Once

by McNeillie, Andrew

  Then very shortly afterwards, at the tender age of twenty-two, I resigned before a Board about to promote me to be a Senior ...what I don’t remember, to leave for Inis Mór, rather in the spirit of Auden’s line, ‘Leave for Cape Wrath to-night’.

  I left by night train from Euston with all my worldly goods to catch the Liverpool ferry for Dublin. I had wrath in me too at the way of the world and the poetry of departure coursed in my youthful veins as the salt-sea coursed round the world. And the rest of this story I have told already.

  The Author

  Andrew McNeillie is a Professor of English at the University of Exeter. He was born in 1946, in Hen Golwyn, in North Wales, and educated at the John Bright Grammar School, Llandudno, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was until recently Literature Editor at Oxford University Press.

  His new book is the belated prequel to an acclaimed memoir An Aran Keening (Lilliput Press, 2002), an account of his stay for just short of a year on Inis Mór, in 1968-69, one of the three Aran Islands at the mouth of Galway Bay. He is the founder of the Clutag Press and of the literary magazine Archipelago, which provides the focus of a new MA at Exeter University’s Cornish campus: Nature, Writing and Place.

  His new poetry collection In Mortal Memory will appear in February 2010. He has published three volumes of poetry: Nevermore (2000), shortlisted for the Forward Prize best first collection; Now, Then (2002) and Slower (2006), all from Carcanet. His biography of his father the Scottish rural novelist and nature writer: Ian Niall: Part of his Life was published in 2007. He is a member of Academi Gymreig.

  Notes

  * Folk-lore and Folk Stories of Wales, by Marie Trevelyan.

  * A story told in But Hibbou was Special (1964) which called attention to me.