many years before we returned.

  58

  The Diary of a Social Columnist

  In due course, after working as a reporter on education, property and news stories over a number of years in The Irish Times, I was asked to write the newspaper’s social column. It was 1999, just before the dawn of the new millennium. I was excited and pleased to be asked. It meant that I would be attending important events in the arts world, covering all aspects of the literary, theatrical, musical, artistic, orchestral and celebratory life of the city. It also meant that I’d have a picture by-line and that I’d have the opportunity to write descriptive and more detailed passages, or ‘colour’ as it’s known in journalistic circles.

  The column was an established element of the paper and was called ‘On the Town’. It comprised a full page each Saturday on the back page of the paper’s weekend supplement and entailed writing about eight separate stories, most of which were accompanied by colour photographs. In all, I was a social columnist with the paper for nine years in Dublin.

  In due course I learned that it meant attending a relentless stream of social and cultural events, which I had to record and describe. My main focus was to ensure that the stories I recorded were of interest and value to readers. My routine generally began each evening around 5 p.m. when I’d leave the offices of The Irish Times on D’Olier Street and head off into the evening, my pen and notebook in my pocket, my energy levels cranked up, my best walking shoes laced up tightly and a small haversack hanging off my back for ease of movement. (Although strappy stilettos were the order of the day for many of the fashionable women who attended the openings and launch parties that I was sent to cover, my fashion statement was that a strong pair of walking shoes would serve me better.) Even though I was invited to glitzy, glamorous parties, the country girl in me never let me forget that I’d be dashing between events o
n foot and that being well shod in a proper pair of flat shoes was a necessity.

  My beat was generally Dublin’s city centre, which stretched from the top of O’Connell Street across the Liffey to the top of Stephen’s Green. For a frantic three to four hours, I’d wind my way through the throngs of invited guests at particular parties and functions, gathering information as I went, never to be deflected from my sole objective – to gather enough detail and data to allow me write up my weekly column. I attended a couple of gala events over three and sometimes four nights a week. I’d file my copy on Thursday evening or after midnight on Friday morning. It would appear in the paper on Saturday.

  Of an evening I might dash up to Nassau Street to Waterstones for a book launch. I’d take notes during the speeches, jot down all the details, collect the names of those present and speak to the author, the publisher and the individual who had launched the book. I’d liaise with the photographer and then I’d be off, hightailing it up to the Olympia Theatre or perhaps the Project Theatre in Temple Bar for the opening of a new play. Here again I’d squeeze myself through the gathering, greet delighted and excited partygoers and, like a bee gathering honey, I’d buzz from person to person, collecting material.

  Usually my demeanour was of the pragmatic variety: I often reminded myself of a garda on his/her beat. I’d ask the name, occupation, rank and current plans of those guests I met. I had no time for, nor did I appreciate, any levity or false information. With my gimlet eye trained on the interviewee, my pen poised and my patience in check, I’d wait until he or she was fully composed before proceeding. Time was always of the essence and getting to a venue on time was always my top priority. So I was pleasant but efficient, moving all the time, jotting down notes as I went. Earnest and unblinking, I only bestowed a limited amount of air kisses on those I met! Not much alcohol – no matter how much champagne was being quaffed and offered – used to pass my lips while I was on duty, as I was a no-nonsense sort of diarist.

  This had all coincided with the Celtic Tiger years, when delicious canapés, glasses of Chablis and flutes of Veuve Clicquot, strobe lights, high-end fashion and fabulous events were the order of the day; where style, charm, brilliance and vivacity were de rigueur. Sometimes I’d ask myself if I was supposed to be enjoying myself while at these events, but then a puritanical streak would quickly reassert itself and I’d remind myself that I was working, that this was my job and not an opportunity to party until the small hours.

  Of course, at times I did enjoy myself; I made many new friends and I met famous and fabulous people – Angelina Jolie, John McGahern, John B. Keane, Yoko Ono, Pierce Brosnan, Louis Le Brocquy, Jonathan Miller, Edna O’Brien. I usually made my way to the most celebrated individuals in the room to ask a couple of questions. Sometimes it was a job that required a thick skin and a certain degree of brazenness.

  I was witness to the unveiling of amazing works of art – in theatre, literature, music, painting, dance and sculpture. I grew to appreciate the strength of artistic life in the city and beyond as I was sometimes sent to cover cultural events in places such as Kilkenny, Galway, Cork and even London. I knew my way around the galleries, theatres, bookshops, museums, halls, emporiums and happening venues of the city. I was on the town and a regular at events in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Gaiety, the National Concert Hall, the National Gallery, the Abbey, the Gate and the Hugh Lane Gallery.

  Some people go into a religious order to contemplate life and the meaning of human existence. Some prefer to live in Tibet for seven years. My nine-year vocation, however, involved me being a chronicler of the arts scene in the capital.

  At night, after whirling my way around the cultural hotspots of the city where creativity, artistic endeavour and dramatic outpourings were the order of the day, I’d return to my small house and sit in silence, wondering if it had all really happened.

  Return

  59

  The Missing Painting

  My mother used to sit at the kitchen table at home and paint away to her heart’s content. She’d lose herself in the work and forget about time. It was only when my father stuck his head in around 6 p.m., wondering about the tea, that she’d realise how late it was.

  She had always pottered with art – driftwood, shell pictures, rockeries in the garden, masks for Halloween, bespoke knitting designs and the like. She had always been making things and taking photographs, but it was only when we had all flown the coop that she had enough time to take up a paintbrush. It was then that her life as an artist took off in earnest. In each painting she seemed to capture something of herself, of her own youth growing up on the mouth of the Suir in Passage East – there is a certain timeless energy, a stillness and an innocence in every picture.

  Her paintings of boats, piers, moonscapes, gardens, landscapes, seagulls and cliffs hang all around our house in Ring – they are a tangible link to my mother and her individuality. They are not abstract but detailed and lyrical works. They are paintings that tell stories; like a poem by Walter de la Mare, they are full of expectation and stark wonder.

  And so it happened that one Sunday morning some years ago, when I was at home, I saw that my mother was all a-flutter when we told her that local painter, the great Mick Mulcahy, was on his way over to the house. Mick is an expressionist painter whose work hangs in homes and galleries around the world. Having heard something about Mama’s painting, he wanted to have a look at her work for himself. She welcomed him in and Mick set about inspecting the paintings. She smiled nervously as she waited for his verdict.

  ‘Magnificent,’ he declared, growing more effusive as he studied each successive painting. My mother beamed with delight.

  ‘Will you do a swap? Will you give me one of yours – in exchange for one of mine?’ he suggested. And my mother agreed, honoured to be recognised in such a fashion.

  ‘Pick whichever one you’d like,’ she told him. So Mick chose a painting that was hanging in our hall at the time, a medium-sized painting that I particularly liked – a raw visceral scene of a jagged rock with three seagulls swooping across it out towards a turquoise sea. Mick went away with it under his arm and my mother was pleased. They were friends from then on, both respectful of the other, each recognising a kindred spirit.

  Years passed and in time my mother had to stop painting as the debilitating illness that claimed her prevented her from holding the brush. But when she passed away in 2011 we had her paintings, each one more precious than the last.

  Yet I often wondered about the painting she had given to Mick Mulcahy. Like a special memory, I missed that particular one and felt its loss. After Mick moved away from the area, his former studio – a great shed at the side of the road – fell into ruin. I used to pass this hulk of a building with its corrugated iron roof and nettles growing out of its slabbed entrance and wonder if he’d taken my mother’s painting with him or if he’d forgotten it and left it there in the damp, thrown in the corner to rot from mildew. I never felt that I could ask him for the painting, as I had no claim on it, so I came to accept that the painting was lost forever – until recently, that is.

  I was at a funeral, sympathising with a neighbour over the death of his own mother when he mentioned it out of the blue.

  ‘You know I have a painting your mother did,’ he said. ‘She did a swap with Mick Mulcahy and he gave it to me to mind.’ He explained how he used to go into the shed where Mick worked. ‘The painting,’ he said, ‘it caught my eye the minute I went in and I asked Mick who had done it. Ena Foley, he told me. He said he had done a swap for it and that he had to give your mother one of his.’

  I smiled at the idea that the painting still existed. Páid, my neighbour, offered to give it back to me but I declined. On another day he called to insist again that we have it. In the end, we brought him in and showed him how many of our mother’s paintings we had hanging on the walls. We told him that it was enough to know he had it and that it was safe.

  He was happy then. The story ha
d come full circle. My mother’s painting is in his house still, there in the warmth, appreciated and on view. She’d have been delighted to know that. And to know that Mick, her fellow artist, had taken good care of it all along. I should have known he would.

  60

  Theatre Royal

  The great tenor, Frank Ryan, sang on the stage of the Theatre Royal on the Mall in Waterford city. Like Caruso, he was a naturally gifted singer who sprang from the land, untrained but brilliant and bursting with talent, just waiting to be unleashed on the world in the 1930s.

  He died in the early 1960s before he was captured on film, but in 2008, I – along with my sister RoseAnn and a film crew – set about recreating a moment from his career for a documentary we were making about him.

  We’d started making documentaries together when I was still working as a journalist in Dublin. However, in 2008 I applied for and was awarded a voluntary redundancy package which was on offer in The Irish Times. I wanted to write full-time, so in due course I moved home to Ring. RoseAnn, who wanted to continue making documentaries, also decided to return home. Soon we began to carve out a living as TV documentary-makers, making programmes for the Irish-language station TG4.

  Telling the story of Frank Ryan was one of our earliest programmes. He’d been a butcher, a farmer and an internationally successful tenor. How could TG4 resist the idea? We were duly commissioned to make a half-hour documentary about him.