It was always there. The sights, sounds, smells and touch of water filled his senses from his earliest days. His wish to be near water remained all his life.
He grew up on the banks of a river on the upper Shannon waterway in Ireland. The family lived in what was called the ‘lock-house’.
His paternal aunt told him the story. There had been an RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) barracks – Ireland was coming to the end of 500 years of colonisation –across the river. His grandfather had been stationed there. He had fallen in love with a local girl and had left the police when he was being move to another place. The real story was maybe more mundane but it’s hardly important.
His grandfatherhad become the lockkeeper across the river. It was the last lock on the northern end of the waterway. It was called Clarendon lock, the name of the British viceroy of Ireland at the time.
He was paid a pittance and was given a very simple lockhouse to live in and a piece of land-just big enough to keep one cow. In return, he had to operate the Locks, almost zero traffic at that time, keep track of water levels and make notes about the weather. A huge ledger was supplied by a government agency called The Shannon Navigation. The ledger was still in use as the boy was growing.
The Shannon river system was re-configured during famine times in 1845 and 46. Locks were added to improve navigation and, above all, to put people to work. Many people died from hunger at that time.
The lock house was just some metres from the river. There was, easily heard from his bedroom, the gentle gurgling of water over stones where the ‘back river’, as people called it, joined the ‘new’ river. The “back river” was magical not just because it was the original river, but because in the more than the hundred years of its existence, it had been left to its own devices and had assumed, in its short length, its own personality.
In fact, the new ‘river’ from the mouth of the lake and Clarendon Locks to the bridge with the same name – was a cutaway, deepened and straightened during famine times.
The back river at its beginning gushed lustily over stones on the lake side of the weir and had much to fascinate him. It had two deep pools where lurked pike with huge jaws, shallow stretches running over pebbles in which one could see small trout facing the nutrition sweeping down from the lake, one occasionally saw eels scampering into vegetation.
Many branches of trees and bushes had fallen and spilled into the water over the years. There were stretches choked with weed. The land bounded by the old river and the new was now an island was owned by Shannon Navigation as was the lockkeeper’ house and strip of land attached. Access to the old river was difficult; fishing it was a challenge. Over the years, never once did he meet another person there. He loved it; it was his kingdom, his alone.
His father and finally his mother became lockkeepers in their turn. Until the 1960s, when hire boats began to appear, there was little or no boat traffic. A few private motor cruisers belonging to well-off Dubliners or a local large shopkeeper.
The locks, the last on the Shannon waterway, was a little upriver along a narrow earthen and gravel path, bordered on both sides by trees and bushes, some of which overhung the river.
People regarded it as one of the loveliest stretches on the whole waterway. It was in fact on the Boyle River, the Shannon being not navigable for boats going north to its source. The path swept gradually around to the left as one went upriver and then it revealed a weir to the left of the locks. The locks, when he was young, had rotting wooden gates and tree trunks functioning as beams to be pushed to swing open the gates.
Taking the path after rain with water dripping off branches and leaves, skirting the puddles or in summer kicking barefoot through them, was often a pleasure. It was before the river, and the lake upstream became popular as a holiday destination and changed many features of .
Even before the sound of the weir reached him the smell of oxygen lifting off the foaming water that spilled over it after rain did. The smell spilled downstream with the foam bubbles and his nose twitched. The sound of the weir and the sounds of water streaming through missing gate planks became part of his abiding recollection of childhood.
He started to fish young: a bamboo rod, a line attached to the top, a hook tied to its end. He fished from everywhere possible: the riverbank alongside the house, the quay beside the bridge – where he had an extraordinarily narrow escape from drowning, from the bridge, the weir, the locks, the back river.
He had five sisters and his mother in the house; his father was away from the house for his work every day except Wednesdays and Sundays. Maybe it was partly to escape the house that he bonded with the river; it became his friend. He learned to spend much time alone with it.
