by John A. Ryan
The Customs and Immigration men saw him coming and sort of shook their heads resignedly and he sailed through, but they stopped Shaw and the woman and took them away somewhere. It was October, no big crowds, and we found an empty carriage and spread ourselves and settled down with a bottle of stout apiece. I suppose if the spare ribs had been cooked we’d have started on them too.
Shaw found us. There had been some trouble, we never found out the full story except that she wasn’t his wife but someone else’s. After sampling the stout he went away again to find her and I suppose to make up whatever differences there were.
Then the ticket-collector called on us. Connery started searching for his ticket, found the large bottle was in his way, looked around for some place to put it and saw the ticket-collector’s outstretched hand. The poor man must have been inexperienced; for the next fully three minutes Connery searched with great care through all his pockets, taking out the contents and examining them and putting them all back before moving on, while the ticket-collector fumed there like an eejit holding the large bottle in his hand. One up for Paddy and a victory over the might of the Empire exemplified in the ticket-collector with his natty uniform and his little neat moustache. Irrepressible humour, ineluctable melancholy. He found the ticket eventually, where he knew it was, in the first pocket.
Later, we each stretched out on a seat and went asleep, with our overcoats over us. I slept anyway, I’m not sure if Connery did. I woke up some time because I was cold, and he had the window open and his head out and was being sick.
We reached London at last. Peter was waiting for me, and I can tell you I was glad to see him and glad that he had a car to drive me to his place. Connery wanted to give me final directions for the Pipers’ Club and he assured me over and over I’d be welcome but Peter had parked his car somewhere nearby and the parking time was nearly spent and so I had to say a hasty goodbye to Connery. The last I saw of him was there on the platform at Paddington, struggling with his luggage and with his legs, and trying to keep his coat shut against the cold. I should have offered him a lift but it was only afterwards I discovered his hospital was in the same direction I was going. He had lost his tin whistle and I never saw anyone look so bereft and forlorn. I could have asked, couldn’t I?
Oriental Thomastown
In the stone and oak of Shee’s Almshouse in Kilkenny city, an intriguing notice read: ‘Imrat Khan, sitar, Barrie’s Barn, tonight.’ Somewhere near Thomastown, the word was, but where exactly no one knew.
The rain came down softly and incessantly, but we persevered. A potter in a castle gave us directions, put us on the right way, and soon we saw a pointing arrow. We followed many of these, pointing into the summer rain. A right turn, no road, just a narrow boreen that got narrower while the trees leaned in and dropped drumbeats of rain on the car-roof. Closed in tighter over the rutted lane – could we have read the sign wrongly? Would we be able to turn or reverse out?
We rolled at last into a great walled garden, wild and wet, but still minded, purple flowers drooping damply to the ground. At one side a complex of buildings, old, perhaps dwellings, perhaps once farm buildings. This was Barrie’s Barn; we had reached the source of the Shee’s Almshouse notice, island in the sodden fields. It was a barn, too, but more than a barn. High windows that began at the floor. At one end a cosy living-place, at the far end a huge hearth; the space between was for us.
Barrie was there, artist, owner of the barn. Present also, to present the musicians, was the remarkable Garech de Brún; he was, we were told, that most important person, the one who had caused it all to happen, and had brought the music-makers half-way across the world, on a magic carpet presumably.
Soon there came two Eastern gentlemen; they hid their hands in their robes and bowed, their brown eyes smiling, and then they squatted on cushions on a low dais just beside us near the great empty fireplace. To say that they made music doesn’t adequately describe what they did. They took, one a sitar, one a set of little drums, or tabla, tuned and caressed them into life, made them laugh, made them cry, soar and sink and leap up again in torrents of music. For two hours, sitting at their bare feet, we lent them our ears, most willingly. There in that most unlikely place, with the damp fields all around us, and the trees, the East thrummed and sang, an exotic oasis, lost barn in a green world, while the Irish summer took its accustomed way and the monsoon rain gurgled in the gutters and spattered against the tall windows, perfect setting and accompaniment for a night that they filled for us with enchantment.
The Dunes
The sunlight gleamed silver on the sea, and on the long wet sands. The fishermen with their slanted fishing-poles stood patiently at the edge of the tide. Nearer, a great sea-beast lay on the machair; how lovely in the waves, but now …
A small wooden house stood near the dunes. On the veranda of the house a girl sat at an easel. When she became aware of me, she looked up – appraisal, acceptance, welcome. Her upper body, which I could see above the veranda-rail, was bare, though she showed no embarrassment nor even any consciousness that this might be thought unusual. And she smiled at me, a smile I had known always, perhaps from an earlier existence; it was the smile that men have known since mankind began.
When I went closer I saw that her painting was of sea and headland, of the fishermen on the distant invisible boundary between the tide and the shining sands.
‘Is it difficult to get the colours right?’
She looked up quickly. ‘Yes, that’s just it. Some blue, a little green, a lot of grey. And yet it must glow with light. In my mind I see clearly the picture I want, but when I try to capture it, it escapes.’ Then she asked: ‘Did you see the dolphin?’
‘Yes. How did it get in so far? Where was it going?’
‘It was going to meet its destiny.’
Her answer startled me and I could think of no adequate response to it.
‘This is a lonely place … is it wise of you …?’
The word seemed to surprise her. ‘Lonely? I’m never lonely here. Besides,’ she went on with apparent inconsequence, ‘Gráinne will be here tomorrow. It’s her house, you know.’
‘But … all alone? You don’t know who I am.’
She looked at me, unsmiling now, gravely and steadily. She said, ‘I am quite safe now that you are here. Quite safe. With you.’
If I had been startled before, this left me astonished and confused. No! not confused. It was quite clear; this was the girl I had always known I would find, and this day this place this meeting had all been fore-ordained.
She left her chair and leaned towards me, her smiling lips parted; I stood as high as I could, and with my hands on the veranda-rail I pulled myself up to reach her mouth.
It was not a passionate kiss. It was gentle, almost casual. It made no promises, it was not perhaps a prelude. It said nothing, yet I think now that it said everything. And from the instant when I had first seen her face, intent over the easel, I had known about this kiss.
‘I was going to the dunes.’
‘Wait for me,’ she said. She took a dress and pulled it over her head, a simple dress, sleeveless, that concealed and showed all the soft curves. We walked side by side, her feet bare, mine sandalled. She took my hand. We crossed the patches of bare sand and the short seagrasses to where the dead dolphin lay, uncaring now of tide or wave, all its surging grace, its strength, its glorious joyous leaping beauty, all gone. She sighed and said, ‘But what could it do? This is where it was meant to die.’
The dunes, from a distance so small, are huge slopes, mountains almost, of coarse loose sand that slips away from underfoot, great amphitheatres whose shifting walls rise up to the sky, their edges rimmed with stiff grasses; it is a place that shuts out the rest of the world and its clamour, shuts out even the sea, everything but the blue overhead. Sun-drenched hollows laced with wiry grass. No sound but the whispering of the wind, the very sound of silence. Shell
-midden, spears of sea-holly, a grey feather that stirred in the faintest breath of air, a whitened bone. Desolate, and yet for us warm with joy.
We had arrived very late the previous night, after our long exhausting journey with just that one stop for a meal, and without even unpacking, had climbed into our narrow bunks and slept and slept. The first sunlight through the eastern window wakened me. She was still asleep, so I kissed her shoulder and went to the kitchen to make coffee. She came so silently that I heard nothing, and when I turned she was standing naked in the doorway. Is she aware at all of the torrents that pour through me when I see her like that? Of the tides of love and lust? That sinuous line from thigh to proud breast, the perilous allure of beauty. She came to me and put her sleepy mouth on mine. She was warm and heavy with sleep. Then she pushed me gently away, picked up her mug of steaming coffee from the table, and padded to the door, where she turned to say, ‘It will be warm and sheltered in the dunes,’ smiled and added, ‘wait for me.’
I stood looking at the empty doorway, whence the light had gone, the gleam and glow of her, the intensity, the radiance. A woman’s beauty is the scent of the rose, that entices the predatory pollen-dusted bee.
Waiting on the veranda, I was struck by how little had changed in the years since my first visit here. No fishermen now, no dolphin, but the dunes seemed just as before; as for the house, Gráinne’s care had seen to it that all was secure, minded, loved. Not painted of course, and no doubt more grey and weathered, even more a part of this unchanging place. The faded lettering near the door had not been renewed. I thought I could make out ‘r’ and an elaborate capital, almost certainly an ‘S’. Sea-something? Spirit … Spindrift sounded apt. Or Sanderling? Spirit of You set my spirit free. Eight letters in all, maybe nine. I rather liked Sanderling. Sea Breeze? It hardly mattered in any case; no postman, I was sure, had ever been called upon to deliver a letter to that remote place, and the naming of the house had been merely a whim of the owner.
Already there was some warmth in the sun, but a breeze came from the far-off headland. Driven by that fresh breeze the tide would more swiftly flood the bay and the level sands would be pushed farther up the beach than last evening’s tide; it would grope its way with slow deliberation towards the nearest slopes of the sandhills, the little lapping wavelets gulping greedily at mouthfuls of dry sand, remorseless, hasteless; it might even reach the grassy path from which I had seen for the first time this small house and the girl at her easel.
How many tides, since that first encounter? How many days and nights, each with its ebb and flow, unfailing, inexorable, the great bay emptying again and filling, under the changing moon? We had seen the same things that day, but each of us saw them differently: the shimmering sands, the far silhouettes of the fishermen, the silvered sea; the poor doomed sea-animal that had come on a brimming flood into this wide bay with its false promise of safety, to keep an imperative assignment; the things she had tried to put into her picture and that had eluded her.
She came and stood beside me. Now fresh as morning, no longer drowsy, she took my arm and placed it round her waist. She was wearing some flimsy blue thing, through which I could feel the softness of her body. We went down the three steps. Between the top step and the lowest she went from siren to concerned mother, and the serious face she turned to me made me say at once, ‘There’s no reason to worry. You know they love being with Gráinne. They think of her almost as a second mother. In any case, it’s only three days. We’ll see them again on Sunday.’
Reassured, she was happy again, and we began our walk, going first to where our dolphin had lain, because something of it might still be there. But no. Nothing. Only the short salt-bitten grass and the tiny flowers of heartsease.
‘Nothing,’ she said and tightened her arm around me as though that absence saddened her.
‘If a storm brought it in, another could sweep away all trace of it.’
We turned away. ‘Poor creature!’ she said.
Reminded of storms, she told me about the wreck of the Sea Horse, of how, savaged by gales, the ship had been driven past the safe haven farther east, and been reduced to the forlorn hope of finding shelter here. But once inside those two headlands, above the treacherous sands that no fluke could grip, and hunted down by a storm so venomous that it mocked at sea-anchors, the vessel was doomed. She foundered, and over three hundred men, women and children went down with her. ‘A few were rescued, but three hundred or more were lost. And many of the bodies were never found. Some were washed up on the beach, and one, a child, was found here on the machair. The heart-break of it! The heart-break!’ We were both silent then, thinking of that long-ago tragedy.
‘And it’s well known,’ she told me, lowering her voice almost to a whisper, ‘that on nights of storm you can still hear the phantom band of the Sea Horse here in the dunes. It was a troopship, you see, with its regimental band. Bridgit, the old woman who used to mind the bathing boxes, knew the air it plays. She called it Ríl na Daibhche, the Reel of the Dunes. But no one knows it now. Bridgit was a hundred years old when she died.’
‘But,’ I objected, ‘who would be here in the dead of night in a storm? And if someone was here, he couldn’t hear that Reel for the noise of the wind and the waves.’
‘But there was an old house here long ago. Gráinne built her house on the foundations of the old one. That,’ she explained with a wonderful lack of logic, ‘is why she calls her house Sea Horse.’
We started then in the direction of the dunes, our dunes, arena born of conflict between wind and wave, a place of sand, grey marram, gull’s cry, home of silence and mystery, keeper of secrets.
‘The wind is cold,’ she said, ‘but we will find again that golden hollow. It has been waiting for us all this time.’
‘Sometimes winds and storms bring changes. We might not … ’ but she turned, put her finger on my lips and said, ‘Sssh! If not, we will find a better,’ and asked me, the smiling lips and eyes confident of my reply, ‘Glad of that day?’ and I answered her in the words of the song, ‘My life began again the day you took my hand.’
She leaned her head against my shoulder and sighed contentedly, and yet, as though she needed one further assurance, she said, and it was hardly a question, ‘But what else could we have done? Was there a choice?’
Dawn on the Boyne: Brú na Bóinne
I meán-oirthear na tíre seo, tá mágh leathan féarmhar, idir an tSionainn agus Muir Meann. Is ins an dúthaigh sin a lonnaigh treabh de na feirmeoirí ba thúisce tháinig go hÉirinn.
Gluaiseann abha go mall maordha tríd an machaire, agus ó ba léir dóibh gurb í an abha sin agus a fo-aibhne, le comhoibriú Lúgha, dia na gréine, a bhronn saibhreas ar an gceanntar, thugadar Abha na Bóinne mar ainm uirthi mar omós do Bhóinn, bandia na féile, na feise agus na torthúlachta.
Thagaidís le chéile i gcomhthionól, rí agus mór-uaisle uile na treibhe mar aon le saoithe is baird, aos dána agus aos éigse, ar bhruacha na Bóinne ar uairibh áirithe sa bhliain chun na déithe a onóradh d’réir mar tuigeadh san dóibh: an grian-dia, Lúgh a d’fhéach anuas orthu ón spéir agus a thug teas agus samhradh; déithe na báistí is na gaoithe; dia dorcha na hithreach, agus Bóinn féin, chun buíochas a ghabháil leo agus chun meas agus tairbhe agus rath a iarraidh.
Five thousand years ago, before ever a Pharaoh thought of building a pyramid, a group of farming people left Brittany by sea in search of a new home. They skirted Cornwall and the Scillies, and leaving Wales on their right hand they continued their voyage, north and north again, following Ireland’s eastern coastline to their final landfall, a seaboard nameless then, that in the centuries that followed has had many names and that we now call county Meath. They found a great wide plain where grass grew in abundance and it was there that those early farmers decided to settle. Settled, and in course of time, prospered and multiplied.
A river flows serenely through that chosen land,
and since they believed that it was the river that gave the plain its richness, they called it the River of Bóinn, in reverence to Bóinn, the she-god of welcome, intimate embrace and fertility. It is known now as the Boyne.
This river was their life. From its faraway sources it brought water sufficient for all their needs. It was their highway, from its small beginnings far inland to its wide estuary on the sea. It fed them: they had a harvest from the land; a second harvest when the salmon returned to the water that they knew as home; and that same river filled and enriched the sea, from which they took their third harvest.
It was tribal belief that the high goddess had at all times looked favourably on them, even from the beginning. They knew she had helped them to find this happy place; the wide sea-mouth had beckoned, the tide was surging in, and they rode that rising tide as far up the river-valley as it could carry them, then hauled their ships ashore, knowing at once that they had reached their destination, their destined home. They were aware of a debt of gratitude for her guidance and benevolence.
At the ordained times they came together on the banks of their river, king and princes, chieftains, captains, bards and druids, learned men, followers of the noble trades, poets and music-makers, and the smaller people also, with the purpose of paying homage and honour to the gods, as they understood those to be: Lúgh, chief of the gods, who looked down from the sky and gave them summer and warmth; and also Bóinn and the gods of rain and wind, and the dark earth god, to give thanks and to beg for their favour and protection, for bountiful harvest and prosperity.
At a point on the northern bank where the river bends south towards the sun, there is a low hill which gives a view to the four quarters over the level lands, a fit place they thought for a memorial cairn. They wished to repay their debt.
They met in council; they debated; they came to agreement. The project they approved was epic and would require all the energy, skill and strength of every member of the tribe, all their art and science, their utmost ingenuity and dexterity. It would be a challenge and a test, and in order that there be no error, every aspect of the work must be tried and verified beforehand. It was intended as the highest expression of their determination, of their construction genius, and not least, of their intellect and subtle art.