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- Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In November 1968, at the age of twenty-two, Andrew McNeillie left his job and his girlfriend in Wales and travelled to Inishmore. He was not a tourist: he stayed eleven months in Aran, living alone in a tiny house. An Aran Keening is a richly lyrical memoir of that time, a celebration of the island and its people, a lament for a way of life that was infused with a deep sadness then and that no longer exists. Based closely on a contemporary journal and on letters home – which are quoted at length, and which show the author to have been an immensely gifted young writer – An Aran Keening tells of a time before electricity and landing strips, a time of true poverty for many. Island life was, in both mind and body, more stark and dramatic then than now; it stood closer to the candle- and horse-powered nineteenth century than to the digitized twenty-first. McNeillie fished and trapped for his food – his accounts of his methods are among the most dazzling passages in the book – and writes with great love, but without a trace of romanticism, about the natural world of Aran. With extraordinary sensitivity and subtlety, he recounts the awkward, sometimes fraught, but ultimately enriching interactions between the green outsider he was and the people of Inishmore, and the islanders' tragic internal struggles. An Aran Keening commemorates both the immortality of youth, in all its courage, folly and quick tenderness of heart, and the passing of a world. It is a singular addition to the literature of Aran and, in this age of two-a-penny memoirs, one of the finest works in that genre to come out of these islands in recent decades.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Acknowledgments
This story was finally written up for my children, as a warning shot, as they passed through their adolescence. I want to thank them for encouraging me to polish it up and polish it off. Others have encouraged me too, and they know well who they are, home and abroad. But the clearest debt I owe in seeing this book into print must go to Terence Brown, who first saw it had the makings, and next to Antony Farrell, publisher extraordinaire, and then to my compatriot Jonathan Williams. My editor Brendan Barrington tamed all wilfulness from my pen with the lightest of touches and sharpest of minds, and I’m much beholden to him.
Two of the poems here were previously published: ‘They so rarely reach here now’ as ‘Greylags’ inBrangle, and ‘Riddle’ as ‘Corncrake’, by the Sycamore Press; both appear inNevermore(Carcanet, 2000).
Preface
This story, this elegy and adventure, is an invention, a remembering of my stay on Inishmore from November 1968 to the early autumn of the following year. That was seventy years after the Irish playwright and poet J.M. Synge first visited the Aran Islands. Now I’m completing it in the centenary summer of Synge’s auspicious visit. Based on incidents and episodes I witnessed or heard told, it begins with an account of my first, exploratory trip to Inishmore, and resumes three years later with my journey back to settle there.
Even in 1898 Synge found Inishmore too touched by capital, too tainted by the filthy modern tide, detecting in eye and expression ‘the anxiety of men who are eager for gain’, and even in its children ‘an indefinable modern quality’. He sought his romantic, unfallen vision on Inishmaan, least accessible of the three islands, in brief visits in summer and early autumn. I didn’t have such qualms when I embarked on my sea-pastoral adventure. The circumstances on Inishmore were ideal enough for me. But clearly I lived in some state deeper than I knew of resistance to the modern world. It was, after all, the 1960s, and what else was my disaffection about? For surely I went from the world as much as to the dream?
As is the inevitable nature of such things, none of the characters involved in this story, including myself, is anything other than a partial portrait, a mix of fact and fiction. To enhance disguise, elements of different individuals are compounded in my characters and transposed one with another. But I’ve not at any point set out to manufacture incidents or generate encounters or exchanges that did not in fact occur, in one combination or another. Nor does what follows here purport to be a documentary, encompassing the island’s culture and history. Others more scholarly have abundantly furnished that need. My concern has been merely to celebrate and elegize the Aran I knew, to recount my adventures, such as they were, and recreate as best I can the world in which they passed. (I use the Anglicized place-name spellings that existed then, though I applaud the later work to retrieve their true forms.)
Also, and not too obtrusively, I hope, I’ve been interested to ponder my earlier self, that playboy who voyaged under my name. ‘Is it me?’ as Christy Mahon asks in Synge’s play. ‘Is it me?’ No, it wasn’t. Yes, it isn’t. ‘Kill the author!’ cried the theatre crowd in Gaelic.But nowadays we know I’m dead already, an empty sack before I start. Almost every plank of my vessel has been replaced since I first crossed Galway Bay. I only truly recognize my youthful predecessor by his log, and something perhaps about the cut of his jib, a not discommendable obstinacy, as the poet said. I don’t deny that I still sometimes catch myself resembling him more fully, star-gazing or map-browsing, or just delaying too long before the fishmonger’s slab and fancying I can taste the salt-and-iodine, the mineral sea, and even hear it surge beneath a cloud of harrying herring gulls at the dead centre of England.
Could I now meet myself in a time-warp thirty years ago on Liverpool dock with my trunk and bags, my desert-island kit with its Shakespeare and company but no bible (Ecclesiastes and Job would doubtless have been my most thumbed books) and no ‘gramophone’ records (but a transistor that would corrode and die), that late October night all set for Inishmore, what would I do? I’m sure I’d rest a skinny hand upon my arm and, like the Ancient Mariner, detain myself with the stories that follow here. By middle age we’re mostly grown too cautious, and selfish love for others renders us afraid. I suppose I’d argue to my earlier self that the undertaking was recklessly unwise, or urge at least postponement to a fairer time of year. I could protest with reason that his deeds would afterwards become a cross for me to bear, an albatross about my neck, a warning bell in mycurriculum vitaesuggesting submerged perils to employers. (I’d already suffered his aborted year of beer-consumption studies in the school of wild talk at a northern university.) But he lived in an age when young people cared little for CVs, if they’d ever heard of them. He stood inconceivably far from the post-Thatcherianenfants terribleswho begin to document their achievements at the age of three. You know the type. We’re all at their mercy still. But why October, almost November? Why not delay? What was there to lose? In spring the Atlantic raging less becomes approachable on foot. The cuckoo calls to the ocean, and the corncrake, with his relentless ratchet, winds back the stars:crex crex crex crex crex crex crex crex crex crex crex crex crex… until you’d sell your soul for five minutes’ sleep; but what price that against what imprisoning winter brings? ‘Look twice, think twice, before you leap,’ I suppose I’d have cautioned, ‘don’t be a fool.’ But such is the nature of time and space we could not meet. And such is the nature of folly that it knows best. What would he have said as he kept a weather eye on the Liver Building clock, shining there like a mirrored moon that night? I’d sooner be dead? For no doubt there was a self-destructive element in this too, a death-wish in the offing. Or perhaps he’d say he went so that one day I could write this. He might claim he was generously investing in me, his future ghost-writer, my past ghost. And it’s true he had his head full of stuff I’d give my eye teeth for now as I begin. Some he has bequeathed me in a little black journal (poorly bound and now disintegrating, posing some minor problems of sequence and chronology) and a bundle of letters home to his girlfriend (now my wife). The rest he entrusted in ten chapters, scribbled hard on his return, to an attic box, whence I have now retrieved them. These chart my way as I set out upon this other, belated verbal voyage, for which foresight forearms me no more than it forearmed him. The first of them is just a simple prelude, once upon a time …
1.Once Upon a Time
If I hadn’t read J.M. Synge’s little bookThe Aran Islandsmy life would make a different story. I say ‘read’, but in a strange way the book, which happened to be on our shelf in a 1912 Maunsel Roberts edition, so affected me as a youth that its pages forced me back on myself and made me dream. So I ‘read’ rather as Synge heard the islanders speaking Gaelic through the broken panes, or as I always fancied through the floorboards, of his lodgings, indistinctly. I had one eye on the poet and the other up the chimney, looking at the stars. This is as good a way to read as any, especially when you are young and the world first excites your conscious wonder.
My adolescence was waxing at that time and came hand in hand with an addiction to language, glutinous grammar, sinuous sentences, and the physicality of the material word. I got caught like an insect in the sticky web of words, as spun by the poets and poetic writers. Whatever they addressed, but especially if they wrote about nature and the out-of-doors, they got the better of me. They seem to have got the better of me forever. But nothing between birth and death starts or ends at once and I still clung hard to boyish pastimes then, activities themselves that made Aran seem all the more attractive as a dream-realm. I was an ardent fisherman, and fishing is a pursuit for mystics. I was addicted obsessively to pier-haunting for whiting, rock-haunting for mackerel, surf-haunting for bass, nightlining the estuary for whatever luck would bring, or aboard the local fishmonger Mr Arundale’sWhat-Ho!trawling for pram-frames, sand-logged wellingtons, barnacled cobbles, plimsolls and glistening locks of weed, with here and there a thornback skate, a box of plaice or flounder flexing, a stone or two of dogfish to rasp our dab hands, as we rode the night-tide home, over creaking mussel beds, piped ashore by waders, cold and cut from skinning skate beneath the moon and stars.
A book may have undone me and poets brought me down, but to be bespectacled by books has never been sufficient unto the day thereof for me. Much study is a weariness of the flesh, I remember reading. And so the end of my eighteenth summer saw me at Holyhead, with my holiday wages in my pocket, on the rocky road to Galway from my native Wales, intent on following the wake of J.M. Synge, to visit Aran.
I was youthful for my years and in company I was shy, too shy for my own good. Perhaps it was this that made the landlady in Galway advise me as she did. I remember as if it was yesterday her warning, just as I remember how much her words surprised me when in innocence I told her where I was bound.
‘For the day is it?’ she enquired sharply.
My plan was to stay for two or three days, I said, at which she exclaimed, ‘Lord help us, and do you know anybody out there?’ I admitted I didn’t. ‘Then you’d best not be going.’ There was no doubt in her mind. ‘’Twouldn’t be safe for a young fella like yourself all on his own.’ She rearranged the place-setting opposite mine. The room was otherwise empty. I looked at my watch and began to poke at my breakfast.
‘Aren’t they wild people out there?’ she began to reason. ‘To be sure, some of them has never been as far as Galway in their lives, would you believe? And that’s the best of them.’
I laughed and said how wise they seemed and even made her smile. She was a woman not yet of middle age, no sour old biddy, and had her wits about her.
‘It’s true, I’m telling you, I’m not joking,’ she protested, and when she spoke next it was with scorn. ‘Never out of it since they were born, can you believe? They’re not fit … not fit at all. They’re …’ she seemed to search for the word, ‘savages.’
On that high moment she went tut-tutting back to the kitchen. I suppose I should have asked her why she spoke as she did, what experience had befallen her? Had it concerned a lodger? Had it, more seductively, involved a lover? Or was it merely a matter of local lore and prejudice regarding the demonized neighbour? As I left she came to the door with me and repeated her warnings as I stepped into the street.
At nine o’clock that morning the MSGalway, an old tub that had served as a tender to ocean-going liners, left harbour for Kilronan, Inishmore, thronged with tourists, among whom an American film crew struggled with its gear. I threaded my way to the bow, to keep lookout like Ahab until the leviathan of my obsession rose above the horizon. The film crew, having shot the view from the stern, now worked their way towards me and, thinking I might complete their picture, asked me if I’d mind turning a little this way, and a little that way, and I obliged them, this way and that way. I hardly imagined that two years later, when I was working as a news reporter in the South Wales mining town of Ammanford, half the populace, as it seemed, all in a morning, would stop to inform me of my thirty-second stardom currently to be seen at the local fleapit. I took a seat in the stalls myself that night, and the dream-like experience of seeing my image bound for Aran, floating by to an appropriately ‘Celtic’ soundtrack, gave a predictable spur to my longer-term intentions.
But for the time being then it was back to weddings and obituaries, and for the time being now, on this my voyage of discovery, it was September and the weather was that morning soft and sunlit. We made easy progress down the bay. Once the scene of violent fishery wars between the islanders and the netsmen of the Claddagh and often the scene of wild storms, it was now almost pacific, with just a little surge and chop and roll of breakers. Gannets plunged. Mackerel, I imagined, would somewhere be throwing themselves blind upon the hook and lobsters stumbling into pots, drunk as late bees. A brown-sailed hooker – it must have been one of the last of the old fishing craft restored – the kind of vessel that Synge sailed in more than sixty years earlier, tacked out from Connemara. The islands themselves, even as we passed Black Head on the Clare coast, remained hidden from sight in light sea-fog and cloud. But gradually three of the heavier pieces of cloud began to settle upon the sea and the islands darkened into sight. People called to each other and crowded the rail, shielding their eyes to see through the glare of sea and sky. Now with a disproportionate suddenness, and then again, as the steamer turned a degree or two north-west, with an equally drawn-out delay, and a slight wallowing and rushing of waves, before we made further perceptible advance, shields of green and badges of white settlement sharpened against the rock. The sea is the serenest dream element, when it is not a nightmare, and involuntarily as I peered ahead through the haze I remember I felt unsteady and put out a hand to grasp the rail, as you might in a dream of stepping off the kerb or more profoundly overboard, to keep my feet firm upon the deck. It was a queer momentary displacement, like being drunk. Plumes of spray snorted from the blowholes by Gregory’s Sound, insisting upon the obvious resemblance of the island to a massive whale. But to me the leaping spray seemed like externalized whoops of pleasure.
How next I’d fare, among the landlady’ssavages, I would now discover as we crossed the bar and sidled towards Kilronan’s harbour wall. A reception committee of jarveys hailed us, waving and pointing with their whips, to catch and hold the eye of potential passengers. I soon found myself contracted to someone below who kept pace with me along the quayside, elbowing his way among his jostling fellows, stepping over ropes, as the holiday crowd edged towards the gangway. This was Gregory, who would become my closest friend upon the island. You might mistake him, in his best jacket and cap, for a Welsh hillfarmer down to market. (There was nothing moresavageabout him, and nothing less.) The event was indeed not unlike an agricultural market or fair. The tourists went down the gangway like sheep and the islandmen, many of them tall, ranging men of the square-backed Connacht cut, a few of them in traditional homespuns, gathered those for whom they had bid, with a nod and a wink, to offer day-trippers rides and longer-term visitors, of which at this time of year there were few, the promise of accommodation.
Gregory led me, and a young American couple, down the quay to where his horse and side-car stood. He was parked first in a long line of rigs on the road that leads back to Kilronan, the crooked little hillside metropolis of the islands, which glinted and squinted that morning in the autumn sun. Shy and impatient by nature, Gregory never had much time for this sort of work. It didn’t suit him to play the courier to a party of Yanks or other pilgrims. But at the close of the season his mother welcomed all the recruits her son could press for lunch or tea or bed and breakfast. So today he’d harnessed the Big Fella and beat away down the morning air to Kilronan, on the off chance of succeeding in the competition for a passenger or two.
At the height of the season there was no want of this sort of business, if the weather would permit a sailing. Now and in the early part of the year matters were different. A man might bowl down the island and end up with nothing but a rig as empty as the unladen steamer. It was a gamble that could leave a vacuum in the heart and a thirst for consolation. So likely as not he’d end up at McDonough’s or Conneely’s American or Kenny’s for a drop of something. Who knows but the day might then wear on until the day was forgotten,in guinness veritas. Then it would be all up. There’d be the horse thirsty and irritable from standing in the shafts half the day, and the cow bursting to be milked. So home he’d go, standing to drive like a charioteer, hell for leather into the quickening Atlantic night, a terror to the landladies of Galway, could they but behold him and hear the apocalyptic clatter of his progress. Nor would home be the end of it, but he must then go out under the drunken stars – how high they are! – to negotiate the stones of the field and stalk the cow.
But Gregory would not be in such shoes this day, though the temptation to try on a similar, celebratory pair after the steamer’s departure might yet prove to be his Achilles heel. Nor was he a regular drinking man but merely a man of extremes, in a place where extremity of matter and of mind, at the edge of the world, go hand in hand. He already had today thirty shillings in his pocket (ten shillings being the lower rate for five or six miles of island road in those days) and he urged us hastily aboard, wheeled the horse round, and mounted. We lunged and jolted and swayed along beneath McDonough’s tall, paradoxically sober window, round the tight corner by Conneely’s and on up the hill, past Kenny’s and the little fire pump in its sentry box, our driver turning occasionally to glance over his shoulder and see where the rest of the field lay. But they were nowhere, only the faintest ringing of hooves below, as we plodded ahead up the great shoulder of the island.
A side- or jaunting car is the ideal vehicle for sightseeing. Perched upon it, you are high above the road and can look round and take in all points of the compass without discomfort or alarm, once you get used to the way it can pitch and swing at a corner or slope upon a hill. The sea now filled more and more of the eye. Behind us Inishmaan emerged to view, dark and distant in a widening moat. To the north lay the coast of Connemara and far upon the horizon the Twelve Pins, to the east the cliffs of Moher. It was a day of soft warm air and haze, a Siren day of wheeling choughs,kazoo-kazoo, and ravens lunging,cronk-cronk, in which all hope for me, if ever hope had been, was lost. We reached the level. Gregory looked along the grey road as if along the barrel of a gun and with a calculated shot of his whip fired the Big Fella about his business.
Until now there had been little or no talk between us. What there had been concerned mere practicalities of destination and accommodation. But at last even the reluctant and reticent Gregory felt compelled to expand and fell into sporadic conversation with the American couple who sat on the opposite side of the car to mine.
‘Were you ever in Aran before?’ I heard him begin in the nasal and elusive English of the islands.
‘I’ve been to Donegal,’ said the man behind me, having mistaken ‘Aran’ for ‘Ireland’. To which Gregory responded, dismissively, and with a befitting circularity, ‘Ah Donegal is in Donegal, butAranis Aran.’
I left them to it, to the indeterminacy of translation, and sank into solipsistic wonder at the view in general, and at the rocks to either side in particular, the terraces of limestone paving, fissured, ragged, jagged, mapped with lichen and honeycombed with drystone walls that as often as not enclosed nothing but stone and light. (‘The walls is where we put the stones,’ Gregory once mocked to me, ‘when we were looking for the earth.’) It is a commonplace that Aran, like much of Connemara, has little or no topsoil and that the people created what soil there is by accumulations of seaweed and sand. Here and there you saw a pocket of green or a garden of potatoes, their haulms down now and bedrock visible between the rows, or, more rare, a bleaching shock of rye, brimming the walls like creamy milk in a bowl. This was rye left to luck, in the hope that it would ripen for seed and grow long enough for thatch straw. Some walls enclosed livestock: a pair of goats with linked collars, so that when one looked up to see us pass the other must look up too, and now and then cattle, sheep, a horse, an ass braying to the barren rocks (such a thing in the desert to hear the wild ass bray). A desolate square house or two stood pitched above the road and down on the terrace below were picture-postcard cabins. We sped on down the long hill from Oatquarter, passing a grey stone crucifix, stark against the Atlantic skyline, in a little walled area by the road, and entered what passes for the Eden of Inishmore, the plain of Kilmurvey, with its foursquare ‘big house’, its thumbnail of silver sand, its several broad fields and its ancient clifftop fort, Dún Aengus (Bronze Age, Aengus the Gaelic for Aeneas), startling, at the very sheer edge of Europe. Gregory pointed out the landmarks, but what I remembered in the intervening years before my legendary sojourn, to which this account is merely the prelude, was the intoxicating air, full of the sea that drawled and crumped and hushed on the sand, and the ancient tattoo of hoofbeats, tapping as we clipped along the road behind the dunes. It was a site that in the distant past had been the scene of a desperate battle, and the ground beneath the relatively new roadway had on excavation yielded many human skulls.
To reach the village of Kil-na-cer, when coming from the east, you take the turning below the graveyard and travel on through Kilmurvey. Instead of turning right at the ball alley you go on ahead, down the narrow track, which swings slowly left and begins to crowd with overhanging fuchsia. There around the corner, as if set to spy across the way upon the dozen and a half denizens of Kilmurvey, you come upon the original settlement of close-set cabins, narrow lanes and paths amid high-walled gardens, that was once Kil-na-cer. At that time only two of the old dwellings were inhabited. Others stood empty, complete with everything – dressers of cobwebbed china, milk jugs in rows, dinner plates, cups hanging on hooks, saucepans, kettles (burial urns for spiders), empty wardrobes, beds and musty mattresses – everything but tenants. On others, fallen tiles and crumbled mortar let the weather in. Drab, weather-blackened thatch hung torn or had fallen away. Roofless homes sat knee-deep in weeds, chimney-breasts bared, the haunts of cats, and of fowl that looked to nest away. All were prey to the evictions of those extortionate landlords, poverty and time, from which the present village had attempted to dissociate itself by moving on a few yards. It comprised four houses, a modern bungalow, and three outhouses of undressed stone, in a group at the lane end.
No one stirred out at the sound of the horse, and this reminded me that we’d seen no one on the road or anywhere else since we left Kilronan. Where was everyone? Drawn to the steamer at Kilronan or in New York or Boston or on some English motorway or a building site in London. Nurse, night-watchman, labourer, I would know of three at least. But probably someone left behind turned to a window, looked and looked away again, or glanced through a half-open door or above a wall top, for there might be something in it. But there was nothing, only the last of the season’s visitors. For winter stood around the corner, or at least that change in the Atlantic weather that heralded winter.
Gregory halted us at a little wicket gate in a wall that was unusually backed by a sparse hedge of suburban privet (I remember it particularly because one day it figured in an odd incident between us) and beyond which stood his mother’s house. We climbed down and he started to turn the horse but something troubled it. It flattened its ears, began to snort and to back the car at the wall.
‘Stand clear,’ called Gregory. ‘Stand clear, I said.’
He shouted fiercely, as if apportioning blame to his passengers, and he cursed the horse as it reared and wheeled back, this side and that, grazing the varnished car against the wall, dislodging a boulder. His cap fell in the road before he could catch the curb chain and draw the horse down, and now cursing and hot he snatched it up, tugged it on and led the rig back down the lane. I turned to follow the Americans up the path to the house. Gregory’s mother, having heard the rumpus, was coming busily down, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, smiling and tutting, ‘poor Sonny.’
‘Kinda mean horse,’ said the American woman.
‘Ah,’ said the old lady, ‘never trust a horse.’
To avoid my fellow tourists I had been scrambling along the low shore all that first afternoon, exploring westwards, prospecting as if I’d already made my mind up, inspecting likely fishing spots, postponing the temptation of the high cliffs, when late in the evening I climbed back on to the road towards Kilmurvey, thinking to cut up to the old fort before nightfall and see the clifftop view. I came upon a man leaning on the sea-wall by the bay. He turned as I approached, as if he knew by a sixth sense I was coming and only awaited my arrival. A burly, close-cropped man he was, with thick forearms and eyes that almost closed as he smiled his greeting.
‘Hello, there,’ he called affably, and then turned back to look at the bay where a curragh rode, or, as the islanders say, ‘swam’, light as a feather at a mooring. He dandled a pick-axe handle and let it swing slowly like a pendulum, to and fro. It knocked against the wall occasionally and made a resoundingchock, chockas it hit.
‘The weather is on the turn, I’d say. Summer’s gone.’
I agreed that it had been a beautiful day and leant against the wall beside him.
‘I’ll not be long after it either, thank God,’ he continued. ‘Isn’t it a terrible place and no mistake?’ He didn’t look for an answer. ‘But you wouldn’t know. You’re just off the boat this morning?’ I said I was. ‘Four months,’ he resumed, ‘four months I’ve done sticking up telegraph poles, and only twice been into Galway.’ He shot me a confiding glance. ‘They’re terrible savages here, you know.’
I thought at once of the landlady in Galway. It seemed she had a cousin.
‘I’ve heard say, but …’
‘But nothing,’ he laughed. ‘The most ignorant backward savages in all Ireland, and that’s saying something, believe me. That’s one you won’t find in the Guinness Book of Records, but it’s a fact.’
We spoke a little about where we came from and so on (he was a Kerry man) and then he pushed himself up off his elbows and stood ready to go.
‘And mind,’ he advised, ‘mind, if you have any trouble while you’re here, be sure to come and see me. I’m staying up the road at Kil-na-cer.’
With this he raised the pick-axe handle, stabbed the air before him with its broad head, and swung it up onto his shoulder, with a deftness that indicated great suppleness of wrist and just the suggestion, perhaps, of a previous incarnation as a military policeman.
‘Goodbye, now, and good luck.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said, and, not knowing then the name of the village I was staying at, I didn’t think I’d meet the man again, unless it be upon the road. And so we regarded each other with some surprise as I came in for my supper, and even some embarrassment, as old Mrs Feaney, than whom no one could be more civil or less savage, introduced us. The engineer’s conversation was now appropriately diplomatic and we talked about the telephone and how he’d worked that summer with island labour to bring the line out to the west of Inishmore.
By nightfall a heavy canopy of cloud hung over the island. There it loomed all the next day, a great dome of luminous grey, amplifying the slightest sound – the wren’s voice in the ivy, the small surf, the muted boom of the Atlantic, the beat of hooves upon a distant road, the bark of dogs between villages. It played tricks with the light, rinsing all colours, finding indigos and heather purples, ochres, rust and coal black in the grey rock, and drew imaginary lines of rain across the window. How could it not have rained? The fishing boats looked black against a sheared-lead sea. The ocean was as calm as it could ever be. (Tomorrow it would send a spume of spray two hundred feet and more into the air. You’d see it from the Feaneys’ kitchen window, shooting above the cliffs, at least a quarter of a mile away.)
At some – at most – perspectives, because the walls are high and the areas they encompass small, the island looks as if it is composed of nothing but rock. It lies in the ocean like the petrified hulk of a giant ship, battleship grey, blackened, rusting, its queer camouflage fading. That second day I walked down the island, scrambling over boulders, clambering over walls, to the south and east, amid the crazy geometry of slab and boulder. Coming up to one wall above the sea and beginning to climb it, I nearly fell off backwards as a tall skinny man sprang up, equally startled, and stared at me from the other side. He laughed as I addressed him and shook his head, and laughed all over his face, as he tried very brokenly to indicate that he did not understand English. I could not see what business he was engaged in, there above the sea. The field he stood in was empty and he carried nothing with him. His sweater was all but threadbare about the neck, shoulders, elbows and cuffs. He seemed oblivious of all appearance.
At Kilronan I stopped for a Guinness at Kenny’s mahogany-dark, fire-lit bar and heard above the solemn silence of early-evening drink and cards one islander say to another, to entertain some tourists in his company, ‘Every day is a holiday on Aran. That’s how it is here now. That kind of way.’ And indeed, as I would discover, that’s how it was for some, a holiday. For others, it was a prison sentence.
It began to rain in the night and rained steadily for a few hours, loud enough to disturb your sleep, and a wind gathered with the dawn and by early morning went howling at every door. Gregory and his brother Bartley, who lived just on the outskirts of the village, took advantage of the bad weather to give each other ‘a clip’, as their mother said, and they occupied the kitchen, joking and protesting as the one cropped the other’s hair to the bone with a cumbersome pair of scissors and a great metal comb. The rain rattled on window and door and showed no sign that it would stop, so I decided to go out, encouraged by Mrs Feaney’s observation that rain is ‘healthy’, on a quest to reach the far west, to see Bungowla. Bungowla, where stands the Black Rock of Woe, is or was a small settlement of cabins, right at the bottom of the hill, in a turmoil of rocks, just above a pair of loughs, overlooking the strait between Inishmore and the Brannock Islands (or Brannogues – where I’d later have adventures).
It was late by the time I made it back to the village and I was soaked, without a dry stitch on my body, though drier for the long walk back along the cliffs to Dún Aengus. Wouldn’t I change and put my wet clothes next the range? Wouldn’t I sit and have a cup of cocoa before bed? So we sat by the range, while my clothes steamed, Gregory uncapped and in his stockinged feet, his mother tutting on about the death of cold I’d catch. The other guests returned – some merrily from the pub – and filed through the kitchen to light their candles and mount the stairs. I felt distinguished not to be among them, and to be sitting by the hearth, especially as the engineer rolled up and passed ungreeted, and to share their talk about the weather and the work Gregory had now before him, harvesting the spuds, and how old Mrs Feaney had earlier that year returned from New York where she had visited her son. She had flown from Shannon and they had seen Aran below. The recollection seemed to render her all but speechless and she smiled embarrassedly and shook her head as if the matter lay far beyond words, somewhere across a gulf of feeling as wide as the Atlantic.
The Feaneys urged me now not to delay my stay beyond the next boat for the weather had become ‘cranky’, as old Mrs Feaney put it (I would later hear her use the word to excuse her daughter Mary’s winter moods), and I could get stranded for who knew how long. So I took their advice and, after one more day of explorations, Gregory drove me without charge, dismissing my repeated efforts to press ten shillings in his hand, to catch the boat. I carried in my bag for souvenirs a stone the size of a decent potato and a succulent plant from Mrs Feaney. She had disappeared to pick it at the last minute round the back of the house from the guttering of an old building, while Gregory waited impatiently in the lane. As she gave it to me, to bring good fortune to my house, and as we stood on the garden path, she pressed my hand and said, ‘God bless you and save you, sir,’ and prompted by what I could not tell she confided as I took the plant, ‘You are more like us than the others,’ and nodded towards the lane where the others, poor creatures, sat upon the car inspecting their watches and worrying if they wouldn’t miss the boat.
2.The Eye of the Storm
Three years passed and found me with a bigger hoard of wages, big enough, I thought, to see me through a year of island life. My elsewhere was so well rooted in my mind that nothing could supplant it, not even my new girlfriend. I was obsessed. Each night I made an appointment with the shipping forecast. When Shannon surfaced, Rockall and Malin Head, and all those resonant names since immortalized by Seamus Heaney, like Finistère and Bloody Foreland, bespeaking the ends of the earth, I’d lie there dreaming in my lodgings of how the night might be about the islands. A furnace of stars, I imagined, or a black mare galloping, the moon in her mane. The islanders would be tucked up abed. Rocked to sleep by the Atlantic, they’d be dreaming of eligible partners. Or Morpheus’s perfect postman would deliver to their bedsides letters from America abulge with news and dollars. Or else at sea, fishing in the bay, they’d hear the very words I heard. There was something rousing in the thought of their spare lives among the waves, at the margin of the airwaves, and this inspired me and filled me with longing to escape. I read whenever I could books of the sea and wilderness (call me Ishmael), and poems, and dreamt of my imminent pursuit along the pathway to experience. Nothing would keep me from my purpose. In the end I went headlong.
