But no, he was in Ireland.
Sweet Jesus come on.
Now, I’m not going to say it was because the Reverend thought mucky Irish ground would give him foot rot, nor that it was because he couldn’t say the word Ireland without distaste, though both were probably true. Despite the efforts of the Tourist Board, Ireland in those days was not in Top Ten Countries to Visit, and for English people it was all but verboten as the Pope would say. Ireland? Catholics and murderers, the Reverend would have thought. Ungrateful blackguards, we had not the slightest appreciation for the eight hundred years of civilised rule of His Majesty and to show our true colours once the English had departed we’d set about killing each other with hatchets, slash hooks and hedge shears.
Ireland? Better that Abraham was in Hell.
Pursuing the image, the Reverend posted the letter through the grille of the fire and began some shallow breathing. The damp boggy idea, Ireland, sat on his chest.
Within a week he was dead.
Amen to him.
Awomen also, as Denis Fitz said half a second after the congregation at midnight Mass before in Faha we moved midnight to half nine.
Grandfather’s response to the Reverend’s refusal to visit and subsequent death took an original form; he stopped believing in God, and started believing in salmon. Plans in this world were pointless. Pointless to have imagined he could ever have fulfilled his father’s dreams or achieved the Impossible Standard.
Grandfather forsook the world for fishing.
In fairness, perhaps there was a deeper point; perhaps secretly it was to out-Christian the Reverend by going back to basics: to Peter the Fish, to Paul the Church, is that how it goes? I’m not great on the Bible, though we have a nice one (Book 1,001, King James Edition), black and soft with the kind of feather-light pages they only use in bibles, as if paper for bibles can only come from this one place, and the pages are thinned down to a fineness that feels holy somehow so that even turning them is kind of sanctifying. Either way, whatever the reason, the Salmon it was. Grandfather stopped all work on Ashcroft House & Lands, walked out the French doors, went down across the lawn, called the workers together and to the collected jawdrops and head scratches told them stop, stop trimming the hedges boys, no more mowing the hay, pack up, go home.
There’s a photograph of Grandfather when he’s about thirty-five. He’s in a white shirt buttoned to his chin and his face has an expression of wild impatience. His lips are so tight you’d think he was afraid he’d dribble out some awful medicine if he cracked them. He resents the moment of the pose, he wants to escape it, that Elsewhere business again, and already in his chin you can see the Reverend coming. You can see the angle of the nose, the furrow between the dark eyes, and you know the old man is arriving in his skin. There’s going to be no way to escape him.
But Grandfather is going to try. Yes sir. He’s going to apply the What-would-my-father-do to everything, and then choose the opposite. So, instead of settling down into the dull acceptance of midlife, instead of comfortable complacence and respectability, he takes his rods and strides out the gates of Ashcroft accompanied by two bounding wolfhounds. He leaves the house to its own devices, which means weeds, mould, mushrooms in the basement, broken panes in the upstairs bedrooms, flies, snails, mice and a family of trapped rooks.
He begins on the two Black Castle sections of the Boyne River. In the notebooks he kept of his catch there are brackets beneath the salmon he caught and the name Mr R. R. Fitzherbert.
For duties to His Majesty I suppose, maybe for going away and getting Him something nice, the Virgin Islands or something, The King had given Mr Fitzherbert all the fish that passed there – To you the fish, to you the chips, same as the Bible only English-style – and my grandfather was scrupulous enough to record which of Mr Fitzherbert’s salmon he took, and with which flies.
I have his Salmon Journals, which were the workbooks for his book. They are here in my father’s library, pressed flattish between Don Quixote (Book 1,605, Vintage Classics, London), a kind of genius Spanish miracle, and Salar the Salmon (Book 1,606, Henry Williamson, Faber & Faber, London), a book so good that reading it you feel you’re in a river. Each journal is carefully kept, blue marbling inside and blackly leatherbound like a Lesser Bible. The first time I opened one I felt indecent. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it’s, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don’t. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership.
I know, I know. I’m not an e-person or an iPerson. Maybe I would be if we weren’t in the five per cent. The Minister says the whole country is Broadband now, except for maybe five per cent. Hello? We’re not even Narrowband. And what with having a predilection, as Thomas Halvey says, for the nineteenth century, I’m older than old-fashioned, I know. No, whatever way they built Faha down in a hole beside the river, we can’t get Broadband. We still get calls from somebody in the Philippines offering us Best Internet Deals ever. We let them talk to Nan. She can keep them on for an hour. It’s a sort of granny-sitting.
But look, here is one of my grandfather’s Salmon Journals. Feel that. Smell that. The pages have a water warp, a buckled edge like a river wave. The paper is a heavy old stock smooth under your hand. Some pages clump together as if the recording was made in rain. The handwriting is neat and done in blue ink that is now faded lavender.
SALMON
Week of June 12th, 1929
18lbs 6oz (Jock Scot)
19lbs 4oz (Blue Jock)
15lbs 11oz (Collie)
14lbs 8oz (Collie)
21lbs 3oz (Gudgeon)
It goes on, pounds and pounds of fish, page after page of pale ink. I wondered what Mr R. R. Fitzherbert thought of Abraham taking all his salmon. Maybe he didn’t know. He lived in Nottinghamshire. I have wondered if my grandfather ate them all, if the Swain jaw was partly a fish-face, and I’ve pouted at the mirror for half an hour one afternoon when I first became sick just to see if I could see the salmon leaping out in me.
For how long can a man go fishing? I asked Mrs Quinty, but she thought it was some cloaked reference to Tommy and the Hairdresser, that once Tommy had caught Sylvia he’d get tired or bored or not be able to sustain himself as Phyllis Lillis says, you know, in what Hamlet calls Country Matters. But what I was actually asking was: fishing. How long could my grandfather be happy getting up in the morning heading out with his rod to go fishing?
Because, Dear Reader, that’s all he did.
He fished for salmon.
He pretty much let the house and grounds go Rackrent (Book 778, Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth, Penguin Classics, London). From the first salmon of the season to the last weary fish returning upriver in the autumn Abraham Swain was there, standing thigh-deep in the river proper, a little swirl of broken water in his wake and his line laying soft swished question marks in the air overhead.
Even the wolfhounds became bored. When they saw him lift his rods they would trot back across the front hall and flop down, their great hair and bone masses immovable and hearts conflicted in the classic dog dilemma of loyalty to their master and knowing he was do-lally. Grandfather let them be, and the hounds commenced what was to be the business of the remainder of their lifetimes, chewing to straggling ropes the various oriental carpets and, when these proved too fibrous a diet, laying sideways and gnawing jag-toothed the pitch-pine floorboards.
Grandfather didn’t give two flying figaries. He had lost all care for
this life which he believed random and meaningless, a constant proof but small comfort he found in those salmon that passed and those that were caught.
In our family history there are few stories told of this time.
Grandfather Fished just about sums it up.
He chose fecklessness as a first response. Let God or the Devil show up if they existed. He was away fishing. Nothing of the struggles then of our emerging nation, nothing of Old Roundrims, Old Gimlet-eyes, our Spanish-American First Irishman who was shaping His Country, nothing of the darkening politics of Europe touches Grandfather’s life. He lives his own solitary unconfinement until April 19th 1939 when there is the last entry midway through Salmon Journal XIX.
It reads:
26lbs (worm)
The Salmon in Ireland
because here the confluence of fact, story and legend make for cloudy waters. Salmon derives from the Latin salire, to leap. It was Cattalus of course who likened the leaping salmon to an erect phallus, a version of which survives in Ireland in a story told to me by an ancient fisherman in the County Westmeath. In this story the mother of Saint Finan Cam is said to have been prompted by a bodiless voice to go swimming in a river after dark. While swimming in mid current, apparently unawares, she became impregnated by a salmon.
One imagines the surprise.
How the salmon achieves the leap has down the centuries been variously explained. By holding his tail in his mouth according to the seventeenth-century poem ‘Poly-Olbion’ by Michael Drayton.
. . . his taile takes in his teeth, and bending like a bowe
That’s to the compasse drawn, aloft himself doth throwe.
That the height of the leap may be linked to a female presence is not perhaps as fanciful as might first appear when we consider that in 1922 Georgina Ballintine landed a 64lb salmon out of the River Tay. The local fishermen, who had been labouring without success on the very same run, attributed the catch to the fact that female essence, as it were, had rubbed off on the bait and this had brought the salmon erect and leaping to her.
All of this by way of getting to my point that it is a fact drawn from the author’s experience in Ireland that with temperature rising salmon become distinctly more active,
Chapter 8
That worm had a lot to answer for, Nan says.
In our house we have videos and a video player and a collection of fairly ancient big cassettes of old films recorded off the TV in the time when that was the coolest thing ever. So, in the movie version of Grandfather & the Worm, black-and-white, William Wyler directing, Sam Goldwyn producing, Grandfather is played by Laurence Olivier aged thirty-five. It’s September 1st, 1939. There’s a big grey sky with dark clouds moving to the Oscar-winning orchestral arrangements of Alfred Newman. The river is fast and there’s a storm coming. We see other fishermen in the minor cast shake their heads and go home. But Laurence walks past them. He’s drawn to it – the sudden pulsing of Arnold Kisch’s bass lets you know A Big Moment is coming.
Laurence steps off the bank into the river.
Close-up of the water curving up over the top of his boot, a little unsteadiness as the river floor shifts underfoot, but he wades further out and casts.
Boom goes the thunder.
Boom boom goes the score. It’s as if somebody knows that elsewhere Germany’s just starting to invade Poland.
And then the rain comes lashing down.
Close-up of Laurence’s face, rainwashed and fierce, equal parts concentration and looneytunes.
He’s to his waist in the river. We know now he’s probably thinking about Merle Oberon, he wanted Vivien Leigh but she was turned down and is Gone with the Wind, so he’s got Oberon which isn’t a great name for romance seeing as how he’s thinking Oberon was King of the Fairies (Book 349, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, W. Shakespeare, Oxford Classics) and I’m going to have to kiss the King of the Fairies, which is a problem until he remembers fortunately he has played that role and so it’ll sort of be himself he’s loving and, well, he can manage that.
The sky is that big angry grey-black that’s MGM’s speciality and which they can somehow make look blacker and broodier still. And whoa those violins are playing faster now and look! he’s got a salmon on the line. The rod tenses and bows and the rain-machine guy is told give it your almighty best, or whatever that is in MGM-ese, and you can picture Mervin Olbacher, conductor, leaping up and whipping that baton at those violinists. He’s not a big man but boy he’s put elbow into it. He’s put hair-toss and sweat into it. So it’s rain-music-river, all Full On and up to ten, up to eleven as Margaret Crowe says, when Laurence pulls and sways and hauls this great silver salmon up into the air. Bass drum, bass drum, batons, Mervin. More, more.
Sweet Jesus, shouts Marty Finucane. You’ve never seen the like.
Jesus Mary and Joseph, says Jesus Mary and Joseph Carty.
MGM Props have outdone themselves this time.
Boys o boys. That’s a Big Fish.
(‘Big enough, Mr Goldwyn?’ ‘No such thing as too big.’)
And it lands, splash.
Sorry, take that again.
It lands SPLASH back down in the river and the whole of Laurence is tugged forward and he’s in this battle of strength now, both hands on the rod as it gets pulled horizontal, forearms quivering and mouth that twisted grimace Laurence does brilliantly when he’s daring God and man and William Wyler to say he’s not the finest actor that ever was.
There’s more, there’s a whole tugging and groaning, there’s flashes of lightning and Laurence giving it the full welly, but the studio decided that was enough, and cuts to the salmon being reeled in.
It’s hard to tell in the film just how big it is though. The assistant director thought maybe there should be other fish he’d caught earlier and Laurence could lay this alongside for comparison, but nobody listened and it was decided you’d just believe this was the Big One if the score and the lighting and the sound effects and Laurence’s acting told you so.
Anyway, here he is getting to the riverbank. He climbs up, falls down, the rain still beating, and he unhooks the fish, holds it for its weight. Crikey, look at that. It’s Number One Salmon, that’s what Props has been told, and they’ve had three rejected and to make their point that this was ridiculous they’ve brought this outlandish one and that got the Thumbs-Up.
So there it is. Man and Salmon. And whatever knowledge is in the fish somehow transfers to him. Whatever secrets of the world, what mysteries of chance and concurrence, of power and force and ultimate surrender, enter him, and Grandfather lets the salmon back into the river. He lets it back and lies flat and exhausted and he’s sort of crying for all that has failed in his life and for the failure of God to show up, and the rain pours down into his face; the Lighting Gaffer throws a switch and Mervin sweetens the score so even if you’re looking into your popcorn you know that up there on the screen your man’s in the throes of something like revelation.
Next shot he’s walking across the fields.
He’s walking into town. It’s Trim in the County Meath, but this being Hollywood it’s not even going to look like the Ealing Studios version, especially because to spare the make-up the rain has stopped.
Anyway your eyes are on my grandfather played by our man Laurence. He walks into town and up to this big house where Merle is just about done with Make-Up and Costumes. We can’t have her say any of the lines here because of copyright infringement but if imagination fails and you’re not in the Five Per Cent you go ahead and download them.
Fizz. Bang. Sizzle.
That’s not Germany entering Poland. That’s Grandfather & Grandmother in Trim Manor the evening of the Big Catch, September of 1939.
(Unfortunately the Censor cut the love scene. At that time there were no love scenes in Ireland. Most people thought kissing was sex. Tongues were penises. Only allowed out for communion. Which, unsurprisingly, proved very popular.
You don’t believe me look up the Irish Committee
on Evil Literature, say hello to those boys. There were no women allowed in Censorship. Some members of the Committee were secretly hoping there’d be No Women Allowed in Ireland, which would be fine, except for the vexed issue of ironing.)
So, if you like, do your own sex scene. You know you want to, as Tommy Marr said to Aoife O’Keefe the time of the Apostolic Social in Ryan’s. That was his come-on. That, half a can of Lynx deodorant, low-slung trousers that showed his Saint Bernard underpants in case of that saint she was a devotee and a big slow wink that was more or less the image of Haulie Roche the time he got the stroke. You know you want to.
Either way, please yourself. Doctor Mahon is here and we have to take our Intermission.
Fortunately, at that time, Ireland wasn’t in the world. So we weren’t in the World War. Old Roundrims came up with that. Brilliant, really. World War II was toirmiscthe, he said, which people had to look up but basically turned out to be verboten in Irish. Twitter went crazy, saying it was shameful and backward, but back then twitter was only spoken by birds. The thing is, Irish people don’t like to refer to a thing directly as Jimmy the Yank found out the time he came home, went into Burns Chemist in Kilrush and asked full volume for something for the blood coming out of his backside. There’s nothing direct about us. It’s not coincidence we have no straight roads, not for nothing we use the back door. People coming to our house sometimes parked in the yard and waited for my father to appear, so they weren’t really calling at all. So no, we weren’t in The War. We were in something else called The Emergency. No one else in the world was in it, just us. The Munich Bother as Paddy Kavanagh calls it (Book 973, Collected Poems, Martin, Brien and O’Keefe) didn’t bother us.
Grandfather wasn’t exactly courting material. For one thing he was old. He’d been born in 1895 and was now past forty. And for another he had been Off-the-Circuit since before Oriel College and had pretty much forgotten the existence of females of the human variety. (Curly ear hair, mad wiry eyebrows like tangled fishing line over rheumy eyes, and his version of the Reverend’s stippled jaw-mask offered in evidence.)
History of the Rain Page 6
