On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Eight years later, Chambers sent Lís his book of poems, which included ones he had written for her. Among them was “The Song of the Island Girl (Eilish),” for the girl she once was:

                 The prison of trees

                  Is all you gave,

                 For the open seas

                 And crested wave

                 Oh, scent of sea-wrack,

                  And keen salt spray,

                 How my heart goes back

                 The Island way!

  He was right about that, she confided to him in a letter in September 1950: “I was very very lonely the time after the Island.”

  Just then she was back from two weeks spent with her parents on the island. “Its nice to be home once again with mother making the tea like years ago.”

  In 1935, Flower went to the United States to give a series of lectures on Irish literature. These later became the basis for another book about the Blaskets, The Western Island. In it, he told how on one visit Tomás and some of his other friends gathered in one of the houses to welcome him. Inevitably, they recalled those who had died since his last visit, talk veering to what island proverbs had to say about the inevitability of death. Finally, the conversation flagged and silence fell … until an old woman leaned forward and piped up in Irish, “Where is the snow that was so bright last year?”

  “I sprang up in excitement,” Flower wrote, “and cried out: “ ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan? ’ ”

  “Who said that?” asked the King, an expert in this lore.

  “Francois Villon said it,” I replied.

  “And who was he?” he returned. “Was he a Connaughtman?”

  “No, he lived hundreds of years ago and he said it in French, and it was a proverb of his people.”

  Now, Flower wrote in his preface, “The King is dead and Tomás and the greater part of that lamenting company, and all this that follows is the song we made together of the vanished snows of yesteryear.”

  The Western Island was published in 1944. Later that year, Flower suffered a stroke. Some months later, he wrote, or perhaps dictated, a letter describing his condition: “I am still a very long way from actual recovery. I cannot read yet and still write with the greatest difficulty. Every letter is still a struggle for me.… I have temporarily lost all foreign languages and a great deal of English.”

  Since at least 1937, Flower and his wife had been living in the Southgate area of London, at 100 Ulleswater Road, in one of a long line of brick row houses, two or three stories high, with little gardens out front, sheltered from the street by hedges, which dropped down to a broad expanse of park at the base of the hill. One day early in January 1946 after lunch, he went out for a walk and never returned. Around four in the afternoon, police showed up at the house, saying he had been found collapsed in the park and taken to the hospital. When his wife and daughter Jean got there, he didn’t recognize them. He died the following morning, age sixty-four.

  “I was so sad to hear of Blaheen’s death,” Lís wrote George Chambers two weeks later. “I could not do anything atall but to think and think and be thinking. Old vivid pictures of the Island and Blaheen and family came before my eyes, of a crowd of Islanders coming down to the pier visiting himself and his family and children and young and old on the Island so merry and happy.”

  “It was a cause of grief to the people of the Great Blasket,” Seán wrote in a tribute to Flower, “to learn of the death of our excellent noble friend. There is no herb or remedy against death.”

  Around the time of Flower’s death, four years after Lís and Seán had resettled on the mainland, forty-five people still lived on the island—thirty-two men and boys, and thirteen females. Folklorist Brid Mahon visited the island during this period. “To this day I can recall the modest comfort of the houses on the island, with their raftered ceilings and open fires and the fragrant smell of turf smoke which I love above French perfume.” She’d remember the boundless hospitality she enjoyed there, the settle beds and dressers filled with delft dishware, the chairs of woven straw, the walls hung with religious pictures. She visited every inhabited house on the island. All seven of them.

  “It’s going downhill almost every day,” Seán wrote after Flower’s death, comparing the village then, in 1946, to when Flower and Marstrander had visited earlier in the century. “There were thirty houses on it at that time and fifty children on the register of the school. To-day it is without a school, without a child.”

  The Great Blasket “was no place at all for old people,” Seán Ó Guithín, one of the last of the island dwellers, said before he died. “It was like a ship which requires a certain number of crew members” and now no longer had them.

  Emigration sapped all of rural Ireland, of course. But, as a 1947 government report had it, “certain features” of Blasket life made matters worse yet—its remoteness, its loneliness in winter, coupled with “the dread of being without food, the danger of not being able to obtain the services of priest or doctor in time of need, the absence of teacher or nurse.” As the population dwindled, the lot of the remaining few grew only worse. “Loneliness is accentuated and there is a greater feeling of helplessness in times of emergency.”

  On Christmas Eve 1946, the emergency arrived. A young island man, twenty-four-year-old Seán Ó Cearnaigh, fell ill, complaining of fever and headache. Most of the Ó Cearnaighs had by now left for America to become Kearneys and Carneys, Seán being among the few who remained. And now there was nothing to be done for him. For days a storm raged; the mainland was inaccessible. A radio telephone that was supposed to connect the island post office to Dún Chaoin didn’t work. On the afternoon of January 10, 1947, “with most of the island community helpless at his bedside,” as Mícheál de Mordha wrote years later, Seán died. When his body was later brought to Dingle, it was determined that he’d died of meningitis.

  Soon after the tragedy, islanders wrote to Éamon de Valera, the Taoiseach, or Prime Minister: “STORMBOUND DISTRESS. SEND FOOD. NOTHING TO EAT. BLASKETS,” read their telegram. De Valera, hero of the earliest days of the Irish Republic, visited in July. On his return, he set up a panel that decided there was nothing to do but abandon the island and resettle its inhabitants on the mainland.

  For a while, rumors flew in Dún Chaoin of a motor ferry to better link the island to the mainland, or even a bridge. These, of course, came to nothing.

  On May 20, 1953, Lís wrote Chambers: “Two men from the ‘Land Commission’ Dublin visited the Blasket Island lately about [islanders] transferring to the mainland. They have signed for them that they are satisfied to get cottages on the mainland,” soon to be built for them. Her own mother and father would be among the last to leave.

  They didn’t come over all at once, only when a mainland house was ready. From the top of the cliffs in Dún Chaoin, recalled Críostóir Ó Floinn, he’d see them rowing in. “I’d go down to the slip and I used to help the lads bring in the stuff.” Wardrobes, cattle, whatever, they all came in on the same little boats, men leaning to one side or another to balance the heavy loads in the surf.

  November 17, 1953, was the day designated for the final migration of the twenty-one people then remaining on the island. Cameramen were on hand to record their passage across the sound and onto the mainland. Breandán Feiritéar, a mainlander born in 1943, remembered from his boyhood those last few islanders. It was a bleak time in Dún Chaoin. “A black gloom hung over the valley and remained there into the early 60s.” They couldn’t so much as muster a football team. Marriage was rare, the local school almost empty. Meanwhile, across the sound stood that “string of islands majestically rising out of the sea.” When islanders came over, they stood out from the grim
mainlanders. Among them, he remembered no “cantankerous faces or careworn countenances. I can only recall to memory the smiling faces of Seán O Súilleabháin or Paddy Daly, or Peats Tom Ó Cearna.…”

  I remember the Island men coming in their curraghs to Sunday Mass in Dún Chaoin. Each face wore a smile, each body a navyblue suit, a zipped navyblue fisherman’s jersey, studded boots and tweed peaked caps. They always spoke to us children, told us what various parts and workings of their boats were called, even gave us rides in and out of the harbour in their curraghs after Mass.

  When he saw them in Dún Chaoin, they always walked in single file, “one after the other, looking over their shoulders to talk to the following Islander,” as they did on the island’s narrow paths.

  Sometimes, returning by taxi from Dingle after selling their lobsters or sheep’s wool, they had money for a pint of Guinness or two. “Watching them stumbling, staggering and reeling their way down the steep path to the pier, some singing songs,” he could scarcely imagine them not falling on their way down, much less navigating across the sound. Yet soon their boats were smoothly slipping from the cove. Anyone “watching them rowing in unison and riding the waves on their way home could swear that not one drop of an intoxicating drink ever passed their lips.”

  One Sunday when he was seven, he was taken out to the island by one of its last inhabitants. He duly recorded “the little white-washed houses with their black felt roofs leaning into the hill.” But what struck him more forcibly was how the islanders treated him, how everyone spoke to him, asked him who he was, how the “old ladies gave me slices of home-made bread and jam and fistfuls of raisins or currants. I never felt so grown up in my life before. These islanders talked to children.”

  Finally, late in 1953, the last families were coming across the sound. “As they approached the pier we could see the three curraghs laden with house-hold furniture and goods. Two oarsmen rowed the first curragh that had across its transom a maroon-painted dresser. An old lady in a black shawl sat in the bow and as the curragh approached the slipway we could see that she was crying profusely.”

  Later, he and the other children trudged slowly up the path with her to the top of the cliff. “She cried every step of the way.”

  Chapter 13

  The Bottom of the Garden

  [1950]

  A U.S. passport issued in 1951 to “Mary Kearney known as Sister Mary Clemens,” an American citizen since 1943, gave her occupation as seamstress. Records furnished by Sisters of Providence, the convent in Massachusetts where she spent the last fifty-eight years of her life, list her work for most of that time as “Sewing—Habits.”

  Sisters of Providence presided over numerous hospitals, residences, and care facilities and was a large, respected institution figuring prominently in its community. Its imposing new Mother House, all brick and churchly arches, the name Providence spelled out in gilded letters above the entrance, had opened in adjacent Holyoke in 1932. Ten or a dozen young women entered the order each year.

  After she joined it in 1930, Mary first went to work in the kitchen at Saint Luke’s Hospital, then in a refectory, then in a nurses’ dining room. In 1937, she took her perpetual vows. Two years later, she began her years-long service as seamstress, first at Mercy Hospital, Springfield; then at Saint Luke’s Hospital, then Holy Family Institute. She sewed habits beside one or two other nuns, a convent spokesperson takes care to explain, not in a factory.

  Much later, in her mid-fifties, Mary became a “cottage mother” at the newly opened Children’s Center, an orphanage, where she worked with troubled children. “She was fantastic with the boys,” her niece, Kathleen Arduini, recalls. In her seventies, she volunteered at Saint Luke’s Home, where what was recalled as her “infectious laugh” left those around her feeling somehow all was well, dispelling their woes, earning her the unlikely nickname “Troubles.”

  In 1951, Mary, then in her early forties, visited Ireland. “One of Pats Kearney’s daughters from America—the nun—was home for a month,” Lís wrote George Chambers in May. Mary and her father, still living on the island, were driven around the mainland and dropped by to see old friends, including Lís and Seán. One day she went in to the island. “It made her very lonely, she told us.”

  Her thick hair in old age forming a crown of almost angelic white around her head, Sister Mary Clemens would be remembered for her faith, and for the joy she seemed to draw from life. Nothing in the record of her service over a span of more than half a century, however, suggests the church ever singled her out for any position demanding talent, leadership skills, or intellect beyond the ordinary. When she died, she was laid to rest on church property set apart for the order’s own, each among that formidable field of headstones identical save for a family name set in the center, a religious name inscribed in a gentle arc across the top.

  Before Mary’s death on January 13, 1987, several students of Blasket Island life succeeded in tracking her down and interviewing her. She received such attention, of course, not in recognition of her service to the convent, or for her religious faith, but as a native of the Great Blasket whose life happened to intersect that of George Thomson, who died three weeks after she did, on February 3.

  One of these Blasket enthusiasts was Tom Biuso, an American scholar of Irish extraction (with a Sicilian stepfather) who, one October day in 1983, convened a reunion of immigrant Blasket women, all once playmates together on the island, now living in New England. Sister Mary Clemens, he wrote, was “a small woman who is towered over by her sister Eileen.” He remarked on the blue habit that set off her white hair, her eyes as bright as the silver crucifix suspended from her neck. “God’s world is so beautiful,” he took down her words. “If we’d only realise that He made the mountains and the valleys and the lakes and the streams just for us,” the world would be better, with “less sadness and war and hatred.” Otherwise, Biuso recorded little of Sister that might rank as memorable—nothing, certainly, of her years-earlier relationship with George.

  Breandán Feiritéar, the mainland boy who’d witnessed the island exodus in 1953 and then grew up to become an accomplished filmmaker, managed about as well when he visited with her. He was in America working on a documentary, Blasket Roots, American Dreams, hoping for reminiscences of George, or memories, or comments, or thoughts, or something. But Mary, half a century in America, didn’t want to talk about George, didn’t want to talk Irish, didn’t want to say much of anything to him. “I found her very difficult to deal with,” certainly as far as George was concerned. She was “a tough, hard lady,” simply unwilling to talk about George if she didn’t want to.

  Ray Stagles fared a little better. In 1940, Stagles, a nineteen-year-old university student, heard Robin Flower, then ministering to British Museum treasures in Wales, give a talk about the Blaskets. Beginning in 1966, Stagles visited the island with his wife, Joan, many times, and co-authored a book with her. On a trip to America, for a lecture tour, he met up with Blasketers in Springfield. Introduced to Sister Mary Clemens by Tom Biuso, he got her and her sister Eileen in front of the microphone to talk about leaving Ireland and becoming a nun. The tape was prepared at least in part with George in mind, for Stagles at one point asked her to send him a personal message. She did. The one in which, her voice fresh and light, she said: “I remember the times on the Blaskets Islands very well. We had a great time, George.” And that was all.

  Some time later, in Birmingham, Thomson had the tape played for him. “He listened very intently,” a witness to the moment recalled. At one point, the tape whirring, Thomson’s daughter Elizabeth entered the room. “Come listen, Liz,” said George, “this is the woman who might have been your mother.”

  Of course, the woman who was her mother, and that of her sister Margaret, was Katharine Stewart Thomson. And it’s hard to conceive any alternative history working out more satisfactorily than the real one did. Sean Cahillane, the American-born son of Mary’s sister Eileen, tells of banter around the ta
ble at the family house in Springfield about how, yes, George would have made quite a catch. But the would-have-beens didn’t materialize. Mary’s life took one turn, George’s another.

  After moving to Birmingham, the Thomsons settled into a house on Goodby Road, which they came to dislike soon enough, in part because their neighbors played the radio loud and incessantly. So, in December 1938, George, Katharine (now six months pregnant with Margaret), and Liz moved to a five-bedroom house on Oakfield Road, in nearby Selly Park, fifteen minutes by city bus to George’s classes near Chamberlain Square. They would remain there for the next twenty years. To this house on Oakfield Road, Margaret dates her most loving memories of her father.

  For years, the family read together, the four of them, Mum and Dad, she and Liz. Before about 1950, they’d gather in her father’s bay-windowed study on the second floor, overlooking the garden. Later, it was the music room. “Last time …,” George would begin, recalling where they’d left off, then plunge into the book for an hour or so. Maybe Sir Walter Scott, or the Bible, or Thomas Hardy, or The Pilgrim’s Progress, the choice keyed to the ages of the children. To this day, says Margaret, a Greek scholar herself, anything she writes, any translation she attempts, is inexorably influenced by the sound of her father’s voice, the rhythms of his speech.

  Her father was not physically demonstrative, any more than was her mother. “But he didn’t need to be,” she says; the bond among them all was so close. He had no patience for small talk, yet when it came to children, to her and her sister, to people they met outside their immediate circle, he could be downright garrulous. With children, “he had a way of getting into their heads.” His parenting style, she says, was no 1940s version of Well, let’s set up your next play date, but engaged and responsive to anything on their minds.