On the Great Blasket, she learns that the king is dead: “I see him, as I often did in winter when, alone in his canoe, rowing with powerful strokes, he took the island’s mail to the mainland.” There’s much more like this. She is reliving all that the island means to her. She remarks on the extraordinary courtesy she finds. She reports that horses are unknown, that the old men remember when there weren’t even donkeys. She tells how the women gather peat, their panniers overflowing, babes in arms all the while. “Deprived of all material comfort,” she writes of the islanders, they enjoy “a social life more intense in this restricted community than in all the scattered parishes of the coast.…” Practically all are “singers, poets, and musicians, without thinking of it,” instinctively drawn “to all that is powerful or strange.”
Her account is warm and evocative, but no mere travelogue. She sees the beauty and oddity of this outpost of civilization on the far fringes of Ireland. But she sees, too, and with icy clarity, its troubles, in particular the emigration of its young.
To reach western Ireland from Paris, she tells you, you can take the usual route—twenty hours, across two national borders through London to Dublin, and thence across the country. But there is another way, the one she makes her own: from Cherbourg, on the French coast, board one of the great transatlantic steamers that will stop at Queenstown, on Ireland’s southwest coast, chief point of embarkation for immigrants to the United States and Canada; of six million who left Ireland in the century after 1848, almost half left from Queenstown. Able reporter that her essay reveals her to be, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt has placed herself at just the spot where Ireland most copiously bleeds its healthy, young, and strong.
She is deeply moved by the sight of them, the lines of emigrants—some thirty thousand a year during this period—waiting to board the little tenders that will ferry them to the steamers anchored in the great harbor. “They appear suddenly from the night outside in interminable procession. The clothes they’ve bought in the little town, commonplace and ugly, make them look as if they are in costume.” The scene stuns her.
It is as if I recognized them, having met so many of their brothers and sisters before.… I spotted here a peasant’s short neck, there shoulders stooped from leaning so long over the peat bog. I saw deeply marked faces, expressions clear like water, then sometimes, too, that peculiar Spanish intensity you see in Kerrymen, which to me is so dear.
As they step forward, she sees past them to the world they’ve left behind, to “the hills swept by the wind, the slender canoe in the froth of the sea, the humble cottages full of wild children, and the savage, epic destitution of this Atlantic coast—all that I will see tomorrow and that they will never see again.”
It is September 1929, and Marie-Louise is in Queenstown. Around the same time, a few months either way, so is Mary Kearney, George Thomson’s island sweetheart, boarding a steamer for the New World.
Back in 1926, before their trip to Inishvickillaun, Maurice dropped by the house where George was staying to find him seated on a stool, chin in hands, staring into the fire. “You are in love, my boy,” Maurice declared with a clap of his palm to George’s shoulder. And indeed he was.
Whatever it was to her, George’s relationship with Mary Kearney was to him no brief summer’s fancy; she occupied a place in his hopes and affections for seven years. In the end, he didn’t win her; one might worry for them both if he had. But it was not for want of trying. Convinced Mary felt herself inadequately educated, he at one point offered to pay her way through school, or so it’s said in Mary’s family today. At another juncture, as we’ve seen, he talked to Father Paddy Browne in Dún Chaoin about converting to Catholicism. What must have been a third fraught moment occurred across the breadth of Ireland from the Blaskets, outside Dublin, but again within the orbit of Father Browne, and perhaps indirectly through his doing.
In flat countryside about fifteen miles west of Dublin lies the town of Maynooth—from the Irish “Má Nuad,” meaning “Plain of Nuadha”—built up around a cozy eighteenth-century streetscape of little houses clustered along a modest tree-lined main street. But if from the center of town you proceeded two or three blocks west, beyond a little stream and the ruins of an ancient castle, you’d pass through a gate and into a world of cloisters, grandly scaled quadrangles, and light-filled chapels. Maynooth’s Saint Patrick’s College, fed by smaller diocesan schools and seminaries, was Ireland’s richest vein of Roman Catholic clergy, the town’s two whispered syllables enough to conjure up visions of the Irish priesthood at its most aristocratic.
For five years beginning in 1917, the college’s resident medical officer was a Dr. Patrick J. Grogan. In 1922, Grogan resigned his position there, but remained in town, presiding over its Maynooth Dispensary until at least the summer of 1927, when he became medical officer in a nearby county. During these years, he, his wife, Margaret, and perhaps her sister Lily as well, lived in a house on the north side of Main Street, near Courthouse Square, virtually at the center of town. Their maid was a girl from the Great Blasket, Miss Mary Kearney.
Dr. Grogan had come out of west Clare, a farmer’s son, the only one of seven boys to get an education, earning a medical degree from the National University of Ireland in 1908. In college, he was active in the Gaelic Athletic Association. He embraced republican ideals; during the Rising, he reputedly harbored a future president of Ireland, Seán T. O’Kelly. “He was very much into the 1916 crowd,” reports his nephew, also named Patrick Grogan, inclined to mix more with political friends than with fellow physicians. He was an Irish-language enthusiast, too, a member of the Gaelic League, and for a time in the 1920s went professionally as Pádraig Séamus Ó Gruagain. He was “very keen on the Irish language,” his nephew recalls, yet never actually spoke it much himself. “Tea, please” or “Sugar, please” was about the beginning and end of his Irish.
When Mary Kearney’s elder sister Cáit returned to the Blaskets after a period in Dublin as a domestic, their father looked at her hands rubbed red and raw by work and burst into tears; he’d never let her go back to that, he vowed. Mary, though, probably had it better; her brother Seán said Dr. Grogan and his wife were good to her. The doctor’s nephew, from when he lived with them in the 1930s, remembers another maid from the Blaskets: up early, tending the house; Sundays to early Mass, back in time to tidy up before the Grogans were back from church; meals in the kitchen; little time off, a half-day or two a week; unobtrusive, a background presence, forever scrubbing, serving, fussing. Something like this must have been Mary Kearney’s lot, too.
A studio portrait from around this time shows her, in a dark, ornately belted dress, papers on her lap, competent-looking and attractive; the photo is credited to a studio on Upper O’Connell Street, Dublin, not many minutes on the train from Maynooth. But just how had she gotten to Maynooth in the first place, two hundred miles across Ireland from the Blaskets? How could she have wound up there, this girl whose command of English was at first probably limited to whatever little she had learned in the island school or from George? She leaves her island home and, at sixteen or seventeen, suddenly winds up outside Dublin?
From the summer of 1924 and for most of the next five years, Mary largely vanishes from island memory, only Dr. Grogan a link to her whereabouts, information about her otherwise blurred and uncertain. This seeming disappearance, the persistence of George’s feelings, and the notorious secrecy surrounding sexual matters in Catholic Ireland make it hard to dismiss entirely the possibility that she’d become pregnant. George later wrote an Irish-language short story, “The Illegitimate Child,” that described a young woman cradling her baby beside a church door, her father offering her passage money to America if she’d give the child over to an orphanage. He wrote another, “Getting On in the World,” about a girl with an illegitimate child who can’t get a job and leaves town, only to find work later as a servant girl with a Dublin doctor. Plainly, not all Irish women and their men friends were pure and chaste. One repor
t from before the turn of the century tells of pregnant young women routinely “sent away” from their homes in the country, arriving on Dublin’s doorstep to have their babies. Now, during the 1920s, between 2 and 3 percent of recorded births in Ireland—close to two thousand per year—were illegitimate. The figure had climbed almost 30 percent in recent years, stoking much alarm in the new Ireland.
Of course, as far as Mary goes, none of this constitutes evidence. It was common for country girls with no prospects in the economically bereft west to seek jobs that could help them send money to their parents back home, or earn passage money to America—which, with few expenses, they often managed to do. The ten to fifteen pounds a Dublin servant earned annually in cash, together with room and board, tips, and Christmas presents like fabric or books, compared favorably with what she could make elsewhere in Ireland. As servants to merchants, well-off farmers, or, as in Mary’s case, professional men in town, such girls were said to be in aimsir, “in service”; they numbered a hundred thousand in Ireland during this period. Their circumstances were mostly above reproach, their motivations straightforward, their stories unexceptional. Marie-Louise Sjoestedt would later write, of another West Kerry woman, that her life first stirred one’s interest not, as with a young man, in tales of adventure, but on that “day when a little girl was sent into service far from her parents and the home of her childhood.”
However Mary got to Maynooth, it is tempting to see at work the able, well-connected hand of Father Paddy Browne, professor at Maynooth and a summer and holiday resident of Dún Chaoin. He may have been trying on his own to defuse an entirely chaste, if awkward, situation between Mary and George. Or, knowing Dr. Grogan—and his uncle knew all the priests at Maynooth, says the doctor’s nephew—he may simply have spread word of the opening around Dún Chaoin; or else, the other way around, spread word around Maynooth of Mary’s readiness for a move. Then again, as one perhaps muddled account has it, Dr. Grogan may have been vacationing on the island himself and actually brought Mary back to Maynooth when he and his wife returned.
In any case, Máire Pheats Tom Ó Cearnaigh worked for Dr. Grogan as his maid, and sometime during this period, perhaps around 1925 or 1926, was visited by George, who stayed on in Maynooth for a couple of days. We know this because in 1965 George wrote to his wife and told her so. While he was in Greece, a chance meeting with an Irish priest from Maynooth had stirred memories of once spending a night there as Paddy Browne’s guest, and how, earlier, “I visited the Blasket girl, Mary Kearney.”
George likely took a train from Dublin that left him a few minutes on foot from the center of town. Did he call at the Grogan house, or meet Mary somewhere else? Did they talk of things they’d done and people they knew on the island? Did they resurrect the religious issue? Or was this actually the first time he’d poured out his heart to her?
In 1928, the Irish journal An Phoblacht, the republic, published a poem by George. Conceivably, it was the product of an active imagination only, not drawn from his own life. More likely, it enacts a pained moment with Mary on the island or in Maynooth. The poem tells of the narrator’s love for a girl. Lost to her charms, unmanned by lovesick distress, he long remains mute. But then, one cool, crisp night, the sky alive with stars, it all comes tumbling out: His silence has been unbearable. Now, more unbearable yet, is her rebuff. It is “crueler still,” he writes, “that she didn’t care.”
The following year, probably in October, Mary arrived in Queenstown, bound for America.
Typically, a West Kerry emigrant made arrangements for departure through a Dingle travel agency, Galvin’s. She or a relative would make a four-pound deposit toward the total fare of about twenty-one pounds; one pound then bought about what seventy-five American dollars does today. An additional seven shillings, for what a clerk recorded as “certs,” went to register the emigrant’s birth certificate. Transactions were recorded, usually in black ink, in a large, leather-spined ledger two inches thick. A page might record half a dozen transactions, each representing an Irish man or woman lost to his native land. And there, on page 285 of one of these ledgers, on August 6, 1929, was listed “Miss Mary Kearney, Blasket Island, by cheque for fare to U.S., 21.10.4.” All together, the evidence suggests that this Mary was our Mary, and that she left on October 22, 1929, on the Cunard liner Scythia from Liverpool, stopping at Queenstown, and bound for Boston and New York.
Queenstown—which since Ireland’s split from Britain had been renamed Cobh, pronounced “cove”—was located on the south shore of a large island a few miles east of Ireland’s second city, Cork, linked to it since 1862 by a busy rail spur. Convicts bound for penal colonies in Australia had shipped out from Queenstown. The Titanic had docked here in 1912, picking up 123 passengers, mostly emigrants from the south and west of Ireland, most of them to go down with the ship. The town occupied a spot commanding fine views of the bay that opened before it. An imposing Roman Catholic church sat perched on the hill above it. The harbor front was crowded with small awninged shops where emigrants could buy food and supplies for the voyage, hotels and cheap rooming houses in which to spend their last nights in Ireland. Queenstown was one great stage on which was enacted the national tragedy of emigration, a place of high hopes and bitter tears.
Mary’s first time in Queenstown came sometime before departure, for the much-feared medical examination. “A lot of boys and girls didn’t pass,” she’d recount years later. You needed to show you could speak and read English, and pass a physical exam. She was “scared stiff”; the medical examiners were said to be ruthless. “We were washed and scrubbed and cleaned, and our hair was washed and cleaned, and we went through doctors and nurses, and we had to be in perfect condition.”
After two days in Queenstown, now back on the island, she met her sister Siobhan at the slip, and mischievously told her she hadn’t passed. Told you so, said Siobhan, who didn’t think Mary even wanted to go to America. Actually, she didn’t, Mary would say later. But “I wanted so much to help my father and mother,” who by now were in their late forties, with five children at home; money from America would help them “get along better and have better things,” maybe help get her brothers and sisters to school in Dingle. It was only once she and Siobhan reached their house at the top of the village that she told her the truth.
Weeks later, with the arrival of her passport, it was really time to go. Her parents took her to Dingle. When her mother came down sick, Mary insisted that she stay in bed and arranged for a friend to get them to the station the next morning in time for the six-thirty train. In Queenstown, it dawned on her that she knew no one boarding the ship with her. “I was all by myself,” save for some cousins from Dingle, two boys whom she’d never met before, the barest tendrils of connection. “It was really very sad, you know? At that time, you never thought of going back.”
The voyage aboard the six-hundred-foot-long steamer, probably about a week, was not unpleasant. “We used to go up on deck, the whole crowd from Kerry,” she’d say. They’d buy cookies and drinks. “The boys who were with us, five or six of them, they were so good to us.” She heard shipboard stories of boys who might be up to no good, of course, “that we were too innocent, that we didn’t know anything about anything.” But there was no trouble that way. The Kerry boys saw the girls to their bunks at night, patrolled the passageways, then would be “waiting for us,” their manly protectors, in the morning. On the way over, “all the Kerrys stayed together. But it was lonesome, very lonesome.”
Mary was part of what Marie-Louise Sjoestedt had termed the “interminable procession” of emigrants from Queenstown. What did she think aboard the tender? Or as the big liner steamed out of the harbor and into the Atlantic? Did she think of her time in Maynooth? Or of the island? Did she think of her parents, brothers, and sisters? Did she think of George?
Did he think of her?
Maybe not. Late 1929 had been eventful for him. He’d left behind his Cambridge University lectureship and moved ba
ck to Dublin; though he retained his King’s fellowship, he was no longer tied down by Cambridge’s academic shackles. He was hard at work writing now—both scholarly projects, such as a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, and stories and criticism for Irish-language publications. He was very busy. Late that year, his father died. He may not have known that Mary had left at all.
Chapter 9
Working at Irish
[1932]
A few years later, George was at a festive theater opening in Cambridge when “the wife of a distinguished historian, a professor, got up, looked through her lorgnette, and remarked, in a very superior voice, ‘I think everybody who is anybody is here.’ ” George cringed. Here, the way his wife told the story, was Cambridge at its worst, smug and elitist. All in all, “he’d rather be in Ireland talking to a fisherman than gossiping in Common Room,” his daughter Margaret reports him often saying. In 1928, he’d been lecturing at Cambridge. He was a fellow of King’s College. His thesis would soon be published as a book. He was proceeding along a well-marked academic career path, Oxbridge-style. And he wanted to get off.
In May 1929, George advised his colleagues at King’s he was resigning his lectureship. By July, he had cleaned out his Cambridge digs, left England, and moved to Dublin. There, for the next two years, he lived in Raheny, a suburban enclave stretching back from Dublin Bay north of the city. When he returned for a visit to Dublin almost two decades later, he wrote, “I felt drawn irresistibly to my old haunts at Raheny, where I spent some of the most impressionable years of my life.”
In Raheny lived Moya Llewelyn Davies, whose grand old house, Furry Park, had so impressed Maurice O’Sullivan on his memorable visit to Dublin two years before. Moya herself left an indelible impression on everyone. She was slim and lovely, and sported the kind of intriguing personal history that can stoke personal and sexual allure. Her father, James O’Connor, was an ardent republican who was imprisoned (the year Moya was born) for his political activities, and later served on the council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. When Moya was nine, her mother and four sisters died, in the span of a few hours, from eating poisoned shellfish; she was spared, she always said, because she’d been sent to her room without supper for misbehavior. When she was twenty-eight, she married Crompton Llewelyn Davies, an official in Britain’s Liberal government, thirteen years her senior.
On an Irish Island Page 18
