Dublin Folktales (4 page)

When they returned home, she was sitting in her favourite armchair eating toast and drinking sweet tea with her feet in a basin of cold water, as if there hadn’t been enough water in the sea at Dollymount to satisfy her needs. It was the first intimation her family had that she was abandoning them and her howling grandchildren for a quieter life of her own. She said Dollymount was grand if you managed not to be run over by learner drivers practising their
driving, while you were having a doze in the sun. When Tom asked her why she sitting in a basin of water, she said she thought her feet were a little sunburnt from the beach, so the water was an after-sun measure that cost nothing to prepare.

Tom’s own mother had abandoned her children in a different way. She went off to see a man in Phoenix Park one fine Saturday in September. At least her children and grandchildren knew she was somewhere among a million other people on the Fifteen Acres gathered to see Pope John Paul II appear on top of a grassy mound. Tom’s family home was beside the park and he and his siblings and pals all flocked to their home on the night before the Pope’s appearance in Phoenix Park. They slept all over the place. There were bodies everywhere in the house that night, and their mother lied and said that she was delighted to see them all back home once more. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said as she went off early to bed.

Excitable small children will wake early in the morning, especially if they are in a strange house. Well, the assembled clan’s youngest kids did so, with much recrimination from their sleep-deprived parents. When they woke they found their granny had run away from home. She had made secret arrangements with old neighbours that they would all go to see the Pope together and off she went before the house was astir. Not a chick nor a child saw her go. She was like a thief in the night. Only she stole away her offspring’s certainties.

Everyone was worried about her and went to the park to look for her. The Pope started to tell everyone how happy he was to be there and everyone cheered and clapped and said, ‘Isn’t it a grand day,’ and ‘Not a drop of rain to be seen anywhere.’ No sight of the errant woman could be found. They all headed home, worn out, but feeling pious, hoping that that extra prayer they said would make the missing woman show up, safe and sound.

On their return, they found a queue of people sneaking into their home from the footpath outside. Their mother,
now home safe and well and full of sisterly love, was providing restroom facilities, in the Name of God, to anyone taken short and willing to queue. It was a work of mercy she said, God’s work, providing a warm toilet sea and a flushable cistern as divine intervention on a day when a million people were on the move around the park. There was no use arguing. Her children and her children’s children soon found themselves pressed into service as loo-queue administrators while the mammy graciously accepted the plaudits of a relieved populace. Some say to this day that it was her finest hour.

Tom’s mother-in-law, the beach lover, in departing for the park from a different parish, managed to do so without encumbrance of any kind either. Though she had a large family, she behaved as a single woman on the way to see a holy man from Poland on his first visit to her town of Dublin. She went, she saw, she heard, she returned and had toast and tea and a dip in a basin of cold water in her house while she watched highlights of the visit on television, in colour.

While in the park, she even waved at the handsome man on the back of the converted lorry as he was driven around the park to wave hello to the faithful collected who had not been able to get close enough to see him on his raised altar. More than a million people had brought folding
picnic chairs with them into the park and were corralled into temporary enclosures of 1,000 souls each. The enclosures were surrounded by sturdy blue nylon rope. The Popemobile, built on the back of a Ford D model truck, travelled up and down wide aisles between the corrals while everyone fell into ecstasy at the good of it all. Everyone was taken up in the euphoria of that September Saturday in Phoenix Park, when the Polish Pope blessed all and sundry whether they wanted a blessing or not.

In time, when the afterglow of that momentous occasion had faded away, a strange thing happened. Both women, Tom’s mother and Tom’s mother-in-law went on a package holiday to see how they might get on. They enjoyed themselves so much they went together once a year for years afterwards, and rigorously ignored one another for the rest of the year. Their
modus operandi
was to meet on a given date once a year, in Bewley’s Oriental Café on Westmoreland Street, and to read the brochures and advertisements together, before going along to a travel agent to pay a deposit on the holiday. For both women, this was a sacred day to be approached with due reverence. They cleared their diaries well in advance, went early to bed the night before, rose early the next morning, went to mass, and then caught a free bus into town from their respective addresses.

So this year they found themselves in Italy, near Castel Gondolfo where the Pope goes on his holidays. The two Dublin mammies decided this was a sign from heaven. It would only be polite to call in and say hello and to bring the decent man up to speed on what had happened in Dublin since his visit there. However, when they tried to have a reunion with him, they were run off by the guards at the gate, who said they were fed up with Dubliners turning up looking to share their picnic sandwiches with his Holiness.

So, Tom’s mother-in-law borrowed a bottle of holy water from Tom’s mother and emptied it discreetly in a corner of the Pope’s palace grounds. They wrote a message for the
Pope and put it in the holy water bottle and threw it over the wall. They waited a while to see if anyone would throw the bottle back over, and when no one did, they went home. When Tom went to pick up the two mammies at the airport he could only wonder and what they had got up to while they were away from their native island.

There was one thing certain, until the days they both left this world, neither of them ever asked any of their family to go on holiday with them. They did, however, leave word that the Pope might be writing to them soon, when he had a minute to spare. But whatever way the bottle landed it must have become lost in the weeds in the garden, for their families are still waiting for a postcard from the Pope to say how he got on on his holidays. Though it is unlikely to come since he has since passed away. Some say he will be made a saint before very much longer and there is a man that lives near Phoenix Park who says prayers every night and morning that it might be so.

Do you remember the miles and miles of blue nylon rope that was used to make corrals in the park on the big day? Well, the local handyman who goes by the name of Jack Ladd gathered up enough of it to lay out a full marathon course if he was ever contracted to do so. This rope he coiled around and around itself until it resembled a great sea monster come to rest in the valley of the Liffey. When asked if he was being dishonest in doing this or, indeed, if it was outright theft of the Pope’s property, he replied that he was simply minding it for him lest it be stolen. The Holy Father only needed to call to Jack’s house and he could have as much of the rope, or all of it, back on demand. Until then, he would mind it for him with due reverence.

But since that Pope was now on the assembly line to sainthood, Jack made no secret of the fact that he was planning on selling the rope, a mounted inch at a time, to those seeking a religious relic of the new saint. In the meantime, he uses bits of it to tie up anything that needs tying up on a
job around the town. Boats of local fishermen belonging to the angler’s club are all tied up now with bits of the Pope’s rope. Whether people believe in the power of a Pope’s blessing or not, it is an undisputable fact that not one single boat has foundered on the river since the Pope came to town. It’s the sort of thing that the two mammies knew all the time. It was what they were trying to tell him when they threw the bottle over the wall. ‘All is well in Dublin,’ said the note in fair handwriting. But a soon to be canonised Pope knew that all along.

The River Liffey has had many bridges thrown over it. Most of them carry both people and wheeled traffic, but a few are for pedestrians only.

With an abundance of bridges now available, we do not think about how we would cross the river if the bridges weren't there, these days. Earlier citizens and visitors crossed over the river using fords when the tidal river was at low tide. Then walls were built to lessen flooding as port commerce demanded a hard standing be provided at the water's edge. The odd bridge was built to convey materials to the other side. Here and there, ferries took people from one side to the other and there was a commercial charge for doing so. A number of ferries operated from the Temple Bar area on the southern side of Liffey Street and on the other.

Crow Street Theatre, the chief theatre in the city, lay on the southern side of the city. Many people crossed over to attend its productions. Then a proposal was made to replace seven ferries with a single-span metal bridge at the Bagino Slip. It would exact a toll for its use in crossing over.

An Alderman Beresford and William Walsh joined together to erect the bridge as a commercial enterprise. It opened for business in 1816 and was formally named Wellington Bridge, but was known to most Dubliners as the Metal Bridge, at least in its early days. Arthur Wellesley,
1
^st
Duke of Wellington, had just defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo, so it seemed appropriate to call the bridge after him. Wellesley was born in a fine house on Merrion Street and was the only Dubliner to be elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

The bridge was the only pedestrian bridge on the Liffey until the Millennium Bridge was opened upstream in 2000. It was cast at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire in England. The right to exact tolls was set for a period of one hundred years from 1816. Paying tolls to cross the relatively short span was subject to some resentment among the populace and any way that could be used to circumvent the toll was to be applauded by the common man.

The adjacent Bachelors Walk and Ormond Quay were populated for many years by the city's auction rooms. People brought their household goods, including beds and wardrobes to be sold at auction there. Those that wanted these second-hand goods came to bid for them. It made this a very busy area of the city, with milling masses of people either collecting or depositing all kinds of merchandise into and out of a myriad of premises along the quays. In the evening, theatre goers crossed the bridge along with ordinary folk going about their daily lives as best they could.

The story of the pair of tinkers who took exception to paying the toll in pursuit of their trade is a battle of wits and triumph, and is not unlike the history of a wonderful night on the town. Some claim to recollect all the little events which lead up to the climax of the story, but few can recollect their order or the exact time they occurred, which makes all the difference to their value or importance.

The toll had been set at a half penny, of which there were some 480 in an Irish pound of the day. But it was still more than the tinkers would pay. After a while, the crossing came to be known as the Ha'penny Bridge, as well as its official name of Wellington Bridge and its unofficial moniker of the
Metal Bridge. To confuse matters even further, the present-day official name for the bridge is the Liffey Bridge.

In its original form, the bridge had a space at either end where a person stepped through a turnstile to pay the toll and then proceeded across the bridge. In those very early days, a toll taker collected the ha'pennies of crossing pedestrians of all classes and creeds. It was thus when the pair of travelling tinkers arrived at the crossing. The tinkers, or workers in tin and travelling menders of metal household utensils, repaired and replaced objects made of tin on the spot, usually at the person's residence or place of business.

They were just some of the many artisans to be found on the streets of Dublin at this time. Bread firms employed men who drove two-wheeled horse carts to deliver freshly baked breads and confectionary to the shops and houses in the city. Laundrymen, wearing uniforms and caps, delivered and collected laundry in the days before the domestic washing machine replaced such activities. Coal men carted coal for the city's coal merchants on four-wheeled lorries. The tolling of the bell on an independent bellman's lorry showed he had coal for sale; when it was silenced he was finished selling for now. Vegetable sellers and fishwives passed by, on their way from the city markets. Newspaper sellers called out the headlines of the day to attract buyers to the paper. In the midst of this hubbub, our pair of tinkers, Johnny and Paudge, approached the toll taker in their most civil manner.

The busy keeper heard the murmur of two voices, where only shortly before he had been listening to the sleepy, hissing, grating sound of a scissors-grinder's wheel as the sturdy Paudge sharpened up knives for Molly, a passing fishwife who had a nice smile and dancing eyes and curled hair worn to her shoulder to show she was not spoken for yet. Charming as she was, Paudge made sure she paid over the few coins agreed for the work, before she walked off pushing her cart with the day's offerings laid out for sale for the crowds to examine.