On an Irish Island (14 page)

But they had happened. They had changed him. He was different now. “
I went to the Blasket Island in order to learn the language,” he would write, “but when I got there I found something even more significant and attractive—the people that spoke it.”

After that first visit, he would go back again and again, once a year,
for
ten or eleven years running. At summer’s end, he would return to his life as student and scholar. At
Christmas, he’d send the islanders
gifts, such as chess sets—he’d taught several of his friends to play. Or a toy railroad for the Maidhc Léan children that was soon monopolized by their father. And then, each summer (and one Christmas, too, perhaps in 1925), he was back. Year by year, his ties to the island strengthened. His friendships with the islanders deepened. His Irish ripened. In the end, Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s son Seán had to notice: “
George had better Irish than Muiris himself,” meaning Maurice O’ Sullivan, “indeed than all the rest of us.”

Over the years, his head brimmed over with memories.

Rowing in to the island and out in a canvas canoe, the waves lapping at its sides, the rhythmic slap of the narrow-bladed oars.

Pulling the table
up to the fire at Maurice’s house, a book between them.

Children lined up on the beach for a photograph, the girls in their dark pinafores, demurely kneeling in the sand, the older ones hamming it up for the camera.

The boy who cut himself while digging and tried to staunch the blood with a
fistful of dirt.

The old woman at the village well who’d filled her buckets and now stood looking out to sea, lamenting the loss of
seven sons to America.

Sitting by the fire in
Peig Sayers’s house, Peig lapsing into a
poetic lament that for all the world could have been a Shakespearean sonnet.

Always, stories rising up, unbidden, at the scantiest excuse, from everyone on the island, Fenian tales drawn from Irish tradition, prose that verged on
poetry, poetry prose.

And then, of course, there were the moonlit nights, and the music, and the
dancing, high on the cliffs above the pounding surf.…

Especially after it was abandoned and reduced to ruins, it would be easy to imagine that the Blasket community had been around since antiquity, or at least since the
Middle Ages, or at any rate was steeped in ageless tradition. But the settlement of the Blaskets was recent enough, the generations going back to the early settlers few enough that creation
myths of a sort around this or that aspect of village life sometimes took hold. One of these concerned its music.

The way Seán Ó Criomhthain liked to tell the story later, an islander, Mike, one day crossed the sound, hoodwinked a Dingle man into letting
him take a
fiddle he didn’t pay for, brought it back to the island, and learned to play it. “
That was the first fiddle of their own which the islanders had.” They called it a sliver, for its shape. Ultimately, Mike left for America, but not before two other islanders learned to play his fiddle and saved up to buy their own. Soon, “all the lads on the Island were becoming interested in the fiddle and some of them set about making one.” For strings, they used fishing-net cord; if the instrument showed special promise, they’d contrive to get proper strings for it. “Within a few years there was a sliver in every house in the village … [and not] a boy or girl on the Island who couldn’t knock some smattering of music out of it.”

Following the fiddle onto the island was the
melodeon, or “box,” a small accordion introduced early in the twentieth century and catching on quickly. At the height of the melodeon craze, nightly dances sometimes kept the young people up almost till morning. “
They had little else to do during the day,” Seán seemed to grumble, “except to bring a couple of loads of turf from the hill and dress themselves up for the night.” Some fine evenings, they’d bring a visiting box-player over to the Spur at Seal Cove, near the northern tip of the island. Out of sight of the village itself, it was large enough and level enough to accommodate two dance sets at once and, said Seán, “
many other activities if you so wished!”

In the village itself, it was often
Peig Sayers’s house where the furniture would be cleared for the evening’s dance. “
The room would be lit by a turf fire, and an oil lamp, and a tiny red lamp before the holy picture,” remembered
Robin Flower’s daughter Síle, a teenager at the time, who visited the island during some of the same years George did. The room was full to bursting, the boys “crouching on their haunches,” ready to jump up and ask a girl to dance before the music started. “And then it was very, very lively dancing, reels and sets.” At evening’s end, in the blackness of the night, they’d wend their way home. “The boys were dying to get a kiss from us. We thought this was terrific at the age of fourteen or fifteen,” she remembered. “Finally we arrived home, and this howling mob of boys would be outside the window, waving through the window and blowing kisses at us.”

It was impossible not to be moved by weeks or months spent in a setting so alive, in the shelter of the darkness, to the lilt of song, the whine of the fiddle, the drone of the melodeon, the play of dancing feet, the abandoned pulse of young bodies. No visitor was immune to it. “
The sharp sounds of their heel irons are still ringing in my ears,” wrote Marstrander of the dancers. Synge wrote of four Blasket couples dancing a polka:

Robin Flower captured the dancing in verse:

Now, the island, one needs reminding about now, was not some easy-living tropical paradise. It was a hard and unforgiving place, difficult to wrest a living from. Clinging to its precipitous cliffs, rowing and sailing over its roiling waters, you couldn’t long forget the essential seriousness of life.
Marriage mattered; so did
birth, so did
death, and not much else. The islanders, many said, possessed dignity and poise, heroic grace. Many of them tapped a deep religiosity. Given the pleas to Jesus and Mary marking everyday Blasket speech, it would be possible to imagine the island as pious or prudish. And many islanders did hold firmly to the tenets of their faith and conform to every standard of decorum between the sexes.

All this was true.

But also true was that the Great Blasket was an island. And islands are famously places of freedom and abandon, of rules relaxed, of stricture and release held in balance. Synge’s
Playboy
idea—a man kills his father and is hailed for his manly daring—was hatched on an island, in Aran. The Blaskets inspired in him another idea, for a play set on an
“island with a population of wreckers, smugglers, poteen makers … startled by the arrival of a stranger.” No priest inhabited the island; one was rowed in for the Stations, to take confessions and say Mass at the school, but that was just once a year. Otherwise, the church, its institutions and representatives, could seem far distant indeed.
“While life was reasonably good there
was little talk of priests or ministers,” recalled Seán Ó Criomhthain. “The ordinary person doesn’t spend his life talking about religion.” The great litanies of the ought-and-should could seem remote, mainland verities not so much rejected as forgotten or ignored.

Sometime before George came to the island, an English translation of
Boccaccio’s
Decameron,
his collection of lubricious tales of love and sensuality set in medieval Florence, found its way to the island; George once saw a tattered copy of an English edition of it in Maurice’s house. Using Irish names and place names,
Mícheál O’Guiheen would translate several of Boccaccio’s stories into Irish, leaving scholars to debate just how much, or how little, he’d cleaned them up. Delving into the story, folklorist Bo Almqvist concluded that O’Guiheen, very simply, was no prude, that the appeal of the Boccaccio stories for him and other islanders lay in their similarity to Irish folktales that could be “every bit as earthy and bawdy as any Boccaccian tale.”

“
On our way back to the village,” wrote Synge of what he observed following an evening’s dancing,

Marstrander, likewise, recounted the flirtatious horseplay that sometimes accompanied these evening dances.

It was a small island, but it wasn’t as if you couldn’t slip away—you could. The village itself might seem claustrophobic, a few minutes’ walk
from one end to the other. But its few houses were really just a speck of urban adornment to an otherwise wild countryside of pasturage, mountain, bog, and cliff; it could be two hours over the back of the island to Ceann Dubh, or
Black Head, at the island’s far southwestern tip. To any red-blooded island boy or girl, there were plenty of less traveled areas to get away to. Close by was the White Strand, with rock-sheltered corners lying behind the cliffs, invisible to the prying eyes of the village. Or else a couple “
might hop in over a fence or up the hill a bit,” remembered Seán Ó Criomhthain of his youth. “They’d go some place where people didn’t usually go.” The island was too small, making it hard to find such a spot? “Not at all. It was easy to find a place there if you wanted to.” Young men he termed “the real experts … brought the girls up the hill.”

It is many years later, and George Thomson is being interviewed for a television documentary. He’s on the mainland, sitting on the grass as he speaks, the island rising across the sound behind him. He is an old man now, and he remembers: “
There were lots of young people on the island” in the 1920s. Dances were frequent. On nights when the weather was bad, they’d gather at
Peig Sayers’s house. “There was a good floor there, as it was one of the new houses”—concrete, not dirt. Or “sometimes we’d have a great night in the schoolhouse. We’d dance all night.”

Among reminiscences delivered in George’s memory at the time of his death was one from
Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, a Roman Catholic priest reared in West Kerry who’d befriended him. “I am certain that dear George is
dancing steps in Paradise with the people of the Island now,” he wrote, “and that he has the sets better than he had them long ago.” He was probably not a naturally gifted dancer, though “he couldn’t have been
as unmusical as he seemed,” suggested daughter Margaret years later, perhaps influenced by standards set by her mother, a musician. But on the island, raw energy trumped any natural want of ability. Sometimes George, Maurice, and one or two other men could be seen dancing on the beach,
pipes hanging from their mouths all the while. One old islander,
Seán Ó Guithín, remembered George with his jacket off, stripped to his shirt. Oh, he said, “
he could step it out with the best.”

Sometimes, on moonlit nights, the young people would drift from the village en masse, cut across the northeast face of the island, beside the fields above the White Strand, to Speir Chuas na Rón,
Seal Cove, the brink of which fell precipitously to the surf crashing up against the rocky cove below. As he remembers those nights of dancing there now, George sits propped on one elbow, his other hand idly fingering a workman’s cap
by his side, an errant wisp of hair slipping down across his forehead.… And then, from that wizened old face, a
secret smile breaks free.

“I suppose he had a few girls on the island?” one of his old friends is asked.

“Oh, he did indeed!” says he. “
There was one girl in particular.…”

It couldn’t have been long after his arrival on the island that he met
Mary Kearney, which is how he referred to her when he mentioned her in a letter written years later. Máire Pheats Tom Ó Cearnaigh was her proper island name: Mary, daughter of Tom Kearney’s son Pat. She lived in a new house at the top of the village with her parents, brothers, and sisters.

She’d entered the world in 1908 through the ministrations of the island midwife,
Méiní Dunlevy, in a house toward the middle of the village that shared a stone wall with the island
school. When she was about five, her growing family—by now she had two more sisters and a younger brother along with older siblings—moved to the upper village; she may have remained there briefly in her grandparents’ coddling care before moving up the hill. Her family’s new Congested District house had a concrete floor, wooden stairs to a second level, a slate roof, and a back door
(atypical for the village) facing the hill behind it. A little road—a wide path, really—passed in front, leading in a lazy arc to the north side of the island. Below, the surf billowing onto the White Strand seemed somehow close by; only a few fields stood between them and the sea. On a fair day,
Beginish, the nearest of the
Lesser Blaskets, small, flat, and green, punctuated by scattered rocks, could seem practically out the front door.