Yeats, Bannow and Hallmark

Six years old, cuddled in bed for the night, head on Pongo your panda. Bedroom door ajar so you won’t be afraid in the dark when the glow in the dark statue of Holy Mary fades. Phone rings in the hall. Murmurings below. Steps on stairs, more light comes into your bedroom as she opens the door. The have found Uncle Owen’s body in Rosslare Harbour, after searching for a week. 

I was five the last time I saw him. He was with us in Dublin, in the days when he still  used to visit. Uncle Owen. He came into my head this summer. I was sitting by the beach in Sligo and decided to write to him and ask him a few questions. I wasn’t expecting answers. He’s dead years, by suicide. January 1972. The first funeral I remember. Sitting in the back of the family Cortina with the red seats, up and down to Wexford, and on a school day. I store his memorial card tucked away in a cupboard in my spare room, black and white headshot of him in the centre. You don’t throw out those sorts of things.  

The road had a hint of grass down the middle. High honeysuckle hedges created a  roofless cave of sweet-smelling safety. Any stronger and the loaded scent would have been sickly and suffocating. It was another Bannow Island summer, I was eight and walking from The Island to the nuns’ house, flapping my brown leather sandals on the softening tar. Our five-person caravan was parked back the road, on the grass beside the sand-banked rushes. This year, we overflowed into the cotton canvas navy and orange A-frame tent, our four growing bodies now too long to sleep crossways on a three-person caravan bed. The tent, long-since perished, was to become part of the annual landscape as we camped on this isthmus of an island, for a slow spell of summer.  

Last summer, I wrote ‘Back in Bannow’ a piece about childhood holidays in Bannow,  Co Wexford. It was an idyll of extended family, unending sun, sea, Tayto and red lemonade. As a family, we Dublin emigres holidayed in Wexford at every chance, landing wherever there was space. Our caravan could be perched in a field beside an Uncle’s house, posted on the driveway to an Auntie’s house or camped on Bannow island, at the edge of the St Georges Channel on the Wexford coast. Among the hordes of summer relatives, ‘Poor Owen’  would get mentioned now and then, usually by one of his two sisters. That was the way of it.  

I don’t remember him being physically part of those holidays, only his visits to us in  Dublin. When we bought the caravan, I watched Owen and Dad manoeuvring it into the driveway. For years there was a cracked pane of glass in the toilet cubicle, where Uncle Owen had pushed his thumb through the little window, while rolling the caravan into the garden. I used to wonder was he hurt, or if he bled. The crack was a monument to him, patched with wide grey freezer tape surprisingly immune to condensation and misty sea air. 

His death took place over the Christmas and New Year period. The photograph on his memorial card looks like it’s taken from a team photo. Rugby or Gaelic, I have no idea. I don’t even know if he was sporty. I don’t know how he fitted in his family or where he came in age order. I think my parents were kind to him. I’m not sure when his visits to us stopped. He took a ‘dislike’ to Mammy, and they could not have him to stay any more. Daddy would go and visit him either at home in Wexford, or in hospital in Enniscorthy. Although I asked as an adult, I don’t remember the name of the institution he stayed in. No-one left to tell me now that I want to be told again. All I have is a mention of the word schizophrenia. 

Four decades on, I’m back in Bannow on a June day, camping at Bannow Bay,  spitting distance from The Island. I walk through fields along the cliffs overlooking the ruined Norman stone church, still used as a graveyard. The grass is brown and flat, dehydrated by the droughty sun. Scrabble down a dry crumbling mud and sand bank, to the hidden rocky beach beneath. Scramble further over these rocks at high tide or walk around them at low tide, and I reach The Island. Today the tide is middling to halfway somewhere. I take to the higher rocks. The lower rocks mesh into the emerging sand on a tidal ebb. Tides are ever-changing. With its wily undercurrents, Bannow is transformed season to season, from stony beach to sandy beach, and back again.  

When you’re five, you generally believe what you are told. But I couldn’t quite grasp  how he died. I knew there was him, a bridge, the Slaney River, and death. How much detail does a parent give a child? I filled them in for my own understanding. In my version, his end occurs around teatime on a grey, cloudy, very windy evening. He is walking across Wexford  bridge. It’s getting dark. He’s wearing a tie and a black and white check jacket. Next second, he is hurling over the top of the railing, arms and legs spread on a gust of wind. Slow motion. No sound. No close up. A stick man silhouetted against the dusk. I can’t see his face, so can’t  tell what he is thinking or how he feels. Off to the side, somewhere, is another man watching. I can’t see him, but I know he is there. Otherwise, who would tell the story? This story, when proposed to my mother, gets a silent nodding agreement. I can’t remember exactly, but I think I get my father to confirm that ‘a man’ saw it happen. I feel very clever. My story has  not been challenged or corrected, so it becomes the truth. Easier all around. End of story. 

Leaving the beach, I face away from the cliffs to return by road to Bannow Bay. The  landscape has moved but not changed. The grass and rushes where we wild camped now banked up on four sides, protecting a special area of conservation. Parking spaces are sparse, our family visitors would not fit today. I walk the gravelly strip to the Wexford mainland, smell the salt marshes as I flip flop along the road to the turn for the Norman Church - to us it was always Strongbow and Eva’s Norman Castle. I continue, and once again meet the  honeysuckle, it’s pungency stagnant in the dead air of pre-sunset stillness. This road forks back to another bay.  

During those summers, pitched by the sea at Bannow, a clatter of aunts and uncles  and cousins turned up almost daily, generally after lunch and definitely if the day was sunny. We could be a group of one, two, three or four families, with a few in-laws thrown in. Up the road, the aunt who was a nun, would be staying in the nun’s house, their holiday home, the nuns. Each sunny day we spread out around the beach and marram dunes. On rainy days we huddled under giant veils of raincoats and old Foxford rugs. In this open, endless gathering, children and adults wandered in and out of the central rug and towel space. I can’t remember if he was ever there, but I don’t find Uncle Owen in any photographs of those summers. Chronology does not behave in child memory. 

Bannow was waking in the morning, stretching into an eternal day. No telly, a  transistor radio, plenty of books. Tinned stew, tinned steak and kidney pies. SPAM on cream crackers and small jars of fish paste. I filled the empty jars with the dainty flowers that nestled in the prickly rushes; single stemmed yellow silverweed, spherical clusters of five petalled sea pinks, their soothing blanket broken by wild green succulent vetch. The same flowers still grow on The Island. Their blousy fragrance combines with the aquatic breeze, in blended perfumes that rise above the rushes to cosset the ocean.  

Fifty years on, I find myself writing to Uncle Owen as a way of ordering my thoughts and memories of him. The man who died by going over Wexford bridge into the Slaney River in the middle of winter. His corpse was found two weeks after at the entrance to Rosslare Harbour. The phone at home never rang late at night. On this evening it did, with the good news that the body had been found, so a funeral could be had. My first. 

A morning stretching into an eternal day grand if it was sunny and happy, but not if it started badly and looked like there was no end. I was a child worrier and if I got it into my  head that a wasp was going to sting me that day, I’d think about it all day. As for crabs. A crab may be afraid of a human, but if I was in the sea all I could think of was one crawling inside me. Out of the sea I worried about when I would have to go back in the water. Worries that seemed trivial to an adult, were all encompassing to me. The whoosh of a ‘you’ll be fine’ did not sweep them away. I grew up and out of them. As expected.

In writing about Bannow, I wanted storybook memories of summer holidays. I would  remember the beautiful setting of the unspoiled Irish coast and old-fashioned family values. It would be rearward looking a voyage of self-discovery. A hard edit of the memories would  help me understand the influence of childhood summers on my life. In the end, it turned out to be beautifully ornate memories of 1970s summers, pleasant reminiscence piece that made people smile. But it was not my epic journey of discovery. Far too reclaimed and cultivated altogether. It felt dishonest describing all the perfect parts but leaving out the less than perfect parts. The gaps were demanding to be filled. But it’s hard to write the good and the bad when everyone else mostly remembers the good.  

I began editing the recollections in my idyllic summer Bannow piece, to make it truer and realer, less processed. While describing ‘languid days on a sandy beach, the family all holidaying in perfect harmony’, I reminded myself how the sand got everywhere, apples, crisps and any imaginable article of clothing. I recalled the dragging rainy afternoons as well,  sardined into a caravan, playing endless games of cards. Feeling constantly behind because I didn’t completely get the rules. I circled around the memories, trying to construct the real narrative of my childhood. The rug. Foxford. Kind of orange green and bits of cream. It was hairy and uncomfortable. Probably older than me. Rug for grass. Towels for beach. Always  stick to the rules. Leave an hour after dinner before swimming. Swim before breakfast. Sign of bravery. The stiff togs starched by sand and salt, white on the top half royal blue on the  bottom. Two circle holes on the back. Two circle tan marks on my back visible at Saturday bath time. Various holiday photographs show three sibling wearers of this same pair. I was the last. Always last. The youngest. Waiting summer by summer to get the hand-me-downs – the indisputable sign of growing up. No matter how I grew, older siblings were always, well, older.

During these summers, Uncle Owen’s death was seldom spoken about, the suicide  word never said out loud. I was in my twenties when I heard it talk about it openly. My sister and I had driven to visit my aunt, the nun in Wexford. We were unaccompanied by parents, uncles or aunts and she spoke openly about how troubled her brother had been.  

My parents did not lie about his death, they just didn’t reveal the details of the truth.  They were protecting me. I presume. Keeping me safe from reality. Or keeping reality away from themselves. Keeping all of us safe. His ‘dislike’ of my mother was probably paranoid schizophrenia. I wanted to write about and pull apart the silence around the dead stick man. I wanted a story where the foamy sea would whisper to me to remember him in the middle of a honeysuckle lane. I wrote to fill the silence around Uncle Owen, trying to put some order on my memories of him. 

I have a book of Yeats poetry on the shelf beside my fireplace. It is a 1965 edition,  cost thirty shillings and belonged to Uncle Owen. It holds yellowed paper clippings from the  Irish Independent newspaper, two Christmas cards (from brothers and their wives) and a photograph of another brother and his family, dated 1968. In all the memorabilia, the only name I do not recognise is a third Christmas card from a friend ‘Eddie’. A relic from the social life of Uncle Owen I will never know. The newspaper cuttings are from letters to the  editor and the ‘Portraits’ column in the Irish Independent. ‘Portraits’ is dated Thursday 5  May 1966 (one year and nine days before I was born). This is what my Uncle read:

By John C. Metcalfe 

Big change  

When my love was young and tender . . . I was happy as could be . . . And there were no cares or worries . . Really troubling me . . . And it never was disturbing . . . As I often left behind . . . And I only thought of leisure . . . And the fun that can be found . . . When you only need a suit-case . . . Getting all around . . . And the skies were always sunny . . . And the clouds were always white . . And the stars that shone at night-time . . . When my love was young and tender . . . I was swift and strong and gay . . . But these days I am older . . . I am  worried weak and grey.

A ‘Portraits’ column by Jamec J Metcalfe was syndicated in America in the 1940s and 1950s and he also wrote for Hallmark. However, this ‘Portraits’ column here is credited to John C Metcalfe, his brother. I don’t know if this is a mistake or not. Either way, it’s not the first time the brothers associated professionally. They worked under cover for the FBI in the 1930s to expose secret Nazi activity. Not what I expected from a Hallmark poet. 

Whichever brother wrote it, I suppose my uncle cut it out because he liked it, maybe  identified with it. It seems dated now. Thinking of the SPAM I loved in Bannow, which was of its time, I look at what it stands for now: Special Processed American Meat and wonder, did we really? 

Did the Metcalfe brothers and Strong write a literary type of SPAM? ‘Special  Processed Annotated Metres’. Their verse very literally does what is says on the tin. No hidden meaning, just human goodness, processed. Uncle Owen saw this piece and connected to it in some way, so he cut it out and saved it between pages of more complex Yeats poetry. When a short memoir I wrote of Bannow was published, my cousins connected with it. Looking at it now, it’s a SPAM set of memories, where the sun always shone, and everyone played in harmony. Not everything is included, but what is there is all true. It’s up to others to read between the lines, beyond the SPAM. 

Uncle Owen’s was a complicated head, and no amount of exploration, explaining or  understanding was going to stop him from killing himself. If it was today, maybe modern medication could change the outcome. Or not. How I recall Uncle Owen is unfinished. 

Understanding is a never-ending aftermath of shifting memory. I try put order on it, but I know this is an impossibility, no matter how many pages I write to him.

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