The Stations

There was a time when Mass did not always begin with a journey to church. Sometimes, the church came to you.

We always looked forward to the Stations.

The excitement began long before the evening itself, in conversations overheard between adults about whose turn it might be next, who had hosted them the previous year, which part of the district they seemed to be moving towards. It was one of those mysteries of childhood that apparently occupied everybody and yet was explained to nobody. We listened, gathered what we could, waited for certainty to emerge from speculation, until eventually it did.

This time the Stations were coming to us.

We lived in Ocean Wave then, the guesthouse my parents ran in the parish district of Curraheen, overlooking Dingle Bay. I must have been ten or eleven when our turn came, old enough to understand that something important was about to happen, but still young enough to enjoy the upheaval without carrying any responsibility for what caused it.

My mother carried plenty.

For weeks beforehand, she seemed to acquire an entirely new way of looking at the house. Paintwork that had been perfectly acceptable suddenly looked tired. Windows that had already been cleaned required cleaning again. Pieces of furniture that had occupied the same place without controversy for years were reconsidered. Small imperfections, previously invisible to everybody, declared themselves one by one as though the announcement of the Stations had somehow brought them into being.

I understand that anxiety differently now.

My parents were still, in some ways, blow-ins to Glenbeigh. My mother had come from Camp, on the Tralee to Dingle road, my father from Connemara, and unlike many of the families around us, we had no great network of relations scattered through the neighbouring townlands. These were the people among whom my parents had made their lives: people they met on the road, in the village, after Sunday Mass; people whose cars they recognised before they could see who was driving; people with whom conversations began through an open car window and sometimes continued long enough to hold up whoever happened to be behind.

However generous the occasion might have been in principle, my mother knew something else as well. By the end of the evening, half the district would know whether the windows were clean.

Kathleen saved us from taking any of it too seriously.

She worked with my parents in the guesthouse and belongs so completely to my memory of Ocean Wave that even now I find it difficult to picture those years without imagining her somewhere nearby, getting on with whatever needed doing. She had an instinct for the moment when another chair, another cup or another unfinished job had begun to assume the proportions of a national emergency, and usually had the remark that could reduce it to its proper size again.

There were chairs everywhere.

They were counted, carried upstairs, counted again, borrowed from wherever another few might be found and somehow fitted into the upstairs lounge where the Mass was to be held. The familiar arrangement of the room gradually disappeared beneath them. Cups and saucers emerged from cupboards. Plates accumulated in the kitchen. Food multiplied on every available surface until the amount being prepared bore less and less relationship to the number of people anybody seriously expected to feed.

That, too, belonged to the Stations. Nobody was going home hungry. There were sandwiches and cakes, cocktail sausages and plates waiting to be filled, tea enough for an army and, tucked away until a more appropriate stage of proceedings, the bottles that would eventually appear when the priest had finished and the Stations began their gentle transformation into something altogether more social.

For us children, the preparations were nearly as exciting as the evening. The house was changing around us. Rooms we knew without looking were being rearranged. Chairs appeared where chairs did not belong. The good cups were out. Adults were distracted. Conversations stopped when somebody remembered something else that had to be done. Everywhere there was that unmistakable feeling from childhood that the ordinary world had been temporarily suspended and something was about to happen.

The Mass was to be held upstairs in the lounge.

It was late spring, and from the windows the room looked across Dingle Bay towards the mountains beyond, a view so familiar to us then that I doubt we gave it much thought. I can see it now with a clarity that surprises me. The altar had been arranged with its back to the windows. Beyond the priest, beyond the candles and whatever flowers had been placed there, the bay stretched away into the evening.

There was still plenty of light when the first cars came into the drive. We heard them before we saw anyone: tyres below the windows, an engine falling silent, the blunt closing of a car door, then voices in the hallway and the sound of people beginning to make their way upstairs.

One by one, our neighbours appeared in the lounge. We knew these people.

We passed them on the road. Saw them in the village. Stood near them at Mass. My parents stopped the car to talk to them through an open window.

Yet many had never been inside our house.

There was something faintly thrilling in seeing them enter a room that belonged so completely to our family. Coats were removed. Seats were chosen and then refused because somebody else should have the better one. People moved along to make room for the next arrival. The room filled with voices and greetings and the smells of the evening outside, mingling with whatever perfume or aftershave had been put on before leaving home.

Gradually every chair filled. Conversation softened. The priest began. And for an hour, our upstairs lounge became a chapel.

What I remember most is not what was said but how it sounded: the familiar responses coming not from rows of people in the church but from neighbours sitting among our furniture. The voices belonged to people we knew individually, yet spoken together they became something else, while beyond the altar the late light slowly withdrew from Dingle Bay.

Of the Mass itself, almost everything has gone. I cannot remember the readings or the Gospel. Whatever the priest said in his sermon disappeared from my memory long ago. Yet things that could hardly have seemed worth remembering at all have remained extraordinarily close: somebody shifting position, the changing light outside the windows, the knowledge that downstairs there were plates of food waiting and that eventually we would be allowed near them.

Then Mass ended and the house exhaled. The change was almost immediate. Chairs turned towards one another. Conversations suspended for the Mass resumed where they had left off. Plates appeared. Cups knocked against saucers. Tea was poured and poured again, and the lounge that had been a chapel moments earlier became our sitting room once more, except that now it belonged, for the evening, to everybody.

Later came the bottles.

The men settled further into their chairs. Conversations grew louder and stories longer. Laughter travelled across the room from people we children could not always see. We moved around the edges of it all, stealing food when we thought nobody was watching, listening to things we only partly understood, enjoying that wonderful privilege of childhood: being allowed to remain in the company of adults without being expected to contribute anything to it.

Next door lived Pat and Jeff. They had previously owned the Falcon Inn outside the village before buying the guesthouse beside ours. Pat was Catholic and had come to the Stations. Jeff was Protestant and had stayed at home.

There was no drama in this. Jeff wasn’t Catholic. The Stations were. His absence therefore required no explanation. At least not to anybody except my father.

At some point, with the Mass finished and the evening well under way, my father noticed that Jeff was missing. Pat, I think, told him that Jeff would not come, but my father was not easily discouraged once he had decided that something made sense, and the idea that a neighbour should be sitting alone in the house next door while ours was full of people, food and drink evidently made very little sense to him.

So he went for him.

Of everything that happened that night, this is the part that remained.

I can still see my father outside, making his way towards the fence between the two properties, and Jeff there on the other side. I cannot hear what they said to one another and have no idea how long the conversation lasted. Perhaps my father had to persuade him. Perhaps Jeff protested that he was perfectly content where he was. Knowing my father, I suspect the possibility that the invitation might be declined was never given very serious consideration.

What remains is the image of the two men talking across that boundary.

It was a boundary they had crossed in other ways many times before.

Jeff kept an extraordinary organic garden, laid out in straight ridges with beautifully manicured grass paths running between them, and throughout the growing season things found their way from his side to ours: onions, chives, raspberries, fruit and vegetables, sometimes left in a box because there was more than Jeff and Pat could use.

The fence marked where one property ended and the other began. It had never been particularly successful at separating the people who lived on either side of it. That evening my father crossed it again. When he returned, Jeff was beside him.

I don’t remember anybody stopping to notice. Perhaps nobody did. There was no grand welcome, no rearrangement of the evening to accommodate what had happened. Another place was found. Jeff settled among the men. Something was put into his hand. Conversations continued. Somebody laughed. Another plate went around.

The evening simply made room for him.

By then, the careful room my mother had worried over for weeks must have been disappearing beneath the remains of the night: cups and saucers on tables, glasses beside them, plates holding the last sandwiches and crumbs of cake, chairs turned in every direction, the altar still there but no longer commanding the room.

And outside, Dingle Bay had disappeared.

The windows that had framed water and mountains behind the altar earlier in the evening were dark now, giving nothing back but the reflection of our own crowded lounge.

Eventually, people began to leave.

Coats were retrieved. Goodbyes began upstairs, continued down the stairs and started again at the door. Cars turned in the drive, headlights swept briefly across the house and then moved away into the darkness. Voices faded with them.

One by one, the neighbours disappeared back into the night until the house belonged to us again.

And the Stations moved on.

Those evenings have largely disappeared now, when Mass travelled from one house to another and a room belonging to one family was handed over, for a few hours, to everyone around them.

I am glad I knew them.

Not because I remember the prayers particularly well. I don’t.

Nor because some great lesson was delivered from the altar that evening. If there was, it has gone with the readings, the Gospel and whatever the priest said in his sermon.

What remained was far more ordinary.

Late spring light lingering over Dingle Bay. Neighbours coming up the stairs. My mother’s relief when there was finally nothing left to prepare. Kathleen making somebody laugh. The smell of tea and sandwiches in a room grown warm with people. Cups knocking against saucers. Children hovering near plates of cocktail sausages. The windows turning slowly from a view of the bay into dark mirrors, holding the whole room inside them.

And my father, sometime after Mass, looking around that crowded room and noticing the one person who wasn’t there.

Whatever distance remained between the two houses, he crossed it.

A little while later, they came back together.