Stones of Aran (66 page)

Tomáisín was pleasant to be with, lively in speech, agile over walls, a neat and trim little man who despite his ordinary
countryman’s
dress of flat cap and tweed jacket reminded me of Máirtín Ó Direáin’s old traditionalists:

Unfortunately, despite his impeccable credentials as village
ancient
, I came to the conclusion that Tomáisín’s version of the boundaries was logically incoherent, and I had to search out an old bachelor I particularly disliked, and go over them again. Sometimes I suspect that folk memory owes its reputation to the fact that there is nothing to check it against; the guardians of oral lore got it wrong in the first generation, and every generation since has added its quantum of error.

Returning from such expeditions I sometimes came down to the village of Creig an Chéirín by a rather precipitous track called Ród na gCaiptíní, after the nickname of the family whose land it served. Na Caiptíní (the captains) were McDonaghs (as were sixty of the one hundred and twenty-one inhabitants of the
village
in Ó Tuathail’s time, for example); the wise woman Máirín a’ Chaiptín was one of them, as was her namesake and
contemporary,
Máirín an Chaiptín, the midwife, from whom the back-road in Cill Rónáin is called Bóthar an Chaiptín. As I have mentioned, most Aran families have nicknames, which distinguish them
better
than the limited number of surnames can do, but since most of them originated in some anecdote that has been repeated for generations with a teasing or spiteful intent, they are not usually used in the presence of those named, and it is difficult for me to discuss them here. However, this particular nickname is not
offensive
. Mícheál the blacksmith told me how it was won. A party of little boys were chasing a wren; one lad outran the rest and caught the bird, and an old man looking over a wall at them cried out “
Is
tusa
an
caipt
í
n!
” (“You are the captain!”).

Ród na gCaiptíní joins a more important one, Ród Charn Maoilín, which comes down from the highest point of the
plateau,
Cam Maoilín (meaning something like “cairn of the
flat-topped
or bare summit”), and where this in its turn joins the main road at Carcair Chreig an Chéirín, there stands a rather
faded-looking ’fifties single-storey house I often used to call in at. It was built by Éamonn Ó Tuathail, great-grandson of the
poitin-
maker
, who used to teach in Eoghanacht school until he left the island as a consequence of some row with the priest. (I never met him, but in his last years we corresponded, and in the remissions of his terminal leukaemia we mentally revisited all these boreens, one of us in Dún Laoghaire and the other in Connemara, and he wrote out their names for me with voluminous and erudite
elucidations
. For several exiles, I am happy to hear that looking into Aran in this way, to help me improve the map from edition to edition, has been a passionate solace.) The present occupants of the house, who used to fortify me with tea for my cycle or walk home, are an Englishman, Arthur, and an Aran woman I think of as “Arthur’s Máireád” to distinguish her from mine. For many years she was only intermittently at home, as she had to be taken into the huge Victorian psychiatric hospital of Ballinasloe for a month or two now and again. An excessive number of people used to have to make that eastwards journey by train or taxi, many of them for no better reason than that they were elderly and a little confused, or at odds with their relatives. It used to be regarded as natural that living in the west, and especially on an island, drove one crazy, and in Aran the commonest way of saying that something is maddening or aggravating is still
“Cuirfeadh
sé
sin
soir
thú!,
”
“That would send you east,” that is, to Ballinasloe. So Arthur’s Máiréad was lucky that she had someone to go and fetch her back from the hospital, which she feared; it was “rough,” she told us. She was born in Aran, and it seems she had fallen off a cliff in her childhood and had never been quite right since;
nevertheless
she had left the island as a young woman to stay with her brother Josie, who ran some boarding-houses in London, and skivvied for him as well as working in a Lyons’ Corner House. There Arthur saw her, a slender, exotic, beauty, and fell in love on the instant. He was a printer on a newspaper, separated from his wife. He took Máiréad under his wing; she was half-starved and he had difficulty persuading her to eat. Then they won a prize on
the Irish sweepstake, and suddenly had enough money to buy the Ó Tuathail house. Now, twenty years later, Máiréad was big and heavy, with the pale blondness of an evening cumulus cloud. Whenever I called in, Arthur would shout for her to come out of the bedroom she lurked in and make me a mug of tea. “Ask him if he wants a biscuit!” he would add. She would take a packet of biscuits from the cupboard and say to me in a sudden,
mechanical
voice, “Will you eat—
three
?”
I would answer, “I will!,” and she would plank three biscuits on the kitchen table.

Arthur is short and square-faced, with a bristly sergeant-major’s moustache and bright terrier eyes, and his head is stuffed with facts like a tin full of assorted nuts and bolts. He had a little car and used to drive with Mairéad into Cill Rónáin on
steamer-days
. Often he would collect our Sunday papers from Powell’s shop—we used to save them to read on the following Sunday—and on the way home he would pull up at our gate and strut down the garden-path with them, crying out like a Cockney
newsvendor
, “Star, News and Standard!” Then he would sit by our fire and bring us up to date with news from the west—drownings, thefts of cabbages, constipations of many weeks’ standing. Máiréad would rarely come in with him, preferring to wait in the car, but sometimes we would hear her stumping round to the yard behind the house. A London friend visiting us during the winter, who was puzzled by the incongruity of Arthur’s cheerful pragmatical presence in this darkly self-questioning island, once asked him why he stayed here. Arthur had no answer at the time, but a fortnight later he told me that he had been thinking about the
question
, and that the answer was: “Love; Faith; Honour.”

When we first came to Aran, Arthur was the only non-islander living there permanently. He was more active then, and used to go fishing for mackerel from An Grióir under the western end of the cliffs, so regularly in fact that I added a dot and a squiggle representing him to that point of my map, an almost microscopic memorial that delighted him. Nowadays he is too wobbly on his legs to clamber along the shingle-banks to An Grióir, and he has
also had to abandon his vegetable patch. But he still holds out, long after I have left the island, and still holds his Máiréad back from that grey hole gaping in the east. That’s Arthur: loving, faithful, honourable.

Followed from east to west, the topography of the island goes down to its end with the assurance of a queen. Having climbed in steeps and stops for breath for over a mile, the road swings around a cliffed cape of the plateau on its left, and discloses a landscape of grand finality, descending in four majestic steps to the tidal streams around the last low fragmentary islets and the lighthouse, beyond which is nothing but the sea’s blue mantle, twitched by the desire of horizons.

From the bend at the highest point of the road one looks down into the village of Bun Gabhla, lodged in a shallow depression of the terrace below like a clutch of eggs on a plate. Behind the
village
this hollow gathers itself into a narrow valley running through slightly higher ground southwards as far as the Atlantic cliffs. It is this cut across the limestone strata that provides the village with the spring-water accumulating in a marshy dell of sally-gardens among little rye-fields, and probably also with its name. In Connemara I find that place-name elements deriving from
gabhal,
literally a fork or fork-shaped thing, often refer to a v-shaped valley or ravine, and so here it seems likely that the
village
name means “foot of the valley.” But if this is so, it is not generally understood, and the name sounds a little odd even in the ears of the islanders, adding to their perception of Bun
Gabhla
as a place apart. Hidden from the rest of the island as it is by the corner of the plateau, exposed to all the frightful glories of the west the other villages cower away from, its very existence seems a little fabulous. For me too, it is
remote and unfamiliar territory.
Once or twice I called in on Maggie and Marcus there (Marcus was one of those I had in mind when describing the fishermen of Bun Gabhla in my first volume), and found their old uncle
Tomaisín
Jamesie lavishing the Irish language’s treasury of comic endearments on their new baby, but theirs was the only cottage I knew. I remember that the first steps I made towards my first map of Aran were to walk up to that high corner of the road and sketch the relative positions of the ten houses laid out in an
already
map-like perspective below. As I worked, a mist rolled in from the sea and encircled the village. I saw a woman running out to fetch in the washing hanging behind her house, and a goose stretching its neck to hiss at her; then the mist obliterated the little scene, and a few drops of rain blurred my penmanship. I felt then that I would never know anything of the life of that place, and so it has turned out. I can only speculate, for instance, that the beam of the lighthouse sweeping over the rooftops gives night a pulse so familiar that its cessation in dense fog must wake the village, as one is woken by a ticking clock’s falling silent. More clearly, I can feel how that cone of light, or as much of it as has failed to contact rock or ship or human eye, sails on over the
horizon
to drown itself in infinite space.

Below the village, the terraces of the island’s north flank sweep round to the south-west, each broadening out into stark rock-floors several hundred yards wide, softened here and there by grassy hollows divided into fields. It is a sublime landscape—the adjective is inescapable—in its scale and clarity, and I often have it to myself; few tourists penetrate so far, and the villagers are usually off in their currachs or busy in the gardens near their homes. Salty gales scour across the wide-open surfaces; plants keep to the crevices. Rose-root, an arctic and montane succulent, is abundant, its sunset-coloured seed-heads ablaze in the late summer, almost down to sea-level. On a recent visit I was brought up short in my striding by a row of tiny greenish darts sticking up out of a fissure: the adder’s tongue fern, a very rare plant on the islands, within a quarter of a mile of the western point. While I
do not have the foot-by-foot knowledge of these crags that I do of the one over the back wall of the Residence, I have crossed them dozens of times and accumulated a stack of notes about their flora, and the Bun Gabhla people have given me much place-lore. Tomaisín has a tale of fairies seen dancing at midday down on An Scrios Mór, the terrace by the shore north of the village, and I have heard a few lines of an otherwise forgotten song about a strange mound, too big to be just a ruined
clochán
and said to be haunted, down Bóthar na gCrúibíní, the road of the “crubeens” or dewberries, just south of the village. Also, Conor MacDermot has pointed out some geological features unusual in Aran: on Scrios na gCapall by the north-western shoreline, a long
undulating
channel cut into the limestone pavement by water flowing at pressure under a melting glacier; a small rift-valley enclosing Loch an Mhuirbhigh, the brackish lake at the western tip of the island, formed where the ground between two parallel faults has dropped a few yards … But, at this point in my book, the tension between its sprawling content and its formal symmetries has to be contained; to cap this Neoclassical can of worms I need to reduce my ultimate steps on Aran to the elemental and emblematic.

Primarily, these crags are steeped in sunsets. The best of my memories of them are sunset coloured. Some years after leaving Aran I returned with two friends who were making a film and needed a sunset. I led them to the brink of a terrace on the
north-west
shoulder of the island. The sun, on a rococo stage of lavishly gilded cirrus, was retiring with the bravura of a diva well practiced in farewell performances. But in the last minutes it dispensed with meretricious pomps, and reduced itself to a white-hot
cutting-disc
. As it poised itself to slice into the horizon, I remembered what I had read of the rare phenomenon called “the green flash”: When the sun’s rays enter the atmosphere obliquely they are
refracted
earthwards, and so at sunset they are bent round the curve of the earth a little, making the sun visible for a few moments when, geometrically speaking it is already below the horizon; and since the longer wavelengths of the red end of the spectrum are
refracted to a slightly lesser degree than the shorter ones, they are cut off first, and the very last glimpse of the sun is provided solely by yellow and blue light; thus, in ideal conditions, its
disappearance
is illuminated by an instant of emerald. This evening,
conditions
seemed to promise that ideal; the atmosphere was intently still, the sky around the vanishing-point of day was as lucid as science. We “inspectors of sunsets” held our breaths, and trained the camera on the sun as it shrank to a low dome, which appeared to spread a little way along the horizon to either side before
gathering
itself into a globule of fierce intensity, and vanishing. We saw no emerald; the sky shed its gold, the crags faded from copper to gun-metal, without spectral discontinuities. But, most
unexpectedly,
when we reviewed that day’s work in the darkroom, there was the green moment in all its veridicity. Sadly, this
epiphany
like so many others ended on the cutting-room floor; in the final restructuring, the film’s editor foreswore the clichéd closure of sunset.

However, it is a sunset that defines these crags for me still, and dresses them for this book. It dawned out of a dark evening in that summer, a wretched rainy season, when we were living
temporarily
above Creig an Chéirín while I made my first map of the island. Evening after evening I used to come back from the boreens, soaked and frustrated, to the damp cottage in which M had spent the day trying to dry out the clothes I had worn the day before. The cottage was lonely, surrounded by tall wet grass and puddles of cow-shit. By day the front windows looked down a grey slope to a grey sea, the back windows up a grey slope to a grey sky, by night we shuttered them up so as not to attract the attention of the only likely caller, a roaming bachelor half-crazed by lifelong fantasizing. We were befriended by an eight-year-old child whom we, still only half familiar with Aran’s genealogical nicknames, knew as Mikey Mikey Tom Mikey. He used to cycle out from some distance away with a milk-pail before and after school, to see to cattle and sheep on the land his parents rented
near the cottage. He too was frequently wet and exhausted, and M would supplement the bit of bread his mother had, as he put it, “thrown down in the pail” for him with cocoa and a boiled egg. He called in on her now and again, bringing an orphaned robin nestling, or to ask her to tell him if the cows started climbing up on each other, so that he would know when to take them to the bull. Once the school holidays began he was often labouring all day, milking the three cows morning and evening, weeding
mangolds
, saving hay or spraying potatoes, all by himself and with little to eat or drink. (He was probably one of the last of Aran’s children to be worked in this way, which was only what their own experience had taught his parents to consider natural; we noted in later years that his younger brothers had an easier life, as modern values began to soften even this obdurately old-fashioned family.) Mikey offered to leave milk for us at the roadside below the
cottage
each morning in an old lemonade bottle; when we asked him the price he said, “Fifteen or ten pence,” but it was clear from the way he held them unseeingly in his palm that the coins meant nothing to him. We agreed on five pence, and arranged to return the empty bottle with the money in its cap to the same spot by the roadside. Sometimes he called on me to help him change the cattle from one field to another, which was difficult for him to do on his own, as the number of ways half a dozen beasts can go astray in the ramifying paths of Aran when driven from behind by one small boy is virtually infinite; also, although he was far quicker than I at “knocking the gap” to let the cattle into the field and raising it up again after them, the big stones were a strain on him. On such occasions he would tell me not to leave any pennies in the milk-bottle cap the next day because I had done that work for him, and I would explain that since I wanted to learn that work from him there was no need to pay me. He was supposed to be saving the money for new shoes, but in the event he bought two goat-kids from one of his contemporaries, and built a little stone hutch for them on a nearby crag. Mikey Mikey Tom Mikey
was the only entrepreneur in that lugubrious neighbourhood, whose few remaining inhabitants seemed to be either moribund or manic.

One evening, as I arrived home from a long day largely spent sheltering under inadequate bushes, the dripping sky suddenly cleared, and after dinner I sat on the doorstep with M to bask in the honeyed evening air. Then Mikey appeared, looking worried; his father was coming to ship some sheep out to An tOileán
Iarthach
the next morning, but in the meantime they had escaped from the crag they were supposed to be on. Reluctantly I got up to help him find them. We located a few on a crag towards Bun Gabhla, and chased after some others that showed briefly on a skyline, but they turned out not to be the right ones. It seemed absurd to be scampering about after sheep that would surely disappear again overnight if we did find them and put them back on their crag. We decided to split up; he went down towards the shore, I roved sunsetwards over the great shoulders of rock below Bun Gabhla. The golden eye of the lighthouse was opening and shutting. I became elated by the vast level tide-race of sunshine streaming around me, a light so palpable it might have been imagined by someone blind from birth, a warm liquid pressing in at the eyes, carrying sharp exciting crystals. I began to run,
crossing
the areas chopped up by shadow-filled grykes as easily as the great burnished rock-sheets, and leaping down the scarps from terrace to terrace as if the light were dissolving them and I could plunge through them like waves. If sheep were the goal of the quest, they hid themselves from my ecstasy and left me free to exult in the miraculous surety of my footfalls.

Looking back on it from this moment of writing, I believe I have transcribed this experience accurately. But, arising where it does in these last pages, it needs to be freed from a weight of
significance
. It took place early in my learning about Aran; it does not represent a summation, a reading, of the work I have done since, a hard-won adequation of step to stone. Only my favouring of spatial over temporal continuity, my childish filling-in of the
island-shape with one long obsessive scribble of record and
experience,
brings it to occupy this privileged site. Unearned,
promising
nothing beyond the moment of itself, least of all was it a
mystic
flight above or from the ground of this book. What could be more natural than that space should reward me for my fidelity by providing this excursus from time, just where it would come in handy many years of writing later?

Meanwhile, Mikey had found a few more sheep. By the time I joined up with him again and we had driven them up to the crag and frightened them into jumping the wall into it, the sun had gone down. We spotted some more sheep on a higher crag, but decided to leave them there, and he set off homewards, dwindling down the hill on his bicycle. A full moon appeared between bars of cloud in the east as I climbed the path to the cottage, to find that M had been worried by my long absence, and, after her lonely day, disappointed of our evening together. So the episode ended sadly.

Indeed I have been gone far too long about this island (but see, my darling, the book I have found you among its stones!). And now, have I reached the end of it so soon? With so little seen, less understood, nothing possessed? Not quite, it seems, for at this last moment something comes into view to the west. Perhaps it is just a patch of foam kicked up by dolphins, perhaps it is the material of a postscript to my Aran …