by Anne Doughty
Just at that moment, a harsh screech shattered the silence. Startled, I looked up and saw two large birds wheeling in the sky. I gazed up at them as I walked slowly on, following their leisurely drifting movements, till I was sure they were riding a thermal, flying round and round each other for pure pleasure. Black. Not crows, and far bigger than jackdaws. The huge wing span made me wonder if there could still be eagles in Ireland.
Before I came to any conclusion, the ground gave way below my right foot. I threw out my arms, had a brief glimpse of something green slapping me in the face and felt water closing over my head. I clutched frantically at the air. My feet touched something solid and I found myself standing up to my shoulders in brown, muddy water.
My eyes were smarting and there was a roaring in my head. Prince was barking like a mad thing. I rubbed my eyes, pushed my wet hair back on my forehead and removed some water weed from the bridge of my nose. Prince leaned cautiously towards me and licked my face. Then he started barking again. I couldn’t stand his bark at the best of times and right now he was only six inches away from me.
‘Good boy, that’s a good boy. Don’t bark.’
My ears popped. It sounded just as if someone had turned the volume up. At the same time, I felt water penetrate my bra and creep up round my breasts with an unpleasant tickling sensation. I shuddered violently and my teeth started to chatter. Come on, Elizabeth, you’ve got to get out of this. Think, woman. Think.
The boghole was about twenty yards long, but only two yards wide. I’d fallen in right at one end, a few more feet and I’d have missed it completely. I grasped a clump of heather and pulled cautiously. It came away in my hand, leaving a small cross-section of moorland soil which at any other time I would have found quite fascinating. Right now, shallow-rooted plants were going to be no help at all. If I could get my shoulders out of the water, however, I might be able to pull myself back up onto the path.
Prince stopped barking and began to whine.
‘Much use you are. Just sitting there.’
I tested the area around me with one foot. It was all deeper than where I stood. Without the rock or tree stump I was standing on I’d have had to swim for it. I shuddered again. The water was icy cold, I could feel the numbness in my feet and lower legs already. I wondered what the survival record was for total immersion in bogholes.
‘Get moving, Elizabeth,’ I said to myself. ‘Just get moving.’
I struggled out of my zip-up jacket. It was red and new. If the brown bog water stained there’d be hell to pay. And Hell or Heaven if you don’t get out of here quick, I reminded myself. I found my handkerchief, squeezed it out and decided to tie it to Prince’s collar. The minute I reached for him, he backed away. Then I remembered Prince didn’t wear a collar. The likelihood of his going home if I told him to was pretty low anyway.
A waterboatman paddled past my chin and explored the edge of the unknown, red continent my jacket had suddenly created. I raised my arm out of the water and looked at my watch. I was amazed it hadn’t stopped. The guarantee had said it was waterproof, but I’d never risked putting it to the test. It was almost ten-thirty. Paddy and Mary wouldn’t miss me until after one o’clock and Sean O’Struithan, whose cottage was somewhere behind the barn that had just come into view, didn’t know I was coming. No one else ever came up the mountain. There was nothing to come for. The turf had been worked out years ago, leaving the land too broken for sheep.
Prince pricked up his ears, stopped barking, and dived off with the enthusiasm usually reserved for rabbits. Having got my jacket off, I was about to try swimming down to the other end when I saw through the gap left by the heather plant, a small figure striding purposefully towards me, carrying a long plank under one arm. Prince greeted him noisily, then fell into step placidly at his heels without another sound. I watched them approach, so amazed by Prince’s behaviour and so relieved help was at hand that I made no effort to silence the incredible noise my teeth were making. Within minutes, the man was standing over me.
‘Miss Elizabeth Stewart, I presume,’ he said, as he dropped on one knee and held out his hand. ‘Sean O’Struithan, your humble servant.’
We shook hands. His was warm and dry and had a firm, friendly grip. Mine was wet and white with cold. I apologised for it being damp.
‘Don’t mention it atall,’ he said, smiling at me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to shake hands with a young woman standing up to her chin in a boghole.
‘Perhaps, Elizabeth, if I may call you Elizabeth, we might remove ourselves to a more congenial environment. Indeed, a little hot refreshment might not seem inappropriate in the circumstances. Allow me.’
He placed the plank squarely across the boghole and showed me how to use it to swing myself out. A few seconds later I was standing on firm ground again.
‘Good, good,’ he said, surveying me briefly. ‘Now if you’ll forgive me, I’ll lead the way.’ So saying, he picked up my sodden clipboard in one hand and the plank in the other and set off at a cracking pace, Prince trotting at his heels.
My boots were full of water, my hands too numb to take them off and empty them and my saturated jacket weighed a ton. I slung it round me and squelched off after them as best I could, leaving a thin trail on the dry path like a car with a leaky radiator.
The path seemed to go on for ever. Try as I might, I could not keep up with Sean O’Struithan’s pace. By the time I turned the corner of the high roofless barn and dripped breathless into his yard, he was nowhere to be seen. Exhausted as I was, however, the sight of his cottage really lifted my spirits.
Thatched, freshly whitewashed, and as trim as a new pin, it stood some thirty or forty yards back from the remaining walls of the old barn. The windows sparkled in the sunlight, their wooden frames painted a pleasant green to match the open door. But it was not so much the well-kept cottage that amazed and delighted me, as the courtyard created in the broad open space in front of it.
There were no fallen roof timbers in the shell of the old barn, nor any of the junk I was so familiar with from the farmyards of Lisara – abandoned machinery, old carts, sheets of corrugated iron, outworn tractor tyres. It had been stripped bare so that its stone floor was continuous with the flagged courtyard. Between the flags grass grew, but it was short and entirely free of weeds. Throughout the large space and on both window ledges were tubs and troughs of flowers. In old three-legged pots, wooden wheelbarrows, half-barrels and hollowed logs, geraniums, lobelia, marigold and fuchsia had been combined to provide matching and contrasting patches of colour.
As I dripped my way to the door, my curiosity increased. One thing was certain, Sean O’Struithan was neither a farmer, nor a shepherd, for there was not a piece of farm equipment or a trace of animal manure to be seen. Prince had settled himself to guard the threshold and he whined as I approached, but for once neither barked nor jumped up to greet me. As I bent to take my boots off, he acknowledged my presence merely by sweeping his tail back and forth across the smooth stone doorstep.
‘Come in, Elizabeth, you’re welcome. Now if you’ll forgive the inadequacies of a bachelor bedroom, you might care to make yourself more comfortable.’
He handed me a bucket, two large warm towels and a dressing gown.
‘I’ll take your jacket now and if you put your wet things in there, we’ll see to them in a few minutes’ time.’
The bedroom was immaculate and I was horribly aware that I was dripping all over a lovely woven rug. I stripped off as quickly as I could, stuffed my things in the bucket and wrapped myself in one of the towels. The woven quilts on the two single beds had a geometric pattern and looked as if they’d been straightened with a ruler and a spirit level. Reluctantly, I sat on the edge of one of them and started to dry my hair and feet. I caught sight of myself in the long mirror of the wardrobe door. My face was as white as a sheet, my hair stuck to my head and cheeks, and my make-up had vanished, except for my mascara which had redeposited itself in dark c
ircles below my eyes. I found my silly little handkerchief with the pansy in the corner and tried to get rid of them.
I found a fine deposit of silt between my breasts and a tidemark across my shoulders. As I pulled the towel too and fro on my back I caught sight of my naked body in the long mirror. No, I wasn’t slim like Adrienne, but I did have quite a nice figure.
I had a sudden thought about how my mother would react if she could see me now, undressing in a man’s bedroom and observing my shape in his mirror. I had such an urge to roar with laughter that I had to concentrate hard on something to stop myself.
The room offered me plenty of choice. It was just as intriguing as the courtyard outside. Spotlessly clean and beautifully cared for, every inch of wall space was covered with photographs, posters in English and Irish, facsimiles of documents and signed portraits of men in uniform. As I wrapped Sean’s comfortable towelling gown around me and put my damp things into the bucket, I knew there was only one label in my mother’s language to describe Sean. He was a man with a past, an ‘Oul’ Fenian’. I could see her face contort with loathing as she spoke the hated word.
I walked back into the kitchen with my bucket and stopped abruptly. Sean was making up the turf fire on the hearth. Outside the pages of a text book, I had never seen an original hearth with turves burning on the bare earth beyond the edge of the stone floor. Above them spread a canopy deep enough to sit beneath. Wooden armchairs were placed across the fire from each other. Sitting in them, you could look up the chimney and through the smoke hole to the blue of the sky above.
He had moved my chair close to the fire and left a pair of moccasin slippers beside it. I smiled at him, quite unable to think of any way of thanking him for being so kind to me. I curled my bare toes forward on the warm stone flags till they almost touched the white ash from the fire. Spreading out my hands to the blaze, I took a deep breath and drew in the warm, sharp smell of turf.
‘It’s such a lovely fire, Sean, I thought I’d never feel warm again.’
He looked down at me with a satisfied smile as if it were he himself who was revelling in the warmth.
‘I think I can appreciate your feelings. I have on many occasions found it necessary to place myself in close proximity to the elements. Sometimes in the not entirely adequate shelter of a stone wall, it did not seem reasonable to let oneself imagine even the existence of such delights as a turf fire or a dry bed.’ He nodded sympathetically as I shivered again at the mere thought of it.
‘I hope, Elizabeth, you have no moral or religious objections to the medicinal use of alcohol,’ he went on, as he opened a door in the bottom of the dresser. ‘I think it might be wise to employ the prophylactic qualities of a little hot whiskey.’
‘No, not at all, thank you.’
I had never heard the word prophylactic before and though I could guess what it meant, it made me wonder about his strange way of speaking. He sounded as if he were reading from a very pedantic script, yet there was nothing contrived about how he spoke. Perhaps the vein of irony which touched all he said had once been calculated, but was now simply part of him.
‘Mmmm, I think I’ve had hot whiskey before. Yes. Isn’t it funny how a smell brings back a memory?’
‘A recollection of times past, perhaps?’
‘It’s come back to me now,’ I began, sipping cautiously as the fumes caught at my throat. ‘It was when Uncle Albert used to take me to see my grandmother. I’d ride on the bar of his bike but I used to get frozen with the wind. When we got back to the forge he’d wrap me in a blanket and give me punch. I can’t have been more than four at the time.’
‘That would have been up in Ulster, in the forties, I assume?’
I nodded and found myself telling him about the small farm near the border where I had spent the first five years of my life, and Uncle Albert’s home on the outskirts of Keady where I had gone on visiting till he died in 1957. He listened hard and asked questions about my family, my work at the university, and my interest in Lisara.
It came to me that I was once again talking at length to a complete stranger, with the kind of ease I had never imagined. It was almost becoming a habit. So often back at home, I could think of nothing to say to the only questions people ever asked me. I oscillated between silence and nervous chatter. I’d just about decided that I wasn’t much good with people at all.
‘So the study of a community in Ireland seemed to you an appropriate complement to that of the Nootka and the Imbembe?’
‘I wanted to see for myself. I hate being told what to think and I got so much of that at home and at school, I was afraid I’d succumb. Having to write a thesis was a marvellous excuse. In my home, there always has to be a reason that makes sense to them, but sometimes I have reasons I can’t explain, not even to myself. Lisara was like that. After I’d read Arensberg’s book I knew I had to come.’
Sean nodded and pursed his lips. ‘I thought you must be an exceptional young woman, Elizabeth Stewart. When my old friend Paddy O’Dara says he’s too busy to accept a lift to the pub on a Saturday night, then there is something, or someone, of exceptional interest involved,’ he said lightly, as he reached out his hand for my empty mug.
‘Tell me, Elizabeth, what time does Paddy feed the dog?’
‘About noon. Before we have our own meal.’
‘Then I think our canine friend may serve as our Mercury. You will stay and have a little lunch with me, will you not?’
‘Sean, I’ve been such a nuisance already. I can’t take up any more of your time,’ I began apologetically.
‘My time is my own and I would welcome your company,’ he said, as he took a sheet of notepaper from the drawer in the kitchen table. ‘As they say in these parts “God made time and he made plenty of it.” Entirely untrue, of course, but a nice conceit. I will inform Mr O’Dara that I shall accompany you to his residence in due course and that he need have no concern for your well-being,’ he added with a flourish of his pen.
He folded the note, called Prince in a low voice, and attached the note to his neck with string. Prince stood perfectly still, made no attempt to remove his temporary collar, and ran off when Sean told him to go home for dinner.
‘I fail to see why Mr Patrick O’Dara should monopolise the pleasure of your company,’ he said, as he watched Prince through the window. ‘The oul’ divil,’ he added unexpectedly.
‘Sean, how do you manage to get Prince to pay attention? One word from me and he does what he likes.’
Sean’s eyes softened as he turned back from the window. His eyes were a very light blue, and there were masses of lines round them, like someone who had scanned far horizons for a long time. His face was tanned and he had white, even teeth. I wondered if they were false and whether he were as old as Paddy, who had long, yellowed stumps. He seemed younger. Everything he did was done lightly, deftly. He moved easily and his clothes were not those of an old man, a comfortable checked shirt, a tweed jacket, corduroy trousers and well-polished brown leather shoes. Only his flat cap bore any resemblance to Paddy’s habitual way of dressing.
‘I like dogs,’ he said. ‘I once worked with an animal trainer in Vienna. I would like a dog myself, but I’m away for many months of the year. A dog needs continuity. Perhaps when I have to desert my retreat I shall have one then. In another hundred years or so.’
‘Surely more like two hundred,’ I said lightly, as I saw the look of sadness flicker across his face.
He leaned across the hearth to unhook the boiling kettle. Then he sat down opposite me and began to talk in a quiet, reflective manner, rather different from the ironic style to which I had now grown accustomed.
‘I’m five years older than this century, Elizabeth, and my good friend Paddy has five on me. We’ll be dead and gone before Ireland heals her sorrows, for all we thought we had the answers forty years ago. Perhaps your generation will be wiser and not seek short answers to long questions.’
He looked into the fire and I thought
of the posters, the documents and facsimiles, the portraits of men in uniform.
‘I suppose Paddy told you I was an Old Republican?’
‘No, he wouldn’t tell me anything about you. He just teased me. He said I had mortally offended you by not coming to call. And that was his fault. When I saw no track on the map, I assumed the house was derelict and he didn’t correct me.’
‘Paddy has a fine sense of humour,’ he replied, nodding at me. ‘During the Troubles it was to my advantage that Paddy and everyone else around should think the house was derelict. We did our best to create that impression. With some success, I may say. There were times when we did have to take to the bog or the mountain, but in general, we were better off than some.’
As he spoke, I regretted again how very ignorant I was of even the basic facts of Irish history. Beyond stories of a very doubtful nature entrenched in family memory, my knowledge was limited to the patriotic songs I’d learnt in youth hostels in Derry and Donegal.
‘Sean, I’m so ignorant I’m ashamed. Apart from marching to Dublin “in the green, in the green, with bayonets glittering in the sun” and so on, I really don’t know what happened in the Troubles. Could you manage a history lesson?’
‘Well now, Elizabeth. I think meeting your requirements would be easy enough, but I feel I should warn you that it might involve a high degree of reminiscence,’ he began. ‘It is a dangerous thing to offer a receptive audience to a man who has reflected much on the events of his life.’
I settled myself more comfortably in my chair. I was prepared to listen to Sean for as long as he cared to talk.
It was well after one o’clock when Sean paused, stood up and began making preparations for lunch. I sat looking into the fire, so absorbed by what he had told me that I didn’t even hear him the first time he asked me if I could eat omelette aux fines herbes. He had indeed marched to Dublin, just like the song I had heard. And he’d heard ‘the rattle of a Thompson gun’ and seen men die at his elbow. He’d nearly died himself. Below the flat cap, a white scar seamed the top of his balding head. His brother, Seamus, had managed to drag him unconscious and bleeding from the building they were holding just before it was taken by British soldiers. The defenders were rounded up and the ringleaders later shot.