Mo Laethanta Saoire: Ashgrove Cottage, by Jamie O'Connell
Jamie O'Connell
When I think of the happiest moments of my childhood summers, I recall wild roses, their cerise pink petals mingling with the shooting stamens of cream-gold honeysuckle. These are the flowers that grew over the stone wall of the front garden in Ashgrove Cottage, my grandparent’s home in Ballyhooly, North Cork.
These roses smelled in the way shop varieties have since been forced to sacrifice in the name of showier blooms. The honeysuckle scent lingered too – a warm top-note on the afternoon breeze.
I recall the French grey of the front gate, tipped with royal blue, with chicken wire stretched between the gaps to keep the two Jack Russells, Miley and Tiny, safe from the ever-increasing traffic on the road to Fermoy.
Either side of the path from the gate were two small formal beds of box hedging and cultivated roses. In amongst the flowers were plastic birds held upright on delicate wires, baby blue, canary yellow and plasticine red, with propeller wings that spun in the stronger gusts.
Even as a child, I was unsure of their plastic beauty; it clashed with the rambling roses, the moss between the stones, and the faded yellow-brown leaves of the long-wilted daffodils.
On Saturdays, our grandparents collected us and either brought us to the cottage or to visit our cousins in Fermoy. I recall singing ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ with my sisters in the back seat, though to my eight-year-old self, it was not ‘Bonnie’ but ‘Bunny’, which made no sense but I was a child and happily singing, so I never thought to question it.
On the days we went to Ashgrove, Grandad parked the car on the left side of the cottage, where the ground continued to slope back till it reached an ancient apple tree. Beyond the garden boundaries were fields and hedges, which drifted downwards till they came to the Blackwater River.
To keep us three children amused, my grandfather opened the gate on the right side of the cottage, to where once there had been a kitchen garden. It still had the ridges of soil, the scars of having once grown potatoes and root vegetables, along with a border of fruit bushes, blackcurrants and gooseberries, mostly overgrown. Beyond the bushes, at the boundary wall, was a line of conifers with two swings. My sisters always claimed these two for themselves, they being ‘two’ after all, so I had to go to the back of the cottage to the third swing, which hung from the apple tree.
I would sit on that swing, looking at the browning cooking apples in the tufts of grass, listening to the echoes of my sister’s laughter. I had gained a swing but hated being alone. There was no fun in this splendid isolation. Eventually, I would give in and go back to the conifers to watch them play, or grow upset until we agreed to take turns on the two adjoining swings.
In late summer, to get us out from under their feet, my grandparents would give us each one of those empty square margarine tubs and ask us to pick the summer fruits from the bushes, promising a pound coin if we did. Though the blackcurrants were sharp, they were edible, in a way the gooseberries seemed not (not that we did not try). The gooseberries had a brownish fungus that tarnished their smooth pale green skin, so we would try to peel the skins and suck out their middles, with eye-twitching results. However, we preferred to pick gooseberries, as they would fill the plastic containers in a fraction of the time of the other berries.
At the back of the cottage, around the old apple tree, some old appliances had been left, probably to be dealt with at a future date, but had remained forgotten about: an old white oven and an old Morris Minor, half-covered in a blackberry bush. There was also the remains of a chicken coop, covered with wire. I recall putting my palms on either side of taut chicken wire, my hands together as if praying, and moving them around. Anyone who has ever experienced the sensation understands this. It is wonderfully pleasant, turning the familiar, the skin on your palms, into something unfamiliar.
One summer, all lost in a simultaneous daydream, my sisters and I decided to bake an apple tart on the old cooker, using the scattered apples from the ancient tree. In our mutual dream, it seemed essential we core the apples, and we hammered the soft fruit down on the broken metal window wipers of the Morris Minor and twisted them.
I was too vigorous, the fruit slid down easily and my palm was pieced by metal. We cried and screamed our way up the garden and, with a small brown hexagonal bottle of iodine, my grandfather cleaned the wound.
As I write this piece and follow the trail of images that is my memory, I wonder about my reader, if they have grown doubtful of my reflections of this ‘secret garden’. Yet, this patch was never designed for three grandchildren; it was the ghost of a working garden, from a time when my grandparents had been parents with three young children, when my grandfather had worked for the forestry and growing vegetables meant his single income was stretched much further.
Later, my grandfather told me about being shamed by the local priest when his name was listed on the church door for being unable to pay his dues. Times were hard; though the garden was a dreamland for us 1980s children, only a generation before it had fed my father and aunts.
What the garden nourished in us children was something different. It represented the consistent love of my grandparents. Each weekend, nana with her headscarf and Claddagh broach, grandad with his cap and sore knee, came to us and took us to that special place, to Ashgrove Cottage with its wild garden.
I felt safe amongst the line of blackcurrant bushes, the scent of honeysuckle, the echoes of my sisters laughing, and that ancient apple tree. Outside of the faded garden of Ashgrove Cottage all was not calm, but it all vanished once inside that grey gate covered in chicken wire. It was happiness, without us children ever stating it as such, a happiness that has survived decades.
To this day, it is memories of sunny Saturday afternoons in that garden that steady me. It is why I feel peace in my adopted hometown of Kenmare, where I walk the dog most days in Reenagross, the small reserve of oaks that slopes down to the estuary, where greenshanks pick for worms in low tide. It is always in nature, meadows of uncut grass or forests with dappled light, where I feel home in the way I once did at my grandparent’s cottage.
- Jamie O’Connell is from Ballyhooly, in North Cork. His debut novel, Diving For Pearls, was published recently. He also runs an advanced creative writing course through www.blackwaterwriting.com
