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Wednesday 9 July 2008

A swift dip in the sea at Christmas

Old Ireland lives on in a frozen Christmas swim

Old Ireland lives on in an Ardmore village custom

I remember the first time I took to the waters on Christmas morning. My son Daniel woke me shortly after six with an excited shout: ‘It’s snowing.’ I looked out and saw the white flurries settling on the frozen fields. Knowing I had made the promise to swim, I groaned. But the good cheer of my fellow swimmers carried me through the ordeal. The water itself was bear-able. It was the wind howling across St George’s Channel and along the Waterford coast that turned my extremities blue. My friend John King took one look at me and remarked, ‘What in the name of God are you trying to prove?’

King is a man who believes that taking the dogs for a walk should be the limit of exercise for any sensible man in his forties.

But it was worth every second of Arctic misery for the sense of achievement that followed. In middle-age a man grasps at what- ever evidence of surviving hardiness he can find. Afterwards the swimmers queue for soup and strong liquor while children riot in the background. By now most people will have been to mass and heard Father Guirey remind them in his calm way to remember those who are without. With the obligations of faith and charity taken care of, they will head to their warm fires and roasting turkeys.

A few years back a big storm came in and knocked out the power for most of the county. The result was that only those with gas ovens — a comparative minority — were in a position to cook. So Ardmore enjoyed its first communal Christmas with the gas-cooker owners entertaining the rest of the village.

As a child I would never have dreamed of going to Ardmore in winter, let alone contemplate spending Christmas there. It was the headquarters of our summer world, a land of swimming and fishing and glorious idleness. I did pass through there once on the way back from a rugby game in late January and felt terribly cheated. How could a place which held such life for me in the long days of August take on such awful grimness in the winter? The rain mingled with the spray from waves crashing over the storm wall and saturated everything. Not a soul stirred on the main street. Magical Ardmore looked as grey as any of the other villages we had driven through that day: rural Ireland at its bleak and unforgiving worst.

Even the local fishermen regarded the onset of winter with foreboding. To them it meant meagre days, the salmon nets stowed away with only the prospect of poorly paid labouring and the dole to see them through until better weather. They faced a winter squinting into the driving rain, footing turnips on some god- forsaken headland with only sheep for com- pany and wind rattling the barbed wire.

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