Stones of Aran (43 page)

Seán’s grandfather would have been the weaver described in Tom O’Flaherty’s account of the making of his first suit of clothes:

(Another villager let me into the secret that this “home-made lubricant” was urine, and the weaver had to put up with catcalls of
fíodóir fuail
,
piss-weaver, because of it.)

In Thomas Mason’s
The
Islands
of
Ireland
,
published in 1936, is a splendid photograph of the Gillan’s old loom at work. It is still kept in one of their little outhouses, but only spiders weave on it. Behind every house in the village there are similar stores, barns, sheds, most of them adapted from abandoned ancestral cabins, clinging like a temporal shadow to the village of today, and stuffed with things that might come in useful if ever history repeats or
reverses itself. Accidental resurrection of this material can be touching, painful, or sometimes comic; sometimes one would not know how to react to it. An elderly neighbour called Colm Mór used occasionally to greet me with a sentence from Pádraig Ó Conaire’s essay “M’Asal Beag Dubh,” which for many children is their first taste of literature, and for Colm had remained the
summit
and epitome of the written word:
“I gCinn
Mhara
bhíos
nuair
chuireas
aithne
ar
m’asal
beag
dubh
i
dtosach.
(In Kinvara it was that I first made aquaintance with my little black donkey).” Ó Conaire was brought up in the respectable shopkeeping family of that name (anglicized as Connery) of Ros Muc in Connemara, lived a wandering Bohemian life, contributed notably to the rebirth of Irish prose writing, and died drunk and neglected in Galway, where there is now a statue of him. Our neighbour,
having
declaimed that unforgettable inaugural sentence of “My Little Black Donkey,” would sometimes break into a paean to artistic glory: “And now they’re gone, the Connerys of Ros Muc! Judge Connery with all his law and all his education, and Canon
Connery
, they’re all dead, and it’s not them the ladies come round to see and look at his statue!” Since we ourselves had just reached the Little Black Donkey stage of Irish literature I asked him if he still had his copy, and he promised to look for it. A few days later he came to the door with a tattered school text of the Ó Conaire
essay
, which he said he had found with a lot of other old books in the pigsty. I was eager to inspect this hoard, and went back to his house with him and round behind it to the disused pigsty, which was full of dust and decay. The literature was under some old sacks in a stone trough. In semi-darkness we picked layer after layer off the pile of mouldering copybooks and calendars from the days of his youth, and suddenly under our noses was a dingy photograph of half a dozen naked girls, standing side by side almost at
attention
, with permed waves in their hair and rosebud lips. We stood there gaping at them wordlessly; they looked as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Colm was the first to recover powers of speech. “Them are people!” he said, and turned them aside.

The Kings were another family that settled in Aran around the beginning of the last century and passed down their trade almost to the present day. Gregory King, thirty-six, smith and farmer, figures in the 1821 census, with his wife Kate and a son aged three, his mother-in-law Mary Joyce, and two stepchildren from Kate’s previous marriage to a Dirrane; in the same household are an
elderly
weaver, James McDonnell and his wife, and a house
servant
, Tom Lee. They have a quarter-acre of land. Mícheál King tells me that Gregory came from Renvyle in the north-west of Connemara; he was a member of the Whiteboys, one of the secret societies behind what the newspapers called “agrarian unrest,” and had to flee the locality after threatening a landlord. Tobar Ghrióir, also called Tobar an Ghabha, the well of the smith, at the head of the village, is named from him, and the roofless house close by it was his. The old smithy, now an outhouse, is next to Gilbert Dirrane’s cottage; Mícheál has pointed out to me among the nettles by its door the stone trough in which the red-hot iron was quenched, and from which pregnant women used to drink because of the magic properties of iron. By an odd chance I have a record of some of the conversations that took place at Gregory’s forge. George Warren, a Protestant bible-reader from the Irish Island Society, was at work in Aran in the winter of 1854–55, and a single volume of his journal which was somehow acquired by the archaeologist John Goulden has passed through my hands. Unfortunately it does not cover his arrival or his leaving the island, but it shows his persistence in calling on five or six families each day and trying to redirect them from reliance on the priest, the Blessed Virgin and the saints, to repentance and the
unmediated
word of God. “Be ye instant in season and out of season,” says St. Paul, and Mr. Warren evidently ordered his life by that word. I select the following from many similar entries:

After a couple of months of this, Mr. Warren turned his
attention
to Cill Rónáin and Cill Éinne, but found the people there immured in fear of the priest, love of drink, and belief in
Purgatory
. His journal makes sad reading; the only living note in it is the echo of that “noise and bustle with sledge & hammer” from Gregory King’s forge.

In the time of Gregory’s grandson, early in this century, the Kings built the new house a couple of hundred yards further down the road, and reclaimed the crags around it. It is a large cottage with ample lofts lit by windows in the gable-ends, that make it almost two-storied. All around it are evidences of the vigour and enterprise of the family: the huge concrete tank built against the back of the house to collect rainwater for gutting fish,
the kiln in which limestone was burned with turf to make lime for whitewash and fertilizer, the sties and
póir
í
ní
and
barns full of tools such as a great two-man saw in a frame with a handle at
either
end, with which the rafters of the house were cut from baulks of timber washed up on the shore, the spinning wheel, the kelp rakes made in their own forge, the tram-nets, the eighteen-foot pitchfork for gathering seaweed. When increasing traffic made it difficult to work with horses at the old roadside forge they built another behind the house, in which their great leather bellows has not yet breathed its last. The field-walls around the forge are draped with rusty chains salvaged from wrecks, out of the links of which horseshoes were beaten before the mass-produced shoes of Swedish iron became available. All this vigour, still tangible in the stout double walls of the green fields won from the rock, only began to slacken in recent times. Mícheál’s brothers left the
island
, Patrick to become a garda and Tiger (after his brief celebrity as the Man of Aran) to work in the Woolwich Arsenal as a smith; he later organized teams of Irish labourers, and a survivor of one of these has told me that Tiger used to pay for their keep in a hostel where they had to burn the bugs out of cracks in the walls with candles. (We met the Tiger once in his latter years, at a reunion of Aran Islanders in the Irish Club in Camden Town; I remember how, when the Archbishop of Tuam was brought over to where he was sitting, the Tiger began to rise like a surfacing whale, and the table rocked and the big pints of Guinness went tumbling, and he grew and grew until we all looked like the runts Oisín found in Ireland on his return from Tír na nÓg.) Then Mícheál’s father died—some years after but because of having been “tackled” by a bull, according to Mícheál—but his mother lived on for years, and in the end only Mícheál was left to run the farm and the smithy. The momentum of the year, like a great flywheel, keeps him going, the horse has to harrow the field to grow the hay to feed the horse, but time has outgrown the
necessary
tasks, and sometimes when a summer Sunday evening was
still bright at nine o’clock I used to find him roving his land in an agony of boredom, and he would groan from the depths of his being, “Oh, that was a long day!”

Nevertheless, even in the 1970s the smithy often relived old times. In spring when the jaunting-cars were being readied for the tourist season, smoke rose quite frequently from the forge
chimney
; the horse stood patiently, tethered to the wall, while Mícheál reproved the inadequacies of the modern shoe with a few taps of the hammer, Oscar the dog would hang around ready to dart in between the horse’s legs and snap up the hoof-parings, and I would hang around too, and carry juicy morsels of talk back to M in the evening. One day I listened to men discussing a Turkish weight-lifter who could lift half a ton, and one of them explained how this could be achieved by training; for instance, he said, if you had a cow in calf, and you went out to the field on the day the calf was born and lifted it up, that would be easy; and if you did the same thing every day you would always be able to lift it, so that when it grew into a fine bull and the day came for shipping it to Galway there would be no need of the winch and you could hand it up onto the steamer yourself. Another time when Mícheál and myself were repainting his sidecar, M brought us out mugs of tea, and we squatted down to drink them. Mícheál put his mug on his knee, and said
“Tá
mé
i
mo
shuí
anois
ag
bord
n
á
rbh
fh
é
idir
leat
a
cheannacht
ar
ó
r
ná
ar
airgead.”
(“I’m sitting now at a table you couldn’t buy for gold or silver.”) “Is that from a story?” I asked, and bit by bit he recovered from the depths of memory a story his father had heard from a cobbler in Cill Mhuirbhigh. It concerned a schooner that sailed into Westport with a cargo of wheat. The hatches were left open for a few days before unloading began, to let the vapours clear from the hold. But when the
captain
inspected the cargo he found that salt water had seeped in around the edges of the hatches, and the grain was damp and ready to sprout. The merchants refused to take it, and the captain was in a fix. However another man turned up and offered to buy it cheap, and he and the captain agreed on a price. But since they
knew nothing of this man the captain asked the mate to find out what style of life he led. The mate followed the man and found him in a thatched cottage with as many holes in the roof as there are stars in heaven, sitting on a stool with his mug on his knee. The man welcomed the mate and fetched out the whiskey bottle, and by the time the mate got back to the ship he was quite merry. “What sort of a place does he have?” asked the captain. “It has more windows than any mansion,” said the mate, “and the table he sat at you couldn’t buy for gold or silver.” “Say no more!” cried the captain, “He’s our man!” So the deal went ahead, and the man bought the wheat and paid for it. Then he spread it out on sheets, and the weather was fine and it soon dried out, and the next year the Famine came, and his fortune was made. His name, Mícheál thought, was Vanderbildt or Levenstein or something like that.