Adventures of a Waterboy (14 page)

‘Looking for a cottage where I can stay for a few months and do some writing,’ I replied.

‘Oh? My old man’s got a place, out along the coast. Meet me tomorrow and I’ll show it to you.’

I didn’t know whether this would turn out be a mirage like all the other leads Dunford and I had followed over the last week, but there was something about my sparkling-eyed new friend, whose name was Sean, that I trusted.

Next morning we met him at a car park overlooking the harbour. ‘Jump in your car and follow me,’ he called with a grin. We drove out of town by the coast road in the only direction we hadn’t yet explored. After a few miles we left the city behind. The full majestic expanse of Galway Bay opened on our left, while to our right lay a strange, rocky land of hills and ancient stone walls. I began to get goose bumps. The wildness of the land and the light on the bay did something fateful to me and I turned and said to Dunford, with a sudden certainty, ‘This is the land of my soul!’ And it really was. The western fastness of Connemara, into which we were advancing, would become my favourite place in the world and the spiritual home of The Waterboys.

After ten miles of coast Sean turned right and we followed him up a hill road with a kaleidoscope of tiny rocky fields on either side. On the crest of the hill was a modern white bungalow. We parked the cars, Sean opened the garden gate, and I walked up to the house. Standing on its doorstep I looked back downhill over the vastest land and seascape I’d ever seen, laid like glory under immense blue and white skies. My eye tracked far inland to the east where hazy mountains rumbled in the dim distance, then south across the shimmering face of Galway Bay and westwards to where the Aran Islands floated like three upturned boats on the far horizon, the broad Atlantic glistening in the sun beyond them. Peace and stillness enfolded the scene and the only sounds were the birds of the air, cars humming far away on the road below, and the haunting moan of the wind in the telegraph wires. I laughed out loud and rented the house on the spot.

A week later I moved in. I set up the living room, which overlooked the view, as a music space with an electric piano, record player and a low table for the industrial-size acoustic typewriter on which I did my writing. On the south and north walls of the room I stuck huge maps of Ireland and Scotland. In the big country kitchen I pinned up Irish ordnance survey maps, each showing a small part of the country in fantastic detail; houses, towers, old castles and the tiniest country lanes or boreens. I covered a wall with these, creating a montage that showed the whole sweep of the west of Ireland, then spent hours dreaming into the maps as I played my new Irish
bodhrán
, a primeval round drum of goatskin stretched across a shallow wooden frame, which made delicious stone-age
rubdub crackadub thwack
sounds.

On the third night Sean’s ‘old man’ turned up to check me out. His name was Charlie Lennon and he had white hair and a long, serious face like one of the philosophers in
The Crock Of Gold
. He seemed very concerned about what condition I kept the house in and insisted on placing lace covers on the arms of all the chairs. But when Charlie saw the living room arrayed as a musical den he exclaimed, ‘How wonderful!’ and told me he was a fiddler and composer of traditional tunes. We became friends there and then and he took me to Hughes’s bar, a stone-floored tavern in the nearby village of Spiddal. He sat me at a table in front of a roaring fire and made me play bodhrán while he and an accordionist played impossibly complex, almost classical tunes. The locals conversed in Irish around us, a winter wind blew in from the Atlantic and charged up the street outside, and I felt plugged into an older, saner world.

Soon I established a groove in my hilltop house of rising around noon and working through the day, playing and listening to music, writing songs and reading. I’d eat in the early evening – always the three ‘b’s: boil-in-a-bag braised beef, baked beans and baked potatoes – then work again late into the night, often till dawn. And as the mood struck, I’d cycle into Spiddal and organise a taxi to take me into Galway.

Galway was the port at the last outpost of Europe, at what was once the end of all things, the beginning of the unknown. And how much wonder and mystery still lingered in the first syllable of its name, that profound long ‘Gal’ with its evocation of distance and immensities. She was a convivial city then as now, but in 1988 Galway had a slow, magical character, mostly lost when it became a Celtic Tiger boomtown in the nineties. It was a cross between an old-fashioned county town and a hip village arts project. The counterculture – or at least a bohemian Celtic version – was a tangible presence, and its actors, poets, philosophers, hippies, writers, students and musicians co-existed happily with the old fishing folk, once the very lifeblood of Galway, and the robust country people of the west: ruddy-cheeked, broad-shouldered men and sharp-eyed queenly women from Connemara, Clare and Athenry. It was common to see wild-looking musicians, parchment-faced fishwives and flat-capped farmers contentedly sharing time, space and conversation in Galway’s ancient pubs.

The city was large enough to be cosmopolitan, small enough to be homely. A roaring river, the Corrib
,
divided it in two and a network of sleepy canals, secret lanes and walkways turned its neighbourhoods into islands. Charming tumbledown streets with satisfyingly logical names like ‘Shop Street’ and ‘Middle Street’ were lined with archaic storefronts unchanged since the forties or fifties. Scruffy cargo ships and brightly coloured fishing boats anchored in the bustling harbour, and on the edge of the Atlantic lay Galway’s greatest glory: the majestic spaces of South Park, a huge green common, opening onto the Bay and the western sky. I’d make raids on my favourite establishments, Kenny’s Books and Powell’s Music Emporium, then hook up with friends and join sessions in the pubs. Brendan O’Regan, my closest pal on the scene, was fond of shouting over the music, ‘The craic is mighty!’ He spelt it ‘craic’, of course, the ubiquitous Irish word for pleasure and high spirits, but whenever he said it I imagined a thin crack opening in the fabric of the universe and a bright light of joy pouring through.

I’d return to my hilltop eyrie late at night, head full of the evening’s fun, arms laden with a haul of books and records to absorb. That winter in a chair snug by the fire I read Daniel Corkery’s
The Hidden Ireland
, James Stephens’ luminous faery novels, the complete works of J.M. Synge, Liam O’Flaherty’s
The
Ecstasy Of Angus
, Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Tomás O’Crohan’s
The Islandman
, and
The Poems Of Egan O’Rahilly
, the eighteenth-century Gaelic satirist.

Spiddal village was charismatic too, comprising a long main street with a crossroads, three pubs, two general stores and a handsome grey-stoned church I never once stepped into. The residents were characters, one and all, seasoned and shaped by the uniqueness of the place and its raw Atlantic weather, a collection of walking tarot cards: stout, sad-eyed patriarch Festy Conlon; white-bearded American giant Hank, who’d marched with Martin Luther King in the civil rights years; sharp-tongued Celtic Queen pub-owner Brida Hughes; and a hundred other distinct personalities inhabiting an almost Shakespearean tableau of village intrigues and dramas, as if fate had shaken them all down to the end of Ireland to take part in a perpetually unfolding passion play. I was a tarot card myself – the Fool, surely – and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of Spiddal. And because I’d arrived in the dead of winter, people treated me as a newcomer not a tourist. The O’Flaherty family who lived a hundred yards down the hill from my house kept an eye on me and brought me bags of turf and Polish coal. I had no TV, no radio, no phone, no fax, no email. If I wanted to contact the modern world I had to find a phone box or write a letter. For months the only way Chrysalis Records could contact me was by leaving a message in the Quays bar in Galway and it might be a week before I picked it up.

When a storm struck in February I tasted the full elemental power of the west. Great winds roared around the house for four days creating a wild fantasia of howls, moans, creaks and whistles while the windows bent inwards and pantheons of clouds scudded like chariots across the sky. The storm was all I could think about, all that anyone I met on rare windblown forays into the landscape could talk about; the experience levelled all differences, humbled us all equally. When the storm finally blew itself out the stillness was like a benediction, as if a mighty god had passed and in his trail the wheels of the world had begun to turn again.

And as I watched the changing tapestry of the days unfolding before and below me I started seeing the world through new eyes. I began to understand the mysteries of landscape: how every bluff, outcrop, hill and promontory had its significance, that each part of the landscape ‘spoke’ to every other part in a language beyond words. And I became aware of a subtle presence, a lingering sense of the past, which cloaked the west of Ireland like another dimension as if older times were here simultaneously, overlaid one on another like wavelengths. This presence acted on my imagination like a drug and made everything look huge, as if Ireland were as psychically vast a country as America was physically vast. And in these stirrings I found the answer to the question that had assailed me after the Pictish Festival a year before:
what did it mean to be Celtic?
Being Celtic was a way of seeing and feeling, of interpreting and inhabiting the world. The Celtic domain wasn’t simply a physical landscape spanning Ireland, Scotland, Wales and other regions on the Atlantic rim – it was a dream-space, a kingdom of the imagination with a coherency, a taste all its own,
room to roam
as the George MacDonald poem said. And this dream-space was inside me too. I was beginning to move at its speed and become a conscious participant in its quicksilver drama.

Yet one mysterious dimension remained out of reach. Spiddal was in the Irish-speaking region, the
Gaeltacht
, and the language, which I heard in the shops and pubs, was a medium through which more of the experience of being in this culture was communicated than ever could be through English. Locals speed-talking in Irish across the counter of the general store were plugged into a communal mind from which I was excluded. Irish was the same language as the Scottish Gaelic
my grandmother spoke, and I was separated from it by only two generations, yet it might have been a thousand years. I picked up a few words but the inner life of the language remained secret, a tantalising but unknowable dimension of consciousness all around me.

I wasn’t the only cosmonaut heading west into the Celtic mystery. The Fellow Who Fiddles, seeking trad tunes to collect, had lit out for Doolin, a one-street, three-pub village on the Clare coast with a reputation for music far outstripping its size. And Vinnie Kilduff had made for Inishmore, largest of the Aran Islands, a wild outpost on the Atlantic horizon from which he sent me postcards with images of wild goats and the words ‘I’m shouting over the bay to you’ scrawled in his whistler’s hand, cajoling me to visit. And on an early March day I did.

I brought Anto with me. The Human Saxophone had just arrived in Spiddal from London when I whisked him off to Galway airport (two huts and a hangar in a field east of the city) to catch the flight to Aran. It was a gusty day and we flew low in the sky, the little propeller plane bucking and dipping as the ubiquitous landscape of the west, all its mad knot-work of tiny fields and haphazard stone walls, passed beneath us, soon replaced by the grey roiling face of the sea. After only ten or twelve minutes the plane touched down on a grassy meadow in the middle of sand dunes, the propeller engines stopped and we stepped out into the low moan of the wind. Vinnie stood waving to us outside the solitary airport hut, his reddish-blonde hair blown back from his face, and as we approached I saw he was changed. Six weeks in Aran had left its mark: his cheeks were ruddy from the constant wind, but there was something else, a far-sighted look of nobility as if he’d morphed into a demi-god or a Viking, and his eyes were narrow and sharp like a bird’s.

Vinnie had hired a minibus, one of only a few vehicles on the island, to take us the three miles to the main village, Kilronan, and as we drove we entered an otherworldly landscape. The colours, grey and green, were similar to the mainland, but unlike Connemara’s naturally random tableau, Aran looked
designed
, as
by a darker god. The land rose on our left in a series of scarped stone terraces to a high ridge dramatically silhouetted against the sky. Straight ahead lay a hulking mountain-sized shoulder of rock with no trees or foliage of any kind, only more scarped terraces slanting crazily downwards from right to left. Nowhere was there anything soft or rounded on which the eye might rest, nor any familiar shape or suggestion of conventional beauty. And the scale was all wrong: it was too large, as if a tribe of giants had abandoned the place. As we drove deeper into this domain its personality closed in on us, dense and primal: a strange sensation for me, even after six weeks of cultural decompression in Spiddal, but what must Anto have been feeling? Yesterday he’d been doing his laundry in Hammersmith!

We rounded a bay and approached Kilronan, a cluster of white buildings hunched on a hill round a little harbour. I noted a general store, a tourist shop not yet open for the season with windows full of Aran sweaters, and a sturdy village hall made of the same grey rock as the land. The bus dropped us off by the harbour. Vinnie was staying in a house a few yards away and we threw our bags in then went straight out again to explore. At a harbour-side shed grandly named Aran Island Bicycles we hired bikes and hooked up with a local musician mate of Vinnie’s called Sean Watty, a bulky fellow with a World War Two moustache and milk-bottle spectacles. As we mounted our bikes Sean told us, ‘Go slowly now, and you might see something.’