On Blueberry Hill

by Sebastian Barry

  SEBASTIAN BARRY

  On Blueberry Hill

  Contents

  Title Page

  Premiere Production

  Characters

  Note on the Text

  On Blueberry Hill

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  On Blueberry Hill was first produced by Fishamble at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, on 27 September 2017. The cast was as follows:

  Christy Niall Buggy

  PJ David Ganly

  Directed by Jim Culleton

  Set and Costume Design by Sabine Dargent

  Lighting Design by Mark Galione

  Sound Design by Denis Clohessy

  Produce Eva Scanlan

  Characters

  PJ

  Christy

  ON BLUEBERRY HILL

  This play went to press while the production was still in rehearsal, so will not reflect any late changes to the script

  A prison cell, narrow and old. There’s a bunk bed. It’s pretty bare otherwise. There’s a radio, with yellowed Sellotape keeping it together. There’s an old black Bible on one of the bunk beds. The wall above the other has a few cut-outs of page-three girls. Ronan Collins is talking on the radio about Fats Domino’s birthday.

  The occupants of the cell are a grey-haired man, in his late fifties, somewhat fat, Dublin middle-class accent, PJ, and a slighter man, maybe ten years older, Christy, working-class accent, balding.

  Direct address to us, but also, somewhat aware of each other.

  PJ

  Ann so tosach do bhí an briathar.

  There I am – I can almost see myself – a young fella at Maynooth, walking along the cinder path, under the host of beech trees. With my Gaelic Bible, the wind snatching at the flimsy paper. The paper like the stuff they used to wrap a loaf in, in a country shop. The yellowness of it. There was something in the paper that meant it was always yellow but I couldn’t tell you what. There must have been a factory somewhere, God knows where, in the midlands maybe, making that paper.

  Walking there, the picture of goodness.

  Then, much much earlier, in the sixties, I remember coming in from school and my mother was crying in the kitchen with the newspaper and I asked her what was the matter, and she said Kennedy had been killed, and I burst into tears. But I had no idea who Kennedy was, he could have been the local grocer. It was her own tears that slayed me.

  I suppose the murderous bits of the sixties never really reached us, we were too far away from everything. Nevertheless, the sixties – like the whole world stuck its finger in an electric plug. In those days you could do a thing like that. You could stick your finger straight in. Parents lived in fear of things like that. But not too much else. Safety. In my childhood we still roamed about, we still climbed trees. We more or less nested in them. You could climb to the top of a great oak and build a house in it and no one would say boo to you. That sort of thing was encouraged.

  There was no safety in plugs and the like of that, but there was another sort of safety.

  You never heard of a child falling out of a tree. You never saw anything like that.

  Everyone went to Mass, everyone believed in God.

  My mother was put to the pin of her collar when Daddy died, we had only his civil service pension then, we had no extra funds, we had no motor car, but what was that to us, we never went too far.

  And when we did, on holidays in Mayo as may be, she always had the lend of a pony and trap from her Uncle Thaddy.

  With the great lamp out in front, in the darkness, lighting our way along the metalled roads.

  And the green roads still, here and there. I remember my mother, well I do remember it, in her thin summer dress, battling along on the trap, the reins lofted high, with the pony a wretch, a wretch at every turn. My mother’s bare arms as blonde as hurleys. Her shouting at Billie the pony, ‘Pull up, pull up, the boy!’ But yahooing herself, you know, on the leafy, dark back-roads, where no one could hear her, excepting myself, aged nine – two stumpy legs like ninepins, me hollering also inside the storm of her own shouting.

  And to ‘Maison Prost’ for the ‘French schoolboy’ haircut. She would run her hand through the surviving eighth of an inch of hair. Embarrassing me, greatly. ‘Oh, just like a French schoolboy.’ Now, Mr Prost’s family had been in Ireland for a hundred years. He’d probably never set foot in his native country. And she had certainly never been to France to be observing the haircuts of schoolboys. But the name alone inspired her.

  Maison Prost.

  That sort of thing gave her joy.

  Half the pleasure of life is not thinking about it too much.

  In those days, the old certainties remained. We hated the English. I mean, at my secondary school, soccer was banned. Association football. Because, they ‘associated’ it with England, the priests did. We played soccer in the yard of course – like maniacs. But for proper matches, it was all rugby.

  Rugby, that well-known game of Celtic origin.

  We hated the English but that didn’t mean we loved ourselves.

  We spoke English, but we were learning the Irish – eventually, you know, to get it back. Government jobs, you had to have the Irish. Postmen, you know. Teachers. People like that. Actors. Prison guards.

  Focail is the Irish for ‘word’. We used to love saying that in class. Briathar is another word for ‘word’, but there’s no fun to be had in that.

  Ann so tosach do bhí an briathar.

  Christy

  We were crowded at the window, seven faces, my sisters and brothers and the ma herself, looking out, at Da, fighting at the gate with that daft cousin of his, Con Daly, and the two of them wrestling for a long while, in the summer mud of the road, then the bodies banging about against the concrete wall of the garden, very awkward-looking and painful to my seven-year-old eyes, and the neighbours looking out their windows the other side of the road, and I saw a man standing in one of the gardens, then withdrawing himself into the house, as if he was afraid somehow, and then, at the end of all, with a last great effort, my da heaving his arm up as if it was a great weight by then, to stop the blow of Daly’s knife coming down on his chest, but he miscalculated, or hadn’t the energy to deflect it, and it went in, deep, into Da’s breast, it might have touched his heart, we in the window gasped out, and Ma screamed, put her hands over her face, Jesus, I remember that for some reason, and then the guards came running down the road, I suppose they had come hot-foot up from Monkstown. It was a feud fight, my father was beholden to answer the challenge from Con Daly, he had no choice in a matter like that, my da was a tinker, the most famous tinker in that time, because he was as big as a dray, and Con Daly his match, and they fought it out, like it was a cowboy at the Adelphi, for fuck’s sake, and the upshot of it was, my da was killed. He was twenty-six.

  I’d far sooner forget that, except, in another way, I hold on to it because it’s the last time I saw my da.

  So then it was just the ma grappling for the bit of money to feed and clothe us and that wasn’t easy, it must have been queer hard for her betimes, I would say, and as each of us reached fourteen, we would just leave the school and go get whatever jobs we could, anything. Me, I got a job caddying up at the posh golf course which was actually not too far from where we lived, just the top of the road there as it heads for the wilds of Dalkey. It was a grand little job really, and the tips were often surprising – I mean, shocking even. I came home once with a ten-shilling note, one of those red jobs, an English one, because in them days you could use both, it was given me by this old chap was in the films that time, it was like nineteen sixty or something, so I was fifteen roundabout, he shot
this wonderful round of golf, so he did, in the wide blaze of a summer’s day, I don’t think I ever saw a man so happy till that moment, really happy he was, gazing at the score card, gazing at the big heap of sun lying all over Dunleary below, and him laughing, with his little leprechaun laugh, and hadn’t he played a leprechaun or something, in Darby McGill was it, or the friend of a fucking leprechaun, ah, yes, he was a lovely man, Barry Fitzgerald was his name, he’s probably forgotten now. But I remember him. When the ma saw the ten-bob note she went white in the face, she thought I had nicked it out of the dairy, because they still kept cows there, and had a fucking meadow, and it was well known that they kept the money in an ould decorative churn, because your man Dempsey what owned it didn’t trust banks, but I hadn’t, no, it was your man the leprechaun gave it to me, though I’d have robbed the Hibernian Bank for her, if she’d have needed me to, I’d have robbed Fort Knox.

  So inspired by this success in my career, I took the old mailboat to England. Everyone got so drunk on that journey the floor of the boat was a sea of black porter, puked up by the drinkers, and I don’t know how, but still black, you know, and down in the hold of the ship were these huge state rooms, with low roofs, and what looked to my young eyes like a hundred bunks in each, three tiers of them like in a fucking concentration camp, and all these ould builders in them, sleeping, dozing, drunk as monks, with the boots on the floor and the big socks still on their feet, stuck like, showing the holes, because a lot of these lads had no women to be darning holes, and anyhow, you’d have needed a long cleft stick to touch those items, such was the almighty dirt of them, hundreds of mouldy thick grey socks, builders’ socks you might say, and when you stepped in the cabin, by Jesus, the stink, the almighty stink would fell a bullock. And that’s how they looked on us, you know, really, the poor English, the shock we gave them, the mailboat was called the cattle boat as everyone knows, and we were the cattle. I don’t remember one girl in all that cargo, but there must have been girls, going working in England, heifers I suppose we must say, hidden away in the ship somewhere. I just remember the big men.

  But when you went working on the buildings you discovered that these men, many of them, were geniuses, they could do very skilled work, amazing really, proper plastering now, that’s very tricky, you should try it sometime, you’ll soon find out the hardship of it, and real brickwork, laying beautiful courses, decorative work oftentimes in London, oh, yes, geniuses, and I watched them closely and learned everything I eventually knew off of them, which was very handy. And the big thing on a building site is, if they ask you can you do something, you always say yes, or I always did, and one time it was ‘Can you drive a dozer?’ and I said yes, sure I had the bit of practice on a pal’s motorcycle in Ireland, and then another time, when I had mastered the dozer, and I did fucking master it, it was, ‘Can you drive a crane?’ and of course I said yes, and climbed up this skinny metal ladder, up a hundred feet, with my legs trembling, into this little cabin, swaying in the wind, and Jesus, I soon worked out the handles and gears, through my tears, fucking scared to death I was, but sure it’s just common sense, trial and error, if you use the noggin you can do it. Driving a crane is good money because it’s so fucking dangerous, talk about fucking skilled work, for fuck’s sake.

  PJ

  We went out, Peadar and myself, to the island. A day as rare as hens’ teeth, with armies of sunlight and shadows advancing and retreating everywhere.

  I had met him on an annual retreat, he was just a local boy, from the other side of Monkstown, thought he had a vocation. I spotted him on the first day, he was talking to the attendant priests, sort of one by one, I thought, as if looking for something, a sign maybe, or an indication. A perfectly normal young Irish boy except he was shining with beauty. To me, anyway. I have no idea what he looked like to other people. I couldn’t even have said those words to myself, then, ‘shining with beauty’. Nor anything close to them. But it was so.

  God knows.

  With an accent on him that would mash spuds. Monkstown Farm he was from, council houses. You wouldn’t go up there without a native guide, you could be murdered crossing Dunedin Field on your own, if they didn’t know you.

  I call him a boy, though he was seventeen years of age, just a few years younger than myself. I could account myself a man, a young man, but there was little of the man about Peadar, in appearance. He was so slim, slight, a little girlish really, a sort of waif, but full of a signalling power. Maybe timeless is the word I want, there was nothing of the child in him, nothing of the man, like a marble statue, glowing, vibrant, but also frozen – eternal. Yes, eternal, was what I meant to say.

  Love, you see, love – well, no one has ever found proper words for that, not really. It’s the thing God wants us to have, to embody, and yet there is no proper description of it.

  The first time I saw him, I thought, ‘Uh-ho, there’s trouble.’ I didn’t know why I thought that. Well, I didn’t know anything. I was just after finishing my third year at the seminary. I thought I knew everything. If I could properly describe him I think everything would be understood. But God didn’t give us words for it.

  We went out to the island. The big island on Aran, Inishmore. Well, we had to find somewhere to be together, I mean, without comment, visitors, two young men going out on the ferry, walkers as might be, seminarians, religious, devout. I mean, Ireland was full of them then, there were hundreds and hundreds of young priests and priesteens, must have been thousands. Everywhere in Ireland, cycling, walking, there were young gossoons, dressed soberly, blackly. And we went out to the island in that guise, like two ordinary lads, to sample the simple pleasure of being in an ancient landscape, with the lovely music of Irish around us in the mouths of the people.

  I am telling the story, and then, my mind goes like a darting bird to what happened, not quite next, but a little later, flies ahead, and –

  In that time my mother was about forty-five years old. Yes, Daddy had died long since, he had been weakened by polio as a child. He was a great race-goer while he lived. He always brought me back a pear from the pram-women who would be selling pears at the meetings, but in the matter of his life he was a poor bet, I suppose he was, and he succumbed, I was told, but to what I didn’t register, or forget. A child has different ears to an adult. But he left her a little house in Monkstown, and she worked in Ballsbridge for the Sweepstakes. She put on a bit of weight and she didn’t care, she said, because she wasn’t planning to marry again, despite her being a bit of a looker, in all honesty, which was one of the things I liked about her when I was boy. When I was little she still looked like she was in her twenties, they thought she was my sister at the school gates. And not very religious, as you might expect of a seminarian’s mother, but she liked old churches, she longed to go to Italy someday to see what she called ‘real churches’, with proper paintings in them, not like the Irish ones with the job-lots of St Josephs and stiff madonnas. So she said. She had a nice high way of talking, I don’t think there was any harm in her.

  She had these old seventy-eights she played on the huge gramophone Daddy had bought, Hoagy Carmichael ‘Down in Old Hong Kong’, ‘The Old Music Master’ who just sat there amazed. (Singing.) ‘Wide-eyed and open mouthed he gazed and he gazed.’ But at what I don’t remember. Daddy’s old records were things like Mussorgsky, ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, a whole set of ten records like ten black plates, in brown paper sleeves all worn and torn, but she never touched them after he died. In the summer I remember she brought me on the train, we would catch it at Monkstown station, out to Dalkey, and we went down the hundred steps to the beach at White Rock, herself and myself, and she laid herself out on an accommodating rock to get the sun, and I walked the whole beach leaping from boulder to boulder, adroitly, or so I imagined. And she had brought fourpenny bars of Cadbury’s chocolate which would be melted in their wrappers in a very agreeable way. And then when I was older she let me climb over the big cliff at the end of the beach and penet
rate on to Killiney Strand, into a new kingdom of experience, and I would go happily, as happy as I ever was at any time in my life, to the little shop where the hanging chalets were, and the long concrete slipway like a woman’s throat, and the handsome fellas hiring out rowing boats, and buy the bottle of Savage Smith orange as cold as your nose in winter. And I would traipse back with that, and drink it on the pebbly sand beside her, raging, raging with happiness.

  I remember things like that. Whether they cause me pain or happiness now I couldn’t say. It seems a long long time ago.

  Now here we are, Christy and me. An odd life, no doubt. How could it be otherwise?

  (Looking around.) Doesn’t look much, I know. Used to be a table in here, but Christy tore a leg off it, trying to fix the blasted thing.

  Christy

  Ancient fucking history. Coming home from England, the bit of money in the pocket, meeting the wife. Well, I suppose I could tell you how that happened. It was in the Monument Creamery, in Dunleary, she had a job there, not out on the floor of course, with her accent, you know, bringing teas and cakes to the good citizens, but yeah, the usual, slopping out, and all the rest of it. There’s a lot of rough stuff goes on in the background of every business, even a nice café. And one morning she comes out into the lane at the back of premises, with her big bucket, and there was what she described after as ‘a long, thin rasher of a man’ lying there, sleeping, and I was in her way across to the bins, real smelly they were too, and so she gives me a kick, just to get me moving. ‘Would you get up, get up, whoever you are, you can’t be lying there like a cat.’ So I goes up on one elbow and look at her. No messing now, she was a fabulous-looking girl. She was so pretty she was walking in her own bleeding light, that’s how it was, with blondy hair and lovely dark skin like a fucking Galway woman, though her people were all from Old Dunleary, they worked in the coalyard there, three generations, several. That evening I came back for her, I cleaned myself up a bit, I’d been on a terrible razzle right enough, drinking around the town for three weeks, money in my pocket, you know. And I walked her home along the seafront, past the railway wall and the coal quay inside Monkstown harbour, and in she goes and comes out in due course all washed and kitted out in that lovely summer dress, and she was only a small woman, seventeen, by Christ we went dancing in the Top Hat, we danced all evening, and I bought her lemonade, which was all the fuckers would sell you at the bar, Fats Domino was all the rage then, she danced so well, much better than me, though I had a go, just for the look of it, ‘I found my freedom, on Blueberry Hill, on Blueberry Hill, when I found you’. Oh my God, the romance. I was crazy about her. And it didn’t take much more than that. She felt the same and we tied the knot, and my ma was still alive in that time and she brought the smaller childer, she made dresses and suits for them, yes she did, and Christine, which funnily enough was my wife’s name, considering my name is Christy, she still had that light of hers, going through the ceremony, Father fucking Murphy that later done time for his sins, and she beaming, like the little lighthouse at the end of the pier, and having the feed at the Pierre Hotel, and us all coming out into the late twilight of a summer’s night, happy as larks with the skinful of beer and burnt chicken, oh yes, and the wide bay lying there before us like the bedclothes of God. And then, one thing following another, in immemorial fashion as you might say, the kids came, Mickey, Doreen and Peadar. Cock of the walk, me then, having my pints in Carneys in the evenings, plenty of money and mates, enjoying the work on the buildings. Be nice to have that back. Yesh, when I think of all that, I think, be nice to have all that back. Be fucking nice. Ordinary life, you could call it. Being young. And your kids young. It’s a special time when you’re young and your kids are small. But you don’t really know it. You’re in the dead centre of things. Like a dart on the dartboard. The bull’s-eye. You’ve hit the fucking bull’s-eye of life and you don’t really know it. That’s the beauty of it maybe. You’re young, you can drink twenty pints in a night and barely feel it in the morning, go off to work at six in the dawn light, with your fucking sandwiches and your billycan of tea, fucking brilliant, and in through the site gate with a wave from the gateman, and booking in with the gaffer, and off you go with the day’s slog, mixing the muck, fixing lines for the block work, digging out trenches for pipework till you’re fair weeping from exhaustion, the pain in your back, the wrench in your legs, and swapping jokes till your gums bleed, but at the centre of everything, fuck it, you’re happy, your wife is as pretty as a film star, a little beauty from Old Dunleary, and your daughter, oh by Jesus, what a shock to you she is, something you made, not with your bare hands, but something you made, and the fucking pride in your little sons, thinking about them, what they would be doing in the world, maybe going out building like yourself, ah, Jesus, I don’t know, sometimes life is stacked up all right, all your ducks in a row, and in the summer the sun is shining, and in the winter frost gnaws at your gloves, why is all that so fucking marvellous, but it is, better than steak every day, better than any fucking thing you can think of, ordinary fucking life, and when I am talking about it now, I am yearning for it, I am yearning for it.