Stones of Aran (41 page)

When the bucket was full, we walked down with it to the Plains, as he oddly named the arena of slanting fields around the bay, and surveyed with relish the smoothly swelling hillocks of rabbit-nibbled sward and rain-washed blackweed in his lea
garden
. A few primroses showed among the briars along the foot of its south-facing wall, over which a suddenly sun-intensified vision of the white-pocked, blue-black sea and the snow-dusted peaks of Connemara glared at us. Having pegged out his line, Séamaisín put down the bits of seed-potato in three staggered rows to
adumbrate
the ridge to be, and spat on his hands, evidently with as much expectation of pleasurable hours as I would have felt (reminded of it by the arrangement of the seeds, at the four corners and central points of a succession of squares) in settling down to read Sir Thomas Browne’s
The
Quincunx
,
or
the
Garden
of
Cyrus.

I learned some refinements of the art that day: how to pierce
the scraw with a little stab of the spade before folding it over,
exactly
at the right point for the potato to grow up through the slit, “to give it a chance, like!,” and how to bevel the edge of the ridge with quick pats and rubs of the back of the spade so that the rain would run off it. In a nearby field a man was ridging a field for mangolds to feed his cow next winter. His technique was quite different; the bare sandy soil, in which some crop had been grown the previous year, had already been shaped into long thin banks about four feet apart—Séamaisín said they were called
uaille
,
but I cannot identify the word in the dictionaries—and seaweed had been laid in the spaces between them. Now he was crouched like a sprinter, using the full length of the spade-handle at a shallow angle, rapidly scooping soil out of the middle of a bank to build up a ridge on the seaweed beside it; the sharp crests of soil he left on either side of the bank became the firm sides of the ridges to right and left of it. However Séamaisín did not encourage my observation of this rival, and recalled me to our own ridges. “Keep your eye on the seed!” he cried, whenever my furrow strayed from the rectilinear. The ground was extremely shallow—in fact it was clear that the principal reason for ridging in Aran is to double up the depth—and I became scrupulous about prizing the last spoonful of soil off the bedrock exposed in the trench. Two pied wagtails flew into the field and fought furiously on the ridges. One by one Séamaisín and I forged the great brown ingots of earth.

The early days of April were blustery and spiteful;
Laetheanta
na
Bó
Riabhaí
,
the days of the brindled cow, Séamaisín called them. (The old cow was congratulating herself on having
survived
the winter, but cruel April overheard her and borrowed a few days from March to finish her off.) I joined Séamaisín for intermittent spells on the ridges, but it was the middle of the month by the time we completed the garden in the Plains and returned to Buaile Phatsa. And there, one late afternoon hour that had unexpectedly been wafted up from the south while we were quincunxing the ridges with spuds, the cuckoo called, two notes as exotic in grey Aran as sugared almonds: pink; blue. Old
Nora Fleming, passing down the road, tall and slim in her long black shawl, paused on hearing the first cuckoo for the
eighty-third
time in her life, lifted her beautiful grey face and murmured to us, “I suppose it’s the same one comes every year.” Séamaisín glanced sideways at me to see if I appreciated the antiquated
unreason
of this, and turned the peak of his cap to the rear to shield his neck from the sun. M came up the road and took a
photograph
of us at work, overruling his protests at being recorded looking “two hundred years behind the times.” Cuckoo-farmers, but disdainful of her obsolete cuckoo-calendrical jokes, we went on jabbing up-to-dates into the earth.

The final act of the planting season is the “trenching” of the potatoes when they begin to show above the ground, that is, throwing the soil that has washed down into the trenches up onto the ridges again. This also gives an opportunity of perfecting the ridges for perfection’s sake. My part in the task was to work along each trench, prizing out stones and loosening the soil around and under them. Séamaisín followed me, shooting spadefuls of my scanty winnings in broad fans evenly across the ridge or in soft packets to plump out slight hollows, and now and again with a quick to-and-fro movement flicking a dab onto the rim and
licking
it into the bevel with the back of his blade. Reading between the lines of the ridges I discovered again the precious
contradictions
of rock and earth. And during that long sunny day with the cuckoo calling, Séamaisín passed on lots of life-wisdom, some of which made my heart pale: for instance, how to clean a deep gash by pouring milk on it and letting the dog lick it; and how to cut a short length of elderberry-twig, make a notch round it near
either
end, split it lengthways, take out the pith and fill each half with a mixture of “bluestone” or copper sulphate and olive oil, fix them together again by a bit of twine round the notch at one end, like a clothes-peg, then peg it round the bull calf’s scrotum above the stone and tie the other ends together, so that the “strings” are burned through and the animal castrated by gentle degrees. This useful tip led us into a discussion of breeding and heredity. Did I
think ducks ever bred with seagulls? He had two peculiarly thin white ducks—they had waddled in and out of the field we were working in several times during the day—and recently some tourists had asked him what sort they were; he had said there was a bit of the seagull in them, and they had believed him! “That was good enough for them!” he cried, weak with laughter, pillowing his face in his arms on the wall. Then, following an obscure chain of associations, “Do you think will they ever get rid of the Royal Family?” When I answered that I hoped so, he laughed again, but uneasily; he seemed to feel that this was rather daring. We started to hack out the briars that were already stretching towards the ridges from the rough margins of the garden. As he wielded his spade he asked me if monkeys ever bred with apes, because he had heard that “the man” came from a monkey and an ape. He speared his spade vertically into the earth and lent on it to hear my exposé of Darwinism. He had once seen a monkey, he told me; the
Guinnesses
’ yacht had moored in Port Mhuirbhigh when he was a lad, and he was climbed out of his currach onto the jetty when he heard a noise, “mmm, mmm,” and saw this thing in the yacht, holding its little paws up; he had thought it looked like a person. But if that was true about the monkey and the ape, what about Adam and Eve and the Earthly Paradise? As I fumbled among different orders of truth, scientific and mythic, his attention
wandered
and he began to recite scraps of school-learning and folklore: “Palestine is a small country on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean,” and something about the dog’s nose being cold because it was stuck out of a window of the Ark for forty days and forty nights; until we both came to a baffled halt and stood
looking
at each other in absolute mutual incomprehension. Then he seized his spade and said, “Well, whatever about religion, we’ve got to get out the briars!”—which Voltairean flash reignited our energies and set us slicing through the knotted roots again. We worked away, caps reversed, while the cuckoo called and called and called, dinning its prehistoric, bang up-to-date, binary logic into our brains.

The logic of the cuckoo is, of course, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” But even in the best of times this is simplistic, and since the cuckoo sang as blithely as ever during those years of “distress” that disfigured almost every decade of the last century, it can also be heard as a black joke. The potato is vulnerable to drought and to blight; it needs care in cultivation and in storage. “Cleaning,”
i.e.
weeding, the gardens is a task that bows the back and cramps the mind into vegetable hatreds: scutch grass, that breaks at the nodes when you pull it and regenerates from the smallest remainder (“I
hate
scutch grass!” I hear Mícheál cry); shepherd’s purse that flowers and seeds itself a thousandfold during a few days’ inattention; docks with great taproots that cannot be dragged out without cracking the ridges. Water is a problem on Aran; it used to be said that the potatoes would be good if they got rain on St. Johns’ Day and St. Macdara’s Day, that is June the 24th and July the 16th; but frequently they did not. Potatoes are often stored in the field where they have been harvested; they are heaped into a low mound, a layer of bracken or withered potato stalks over them, and covered in soil to make a
maolán
or “clamp.” This
protects
them from rain and frost, but one can still be disappointed on opening it up, for, as Mícheál explained to me, the rats are “cute” enough to leave no sign on the outside of the clamp to say that they are inside it, building nests and with lots to eat. Also, potatoes that looked healthy enough on being clamped might turn out to have been infected with the blight, and to be melting away.

Potato blight threatens on muggy days in July and August, when the spore of
Phytophthora
infestans
,
the fungus that causes it, spreads rapidly. Nowadays official blight warnings and
insistent
radio advertisements for proprietary fungicides remind us to spray the crop several times in the summer months. Until
recently
the Aran farmer would make up a solution of copper
sulphate
, and spatter it onto the leaves with an old paint brush or, in
earlier days, a bundle of heather. Neglect such precautions, and the spore may wash down from the leaves into the ground and affect the tubers, tinging them with an inward-speading
darkness
. The effect of a severe infestation is vile. I remember the face of an Inis Meáin farmer who had just discovered that there was nothing in his ridges but sacs of black slime. One’s instinctive repulsion is doubled by a historically transmitted shudder. The potato famine of 1845–49 left a soft
blackness of despair at the heart of rural Ireland, which I think will not be dispelled by all the grants in Europe.

The blight organism followed the potato itself from the
Americas
, with a delay of two-and-a-half centuries. During that period the potato had become a staple of the poor throughout much of northern Europe, but nowhere else had they been forced into such a dependence on the one foodstuff as in Ireland. A vast
population
growth and an unprecedented degree of exploitation had been made possible by the fact that a family could feed themselves almost totally by cultivation of a small potato-patch,
liberating
all the rest of their time, energy and land for the production of rent. The amount of potato the farm labourer forced down himself, when he could get it, was formidable; one reads of a
father’s
advice to his son on ensuring his share of the midday meal: have a potato in each cheek, one in each fist, two more at the back of your two fists, and your two eyes stuck into two others in the basket. “We’ll have the potatoes again at seven,” said the old lady who looked after me in Inis Meáin on my first visit, having served me with bacon and cabbage at midday; to her,
na fataí
,
the
potatoes
, were still synonymous with food. The variety of potato most widely planted in Ireland in the years before the Famine, the “Lumper,” was very productive but watery and disease-prone; again one reads of landlords’ agents who would raise the rent of a tenant seen growing a better quality of potato. Thus the two million or more acres of potatoes planted in Ireland in the spring of 1845 constituted, in the words of one authority, “a vast congested potato slum, ripe for devastation by epidemic disease.”

Cruelly, the immediate cause of the disaster was a
well-meaning
attempt to remedy the instability of the situation. The Belgian government was conducting field-trials of various newly imported strains of potato to find one resistant to another disease, dry rot; the blight spores seem to have come in with these, either from Mexico or the central Andes region. In June the disease was noted in Flanders, by August growers in south-east England were prophesying a calamity for the poor, and by September the plague had reached Ireland. Over the next few years a million people died of starvation or fever, and more than a million fled the ruined country.

In Connemara, any enquiry into local lore will bring you to the famine-grave in the bushes behind the ruined cabin or among the rocks of the seashore. Such a thing has never happened to me in Aran. Official reports and oral tradition both indicate that there was perhaps only one death from starvation in the islands, that of a woman in Cill Rónáin. The blight was less severe here, and although the fishing was limited by the lack of suitable boats and nets, there was always shore-food—winkles, sea-urchins, a few sorts of edible seaweed—for those who conserved the strength to gather it. Nevertheless there was undoubtedly severe want; in the spring of 1846 Indian meal was distributed from the coastguard station, and the local relief committee reported that three hundred and forty people lacked food and fuel and were too weak to undertake cultivation. But island memory hardly distinguishes between this period and the other spells of recurrent tribulation of that century, so far as concerns its own suffering. The
sufferings
of Connemara were made vivid to Aran, however, by the number of refugees who came across the channel, lived in little hollows of the inland cliffs and worked unpaid for anyone who could afford to feed them, and most of whom were eventually forced by the bailiffs to return to their own deathly shores, lest they become an expense to the parish or the landlord. Some Aran tenants were persuaded to let their Connemara labourers go, by the threat of having their potato-patches taken from them (but
Mícheál tells me that the bailiffs did not trouble the blacksmith of Oatquarter about the people he was harbouring, because they got a better service from him than from his rival in Cill Rónáin). Also there was forceful resistance to this sentence of repatriation; one bailiff came riding home on his donkey, dead, apparently throttled by some fiddlers and other musicians from
Connemara
.

But even in those lowest years, the insufficient and
undependable
crop of human kindness sometimes reached fruition, as the following scene from oral history shows. I leave the word to the teller, old Seán Gillan of Oatquarter.