Stone me! How my mother and Séamus Murphy conspired to dash my hopes of being a sculptor

IT was May, 1963, and the Inter Cert was looming. I had had enough. I just wanted to be out, not just out of North Mon, but out of rooms and buildings.

I knew my parents - well, really my mother - wanted me to stay on and do my Leaving but it seemed so long to be stuck in those old, tired rooms.

No I wanted out, out in the air.

When I thought about it, I also knew that I was not going to get an apprenticeship, not a usual one anyway. I had been considered too bright for the trade school at Primary Cert so I had gone into the academic stream. And also, my dad wasn’t a craftsman and that counted a lot.

How it happened, I don’t know, but I set my heart on being a stonemason. Not a lot of boys wanted to do it so I might get in. Not a brickie, but a stonecutter.

I was good at Art in school, maybe that explained where the idea came from. And I was a reader. I had read a novel about the raising of a medieval cathedral, and the stonemasons loomed large in it. They were heroes and what 14-year-old doesn’t want to be a hero? In any case, that’s what I set my heart on.

I told my mother, she was the power in the house, if I could convince her, my dad wouldn’t be a problem. She was furious. It was a sort of grown-up anger I hadn’t seen directed at me before. Oh, I’d gotten the occasional slap and been shouted at often enough, or just overruled, but those storms passed over very quick. Not this.

My mother remained angry with the idea of my leaving school all the next month. My father took his lead from her and tried to talk me out of it.

“I don’t want any son of mine having to take off his coat to work,” he said.

“You have the head on you, stay at school.”

“You’ll be out in all weathers,” and “Nobody in our family ever worked at the stonecutting.”

I didn’t rise. I knew better than to argue with my dad on stuff like this. He would get annoyed with me and that would make it harder to convince my mam. But I kept at it with her. I thought the argument about my earning my keep would help, but it seemed to annoy her even more.

Summer hols arrived and I was working in Spitere’s shop on Shandon Street, stacking shelves and going to the cash and carry for supplies. But everybody, even Mr Spitere, knew I wasn’t going to stay.

I kept up the pressure on my mother and then, out of the blue, she caved in. At teatime one evening she said: “We’ll go and have a talk with Mr Murphy on the Watercourse Road. We will go out to him tomorrow and see what he has to say.”

Séamus Murphy was the only stonecutter that I knew of. Delighted, I tried to thank her, but she brushed it aside and I knew she didn’t want to talk about it.

I left the house on Cathedral Road and went to my best pal’s house on Church Street to tell him the good news. Nielie O’Donavan lived halfway along Church Street and Shandon loomed so tall at his front door, you’d think it was going to topple down on you.

As we walked around to the top of Redmond Street, smells filled our noses and heads. A wet, warm steam escaped from O’Gorman’s hat factory. Just steps away inside the doorway, always kept open, you could see the workers shaping the hats on the steam moulders. The hiss of the machines and the smell of wet felt was continuous. Then there was a sweet factory, much nicer smells, but we knew from experience that nothing could be cadged out the door of that one.

We sat together on the plinth of the Butter Exchange. Across the way in a curious round building was a margarine factory. Its doorway and the entrance way were always slick with fats. And it had its own greasy smell.

We had played about here all our lives. The Butter Exchange, Skiddy’s Lane and Shandon’s graveyard were the playground of all the local kids’ lives. We took them for granted. They just were.

We talked for a while about my prospects and what might have changed my mother’s mind. Then we sat quietly.

Now, for the first time, I looked, really looked, at the buildings around me. We were seated in what could be the entrance to a Greek temple. Four large columns rose around us, on vast limestone bases, holding up a flat roof with a solid cantilevered plinth. The entrance was closed up, but there was another around the corner towards Dominick Street. Not as grand but still in use. On the other side was a set of six arches, walled up except for fanlights, leading the way back to Shandon.

Those arches and fanlights were repeated in the margarine factory. A perfectly circular building which stood in an open square at the top of Redmond Street. It had a sort of slated domed roof with a central skylight.

Either of these buildings would have been strange enough in these back streets of Cork, but both within yards of each other?

And then Shandon! Twenty yards away in the other direction the great steeple topped with the giant golden salmon. Two faces limestone, two red sandstone.

But not just red sandstone. The corner stones on those faces were limestone too. It produced that peculiarly Cork look. Rashers of bacon! A tall, thin square tower topped with three other towers, each smaller than the one below, then a domed cupola made it like a finger pointing at the sky. As if challenging God. Then the ‘Goldy Fish’. The final, impossible weathervane.

Each face in the main tower had a giant clock. Nobody who grew up in these streets ever needed to own a watch. No matter where you were, you knew almost by instinct which way to glance to see the time. The clocks never quite agreed with each other, hence the nickname ‘The Four Faced Liar’. In those more relaxed times, Shandon’s time was good enough.

Now I looked and realised that unknown men in the trade I aspired to join had made these huge and impressive things. I would have called them beautiful if I knew how, but we weren’t used to talking like that. But I knew they were important and impossible. Both these things filled me with a pride and humility at the same time.

The next day I told Mr Spitere there was a job my mother wanted me for and I knocked off work early at 3pm. I went home and my mother nagged me into changing my clothes and putting on my polished shoes and off we set. Down to the Cathedral and then left into Great William O’Brien Street. The Watercourse Road was on our right and Mr Murphy’s yard was at the Blackpool end of it.

The connecting streets had funny names to my ears, even if I was used to them: Allinett’s Lane, Bleasby Street, Berwick Lane, and strangest of all, Wriyons Lane. We crossed to the Watercourse by Maddens Buildings.

I was getting very nervous by the time we reached the large double wooden gates. They were closed but there was a small door in one of them. We stepped in gingerly, this was as strange a world to my mother as it was to me.

All around the edge of the yard were piles of different stone seemingly dropped at random. There were a few small sheds, barely shelters from the rain. From one of them came a fairly steady ringing of metal on stone. Each blow rang out a note and then, after three or four notes, the pitch would change and a new note would be struck.

My mother waited for a pause in this music and “Mr Murphy?” she called.

The ringing stopped instantly. An old hessian sack hanging across the entrance to the shed was drawn back and Mr Murphy emerged, covered in a fine white dust. He wore what had once been a white coat over his clothes and an old, battered soft hat on his head.

“Ah, Mrs McCarthy,” he said. “Is this the boy?”

“Stephen,” she answered, nudging me forward.

“Very pleased to meet you sir,” I said, extending my hand.

My mother explained that I had taken it into my head to be a stonecutter and thought a talk with a stonecutter might make me see a bit of sense. Nobody was in any doubt what she thought of the matter.

Mr Murphy took a long moment to look me up and down.

“Well now, Mrs McCarthy,” he said, taking off his glasses and wiping them in a handkerchief that emerged from his clothes under the white coat. “Have you got messages to do and could you leave the boy with me for an hour or so?”

“Yes, Mr Murphy,” she said. “My mother lives just up here in Thomas Davis Street. and I must visit her.”

“Good, good, Mrs McCarthy, come back when you’re finished there then.”

We both watched my mother walk out the gate and turn into Blackpool.

“Well Stephen, come in.”

I noticed that when Mr Murphy spoke there was a large gap between his front teeth. This steadied me, it made him human, approachable in a way I couldn’t fathom. He lifted the hessian sack to one side and I led the way into the shed.

Inside was a heavy wooden bench littered with stone chipping. Similarly the floor underneath. On the bench itself was a headstone. It was already cut out and Mr Murphy had been working on the lettering. I thought it was very creepy.

“So, Stephen, you want to be a stonecutter?”

“Yes sir.”

“And why, Stephen?”

I was suddenly tongue-tied. I didn’t know if I could explain to myself why this urge had come over me. I certainly couldn’t explain to Mr Murphy. I mumbled an “I don’t know” into my chest.

Mr Murphy didn’t seem to mind. He sighed. “Sit on that stool over there and we’ll chat,” he said. “I’ll carry on.”

So I sat down and Mr Murphy picked up the mallet and the small lettering chisel and started the ringing music again.

“Tell me, Stephen,” he said after a short while, “do you read any books?”

“Oh yes, Mr Murphy, loads and loads.”

“Good, good. What are you reading just now?”

I drew breath and started into telling the plot of A Tale Of Two Cities. After a long chat about the book and Paris, which Mr Murphy had been to as a young man, and even a little about Charles Dickens, Mr Murphy told me about an exciting book he read when he was 14 or 15. He didn’t quite remember the plot though and the story rambled off.

I next told the story of a book I had recently read, Missing, Believed Lost, a sailing adventure story set at sea and in the Caribbean. This started a long chat about the differences between Irish and English schools. The boys in Missing, Believed Lost were from a public school. It hadn’t occurred to me that the schools which featured so much in my childhood literature were so different to the only school I knew well, the North Mon.

This led us on to talk of hurling and bowling and drag racing. Before I knew it, my mother was back.

I was much more relaxed now. I liked Mr Murphy. He spoke softly. He waited for me to finish explaining something before butting in. And he always had an interesting take on anything I said, a take which had never occurred to me before. I felt Mr Murphy liked me too and that we would get on well. I was sure I had it in the bag!

Pleasantries over.

“Well, Mr Murphy?” my mother said. What came next was like a bucket of cold water over me.

“Keep him at the books, Mrs McCarthy.” And with those few words, Mr Murphy dashed all my hopes of freedom.

I did indeed stay at the books, and in the wider sense I am still at the books. As I got older, I changed my mind about Mr Murphy. I left behind my resentment and saw the clear-sighted man who had helped push me firmly in the right direction. If you asked me, I would even say I was grateful to Mr Murphy.

But then, one day, soon after my mother’s funeral, when I was musing about these matters as you often do after the death of a parent, I remembered.

“Is this the boy?” The first thing other than my mother’s name that I had heard Mr Murphy say.

And then, in an instant, I knew the truth. It had had nothing to do with Mr Murphy at all. And I had almost as little to do with it as the stonecutter. There must have been an earlier conversation.

I knew it for a certainty that my mother had been to see Mr Murphy the day before and had asked him to help.

No matter what he thought of Stephen after an hour’s chat, there was only ever going to be one outcome. “Keep him at the books,” said my mother!

SÉAMUS MURPHY FACT FILE

Born in Burnfort, near Mallow, Séamus Murphy is one of Ireland’s finest ever stone carvers/sculptors.

He grew up in Ballyhooley Road and Daniel Corkery was among his teachers.

Séamus was an apprentice for John Aloysius O’Connell in Blackpool and opened a studio next door.

His best known works are Church of the Ascension, Blackpool, The Onion Seller in Bishop Lucey Park, and busts of Terence McSwiney and Tomás MacCurtain at City Hall.