DAY 11,989

The end of the rainbow

The Saturday workshop in Acadamh Ghaoth Dobhair was successful and enjoyable. As in the best creative writing workshops, the atmosphere was friendly and industrious. I was above all impressed by the fluent mellifluous Irish of the eight or nine participants, and some of them had composed excellent poems or stories. The day passed quickly, and on Sunday Bo and I left Gweedore and drove east to the cottage on Lough Swilly.

It’s an old house, dating from the eighteenth century, owned by my parents during the last decades of their lives, and now shared by me, my brother and my sister. Nestling among big old trees in a large garden, with the hills behind and the sea in front, it must have looked really beautiful when its roof was thatched, but even with grey slates it has a hospitable appearance. Everything was in fine shape – the grass in the garden was cut, the fire set on the hearth. My brother Donagh (one of the kindest, wisest and most entertaining people I know) and his lovely wife, Linda, had hung some pictures on the walls – reproductions of paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, Jack B. Yeats. Bo and I were both pleased by the pictures, which were predictable but which the house needed. We unpacked the car – all our stuff, out again, with added bags of food. After lunch, Bo lay down for a nap and I went for a walk on the beach – the walk I have so often taken with him, but that he hasn’t been able to do for two years now, because of pain in his back.

The beach – Stocker Beach, Warden Strand, an Trá Bán, Portsalon strand; kärt barn har många namn, a beloved child has many names – is a few miles long. It stretches in a shallow crescent from the foot of the Knockalla hills to the cliffs at Portsalon – the last wide bay in Lough Swilly, facing the open sea which looks very ‘North Atlantic’ at this place, cold and vast, stretching from Donegal to the Arctic. The sea is often rough, and so it was today. Great waves broke on the sand; the sea roared, its voice like that of angry lions or of heavy traffic pounding along a motorway.

The beach is magnificent, a fine sandy beach that is sometimes golden, sometimes russet. It’s bisected by a river – Warden Burn – about half a kilometre from the place where you enter through the sloping dunes, the silvery green marram grass spouting from the sand. You used to have to wade through this river to cross it. Bo always hated doing that, even in summer when the water level was low. He didn’t like taking off his shoes and socks, and putting them back on again at the other side, and he never felt confident on uneven surfaces – for some years, his toes felt numb sometimes, and he didn’t trust his sense of balance. And even in summer, Warden Burn is cold. That meant that Bo seldom walked the full length of the beach – perhaps three miles or so. In 2011 however, the county council thoughtfully bridged the river, as close to the landward side of the beach as they could, since near the sea it changed course constantly. The following winter the bridge caved in under pressure from storms and when we were last in Donegal in late May it was unusable. The burn was now in flood, its voice up, its waters swollen and rushing fast towards the ocean. Impossible to wade through. But I walked up towards the land and – hey presto! – the bridge was there, rebuilt, allowing easy access to the other bank. Indeed, I met three or four groups, mostly families or couples, with their dogs, all ‘walking the beach’.

I walked a few kilometres, as far as the next burn, just before the cove of Portsalon itself, and then returned. The sea was still splendidly rough and loud, lashing in on the sand – Emily Brontë would have loved it. But a few hundred yards out, it looked smooth as a mirror, and bobbing about on the lake of calm water were two large birds. Not seagulls, not cormorants. Grebes? They swam about looking as if the great wide bay was under their exclusive command, as if they had a magical druidic power to calm a section of the stormy ocean, the way a farmer moulds a field out of mountainside or forest.

Clouds scudded across the iron sea as I was halfway back, but it rained only for a minute. Then a magnificent rainbow appeared. I photographed it with both my camera and my phone, and sent the snap to my sister Síle with the text, End of the rainbow.

Later – dinner, then Bo and I sat down by the fire to enjoy the Sunday night episode of Downton Abbey. To our disappointment, we couldn’t get it, and when I phoned my brother he said there was a problem with the television set and it wasn’t receiving that channel any more. Drat! We were both irritated. Such minor things do irritate you – when life is normal, when life is at its best. We played Scrabble instead. I won by quite a wide margin and Bo laughed. The page with our score that night is still in the box. But he wasn’t trying very hard and my easy victory puzzled me. Bo always loved to win a game. This wasn’t like him. I guessed the pain in his back was very bad, or that he felt unusually tired, and my heart sank.

There was a loneliness in the cottage that night. Perhaps the ghosts of my parents hovered? For Bo, if not for me. Because the next day he wanted to go to their grave, in the small churchyard in Glenvar overlooking Lough Swilly. We visited it briefly, in driving rain. I never visited graves – then. I didn’t see the point. But he did.

We slept in the big bed in the room at the back. Our room, traditionally – we have always slept there, ever since my parents got the cottage. Bo complained of the cold, and the room was freezing – even though the central heating was on it did little more than take the bite out of the chill in that room, with its three exterior stone walls, in this wintry weather. Next morning Bo said he hadn’t slept well. So we decided to move to the room in the middle, which adjoined the kitchen. It was warmer there, although we had to sleep in single beds, which Bo hated. Somehow the cosiness of the marital bed was very important to him – it was more important to him than to me, or to most people of his age, or even my age, as far as I have noticed. Even in hotels, where sometimes we were given rooms with adjoining twin beds, Bo seemed to feel abandoned even though I often slept better. He, however, had the great gift of being able to fall asleep as soon as he had read for fifteen minutes and turned out the light, and usually he slept peacefully till morning. Ett rent samvete är den besta huvudkudden, a clear conscience, he claimed, is the best pillow. Sometimes I could lie awake for hours, waiting for sleep to come, and I often woke at four in the morning. Bo would be sleeping like a newborn baby. I often put my hand to his chest to check that he was breathing, whereupon he would wake up for a second and say impatiently, ‘Yes, yes, I am still alive.’ And then fall fast asleep again.

We stayed in Magherawarden for Monday and Tuesday. The days followed the same routine. In the morning, I wrote – I was preparing a speech for a book launch on that Thursday, 31 October, Halloween, and a short presentation that I was going to give at the concert in aid of the National Folklore Collection, which would take place on the same night. Bo wrote in the small room – what was he writing? I can’t remember. Probably he was working on the introduction to a second selection of stories by Peig Sayers, stories for which sound recordings survive. He went for a walk, on both mornings, not to the beach but up the boreen past Knockalla Caravan Park, which is not far from the cottage, and along there – a leafy ramble; it pleased him that he could do this walk without difficulty, and, smiling in delight, he reported that his back was not aching. Bo had a true capacity for happiness; he was naturally cheerful, and tiny pleasures, such as this, lifted his spirits enormously.

On the Monday afternoon, I did the beach walk again, and on one of those days we drove, at Bo’s request, down to Fanad lighthouse, along the small roads of the peninsula, which wend their way dreamily between a landscape of hills and drumlins and lakes and the sea: a landscape that looks like a picture in a particularly beautiful children’s book. This part of Donegal, between Mulroy Bay and Lough Swilly, is not very well known but it is one of the most exquisite places on earth. We shopped a little in the local store, the Blueberry – and we tried to find some information in the tiny local museum they have upstairs there. Some question we had about the locality – about megalithic remains, dolmens, in the area. Just a few weeks previously we had visited Lough Gur, in County Limerick, which is rich in ancient archaeological artefacts and which has been inhabited for four or five thousand years, and were wondering if this part of Donegal had an early history of settlement, or if it had been settled later? The museum did not hold the answer and in fact I still don’t know, since very soon such questions were far from the forefront of my mind.