The Canal Bridge: A Novel of Ireland, Love, and the First World War

by Tom Phelan

  Come to my side, come to my side

  where the sun is shining,

  where there is no rain and there is no frost.

  Come to my side, come to my side

  where the yellow cowslips are speckled red,

  where the small daisies dance in the breezy grass.

  The song was made up by two boys and a girl who lived fornent each other across the Canal, and the boys were born on the same day.

  When you stand on the coping stones at the Harbour, you would think a giant had made the Canal by laying down his hazel fishing rod and pressing it into the ground. The Canal as far as the Bridge is a straight line of water lying one foot below the level of the smooth green fields. In the summer there’s a necklace of flowers along the banks. Some days, when there is no wind, the water is a mirror. Then the Bridge is reflected in the water, and it becomes a stone circle with the Canal flowing through it. And the necklace is reflected too, and it all looks lovely.

  I love the Bridge with its smooth stones along the top of the wall, shaped like pan loaves, only much bigger. They are a lovely colour, nearly silver. Our Bridge is the same as all the other bridges on the Canal. There is a narrow ledge sticking out all around the wall on the side over the water. The ledge is about three inches wide and four feet from the top of the wall. Boys lower themselves down onto the ledge, and they hold on to the top of the wall with their hands while they edge their way all around the Bridge up in the air. One girl does that too. If they fell, they would fall into the water or onto the Towpath and get killed. Swallows build their nests in holes between the stones. Sometimes they fly out and frighten the ledge-walkers.

  There is a secret loose stone in the wall around the corner from the coping stones in the Towpath. Some children keep a bar of Lifeguard soap hidden behind the stone, and on Saturday nights in the summer they take off all their clothes and wash themselves under the Bridge in the dark so an inspector won’t catch them.

  I love the Grand Canal at Ballyrannel. I can swim in it. Boys and girls can fish in it. I can walk beside the boats floating by on their way from Dublin and listen to the funny way the boatmen talk. They say, “Hello Missy,” and make me laugh when they say I am as pretty as the flowers near the Towpath. I can get meadowsweet and valerian for the May altar from the Canal track. I can walk with my brothers for six miles along the bank and never have to climb over a fence. I can listen to the Canal Song all during the year. The song can be heard for miles when there is frost, and it sounds even nicer than Sheila Feeney singing Tantum Ergo during Benediction when the church is only half full, and Sheila Feeney won the silver medal for best singer a whole lot of times at the Feis.

  Missus Hatchel

  You know how it happens sometimes—you’re awake in the dark in the bed in the middle of the night on the flat of your back and you don’t know if you’ve been awake for hours or if you just came to the surface.

  One night I was staring into the pitch black, and my brain telling me our Kitty and Matthias were in love, that they had been swapping calf-glances, and even though I’d been seeing the behaviour, I hadn’t recognized it for what it was. I knew I could be excused for not noticing, what with Matthias living with us for so long, a brother to the other two, but talk about thick!

  Of course, the next day it was a glaring fact that they were behaving like sick cats when they were near each other. I had to make sure our Kitty would be all right. Here she was, a child one day and the next you’re having to worry about a young lad getting at her. God, she was a lovely-looking girl with a smart brain. But I ask you, what girl or what young lad, no matter how smart they are in the head, has much sense when it comes to the other end of the body? At that age the urges can be strong enough to make youngsters do things without a thought for the consequences. We all went through that, the girls even worse than the boys, just the same as any other animal lepping all over the place and not knowing what’s the matter with it. God help us, but it’s terrible having to think of ourselves as animals, with all of an animal’s urgings and functions. I hate to think about how much we have in common with a goat.

  “I can’t keep my hand over it all her life,” is what James said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that what you want me to do? Keep my hand over her bird to make sure Matthias doesn’t do a bit of plucking?” The way James talked at times!

  “Well, you could talk to Matthias without saying all that to him,” I said.

  “Couldn’t you talk to Kitty? And what am I supposed to say to Matthias? ‘If you do it to Kitty, I’ll cut them off you with a beet knife and hang them out to dry on the clothes-line’?”

  James was very funny sometimes when he was being unreasonable, and he’d go on with this quare twaddle of his—tell you what he was going to say to someone, and he knowing and I knowing he’d never talk to anyone that way. Imagine him saying that—I’ll hang them on the clothes-line to dry, just like the pig’s bladder the children hung in the chimney, blew it up to make a ball—the stink of it, just like old pig-water.

  “Your father didn’t keep his hand over yours when I started coming around,” James said, and he laughed as he went out through the kitchen door.

  “And he didn’t tell you he’d cut your things off you and hang them out to dry either.”

  “Begob, he didn’t,” James shouted back from the middle of the yard. “He told me he’d give me a cow and a calf if I married you right away and got you out from under his feet.”

  I jumped up and ran to the kitchen door. “My father never said any such thing to you,” I called, but I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

  “When I told him we’d have to wait a year on account of Uncle Jer not dying when he was supposed to, your father offered me four cows.”

  “He did not.”

  “He did too,” James called as he disappeared around the corner of the cow house. I was never sure when James was codding me. He stepped back out from behind the cow house and said, “He told me to keep my hand over your bird and not let you push it away, because he’d noticed you lepping all over the place like a goat not knowing what was wrong with it.”

  “James!” I shouted. He went off laughing. I went in to give myself a wash and put on clean knickers, because after talk like that I knew we’d be doing it that night.

  Kitty was only seventeen, a child, and Matthias only a year older. If I’d been a man, I’d have told Matthias to be good to Kitty. That’s all James had to say to him. Matthias would have known what he was talking about. I couldn’t talk to our Kitty about anything like that beyond telling her to be a good girl. I hadn’t the words to say what I knew I should say, and I was too embarrassed to use the few words I knew.

  Con and Kitty and Matthias had blathered to each other across the Canal when they were still too young to talk. But once the words came, they got a sort of chant going between them, half singing and half talking, one repeating what the other said at first, and their little voices sailing along the top of the still water up to the Harbour and down under the Bridge past the Dakeydocks, the other children along the Canal hearing the chant and picking it up. There’s times, still, when I go into the town for the messages on a Friday, and I hear the children singing across the street to each other what our Con and Kitty and Matthias sang across the Canal. My side, my side. The fish bite better on my side, my side. Come to my side, my side. The roach are redder, the perch are bigger, on my side.

  Forever, it seems, they fished against each other on opposite banks, Kitty as good as the lads. When they weren’t fishing, they were skipping flat stones on the water. They were always looking for the perfect stone. When they found it, they could skip it right into each other’s hands as they walked along their own bank, the three of them, Kitty as good as Con and Matthias. I would see them jumping into the air and tumbling onto the grass to catch the skipped stone before it touched the ground. It was like magic, what they could do. Then, of course, the stone
would get thrown wrong and sink, and the search would be on again.

  The three of them took care of the waterhens’ nests and the swans’, kept the town lads from cutting the heads off the young swallows down at the Bridge. Something happens to young lads when they get into a herd; it’s like they all lose whatever bit of sense they have and do stupid things. Cut the heads off baby swallows! Kitty used to go mad when she’d catch them, take on the toughest of the tough, and even if she lost the fight, she always won in the end because no one could make her keep her mouth shut.

  Con and Matthias walked hand in hand when they went to school that first day. Kitty was left at home not knowing what to do with herself, spent the entire long day sitting up on the Bridge waiting for them to appear at the Windlass. When she saw them, she took off like a greyhound and never heard the shouts coming out of James and myself telling her to come back.

  I think Con and Matthias became the best of friends because neither of them had a brother. After the fire, when we took Matthias home with us out of the Workhouse, the two of them couldn’t be separated. Kitty was in the middle all the time, and there was no getting rid of her even if they’d wanted to. I don’t know where she came from—not my side, for sure; maybe James had a highwayman hiding in the leaves of his family tree. On Sundays, when they got older, they were fishing all the time, or riding their bikes to football matches, or pedalling all over the country to look at castles and mountains. No place was too far for them. Con would look at a map all week and then off they’d go to Croghan Hill or Dunamase or the Windy Gap off the far side of Stradbally, even going as far as Clonmacnoise once and not getting back till eleven at night, and James and myself worried to death they’d fallen into a canal and drowned. Matthias always came home with a half-drawn picture of what they’d seen, and he’d finish it off during the week at the kitchen table, the others looking in over his shoulders telling him what he’d left out.

  “You’ve a great talent for missing what’s at the tip of your nose,” is what James says to me when I fall over the dog while I’m carrying a bucket of milk or step in a cow dung on my way to Mass on Sundays. I don’t know how long Matthias and Kitty were carrying on under my nose before I noticed them.

  Even though I was brokenhearted at the time, I was relieved, too, when the lads joined the army; the distance might let the blood flow back into their brains. It was easy to see what was going to happen next, Kitty long-legged and as giddy as a March hare, Matthias young and healthy. The bushes at the Canal, between the Bridge and the Dakeydocks, would have been too much for them.

  I don’t know whose idea it was to go in the first place—Con’s, I would think, because he was always reading about faraway places in Mister Hodgkins’s books. And maybe Lionel Hodgkins got them worked up about seeing the world while they were still young. Young fellows are more apt to do things when they have company, like bunches of young dogs rambling the countryside killing sheep. Kitty waited at the Bridge for them for years. And I can still see her tacking Matt’s drawings all over the house, reading Con’s letters over and over, making a book out of the sheets of newspaper that told about Matthias’s escapades.

  Con and Matthias. I can still see them walking along the Canal bank that day, heading for Marbra to join up, wearing their caps to the Tipperary side, the two of them off to see the world. The night of the day they went away, Kitty never came home, and James found her at two in the morning on the Bridge wall, lying flat out on her back looking up at the moon sailing through the clouds like a ship.

  Ralphie Blake

  Con and Matthias left for the army on a Thursday, the day before the first Friday of August 1913, exactly one month after my mother was buried. Died roaring, as they say; may she rest in peace.

  I was scooping a shovelful of dirt up into the ass’s cart when I saw the two lads down at the far end of Blessed Oliver Plunkett Street, or “Bops” as we all called it when Father Kinsella wasn’t around. Everyone in Ballyrannel knew Matt and Con were going to Marbra on the train that day to sign up. That’s how I knew it was them, even though I couldn’t make them out—Matt tall and long-armed with a head of black hair above a well-put-together face; Con, about three inches shorter, was blond and within a hair’s breadth of being too good-looking for a man.

  While I leaned on the handle of my shovel I could see there was something different about them: their feet weren’t touching the ground, and the piece of Bops they were in was brighter than the rest of the street, like someone was keeping the beam of a carbide lamp on them all the time. The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, not the whisper of a cloud in sight, a grand August day.

  The two of them were laughing and waving and shouting back to the older women hanging on the half-doors of their kitchens. Most of the women were black-dressed grannies with few or no teeth, wrinkled faces, and grey buns on top of their heads. They had known Con and Matt since the first day they trotted along Bops on their way to school, their cloth schoolbags dancing on their backs. The hanging women had been greeting the young men six days a week for the last seven years as they walked to and from their work at Enderly.

  As they came closer to my ass and cart, I saw they were dressed in their new suits and caps. Of course everyone in Ballyrannel knew that Missus Hodgkins had paid Miss Bowe the Seamstress to make the lads’ clothes. And now little children ran from the houses, pushed out by their grannies, to trot along with the lads for a few steps and push their faces into the new material of the trousers to get the smell.

  Matthias and Con—the adventurers, as we all thought of them—each had a homemade carrying-case made from two stick handles sewn into the top of a cloth bag. As they got closer, I heard Missus Cunningham shouting over her fat arms and huge diddies, “What do you have in the bags, lads? Your bit of dinner or what?” And Con shouted, “Extra pair of socks, Missus Cunningham.” And Missus Cunningham cried back, “You must have ferocious feet, Con,” and everyone who heard them laughed with them.

  Along the middle of Bops they came on up into the town like Jesus going into Jerusalem with the people throwing palm leaves on the road to soften the step of his donkey, only it was the women of Ballyrannel who were laying down their gentle banter for the passing of the lads. All the women liked Matt and Con and their sister, Kitty—the Hatchel triplets—and wished they were theirs. The triplets had been happy and talkative since they were young, with a certain air of innocence, as if the freshness of the countryside was always about them. Not one of them was ever cruel to animals or to other children like most youngsters are at one time or another; they had never drowned a frog or cut the heads off baby birds or robbed nests or kicked an ants’ nest to bits or played football with a hedgehog. The worst thing they had ever done was put live worms onto fish hooks and thrown stones at the delph cups on the Canal’s telephone poles. Of course, no one in the town would ever forget about Matt’s family getting burned to death, and there was still a great sadness for him even after all the years.

  “You’ll be the best-looking soldiers in the entire English army, lads; God bless you,” Missus Carroll called, her well-used diddies falling down and nearly hiding her arms.

  “Goodbye, Missus,” Matthias called back, “and God bless you and the children too.”

  Because of the height of the half-doors and the way the women leaned on them, every woman had fat arms and huge diddies. Missus Furlong had the biggest ones in the entire length of Bops. Her diddies came up so high, she could have used either one as a pillow, and she often did too, snoring away when she dropped off for a minute on the door until her knees gave way. When Con and Matt were passing her house, she called out, “Where’s Kitty, lads? I thought she’d go as far as Marbra at least.”

  “We left her at the Bridge, Missus Furlong. She’s too upset,” Con told her.

  “Kitty’s going to miss you, lads,” Missus Furlong called back.

  That bit of back and forth knocked some of the wind out of the lads’ sails, and for a few steps the smiles fa
ded and the banter quietened down.

  My job as the road brusher—brusher mostly of horse and donkey and pony dung and Woodbine boxes and butts—meant that I knew most of the things that happened in Ballyrannel. I didn’t want to know what people told me without even stopping as they walked by because I didn’t know what I was supposed to say back to them. “Drunk again last night,” a woman would say, meaning her husband. “Look what he did to me,” a woman told me one time, and she pulling up her sleeve to show me four purple finger marks. I didn’t want to get on anyone’s bad side so I just made sounds with no words that I thought they wanted to hear.

  The men were as bad as the women. “God, she was a rip last night, eating the face off me for not finding work, and I out beating the bushes all day.” Some of them would even ask me for advice, and I not knowing me arse from me elbow. “I’m thinking of joining the army, Ralph. It’s the only way to get a job. What do you think?” “Do you think we’d make it in England, myself and the wife, Ralphie?” There were so many men with no work that I sometimes felt bad about having a job, and I in full sight of every jobless man in the town.

  Some people in Ballyrannel thought Con and Matthias were daft for joining the army. “They have work for the rest of their lives up in Enderly.” But everyone in Ballyrannel knew why Con and Matt were signing up—they were off to see the world. I wished I had the balls it takes. One very holy man who went to Mass every day said, “They wouldn’t be joining only for that young Hodgkins fellow. They got too close to that Protestant, fishing and hunting with him like he was one of us.” And then there were the men who wanted to be Fenians, and a few women too: “They’re traitors to their own country, them lads. The English army is the army of our enemy.”

  After passing another few houses, Con and Matthias got the jaunt back into their steps.