Stones of Aran (42 page)

I begin my house-visiting at the top of the village, with the foundation-legend of Gilbert Cottage, as I have often heard it told.

At Grand Central Station a man stepped out of the crowd
saying
“Carry your bag, sir?” and took the suitcase out of Stephen Dirrane’s hand. Stephen and his uncle Colman trotted after him through the crowd with increasing anxiety as he got further and further ahead of them, because all the money they had saved through their years of work in America was in that suitcase. Just as he was about to disappear from sight, two other men leaped out of nowhere and knocked him down. They were plain-clothes detectives who had been watching the thief, and thanks to them Stephen and Colman came back to Aran with their savings
intact
. So they were able to buy the cottage by Gort an Bhiolair, the watercress field, in Fearann an Choirce, that had once belonged to a distant forbear, Gilbert Dirrane. Stephen, who felt the cold after those malnourished years, lit a huge fire in the grate, and set about realizing his dream of offering visitors comfort and good food, on the island that had treated his youth with such harshness and thrown him out into the world at the age of sixteen.

First a kitchen was added to the back of Gilbert Cottage, and then a little garden of marigolds was wrested from the crag by the front door. At intervals of a year or two the cottage sprouted further additions: another storey, extra rooms behind the kitchen, a long loft above those. The original interior was all knocked into one sitting-room, which was still quite small, and a dining-room built in front of it; then two snug little alcoves for candle-lit
tête
-
à
-t
ê
tes
were built out from the dining-room, replacing the plot of marigolds, with terraces on top reached by a very narrow outside staircase. The building has the look of a provisional arrangement that has lasted long enough to weather into endearing familiarity; cube is balanced on cube as in photographs one has seen of
sub-Saharan towns. The interior is dark, an old curiosity shop. Every bit of wall-space is filled with antique clocks, painted plates, the text of the Declaration of the Irish Republic, a
poster-reproduction
of Frederic Burton’s Victorian weepy “The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child,” mirrors, old lamps, and since his death a few years ago, photographs of Uncle Coleman. The fire, a glowing quarter-sackful of coal, is appreciated even in summer by visitors mortified by the unaccustomed damp of Aran. Colman, who used to be a boilerman, would tend it, and spent his winters by it, sitting up, tall and rigid, always clean-shaven and wearing a neat lumberjack shirt. Occasionally, we heard, he would go into Galway and get drunk, but that was as hard to imagine as a grandfather clock getting drunk. Starved of speech sometimes when M was in London for long autumn months and there were no visitors on the island, I would come up to Gilbert Cottage to phone her, which was a comfort even though the telephone, one of the first in the island, was in a cubby-hole under the stairs in which I had to lean sideways like a wind-blown thorntree, and often I could hardly hear her over the sighing of the waves and the crackling of the stars. Then I would sit for a while opposite Coleman by the fire, and Stephen would come and go with large and frequent glasses of red wine, and sometimes recite sad
folksongs
, making his eyes very round and pathetic:

—which would make us huddle round the fire even closer. Or
Coleman would intone a reminiscence of the America of
innocent
frontiers:

The famous used to come to Gilbert Cottage to escape from fame; once M had to calm Stephen’s nerves in the kitchen and serve lunch on his behalf to the wife of an American of
inconceivable
power and riches, and shoo the security men out to sit on the garden wall because their gigantic shoulders were blocking the light of the little windows, while the poor woman lingered at table and let hour after hour of the afternoon dissolve in her wine-glass. Gilbert Cottage was the choice of all official and important visitors to the island. Nowadays there are other guest-houses
offering
more spacious comforts, many visitors prefer to be nearer the nightlife of Cill Rónáin, and Gilbert Cottage is left to settle into the past. There came a time in which the joins of its structure were not so often plastered over or the snug corners so fussed at with dusters. Stephen talked of religion, to which he had given no heed in the frenetic years of construction and cooking, and told one that material things do not last, that what is built up falls
down again. For a while house and master grieved for Uncle Colman.

Nowadays, though, this is still the place to find those who come to Aran for talk, and who prefer the fireside to the television lounge or the voice-quenching din of the pub. Recently I found there a linguist, Dr. James Duran of California, whose
grandfather
, an Ó Direáin, was related to Stephen’s forebears. Dr. Duran was completing a study of the Irish of Aran, and in particular that of Árainn itself, which was relatively neglected in favour of the smaller islands by previous researchers. Our conversation ranged from the regrettable decay of the Indo-European case system over the last two thousand years, to the use of the word
blackin
for shoe polish by Gort na gCapall children—the Cill Rónáin
children
laugh at them for talking of putting
blackin
b
á
n
(white blacking) on their trainers. I had sometimes heard Cill Rónáin people complaining of the difficulty of understanding people from Fearann an Choirce, and was interested to learn that there are two sub-dialects in Árainn, the linguistic boundary lying between Corrúch and Fearann an Choirce. However, the
significant
differences between local speech patterns are not to be looked for in such oddities of vocabulary as
“blackin,”
which can crop up anywhere by historical accident, but in the pronunciation of the most ordinary and common words. Thus in western Árainn the word
siar
,
westward, is pronounced as in standard Irish, whereas in eastern Árainn it tends to be pronounced as
séar.
A form peculiar to eastern Árainn is the pronoun
muinn
,
we/us, which is
sinn
in Standard Irish; western Árainn uses the
Connemara
form
muid.
There are similarly subtle differences between the Irish of the three islands, and there is a distinct tinge of Clare (
i.e.
Munster) in that of Inis Oírr, though all of them are very close to Connemara Irish. As to the future of the language in Aran, Dr. Duran is much more optimistic than the late Breandán Ó hEithir or the geographer Reg Hindley, on whose work Breandán relied. In Cill Rónáin, for example, where Prof. Hindley
thought Irish was in a state of collapse, there has in fact been a resurgence of the language. To quote from a draft paper on the subject Dr. Duran showed me:

Professor Hindley, it seems, was struck by the fall in the
number
of “£10 grants” awarded in recent years, but in fact Cill Rónáin families often do not even apply for them, because they are no longer a significant addition to the family income, and the monolingualism they presuppose is not seen as necessary to the
preservation
of the language. As Dr. Duran writes:

As to Aran English, it is so vigorous and savoury that much of what talk my memory brings back from the houses of Fearann an Choirce is in English. I used to call in on Stephen’s stepmother, Bríd Gillan, in her cottage just behind the guest-house. In both Irish and English she has an incisive tongue greatly feared by her neighbours and relatives. In her youth she went to Tipperary as a priest’s housekeeper, and joined Cumann na mBan, the women’s nationalist organization founded by Countess Markievicz. Both there and later in Dublin where she became nurse to the children of General Mulcahy, she carried food and messages for the IRA men in their guerrilla war against the British. I heard her describing her arrest by the Black and Tans once on Raidió na Gaeltachta. Her captors told her they had done dreadful things to the Countess and threatened to do the same to Bríd. The lapidary English sentence with which she quelled the ignoble brutes stood out for me among the vaguer details of her Irish narrative:

In her eighties Bríd still had the vigorous stride of her
revolutionary
youth—a standard military pace, a fraction too long to be exactly “the walk of a queen”—and a way of discharging her words individually like rounds from a heavy revolver. “When you’re past eighty-two,” she told me once, “you’re not so Spry—or
not so Bright—or not so Nice—as you were when you were young (I don’t know how nice I was when I was young)—and it’s Time—to take a little Trip—to the Other Side.” But Bríd has no marching orders for the Other Side as yet; she has received the congratulations of the Presidents of Ireland and the United States on her hundredth birthday, and still tends the roses round the door of her home, Cliff Top Cottage. But the republic she had fought for was a disappointment to her; in fact she once told me that it was a dictatorship, that had (vainly) tried to limit the size of an extension to her cottage. However, God had evidently
approved
this work, for while it was in progress and half the house was roofless it had survived a terrible storm, the events of which Bríd recounted to me with great emphasis. The joists and
floorboards
of the attic kept lifting up and settling down again; she scattered holy water around as much of the extension as she could reach, then lit a Sacred Candle to watch over it while she and her husband retired to the old part of the cottage, which was under the protection of the Sacred Heart. Even if, as she told me, we are just grains of sand, she was not afraid, for “Why should God let the roof be blown off just to please the Devil or a few evil spirits that might be around, when He had only to blink an eyelash to keep it on?” And indeed no harm was done. “Now,” she concluded, “I don’t know Who Believes, or Who Believes in What, or …” (the impetus of her delivery driving her inexorably
onwards
) “…What Believes in Who—but
THAT WAS A MIRACLE
!”

The Gillans came to Aran from Leitrim some time before 1821, when the census lists Peter Gillan, forty-eight, a weaver, his wife Rose and their six children. Róisí Mhór, as she was called, was the midwife I have mentioned who was drowned off Inis Meáin one stormy night. Perhaps her skills were inherited by Bríd, who also served the island as a midwife. Certainly Peter’s craft was passed down through subsequent generations, and I believe the old loom is still in existence, in one of the little thatched barns behind the Gillan family home, a small neat house just east of Gilbert
Cottage, on the boreen running down to the shore. I sometimes used to find Bríd’s brother Seán, the story-teller whom I have quoted extensively, poking about in the “street,” the space
inhabited
by chickens and dogs and clumps of comfrey between his cottage and the barns. The plot in front of the cottage was always scrupulously orderly, whether it was ridged for potatoes, a golden sea of rye, or a constellation of little haycocks. Seán himself was exemplary, as neat and bright-eyed as a wren in his eighties (he died at the age of ninety-eight; a brother of his in Connemara lived to be a hundred), but his wife was elderly and infirm, and I rarely penetrated the house. Séan’s reminiscences were for me the gateway to the old, vanished, Fearann an Choirce which clustered around the bends in the boreen where it wound down the scarp below Clifftop Cottage: