Going through old photographs after my mother’s death, I came across a picture of her father, William Murphy, who lived in Caragh, near Naas in Co Kildare. If you’ve ever been to Mondello Park, you’ve probably passed his home.
The picture left me with a sadness that I think arises from the way the world disregards our dreams. I knew of him as a blacksmith who had a very small farm and a large family to support.
He also worked hauling gravel for the county council with a horse and cart. And he would cycle the long, long journey to Tullamore to buy a horse or two and walk them all the way back to sell them on later.
In the photograph, taken when he was a young man, probably before 1920, he is sitting in a chair in a studio, arms folded, smiling confidently at the camera. In any other photograph I have from that time, the subjects are unsmiling as though cowed by the unfamiliar seriousness of having their picture taken.
Not William. William looks like a man who is ready to take on the world. When I took the photograph out of its frame to scan it I saw that the back of the photograph was a blank postcard.
Why did he do that, I wondered. To whom did he think he might send such a postcard? What would people think if they got a postcard from him that had a picture of himself on one side? What would you think today if someone sent you a postcard of their own photograph?
Then I remembered a Christmas card my mother found last year, which her father had printed in 1916. It was quite an ornate card offering the recipient “good wishes for peace and happiness in the coming year from WJ Murphy”.
Christmas 1916
Why would a blacksmith with little money go to the expense of getting a Christmas card printed with his name on it? Did he send out these cards, and to whom?
I can imagine people getting the card and repeating “WJ Murphy” and rolling the “WJ” around with their tongues. “Is that Willie Murphy?” they might ask. And for a while they might refer to him among themselves as “WJ”. And the implied question in all this would be, “Who does he think he is?”
Well, I think he was a playful man at some level, a creative man who wanted to do something other than shoe horses and haul gravel and who was, perhaps, fully confident that great things waited in his future.
At about the time the photograph was taken, the Black and Tans searched his home while he spent the night hiding in a pond in a corner of a field. He was afraid to leave the pond until morning because sometimes the Tans drove off, leaving a couple of men behind to watch. He wasn’t involved with the IRA but that didn’t help if the Black and Tans came calling.
I wonder if surviving their visit convinced him that great things were, indeed, waiting.
His mother had died in childbirth and he had been sent from Drumcondra in Dublin to be reared by two relatives in Caragh, whose humourlessness was so deep it was still being remarked on 100 years later in the family.
So the playfulness and creativity I read into the photograph and the Christmas card, and the confident smile at the world, were quite an achievement.
But even if he dreamed of great things, reality had its own demands. So when the time came, he knuckled down and worked very, very hard to support his growing family. Two of his sons died as children and he himself did not get to live into old age.
But this is the story of so many people: why would the photograph make me sad? Probably because it brings home what I already know: that the world isn’t there to make our dreams come true, however confidently we look into the lens.
pomorain@yahoo.com
Padraig O’Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.