by Tim Robinson
(Another villager let me into the secret that this “home-made lubricant” was urine, and the weaver had to put up with catcalls of fíodóir fuail, piss-weaver, because of it.)
In Thomas Mason’s The Islands of Ireland, published in 1936, is a splendid photograph of the Gillan’s old loom at work. It is still kept in one of their little outhouses, but only spiders weave on it. Behind every house in the village there are similar stores, barns, sheds, most of them adapted from abandoned ancestral cabins, clinging like a temporal shadow to the village of today, and stuffed with things that might come in useful if ever history repeats or reverses itself. Accidental resurrection of this material can be touching, painful, or sometimes comic; sometimes one would not know how to react to it. An elderly neighbour called Colm Mór used occasionally to greet me with a sentence from Pádraig Ó Conaire’s essay “M’Asal Beag Dubh,” which for many children is their first taste of literature, and for Colm had remained the summit and epitome of the written word: “I gCinn Mhara bhíos nuair chuireas aithne ar m’asal beag dubh i dtosach. (In Kinvara it was that I first made aquaintance with my little black donkey).” Ó Conaire was brought up in the respectable shopkeeping family of that name (anglicized as Connery) of Ros Muc in Connemara, lived a wandering Bohemian life, contributed notably to the rebirth of Irish prose writing, and died drunk and neglected in Galway, where there is now a statue of him. Our neighbour, having declaimed that unforgettable inaugural sentence of “My Little Black Donkey,” would sometimes break into a paean to artistic glory: “And now they’re gone, the Connerys of Ros Muc! Judge Connery with all his law and all his education, and Canon Connery, they’re all dead, and it’s not them the ladies come round to see and look at his statue!” Since we ourselves had just reached the Little Black Donkey stage of Irish literature I asked him if he still had his copy, and he promised to look for it. A few days later he came to the door with a tattered school text of the Ó Conaire essay, which he said he had found with a lot of other old books in the pigsty. I was eager to inspect this hoard, and went back to his house with him and round behind it to the disused pigsty, which was full of dust and decay. The literature was under some old sacks in a stone trough. In semi-darkness we picked layer after layer off the pile of mouldering copybooks and calendars from the days of his youth, and suddenly under our noses was a dingy photograph of half a dozen naked girls, standing side by side almost at attention, with permed waves in their hair and rosebud lips. We stood there gaping at them wordlessly; they looked as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Colm was the first to recover powers of speech. “Them are people!” he said, and turned them aside.
The Kings were another family that settled in Aran around the beginning of the last century and passed down their trade almost to the present day. Gregory King, thirty-six, smith and farmer, figures in the 1821 census, with his wife Kate and a son aged three, his mother-in-law Mary Joyce, and two stepchildren from Kate’s previous marriage to a Dirrane; in the same household are an elderly weaver, James McDonnell and his wife, and a house servant, Tom Lee. They have a quarter-acre of land. Mícheál King tells me that Gregory came from Renvyle in the north-west of Connemara; he was a member of the Whiteboys, one of the secret societies behind what the newspapers called “agrarian unrest,” and had to flee the locality after threatening a landlord. Tobar Ghrióir, also called Tobar an Ghabha, the well of the smith, at the head of the village, is named from him, and the roofless house close by it was his. The old smithy, now an outhouse, is next to Gilbert Dirrane’s cottage; Mícheál has pointed out to me among the nettles by its door the stone trough in which the red-hot iron was quenched, and from which pregnant women used to drink because of the magic properties of iron. By an odd chance I have a record of some of the conversations that took place at Gregory’s forge. George Warren, a Protestant bible-reader from the Irish Island Society, was at work in Aran in the winter of 1854–55, and a single volume of his journal which was somehow acquired by the archaeologist John Goulden has passed through my hands. Unfortunately it does not cover his arrival or his leaving the island, but it shows his persistence in calling on five or six families each day and trying to redirect them from reliance on the priest, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, to repentance and the unmediated word of God. “Be ye instant in season and out of season,” says St. Paul, and Mr. Warren evidently ordered his life by that word. I select the following from many similar entries:
Tuesday 19th December Visited the forge at Farnachurke where I met five men & after some time, I turned the Discourse on the shortnefs of time & the length of eternity, & the love & all sufficiancy of our Lords sufferings, throgh repentance and faith, but repentance sounded very strange in some of thier ears, & some seemd to take some notice of what I said—Visited Griggory Kings, George Gailliams [i.e. Gillans] Dannial Dirrans, and Patrick Dirrans, Farnachurcke, & all seemd very civil, & liftened all I said, & made no reply, but at Guilliams, where we had some reasoning, & he admitted that my reasoning was very plain present in all thirteen—
Wednesday 27th December Visited the forge at Farnachurcke, & met some men there, & after some time I turned the discourse of the Means of grace, but was paid but little attention to as they were all young lads, present five.
Friday 29th December Visited the forge at Farnachurcke, & after some time, I turned the discourse from the war, to eternity as I met some old men there I shewed them that was what should trouble us, & one man said that I was right, but that they never thought untell they were laid on a sick bed & I reasoned with them on the danger of living in such a way & on the 6 of the 14 of John, & some began to pray present eight—
Thursday 11th January Visited the forge at Farnachurcke, & done no good, as all was noise & bustle with sledge & hammer—
After a couple of months of this, Mr. Warren turned his attention to Cill Rónáin and Cill Éinne, but found the people there immured in fear of the priest, love of drink, and belief in Purgatory. His journal makes sad reading; the only living note in it is the echo of that “noise and bustle with sledge & hammer” from Gregory King’s forge.
In the time of Gregory’s grandson, early in this century, the Kings built the new house a couple of hundred yards further down the road, and reclaimed the crags around it. It is a large cottage with ample lofts lit by windows in the gable-ends, that make it almost two-storied. All around it are evidences of the vigour and enterprise of the family: the huge concrete tank built against the back of the house to collect rainwater for gutting fish, the kiln in which limestone was burned with turf to make lime for whitewash and fertilizer, the sties and póiríní and barns full of tools such as a great two-man saw in a frame with a handle at either end, with which the rafters of the house were cut from baulks of timber washed up on the shore, the spinning wheel, the kelp rakes made in their own forge, the tram-nets, the eighteen-foot pitchfork for gathering seaweed. When increasing traffic made it difficult to work with horses at the old roadside forge they built another behind the house, in which their great leather bellows has not yet breathed its last. The field-walls around the forge are draped with rusty chains salvaged from wrecks, out of the links of which horseshoes were beaten before the mass-produced shoes of Swedish iron became available. All this vigour, still tangible in the stout double walls of the green fields won from the rock, only began to slacken in recent times. Mícheál’s brothers left the island, Patrick to become a garda and Tiger (after his brief celebrity as the Man of Aran) to work in the Woolwich Arsenal as a smith; he later organized teams of Irish labourers, and a survivor of one of these has told me that Tiger used to pay for their keep in a hostel where they had to burn the bugs out of cracks in the walls with candles. (We met the Tiger once in his latter years, at a reunion of Aran Islanders in the Irish Club in Camden Town; I remember how, when the Archbishop of Tuam was brought over to where he was sitting, the Tiger began to rise like a surfacing whale, and the table rocked and the big pints of Guinness went tumbling, and he grew and grew until we all looked like the run
ts Oisín found in Ireland on his return from Tír na nÓg.) Then Mícheál’s father died—some years after but because of having been “tackled” by a bull, according to Mícheál—but his mother lived on for years, and in the end only Mícheál was left to run the farm and the smithy. The momentum of the year, like a great flywheel, keeps him going, the horse has to harrow the field to grow the hay to feed the horse, but time has outgrown the necessary tasks, and sometimes when a summer Sunday evening was still bright at nine o’clock I used to find him roving his land in an agony of boredom, and he would groan from the depths of his being, “Oh, that was a long day!”
Nevertheless, even in the 1970s the smithy often relived old times. In spring when the jaunting-cars were being readied for the tourist season, smoke rose quite frequently from the forge chimney; the horse stood patiently, tethered to the wall, while Mícheál reproved the inadequacies of the modern shoe with a few taps of the hammer, Oscar the dog would hang around ready to dart in between the horse’s legs and snap up the hoof-parings, and I would hang around too, and carry juicy morsels of talk back to M in the evening. One day I listened to men discussing a Turkish weight-lifter who could lift half a ton, and one of them explained how this could be achieved by training; for instance, he said, if you had a cow in calf, and you went out to the field on the day the calf was born and lifted it up, that would be easy; and if you did the same thing every day you would always be able to lift it, so that when it grew into a fine bull and the day came for shipping it to Galway there would be no need of the winch and you could hand it up onto the steamer yourself. Another time when Mícheál and myself were repainting his sidecar, M brought us out mugs of tea, and we squatted down to drink them. Mícheál put his mug on his knee, and said “Tá mé i mo shuí anois ag bord nárbh fhéidir leat a cheannacht ar ór ná ar airgead.” (“I’m sitting now at a table you couldn’t buy for gold or silver.”) “Is that from a story?” I asked, and bit by bit he recovered from the depths of memory a story his father had heard from a cobbler in Cill Mhuirbhigh. It concerned a schooner that sailed into Westport with a cargo of wheat. The hatches were left open for a few days before unloading began, to let the vapours clear from the hold. But when the captain inspected the cargo he found that salt water had seeped in around the edges of the hatches, and the grain was damp and ready to sprout. The merchants refused to take it, and the captain was in a fix. However another man turned up and offered to buy it cheap, and he and the captain agreed on a price. But since they knew nothing of this man the captain asked the mate to find out what style of life he led. The mate followed the man and found him in a thatched cottage with as many holes in the roof as there are stars in heaven, sitting on a stool with his mug on his knee. The man welcomed the mate and fetched out the whiskey bottle, and by the time the mate got back to the ship he was quite merry. “What sort of a place does he have?” asked the captain. “It has more windows than any mansion,” said the mate, “and the table he sat at you couldn’t buy for gold or silver.” “Say no more!” cried the captain, “He’s our man!” So the deal went ahead, and the man bought the wheat and paid for it. Then he spread it out on sheets, and the weather was fine and it soon dried out, and the next year the Famine came, and his fortune was made. His name, Mícheál thought, was Vanderbildt or Levenstein or something like that.
A smith has an affinity for iron; he can sense its presence by smell or magic; Mícheál has told me that he can always find a cast shoe or a link or hook lost off a harness and kicked into the grass of the roadside. Similarly iron tends to find its way to the forge, whose dark shelves and dusty windowsill are littered with odd bolts and nuts that sometimes after long separation achieve a new conjugation in use, twisted hinges that might live to squeak again, rusty cleats, stanchions, toggles and pulleys discharged from the sea but still fit for odd jobs on the water-front. And among all this lumber I have found an accumulation of generations of anvil-talk. The son of the smith watches and listens as the raw matter of reality is heated, hammered out, quenched, shaped into useful and durable items, which in his turn he will be called upon to reshape and improve and adapt to other days. Mícheál is generally admitted in Fearann an Choirce to be the best man for genealogies, which in this densely interwoven community are much discussed, sometimes with pride or anxiety, but often with a disinterested fascination, like a puzzle. If a particular field is mentioned in an anecdote, we have to diverge into the question of its ownership before the story can proceed, and thence into genealogies, which either ramify uncontrollably and have to be summarized with an exclamation of “Oh, there’s a crowd of them in it!” (e.g. the Ó Direáin clan, so numerous in this village), or successfully pursued down to a personal acquaintance (“Oh, I knew him as well as an old penny!”). Thus everything is worked over again and again, every place, personality or event is traversed from every angle, everything is shown to be connected with everything else, every story contains all stories. And now by some quirk of elective affinity I have fallen heir to four generations of these anvil-words. Difficult as I find its country elisions and density of local reference, after years of repetitious neighbourliness and companionship a portion of this matter has lodged itself in my head—only a fraction of the whole, but more than I know what to do with. The fact that I could, for example, recount the course taken by the last hare to be hunted in Aran, or imitate Fr. Farragher’s domineering way of taking the hammer from the hands of Mícheál’s father and forging a horseshoe himself, sometimes feels like a burden, a responsibility it might take more than a lifetime to discharge.
The next buildings down the road from the forge are the National School and the Summer School, with the ruins of the earlier National School opposite them, and a little further away, the former teacher’s residence. Whatever joyful rumpus or dull rumour of rote-learning songs emerges from the living schools, I hear the echo of a thunderous silence from the dead one. The original of this silence lasted for six months, from January to May, in 1911; it is part of the island’s history.
David O’Callaghan, of Broadford in Limerick, came to Inis Meáin as national schoolteacher in 1880, and married the schoolmistress. He took over the Oatquarter National School in 1885, and was driven from the island in 1914. A go-ahead cleric dominated most of this period: Fr. Farragher, who was a curate under Fr. O’Donoghue and returned to the island as Parish Priest in 1897, was the driving force behind the buying-out of the Hill Farm and its division between the Cill Éinne tenants, and later in the foundation of the Aran Fisheries Co-operative Society. At first O’Callaghan was not opposed to the priestly drive to material improvements. He became the secretary of a little agricultural bank under the chairmanship of Fr. Farragher, which he ran from the Residence; it was known popularly as Bane na mBanbh, the piglet bank, because it lent money for the buying of piglets, repayment being due on sale of the fattened pigs. (Unfortunately some who could have benefited from it did not do so because they tasted the copper spoon of charity in it; Mícheál remembers hearing old men boast that, poor as they were, they “never went to Bane na mBanbh.”) O’Callaghan was also concerned in the fisheries; in 1895 he had two currachs let out to islanders and was among the founders of a fishing co-operative. But he soon became deeply interested in the islanders’ culture. He learned Irish and spoke it with his neighbours, as appears from this account of the “evil eye” he gave the ethnographer A.C. Haddon in 1890 or ’91:
Numberless are the tales told of the Evil Eye and of those who have succumbed to it, and of those who have been cured. Among the latter is one which was related to me lately as having happened to the narrator himself:—
“Well, master,” he says, “and you don’t think there is such a thing as the Evil Eye?” “No, Pat,” said I; “I don’t think there is.” “You don’t think there is? Well! I tell you there is, and I am the man who can tell it to you. You see me now,” he says; “I suppose you don’t think much of me today; yet, thirty or forty years ago, I was one of the best men in Aran. I was one night at
a dance, and although you would not believe me now, I was then a fine dancer. I was praised by all in the house while I was dancing, but just in the middle of the dance I fell down dead on the floor.” “Dead, Pat?” “Yes, dead,” said he; “for I had not a kick in me then, nor for two days after. Well, my friends, knowing what was the matter with me, got every person in the house to throw a spit on me, saying at the same time, “God bless you,” but to no purpose. I remained dead, thrown in a bed in the corner near the fire, for two days, when a young woman comes in and spits on me, saying “God bless you, Patrick, you are very ill;” when I went of one jump from the corner to the middle of the floor, and began to dance; and I was well from that out.” “Of course, Pat,” I said, “You married that girl?” “God bless you,” said Pat, “I thought you had sense till now. I did not, nor would I, if there was not another girl in Aran.” This is as close a translation, as possible, of Pat’s story as told to me in Irish.
O’Callaghan also contributed lists of Aran words to Fr. Dinneen’s famous dictionary, and an Aran folksong to a pioneering collection published in 1892 by Dómhnall O’Fotharta of Callow in the west of Connemara, a fellow schoolmaster and enthusiast for what he called “an teanga bhinn bhríoghmhar, teanga treun tuilteach, teanga uasal ard ársa ár sinnsear féin” (“the sweet lively tongue, the strong overflowing tongue, the noble, high, ancient tongue of our own ancestors”). Such teachers were at that time totally reversing the ethos of the National Schools; whereas it had been the policy to beat the Irish language out of the pupils and to turn them into loyal subjects of Her Majesty, it was now the schoolmasters and mistresses who were insisting on the importance of Irish, even in the face of parental opposition, and who were revealing to native speakers that their language had an existence in books. Liam and Tom O’Flaherty were among those taught to read and write Irish in Oatquarter National School. Returning to Aran from America thirty years later Tom O’Flaherty remembered O’Callaghan with the greatest respect: