W2F-014 The Sergeant-0.txt
The Sergeant

Mary Cummins

Past Lisselton, on the road between Ballybunion and Listowel, there is a spot in Ballydonoghue that divided my father's territory from that of Listowel. There is a pub, the Thatch of the Half Way House and a stream near it, that marks the line. He pointed it out once. My parish ends here, he said. A bit self-conscious he was, using the language of another power structure. But that was how he saw his jurisdiction. There were other markers on the roads to Tralee and Limerick.

He knew them. Inside those boundaries he knew every stick, stone and person. In those days, in the Fifties and Sixties, he would cycle to those boundary lines frequently. The Listowel road was straight but up Doon and on to Rahavannig or Beale, he would push his bicycle up the hills, mount at the top and cycle down the other side. The other guards would do it too, in turn.

When he did not cycle out the country, he went for a walk every afternoon in winter. In summer, if it was fine, he went down to the Long Strand every afternoon for a swim. Like everything, he did it according to the rules. Wading out until the water was up to his chest he would swim parallel with the shore or swim in. He never went into the water before the end of May. He taught us to swim, holding up your chin while you flailed around trying to get the guts to lift your feet off the sea-bed. In those days there was only one lifeguard. There was usually at least one drowning every summer. For a day or two a pall of quiet and grief would hang over the town even though they were usually visitors and you would not have known them.

You could set your watch by him every day when he went to the post office at about a minute to four. He would drop all the brown envelopes with the harp on them into the box and then set off down to the strand, walking in long strides, sometimes as far as the Cashen. This was his routine from after the Listowel Races when Ballybunion closed down until the following Easter, if the weather was good, or Whit.

Walking back the Long Strand, he would take in deep breaths, sometimes stopping for a minute. On fine days, when you could see nothing except the glassy sea and the coast of Clare, the sea gulls swooping, he would say, "Isn't this grand. Think of all those people stuck in cities, working away in the heat and the smells. Look what they 're missing," he would say, before striding off again. It has given me a life-long habit of fast walking, tireless until I stop and realise how far I 've gone.

Before the sandhills skirting the golf course were eroded, there was an alternative route up and down the dunes, jumping over Kitty's River. If he was busy, he would only go as far as the 6th, mostly to the 9th and sometimes all the way to the 18th hole. Then, in the days of less bustle on the golf links, you could cross over to the Sandhill Road. That was before the new golf club was built. Long before the brand new clubhouse that replaced it this year, was thought of. The Taj Mahal, some call it.
Sometimes we would go into the graveyard at Kilahenny and examine the graves and look at the new headstones. Then back up to the Main Street. He would tip his cap to most people. "Hello, men," he would say to small groups at corners. One woman used to say, "Gooday sergeant. How's crime?" He got a kick out of that and would tell my mother when we got home. Sometimes, he would chuckle suddenly to himself - "How's crime".
On those afternoon walks he would wear a brown gaberdine coat (tweed sports jacket in summer) over his uniform. It was his usual attire unless we were going to Cork or Tralee or he was going to a family funeral. A few months ago, I saw a man coming towards me across the newsroom in The Irish Times. The face was familiar but it was his gaberdine coat over the blue shirt and navy tie that suddenly, after nearly 20 years, brought the image of my father back instantly. It was Lawrence Wren, the former commissioner. He had known my father and used to take Miss Carmody's house, next to the barracks with his family sometimes in the summer.

A few times a year, we would go on a really long walk up to the Hill (Cnoc an &/air where Fionn and the Fianna were supposed to have fought a bloody battle) and down the other side by Moohane to Ahafona and up by East End. Townlands merged into other townlands. After Rahavannig there was Derra, the dividing line from Ballylongford. Then Lahasreagh and Ballynoneen. He knew where each started and finished. He knew who was in every house, who had died there, who had emigrated and who had trouble or secrets. On a long walk out of the town, he might tell you things but not much. He was compulsively, obsessively secretive or discreet. Sometimes he would spell things backwards for my mother and we would try to guess. Sometimes they would talk in Irish. We would try to keep up.

This discretion passed on through the wives of the other guards. They had a special relationship. While they were part of the general life of the town, the ICA, doing the brasses in the church and suchlike, they were also particular friends with each other. Often, it was only the jobs of their spouses they had in common but that common, almost familial thing passed on to them, like a mantle of responsibility.

Then, the barracks was the centre of most business. Spring had arrived when the boards went up outside the door with notices on them to say it was a breach of a by-law to allow thistle, ragwort or dock grow on your land. The guards did the census and everything else of an official nature so they knew everything. People had come to get passports, for references, numerous other minutiae. There was little welfare. My father would send people - mostly women who were left widowed or abandoned - to Dan Spring in Tralee. Neither he nor my mother ever talked politics, but it seemed to be taken as read that it was Dan Spring who got things done. On 15th August, Pattern Day, Dan Spring's brother, Frank, who was the social welfare officer for the area, used our sitting room as the base for the annual ISPCC collection. There would be boxes everywhere and collectors coming and going.

There was no bank then in the town for much of that time. Some lending agency in Cork used to ring my father to find out about people's credit worthiness. If you hung over the railings on the landing at the top of the stairs you could hear bits of the conversation. You could hear my father telling the man what size the farm or the business was, if they were a good bet.

The lost children, who turned up kicking and hysterical every Sunday afternoon in the summer, were kept in the kitchen until their parents, red-faced, cross, relieved and sweating, arrived to claim them. People, usually men, being taken to the asylum in Killarney were kept in the sitting-room until they were ready to leave. Long after I left home, for me, Killarney still only meant the lunatic asylum. In the summer we often went to sleep to the howls and rich, roaring language of drunks in the "lock-up" which faced onto the backyard. They would bang the doors and curse and swear until they passed out, exhausted in the tiny cell.

On Sunday afternoons, my father and mother would go for a different walk. More of a stroll, usually up Doon Road and back by the Cliff Road. Stopping and talking to others. Sometimes they would meet the nuns and he would come back with accounts of how we were doing. My two sisters were hard-working and conscientious. I was bored and brazen, with a name for being clever. I got away with a lot. He used to say I was like his mother.

She lived in Cahirciveen where he was born. My grandfather, who was in the RIC died young and left her with five sons. She reared and educated them on a tiny pension. She was supposed to be very strict and my cousin, Marian, who lived in Cahirciveen once told me that all the sons were terrifed of her. I remember going to see her with my father. Once she gave me a ten-shilling note. I remember my father telling me that when he joined the guards he used to send her £ 2 a month. This was out of his pay packet of £ 8.

My father was from Kerry and my mother from west Cork. The Cork/Kerry thing only surfaced around the time of All-Irelands when they would banter about which team was best. But my father never openly showed a particular affiliation to Kerry. Maybe it was being in the guards. He had worked briefly in Dublin after leaving the Depot and hated it. He talked about having to walk in pairs on the streets around O'Connell Street and the open cheek they got from the Dubliners. Strict and authoritarian, he had no time for that and was disparaging about the natives of the capital. He had worked in a few different parts of the country but hardly ever referred to them.

We never argued, never talked back until after we had left home. From time to time he would say that Dev had been right not to get into the War. The country was too poor. I never knew if he was trying to rise me when he said the worst day for the country was when the English left. When I was drifting first into communism, and then into wet socialism, he would never argue but usually had some missile to throw me off my stride. He had no time for Conor Cruise O'Brien. Any man who would leave his wife... He did not spell it out but his strength of feeling was palpable. To him, to do such a thing was a total abnegation of responsibility. It spelt feckless, irresponsible, selfish. When I was raving on about Noel Browne one day, he corrected something and said yes, he had done such and such but it was when he was in Fianna F&/ail. Noel Browne in Fianna F&/ail? My youthful idealism was severely jolted.

He was never judgemental, at least in a language we could understand. He would describe someone as a blackguard. A rogue or a rascal was a lesser evil. Sometimes he used that description with humour in his voice. The only work of totally dismissive reproof that he used about anybody - usually a man - was, "he has no savvy"." To this day I don't know what it means, but in the way he used it, no savvy meant that someone was not the thing. It was the ultimate dismissal.

His pride in the Garda Siochana, or the Force, as he usually referred to it was cosmic. There was no other body of men like it, no better members, no higher standards. There was a sort of universal pride thing in it that was almost familial. When someone got promoted, or someone else's children did well, it was almost as good as if one of us passed something. But also, if a guard broke a rule there was a muted sympathy in the air. There was no overt criticism. My mother used to talk sometimes about poor old this one or that one whom they knew from another place and who had a fondness for the drink or something.
