Together Forever
Sian O'Gorman
For Sadhbh
The Forty Foot
For centuries people have been swimming in the Forty Foot, stepping into the cool waters of the Irish Sea from a tiny tip of rock at the southern end of Dublin Bay. In the shadow of a Martello tower, the swimmers gather, even on the coldest winter’s day. Some arrive in dressing gowns over their togs, others with towels under their arms, ready to wobble and wriggle into their swimsuits before gingerly picking their way down the steps and into the cold (always so cold!) sea, only ever deterred by large swells or big waves churned up by storms. The last time I swum there was the morning of my grandmother’s funeral, when I was twenty-five; years ago now. And these days, when I drive past and see the hardy swimmers making their way down, all I feel is relief that it’s not me submerged in those unknown depths.
Rosaleen, my grandmother, was one of those daily swimmers at the Forty Foot. She had no time for ‘namby-pambies’ her word for people who didn’t swim in the sea in all weathers, in other words the rest of the world.
‘I go in with a head full of problems,’ she used to say, pulling on her flower-strewn swimming cap and red swimsuit, ‘and come out with the clarity of John the Baptist himself.’ She wasn’t remotely religious, and had brought up her daughter without the encumbrance of a man or even marriage, but often she would invoke the name of a holy person or holy event to make a point. The Irish emphasis. ‘Mother of the divine Jesus’ was as exciting her swearing ever got, and usually when she had lost her purse or burned a stew or when the sea was particularly cold. But a swim in icy water cured everything. Colds, headaches and even namby-pambyism. ‘Come on, Tabitha,’ she’d urge while I teetered on the edge. ‘Sure, you’ll be grand once you’re in.’
And I always was. With her anyway. She was the nicest person I knew, always laughing and chatting with people, and I her little shadow. She’d bring me down to the sea on a Sunday morning and in we’d plunge, laughing and screaming at the cold until we’d float out, stretching our arms towards the horizon, feet kicking madly. Away we’d go, a tiny propeller of a girl and a fine-figured woman slicing through the Irish Sea. ‘Holy water,’ Rosaleen used to say. ‘We’re swimming in the holy water. That feeling of stepping into the sea. It was like nothing else. I remember the icy water, the camaraderie of the other swimmers, the feeling of zingy invincibility when you got out, as though you’d been reborn, made anew, and we’d emerge, skin bright red, singing and stinging and tingling.
I remember being very little and sitting on one of the old stone benches while Rosaleen bent over me, drying my feet carefully and gently, and then putting on my socks and shoes. Years later, on the very last day we swam together, I returned the favour. Her breathing was bad and bending down was difficult, so I dried her feet and pulled on her stockings and slipped on her shoes. ‘Thank you, loveen,’ she’d said. ‘You’re a pet.
Sometimes my mother, Nora, would join us, if she wasn’t off somewhere working, protesting, righting wrongs; as an ‘environmentalist and political agitator’, as she likes to call herself, her life spent protesting, placard waving, and heel-digging in. These days, as she’s grown older and since she’s retired she too has become a daily sea communicant. For years and years, Nora worked for various environmental groups as a press officer, spending her life calling journalists and trying to make them care about the planet. Oil spills, Sellafield, tree cutting, forest fires, rezoning were all in a day’s work. Just last year she was on the front page of the Irish Times protesting about a car park which was being built beside a tuft of gentian orchids. Hair flying in the wind, Barbour flapping, she looked like the pirate queen I remembered from when I was growing up. Nora, my accidental mother, always engaged, forever concerned and outraged, saving slugs, fungi and flowers from the farmer’s spade, always standing up for her beliefs.
‘You should come down,’ she goes on, even though she knows why I don’t. But she never gives up. Ever. ‘It’ll do you good,’ she keeps saying. ‘Your grandmother said it was a cure-all, and like in most things, she was right.’
‘But I don’t need to cure anything.’
Nora gives me a look as if to say, she knows better. I could still see the appeal. The icy water, the camaraderie of the other swimmers, the zingy invincibility when you remerged, as though you’d been reborn. But the reason I never swim there is not a fear of cold water or sharks or jellyfish. It’s something else. You see, for me, the water isn’t holy and magical anymore but dark, disapproving… there’s an ominous power to that water, as though I can’t quite shake off all those droplets that cling to my skin.
Chapter One
A summer morning, early May, the sky blue, the air still. Ireland at its most beautiful. Driving back from the supermarket, I took the coast road, through Sandycove, past the Forty Foot, worrying about my daughter. Rosie was all I really thought about now, anyway. For the last two years, she had done nothing but revise. The Leaving Cert are the set of tough, gruelling exams at the end of your school days that you fervently believe will dictate the rest of your life. They wreak such havoc on the psyche of every Irish citizen, instilling such fear and horror, no one ever quite recovers. Your whole life hangs in the balance of knowing particularly difficult Irish grammatical tenses, impenetrable maths equations and the exact movements of Padraig Pearse during the Easter Rising. I still remember that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the dread… and then, when they are over, you do miraculously move on with your life but like traumatised elephants, you never forget.
But we were so close to Rosie’s liberation from all this tension and pressure. She was pale and seemed to be fading fast. She just had to cling on and the old Rosie, the confident happy girl, would return. As I indicated to turn left to continue on to home, in Dalkey, I spotted my mother on the road ahead, creakily, rustily, slowly pedalling home from her swim, dressed in her usual charity-shop purchases. Her old men’s sandals and knitted socks, her legs bare under her long skirt, her trusty battered Barbour and an old cloth bag slung over her shoulder. Her long hair, damp from her dip, hanging over her shoulders to dry. Instinctively I thought of my husband Michael and what he would make of her and mentally cheered her on. She stood for everything he didn’t and Nora was the part of me which he found most difficult to accept. She didn’t fit in with his idea of an acceptable extended family. She would cheerily tackle him on any issue, good-naturedly holding him personally accountable for everything from homelessness to the closure of the Dun Laoghaire bowls club.
He believed in the individual, that anyone can make it if given the right support. She believed in welfare and community. But when I decided to marry him, it seemed, to be the most rebellious thing I could do and I don’t regret it – I wouldn’t change a thing about Rosie, after all – but it had been rash, not a love match but what I had thought was a pragmatic and sensible choice.
As I passed Nora’s bike, I slowed down and tooted my horn. ‘That’s it!’ I called through the open window. ‘Keep it up! Nice to see you getting a bit of exercise!’
‘Thank you, Tabitha,’ she said, ‘You’re very kind. But your encouragement is unnecessary.’ But she was smiling. ‘How’s Rosie? Not still at those books?’
‘You know what’s she’s like, takes after you. Never gives up!’
There was a car behind me. ‘See you later, Mum.’ I said, pressing on the accelerator and moving forwards. But her face suddenly lifted as though she’d just remembered something.
‘The trees!’ I think she shouted. In my rear-view mirror, she waved again, mouthing something. ‘The trees!’