My wife Julia often remarks that I am never happier than when we are aimlessly travelling the backroads of south Wexford, between the town and the Hook Peninsula, and especially, the environs of our house on the backwaters of Bannow Bay. Intermittently, places of small joys or incidental sorrows from my vanished childhood loom: the water pump near Bridgetown where my father used to wash the car; the lane my mother made an annual pilgrimage to for blackberries; the graveyard near Lady's Island where my priest cousin's housekeeper was buried, following a fatal car accident.
Although the landmarks are now few and far between, what is always around me in the magical hinterland of the Blackstairs are the hauntingly beautiful voices of my parents as we travelled these roads to God knows where. And a treasure trove of song with its crowning glory, the Joe Stafford and Gordon McCrae number, Whispering Hope. It is as real for me in this cherished landscape as the co-mingling baby babble of my small children in the back of the car. Elishka talking about her poor baby bear, while carried on the wind is the hushed diminuendo, and now the soaring: "hope for the sunshine, after the shower is gone".
My father regularly sang the Ave Maria and Panis Angelicus in public. With his immaculately tailored dark suits, he cut a splendid figure in the organ loft in Rowe Street, his sonorous voice filling the church with sacred song. Through the 1930s and 1940s, my mother waltzed her way through the light opera repertoire in the Theatre Royal, her performances in Maritana and The Bohemian Girl most fondly recalled in her twilight years. The fabled organist, Miss Codd, who lived not far away on John's Road, was a regular visitor to our home; the legendary Dr Tom Walsh, who founded the festival, and Nellie Walsh lived only doors away on Lower George Street; the future impresario of Opera Ireland was my next-door-neighbour; and then there were the stalwarts of choir and chorus, my father's sisters, like dolmens around my childhood, my eight aunts. In the gloaming of a Sunday evening, I would sit with my Aunt Madge listening to Sing Something Simple on the wireless and afterwards coax her into the front room of her flat over Lowney's on South Main Street, to play the piano in that extravagant style of hers I loved so much.
Thus music was part of the currency of my daily life and it was inevitable that I would be drawn to the romance of the Wexford Festival. We lived in the old part of the town. The Norman walls ran at right angles to our house from Westgate via Abbey Street to Rowe Street. The festival was all around us: exotic foreign singers were quartered with our neighbours; Rossini Masses were sung in Rowe Street; fireworks from the Ballast Bank lit up the night sky over the Slaney; at Selskar, Dr Hadden explained to his walking tour how Henry II had here done penance for the murder of Thomas a Beckett; throngs of evening-clad opera-goers made their way from White's Hotel to the Theatre Royal; orchestral musicians crammed into Mythen's pub on the Cornmarket, mostly after performances, but sometimes during them.
Not possessing the musical gifts of my parents and being of a shy disposition, I sublimated my love affair with the theatre at the extremities and in the nether reaches of the Theatre Royal. This involved helping with sets, props and costumes; being of some small assistance at the box office (is it my imagination or did I once pass over a pair of tickets to Sir Alfred Beit and speculate afterwards with Jim Golden whether the gash on his head was sustained trying to hold on to his pictures?) I stage-managed Christopher Fitz-Simon's revues in the Mc Clure Room at White's Hotel, passing out the props while simultaneously turning the pages for Eileen Studley at the piano. I paged the tabs at performances of Thais by Massenet. I held the end of a broom handle and lowered it across a row of dimmers to bring the lights down on another performance. I loved and was intoxicated by it all.
At 15, I fell in love with a beautiful, exuberant 20-something English production manager, called Sally - I expect half the town did as well. I remember the dashing Brian Dickie insouciantly flicking at this quiff, and a director called Adrian Slack who was kind to me in later years, explaining the system of Mozartian recitative when I came to direct my first opera. The singers and the conductors, the directors and designers, the imported stage managers and repetiteurs - they were all impossibly romantic figures to my eyes, but somehow, across the years, they are no longer vivid to me.
The people who are very vivid, however, are the unsung ones, the voluntary cohorts upon whom the Wexford Festival depended, and, I dare say, still does: Nick Cleary; the Reck brothers; the heroic wardrobe department; our local Pavarotti, Sean Mitten, the fabulous Jim Golden, who taught me Irish by day in St Peter's and the vital importance of marking off your booking chart by night. They are my remembrance. They are the heroes of my halcyon days, the familiar landmarks of that foreign but beloved country which we call the past.
Ben Barnes is a native of Wexford and artistic director of the Abbey Theatre. He will speak on the subject of "New Initiatives and Directions at the National Theatre" at the County Library, Wexford, on Saturday, October 21st, at 3 p.m.
