The Metals

It was unsettling to go back to the place where my parents used to live. It is not where I grew up; I was already gone and living my own life when they moved there, bringing the same furniture, objects and paintings they had in all our houses, the same atmosphere of things unsaid and unacknowledged: the emotional wasteland of our family life. They moved from the country to a house in Dalkey, south of Dublin, where my brother and I would visit them, at Christmas and in the summer, somewhat disoriented by the different configurations of the furniture but doing our best to pretend that we were still a family.

            It was their last home, my father died there and my mother lived on  in a different, more convenient house, as widows do. So the town was full of memories, glancing ones, as if we had still been part of their lives as old people. It wasn’t only my parents who haunted Dalkey: we also saw an old friend from whom we had long heard nothing, and who seemed to be drunk at ten o’clock in the morning. And the mother of one of my daughter’s dearest friends, who died too young; we saw her at Powerscourt Waterfall, surrounded by large family groups setting up barbecues.

            The only person amongst us whose ties with my family are not by blood had decided that we should climb the Sugarloaf, the mountain that is visible all along the Wicklow coast, indeed is emblematic of that coast. A certain amount of dissent greeted him when he proposed this: when I was a child my father used to make us climb some mountain every summer, and as soon as we got started clouds would gather and it would began to rain. My brother and I would trail behind, complaining, as my father got further and further ahead, and when we eventually caught up with him he would be drying himself with his handkerchief after bathing in some dark mountain lake; trekking across the Wicklow mountains was a family tradition. No special equipment, just stout shoes and a handkerchief. There is even something called the Hart Walk, 75 miles over the mountains, which my father’s Great-Uncle Henry did for a bet in just under 24 hours in June 1886.

So with history in mind we set off to emulate Uncle Henry, but it was far too easy. There was a heatwave, the sky was blue and the sun shone. You could drive quite far up, and leave the car in a respectable carpark with an informative noticeboard, unlike the old days of leaving the car near Sally Gap where it was said it would be broken into as soon as you turned your back. A five-year old grandchild who had firmly stated earlier that morning that she hated climbing and didn’t want anything to do with the Sugarloaf, took one look and basically ran up it. I stopped before the rocky part at the top, made a scientific study of the lichen on the most comfortable rocks, and took pictures of the others on the summit; it was the best almost ascent of an Irish mountain I have ever made. Fortunately neither my father nor Uncle Henry was there to see me, although they would surely have approved of the granddaughter.

            Like the Sugarloaf, Dalkey has changed a lot in the last few years, but then so has everywhere else. Still, that my parents lived and died there now seems like prehistory, as if the place had for all those years been the same, and only now had changed. Up the hill was the nursing home where my father died; on the way to the beach we had a glimpse of the first house my parents had, the one with the view of the sea and where you could see the mailboat on its way to England (someone would always point it out), and here is the station where my father took the train to Dublin. I didn’t look for my mother’s last house, having heard that it has been completely transformed, but did think of her last dog, a Tibetan terrier who used to get top marks for Beauty and Good Behaviour from the grooming salon, and who died when my brother was staying with her. They buried him in the garden and my mother said she would never get another dog.

            We stayed in a house that was nowhere near either of our old houses, also much more modern than they were. But it was near the Atmospheric Road (where long ago there was an atmospheric railway) and, better still, just beside a path called the Metals. I had never heard of this or seen it before; it was the track of the railway, built in 1817, that was used to bring blocks of granite from Dalkey Quarry down to the harbour at Dún Laoghaire, where they were used to construct the piers. Dalkey granite is apparently particularly hard; it was also used for part of the Thames embankment. We walked up to the quarry, which is unused now except by climbers; it is open, not fenced off, and festooned with climbing ropes. A fantastic sight, with jagged chunks cut out of it; an informative sign said if you looked closely you could see the holes where the dynamite had been inserted. Once hacked, or blown, out of the hillside the granite would be sent off down the hill, trundling along this path that still exists, with walls on either side, running along between the main railway line and the backs of the houses, presumably hardly changed apart from the removal of the rails. It brought us out handily beside Teddy’s ice cream shop, which is almost as much part of the Dún Laoghaire ritual as walking to the end of one of those long piers made of Dalkey granite. We did not do this walk now, the last time I did it was with my brother after my mother died.

            Now the main street of Dalkey is lined with cafes and restaurants, with people sitting outside drinking wine and Aperol Spritzes, and nearby on Killiney Hill you can get a cappuccino with oatmilk, but the Metals are still there, a relict of a not all that distant past when the town had a different function. Walking along them, hidden by high hedges, between the back gardens and the railway line, invisible to the modern world, it felt as if it was all much longer ago, as if we were on one of those fairy paths made in ancient times. Now we were ghosts come back to look at old haunts: partly to feel again the pain of the past, but also to try and paper it over with something else. I can’t be certain but it seems to me now, a few weeks later, that we made a good start.