Knowing well the inner nature of its customers, their sense of history and deep appreciation of any attention from Dublin, the electricity company promoted the idea that each village mark the moment of connection by a function. The switch-on could have happened at any moment once the wiring was completed, but, with a modern genius for publicity, the Board said they would send a photographer to record the event for posterity, and a cardboard poster. They announced the noon of June 8th as the birthday of electricity in the parish and Rushe sent word to the Master, as Head of Committee, that it would happen in Church Street at the transformer on the pole outside St Cecelia’s.
Around this pole of Mr Salovarra from Finland gathered the aura of history. On the days of the lead-up the seating was set out on the slope of the churchyard, facing away from the church. (Father Coffey regretted the symbolism and what it foretold for modern times, but what-to-do?) Those without the privilege of seats could set up opposite in the constitutional places along the walls and windowsills. Strings of triangular flags of blue and gold were strung from the upstairs windows across the street. They were venerable and rain-washed from years of drowned football finals and parades and were bluer and more golden – saffron, Felix Pilkington said – than anyone recalled when Tom the sacristan and two of the Kellys hung them in criss-crossed archways beneath a luminous sky. Tipping its cap to modern times, Faha’s first, and only, ban on traffic for the day was announced from the altar by Father Coffey. (It was not so much to the few car drivers he was speaking, but to Micko King in the Men’s Aisle, who had an outside farm on the other side of the village and was wont to drive his frisky, free-dunging herd through the streets and down the footpaths, the buildings on both sides having a funnel effect and compensating for his lack of drovers.)
All the usual small emergencies arose and were resolved after a Fahaean fashion. There was a hectic day of fierce carpentering when Seamus Nash finally arrived to put up the stage, and another to take it down a level when it was adjudged a hangman’s scaffold. There was a motion put forward by the Faha Players that to give the pole the authority of centre stage it should be painted, but the problem of whether to buy the paint in Clohessy’s or Bourke’s would require a Solomon, and Master Quinn postponed the vote.
Aware that a noontime switch-on in June would lack the theatre of one in winter, the company sent Moylan’s van, loaded with electrical machines and any amount of cable, to hook them up. Moylan was in his element. He came the day before to test out the stage. It was better than a country kitchen and allowed for his more expansive gestures. If he had the robe he could have played the Messiah.
When the day finally came, I wasn’t sure Doady and Ganga would want to go. Theirs was one of the few houses in the parish not taking the electricity, and I took the shallow view that they would want to turn their backs on the excitement of others. I supposed Ganga would find the bog needed him and Doady disappear into the milking parlour or to one of the many jobs around the house that always had an air of the imperative. After Rushe had left there had been no further debate as far as I knew. There were no arguments, no self-pity on Doady’s part, and no regrets. The remarkableness of the old people was without measure. That’s a fact. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised when, the night of June 7th, Doady put the amateur curlers in.
The next day, at eleven o’clock, New Time, we set out by horse and car to go and see the future. The road into the village was already alive. To allow the children to be eyewitnesses to history, the Master had closed the school. (It was a gesture of grace that outlived him, for in sixty years’ time, there were still old men in the parish who could recall the day, being in around the stage and watching Moylan, and running home after to wait impatiently for the dark to fall so they could flick down the pip.) On the roads there were children running, there were whole families moving, bicycles, cars with ten in them, some doing shuttle journeys to pick up some more. On the outskirts of the village, Quinlavin’s forge operated as the no-go point and the field next to it a general corral.
As I’ve said, the fine weather had become so customary as to go unremarked, but the energy of that noontime was doubled by the warmth, and the liveliness of the crowd wore the hallmarks of an outlawed crossroads dance. No one wore a coat. Because of the solemnity of history and respect for engineering, men kept their suit jackets on and endured a lathering sweat. In Mick Liverpool’s black-and-white photographs of that day you can’t see the sunburn and the freckles of the heatwave, but you can the general glowing, and the smiling pride. They are some of the only surviving photographs of the parish entire, as if it were the last day of community and after this people would stay in their homes among the comforts of an electric solitude.
Half an hour to noon, Church Street was thronged. The shops stayed open, the pubs had forgotten to close. The Bishop, whose stomach had been brutalised from attending switch-ons at parishes east, sent his apologies and a bespoke blessing. One of the councillors papered over the Deputy’s failure to appear by a knowing look, a lean-in and the soft-voiced catch-all of ‘Matters of State’. Faha didn’t mind. The people had lived too long within the wound of neglect to feel the fresh slight. Rushe was there, and Moylan was just off the stage, which was occupied by an unlit standing lamp with no shade, the bare bulb like an exposed eye, a washing machine, a toaster, and an iron on an ironing board. Equally exciting were the cables that came up to and across the stage. (Isn’t there a fine nest of ’em?)
Another signal of future times, when exactly it was noon was for once not at the discretion of the Church. Rushe had a wristwatch, and he was the one who would give the word. He hadn’t the personality for the pantomime. He had a get-in-and-get-out manner and was unsuited to the role of ceremonial general. When Doady and Ganga and I came within sight of the stage, he was waiting for Father Tom to stop talking to his parishioners and take up his position next to the washing machine.
My grandfather had a bottomless love for Faha, and although he himself wasn’t taking the electricity he couldn’t stop beaming at the marvel of it come to his own parish. ‘O now!’
The current of course was already there, and had been for some days, just not switched on. But the theatre was that, at the signal, Rushe would raise and then lower his arm, and at that moment the electricity for Faha would be turned on in the capital at the other side of the country, and in a first demonstration of the actual speed of light, instantly, the light in the standing lamp would come on.
Because of his affinity for dramatics, to get around the glary quality of the day, Moylan had recourse to a magician’s know-how and secured a black card to hold up behind the bulb once it lit.
As befitting his seniority, Father Tom was to give the Bishop’s blessing. Father Coffey would be standing alongside with three priests from neighbouring parishes and one back from Africa. But when Rushe came and told him it was nearly noon, Father Tom played a round of Church versus State and said the holy-water bottle was empty. Father Tom was an old-time operator and enjoyed the look in Rushe’s face. He’d enjoy it again with his tea and Marietta biscuits later with Mrs Prendergast. He himself had the wisdom to know that the thing that came between intention and its execution was life, and that in a place half a century behind the world another ten minutes would be no catastrophe. (The wisdom ran out there because he sent one of the Kellys for the holy water. I don’t know which one, at that age they all had the same tadpole face, but whichever it was, he defied all calculations of time and distance and didn’t come back, and still didn’t, finding a fresh wrong way to do a thing, and Moylan had to announce the hold-up to the crowd but assure them that Dublin was on standby.) It all added to the open-air theatre. Every seat was filled, every vantage point taken. Bourke had outdone Clohessy in ceremonial touches by flying the tricolour, and while waiting for Kelly, children started saluting under it and running away, another coming to it and saluting and running away in turn.
When Kelly came back with his trainee-devil’s look and the holy-w
ater bottle was finally loaded, Master Quinn gave a nod to Father Tom who stood to signal his own noontime. He was large and slow with a largeness and slowness decreed fitting, and the hush that fell over the crowd put a glimmer in his eye as he realised that mankind had still failed to kill off Christianity.
The moment Father Tom stood, the crowd pressed forward as one. The people performed the same miracle they did each Sunday in St Cecelia’s by moving into a space where there was none.
At an up-nod from Rushe, Moylan was off. ‘Reverend Fathers and Sisters, ladies and gentlemen…’ He wore the best of his two-toned shoes and spoke as if in an amphitheatre to multitudes. You’d pay money to see him. He said the same things he said in other parishes, which were the same obvious and portentous things you could make up yourself, but the reality of what was about to happen before our eyes lent them gravity.
I looked at my grandfather looking up at the stage. He couldn’t hear what was being said, but his face was full of happiness. Doady was holding on to his arm against the jostle of those younger, the suns of her glasses flashing. I don’t think I could have loved them more.
And it did not matter that all of this would pass, that’s what occurred to me. It didn’t matter this time and place would be gone, that these feelings would go to the place of all feelings once pure and complete. It didn’t matter that Sophie and Charlie and Ronnie Troy would slip out of my life, and Christy and Annie Mooney, and then Ganga and Doady, that all of them would be gone but be like remembered music or the amassed richness of a lived life. Because at that moment I understood that this in miniature was the world, a connective of human feeling, for the most part by far pulsing with the dream of the betterment of the other, and in this was an invisible current that, despite faults and breakdowns, was all the time being restored and switched back on and was running not because of past or future times but because, all times since beginning and to the end, the signal was still on, still pulsing, and still trying to love.
Father Tom threw the holy water at the pole and said the Bishop’s blessing. Harry Rushe held his short arm in the air.
He held it long enough for some to think the twentieth century might not come.
Then he chopped it down through air, and the light bulb in front of the church came on.
There was a gasp. And then ripples of applause that sounded like a tide coming in across stones.
Quickly then, the crowd turned from the church to go inside the shops to see if the electricity had crossed the street. The festivities were curtailed by human curiosity, because soon enough people were hurrying to their own houses. Faha emptied quicker than it filled.
My grandparents, of course, were in no such hurry. By the time Ganga and Doady and I came out to Thomas and the car, Church Street behind us was deserted, the tricolour and the banner flags just starting to flap with the first whisperings of a coming breeze.
We went, unhurried, at one-horse speed, out of the village.
Somewhere just past Considine’s I lifted my face. I held out my palm.
It had started raining.
Acknowledgements
It seems to me that everything you read and everyone you meet that inspires or moves you contributes in some way to the book you are writing, so a list here would be as long as the book itself. But among the many books that have gone into this one, I would like to acknowledge The Quiet Revolution: The Electrification of Rural Ireland by Michael Shiel, a book my father gave me, and Barry Taylor’s superb Music in a Breeze of Wind: Traditional Dance Music in West Clare 1870–1970, which I borrowed from Martin Keane, for three years. This novel was written in Kiltumper in the company of the extraordinary music of The Gloaming.
Once again, I am enormously grateful to Caroline Michel, and all the team at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop. To Michael Fishwick and all at Bloomsbury in London, to Lea Beresford and all at Bloomsbury USA, my sincere thanks.
To Deirdre and Joseph, who continue to be the light in every day.
And lastly, to Christine Breen, the beginning and end of everything.
A Note on the Author
Niall Williams was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of the Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain and eight other novels including Four Letters of Love, set to be a major motion picture. He lives in Kiltumper in County Clare, with his wife, Christine.
niallwilliams.com
Also available by Niall Williams
John
‘An eloquent and moving statement of the power of love and the belief that it will triumph in the end’ Barry Unsworth, Guardian
Aged, blind and perilously frail, John the Apostle has walked ten thousand miles to tell of love. In a hundred years he has lived to witness sights and scenes that now cloud his mind. Of his followers, there are few remaining, banished with him to an island where they wait. They wait as storm clouds whip the island with rain. They wait for the world to free them from exile. They wait for signs that seem like they will never come.
But eventually a sign does come and together the disciples leave the island. They embark on a journey that will change their lives forever: a journey filled with purpose and fear which will test their belief – in love and in each other – to breaking point, and John must face his biggest battle yet. Romantic, wild and passionate, John is the story of what it might be to love for a lifetime.
‘Gripping and believable … It is important that serious writers such as Williams face the perennial questions of faith and love’ Irish Times
‘Powerful and moving … an absorbing and intelligent novel’ Times Literary Supplement
‘What beguiles about John is the power and poetry of Williams’s language … demands to be read in one sitting’ Independent
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History of the Rain
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014
‘A surge of language, beautiful and enchanting, a novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale’ Guardian
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story...
Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, in the margin between this world and the next, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father, Virgil. To find him, enfolded in the mystery of ancestors, Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces, and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to her grandfather Abraham, and finally to Virgil, through wild, rain-sodden history, exploits in pole-vaulting and salmon-fishing, poetry, and the 3,958 books piled high beneath the skylights in her room. Her funny, meandering narrative sings, moves, and irrevocably inspires.
‘This is an important new book … the rewards increase tenfold the further into the story one gets’ Radio Times
‘Extremely moving, poignantly capturing Ruth's doomed childhood relationship with her twin brother. By the final chapter I was weeping’ Sunday Times
‘Deeply allusive, infectiously hopeful … an unashamedly unfashionable, lyrical paean to the pleasure of reading and to serendipity’ Daily Telegraph
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First published in Great Britain 2019
This electronic edition published in
2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Niall Williams, 2019
Niall Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-0933-5; TPB: 978-1-5266-0936-6; EBOOK: 978-1-5266-0934-2
This Is Happiness Page 33
