We were hungry as we trudged along. Towards evening we had our eyes peeled for a sight of the village. Then we heard a sharp, clear noise like a bark. I listened out for another sound but there was nothing. We carried on until I was sure I heard a donkey braying. I turned and so did the others but there was no animal in sight.
We walked ever upwards until we saw the village, sitting on the edge of the mountain just ahead of us, cut off from the world. I heard the laugh of a goat and I searched the rocks for a sign of it.
As we neared the houses, we began to hear the sound of more farmyard animals. We heard chickens clucking and ducks quacking. I scanned the rocks but there was no sign of any animals. Before we reached the little lanes that ran between the huts, we were all bemused at the chorus of animal noises that were trumpeting our arrival – quacking, clucking, crowing and braying, all chiming one after the other – and I smiled as they began to reveal themselves – the mischievous boys in the evening shadows.
They were perched on the tallest rocks, cheeky smirks and darting bright eyes in the deepening light, all peering at us, all delighted we’d been duped. As we passed near their lookouts, they carried on mimicking the sounds of domestic animals. We had to laugh. Their croaks and cries were so realistic, each sound a perfect imitation.
They were too shy to come any closer. I could just make out their white teeth gleaming in the twilight. By the time we arrived, they had vanished. This isolated village, so cut off from the world, reminded me of the Great Blasket.
Our guide led us to the house where we were to stay for the night. He prepared a meal for us. After eating, I stepped out to admire the night sky. There in the dimness, like a ghost, was the mountain, its great brooding immensity blocking most of my view. If it shifted the village would be lost. As I stood there I was filled with a sense of its power. In its height, its proximity, it was a mass like no other. Its immensity hinted at an even mightier, more mysterious power.
I went inside, shivering from the night air, nervous and alert, dwelling on the glimpse I’d got into the gaping mouth of the heavens. We were to leave early the next day and trek along the upper slopes of the mountain range. As I lay down on my sleeping bag, it was only the braying of a donkey and the bark of a dog in the darkness that comforted me and made me smile.
When we were only halfway through our trek in Morocco, we had already accumulated so much luggage that we decided to send clothes home to County Waterford. When we returned to Marrakesh, we went to the post office, put our excess bundle of clothes into a cardboard box and wrapped it up. As we pushed our parcel through the grill, we wondered if we’d ever see those clothes again.
Some weeks after our return, the parcel from Marrakesh – tied up with twine and stamped with various exotic marks – arrived home. As I cut the twine, I thought of those Berber women and I wondered if the mysteries of the universe might be unveiled to me if I lived a nomadic life in the desert. Would I taste the wideness, purity, light, silence and emptiness of the night sky in the Sahara if I lived there with the Berbers?
One of the items in the parcel was a leather satchel made of camel skin that we had bought as a present for our mother. It had a long strap, a geometric design on the front and it smelled strongly of camel. Mama put her purse, her handkerchief, a comb and a lipstick into it and wore it, I knew, simply to please us.
It was only when my mother and I later visited an outspoken cousin that the satchel became an issue. After its smoothness was admired, its smell was commented upon – somewhat politely, at first. Tea was made and conversation continued. I sat lost in thought, dreaming of magic carpets and sheiks on their camels in the desert, until our host, trying to be discreet and not offend my mother, asked me in a whisper if I’d mind putting the bag outside the door.
54
Haworth
The village of Haworth in West Yorkshire lived up to all my expectations. It was darkly Gothic; the main street, cobbled and steep, ran wet with runnels of rain. The houses were dour and tall, arching over us like watchful guardians.
I was inspired to take a trip to Haworth in 2006 after seeing Brontë, a powerful play by Polly Teale in Dublin’s Project Theatre. I wanted to see the village, the moors and the parsonage where this family of such creativity and genius had grown up. RoseAnn, who was equally fascinated by the Brontës – and the fact that they were three sisters – was as eager as me to visit.
It was late September, a weekend when the skies kept opening their sluice-gates to pour bucketfuls of water down on top of us. Each day, on leaving our lodgings to walk on the moors, torrential downfalls would soak us and force us back.
Still, we were determined to reach the ruined farmhouse, Top Withens, which is believed to be the place that inspired Emily Brontë when she wrote Wuthering Heights. If we could get to this mythical spot, we were sure we would be at the heart of the moors and the Brontës’ wellspring of inspiration.
The farm is about four miles walk from Haworth along a path that crosses over fields, stiles and peaty fenland. As RoseAnn and I set out on our first attempt, sheep stared vacantly at us, hawks flew up suddenly out of heather and soggy moss-covered stones slipped under our feet. On this first attempt, we misgauged the amount of time the hike would take. We could see the deserted homestead dark and forbidding yet seemingly close on the horizon, but before we realised it shadows were lengthening over the marshy ground and we knew we’d have to turn back.
The next day it rained, and a visit to Hatchard & Daughters’ booksellers on Haworth’s main street was the highlight of our morning. A bell rang as we opened the door and a young woman behind the counter smiled at us in welcome. Within minutes we were happily engrossed and a kind of reverie descended on us as we browsed. My sister and I opened one volume after another, breathing in the musty smell of old books, losing ourselves in a range of titles and covers. The woman at the counter encouraged us to explore further.
When the little bell over the door rang out again, all three of us looked up. A man in rain gear put one foot inside the threshold and asked: ‘Do you have a copy of Mein Kampf?’
We looked to the twinkling bookseller and wondered what she would say.
‘No!’ she said.
The man pulled the door shut with a rattle and was gone.
‘Ha! Emily Brontë would turn in her grave,’ said the bookseller.
I found the last of Mrs Gaskell’s seven volumes on The Life and Works of Charlotte Brontë and Her Sisters in that shop. The hardback includes portraits and illustrations and a facsimile of the title page of the first edition, as it was when it was published in 1857. Mrs Gaskell wasted no time in writing the biography: Charlotte Brontë had been dead only two years when it came out. The rest of the family were already dead and buried at that stage. Anne was only twenty-nine when she died in 1849. Emily died the year before that at thirty years of age. She died only a few weeks after her brother Branwell. Although ill, she refused to see a doctor or to rest.
We wandered by the parsonage and the church, passing the Black Bull pub on our way, where Branwell drank himself into an early grave. His father slept with him in his final weeks, hoping to nurse him back to health, but the self-destructive drinking had caused too much damage.
The bleakness of the place, the cold and damp of the stone and the loneliness and isolation of the spot, left us grieving for each of the Brontës. The way the light bounced off rain-drenched stone and slate made us emotional and we dreamed about them all, devouring all the books we could find about them.
When we visited the parsonage itself, we saw their little cave-like rooms and narrow beds. Their voices seem to echo off the walls. We saw the room where they sat to sew and write, and the black sofa where it is thought Emily died. Their books are laid out under glass, as is the magnifying glass which was used by their father, Patrick Brontë, in his little room across the hallway. Upstairs we glimpsed the girls’ tiny dresses, combs and lace bonnets.
On our last day, a Sunday, the sky was
high and clear. We had passed the stone seat where Emily used to sit when it began to rain. We marched on, squelching over the stiles. Then the heavens opened, but still we soldiered on, wanting to endure the cold and wet in memory of the three writers. But finally, when lightning struck and with the water running down our backs and into our shoes, we had to turn back.
We waved goodbye to Top Withens glowering at us in the distance, almost within touching distance. We went home, thinking how easy it must have been to catch a bad cold in the 1840s and how that could quite possibly have developed into pneumonia and an early death. We consoled ourselves with the fact that we’d truly tasted the full Brontë experience.
55
The Basin Street Visitor
That first night, I waited expectantly for his knock.
Finally, he was there at my door
breathless after running,
He’d got off at the wrong bus stop and hurried to catch up with himself.
I let him in
noticing the tightness of his sheepskin coat across his chest.
He was like a student outgrowing his clothes,
or a bachelor harkening back to a slimmer time.
I bristled in my bed that night when I heard him coming up the stairs,
moving around my house.
Clattering.
My ears pricked, noting each infringement on my privacy.
He was in Dublin to attend a weeklong seminar on Beckett.
Learned dissertations on the nature of existence was sustenance to him.
He loved to talk about emptiness and stillness,
He hungered for it. As did I.
In the morning, we rattled around like periwinkles in a bucket,
knocking against timber doorjambs,
turning knobs noisily after ablutionary visits to the bathroom,
his outrageously bare feet large like paddles on my wooden floors.
I left rashers in the fridge for his breakfast
And toffee squares for his tea at night.
He left for Trinity College.
There was no fuss.
He was away all day, coming home late.
He stayed for three days,
He liked to rise early in order to meditate on the futon each morning,
His eyes closed, his thoughts suspended in time.
He soaked up the east-rising spring sunshine in the back bedroom,
its beautiful creamy light falling like a blessing through the window.
He loved the quiet,
the bare walls, the empty stairwell of the house.
But after three nights I said I had to go away,
And that meant he’d have to leave too.
He packed his bag and left the next morning.
He’d find a B&B.
He wasn’t perturbed.
Further discussions on Beckett beckoned.
He longed to hear about avant-garde minimalism.
I heaved a sigh of relief and finished off the toffee squares myself.
He’s gone now, Breandán.
I use that bedroom as my office.
The view out the window is a vaulted grey sky over rooftops.
I’m in the Liberties,
If I stand up I can see Guinness’s Storehouse,
Off to my right are the Basin Street flats.
And when I think about what to write,
I look out and the shadow of a white cat
walking across the wall outside catches my eye
and a bird,
snug in the heart of long loose lilac branches,
dips in the breeze,
And I remember with a twist of guilt
That it was my uncle who loved this view.
56
Joe Martell
Our house in Waterford city was called ‘Corsica’. The three-syllable word appealed to me when I was small. It was a satisfying word to say and I could spell it out easily. I loved the way it sat in cast-iron letters on our gate, all definite and distinct. Cor-si-ca. It was where our great-grandfather, Joe Martell, had come from. It was like a little wayfarer’s arrow in those early days: we were here and Corsica was way over beyond, an axis on which to mark a trail.
Joe Martell ran away to sea when he was sixteen. That was back in 1873, a year after a full census was conducted in Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica, which at the time was a bustling fishing port on the western coast of the Mediterranean island. For some reason he didn’t want to stay, so he escaped to a life at sea. As I got older, my ideas about my ancestor became a little fanciful – I’d wonder if he ran away because he’d fallen in love with a woman who was forbidden to him by his papa. Perhaps his father, Bastien Martell, a stonemason, had threatened to come after him with a gun for thinking of dishonouring his family in such a way, and so he’d left in a hurry.
What I do know is that he secured a job as a sailor on board a ship and sailed out of Ajaccio, thus becoming a merchant seaman. In time he became a ‘bosun’ – this is the officer in charge of the deck crew and the ship’s deck equipment. On one of his voyages he met Captain William Ryan from Passage East and the two became friends. They must have been in their twenties when they came to Passage on a holiday, Captain Ryan showing him his home place, where small fishing boats were tied up along the quays in the village, where the houses snuggled in under the cliffs at a narrow stretch in the River Suir before the estuary widens to flow out to open sea.
It was here that Joe Martell met Willie’s sister, Mary Ryan. We have a photograph of Mary Ryan wearing a long skirt, standing in the road with her hand raised to shield her eyes from the light. She looks cross, flinty even, as if she’s calling someone and is waiting impatiently for that person to come to her. This is in contrast to a photo we have of Joe Martell, who looks dreamy, with a drooping moustache and a slouched soft cloth cap, very much in keeping with the manner of his countrymen back in his native Corsica. His eyes are deep-set under the brim of his cap. Though different, it seems that the two fell in love and were married in 1883 in Crooke church, the grey stone building on the clifftop overlooking the wide expanse of water. They had four daughters – RoseAnn, Maggie, Angela and Mary Ellen, who was the youngest.
My mother, Ena – who was the daughter of Mary Ellen – could clearly remember Joe Martell, even though she was only a little girl when he died. They used to walk along the cockle walk together, chatting away, hand in hand. He had black hair, dark brown eyes and sallow skin. When he got older, he used to make model ships, which he moored against detailed miniature piers, all set against the painted background of the river estuary with detailed ’scapes of Ballyhack, Arthurstown, Duncannon and Cheekpoint. These elaborate seascapes were housed in great display cases made of glass. He used his wife Mary’s grey hair for the wisps of smoke coming out of the funnel of the ships.
‘You’ll be beautiful like your Aunt Madeline when you grow up,’ he used to tell my mother when she was small, comparing her to one of his sisters. ‘You’ll be a lady and ride a horse,’ he’d tell her. They used to have great chats. She remembered how he had a funny way of saying certain words, such as ‘meeses’ instead of mice and ‘ices’ instead of cream cakes. And we know that he was the first seaman to bring a gramophone home to Passage East from one of his voyages.
It was many years later that RoseAnn and I decided to travel to Corsica. It was a complicated trip that involved flying to Marseilles first, where we felt the lovely heat of the Mediterranean sun on our backs. The next day we caught the ferry and travelled through the summer night towards a distant landmass that loomed ever larger as the dawn came up.
To our knowledge Joe Martell never returned to see his family or the home of his youth. My sister and I were emotional the day we saw the mountains of Corsica in the distance. He had left all of this behind.
As the ferry sailed into the port of Ajaccio, the sun came up and we saw purple and lilac hills wrapped around the ochre and cream-coloured houses of the port. As the ship glided in, th
e sun burned away the morning mist and the great wide expanse of bay with its corral of white cliffs lay before us. The distant hills were still a sleepy, lilac colour but the sea was a turquoise blue and the houses and hotels of the little town were warm and yellow. RoseAnn and I had lumps in our throats as the boat got closer to the dock.
We were determined to find some links with his past. Maybe we’d find a key to his early life and to his family? We wanted to dig up any trace of him, to see if there was any record of his life.
Our search began as soon as we had docked and checked in to our hotel. Without wasting any time, we headed out towards La Chapelle des Grecs and the local cemetery beyond. It was deathly quiet when we got there in the bright mid-morning. No one was about but we began looking for a Martell plot, wandering through the little narrow lanes that wound themselves between the large tombs and lavish burial chambers.
We peered at the family names and at the sad framed photographs of the deceased. Nervously, we squeezed through half-open gates into forgotten, overgrown parts. It was an eerie place in the white sunshine with the cicadas clacking away. It was still, ancient and deserted. In the end, Le Cimetière des Sept Familles yielded no clues. We felt rejected as we walked back towards the centre of Ajaccio.
Over the coming days we went through the census records at the national archives, trawling through dusty columns of names. With our broken French, we asked bemused natives for directions. They looked sceptically at us. Perhaps they wondered why we were not going to the beach or to trek in the mountains. We visited the Maritime Museum where one man hunched his shoulders, lifted his eyebrows and said with a Gallic flourish: ‘Il est difficile le trouver, comme une aiguille dans une meule de foin.’
‘Oui,’ we said, nodding our heads in weariness, just about grasping his meaning – which had to do with our search being difficult, like finding a needle in a haystack. ‘C’est vrai,’ I responded, giving my few Gallic words a spin of their own.
Beyond the Breakwater Page 16