On an Irish Island (36 page)

During their visit to the island in 1931,
Edward Meyerstein wrote how Flower discarded
“the cares of the
British Museum, and jests with everyone.” He was known to all, much liked, respected. From the beginning, Seán Ó Criomhthain recollected, Flower had fallen in easily with the islanders.

Anytime he’d come, he’d bring whiskey, tobacco, old clothes and shoes for his friends. “
He was big-hearted,” remembered Seán, “generous, hospitable, with no miserliness about him,” good for a hundred pounds or so every year to the villagers. Indeed, Seán’s recollections can make Flower seem something like a feudal lord: “The Islanders were very fond of him and their hearts were set on pleasing him, and if he had called them to arms they wouldn’t have failed him.”

On the island and off, he was identified with the Blaskets. He was a fixture of the place, a bad word never heard of him. “
I would confide things to Bláithín I would not reveal to the priest,” one islander said. He’d come to the island when it was virtually unknown and kept coming, all through the 1930s. He was the island’s ambassador to the larger world, giving press interviews, lecturing on it in England, Wales, and America. If any of the visitors deserved to be called Mr. Blasket, it was he.

By the outbreak of the war, however, Flower was getting on in years; he was just short of fifty-eight, and medically speaking probably older. Even when he was young, he was dogged by health problems, physical and mental: “
I have had rather a worse time than I expected. The attack declared itself, like last year’s, in migratory pain over the whole field of my
body,” leaving behind “a legacy of weakness and headaches which effectively blackens the world for me.” This was in 1911, when he was thirty.

“
I have been ill of late,” he wrote ten years later; “a thing called gastric catarrh knocked me out for a fortnight and I cannot get back any power of work. I hope a holiday will soon set me straight.”

And in 1929: “
I am feeling ill with overwork and many different anxieties.”

Long before the three score and ten years he might have hoped was his due, Flower was getting old and sick. And the Blaskets were getting old and sick with him.

“
Great hardship has been on islanders with the last 3 and 4 months,” Lís wrote Chambers on October 2, 1941. “No flour comes to Dunquin for them as it used to.” And for any that was available, “islanders must pay more and more.”

The island’s economic future, anyone could see, was bleak. In the 1920s, the
United States had placed a
tariff on salt mackerel, crippling the local market. The best turf on the island’s back spine had been cut and burned, leaving its only ready fuel in short supply; islanders had increasingly to rely on
driftwood washing up on shore. The 1930s were bad, the war years no better. In 1937, an Irish govern
ment agency, the
Gaeltacht Services Division, brought in a few hand-operated
sock-
knitting machines and supplies of yarn and set up shop in one of the houses; two women from Donegal were brought in to train the villagers. By the early 1940s, however, it had been discontinued.

Meanwhile, the islanders continued to leave. In 1911, the Irish census recorded 160 people on the island. The census of 1926 showed 143.

In 1936, there were 110.

The women, especially, left. “
The young women weren’t willing to settle down anyplace there,” author
Críostóir Ó Floinn told an Irish radio audience later. “They were going off to London as nurses, or going off to the civil service in Dublin, or anywhere. They wanted to go to the cities, go to America, if they could. You wouldn’t blame them, you know.”

Back in 1936, Lís had written Chambers, “I am the only girl that got married since you were here” in 1931. “
At present nobody thinks of marrying.” Four years later, the war on, she responded in this way to Chambers’s news that he’d be alone that winter, his wife presumably withdrawing to
safer ground: it was a pity, of course, but she knew “
of men who are more lonely and have to live alone through all their lives, who never had the joy of sharing one day of family life and has never now any chance of tasting that joy.” She meant the island’s men, of course, left behind by emigrating women.

Day is done: an islander returns to the village after cutting turf.
(
Illustration Credit ill.25
)

During the 1930s, the first stirrings of a tourist industry propped up the island economy a bit. But with the war, that was gone, too. A “
black cloud” hung over the island, Lís wrote in 1940. “It is terrible this summer season, and it is no happiness atall.” Only one
naomhóg
had gone out
fishing. There was a
lobster blight. “Shillings are far and scarce at present.” And hardly a visitor to be seen. “Only the one visitor has come to the Island yet,” she wrote Chambers two weeks later, on June 29. “
It’s a hopeless, fruitless year, everyone thinks so.”

In August, she told of another house being shut down, the old woman who’d lived there having left for the mainland. “
So picture our Island home sinking from day to day.”

The following February, the island schoolteacher was ordered to close
the school. She “bid the Islanders adieu after about seven easy years teaching,” Lís wrote to Chambers, “
and left the three poor scholars to run wild with the rabbits—which,” she added, “is their delight indeed.”

One stormy night the following winter, she and Seán were sitting by the fire. Outside, the wind blew, lashing rain. She had recently visited the mainland, she declared to her husband. Life was better there, easier and more peaceful, with “no swell or surge of the sea washing over their rock,” as Seán reported the conversation later. She wanted out. That was it. That was all of it. “
This is the last winter here for me,” she told her husband, “even if I have to shoulder my own pack!”

“That was the sermon she gave me,” Seán recalled, “and it wasn’t in Latin either, with every word of it sinking home.”

On February 23, 1942, she wrote Chambers: “
We have determined at last to leave this lovely Island.… Next time you will come to this Island there will not be no Eibhlís but the ruins of the house.” She wanted a new life, the sort of life she knew they were missing where they were. Visitors on holiday, from comfortable homes on the mainland, seemingly without care, “would never believe the misfortune on this Island no school nor comfort, no road to success … everything so dear and so far away.” The fishing was down to nothing. People couldn’t live “on air and sunshine.”

In July, they left. By the time she wrote Chambers in November, they were well established in
Muirríoch, about ten miles away. Daughter Niamh was doing fine at school. By the following February, in the middle of what she ranked as “the severest winter that came with ages,” she had to say, “
I don’t miss my lovely Island so much.”

Eight years later, Chambers sent Lís his book of poems, which included ones he had written for her. Among them was “
The Song of the Island Girl (Eilish),” for the girl she once was:

He was right about that, she confided to him in a letter in September 1950: “
I was very very lonely the time after the Island.”

Just then she was back from two weeks spent with her parents on the island. “Its nice to be home once again with mother making the tea like years ago.”

In 1935, Flower went to the United States to give a series of lectures on Irish literature. These later became the basis for another book about the Blaskets,
The Western Island.
In it, he told how on one visit Tomás and some of his other friends gathered in one of the houses to welcome him. Inevitably, they recalled those who had died since his last visit, talk veering to what island proverbs had to say about the inevitability of
death. Finally, the conversation flagged and silence fell … until an old woman leaned forward and piped up in Irish, “
Where is the snow that was so bright last year?”

“I sprang up in excitement,” Flower wrote, “and cried out: “ ‘
Où sont les neiges d’antan? 
’ ”

Now, Flower wrote in his preface, “The King is dead and Tomás and the greater part of that lamenting company, and all this that follows is the song we made together of the vanished snows of yesteryear.”

The Western Island
was published in 1944. Later that year, Flower suffered a stroke. Some months later, he wrote, or perhaps dictated, a letter describing his condition: “
I am still a very long way from actual recovery. I cannot read yet and still write with the greatest difficulty. Every letter is still a struggle for me.… I have temporarily lost all foreign languages and a great deal of English.”

Since at least 1937, Flower and his wife had been living in the Southgate area of London, at 100 Ulleswater Road, in one of a long line of brick row houses, two or three stories high, with little gardens out front, sheltered from the street by hedges, which dropped down to a broad expanse of park at the base of the hill. One day early in January 1946 after lunch,
he went out for a walk and never returned. Around four in the afternoon, police showed up at the house, saying he had been found collapsed in the park and taken to the hospital. When his wife and daughter Jean got there, he
didn’t recognize them. He died the following morning, age sixty-four.

“
I was so sad to hear of Blaheen’s
death,” Lís wrote
George Chambers two weeks later. “I could not do anything atall but to think and think and be thinking. Old vivid pictures of the Island and Blaheen and family came before my eyes, of a crowd of Islanders coming down to the pier visiting himself and his family and children and young and old on the Island so merry and happy.”

“It was a cause of grief to the people of the Great Blasket,” Seán wrote in a tribute to Flower, “to learn of the
death of our excellent noble friend. There is no herb or remedy against death.”

Around the time of Flower’s death, four years after Lís and Seán had resettled on the mainland, forty-five people still lived on the island—thirty-two men and boys, and thirteen females. Folklorist
Brid Mahon visited the island during this period. “
To this day I can recall the modest comfort of the
houses on the island, with their raftered ceilings and open fires and the fragrant smell of turf smoke which I love above French perfume.” She’d remember the boundless hospitality she enjoyed there, the settle beds and dressers filled with delft dishware, the chairs of woven straw, the walls hung with religious pictures. She visited every inhabited house on the island. All seven of them.

“
It’s going downhill almost every day,” Seán wrote after Flower’s death, comparing the village then, in 1946, to when Flower and Marstrander had visited earlier in the century. “There were thirty houses on it at that time and fifty children on the register of the school. To-day it is without a school, without a child.”

The Great Blasket “
was no place at all for old people,”
Seán Ó Guithín, one of the last of the island dwellers, said before he died. “It was like a ship which requires a certain number of crew members” and now no longer had them.

Emigration sapped all of rural Ireland, of course. But, as a 1947 government report had it, “certain features” of Blasket life made matters worse yet—its remoteness, its loneliness in winter, coupled with “the dread of being without
food, the danger of not being able to obtain the services of priest or doctor in time of need, the absence of teacher or nurse.” As
the population dwindled, the lot of the remaining few grew only worse. “
Loneliness is accentuated and there is a greater feeling of helplessness in times of emergency.”

On Christmas Eve 1946, the emergency arrived. A young island man, twenty-four-year-old
Seán Ó Cearnaigh, fell ill, complaining of fever and headache. Most of the Ó Cearnaighs had by now left for America to become Kearneys and Carneys, Seán being among the few who remained. And now there was nothing to be done for him. For days a storm raged; the mainland was inaccessible. A radio telephone that was supposed to connect the island post office to
Dún Chaoin didn’t work. On the afternoon of January 10, 1947, “
with most of the island community helpless at his bedside,” as
Mícheál de Mordha wrote years later, Seán died. When his body was later brought to Dingle, it was determined that he’d died of meningitis.