The Moate Harbour Boys remembered

The Moate Harbour Boys was written by the late Dr Joseph Robins and published twenty five years ago in the Marist College Annual in their centenary year 1984. Dr Robins was the recipient of a Rehab People of the Year Award in 1993. This story was amongst papers loaned to me by Dermot Robins which I feel will appeal to many readers of this page. Next week you can read about the ' Nuns' Library'. Recently I drove along the road between Moate and Athlone and thought of the Moate Harbour Boys. Few will have heard of them; perhaps none but the survivors of that small group will recall them. For me they are one of the happier and more enduring memories associated with Marist College (alias St. Mary's). During the 1930's and 1940's boys living in the Moate area who were anxious for a secondary school education could not get it locally. The Sisters of Mercy provided for the girls, but there was no provision for boys. If one's family could afford it there was, of course, always a boarding school but in the depressed conditions of the period this was out of the question for all but a privileged handful. On the other hand there was the Marist Brothers in Athlone: a day secondary school, ten miles or so away. A few chose that option. I was one of a handful of Moate boys who cycled daily to and from Athlone six days a week (Saturday was a half-day). Our numbers varied over the years. Very few persisted long enough to do their leaving certificate, and I don't recall more than four or five boys from the Moate area simultaneously attending the school. But on the long road to Athlone we were joined by others along the way. From Mount Temple, Castledaly, Ballinahown and Clonbonny, they gladly joined us and strengthened our ranks, and collectively we came to be known as the "Moate Harbour Boys." Moate has not, of course, a harbour. Indeed there isn't even a stream of any significance in the area. Our Athlone colleagues, boastful of their own expanse of water, were poking fun at us as they did in various ways. In their sophisticated eyes we were range troglodytes with peculiar accents from an unchartered hinterland. In our hearts we knew we were superior. Townies were inferior beings. We had a kingdom of fields and woods and farm animals and skills like snaring rabbits and digging out badgers that they didn't have and would never understand. We found confirmation of our superiority in our history lessons. When the feudal system broke up the serfs had moved into the towns and the lords of the manor had remained on their estates. "So your boat has arrived," the genial rotund Brother Basil would remark standing in his command post on the first landing to chastise the late-comers. Or if we were late "was there fog at sea?" or "did you run on the rocks at Bonavalley?'' While there was often a caning for the tardy there was a tolerance of those of us who had cycled for up to ten or twelve miles. It was, I suppose, understandable when you arrived soaked to the skin, or with icicles on your nose, or exhausted from pushing against a gale-force wind that you knew was bound to be blowing in the reverse direction by the evening. In the evening time after school we gathered like migrating birds on Bonavalley bridge. There were a few who attended the "Tech" and this was a suitable meeting place. Then once assembled we took off every time as if we were setting forth on a new adventure. The world was ours once we were into the countryside and away from the broken string of houses that then represented Athlone's eastern suburbs. It was a world of innocence and simple pleasures. Sometimes we raced each other madly over set distances; other times we fought mock battles on our bicycles, pushing and shoving, performing miracles of staying in the saddle, weaving in and out, tracing arabesques of motion. It was the sort of behaviour that was possible on the public highway only when, as then, there was relatively little motorised traffic. Sometimes wheels were punctured, spokes were broken. If the bicycle could not be repaired on the spot the unsaddled had to be given a seat on the bar of another. Victims of battle were always kindly treated even if the task of transporting them up and down hill was not easy. Noblesse oblige. We knew every feature of the road and every family who lived on it. Some of them probably had mixed views about us. Their apple trees became vulnerable in the autumn. If they were people of strong political views we chanted the cries of the opposing party as we went past. It was the period of the political slogan; "Up Dev" and "Up the Blueshirts'' were invested with an ardour and a militancy that young people of today would find hard to appreciate. We taunted bulls and rams and in the absence of fiercer prey turned our attention to ganders and turkey cocks. We stopped as a matter of routine at the blacksmiths' forges along the way: Hatton's at Fardrum and Molloy's nearer Moate. There was always a fascination about the shaping of horse shoes on the anvil and the paring of hooves. We were probably tolerated because we were prepared to work the bellows and carried a certain amount of unconscious gossip. Forges were a clearing house for gossip. At Glynwood we fought battles with the wind-made heaps of autumn leaves under the long arcade of beech and oak and ash. These trees stretching along by Nash's nursery were full of wild life: grey and brown squirrels, nesting crows and pigeons, the cuckoo every spring. It is hard now to suppress anger at what one can only call the vandalism of Westmeath County Council in utterly destroying that beautiful stretch of road in, presumably, the interests of progress. As we reached each crossroad some parted company with us. Up to now a united band, we shouted insults at the departing members until they were out of sight. Their ginger hair, their freckles, the deficiencies of their local football team, the poverty of their townland where the "man was eaten alive by the fleas." Stones were sometimes exchanged. It was an established ritual which did not damage our friendship. On the morrow there would be no reference to the exchange of pleasantries until we were again parting and battle was resumed. By the time we reached Farnagh, Moate lay before us at the end of the long slope and we would be a tiny group glad to be nearly home. The names jog the memory. Colclough, Costello, Duffy, Holden, Doyle, Coughlan, Connolly, O'Connor, Murphy. On a dark night in 1940 I stood at the railway station in Moate and watched a crated coffin taken from the Dublin train. One of the Moate Harbour Boys was coming home for the last time, killed in action with the Royal Air Force. The same year my mother, to whom I was deeply attached, died. Life was changing inexorably. A year later I cycled home from school, alone and for the last time, on the day I completed my leaving certificate. It was a time of war and rationing and no employment. The road from Athlone had broadened out into harsher, less predictable highway. Joseph Robins, Ph.D.