by Tim Robinson
Mr. O’Callaghan did great work. He was no cheap Jingo nationalist of the type who froths at the mouth at the mention of an Englishman; but he hated British imperialism with all its works and pomps. He was the first Sinn Feiner in the island, and had no difficulty in making one of me….I wondered where my old schoolmaster was, if he were still alive, and if he recollected the many tricks I played him on him for which he thrashed me with violence and with demoniacal fury. He was a fine man. How many workers like O’Callaghan are forgotten when the ideals for which they struggled are realized in whole or in part, while the blatant politicians and the gentlemen who always managed to pick the winning side are honoured?
O’Callaghan was a member of the Gaelic League from soon after its foundation in 1893, and when Patrick Pearse was thinking of starting an Aran branch in 1898 it was natural for him to canvas the opinion of “Dáithí Ó Ceallacháin.” At the inaugural meeting of the Aran branch, chaired by Fr. Farragher, O’Callaghan delivered “a scathing indictment of the National School system as worked in the Irish-speaking districts, maintaining that where Irish is the home language of the people it should be taught simultaneously with English from the time the child first enters the school.”
Over the next few years relationships between the two rival leaders of the island community deteriorated. In 1905 O’Callaghan resigned from the secretaryship of the bank, and in 1907 Fr. Farragher resigned from the position of school manager for a time in an attempt to get rid of the teacher. Then came “the time of the Saucepans,” the bomb-attack on the presbytery arising out of a feud over the distribution of the Hill Farm lands, and the sentence of boycott pronounced from the altar by Fr. Farragher on those responsible and anyone who had dealings with them. O’Callaghan, deeply involved in the web of island relationships, refused to ban certain pupils from his school as directed by the priest. Farragher tried to have him dismissed, but O’Callaghan had the respect and support of the Inspectors of the Board of National Education and was able to hold out against him. Just before the beginning of the January term in 1911 the priest spoke from the altar about O’Callaghan’s school:
[I] would not recommend parents to send their children to that school if they had any other; not telling you not to send them there, but if you take my advice you won’t. As you know I have not visited that school for some time, and when the Priest does not visit the school there is something out of place, and I believe the fault is not mine.
As a result O’Callaghan found the school deserted when he came to open it. He remained facing empty benches to the end of the school day; he came the next day at the appointed time and did the same, and maintained this dignified and lonely vigil throughout the winter and spring, until the school closed at the end of May. In the following year he took Fr. Farragher to court for the words he had spoken from the altar, but the jury found that the priest had spoken in good faith and without malice, and the slander action failed. Fr. Farragher was awarded costs, and as O’Callaghan refused to pay, eventually had him evicted from the Residence. O’Callaghan wrote a last plaintive letter to a Galway paper before leaving the island, in February 1914:
Dear Mr. Editor,—I was evicted from my residence on yesterday, 16th inst. at the suit of Rev. M. Farragher, P.P., Aran Islands, for the recovery of his legal expenses in the case of Callaghan v. Farragher…. The late Mr. Gladstone styled an eviction “a sentence of death.” These sentences were carried out in the past by a few evicting landlords, but it is rather a novel incident for a priest professing national sentiments to play the role of evictor.
Of course it was not a sentence of death; O’Callaghan went on to teach elsewhere, and even, I am told, revisited the island in about 1931, at which time Liam O’Flaherty was writing up his old schoolmaster as the eponymous hero of Skerrett. O’Flaherty, who as pupil to the one and altar-boy to the other had seen them both as towering figures, made of their conflict a titanic struggle for the island’s soul. He ends his version of their story with these words:
Thirty years have passed since Skerrett’s death and already his name has become a glorious legend on that island, where his bones were not allowed bleach and moulder into the substance of the rock, which was so like his spirit. His enemy … has also become a legend, but his legend grows less with the years, while that of the schoolmaster grows greater … He aimed at being a man who owns no master. And such men, though doomed to destruction by the timid herd, grow after death to the full proportion of their greatness.
However O’Callaghan inhabited a more complex and less teleological world than does his literary counterpart. A few Dublin Gaeilgeoirí are aware of his role in the preservation of the Irish language in Aran, but on the island itself his spirit is locked up with that of the priest in the puppet-booth of folk memory. The Residence is now Mícheál’s, for the educational authorities eventually sold it off to his father, and together with its other dilapidated fixtures and fittings he has inherited something of its history, from which he has acted out a few scenes for me. The first shows me the villagers and the curate assembling in the Residence for the annual Stations. It was customary on such an occasion for the householder to send a horse for the parish priest, but the teacher has omitted to do this, and after hearing the confessions in the living room the curate has to emerge into the kitchen and tell the people that as the Priest has not arrived they will have to wait until the next Sunday to receive the Sacraments. The next scene takes place on that Sunday: the priest paces up and down outside the chapel wondering if the teacher will apologize, but when he arrives the teacher comes bounding up the steps and pushes past with an off-hand greeting. Sorrowfully the priest speaks from the altar, saying how glad he is that it was no islander who has done this thing. Finally I see the teacher swaggering back to the Residence with his cronies and crying “I wouldn’t send a cat for that old devil!”
The Residence stands almost on the brink of the scarp marking an ancient boundary which I will use to fractionate off a further essence of Aran, and so it provides a convenient full stop for the eastern portion of this book. It is a neat little house, perfectly symmetrical, of the standard 1880s design of such residences; an architect has described it for me as follows:
This two-storey house has an unusual front elevation. The traditional straight-ridged slated roof, with gable-ends, has a feature central gable with a decorative scalloped fascia. The two small square windows of the upper storey are gathered together within the gable directly under the fascia. At the intersection of the gable with the main roof ridge is a central chimney-stack. The entrance porch is plain and small, with a lean-to roof having a sprocket-supported fascia; there is a glazed lunette fanlight above the single solid entrance door. On each side of the entrance porch is a rectangular window, which is four-paned, as are the windows at first-floor level.
The history of the Residence after the eviction of O’Callaghan, and the tenure of his successor, Moloney, whom I have already dealt with, is soon told. For many years it was rented out by the Kings to summer visitors, and stood gathering damp into its bones through the winter; then in 1972 it was taken for a longer period by a couple from London. I have not been in a good position to hear much talk of these people, and the following is put together out of the blurbs of a few books and maps they have subsequently published, one or two rather cagey newspaper interviews, and a C.V. concocted as part of an unsuccessful grant-application to Galway County Council.
Tim Robinson was born in England in 1935, attended the grammar school in Ilkley, a small country town in the Yorkshire Dales, and did his National Service as an RAF radar-fitter in Malaya. He went to Cambridge to study physics, switched to mathematics, obtained a second-class degree, and has not maintained any links with his college or his contemporaries. He married in London (little information is available about his partner), and took up a teaching post in Istanbul preparing Turkish students for entry to Robert College, an American foundation now known as the University of the Bosphorus. After three years he rel
inquished the academic life and moved to Vienna, where he embarked on a career as a painter under the name Timothy Drever (his mother’s maiden name was Drever; she was Scottish). His first exhibitions were at the Galerie Fuchs and Galerie Nansen-Haus; the former was the focus of a belated surrealist group known as the Wiener Schule, and the latter had some obscure connection with the Cold-War propaganda instrument, Radio Free Europe, but it does not appear that “Drever” was associated with either ideological tendency. He returned to London in the 1960s, exhibited abstract works in such bastions of the avant-garde as Signals Gallery and the Lisson, and in 1970 had some critical success with a large “installation” entitled “Moonfield,” in the Camden Arts Centre. However he shortly thereafter disappeared from the London art scene and resurfaced in Aran, reverting to the name of Robinson. A projected novel never materialized, but in 1975 he published a rudimentary map of the islands. This was followed by more detailed maps of the Burren in 1977 and of the Aran Islands in 1980. In 1982 the Robinsons left the island for no known reason and were next heard of in Roundstone, a small fishing village in the west of Connemara. There “M” (as she is designated, in her brief appearances in one of Robinson’s books) established a small concern called Folding Landscapes to publish the Aran and Burren maps and a map and “gazetteer” of Connemara that appeared after long delays in 1990, together with some related prose works. In 1989 the collected output of Folding Landscapes won the Ford European Conservation Award as Ireland’s official entry. This seems to have suggested to Robinson that it was incumbent upon him to participate in local environmental controversies, but little has been heard from him on such topics in more recent years. A TV film entitled Folding Landscapes by Michael Viney and David Cabot hinted at a metaphysical or perhaps merely mathematical background to Robinson’s mapping procedures. The first volume of his book on the Aran Islands, or rather on one of them, Stones of Aran, was published by Lilliput Press as long ago as 1986; a second volume is promised, but has been so long in gestation that by the time it appears the first will have been forgotten.
This “career” can best be described, I think, as inconclusive. The Residence has stood empty for many years now, and gives an impression of internal collapse; its garden is occasional grazing for the blacksmith’s horse. If one asks Mícheál about its former resident, he says merely “Tim Robinson? Oh, I knew him as well as an old penny!”
II. RESIDENCE
RESIDENCE
The weed-grown path, north-south, bisects the rectangle of our garden. The house is symmetrical about the same axis, and at times the solar system nods to this fact. At six o’clock of an equinoctial evening the half-moon, seen from the gate, stands just above the chimney-pot, its diameter exactly vertical. A long braid of starlight and dark matter divides the glamorous night of Aran above the garden: the Milky Way, the home-galaxy seen from within. As the earth rotates, this vast pointer swings across the dial of the sky at half the rate of an hour-hand; twice a day, therefore once a night, it is aligned with the garden path. Life is repetitious enough for us to rehearse tomorrow’s words, it provides respites in which one can try to make sense of unrepeatable acts like our coming to Aran; it suggests that a book is a compilation of sentences. I think much about these things, thinking nothing of them. Once, chatting with a passing islander at the gate on a summer evening, I aired my knowledge of the constellations (which in fact does not extend much beyond the two Bears and the Seven Sisters), and he said “I suppose now, if you were put down in the middle of the Mediterranean”—that being the most impressive-sounding sea he had to hand—“you could find your way to shore, on the strength of your education!” But education assumes that yesterday’s lesson is valid today, and as a might-have-been mathematician whose thumbs ache from milking a cow, I know that nothing happens twice, that if today you find the right words to greet your beloved or the passer-by, it does not mean you will do so tomorrow; nor does a surplus of meaning in one sentence stand to the credit of the next. At six o’clock of a midwinter evening the half-moon is high in the sky above the chimney, and tilted; the slant of its flat side, according to a little diagram I have drawn in the margin of my manuscript, represents the inclination of the earth’s axis to the plane of its orbit about the sun. So the midwinter moon says Here we go, spinning through space like a stone skipped on water; if we slow, we sink—but we will never slow. And why should I accept even that assurance from the backslider of the heavens, every evening a little later, a little older? However I do not envy those with a southern hemisphere to their minds, whose night skies are certified with the Cross. Mine are queried constantly by those three constellations, the Greater, Lesser and Least Question Marks, and I like it so.
The garden wraps around the house like an old coat, out at elbows, suitable only for gardening in, pockets full of seeds and string. Moloney built high walls to temper the wind to his shrubs, and put windows in the walls to sun them; the glass is long gone and blackbirds can fly through their panes of air. The garden is neither battlefield nor neutral ground between nature and the domestic, but a bazaar of exchanges and thefts. As I tug out yards of goosegrass and bindweed, the guardian robin watches me from the bushes, its eye glinting through first one triangle of twigs and then another. Donkeys wandering the road make a note of what they see, and come back by night to nose the gate open and rip the young carrots out of my neat ridges. The white stonecrop does not grow in our garden, but it must have done so once and been thrown out of one of the windows with garden rubbish, for it flowers on a heap of stones outside and has crept along the grykes to the east and to the south for a hundred yards or more. When I wanted a rockery (a curious wish, on Aran!) and brought in stones from the crag with interesting saxifrages and cranesbills, various grasses came too, and soon all I had was a grassy mound.
To the left of the house, where the cypress lifts its derelict limbs into the windy spaces above the walls, there is a gateway which once had a high wooden gate in it, leading to the back yard and a stone outhouse, its doors, windows and corrugated iron roof half wrecked by storms. Gusts funnelling through the gap between this store and the house are to be respected; in squally weather when we have to run out for a bucket of coal or to disentangle the sheets on the clothes-line strumming across the yard, we find ourselves adopting the crouched, hen-like scuttle we have noted in certain village housewives on their rare sallies into the open. The floor of the yard is a single huge flag of the limestone bedrock, the two or three fissures across it filled in with concrete. We often dine there, moving cushions around to catch the last of the sun. In high summer we sunbathe with our backs to the back of the house, naked as the rock, melting into a drowse but keeping an eye awake for the horsefly that materializes out of a tiny crescendo whine into sudden immobility beside us on the baking stone, and an ear for the click of the front gate or the tactful whistling with which the postman always announces his approach. Sometimes the small stone enclosure is too intense with life for comfort. One spring there was an exceptional emergence of six-spot ladybirds; the split husks of their larvae were everywhere on the whitewashed rear wall of the house, with the adult beetles oozing out as glossy as fresh drops of blood. Every summer there comes a humid day on which the ants take their mating flight, and by sunset the yard is littered with fallen wings and spent bodies.
The thick, solid, chin-high wall closing the yard off from An Chreig Mhór, the great crag, is of big blockish stones mortared together, with alternate stones of the topmost course set on end as a rough castellation. It is inhabited by little ferns—wall-rue, common spleenwort, the rusty-back, which is rather an Aran speciality—and is knobbly enough to be climbed with ease; I once scrambled over it from the other side holding a butterfly in my cupped hands, an unfamiliar moth-like one I’d caught on the crag and was bringing home to identify (a dingy skipper, it turned out to be). It is a good wall to lean against with one’s morning coffee and look over at the level acres of rock stretching southwards to the Atlantic. If the ocean
is still and grey it is hard to make out in this low perspective where stone ends and water begins, somewhere beyond the rooftops of Gort na gCapall half a mile away. But further to the right of the view the edge of the land rises, and Dún Aonghasa is profiled against the sky. I had not realized how much the daily sight of that fold of mysteries, in uninterrupted co-presence with my own home, meant to me, until we returned from a brief absence to find that an electricity pole had been erected exactly on that line of vision. I have no belief in the flow of Celtic energies and the psychic virtues of ancient stone, no respect for the theory of ley-lines, based as it is on the fusty paradigms of Victorian physics—but some communication was broken by that damned pole. On seeing it for the first time I felt that my presence in Aran was unsettled, that the idea of leaving Aran could be explored, as one’s tongue worries at a tooth that has been loosened by a blow.
The front door of the Residence is difficult to open; it has sagged on its hinges and drags on the tiled floor within. Now and then I rasp a bit of rotten wood off the lower edge with whatever tools I can find, but it soon lapses a bit further and jams again. The hallway is just space enough to turn around in and hang up a coat. And there is sometimes another obstacle to getting through it, an image that fills it completely with horror. A very old lady I met on the road one day told me about the death of David Callaghan’s wife, whom she could remember. Mrs. Callaghan, she said, was very fat and heavy, and she liked a drop of drink. One day she staggered against the kitchen range and set herself on fire. She tried to run out of the house to scream for help from anyone passing the gate, and she died in that little box of a hall—perhaps the door jammed even then. But we pass through the hall so often that the idea of Mrs. Callaghan’s death there is fading, like linoleum due for renewal.