It was wrong to have a child here though and Eva would sooner die alone than see this toddler be forced to witness death. The child held out a cluster of fresh daisies in her two hands, although Eva could not smell them because, as the nurse leaned over, the scent of the hand lotion that Mother once used became so strong. The nurse did not touch her hair and yet Eva could feel someone’s comforting fingers stroking it. This sensation frightened her, although she knew in her soul that she had no reason to be scared. The girl was standing beside the nurse now and Eva wanted to say, ‘Please, for her own sake, take your daughter away from this’. But the nurse seemed unaware of the child. Instead she began to recite a prayer for the dying. Eva knew that the nurse wanted to call someone, yet was afraid to move from the bed in case Eva died alone in her absence. The child held up the daisies, which Eva now realised were a gift for her, but Eva could not reach out to take them because her arms had no strength. Yet the child was so excited and proud of having managed to gather these wild daisies that Eva needed to try. But all she could so was stare at the child, silently beseeching her to bring the daisies closer until their vibrant colour and marvellous smell blocked out every other sensation and, as the child’s tiny fingers touched her bony hands, Eva finally recognised who had come to rescue her.
She could no longer distinguish the child’s fingers from her own or exactly be sure of where she was. But she felt calm at last, with her mind clear, having floated free from needless clutter to be allowed to simply be herself: that untainted essence of joy which she had been as this tiny child, before her life grew entangled with so many other intertwined lives. She knew that all she needed to do was trust in her ability to learn to walk further that she had ever walked unaided before; to stand upright and take those giant steps across the grass bank beside the tennis court in the garden in Dunkineely where her nurse was beckoning. She could see nothing because the fresh daisies were pressed right up against her face, but beyond them she knew that eternity or rebirth or oblivion beckoned. The answer was not to question but to simply be – to show the same trust as a sycamore sepal willing to be whirling in the wind to wherever its creator meant for it to fall. Intoxicated by this scent of daisies, Eva rose on her unsteady young legs and began to wobble blindly forward, scared and yet excited, certain that she was running across these tumultuous, immeasurable seconds towards the waiting clasp of widespread welcoming arms.
Postscript
Sheila Fitzgerald (née Sheila Dorothea Goold-Verschoyle) died in a nursing home in Kilmore, Co. Wexford in the early hours of August 3rd, 2000 – twenty-five days shy of her ninety-seventh birthday. David Sumray and Jacquie Kehoe, who along with so many other friends, worked so hard to allow her to lead as independent a life as possible, tried to honour the spirit of her last wishes. At her request, David Sumray had already taken her measurements to personally make the small wooden box that she wished for as a coffin. In honour of her radiance, Jacquie Kehoe helped to paint this box in such an array of bright colours that it matched the vibrancy of any painting produced in her child art studio amid the conservatism of 1950s Dublin. Sheila was anxious to avoid what she regarded as the ostentatiousness of being transported in a black hearse. While her body needed to legally be held in the care of a Wexford undertaker, they respected her wish by transporting her body to Dublin in an unassuming white van, to the surprise of staff at the Glasnevin Cemetery crematorium. No clergyman spoke in that crematorium but I recited her chosen poem, Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’, before the body she had outgrown entered the flames to the sounds of the joyous final chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Friends from across the decades were present, along with the gracious children and grandchildren of her older sister.
Some months later I travelled to Wexford with my late wife and our two young sons for another simple ceremony. Many of her Wexford friends and neighbours gathered to watch David Sumray plant a tree close to where her caravan, The Ark, had last stood. I was tasked with scattering her ashes into the hole which he had dug to let them nurture the roots. Having poured several handfuls of ash in the Wexford clay, I asked every child and adult present to scoop out one handful of Sheila’s ashes from the urn so that everyone there could share in this task. Observance was then paid to her final request, which was that not only should her ashes be spread in a spirit of celebration, but this should culminate in everyone present joining in a joyous shout at the end. It seemed superfluous to ruin the simplicity by placing a plaque to mark this spot where the final remains of Sheila Fitzgerald have been absorbed back into the natural landscape she cherished, on a peaceful corner she would have so often passed in the final walks she took with her beloved dog, Johnny.
I hope this tree has flourished. Unobtrusively it marks the last resting place of Sheila Fitzgerald, who was among the most remarkable and inspiring people I ever met. The question of how much of Sheila lives on within my fictional creation of an alter ego for her in the character of Eva Fitzgerald, is one which I cannot honestly answer. While I felt that I possessed a unique relationship with her, her great gift for friendship and empathy meant that a hundred other people equally felt that they shared just as strong a bond. Each one of us would therefore recreate a different version of her, depending on what she told us about aspects of her life, and on what impact she had on ours. After shaping and reshaping the manuscript of this novel for well over a decade, retuning to it afresh every few years, I can only present this fictionalised account of the second half of her life, hoping that parts of it will ring true to those who knew her and that some part of her unique essence will comes through to readers who never had this privilege.
Our first meeting was similar to how the teenage poet, Donal, meets Eva in this novel. In 1977 Sheila read some small thing about me in a newspaper and wrote a postcard to say that, if ever in Mayo, I was welcome to sleep in the window seat of her caravan in a field in Turlough village. Darkness had fallen by the time I hitchhiked to Turlough on my first visit. I stopped at a bungalow to seek directions. The householder asked if I was a friend of Sheila’s, adding that if I was, ‘Then you are a very lucky young man’. When I turned up a side road by the Round Tower Bar there was only darkness. I located a gate and entered a field, not sure of where I was going, though I saw a faint glow: light emanating through the curtains on her windows which faced the opposite way. Putting out my hands blindly they made contact with the door of her caravan.
I knocked. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then the door burst open in a luminous square of light. Standing radiant at its centre was a tiny little woman with a shock of white hair and a delighted smile. ‘You’re here,’ she said. ‘Isn’t life exciting?’ It felt like glimpsing a ball of energy or flame of life. I entered her small den crammed with books and paintings, heated by a wood-burning stove. Three cats lazily bestowed upon me their friendly hospitable gaze. I didn’t know it then, but the caravan was truly an ark: a citadel of refuge and happiness. Yet even on that first night I discovered that its name – The Ark – was linked to one of the tragedies in Sheila’s life. It was named by her granddaughter who died just two years previously and would have only been a year younger than me. Many events in this book are invented, by necessity or by discreet subterfuge. But the visitation by the dying cat, who instinctively knew where to come for help, happened exactly as described.
The tragedies that Sheila had endured during the decade before I first met her might have overwhelmed a lesser soul, but at her lowest ebb – when she seemed to have lost everything – Sheila made a deliberate choice in old age to resolutely embrace happiness. At eighteen I was too inexperienced to understand how difficult this choice was, when it would be easier to sink beneath the weight of grief. But in the years since, whenever bad things happened to me, as they invariably happen to us all – it is Sheila’s example I try to emulate when picking myself up, feeling myself borne forward by the inner strength of this woman I first met in a Mayo field.
Sheila was a bohemian alternative
thinker who would stand out in any generation. Her bookshelves were crammed with thinkers like Meister Eckhart and Martin Buber, but also with books about Andy Warhol and Nelson Mandela. There was only one clock in The Ark. Just like in this novel, Sheila had removed its hands and covered the clock face with a piece of blank paper on which was written one word: NOW. This clock – which now resides beside my writing desk – always told the right time, because Sheila lived in the present. This did not mean the past was buried away. Her walls were lined with pictures of family members she had loved and lost. I became a regular visitor in those first few years. If you have a dream – and my dream was to be a writer – you need one person to take you seriously. Sheila became that person. Unemployed in Dublin, I would hitchhike across Ireland to sit in her caravan with the candles lit and read aloud my latest poems, seeking her honest opinion. A poem only felt finished when Sheila heard it. We always talked long into the night and, while immersed in the present, she was unafraid to address the sorrows she had known in life, so that many of the stories recreated here in this book were tales that I heard on my first visit to her caravan and on many subsequent visits.
There was a fifty-five-year gap in our ages, but maybe because I had lost my mother at an early age and she had lost a son, there was an affinity between us. Sheila opened my eyes to new ways of seeing things. Although penniless, she was the richest person I knew because she wanted nothing. She had her beloved dog, Johnny, her books and the cats who shared her caravan, along with numerous callers of all ages, inspired by her positive attitude. I remember her walking for miles with Johnny, stopping to talk to everyone she passed as we approached the small woodland wildlife sanctuary on the site of her old house from the 1930s.
She took seriously the advice she felt she had received from her late son on that night in the White Eagle Lodge in London, and tried to keep only possessions that were precious and important. Amid all her moves, a sketchbook of exquisite drawings from her girlhood in Donegal somehow survived. But it needed to be snatched from a bonfire in the field in Mayo by a friend who chanced to call as Sheila was about to add it to the fire, convinced that nobody would be interested in her drawings, which capture everyday life for her family as the Irish Free State was awkwardly being born around them. I helped to edit them into a small book, entitled A Donegal Summer, published in a small edition by Raven Arts Press in 1985. I still remain moved at the vibrant joy they radiate and the carefree life they chronicle, with no forewarning of the tragedies awaiting her family.
Sheila was the second oldest of five Goold-Verschoyle children, growing up in Dunkineely: all headstrong and raised amid a babble of debate where no viewpoint was taboo. Sheila was closest to Neil, who is called Art in this novel, and who was her childhood confidant and minder. Neil was destined to inherit The Manor House in Dunkineely, as the eldest son of the eldest son, under a legal indenture. But Neil Goold (he dropped the Verschoyle part of his surname) rejected his inheritance and become a communist. He moved to Moscow but was forced to leave a wife and child behind there during Stalin’s 1930s purges. He worked and proselytised in Dublin’s worst slums and was jailed for communist agitation. Brendan Behan’s mother – who considered Neil to be a saint – sheltered him in the Behan corporation home in Crumlin, as he continued to renounce his upbringing and isolate himself from the family he loved.
Neil seems an idyllic, happy figure in Sheila’s sketches, as does her beloved youngest brother Brian. Nothing prepares you for the fate that Brian (named Brendan in this novel) later suffered after volunteering to fight with the Soviets in the Spanish Civil War. Growing disillusioned, he was tricked onto a Soviet ship in Barcelona and disappeared. His mother spent her final years desperately seeking news of his whereabouts; the family never knowing whether to believe the information they eventually received, claiming that he had died in an attack by a Nazi plane on a Soviet train transporting political prisoners between gulags. Indeed when I first knew Sheila she remained haunted by uncertainty as to whether Brian could somehow, against all the odds, still be alive as a political prisoner who might one day be released from that limbo.
Brian Goold-Verschoyle rarely gets mentioned in history books. The two other Irish victims of Stalin’s gulags, Patrick Breslin and Sean McAteer, are only slightly better known. The enormity of the gulags is barely comprehensible: the lives of three random foreigners easily forgotten amid the millions who suffered there. But in recent years the Irish historian Barry McLoughlin has authored a fine book, Left to the Wolves, a factual account of those three young Irishman who died in Stalin’s gulags. McLoughlin’s carefully researched account of Brian Goold-Verschoyle’s interrogation, captivity and death makes for stark reading. But much of the information it reveals – gleaned from MI5 files (describing him as ‘a naïve enthusiast’ recruited by the NKVD to be a ‘sleeper’ in Britain) and from Soviet transcripts of his interrogation – contain information which Sheila never knew during her lifetime.
This is one of the problems for any novelist trying to recreate, in a parallel fictional world, the life story of someone who, like many of us, may not always know the full facts about what happened to people they loved or what motivated people’s actions. Whether when dealing with her daughter’s fate in Kenya, which she always struggled to accept, or her brother’s death in the gulags – the only way that I could tell Sheila’s story was to remain as true as possible both to what she knew and also to the gaps in her knowledge and the subjective ambiguities contained in anyone’s memories. This novel has tried to follow, where possible, her account of how she remembered certain aspects of her life: an account which she gave to me during long conversations in her caravan, which I tape-recorded in 1992. However, insomuch as the characters that I have invented here reflect her interpretation of certain real-life people, about whom she talked at length, I must insert the caveat that, while I have tried to remain true to how she remembered them, any real-life people upon whom these characters were originally based are portrayed only through the prism of how she recalled them. I have changed all their names and certain details to emphasise this subjective fictional quality. I am cognisant that, from their own perspective, their stories and roles may be undoubtedly more complex and that, if alive today, they might recollect certain of these events from differing viewpoints. So I have tried to show this version of them solely in the moments when their lives intersected with Sheila’s life, rather than to try and present the far wider lives that they undoubtedly led and which I have tried, insomuch as possible, not to unnecessarily intrude upon.
Although Sheila never became as entangled in politics as her brothers, she campaigned tirelessly for causes she believed in. The artist Pauline Bewick – whose mother, Harry Bewick, was an equally unconventional, free-spirited resident on Frankfort Avenue when Sheila taught child art there – remembers Sheila as a tiny crusader covered in flour hurled at her by an outraged citizen after Sheila took part in a protest march. The poet Paul Durcan attended her innovative child art classes, which started his passionate love for paintings. In the preface to his acclaimed book, Crazy about Women – a collection of poems all written in response to paintings displayed in the National Gallery of Ireland – he wrote: ‘The origins of this book … go back to winter nights in Dublin in the early 1950s when my mother used to take me one night a week for yet another magic assignation with Sheila Fitzgerald. Sheila Fitzgerald was a painter who gave classes in her home in Frankfort Avenue. To these two women – Sheila Durcan and Sheila Fitzgerald – I owe my lifelong obsession with picture-making.’
Young artists like Camille Souter and Barbara Warren found lodgings in Sheila’s home; the walls covered in paintings by children – sometimes on whitewashed sheets of newspaper when Sheila couldn’t afford blank sheets. An Ark of Light explores Sheila’s life from the time that she had the courage to separate from an unhappy marriage and start out on a quest that was both physical and spiritual: to strip away the veneer of complexity and strive – despite tragedies
and setbacks – to grasp the joy at the core of life.
Painting and sketching were Sheila’s childhood passions. The family’s Visitors Book shows people crowding in to share their home in Donegal. Cousins or friends or local children who felt free to play tennis in the garden or were encouraged to visit the coach house, where Sheila had her studio, to try their hand at watercolours.
Her father – a pacifist who supported Home Rule – was a utopian barrister who often defended locals without seeking payment. His passion was composing music. He loved Walt Whitman and carried Leaves of Grass in his pocket on family walks. Occasionally he anonymously contributed to ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ in The Irish Times.
His wife, Sibyl, suffered from arthritis but loved to garden and paint. Like many upper-class women, she was fascinated by mysticism. Household decisions often fell to her eldest daughter, Sheila’s sister. When the IRA stole the family car during the War of Independence, it was Sheila’s sister who visited the cottage where the local IRA were based to seek its return. Startled volunteers played her protestant hymns on a gramophone until their commander returned and handed back the car. The IRA came back one night to commandeer two bicycles, but put away their guns after Mrs Goold-Verschoyle exclaimed how she hated the sight of weapons. It helped that they were related to the rebel Countess Markievicz, although some Northern cousins were Orangemen. Sheila recalled writing poems in support of the IRA and her autograph book suggests similar Nationalist sympathies by other siblings. The family looked forward to playing their role in a new Ireland, not realising that the new Ireland envisaged no role for them.
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