Well drugged with the travel sickness pills I would doze intermittently on an Irish ferry, my eyes almost too sore from cigarette smoke that engulfed those ferries in those days. I would blink at the morning light over the port and we would trundle our way slowly off the ship and along the concrete out into the real world of Ireland.
Sometimes we would follow the family tradition .'...on return to the homeland Mammy and Father....they would always celebrate ....a glass of champagne in The Gresham ...just the one to mark the ocassion if you understand.'......I could cope with that little tradition very well indeed ...lovely.
I was not however to follow the tourist routes, although I can say I have lain on the parched grass of St Stephen's Green in the sun trying unsucessfully to stop soft ice cream pouring through my fingers, have had coffee in Bewleys, walked the Cathedrals, counted the bullet holes in the Post Office wall, admired the Georgian architecture and gazed into the swirling dark green waters of the Liffey at night when the twinkling lights run like watercolours on wet paper. In later years I have returned and advanced my tourist education somewhat ...but not then, then there were things to do, places to go, people to see...
My mother back home on the Welsh border was not pleased. In fact she was absolutely hopping..'Havent you forgotten you are a mother now...tearing about the countriside with that ...that ...that....(on good days it would be long haired lout...on bad days there would be a list of drug smuggler, arms dealer, terrorist....need I go on? Irish and Catholic would appear somewhere in the tirade as well) It went over my head most of the time, I only headed out on the trips when N was away with his father and when I was in Ireland N was happily holidaying in France or similar so that argument never really held water. I know ...she was scared of the unknown, the unfamiliar, of me stretching my relatively clipped wings. My dear old dad quite liked the long haired lout, they would sit in the sun in the back garden of my cottage over mugs of tea and put the world to rights while she sat inside bristling like a Jack Russell with hackles. However even dad would quietly ask if I was sure I had enough to cover the fare home should I want to come back alone and slip me £20 but I bet mother was the instigator ...
The Ireland I saw included the vast lonely open spaces, where curlews mournfully wept in to the early morning and evening skies that opened above, milky, like opal, shot with glimpses of pink and gold tracery. The dark, dripping woods hiding streams and rivers, clean and fast flowing over brown and cream stones. We walked. The smell of wet earth after rain, of plants and wildflowers I had never seen before ...perhaps I just hadn't been looking. Evenings would find us in an out of the way bar perhaps listening to a yellow headed girl, her eyes closed as she sang, with a voice as clear and as sharp as Waterford crystal itself singing mournful tales of love lost, a group of toothless old men would hang on her every word as though hearing it for the first time. A fiddle would cry in the shadows. The fishing harbours, the scruffy boys with stand on end hair in odd wellies fishing with home made rods off the side at high tide. The ruins of houses, large and small, old donkeys waiting for a friendly voice that never returns.
Sometimes we would find the fire irons crossed on the floor and crotchety old men, all brown skinned from nicotine and hard work would leap about amazingly agile in complicated patterns for pints of Guinness or a couple of whiskies as a reward. The fiddle was very happy on those nights. I was in good company, I was made welcome ...he took me to the places he knew, where he was treated like royalty, the prodigal son back for the fatted calf ceremony. Long complicated enquiries of relations had to be exchanged and mulled over ...sometimes for hours at a time like a ritual...but I loved it and always had a bagful of questions for later. Later, in cheap and clean B and B's, with lino on the landing, with the mullioned window open to the stars when he would accentuate the Irish accent to tell me stories and sing songs that would have me shrieking hysterically until a knock would clump on the floor from the ceiling below.....
He taught me the history, of poverty, despair, of politics that lost their way when disaster struck, the infighting, the struggle to rise above adversity was like trying to climb a mountain barefoot, of a stuggling economy, the people that left to make new lives elsewhere and those that stuggled on to stay, the religion , the need for something secure to grasp on to, to provide a backbone in a community lost and alone.
I look at our dwindling congregations in Churches and Chapels and wonder that if today we were really at our wits end, against the wire, would we not be back in there clogging up the doors to get in? Hanging on a preacher's word to make sense of reality? Just a thought ...no need to answer.
I saw the Ireland of hard work, grit and determination, of generosity, kindness unsurpassed, loyalty and humility and of course humour.
I met his widowed mother one afternoon, a quietly spoken brown bird of a lady ooozing pride for her youngest son who worked hard and undoubtedly provided her with the little things to make life easier in her old age. His sister, a gentle eyed nun, smiled peacefully from beneath her grey veil, she was at one with her world and it showed. I saw the family album of black and white photographs of three happy smiling children in stages of play, at school and as they grew up.
I was to see those pictures, great canvases of oils, of dark rivers, night skies over London with skyscrapers, fingers piercing the hearts of the stars....moody almost threatening. Flooded Irish rivers, craggy Welsh mountains, and heartstoppingly ...my cottage and the jumbled layered garden falling down the higgledy piggledy terrace to the brook at the bottom. I think he loved that little house as much as I did.
Back in England, through the little stripey door that was not high enough for me never mind anybody else, we would sketch each other in the firelight...I doubt I would recognise myself now, and the sketch pads lie well hidden beneath years of collected detritus. he was almost biblical with the scrolls of coppery hair and the beard...the wild blue eyes, a John the Baptist or a Judas perhaps. Sometimes he would cook with strange and delicious ingredients from the Chinese shops in London...but he was a liver and bacon with onion gravy, mashed potatoes and cabbage person at heart. We would read, listen to music or he would be tapping away producing a mountain of typewriiten sheets to light the fire with because only about four would ever be saved.
The only sure thing in this life is change ...so someone said, and sadly there was to be change ....my father's sight began to fail and my mother already infirm due to arthritis was heading into panic mode. As a 'lonely only' I had to be nearer to them and so the For Sale sign went up and a rather larger tranny van was required to move me, five year old son, three cats, two rabbits and what appeared to be half of Toys R Us into a sterile brand new little bungalow on the approach road to the village I had grown up in ......the end of an era in the little house.
The phone calls lessened, the visits became more sporadic and eventually ceased as I took on more responsibilities of aging parents and a now school aged child ....I suppose I knew it would happen like that.......committment had never featured, had never even been discussed. One Christmas I had bought him a lovely deep blue jumper ....the colour that can only make blue eyes bluer...I found one of those silly badges and pinned it on the front ...he laughed at the words 'I am a confirmed batchelor ...a thing of beauty and a boy forever' ...he wore the badge!
At the outset, three years previously when the conveyancing was done and I had the letter from the solicitor, who is a dear friend, telling me the little cottage was mine he had added a poem ........
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dripping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now , for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Little did he know that I would indeed go to Innisfree with a red haired Irishman, who knew this poem and recited it to me right there in Co Sligo with the watery sun peeping from behind grey storm clouds with wet purple heather at our feet. A curlew cried mournful tears and so did I.
