by Tim Robinson
The poor man had lost his courage because of what he’d been through, and his fear had stopped him from asking Dónall for the potatoes.
A MOUTHFUL OF ECHOES
I begin my house-visiting at the top of the village, with the foundation-legend of Gilbert Cottage, as I have often heard it told.
At Grand Central Station a man stepped out of the crowd saying “Carry your bag, sir?” and took the suitcase out of Stephen Dirrane’s hand. Stephen and his uncle Colman trotted after him through the crowd with increasing anxiety as he got further and further ahead of them, because all the money they had saved through their years of work in America was in that suitcase. Just as he was about to disappear from sight, two other men leaped out of nowhere and knocked him down. They were plain-clothes detectives who had been watching the thief, and thanks to them Stephen and Colman came back to Aran with their savings intact. So they were able to buy the cottage by Gort an Bhiolair, the watercress field, in Fearann an Choirce, that had once belonged to a distant forbear, Gilbert Dirrane. Stephen, who felt the cold after those malnourished years, lit a huge fire in the grate, and set about realizing his dream of offering visitors comfort and good food, on the island that had treated his youth with such harshness and thrown him out into the world at the age of sixteen.
First a kitchen was added to the back of Gilbert Cottage, and then a little garden of marigolds was wrested from the crag by the front door. At intervals of a year or two the cottage sprouted further additions: another storey, extra rooms behind the kitchen, a long loft above those. The original interior was all knocked into one sitting-room, which was still quite small, and a dining-room built in front of it; then two snug little alcoves for candle-lit tête-à-têtes were built out from the dining-room, replacing the plot of marigolds, with terraces on top reached by a very narrow outside staircase. The building has the look of a provisional arrangement that has lasted long enough to weather into endearing familiarity; cube is balanced on cube as in photographs one has seen of sub-Saharan towns. The interior is dark, an old curiosity shop. Every bit of wall-space is filled with antique clocks, painted plates, the text of the Declaration of the Irish Republic, a poster-reproduction of Frederic Burton’s Victorian weepy “The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child,” mirrors, old lamps, and since his death a few years ago, photographs of Uncle Coleman. The fire, a glowing quarter-sackful of coal, is appreciated even in summer by visitors mortified by the unaccustomed damp of Aran. Colman, who used to be a boilerman, would tend it, and spent his winters by it, sitting up, tall and rigid, always clean-shaven and wearing a neat lumberjack shirt. Occasionally, we heard, he would go into Galway and get drunk, but that was as hard to imagine as a grandfather clock getting drunk. Starved of speech sometimes when M was in London for long autumn months and there were no visitors on the island, I would come up to Gilbert Cottage to phone her, which was a comfort even though the telephone, one of the first in the island, was in a cubby-hole under the stairs in which I had to lean sideways like a wind-blown thorntree, and often I could hardly hear her over the sighing of the waves and the crackling of the stars. Then I would sit for a while opposite Coleman by the fire, and Stephen would come and go with large and frequent glasses of red wine, and sometimes recite sad folksongs, making his eyes very round and pathetic:
Cé hé sin amuigh a bhfuil faobhar ar a ghuth
ag réabadh mo dhorais dhúnta?
Mise Éamon an Chnoic atá báite fuar fliuch
ó shíorshiúl sléibhte is gleannta …
Who’s that outside with hoarseness in his voice
beating down my closed door?
I am Éamon of the Hill, who is drowned wet and cold
from endless walking in mountains and valleys …
—which would make us huddle round the fire even closer. Or Coleman would intone a reminiscence of the America of innocent frontiers:
THERE WAS AN OLD INDIAN MAN. HE HAD A FINE HEAD OF HAIR. “BY GOD,” I SAYS TO HIM, “YOU’VE GOT A FINE HEAD OF HAIR FOR YOUR AGE!” “I HAVE,” HE SAYS, “AND DO YOU KNOW NOW, WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN ALL MY HAIR FELL OUT,” SAYS HE, “AND I WAS ASHAMED AND I NEVER TOOK MY CAP OFF. WELL,” SAYS HE, “I WENT TO BUFFALO ONE TIME, AND I MET AN INDIAN, AND SAYS HE, “YOU GIVE ME FIVE DOLLARS, AND I’LL GIVE YOU A BOTTLE WITH SOMETHING IN IT,” SAYS HE, “AND IF IT DOESN’T GIVE YOU SOME OF YOUR HAIR BACK—I WON’T SAY ALL OF IT—YOU CAN WRITE TO ME AND I’LL SEND HALF YOUR MONEY BACK—I WON’T SEND ALL OF IT—OR I’LL SEND YOU ANOTHER BOTTLE.” “WELL BY GOD,” SAYS HE, “I’D GIVE ANYTHING TO HAVE A FINE HEAD OF HAIR, AND I’LL GIVE YOU TEN DOLLARS, AND IF IT WORKS,” SAYS HE, “I’LL SEND YOU ANOTHER FIVE.”’ WELL, I DON’T KNOW WHAT WAS IN THE BOTTLE, BUT HE RUBBED IT IN EVERY DAY, AND HE PUT A WARM CLOTH ON HIS HEAD AT NIGHT, AND BY GOD IT COME UP! THEM INDIANS, YOU KNOW, THEY HAVE A LOT OF REMEDIES, OUT OF THE GROUND.
The famous used to come to Gilbert Cottage to escape from fame; once M had to calm Stephen’s nerves in the kitchen and serve lunch on his behalf to the wife of an American of inconceivable power and riches, and shoo the security men out to sit on the garden wall because their gigantic shoulders were blocking the light of the little windows, while the poor woman lingered at table and let hour after hour of the afternoon dissolve in her wine-glass. Gilbert Cottage was the choice of all official and important visitors to the island. Nowadays there are other guest-houses offering more spacious comforts, many visitors prefer to be nearer the nightlife of Cill Rónáin, and Gilbert Cottage is left to settle into the past. There came a time in which the joins of its structure were not so often plastered over or the snug corners so fussed at with dusters. Stephen talked of religion, to which he had given no heed in the frenetic years of construction and cooking, and told one that material things do not last, that what is built up falls down again. For a while house and master grieved for Uncle Colman.
Nowadays, though, this is still the place to find those who come to Aran for talk, and who prefer the fireside to the television lounge or the voice-quenching din of the pub. Recently I found there a linguist, Dr. James Duran of California, whose grandfather, an Ó Direáin, was related to Stephen’s forebears. Dr. Duran was completing a study of the Irish of Aran, and in particular that of Árainn itself, which was relatively neglected in favour of the smaller islands by previous researchers. Our conversation ranged from the regrettable decay of the Indo-European case system over the last two thousand years, to the use of the word blackin for shoe polish by Gort na gCapall children—the Cill Rónáin children laugh at them for talking of putting blackin bán (white blacking) on their trainers. I had sometimes heard Cill Rónáin people complaining of the difficulty of understanding people from Fearann an Choirce, and was interested to learn that there are two sub-dialects in Árainn, the linguistic boundary lying between Corrúch and Fearann an Choirce. However, the significant differences between local speech patterns are not to be looked for in such oddities of vocabulary as “blackin,” which can crop up anywhere by historical accident, but in the pronunciation of the most ordinary and common words. Thus in western Árainn the word siar, westward, is pronounced as in standard Irish, whereas in eastern Árainn it tends to be pronounced as séar. A form peculiar to eastern Árainn is the pronoun muinn, we/us, which is sinn in Standard Irish; western Árainn uses the Connemara form muid. There are similarly subtle differences between the Irish of the three islands, and there is a distinct tinge of Clare (i.e. Munster) in that of Inis Oírr, though all of them are very close to Connemara Irish. As to the future of the language in Aran, Dr. Duran is much more optimistic than the late Breandán Ó hEithir or the geographer Reg Hindley, on whose work Breandán relied. In Cill Rónáin, for example, where Prof. Hindley thought Irish was in a state of collapse, there has in fact been a resurgence of the language. To quote from a draft paper on the subject Dr. Duran showed me:
Kilronan has always been an English-speaking town, but Irish independence and the small government grants of money awarded to Irish-speaking families (now th
e “£10 grants”) stimulated the interest of families in Kilronan in the language. Nevertheless, only thirty years ago, it was common for people from western Inis Mór to be shamed into speaking English by the shopkeepers when they went into Kilronan to do their shopping. Something happened in the mid-1970’s, however, which totally reversed the situation, as the following incident illustrates. A young woman fron western Inis Mór went overseas in 1972 and returned in 1977. When she went into a Kilronan shop to make a purchase, and spoke English to the shopkeeper, as she was used to doing, she was greeted with “Well, aren’t we posh now that we’ve been overseas and have learned a bit of English!” The enraged customer then responded with “Well isn’t it nice that we’ve learned enough Gaelic to do business with the customers!”
Professor Hindley, it seems, was struck by the fall in the number of “£10 grants” awarded in recent years, but in fact Cill Rónáin families often do not even apply for them, because they are no longer a significant addition to the family income, and the monolingualism they presuppose is not seen as necessary to the preservation of the language. As Dr. Duran writes:
If I, as a stranger, go in to have my bicycle fixed at the Kilronan pier, and drift into English while discussing the virtues of bicycle parts, it will be the teenagers that insist on continuing in Gaelic while we handle the technological problems of the modern world. Teenagers are proud of being bilingual. They are catching up educationally rapidly with the rest of Ireland, and in fact the large floods of foreign visitiors to the Aran Islands every summer can help foster a sense of being “European,” that is, multilingual and multicultural in a world where knowing the English language is an advantage, but not the sole measure of a person’s intellectual capacity or of his/her cultural refinement.
As to Aran English, it is so vigorous and savoury that much of what talk my memory brings back from the houses of Fearann an Choirce is in English. I used to call in on Stephen’s stepmother, Bríd Gillan, in her cottage just behind the guest-house. In both Irish and English she has an incisive tongue greatly feared by her neighbours and relatives. In her youth she went to Tipperary as a priest’s housekeeper, and joined Cumann na mBan, the women’s nationalist organization founded by Countess Markievicz. Both there and later in Dublin where she became nurse to the children of General Mulcahy, she carried food and messages for the IRA men in their guerrilla war against the British. I heard her describing her arrest by the Black and Tans once on Raidió na Gaeltachta. Her captors told her they had done dreadful things to the Countess and threatened to do the same to Bríd. The lapidary English sentence with which she quelled the ignoble brutes stood out for me among the vaguer details of her Irish narrative:
WHATEVER
was Done
to the
COUNTESS MARKIEVICZ
I will count it an
HONOUR
if it is Done
to ME.
In her eighties Bríd still had the vigorous stride of her revolutionary youth—a standard military pace, a fraction too long to be exactly “the walk of a queen”—and a way of discharging her words individually like rounds from a heavy revolver. “When you’re past eighty-two,” she told me once, “you’re not so Spry—or not so Bright—or not so Nice—as you were when you were young (I don’t know how nice I was when I was young)—and it’s Time—to take a little Trip—to the Other Side.” But Bríd has no marching orders for the Other Side as yet; she has received the congratulations of the Presidents of Ireland and the United States on her hundredth birthday, and still tends the roses round the door of her home, Cliff Top Cottage. But the republic she had fought for was a disappointment to her; in fact she once told me that it was a dictatorship, that had (vainly) tried to limit the size of an extension to her cottage. However, God had evidently approved this work, for while it was in progress and half the house was roofless it had survived a terrible storm, the events of which Bríd recounted to me with great emphasis. The joists and floorboards of the attic kept lifting up and settling down again; she scattered holy water around as much of the extension as she could reach, then lit a Sacred Candle to watch over it while she and her husband retired to the old part of the cottage, which was under the protection of the Sacred Heart. Even if, as she told me, we are just grains of sand, she was not afraid, for “Why should God let the roof be blown off just to please the Devil or a few evil spirits that might be around, when He had only to blink an eyelash to keep it on?” And indeed no harm was done. “Now,” she concluded, “I don’t know Who Believes, or Who Believes in What, or …” (the impetus of her delivery driving her inexorably onwards) “…What Believes in Who—but THAT WAS A MIRACLE!”
The Gillans came to Aran from Leitrim some time before 1821, when the census lists Peter Gillan, forty-eight, a weaver, his wife Rose and their six children. Róisí Mhór, as she was called, was the midwife I have mentioned who was drowned off Inis Meáin one stormy night. Perhaps her skills were inherited by Bríd, who also served the island as a midwife. Certainly Peter’s craft was passed down through subsequent generations, and I believe the old loom is still in existence, in one of the little thatched barns behind the Gillan family home, a small neat house just east of Gilbert Cottage, on the boreen running down to the shore. I sometimes used to find Bríd’s brother Seán, the story-teller whom I have quoted extensively, poking about in the “street,” the space inhabited by chickens and dogs and clumps of comfrey between his cottage and the barns. The plot in front of the cottage was always scrupulously orderly, whether it was ridged for potatoes, a golden sea of rye, or a constellation of little haycocks. Seán himself was exemplary, as neat and bright-eyed as a wren in his eighties (he died at the age of ninety-eight; a brother of his in Connemara lived to be a hundred), but his wife was elderly and infirm, and I rarely penetrated the house. Séan’s reminiscences were for me the gateway to the old, vanished, Fearann an Choirce which clustered around the bends in the boreen where it wound down the scarp below Clifftop Cottage:
There were seven houses down there on the east side of the road. I only remember the last of them. In fact it was I who knocked it down about twenty years ago, long after the two old women died, the Nancies, as they were called. You wouldn’t believe how small it was! From here to there, about eight feet long and six feet wide. You wouldn’t know how in the world they lived inside in it. The two of them were always quarrelling with each other, and then nobody would go near the house. They used to be throwing things at each other. My grandfather told me it was a right hullaballoo. But the last of them died a good while back now. A good while, three score years perhaps, or more.
But when the house was knocked, you wouldn’t believe the rafters that were in it! The thickness of them! And it was here in Fearann an Choirce those trees were felled! There was a wood back there on the left-hand side, along the bottom of the cliff. Water flows out there. Soft ground, a sort of turlough. That is where they cut the trees those rafters were made from. I tell you no lie! I took them myself and put them in that little cabin north of my own house. They’re still there. Not a bit of woodworm in them, just as they were. That was the last of the seven houses. The house of the Nancies.
Seán’s grandfather would have been the weaver described in Tom O’Flaherty’s account of the making of his first suit of clothes:
In Aran the boys wore woollen petticoats until they reached what I then considered an advanced age. We had one old black sheep [whose] wool was enough to supply my father’s requirements; but now that I was growing out of the red petticoat stage another black sheep was necessary. Unluckily all the black lambs this sheep produced were males! If I had to wait until she had a female I might be in petticoats for the rest of my life. Then the weaver decided to do something about it. He decreed that my mother and I pray for a black female lamb. Our prayers were answered. Now I wouldn’t have to go through life dressed like a woman!
I always helped my mother prepare the wool for the weaver. After it was washed we spread it out on the flag
s to dry and I stood guard over it. After it was thoroughly dried we teased it into a soft fluffiness. Then it was carded into rolls ready for the spinning-wheel. When mother had a number of spindle-fuls spun I held the spindle while she wound the thread onto a ball. Then the great day arrived when we took the balls of thread, ceirtlíni we called them, to the weaver…. The weaver’s loom had a great fascination for me. I sat for hours at a time watching our craftsman throw the shuttle, operate the crude machinery with his legs and now and then sprinkle the thread with a home-made lubricant. The odour of this lubricant was not as incense to the nostrils.