by Gil McNeil
Then Malcolm felt Papa’s arms around him and he wondered why Papa was hugging him so hard and why Papa was saying Sorry, son, when Papa should have been beating him for what he’d done, for hiding under the seine. Papa shook his head. ‘Scun was right, boys,’ he said, and his eyes were sorrowful. ‘It weren’t a day to go off.’
A silence fell over them and as it grew so grew a sensation in Malcolm, unlike any he’d ever felt or imagined. It started as a tingling in his scalp, which spread downward until his body seemed all awash in a faint electric charge. This faded, dissolving into a general sense of well-being and optimism, which itself grew, and it was stronger than his thankfulness at being delivered from the sea’s cold clutch with his bones unbroken; stronger even than his love for Papa and Mama and Grandpa Eli, Shifted Yonder now. The feeling surged and swelled and as Malcolm stared down at the gently rolling blue, his mind was transfixed but clear in its purpose, in his purpose.
He had to see to the setting of the seine, for striped bass were stirring the depths, unseen, all around him, moving as one and whispering a hushed shimmering sweetness Malcolm heard and understood.
READING CONNEMARA’S COASTLINE
JOSEPH O’CONNOR
WHEN I WAS a boy in the suburban Dublin of the 1970s, my father used to take us on holiday to Connemara. It was a region of western Ireland we loved, a wonderland of delights. Summer would arrive and the talk would turn quickly to the matter of when we would make for the west. The preparations, the small rituals of the annual pilgrimage, simply became part of our lives.
The Atlantic was the essence of Connemara’s allure. At home in Dun Laoghaire we lived near the coast, but our local version, for all its charms, seemed tame. We had ice-cream vans, a public baths, a forlorn chipper – Gene Vincent on the jukebox, the Virgin Mary on the wall. Old ladies shuffled along the pier, arm in arm, tutting at the greasers and their bell-bottomed babes. But it wasn’t the real thing. It was Brighton with nuns. You could walk from Glasthule all the way to Booterstown and scarcely set eyes on a grain of sand.
You didn’t see the waves roar in from the horizon, those thunderous breakers born off Newfoundland, or feel the shocking tang of spray in your mouth. In Dublin we had the sea. In Connemara they had the ocean. We were the Wombles. They were the Stones.
If Connemara’s history is a ghost story, its phantoms are sea-ghosts. Grace O’Malley of Inishbofin, the pirate queen, who forced the mighty Elizabeth I to learn Gaelic so as to be able to address her. The smugglers who took refuge in the coves of Ballynahinch, safe from the muskets of prowling revenue agents. The Princess of Connemara, Mary Martin, her fame sung in novels, the beauty of her age, who voyaged to New York only to die in a cheap hotel. Cartography includes such phantoms, and many more. The gazetteer accompanying Tim Robinson’s magnificent map of Connemara is both masterpiece of linguistic archaeology and roll-call of the departed. Scailp Johnny: the grotto that hid an outlaw from the yeomanry in 1798. Lochán na hOinsí: the foolish woman’s lake. Meall an tSaighdiúra: the hummock of the soldier; landscape’s commemoration of an unnamed English trooper who died after profaning a holy well. This coastline seemed to me then, as it seems to me still, a storybook of spectres waiting to be opened.
Yet for all its familiarity, Connemara felt exotic. I remember sitting in the back of my father’s Hillman Hunter on those wearisome, annual westward drives, reading the place-names of coastal Connemara from his fraying AA roadmap. Bunnahown, Rosroe, Kilkerrin, Tawnaghbaun, Aillenacally, Aillebrack, Curhownagh, Ardnagreevagh. If you said them aloud the result was poetry. What would these havens be like when we saw them again? Could they possibly be as beautiful as their mellifluous names? For how ethereal that vowelly geography sounded, how thrilling its music on a Dublin tongue. To speak it you had to use every muscle in your mouth. It gave you the feeling that language was love.
It was on one of those blissful childhood jaunts into Connemara that we stopped at the village of Letterfrack. I can remember the moment I first set foot in the place, with my father, Seán, in about 1972. Three decades have passed, but whenever I drive through Letterfrack now, I am struck once again by its strange appeal. It’s a neat little hamlet, not far from the coast, with thatched cottages, cosy pubs; chocolate-box pretty. An aroma of the sea drifts in on the air, commingling with that Connemara redolence of peat-smoke and rain. Turf stacks are silhouetted on the stony hillsides. Trawlers churn the whitecaps off nearby White Strand.
Not far from the town is the manor where Yeats honeymooned. Close by is the ruined grave of one Commander Blake, a nineteenth-century landlord despised by his tenants. (He appears in my novel, Star of the Sea.) His tomb, in the weedy rubble of a long-deserted Protestant chapel, overlooks a seaside campsite on the outskirts of Renvyle. Near by you can stroll on a shingled beach. Sea-wrack, gull-call, Atlantic breezes – the eerie loveliness of certain Irish coastal places. There is a sense of continuities, of things unchanged for generations. But all this is illusory, the wishful thinking of the interloper. Modernity has indeed touched Letterfrack. Father Ted might be playing on the TV in the bar. The guesthouses offer en suite bathrooms, as well as turf fires.
We tourists take pleasure in the emptiness of Connemara, its remorselessly jagged coastland, its broken-down piers. We don’t think of unemployment, emigration, rural poverty. For centuries the fantasies of outsiders have been projected onto this place. It has been Connemara’s lot to be regarded as a repository of authenticity, and it struggles, still, to be what we want. Our feet crunch its beaches; our lenses try to capture its unfathomable atmosphere, as much as our adjectives make the same attempt. An army of others have tried before us. The arc leads from John Synge to the Beauty Queen of Leenaun. How photogenic those ruined cabins and deserted coastal villages. How marvellously lunar, all that Becketty barrenness.
Yet this coastline’s elusiveness approaches the surreal. A currach rots on a shale-strewn strand, its crossbeams bleaching like the ribcage of a whale. A tumbledown pigsty is choked by wild rhododendrons. A rusting Edwardian bathtub on a bogside boreen is pressed into duty as water trough. From Douglas Hyde to Patrick Pearse, from Heinrich Boll to Richard Murphy, artists have encountered on the bleak western shores the banshee-muse that translates silence into beautiful image. But the making of images is an ambiguous enterprise. There are reasons why such a silence exists.
You would not think, as you amble the impossibly lovely waterfront at Cashel, that you might be walking over a burial ground. As you are stilled by the twilight descending on Dog’s Bay, as you stroll the tidy fishing village laid out by Nimmo at Roundstone, it does not feel that you are moving through a space that was once a disaster zone: the Ground Zero, perhaps, of Victorian Europe. These beaches, those pebbled strands, saw astonishing suffering, as famine devastated the region in the 1840s. There was heroism, too; there was extraordinary courage. But this sea-land so hallowed by poet and tourist board alike witnessed tragedy so immense that many of those who observed it would be traumatised for ever by the sight.
The story told by Connemara’s coastline is not part of modern Ireland’s anthology of itself. Somehow, until recently, it had become an embarrassing bore. We thought it important not to dwell on that horrendous decade in which a million of the underclass died of famine. How old-fashioned, how uncosmopolitan to mention all that. Impolite, perhaps; a tad inconvenient. If we didn’t forget the victims, we stewed their bones into propaganda, the meat of the murderous ballad and the lachrymose comeall-ye. But behind all the evasions were real men and women, children starved and dumped into pits. Their graves can still be discerned around the shorelands of Connemara: unmarked mounds, like middens for rubbish.
Abandoned by too many of the dominant of Ireland and Britain, masses of the desperate became refugees. We might call them ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘economic migrants’. They were called scrounging layabouts by the commentariat of their day, a good number of whom regarded the landless Irish as subhuman. Government aid was insufficient: oft
en too little, often too late. Many in Connemara fled their rotting homeland, drifting towards Galway to wait for the ships. The sea, which had supported some of them, became means of escape.
Like the age we inhabit now, this was an era of technological advances, of artistic brilliance and scientific progress. Great novels were written; revolutions shook Europe; democracy budded; new engines were invented. But little of that trickled down to the starving of Connemara’s coastline, as little enough of it matters now to the starving of Africa. The world was organised as a pyramid of power, with the affluent at the summit and the destitute bearing their weight. Then, as now, free-market politicians treated the poor to oratorical whip-cracks: inequality was regarded as economically progressive. Those who worked the hardest possessed the least wealth. Those who did nothing at all owned the most. With the wretched at the bottom were the nobodies of this shoreline: white Ethiopians of the Dickensian world.
Tens of thousands died. Entire families, sometimes. Within a few years the amazingly populous seaboard on which they lived would be decimated. A great many more would also have perished, but for the efforts of two gentle English people. James and Mary Ellis were a prosperous Quaker couple from the industrial city of Bradford. Despite having no apparent connection with Connemara, they moved from Yorkshire to what is now Letterfrack in 1849. There they paid for the building of homes and roads, a school, a store, a doctor’s dispensary. They employed the locals fairly and treated them with dignity. ‘A finer race of people no one could wish to see,’ wrote Mary Ellis. ‘Gentle, polite and easily made happy.’
The story of this coastline is incomplete without the Ellises, whose compassion altered its moral history as well as its geography. They believed that the world need not be a slum; that we live in a society, not just an economy; that every human life is unutterably precious. The imagery of holocaust is sometimes used about the Irish famine. If that’s what it was, James and Mary Ellis are our Schindlers. The coastline they loved commands authentic memory. It is there to be read, and it has much to say.
On Cashel Hill, Connemara, there is a famine-era cemetery that is still in use today. Ard Caiseal looks down on a rock-strewn inlet that opens, dramatically, into the Atlantic. It is one of those loftily lonesome places that the folk music shared by Ireland and Appalachia somehow translates into sound. Oceanic windstorms buffet Cashel Hill; the trek up is dizzying and arduous. On the wintry afternoon I last made the climb, Christmas Eve 1999, a small stars-and-stripes pennant had been placed on a tombstone. It marked the grave of a young man of Connemara and Massachusetts, his surname a common one in this corner of Galway. He was twenty-one when he lost his life, very far from home. He should be alive today, dandling grandchildren, but that was not to be his emigrant’s fate. Locals recall that on the icy morning when his family and comrades came to bury him, the jeep that bore his casket could not manage the steepness of Cashel Hill. So he was carried up the mountain to his final resting place, up the rocks to Ard Caiseal, as his ancestors had been. He lies among those others whose names are long forgotten, who were abandoned in the latitudes of hunger.
His grave, and the desolate coastline that enspaces it, is a powerful reminder of many things: among them, the awful cost demanded by patriotism, the wrongs we have done to one another for love of country, the dreadful waste that is racism, all those unaccepted friendships, but the hope that the world can yet be a fairer place. If the text of Connemara’s coastline includes any moral, it is a potent forewarning about hatred and bigotry. The sea divides. It also connects. Much depends on how you regard it. All who have found peace on this silent shore have something to learn from the stony words that commemorate him. In some sense they remember not only his own short life, but all the nameless who lie around him – wherever in the coastland of Connemara they lie, and in other Connemaras, across other seas.
L/CPL Peter Mary Nee:
United States Marine Corps
Born August 15, 1947
Died March 31, 1969
Vietnam
BIOGRAPHIES
SARAH BROWN
Sarah Brown is married to Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and is President of the charity PiggyBankKids, which she founded in 2002. PiggyBankKids supports charitable projects that create opportunities for children and young people, and has launched the Jennifer Brown Research Fund to seek solutions to pregnancy difficulties and save newborn lives. Sarah is also Patron of the innovative educational charity, SHINE, and Patron of the Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre charity. Most recently, she became a Patron of the charity Women’s Aid which works to keep women and children safe. Sarah and Gordon live in Fife and London with their son John.
GIL MCNEIL
Gil McNeil is Publishing Director for PiggyBankKids and has worked in advertising, the film business and publishing. She has written three novels: The Only Boy for Me, which is currently being adapted for television, Stand By Your Man and In the Wee Small Hours, which Bloomsbury will publish in 2005. Gil lives in Canterbury with her son.
HUGO TAGHOLM
Hugo Tagholm is Programme Director for PiggyBankKids. Hugo has worked in public relations and event management with a wide range of organisations, including the National Gallery, the Art Fund and the BBC. He lives in Camden Town and spends most of his spare time wake-boarding or chasing waves along the north Devon coast.
CHRIS HOOPER
Chris Hooper joined Special Olympics GB at the beginning of 2004 having spent almost seven years at the helm of the Special Olympics programme in New Zealand. Chris considers himself a quarter Kiwi and with his wife Sue and two young daughters lives near Tonbridge in Kent. Chris moved to New Zealand in 1993 having spent ten years working in the field of sport and leisure management.
ANDREW MOTION
Andrew Motion is Poet Laureate and Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
Alexander McCall Smith is Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, but is currently on leave to concentrate on his writing. He is the author of over fifty books on a wide range of subjects, but is best known for The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, translated into thirty-two languages worldwide. The first book in his new series, The Sunday Philosophy Club, has recently been published in the UK and USA. In his spare time he plays the bassoon in the RTO (Really Terrible Orchestra).
TRACY EDWARDS
Tracy Edwards successfully completed the 1990 Whitbread Round the World Race with the first all-female crew. Their yacht Maiden won two of the legs and went on to come second in class overall, the best result for a British boat since 1977. Tracy was voted Yachtsman of the Year and awarded an MBE. In 1998, again with an all-female crew, Tracy set out to beat the non-stop circumnavigation-of-the-world record and win the Jules Verne trophy. She was well on the way when her 92-foot catamaran was dismasted by a freak wave 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile. Tracy now lives in Doha, Qatar with her daughter, Mackenna, and has secured state sponsorship for a four-year sailing programme there. The Oryx Cup and the Quest will be the first ocean races based in the Middle East.
JOANNE HARRIS
Joanne Harris was born in Barnsley in 1964, of a French mother and an English father. She studied modern and medieval languages at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, after which she taught for fifteen years until the publication of her third novel, Chocolat, which was made into an academy award nominated movie in 2001. Since then she has written seven novels, a book of short stories, Jigs & Reels, and a cookbook, The French Kitchen, co-written with Fran Warde.
FI GLOVER
Fi Glover currently presents Broadcasting House on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday mornings. She has existed in a radio world for the last ten years, presenting the award-winning Sunday Service on Five Live as well as The Fi Glover Show. She has also presented the Travel Show on BBC 2, which inspired her to write her first book, Travels With My Radio. She also writes for the Guardian, Independent and various
magazines.
ADMIRAL SIR ALAN WEST GCB DCS ADC
Born in 1948, Admiral Sir Alan West joined the Navy in 1965. He has spent the majority of his career at sea serving in fourteen different ships and commanding three of them. He was appointed as First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff in September 2002; this carries membership of the Defence Council and Admiralty Board. He is also the First and Principal Naval Aide-de-Camp to Her Majesty The Queen. He was made a GCB in the New Year’s Honours List in 2004.
RUTH RENDELL
Ruth Rendell is the author of more than fifty novels, both in her own name and as Barbara Vine. Films have been made of two of her books, and Pedro Almodovar adapted her Live Flesh for the cinema. She was awarded the CBE in 1996 and a year later was made a life peer. Ruth Rendell lives in London and Suffolk, and has one son and two grandsons.
ALEX DICK READ
Alex Dick Read was born and raised in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, where he learned to love the ocean immediately. His surfing addiction began at 14-years-old and hasn’t abated. After journalism training in London in the early 1990s, he returned to the Caribbean and worked for regional media, AP and Reuters. In 1997 he went to England to found and edit The Surfer’s Path, a bi-monthly surf travel magazine. It now sells worldwide, placing a strong emphasis on world cultures and environmental issues. In 2003 it became the first ‘green’ surf mag, using 100 per cent post-consumer recycled paper and soya-based inks.
MARY LOUDON
Mary Loudon is the author of Secrets & Lives, Middle England Revealed; Revelations, The Clergy Questioned, and Unveiled, Nuns Talking. She has won four writing prizes, appeared frequently on radio and TV and contributed to three anthologies. She reviewed for The Times for five years. Mary is married, with two young daughters, and lives in Oxfordshire and the Wye valley. Her latest book, Relative Stranger, is published in 2005.
