A path leading down to the beach is just in front of us, and at the last moment we remove our sandals and launch ourselves, barefoot, on to the loose, warm sand. At the moment of impact I am conscious of a sharp pain in my right foot. I have hit a spot where a rock is concealed below the surface of the beach. For a moment or two I think I am only bruised and decide not to mention the mishap. But a trail of blood on the sand soon alerts the others. ‘What have you done!’ they shriek. ‘Oh dear,’ I say, looking down, ‘I seem to have cut my foot.’
This seems to me the right line to take: I think we’d all have gone to any lengths to avoid losing face by making a fuss about a tiny accident. It is perfectly permissible to make a fuss on someone else’s behalf, however. The others gather round and force me to sit down on the beach while someone dabs at the injury with a pocket handkerchief to get the sand out of it. The handkerchief is then wrapped around my toe and tied in a knot. Angela Magill, who’s taken charge of these operations, dispatches Olivia and Colette for the resident nurse. I feel this is going too far; I am really not that badly hurt. It’s the blood that makes it look worse than it is. After sitting there for a bit I insist on hobbling up to the road, leaning on Angela’s arm.
And there approaching us are Olivia and Colette, accompanied by a trio of sturdy looking boys. Having failed to find the nurse, they’d spotted Little Peadar’s sons and blurted out, in garbled Irish, an account of the accident to my toe. These boys are Maghnas, Frank and Dermot Bell. They are very nearly as presentable as Olivia has claimed, and one in particular I am instantly drawn to. He’s the middle one (I think), the one called Maghnas, auburn-haired, assured, not in the least a bumpkin. Clearly all three are accustomed to making a good impression on the summer visitors, as indeed are many more of these local boys whom we get to know over the next few weeks. The whole place is seething with adolescent ardour, in a framework of denial and restriction which only adds a savour.
On this first occasion I am helped by many hands across the fields to Teach Pheadair Bhig, where the woman of the house, standing in for the nurse, applies disinfectant and elastoplast to my damaged toe. The worry uppermost in my mind at this moment is the question of whether I might be incapacitated for the dance, the ceilidhe, due to take place on the following – Wednesday – evening. I keep comparing myself to an amadán (a fool); at the same time, I am exhilarated because I think, I think it is just possible that Maghnas Bell has reacted to me in the same way as I have reacted to him. I am sure – almost sure – that a frisson of sexual attraction has passed between us. Either that or I’m deluding myself – of course I don’t rule out the possibility. We’ve hardly exchanged a word, but there is something … I am sure there is.
I find I can get about quite well as long as I remember to put my right foot to the ground quite gingerly. (In fact the cut heals quickly and doesn’t inconvenience me at all, though it leaves a scar that has never gone away; that and a mark on the palm of my hand from an encounter with barbed wire on a later visit to Rannafast are two of my legacies from the Gaeltacht. The journalist and author Cal McCrystal ended up similarly afflicted, when he showed off before his classmates by once going swimming during an Easter visit to the place, and had his stomach cut by a shard of glass for his pains. Not profiting sufficiently by this experience, he showed off again by eating an oyster dug from the shore and made himself fearfully sick – thereby demonstrating how ‘Providence punishes those who step out of line and allow their attention to wander from the righteousness of fireside storytelling.’
That August evening, more than forty years ago, I spend some time hanging about the secretary’s office at Coláiste Bhrighde, trying to effect a transfer to Teach Pheadair Bhig. For some reason, I don’t know why, nothing comes of it. I am billeted on Eddy Doyle and his family and there I stay, with some disgruntlement at first but later in a spirit of enthusiasm. I like the house, and the people in it, and make some friends there, and generally have a whale of a time.
There must have been problems, however. For example: what on earth did I eat? I wasn’t a tea-drinker then, any more than now; bread and jam held no appeal for me, and as for meat of any sort … even the sight of it brought on a feeling of revulsion. These peculiarities were accommodated at home, but they certainly didn’t add up to a dietary principle that many people would have understood. Vegetarianism was not in vogue. I hardly knew the term, and would not have thought of applying it to myself. I didn’t eat meat, that was all. It was a matter of taste, not an ideology. (It wasn’t until much later, after I’d lived in London for a bit, that I formalised the practice I’d more or less abided by for most of my life, and became an out-and-out vegetarian.) It was also an inherited trait. At some point in her remote infancy, my mother took a scunner at onions and then somehow the whole range of vegetables, apart from potatoes, peas and beans, got tainted with the same unpalatability. As the youngest child, spoilt, her sisters said, she got away with being pernickety. Then she passed the same pernicketiness on to me, only it was meat and fish that made me go ‘Ugh’. Jack Spratt would eat no fat. But despite her odd aversion to vegetables, my mother was never an avid carnivore. This was someone who had to give up Domestic Science at school for fear of opening an exam paper and finding herself required to stuff a chicken.
In the Gaeltacht, on my first holiday with friends rather than relatives, I suppose I lived on boiled potatoes and carrots, bread and butter, biscuits and so forth, eked out with numerous bars of chocolate and packets of crisps from the local shop. It doesn’t sound like a healthy diet, but it seems to have kept me going. If anyone wondered at my constant refusal of this and that at the dinner table, they didn’t comment on it. There were more enticing topics to engage our attention.
Not that these would have come up for discussion at mealtimes, with the presence of the Doyle family – to start with at any rate – imposing an inhibition. ‘Cuir chugam an salann, le do thoil’ (‘Pass the salt, please’) and ‘Lá breá atá ann’ (‘It’s a fine day’) would have been about all the conversation we could manage, at least until we settled in and became more daring. Of the people of the house, I don’t remember Eddy Doyle at all, probably because he left for Scotland after about a week; his wife, the bean a’ tí, has left a slightly clearer impression on my mind but not much: stout and friendly and never seen without that ubiquitous Gaeltacht garment, the navy overall patterned with tiny white flowers. I remember two of the younger Doyles, a boy a year or two older than us and a girl of thirteen or fourteen; but these, though perfectly agreeable, don’t loom very large in the network of friendships, intrigues and infatuations which soon developed. A younger brother of the bean a’toigh’s, called Cathal I think, appeared at some time during the month of August and did take part in the – what to call it? Sexual isn’t right, since it implies rather more than the truth: perhaps amorous is a better word. The amorous free-for-all which dominated the district for a month in the summer, in opposition to the decorum required by the authorities. Cathal, from our house, proved as prone to flirtation and horseplay as anyone, even though he must have been thirty at least.
It wasn’t all fun and games, of course. We’re obliged to attend classes at Coláiste Bhrighde for a couple of hours in the morning and the afternoon (apart from weekends and Wednesday afternoons, which are free). It’s our first experience of the direct method: instruction doled out to us, not in English, but in the language we’re striving to acquire. This, at least to begin with, has the charm of novelty. We listen hard and absorb as much as we can. At the same time, among ourselves, we vigorously disclaim any wish to work. We are playing the part of giddy girls – aided and abetted by the holiday spirit. It’s de rigueur to flaunt the amount of indolence you can get away with. We loll at the back of the classroom, pretending to doze, and putting it down to luck if we manage to answer correctly when addressed. The teacher, who after all is on holiday too, isn’t very strict with us. He, to my delight, is the personable young man who amiably laid down th
e law on the bus from Derry. Martin Henderson, his name is. God knows why he’s been assigned to a class of girls; but there it is. All the other classes in the building are mixed, while ours, for some reason, consists of girls only. Thirty or forty of us, all shapes and sizes, all varieties of temperament and intellectual capacity.
The teacher exerts himself to deal with the more alarming forms of girlishness, and manages very well. He doesn’t mind if we call him by his Christian name, but makes it plain that his patience and good humour aren’t inexhaustible. Somehow he keeps us in order, while tolerating our pretence of idleness, and actually duns into our heads – some of our heads – a fair amount of information. One or two of us benefit from his teaching to the extent of achieving an interest in Donegal idioms. Cora Cainnte as Tir Chonaill, I remember, was the title of a book he used. As for me – I am so taken with Martin Henderson’s appearance and manner that I never can decide finally between him and Maghnas Bell as the ultimate man about the place to hanker after.
The stations of the west, Seamus Heaney wrote. ‘But still I would recall the Stations of the West, white sand, hard rock, light ascending like its definition over Rannafast and Errigal, Annaghry and Kincasslagh …’
Light ascending like its definition. I think by this Heaney means that everything is reduced to its essence, its most elemental form, in this wild place. ‘I had come west to inhale the absolute weather.’ He had also come with his school, St Columb’s in Derry; but he seems to have been younger at the time than we were and less emphatically primed for merriment. It’s the more serious aspects of the Gaeltacht that have lingered with him, if we’re to go by the prose poem in Stations: history, famine, injustice, insurrection, ‘Croppies’ graves’. The stations of the west modulate into the stations of the cross, and thence point forwards and backwards to Station Island, St Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg in another part of Donegal, all the emblems of a persecuted, an austere and glamorous, Catholicism.
Lough Derg never held the slightest attraction for me, or for anyone I knew well; but there were girls at school who had made the pilgrimage, gone there to fast and pray all night and trudge over sharp stones reciting the Rosary in their bare feet. I’d no more have considered inflicting these privations on myself than going in for flagellation. Lough Derg and everything it stood for seemed to me to be the opposite of Rannafast. It was like some kind of medieval torture chamber, and I hated the thought of it. However, at sixteen I was no enlightened renegade either. If I’d been aware of it I’d certainly have repudiated William Carleton’s repudiation of the whole sorry, penitential business. Carleton’s ‘The Lough Derg Pilgrim’, written in 1828, is the first of his Traits and Stories and announces his incipient apostasy, as repugnance for Catholic chicanery grows on him in the course of his sojourn at Station Island. I suppose, if I’d thought about it at all, I was still, at some level, equating Catholicism with integrity, and apostasy with some depravity of character. This had something to do with the actual religious force but more, I think, with a sense of national identity – the immense allure of ill-treated Ireland, martyrs, misgovernment, indomitability and all.
Carleton, who took as strong a line as anyone concerning the abuses of his day, turns up among Heaney’s formidable revenants in the poem ‘Station Island’. ‘Your Lough Derg Pilgrim,’ says the narrator,
haunts me every time I cross this mountain –
as if I am being followed, or following.
I’m on my road there now to do the station.
– which draws an exasperated retort from the forthright old turncoat, ‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’
Things were changing, but slowly. By the 1940s and ’50s, goings-on at St Patrick’s Purgatory were likely less gaudy and disorderly than those recalled by Carleton; but the features of Catholicism provoking the fullest outrage in non-believers were much the same: superstition, priestly greed, hypocrisy, the whole repressive repertoire. Carleton’s singling out of ‘that jealous spirit of mistaken devotion, which keeps the soul in perpetual sickness, and invests the innocent enjoyments of life with a character of sin and severity’ certainly strikes a chord with me, when I consider my schooling in Belfast, and the way it ended – even though I know it isn’t sex but boisterousness, play and conviviality the nineteenth-century novelist has in mind.
As far as sex is concerned – there is nothing in the whole of Carleton’s output to suggest the smallest deviation from the conventions of the day. You get the feeling, from his books, that any failure to uphold a po-faced purity would be tantamount to traducing the national character. It’s only the odd inferior gentleman, like Hycy Burke in The Emigrants of Ahadarra, who has trouble damping down his erotic impulses. In this world of make-believe, of course, women have no erotic impulses. What they have instead is an unshakeable morality. ‘In no country on the earth,’ William Carleton assures his readers, in the preface to Fardorougha the Miser, ‘or among no class of females, could the eye of an observer discover greater truth, sincerer religion, or firmer principle, than among the wives and daughters of the Irish peasantry.’ Whew! It’s a far cry from Brian Merriman’s
twenty-year-old with her parts untamed.
She was no ignorant girl from school
To whine for her mother and play the fool
But a competent bedmate smooth and warm
Who cushioned him like a sheaf of corn.
Line by line she bade him linger
With gummy lips and groping finger …
In the Irish poetry book we used at school, Filidheacht na nGaedheal (Poetry of the Irish), the innocent opening section of Merriman’s Cuirt a’ Mheadhain Oichdhe (The Midnight Court, c. 1780) was included under the heading ‘Nature Poetry’, but not the rest: the rest was definitely out of bounds as far as school children were concerned.
And not only schoolchildren. When Frank O’Connor’s spirited translation of Merriman’s masterpiece came out in 1945, it promptly fell foul of the Irish Censorship Board, which left the poem doubly banned in Ireland. ‘… I believe the best authorities hold that it is almost entirely my own work,’ O’Connor wrote in 1959 (our Rannafast year), ‘the one compliment Ireland has ever paid me.’
Na Rossa go Bráthach (The Rosses For Ever) is the title of another of our school readers. Rannafast is a townland in the Rosses, north-west of Lough Derg – a poor district, abundant in memories of hardship and exploitation, and also in local lore. Many stories are current about the heroes of the Rosses and their epic deeds, whether these have to do with fighting, piety or scholarship. Some of these stories are recounted in Séamus Ó Grianna’s Nuair a Bhí Mé Óg (When I Was Young), a charming exercise in autobiography published in 1942. Séamus Ó Grianna (James Greene) belonged to the famous Mac Grianna family of Rannafast – authors, storytellers, broadcasters, folklorists and singers – some of whose members were still around at the time of our first visit to the district, though unfortunately not of a generation to attract our interest.
‘Ignorant girls from school’ that we were, we were happy to assign any kind of scholarly pursuit to some date in the duller future. Well, we had a lot on our minds – whether we’d be shamed as wallflowers at the very next ceilidhe, or caught infringing some rule and sent home in disgrace. (‘Disgrace’: the word conjures up a whole different ethos, the world of those enticing English stories of the 1920s and ’30s with titles like A Disgrace to the Fourth, The Worst Fifth on Record, Expelled from St Madern’s, or Averil’s Wild Oats – titles not without a bearing on our impending predicament. These, it’s true, and others like them, would have meant not a thing to me at the time, having been consigned by me, some years earlier, to the literary scrapheap of the staid and old-fashioned. At nine or ten, I’d judged them vastly inferior to the sparkling adventure stories of Enid Blyton and Malcolm Saville, the Bunter books or the girls’ and boys’ papers of the Amalgamated Press and their brand of school fiction. It took me a long time to get around to the older school stories. It was only
when I decided to form a representative collection of children’s books from about 1900 to 1955 that I came to revel in their appearance and associations – though less perhaps in their actual content. But, as evocative items of juvenile reading, they are now at the core of a collecting enthusiasm which surpasses even the quilts and spongeware mentioned above.)
The School – or summer school – of Ups and Downs (to borrow another title) does very well to describe the events of that August, and our fluctuating moods. We were all up and down, for one reason or another – though not down and out completely before the end of the month. Occasionally – very occasionally – a fit of holiness would come over one or two of us and we’d attend early morning Mass without being obliged to. On the other hand, we were soon regaling one another with bilingual jokes like the one about the two nuns, one of whom is called Charlotte. The Irish for ‘Sister’ is ‘Siúr’, and, in the vocative case, the ‘S’ is aspirated to give an ‘h’ sound. ‘Ch’ also becomes ‘h’, so, when the two nuns meet in a corridor and exchange greetings, you get something that sounds like: ‘Well, a hoor’; ‘Well, a harlot.’ This tickles our sense of irreverence.
I’d like to think that the atmosphere in Rannafast that summer was closer to Merriman – the well-named Merriman – than to the ‘ologroaning and ologoaning’ of Station Island, but of course it wasn’t as simple as that. The two things existed side-by-side, inculcated piety and would-be licentiousness – and existed in a heightened form for reasons not to be wondered at: among them the supercharged locality and the closed community. Merriman again (via O’Connor):
The girls at home and the boys in college.
Asking For Trouble Page 10