Rose

Rose

“I have never seen things more clearly than I did when I lost my sight.”

My name is Rose, and I am ninety six years old. This is my story. Well, our story really, mine and Eddie’s. I have decided to record it now - as the day draws ever nearer when I'll go to my just reward - for my family : my three children, my twelve grandchildren, my twenty-three great grandchildren and my great, great granddaughter. I am thankful for the kind assistance of Michelle, a nurse from the care home in which I now live, who has committed the story to paper on my behalf. I should like to say that while I may not remember what I had for breakfast this morning, I remember the events as recorded here in photographically vivid detail. If God spares you, and you reach my age, you’ll see this for yourself. Memory is a funny thing.

I was born in 1904, the middle of three girls, and my mother's father, Captain Reason, ran the family business which provided employment for my father, James Mulvenna, and my mother's brother, my Uncle Gerard. Captain Reason sailed a small vessel, The Nugget, between The Glynn, the village in the North of Ireland in which we all lived, and Greenock in Scotland. Mostly it went out with lime and came back with coal. It was November 1920 - I was sixteen years old - that our lives changed forever.

My grandfather left The Glynn for Greenock on the Thursday as usual. It wasn’t his habit to cable home news of his arrival in Scotland, so it was the following Monday before the terrible news reached us. The Captain of a schooner called The Wyre, out of Dundalk, reported he had been in contact with The Nugget at Greenock but lost sight of her off The Cloch on the Saturday night. We later learned that she had been struck twice, when beating against an easterly wind. She was hit first by a cruiser, 'The Hungarian', and then almost immediately suffered a second, fatal blow from a schooner, 'The Ladykirk'. Passengers on board The Hungarian reported hearing cries for help from The Nugget, cries from three or four persons. To this day it strikes me as incredible that in such a strong wind their voices could still be heard.

Thereafter, whenever this event was discussed within the family, it was unvaryingly described as "The Disaster". When the news of The Disaster reached her, my mother immediately rose from the chair by the fire, into which she had been placed by our neighbour Dr McHugh to receive the blow, and moved to the window. She looked out into the watery winter sunshine, and sighed. It was the sound of someone just breaking. Her hand shook as she reached out and slowly pulled down the blind. Without a word, she moved through the house, pulling blinds and curtains against the thin November sun, until the house was shrouded in a buttery yellow darkness. At eleven o’clock in the morning I went to my room and fell asleep on top of the bed I shared with my sister Jean. When I woke up at five o’clock that evening, I could see nothing.

It was at a funeral Mass for the three men a month later that I met Eddie for the first time. He was on three days’ leave from the Irish Lights. He was a lighthouse man, and my sisters and cousins commented on how handsome he looked in his uniform. I could see nothing at this time and was indignant when he called at our house before his return to duty and asked if I would do him the courtesy of sending him the local newspaper, the Larne Times, every week. He said he had developed a keen interest in the affairs of the town in his short time there, but he left without receiving any such assurance from me. My cousin Stella, however, followed him after he left without my knowing, and for a year faithfully sent the paper to him at his station. With the paper, Stella included ever longer notes on life in the town and our house, which she told him were being written by her from my dictation. I knew nothing of any of this, of course.

After a year, the three widows sold their houses in The Glynn and together bought and moved to a big house in St James in Belfast. There were six children, including my sisters Jean and Margaret and my three cousins – and all six were girls. So it became a house of nine women. I can remember so clearly the journey we took that day. Automobiles were still rare in this part of Ireland at the time and so we undertook the journey, the nine of us and everything we owned, on two charabancs.

Coincidentally, we flitted on the day that the Government of Ireland Act was passed, and so when we reached Belfast we were arriving in the capital city of the new state of Northern Ireland. Everything seemed so big to us - the streets so wide, the buildings so high. This was all described to me by my sisters and cousins, of course, as my sight had still not returned, despite the doctors being at an absolute loss to even explain the problem, let alone make it good.

What I remember are the sounds – of traffic, machinery, strange voices with harsh accents - some speaking in completely foreign tongues. And the smells: alien foods, and the acrid pall of chemicals which hung around the enormous linen mills and rope works we passed, a smell so sharp it seemed to actually prick your nose. I clung closely to my sisters as we made our way slowly through the city to our new home.

After less than a month in the new house, a letter was sent on from our old house and when Stella read it, she ran to fetch me, beside herself with excitement. It was from Eddie: he had two weeks’ leave and he intended to spend it in Larne, the town nearest The Glynn. Stella was so thrilled she could barely breathe and, forgetting herself, she read the letter to me. I, on the other hand, was bewildered that this man - who I scarcely remembered from the funeral a year before - should be writing to us now. Of course, I was completely unaware that Stella had spent the last year corresponding with him on my behalf. Stella now had no option then but to disclose all. When she told me what she done, I was beside myself with rage. When I told Mother, she too was furious with Stella, who quickly retired to her room in floods of tears.

As Mother and I discussed it, however, we quickly realised that we had no good reason to be angry with Eddie, and that as a matter of courtesy he should be written to and the unusual circumstances of his correspondence explained.

Three weeks later, we received a reply from Eddie, who - although clearly a little crestfallen - did not seem at all irate. Indeed, he wrote that he would instead spend his forthcoming two weeks’ leave in Belfast and requested my Mother’s permission to call at our house. Mother asked me what I thought and I told her that while I had no interest in the man, I felt we owed him for the ungracious deceit of which he had been the unwitting victim, and therefore the opportunity to extend him our hospitality should be graciously taken. Mother replied to Eddie on those lines, and less than a month later he arrived at our door.

Eddie, it soon became apparent, was an old-fashioned gentleman and he took the rather odd situation in his stride - even teasing Stella, to her chagrin. As he sat that afternoon in our parlour, I listened to his soft brogue assuring my Mother over and over again that she had nothing to reproach herself for and I confess my heart began to warm to him. He asked if he might call again to take me out the following day, in order that I should act as his guide to the strange city in which he somewhat unexpectedly found himself holidaying. Mother agreed and - although a little wary at first - I spent almost every afternoon of those two weeks with him, visiting the attractions of Belfast, most of which I hadn’t been to myself at that time : the castle, Botanic Gardens and the Zoo, then called Bellevue Gardens, which had opened just that year.

As we sat by the Palm House in Botanic Gardens on the last afternoon before his return to work I knew there was something he wanted to say. I could hear the rustling of his serge suit as he shifted uncomfortably on the bench beside me and cleared his throat repeatedly. Eventually he spoke. And he asked me to marry him.

I was stunned. In two weeks, he hadn’t so much as tried to take my hand as we walked. I pursed my lips, set my features to what I thought was a stern aspect, and told him I didn’t appreciate his humour. He assured me he was being entirely earnest and asked that I give his request my best consideration. Little consideration was necessary: I was at that time inclined to believe that I had a vocation, and my intention was therefore to join a nunnery. Further, I was seventeen years old and he was twenty five, and while age differences of that sort were by no means unusual for the time, it felt to me that there was a lifetime between us. I thanked him for his interest but told him that I must respectfully decline. I could sense his disappointment, but he remained courteous to a fault. I have to say I felt my heart soften toward him further as he asked if I would at least agree that we could continue to correspond. I did agree, as I felt that in some way he was owed at least that, and by then this kind and gentle man had begun to firmly establish himself in my affections.

There then began four years of letters, increasing all the while in both length and frequency. This time I dictated the letters myself to Mother, who would read me Eddie’s replies. In those four years he did not presume to visit again, and I heard each year of the holidays he took in his home county of Donegal or the Ring of Kerry with increasingly sharp pangs of disappointment that he did not call to see me.

It was the beginning of the summer of 1925, in the fifth year of our correspondence, that my sight was restored. I awoke one morning and when I opened my eyes they were flooded with a light so brilliant and unrelenting that I was fearful of what was happening. I rose from my bed and stumbled to my Mother’s room, crying, almost hysterical with fear and joy. My Mother embraced me as she too cried, before falling to her knees to give thanks for our little miracle. The doctors were just as incapable of understanding the return of my sight as they had been of explaining its initial loss.
Later that day, a letter arrived from Eddie, and although my eyes were tender and sore, and still struggling to find their focus, they fell greedily onto the little blue envelope. My hands trembled as I tore it open, but the words were just swimming on the page, and I was disappointed to have to ask my Mother to read it for me. She confirmed just what I had hoped: Eddie’s three weeks holidays this year were to be spent in Belfast.

The weeks between the arrival of that letter and the arrival of Eddie were the longest of my life. Even with my sight restored, things seemed strangely dull and muted. My sisters and cousins helped keep me busy, showing me all the things I’d been living among for years but had never seen. They brought me into town to shop for new clothes for Eddie’s visit and so the excitement in the house rose with each passing day.

Eventually, the day arrived and so did Eddie. A rather halting knock on the door announced his arrival, and I was literally pushed out into the hall to greet him. When I opened the door, we both broke into the widest smiles as I saw him for the first time. My sisters and cousins were right - he did look handsome in his uniform; tall and distinguished and proud. For the first time, the irony of the situation struck me – the young girl who had lost her father, grandfather and uncle at sea had fallen for a man whose job it was to keep safe from harm all those who sailed the high seas.

The following three weeks passed in a blur and before I knew it, it was Eddie’s last day of leave. We found ourselves on the same bench in Botanic Gardens on which we had sat five years before. This time, Eddie’s discomfort was plain for me to see, and I nervously awaited the moment. When it arrived, he gently took my hand, looked straight into my eyes and in the softest of voices, barely audible above the stiff summer breeze in the trees all around us, he said, “Rós” – from the first day he had called me Rós, the Irish for Rose, as he was from an Irish-speaking part of Donegal – “Will you marry me?”

I barely allowed him to finish asking before I replied – “Yes. Yes I will, Eddie”.

We were married within the year and honeymooned in Kerry. We bought a lovely house on the Victoria Road in Larne and made our home there. Eddie was appointed to the lighthouse in Islandmagee. A few years later, we were blessed by the arrival of our first daughter, Margaret, followed closely by another girl, Stasia, and a son, James.

The story ends on Easter Sunday 1976: Eddie was taken ill during Mass, and spent the rest of the day in bed. That night when I went up, I brought him the tablets he had been prescribed for his heart. I left them on his bedside table and kissed him goodnight.

“Rós”, he said weakly, “Could you get me a glass of water? My mouth is awful dry.”
I returned to the bedroom with a heavy tumbler of water and put it in his hand to help wash the pills down. I turned my back to him to walk round to my side of the bed, and heard a thump as the tumbler hit the floor. In that moment, I knew the romance was over.

END