On an Irish Island (8 page)

Robin Flower, about the time of his first visit to the Blasket in
1910
(
Illustration Credit ill.5
)

What might better suit
Robin Flower than the British Museum? Located in
London’s Bloomsbury, off Great Russell Street, founded in 1753, it had grown into one of the world’s great cultural institutions, repository of all Britain could draw into its outsized imperial hands; it had the Benin Bronzes, the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone. Its
Manuscripts Department, during the four decades Flower worked there, held ancient and medieval books and manuscripts taken from all over the world. It occupied a group of rooms, or saloons, to the southeast of the great Reading Room on the ground floor, all dark wood and coffered ceilings, tiers and tiers of ancient books, along with low glass-topped wooden cabinets for their public display.

For most of his life, his son wrote later, the Museum was “
home from home for the great reader. Thousands of lovely books and manuscripts to absorb.” Early on there, his biographer,
Idris Bell, wrote of him, Flower would indulge “
his practice of wandering about the Department and taking down from the shelves any manuscript which caught his attention”—Elizabethan literature, or Oliver G
oldsmith, or even, as a colleague chided him, “Mexican hieroglyphics.” His intellectual interests, it would be said of him, were “inexhaustible.” Once, Flower translated an eighth-century poem written in
Old Irish, “
Pangur Ban,” which tells of a monk, cat by his side, and the surprising similarities of their work.

Flower had been at the Museum for four years when, in August 1910, age twenty-eight, he arrived in the Blaskets. He wrote, with characteristic lightness, from the house of the king: “
I am safe here in the royal palace, which consists of a fair-sized cabin with an earthen floor and two
small rooms built on it to accommodate visitors.” He briefly described the village, the houses “thrown down anywhere where they can find a bit of reasonably level ground,” the
naomhóg
s and their curiously stunted oar-blades. He was finally learning to row them, he wrote, after earlier being unable to synchronize with the man behind him. He was happily boating, bathing, reading. “I lead the life,” he wrote, “of
Tír na nÓg here.”

The reference, one any self-respecting Celticist would know, was to perhaps the most famous legend in the whole Irish canon, part of the mental landscape of any Irishman even lightly attuned to his culture. It told of a
mythical place, beyond any map, located on an island far to the west that could be reached only through an arduous voyage or by invitation of one of its fairy residents. It was a place without sickness or death, full of music, food, drink, and pleasures of every sort, of tireless strength, unending bliss, life lived to the full. It was the Land of the Young. Listen to its music, Flower exhorted his readers in a poem, “Tír na nÓg,” that appeared in a slim volume published the year he visited the island:

Especially pleasant, he wrote near the end of his stay, was “
talking with
Cáit Ní Catháin, the Princess, who’s teaching me Irish at a great rate.” Cáit, then about twenty-four, was the younger daughter of the king and sister of Máire, Synge’s little hostess. In one of Flower’s sessions with her, a boat approached the island, and while it was yet distant, Cáit identified who was aboard. “I tried to say,” Flower wrote, “ ‘You’ve got good eyes,’ but what I said was, ‘You’ve got pretty eyes’ (which by the way is quite true). Cáit’s answer was ‘So have you.’ ” Abruptly, he realized his error, and they both burst out laughing, agreeing it was “a pardonable mistake.”

Flattered by the islanders that his still-fumbling Irish at least boasted “the proper island
blas,”
or accent, he was plainly making progress. He
would be leaving on Saturday, he concluded his letter, and back at work the Monday after that. “Remember me to everybody and tell them I am working hard, learning Irish from the prettiest girl on the island.”

When he returned the following summer, Flower brought with him his new wife, Ida Mary Streeter, the youngest sister of a friend from Oxford. They had met and fallen in love while he was still a student there and she attended an art school in Hertfordshire of which Flower’s father was director. They went on to meet at
London’s Royal Academy, or the National Gallery, where art students needn’t have chaperones. While enjoying his island lessons with Cáit, Flower may already have been engaged to her. He’d been back in London just a few months, living near Leicester Square with his friend Vivian Locke Ellis, a poet, when, in January 1911, the Museum granted him a special
two-week leave to be married. The ceremony took place on February 4. The couple went to live in a Chelsea flat, and that summer he brought her to the island.

Later, Flower wrote Richard Best in Dublin of their “
glorious time there. The weather was too hot, and I was too tired for any serious work, but I got to be able to speak and understand pretty well.… My wife enjoyed herself thoroughly,” he added, “
and did some rather nice sketches of the island.”

They were better than nice; our feeling for the village in that summer of 1911 owes as much to her as to him. While he worked on his Irish, Ida, who was pregnant at the time, roamed the island with pencil, sketchbook, and drawing board, making finely detailed renderings of the village and its cozy interiors. Together, they bathe the village in a balmier, more settled light than that by which it’s more often seen. Maps and surviving photographs don’t suggest a place that could have leapt intact from a Hollywood soundstage. Ida Flower’s drawings do.

A
pen-and-ink she made of the interior of the king’s house suggests all the comforts of home, rudimentary though they were. In the middle, the
croch,
or fireplace crane—the sturdy, trusslike structure from which pots were suspended over the hearth. The settle, a bare wood bench, off to the side. A beam reaching across the breadth of the room, supporting a loft, a kind of rude attic, bearing household gear. All modeled by soft window light. Three years earlier, Marstrander judged the house to represent “
as good lodgings as I found in Ballyferriter,” meaning
Willie Long’s place, a commercial inn. It still was.

Island
houses were truly
homes,
some imperfectly maintained, others neat, warm, and snug. Floors were of beaten clay, the area around the
fireplace stone-flagged; sand brought up from the White Strand would be scattered on the floor and, with any animal waste, swept out daily. The largest houses were about twelve by twenty-five feet on the inside; most were smaller. With a few exceptions, they were oriented the same way, their front doors facing south, one of the short sides dug into the hillside, offering the smallest target for prevailing westerly winds and rain.
Cluthair,
meaning cozy or snug, was the ideal. On the sheltered side of the house it was as if you were “
in another country,” poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who spent the summers of her youth across the sound, in
Dún Chaoin, has noted of similar houses on the main
land. “The old houses had their own charm and they were very comfortable. Mind you, when you got out of one of those westerly gales … into the warm kitchen it really was the height of luxury.”

During Flower’s earliest visits to the island, big changes were in the works, altering the village more than anything in the last century. Like much of
West Kerry, the island had in 1907 been declared a “congested district.” In fact, such districts were in no way congested the way
Dublin and
Belfast were, with crowds of urban dwellers, but distinctly rural. They were “congested” only in the particular sense of being so poor, so barren of industry, jobs, or opportunity for life at anything but bare subsistence, that they were thought to hold more humanity than they could support.

The
Congested District Board bought up Blasket croplands owned for ages by the
Earl of Cork and reorganized the system of
land
tenure. It repaired and improved village paths, put islanders to paying work. It condemned some houses as unfit, and built five new ones, in the upper village, in three structures. To this day, even from across the sound in Dún Chaoin, they stand out from the rest of the village. They sit higher on the hill, farther west, a little apart from the other houses. They have two stories, not one, with interior staircases leading up to an additional room. Built of concrete, not stone, they have staircases and floors made of timber brought across the sound to the treeless isle.

Another project was to improve the slip where the
naomhóg
s docked. Among those who worked on it—on his first visit to the island, in the summer of 1910—was Flower. A photo shows the work crew
posed beside the slipway with their spades and pails, rubble and stone. They are a serious-looking bunch, wearing hats, vests, sweaters, and heavy boots. But Flower stands hatless, shoeless, and sockless, his head swung up toward the camera in a broad smile. At the
British Museum, of course, he was
hardly used to physical labor, so the work took its toll in blistered hands. “
My high-spirited friend,” an islander with whom he’d worked, began a letter to him later, in Irish, thanking him for gifts he’d sent from Dingle. And then: “Are the pickaxe marks still there?”

As we’ve seen, Flower returned to the island in 1911; then he came again every year through 1914. In 1913, he wrote
Kuno Meyer that he’d had a productive time, transcribing island stories for three hours a day, hunting rabbits with the king’s son, Seán. In 1914, he was on the island when word reached them that the Austrian archduke had been assassinated, setting off the Great War. It was 1925 before Flower returned, this time with his children, as he would many times more over the rest of his life.

At least from 1912 if not before, he was called “Bláithín” on the island, Irish for “Little Flower.” Of all the distinctions and honors awarded him over the years, it was noted in a radio talk a few days after his death, this “honour from the little island kingdom was that which
Robin Flower appreciated most of all.”

On his first visit to the island, Flower became aware of changes the
Congested District Board was making in how fields were allotted for cultivation.
In the old
“rundale” system, which went back to the Middle Ages, each family owned strips of land scattered widely over the island. In the new system, each family got land concentrated in a few areas. “
You may imagine,” he would write, “the process of ingenious and complicated judging by which this metamorphosis was effected.” Most of these intricate debates, however, went right by him. “It is one of the great regrets of my life that this happened at a time when my knowledge of Irish was so rudimentary that I could not follow the arguments that went on round me.” He remembered “
foaming crests of rhetoric.” But just then, in August 1910, he could understand little of it.

Hatless, shoeless, and, it seems, callous-less:
Robin Flower on a crew helping to build the village’s new pier—work from which the London scholar’s hands came away well blistered.
Tomás Ó Criomhthain stands to Flower’s left.
(
Illustration Credit ill.6
)