But the outside world intruded on Sheila’s paradise. Her sketchbook ended abruptly. On the final page she wrote: ‘I stopped after the day two young men came down from the mountain … the arrival of these strangers brought the more complex world into our small oasis … (and) heralded the time to grow up.’ Those two young men included the husband she married. I had always longed to know more about her life after those drawings stop. Sheila often expressed her desire to write her own life story. Yet I never realised how seriously she desired to be a writer until, after her death, I unearthed a very old passport of hers, in which she listed her occupation as ‘writer’. A tattered envelope listed stories she had written and comments from various editors who rejected them. She was at an age when most people’s lives seem settled into fixed routines when applying for that passport, travelling cheaply through Spain and Morocco, trying to write and engage with new ideas and people. Her notebook from that time is filled more with quotations from mystics than with her own thoughts. Perhaps, as when studying painting in London’s Slade School almost a half century before, she found that the more she tried to write the less she actually could.
In 1985, shortly after her sketchbook of drawings was published, I was in her caravan when a local woman told Sheila that her elderly mother couldn’t understand Sheila’s book. It wasn’t the drawings, the woman explained: what baffled her mother was that Sheila didn’t dress in black and live out her life in mourning; that she possessed the audacity to still embrace happiness. Sheila’s happiness came from not hiding from grief but refusing to be conquered by it. It wasn’t the simple unthinking happiness of a child, but a hard-won happiness. She was happy not because of life but in spite of everything life had stolen from her.
By 1992, when she was in her eighty-ninth year, it seemed unlikely that she would ever get around to writing the memoir that she always talked about writing. Just before my second son was born, I travelled to Wexford and we discussed the idea that one day I would write a novel based on her life. Sheila preferred a form of inter-linking vignettes, with names being changed, certain facts blurred to be less recognisable and the leaving out of some matters that are not included in this novel.
Over several nights, we sat up in her caravan, making recordings in which she discussed aspects of her life which I knew and experiences that were new to me. I never listened to her tapes during her lifetime but I treasure the memories of the evenings we spent talking, reminiscent of my early visits to The Ark as a teenager. After she died in 2000, I hesitated to attempt to write a novel, knowing that I could never capture her unique essence or tell the essential truth of her story in the way that Sheila would have done. There was also the problem of what was the ‘essential truth’. Denis (Thomas in this novel), her middle brother who moved to South Africa and was Sheila’s rock, regarded parts of A Donegal Summer as inaccurate because – as a well-respected member of the Donegal Historical Society – he remembered their childhood differently.
Whose truth could I tell? If Sheila’s impressionistic memories contained inaccuracies on one level, then a literal historian’s logic might recreate a reality that Sheila could not identify with, because in most families siblings often recall the same events differently, depending on their age at the time or level of emotional involvement. I struggled with this dilemma and with occasionally discovering facts that ran contrary to Sheila’s stories. This was partly because it was not in her nature to speak ill of anyone, even her husband who, as I only later discovered, had left their children out of his will.
A year after Sheila’s death, I unearthed the tapes and played them. Because she found aspects of nursing home life difficult, some of my final visits to see her had been distressing. But listening to these tapes in private allowed me to reconnect with Sheila when she was still in good health and spirits, even at eighty-nine and then, through the stories she told me, to connect her with her at the ages of fifty-nine and thirty-nine and nineteen. Initially, I tried to tell each story exactly as told to me, but taken out of a conversational context, her words did not form a coherent narrative. After two years of writing, I needed to start again, this time first and foremost as a novelist and not a biographer, taking for courage and guidance a sentence by Sheila on the tapes about how she admired artists who had the courage to take reality and create something new and different from it.
Five years after her death, I published a novel based on the first half of her life, entitled The Family on Paradise Pier. Like in this new standalone novel, it deliberately played with some aspects of reality. I changed the first names of each family member to show that my representations of them were subjective recreations, shaped in my imagination. But I retained the family name because the Goold-Verschoyle children were too unique to be any other family. Likewise I kept the surname of the famous Fitzgerald family of Mayo into which she married, although again I have changed the Christian names of her husband and children to show that this is my fictional recreation of them, as described to me by someone who still felt their loss as keenly in old age as when they died. While the majority of these stories are true, down to the touch of her son’s old jumper bursting her dam of grief in 1966, all letters quoted in this book are in my words and not theirs.
The Family on Paradise Pier was set in Donegal and Mayo but also in Moscow and Spain as it followed not just Sheila’s early years, but the complex lives of two of her brothers. By 2005 I also already had a first draft written of An Ark of Light. This novel is different and completely independent from the first book in that, while Paradise Pier exploded the political tensions and turmoil in which her brothers’ immersed themselves, An Ark of Light is a quieter and more solitary book, focused purely on Sheila herself. It tries to tell her story in her latter decades, when she was no longer part of a large boisterous family but needed to make a new life and find a new sense of purpose, as a separated wife in a society that did not recognise divorce and also as the mother of a gay man in those decades when very real dangers lurked everywhere for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, who had to live within two worlds at once.
During part of the period in which I wrote my final draft of An Ark of Light, I was the first ever Writer in Residence at the National Museum of Ireland, based both in Collins Barracks in Dublin, which houses their Decorative Arts and History collections, and in Turlough Park in Turlough, Co. Mayo – the mansion in which Sheila’s in-laws lived and which plays a role in this novel. I was blessed by the great support of the staff of these two institutions. It was a privilege to be able to draw inspiration from the superb national collections housed in Turlough Park and to be allowed to spend time writing and conducting workshops in the stately rooms which Sheila would have visited so often as a young mother. I am no historian, and so I would direct readers seeking a factual account of the Fitzgerald family in Turlough to an excellent book, Turlough Park and the Fitzgeralds by Patrick Butler, a fine historian and one of the last people to live in that house before it became a national museum.
Now, finally, eighteen years on from her death; a quarter of a century after we sat together late at night in The Ark to make tape-recordings about her life, and more than forty years since the first night when I sat in her caravan listening to her tell me the stories that form the basis of this novel, this is my attempt to provide a fictional account of the second half of Sheila’s remarkable life. Some of it is based exactly on her own words when describing certain experiences, some sections are deliberately fictionalised, when I need to fill in gaps where not even Sheila had a full knowledge of what occurred to people she loved. Some characters are closely based on people she told me about, whereas other are composites of various people who touched her life. It is not my task as a novelist to say who is who, because in the end this novel is a work of imaginative fiction based on one woman’s memories.
While fiction can never tell the full truth, perhaps it can tell a different but equally important truth. I make no claims to fully know exactly who Sheila Fitzg
erald was at these different stages of her life, no more than I can even claim to fully know myself. To write a book like this is to feel judged by the living and the dead and I have no way of knowing if I will ever know the verdict of the latter. I just hope that I have honoured her instruction to take the outline of her life and craft something new from it. I also hope I have done justice to the people close to her about whom she spoke with such warmth.
Having spent thirteen years living with this manuscript, I feel it is time to publish it. I hope that, in my fictional Eva Fitzgerald, I have captured something of how she played a huge part in shaping me into the person I am now, and how she inspired so many people whom she came across in different countries and different decades. On the afternoon in 2000, when the staff at Glasnevin crematorium were baffled by the arrival of a white van from Wexford, Sheila’s colourful, handmade coffin looked like a small boat that would cause only the barest ripple. Only now, as the years pass, do her friends realise how that ripple has spread out across her lifetime to touch distant shores and how it still keeps moving on its own course, long after many of the seemingly great waves of her time have petered out. I thank her for the great gift of her friendship.
Dermot Bolger
Dublin, 3rd July 2018
An Ark of Light Page 42