While the Fine Gael Party had traditionally leaned in a pro-Commonwealth direction, it was, ironically enough, a coalition government led by John A. Costello of Fine Gael that finally, in 1949, severed all remaining constitutional ties with the British Crown and declared the erstwhile Free State to be, in fact and not only in aspiration, the Republic of Ireland (An Poblacht na hÉireann). But after sixteen years of firm Fianna Fail Party rule under the leadership of Éamon de Valera, the Ireland that emerged from the years of hardship during the World War II Emergency remained very much de Valera’s island. It was a country committed, after its years of wartime neutrality, to standing apart from international alliances and to an inward-looking striving for economic self-sufficiency. The acreage under tillage had more than doubled, farmers were required to grow a certain amount of wheat, and government subsidies supported the growing of the sugar beet needed to maintain an adequate supply of sugar. Insular in more than an economic or geographic sense, it was a country withdrawn into itself, hemmed in, culturally speaking, by the imposition of a fairly draconian system of book censorship and by its adhesion to a highly clericalist and traditionalist version of Catholic belief conducive to shaping a docile laity somewhat cowed in demeanor and an arrogant hierarchy that felt free to intrude itself into the political arena sometimes in a clumsily heavy-handed fashion. This it did, classically, in 1951 when, asserting bizarrely that the proposed scheme would “constitute a ready-made instrument for future totalitarian aggression,” it came out in harsh opposition to the efforts of Dr. Noel Browne, minister of health, to reduce the high infant mortality rate in Ireland by introducing the Mother and Child Scheme—maternity care and health education for mothers as well as health care for children up to the age of sixteen. This was the Ireland with which I was to become quite closely acquainted during the years from 1946 to 1951. But its drawbacks and idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, it was a wonderfully welcoming country with which experience no less than heritage encouraged me to identify, and where I came to feel very much at home.
With the war finally over and travel restrictions more or less gone, it had once again become possible for us to get back to Ireland. In the summer of 1946, then, I accompanied my parents on a trip that took us first to Dublin, where we again spent time with my father’s sister Florrie and his younger brother Paddy, then on to Athlone to visit with his older brother Tommy and his family. Not being accustomed to the mores of a small town (Athlone’s population was no more than twenty thousand), I was astonished when old friends and acquaintances of his, who hadn’t seen him for years, stopped my father in the street to greet him warmly by name. After Athlone, we headed west into Connaught to stay with my mother’s older sister Mary, my Uncle Tommy Devaney, and their family of six. They worked a small farm in the tiny village of Lissananny, County Galway, situated about eight miles northwest of Tuam and close to the border with County Mayo. In that it took us from metropolitan Dublin via small-town Athlone to the rural fastnesses lying just to the east of Lough Corrib, the trip was an interesting one. At Athenry we switched from the Galway train to one going north to the ancient cathedral town of Tuam, there to be met by my Uncle Tommy and taken to Lissananny in a jaunting car—a traditional type of horse-drawn trap in which one sat sideways. Given the long lapse of years since my mother had seen her sister, our visit was clearly viewed by all as an important occasion worthy of ceremony. Both Tommy and his horse were well groomed and cleaned up, and Tommy was wearing his Sunday suit. When we arrived at his house, his father, still functioning in retirement as the patriarch of the family and shaved and suited up for the occasion, had been seated outside the gate in the wall surrounding the house and was helped to his feet to deliver in Irish on behalf of the family the traditional, formal words of welcome: Céad mile fáilte—“A hundred thousand welcomes.” Thus began what was for me the first of several visits, for I returned by myself in subsequent summers, arriving in time to help with the haymaking and staying through the harvest. During that first visit we were driven over to Ballycasey where, for the first time, I met my grandfather, then in his early eighties. Still farming, he came through as a tough old fellow, with a full head of roughly cropped white hair and a twinkle in his eye. He no longer lived in the old thatched cottage where my mother had grown up, but had at some time been well enough off to build for his wife a largish, two-story house possessed of a parlor as well as the usual large kitchen-cum-living room. Unfortunately, my grandmother had died before it was completed and, at that point, all work on the house seems to have stopped. He had not bothered even to paint the window frames, which, when we visited, were beginning to crack and split, and he was using the parlor to store the dirty, oily wool from the previous year’s sheep shearing. Canny, it seems, about wool prices, he was holding onto it in the hope of getting a better price the following season. He and my mother’s younger brother Pawdy (short for Pádraig/Patrick) had fallen into the habit of camping out in what was basically an unfinished and deteriorating structure, more or less living in the kitchen on a residual diet of potatoes, bread, bacon, tea, and whisky. When she saw the conditions under which her father and brother were living, my mother was terribly upset and spent the next several days cleaning and scrubbing up the place in a futile attempt to make it more livable. Most of the young women had left Ballycasey for what they hoped would be a more promising city life, if not in Ireland then abroad, so Pawdy, like so many rural Irishmen, had never married. But I remember him as a warm, happy, and amusing fellow. When I was helping him move the sheep one evening, he began spontaneously to tell me a story about mysterious, supernatural happenings not in the next village, but in the one beyond that. Having assumed that I was being made privy to a piece of authentic Irish folklore, I was startled as the story unfolded to recognize that it was clearly based, beneath all his embellishments, on one of the Grimm’s fairy stories which he must have encountered at school.
It was not with Ballycasey, however, but with Lissananny that I was destined over the next several years to become quite intimately acquainted. “Lis” (lios) in Irish means either “ring fort” or “fairy mound.” While no remnants of fortifications were evident, there was, in one of my uncle’s fields, a symmetrically circular, clearly man-made mound, about eight feet in diameter and three feet in depth with a flat stone positioned right at its center. As a young man, when working as a laborer on the roads, Uncle Tommy had been involved in an archaeological discovery somewhere in Galway, with the site yielding some very handsome Celtic brooches, and he had proudly shown me a copy of a scholarly article which described the site and the find and listed his name among those of the participants in the dig. But when I suggested that this particular mound on his own land warranted archaeological investigation, he would have none of it. Instead, he related to me a story of all the bad things that had happened in a neighboring village when someone was disrespectful (foolish?) enough to interfere with a similarly mysterious remnant from the ancient past.
Lissananny itself was strung along a twisting boreen and was not graced by a church, school, or shop. It was, in fact, little more than a collection of about twenty houses, many of them of the old, thatched cottage variety, small, picturesque, thick-walled, and cramped. The rest were rather ugly “modern” houses, some of them two storied and, in outside appearance, not unlike English council houses with slate roofs and walled gardens in which vegetables were cultivated for domestic consumption. The Devaney’s, though one storied, was such a house, the original thatched cottage having been turned into a barn that housed the two cows on which they depended for their milk and butter. Unfortunately, like the other new houses, it was built of concrete with no damp course in the walls and, with the exception of the kitchen, had a slightly dank feel to it. I know that my clothes always felt a bit damp when I put them on in the morning. The kitchen was the large main room in which most of the living took place. It was warm and inviting enough, dominated as it was by the large, open fireplace in which a turf fire burned day and night and on which all the cooking was done. That room I associate especially with the figure of Grandfather Devaney, who would sit on a hard kitchen chair, lost in some sort of reverie, staring at the glowing turf fire and, with his stick, tapping rhythmically and incessantly the side of the hard sole of his right boot. He spoke little but would occasionally begin singing, to himself rather than anyone else, the words of one of the old, seemingly endless, narrative songs known as “Come all ye’s.” The house had a slate roof and was equipped with gutters and drainpipes which fed the abundant flow of rainwater into a cistern to supply water for use in washing and in the laundering of clothes. For just as there was no electricity (light was provided by oil lamps), so, too, was there no running water, no sewage system, no outhouse, even—this last providing something of a challenge for a city-raised boy unaccustomed to the practice of hopping over a loose stone wall in order to relieve oneself in an open field. Drinking water had to be brought in by bucket from a spring that bubbled up in a nearby field. Unfortunately, that spring was not fenced off from the rest of the field in which sheep were often left to graze. It is to drinking that water across the course of several summers that I am inclined to attribute my acquisition (presumably via fecal contamination) of the h. pilori bacterium which, while it would lie dormant for years, caused me periodic bouts of stomach pain until, in my late sixties, a test detected its presence and it was eliminated by a fortnight’s course of heavy-duty antibacterial drugs.
If by modern city standards there was a lot that was lacking in the conditions of life prevailing at that time in places like Lissananny in the rural west of Ireland, there were also many things that attracted. Not least among them, to one who had grown up on bleak wartime rations in Britain, the freshness, quality, and quantity of the food available. The Devaneys kept hens, chickens, and milk cows, so fresh eggs, milk, and butter were in abundant supply, along with onions, carrots, cabbage, and first-rate potatoes grown in the vegetable garden adjoining the house. To my knowledge, the two milk cows were not tuberculin tested (a pertinent precaution given the salience of tuberculosis among the rural population), nor was the milk they produced pasteurized. But it tasted good, as did the pungent country butter my aunt made from it that went so well with the wonderful, coarse soda bread she baked in a flat Dutch oven suspended from the fireplace crane over the glowing turf fire. Although they raised a few bullocks and heifers and had a flock of about forty sheep (the former fattened for sale at market, the latter kept for the wool that was the main source of the family’s cash income), they ate neither beef norlamb. Even had they been able to afford to do so, that would have been an option precluded by the absence of electricity and, therefore, of refrigerated storage. But they also raised pigs, some for sale at market, and some to be slaughtered, cured, and eaten. So the staple meat, served with almost every dinner, was wonderfully tasty home-cured bacon, cooked and served in large thick slices. The only exception was the periodic Sunday meal when my aunt, having gone out into the farmyard, caught a hapless chicken, and wrung its neck, served that instead.
Fortified in this fashion, I came to enjoy the rhythms of country living and the regimen of agricultural work that went with it. I helped out with the rounding up and moving of the sheep and, in that wet climate, with the checking for and removal of the lethal maggots that could develop in their rear end from the eggs laid by the seemingly omnipresent large flies that we knew in England as “blue bottles.” I was also called upon once to help load piglets onto the cart that was being taken to market. Given the amount of squealing and their frantic attempts to escape into the early morning darkness, it was hard not to suspect that they had somehow divined the dire fate that lurked in their future. But I didn’t distinguish myself in my clumsy attempts to milk the cows or to help with the gathering and stacking of the turf needed to fuel the fire. While I was not altogether incompetent wielding the two-sided spade (a sleán) used to cut the sods of turf, my efforts to catch those rather sloppy sods when thrown to me by another cutter without splattering the messy stuff all over myself were clumsy enough to evoke a good deal of hilarity among my cousins. With the pitchfork and scythe, however, I did much better, wielding the former skillfully and even learning how to carry the latter while riding a bike—this last a maneuver not casually to be undertaken. And, tiring though it was, I came to enjoy the whole business of haymaking, from the cutting, turning, spreading, and gathering to the building of the conical haystacks that, from late summer onwards, were to be seen in all the farmyards in the region, some better (and even more aesthetically constructed) than others.
In the Lissananny of those faraway days, the sole source of traction, whether for ploughing, mowing, or haulage, was the horse. In the Devaney’s case, this was a solitary mare. She was, as she had to be, a patient, hardworking beast who, as I found to my surprise when first handling the reins while she pulled the wagon, knew her own way home at the end of a long day and would firmly resist any attempt to steer her in any direction other than the one leading to the nice, dry barn where she clearly knew she could expect to get her well-deserved grain and hay. Given the frequency of rain in that part of the world, cutting and bringing in the hay during the fleeting intervals of sunny weather could involve very long days. After the hay was cut, we would fluff it up, rake it into long rows, turning it frequently, and then gather it up with pitchforks into large piles so that the wind could help dry it out. When it was ready, and we were given a day when the weather cooperated, everyone—men, women, and children—would turn out with pitchforks to load it onto the wagon to bring it back to the farmyard where the more experienced and skillful hands would have begun the task of building around poles the conical haystacks where the hay would keep dry for use in the winter months. One person would stand on top spreading the hay out into a neat circle around the pole and the rest of us had to be careful to turn over the pitchfork while hefting the hay up to him in order to avoid inadvertently stabbing his ankles. When the stack was over ten feet in height, it would gradually be shaped into a cone, thatched with straw to protect it from rain (I don’t believe I ever saw a tarpaulin in Lissananny), and then stabilized against the wind and secured to the ground by “thumbropes,” themselves made out of straw by twisting it around a stick. A half century later, and long after Irish agricultural practice had changed, I can recall seeing on TV, during reportage about the tragic warfare and massacres that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia, shots of almost identical conical haystacks in the farmyards of the Bosnian countryside. It was as if time had stood still.
During those summers, I more than once biked over to Ballycasey with my cousins Pete and Paddy. I also accompanied my uncle Tommy on visits down to Tuam and Galway city, and we all went once en famille on what amounted to a pilgrimage to the Marian shrine of Knock in southeastern County Mayo. But most of the time, apart from the three-mile trips to the larger village of Kilconly to attend Sunday Mass at the parish church, was spent in Lissananny itself or on the additional fields called Lissalean that my uncle owned outside the village. The latter were mainly hay meadows, though one piece was given over to grazing because, I think, he didn’t want to do anything to disturb some graves there that dated back to the potato famine of 1845–52 or, as they called it, “the Great Hunger”—An Gorta Mór—when people who had starved to death had been hastily buried in unconsecrated ground and their last resting places marked simply by jagged pieces of stone. After working hours, social life in Lissananny was very simple. The nearest pub or place of assembly being in Kilconly, people in Lissananny were thrown back on their own devices even during the summer months. One rather cranky old man did own a wireless, but he kept himself very much to himself and didn’t let anyone else listen to it. So the main diversion available was the traditional one of stopping by each other’s houses in the evenings for tea and talk. The protocol for so doing was firmly established. One didn’t have to be invited in order to visit and one didn’t have to knock on the door when one arrived. Instead, it was the customary practice simply to lift the latch, open the door and step inside, and greet those already there in formulaic fashion with the words: “God bless this house.” One would then be welcomed in to sit around the turf fire, given a cup of tea, and drawn into the flow of conversation which could often be quite lively and amusing. Words loomed large in Irish life and talk dominated. But if one played any sort of readily available musical instrument, one would also be called upon to perform. Once it became known that I could play the violin, a fiddle was found for me and I had to play. To my surprise, the villagers proved to be less interested in hearing traditional Irish songs and dances, quite a few of which I knew, than being updated with renditions of the most recent pop songs, which, fortunately, I was usually able to knock off by ear. Subsequent and more recent visits to Ireland suggest to me that the reverse would be true today. None of this, I suppose, seems very exciting, but there really was something quite enchanting about whiling away the evening hours in this way, especially when it involved sitting around an aromatic turf fire in the thick-walled, low-ceilinged, hobbit-like snugness of one of the old thatched cottages. People were invariably (and incuriously) welcoming, even to a “Yank” (all offshore returnees and visitors were referred to as “Yanks” even if they didn’t hail from America). And I was quickly made to feel part of a pattern of village living which belongs now, I assume, to a past that is forever gone.
My last visit to Lissananny was a brief one in the summer of 1951, and it was little more than a coda to a long summer of hard and poorly remunerated labor in County Offaly, in the southeastern midlands of Ireland. Late in the previous summer, just before I went up as a freshman to Oxford, my brother Noel and I, looking for a change of scene as well as a way to make a bit of extra money, had spent a fortnight at an agricultural camp in the Thames valley, not far from Staines. As had been the case in Ireland, the amount of English land given over to tillage for agricultural produce had been much expanded during the years of war and it had yet to contract again to prewar dimensions. As a result, the country had come to be dotted with agricultural “camps” intended to attract young people who could provide the supply of needed cheap seasonal labor which, under the conditions of low unemployment then prevailing, was hard to come by. Ours was such a camp. We were housed, barracks-style but reasonably comfortably, in large Nissen huts that had been erected when the camp was a wartime army establishment. We ate in a common canteen (the food wasn’t all that bad) and spent our days either “budding” large fields of chrysanthemums or picking potatoes. The work was monotonous but not backbreaking or tiring enough to preclude us from going pub-crawling in the evenings in the lively drinking-spots strung along the banks of the Thames or, on weekends, going dancing in Staines. The atmosphere was, in fact, a bit holiday-like and during those two weeks we had a great deal of fun. Though no more than half of the campers were university students, the age of most of them coincided with the typical eighteen to twenty-two range for undergraduates. The group was made up of young women as well as men and, at the age of eighteen, it was my first “coeducational” experience since leaving elementary school. It was also broadly international in composition—mainly European, but the group also included one Indian student, a couple of Nigerians, and, five years after the end of World War II, at least one forlorn displaced person. He was an older, world-weary Rumanian fellow who probably viewed the rest of us as a bunch of immature idiots. I cannot recall all the names involved, but we speedily made some good, if fleeting, friendships with a lively French student from Brittany, Henri by name; a Dutch girl, Joep, and her Austrian boyfriend, Kurt, who had linked up in the course of an extended Wanderjahr that had taken them right across the continent; and, setting our hearts aflutter, some lovely Swedish girls, not Stockholm sophisticates but from a small town in one of the rural provinces. I loved the international complexion of the group and reveled in the lively and earnest conversations about differing national mores, politics, religion, and the “meaning of life” that sometimes went on well into the night as we sat around the dying embers of a large outdoor fire that was lit on several evenings of each week.
It was a wonderfully enjoyable, educational, and stimulating experience and, as one who as yet had been given no opportunity to visit the Continent, I was left with a strong appetite for involvement in things international. Perhaps because of that I perused, during my freshman year at college, the literature about summer jobs put out by the International Students Union and ended up signing on to work in Ireland during the summer months of 1951 for Bord na Móna (Peat Board), the semi-state company not long since established to promote, among other energy-related efforts, the mechanical harvesting of turf (peat) to fuel the generation of electricity in a series of power stations strategically located in the vicinity of some of Ireland’s largest peat bogs. Despite the high rate of unemployment then prevailing in the Republic, Bord na Móna, headquartered in County Kildare, had experienced difficulty in recruiting enough labor to run its operations effectively, and the recruitment in 1951 of foreign student labor to work in the bogs during the long summer vacation was an attempted (if ill-conceived) response to that pressing need. But, so far as I was concerned, it didn’t deliver anything remotely like the experience I had enjoyed so much during the summer preceding.
I was assigned to one of the Bord na Móna operations in the vast complex of peatland in the province of Leinster known as “the Bog of Allen,” which stretches across parts of the counties of Laois, Offaly, Meath, Kildare, and Westmeath in the eastern midlands of the country. Our particular operation was situated within a few miles of Portarlington, a rather handsome, stone-built, former Huguenot settlement that lies right on the border between Offaly and Laois. As had been the case in our agricultural camp the previous year, we were housed on the grounds of what appeared to be an old army camp, but under conditions that were a good deal less satisfactory. There was the normal array of huts, but we were not housed in them. Rather, we were housed in a sort of tent village. The huts themselves were reserved for the cadre of regular employees who turned out to be Irish-speaking migrant laborers from the Aran Islands, a distant Irish version of the Turkish Gastarbeiter who were to make their appearance later on in Germany. Their goal was to earn money that they could send back to their impoverished families on the islands and, to that end, they would sometimes work in succession and without any break two full, backbreaking shifts. They lived in a fair degree of squalor (we had to share the toilet and shower facilities with them) and, though we ate with them in the camp canteen, they kept themselves very much to themselves, conversing exclusively in Irish.
Our group was totally male, no “coeducation” here, and turned out to have only a small sprinkling of students from the Continent. The only one of them I can remember at all well was a rather surly Belgian. Instead, and oddly, it was almost exclusively English in composition, though leavened by the presence of a rough, tough, and boisterous number of Catholic students from the northern six counties. They were all from Queen’s University Belfast and, Catholic loyalties notwithstanding, lost no opportunity to convey that they didn’t think much of the conditions of life prevailing in the Irish Republic. I myself shared a tent with a couple of students from Manchester University, and it proved to be a reasonably congenial arrangement. Indeed, the students as a whole proved to be an interesting and decent lot and, while it would be stretching things a bit to describe our Bord na Móna experience as enjoyable, we did manage to have some fun on our Saturday night excursions to Portarlington. These necessitated a three-to-four-mile walk to and fro, though on occasion we were able to hitch an illicit ride in empty wagons on the mainline freight trains as they rumbled along to the railway siding in town. To do so, we would have to run hard and scramble on board at a curve in the line where the trains always slowed down and, to avoid being caught, jump off before the train finally came to a halt in Portarlington. I view this in retrospect as a rather foolhardy undertaking, though at the time it smacked to us of high adventure, tempted, as we were, to imagine ourselves as American hoboes riding the rails in an effort to escape the miseries of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression alike.
In my mind I retain a vivid picture of an incident that occurred on one such Saturday night as we were making our way back to camp after an evening’s drinking, during which I had witnessed heavier and more sodden drinking among the Aran islanders than I had ever seen before. On the way out of Portarlington, there is (or was) a humpbacked bridge spanning a stream or canal. As we approached it, we saw the extraordinary spectacle of one of the islanders laboriously peddling an old-fashioned “sit-up-and-beg” bike right up to the crown of the hump and then, at that very moment, passing out. For a few seconds—it seemed an eternity—rider and bike stood upright, quite still, all lines of force, as it were, in momentary equilibrium, before the rider crashed sideways to the ground, his hands still gripping the handlebars. This was the cause of great merriment among his comrades who picked him up and, we had to assume, somehow got him back to camp. Had the next day not been a Sunday, I have no doubt that he would have been up on his feet for work at the crack of dawn.
On working days the routine followed a pattern of great regularity. The bog itself, the unforgiving site of our daylong labors, was a vast, flat, surprisingly parched, and desertlike wilderness. Having picked up at the cookhouse a packet of sandwiches (thick and dry), we lined up to be transported to the point of action in open wagons of the company’s own narrow-gauge railway that crisscrossed the Bog of Allen. To this day, Bord na Móna claims to have the largest industrial railway network in Europe and to have in operation more mileage of track than Iarnród Éireann, the mainline Irish railway network. Nowadays the harvesting of the turf that is moved around on those narrow-gauge tracks appears to be mechanized from start to finish, producing “milled peat,” which is scraped by machines from the surface of the bog. And Bord na Móna employs no more than a couple of thousand people nationwide. In our day, however, the whole process was much more labor-intensive. Big machines were used to cut down until they reached the layer of mud that lay beneath the seam of peat, a depth of about fifteen feet, thus creating huge and widening trenches. The sloppy peat thus cut would then be squeezed out like toothpaste to dry on the sections of bog not yet touched that lay adjacent to the rail tracks. The rest of the harvesting had to be done by hand and that is where we came in.
Our task was a twofold one. First, that of doing what used to be called “footing turf”—namely, breaking up the long rows and arranging the pieces into piles so that the wind blowing through them could further the drying process. Second, in sections where that process had been completed, throwing such piles onto a conveyor belt that kept moving remorselessly towards one while at the same time shifting the piles of turf sideways to a rail wagon for removal. While not complicated tasks, they both involved raw and unremittent manual labor, hard on the back and on the hands and nails. And, given the fact that we were paid by piece rates rather than by hours spent on the job, it was labor that was not particularly well remunerated. We were issued neither with protective gloves nor with water bottles. Under bog conditions, we could safely slake our thirst only at the price of stepping aside from the job at hand, thereby losing work time, and walking to the nearest barrel of chemically treated water, such barrels (not always kept filled) being placed at half-mile intervals along the track. Under such conditions, of all of us only the above-mentioned Belgian, who combined with his surliness marked Stakhanovite tendencies, succeeded in making a reasonable return for his efforts. But I needed whatever I could make and, in the end, did accumulate enough cash to see me through the rest of the long vacation without burdening my parents. I also made enough to pay my share of the cast’s contribution towards making it possible to bring our Corpus production of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (during the Trinity term it had been a great success at Oxford) in September to the newly founded Edinburgh Festival as a fringe attraction.
If the daily round of work for Bord na Móna was a bit grim and certainly monotonous, life back at camp was anything but that. Neither at our camp nor, it seems, at the others it set up, had the company planned at all well for the influx of invited foreign labor. By midsummer, angry letters of admonition and complaint about the deplorable conditions prevailing at some of the camps had begun to appear in the press. Our camp, which may not have been the worst, certainly left a great deal to be desired. Apart from the general squalor of the facilities, the food, even by the not very exacting English institutional standards of the day, was really pretty awful. More worryingly, there appeared to be something amiss with the camp’s water supply. We had all begun to experience mild, dysentery-like symptoms which, with the passage of time, became cumulatively worse. Indeed, by the time I completed my tour of duty and departed, I was beginning to feel a bit weak and it took several days away from the camp before I began to feel normal again. Grounds, certainly, for concern, but it was not clear that there were any readily available avenues for complaint about it. The boys from Belfast certainly made their views known in rather threatening fashion, cornering the plant manager in the driveway to his house. But their efforts were without avail and resulted in no discernible change. Finally, for the matter was becoming a bit of a public embarrassment, Bord na Móna sent down a representative to speak to us and, one assumes, our discontented counterparts at other camps.
The man they sent was a small fellow, possessed of the diffident (if, it turned out, deceptive) demeanor of a subordinate office clerk. Dubliners, in those days at least, being frequently small of stature, he was what my mother would have called “a little maneen from Dublin.” And he may well have been precisely that, though I assume he was out from the company’s headquarters in neighboring Kildare. He was destined on this occasion to earn his keep the hard way. A meeting had been set up in the canteen after the evening meal. It was well attended and began promisingly enough with the concerns of the group being presented to him in reasonably civil fashion. When it became clear, however, that his modus operandi if it came to allegations of shortcomings on the company’s part was to be consistently defensive and exculpatory, the atmosphere rapidly deteriorated. The boyos from Belfast had arrived in a characteristically boisterous mood, sitting together in a clutch with some, having dismembered a chair, wielding chair legs and projecting a stance of slightly comic belligerence. To express their disapproval of what the visitor had to say, they began to bang their chair legs rhythmically on the edge of the table at which they were sitting and the little maneen’s voice was totally drowned out. Somehow or other, however, he succeeded in rescuing victory from the jaws of defeat. “I do hear,” he said, raising his voice to make himself heard above the tumult, “I do hear that obscene and disgusting things have been scrawled on the lavatory walls.” (At a place like that, of course, it would rather have been cause for comment had such things not been written.) “I am ashamed,” he went on, more in sorrow it seemed than anger, addressing himself directly to the Belfast crowd and hitting his rhetorical stride, “I am ashamed that good Catholic boys like you would set so bad an example to these students from abroad. What sort of an impression of Ireland do you think you are giving to them?” And so on, and on, in a similar vein. By this point he had slipped into an affectingly homiletic mode, though perhaps not up to the standard of the Jesuit that James Joyce depicts delivering the hellfire sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. To the surprise of the rest of us, the chastening effect of his words on the Belfast rowdies was immediately evident. They quieted down and lapsed into a species of guilty sheepishness, while the little maneen wound up to his peroration and, mission handily accomplished, departed in scarcely concealed triumph.
In relation to our grounds for complaint, nothing at all appeared to be done (at least while I was still at the camp), not even about whatever it was that was wrong with the water system. When the summer began to draw to a close and it was time for me to leave, I did so with some relief. Stuffing my belongings into my army surplus rucksack (backpack), I set out to hitchhike across Offaly and Westmeath to Athlone in order to pick up the Galway train. I had no difficulty at all in getting the two successive lifts I needed to reach the Athlone railway station where, to my surprise (it was sheer serendipity), I spied my brother Noel standing on the platform outside his compartment and chatting up two dark-haired, gravely attractive Irish girls. They turned out to be students at University College Galway, and we had the pleasure of their company all the way to Athenry, where we had to bid them a reluctant farewell in order to catch another train heading north to Tuam.
When we got to Lissananny, my uncle and aunt seemed genuinely surprised, disturbed even, at what I had been doing for the rest of the summer. “Why,” they exclaimed, “only criminals work for Bord na Móna!” And they were at pains to ensure that I ate heartily during my short stay with them. After a week, however, it was time for me to return home, though Noel, I believe, stayed a little longer. Although I had no premonition of it then, it was to be the last time that I was to see my uncle and aunt or Lissananny itself. While I was to do a great deal of travelling in the years immediately ensuing, it was more than thirty years before I saw Ireland again. By the time I did get back, in the autumn of 1984, it had ceased to be de Valera’s self-sufficient island, enchanted and withdrawn. Instead, it was marked everywhere, and especially so in the West, by the rationalizing imprint reflective of membership in the European Union.
My reason in 1951 for leaving Lissananny so quickly and returning home was the need to pick up different clothes and head over to Manchester to the house of a friend from Corpus. There, those of us from the north who had been in the cast for the Oxford production of Murder in the Cathedral were to assemble in order to join the rest of the cast who, with a rented coach and a rented light board, had already set off from Oxford on the journey to Edinburgh. So, the full cast then assembled, we continued on north in high spirits, journeying via Carlisle and the stark high country just south of Hadrian’s Wall and then through the Scottish Lowlands to reach our goal. Having added to my modest role in the chorus of the Men and Women of Canterbury an amended version of Eliot’s Fourth Knight, it was my privilege across the two weeks following, and up and down Scotland, to deliver the first mortal blow to the hapless archbishop—in the Chapel of St. Salvator at the University of St. Andrews, during charity performances in the ruins of Arbroath Abbey and of the chapel at Holyrood Palace, and, most dramatically, in the east end of the nave of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. There we had capped the sobriety of the Calvinist communion table with the facsimile, at least, of a medieval high altar. To our surprise, this turned out to occasion in the correspondence columns of The Scotsman several expressions of outrage about the impropriety of permitting such an outward sign of creeping popery in the High Kirk. We should not have been surprised. We were staging our performance, after all, in the section of the cathedral where Jenny Geddes was famously reputed to have thrown her stool at the dean when he began in 1637 to read the collects from the newly-prescribed Book of Common Prayer—an unacceptable piece, it was thought, of Romanizing effrontery. And her historic act of defiance is memorialized on a wall plaque in the cathedral. But we needed that high altar. In our production it was to be the site of Becket’s murder, effected in a highly stylized and carefully choreographed fashion. The members of the audience were seated in the eastern section of the nave and faced the altar. As their attention was fixed intently upon the other three knights who had burst in upon Becket, surrounding him menacingly with swords drawn, I in my capacity as the mysterious fourth knight suddenly stepped forth from the darkness behind the audience and out onto the center aisle. With dagger drawn, dressed throughout in black, I was equipped also with riding boots that rang out imperatively on the stones of the aisle as I made my way with quickening steps up to the altar, my movements orchestrated with the growling opening bars and my dagger’s fatal thrust coinciding with the first, tympani-lashed, crescendo of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra! The sword thrusts that followed were likewise orchestrated with the subsequent crescendos, and when the stricken archbishop finally sank to the floor all lights in the cathedral were suddenly cut and a spotlight situated across Parliament square simultaneously illuminated the great East window above the altar. It depicts the ascension of Christ into heaven. If the putative theology implied by that maneuver could well be questioned, its dramatic impact could not. For me, certainly, it was a moment arresting enough to consign the residual memories of my laboring work with Bord na Móna into “the dark backward and abysm of time.”