Time moves in one direction, memory in another. Lots of us mistake our imagination for our memory. I know I do, and the tendency becomes more frequent as the years unfold.
Throwing my mind back to the first meeting with this writer whose work had so intrigued me, I recall one of those sunny winter’s days in June—the best Sydney has to offer. So, where does one entertain a visitor from the elegant city of Melbourne? Find a place close to the harbour, buzzy with ferries, in the shadow of the Opera House. That should do it. They talk about ‘power dressing’—this might be called ‘power entertaining’.
To be perfectly honest, I approached the chosen Chinese restaurant with a wee touch of apprehension. Confronted with an aged cleric who had introduced himself to her by a series of emails, would this young pilgrim be flexible enough to deal with the cold reality of white hair and wrinkles?
My anxiety dissolved before we finished our salt and pepper prawns. The conversation was lively, the food delicious, and a glass of Tasmanian Riesling kept the boat nicely afloat. With the other guests, a prodigiously gifted actress and a Catholic nun of keen intelligence, the conversation was both zippy and spirited. Anecdotes about the theatre, the day’s political news (asylum seekers were in the headlines again), that always pleasing discovery of identifying mutual friends, even arcane subjects of theology were explored. I found myself occupying the role of listener. This, I must quickly admit, might not be the recollection of others. Memory and imagination, as I have already observed, are slippery critters.
One of the oddest connections unfolded when I told Ailsa that I’d been unable to sleep in the early hours of that same day, and had listened to a fascinating story on radio about a gritty New Zealand psychologist running a program of rehabilitation among the most hardened prisoners in his country. My distinct feeling had been that I must have been the only person in this country listening to radio about such an odd topic at such an unfashionable hour. To my utter astonishment, Ailsa had been listening to the same program at the same ungodly time—and she had shared my excitement about what we’d heard. An amazing connection.
What are my other enduring memories of meeting this new email friend of a short three months? Instantly engaging, vivacious, hardworking, and intensely committed to the task, whether it was walking, acting, directing, or writing across several quite different genres—such as adapting the text of a 17th-century play, crafting a radio script, or recounting her pilgrimage of carrying the sins of others across Spain. All of this while maintaining rich and frequent contact with an unimaginably vast network of friends living in every corner of the world. I felt I was swimming in waters just a little out of my depth. Ailsa’s enthusiasm and joie de vivre were apparent in both her book and the letters we had exchanged, and they shone out in her welcome. To that date my only image of Ailsa had been a blurred and rather sketchy photograph on the inside flyleaf of her celebrated Camino memoir. The publisher should be sued. The reality was so different—in focus, she was bright of eye and wide of smile.
Another twist in this long lunch turned to Ireland and the magic of storytelling. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, the Irish believe stories are the thing we need most in the world. Our individual recollections of that meeting might not perfectly match, but one thing we both remember was a story I told. Don’t know when I first heard it or even where it came from. All I know is that it had been floating around my memory bank waiting to find a mooring. Allow me to expand the story here, as I did that afternoon.
In some far-off age, within every Irish village, the three most highly regarded figures in town were the priest, the policeman and the keeper of the story. (I’m not even sure that was the precedence, but I’m the one telling and I’m sticking to that order of things.) The storyteller enjoyed the colourful Irish name of ‘the shanachie’. As I vigorously interrogated my lunch companion about the stories she had written or performed—had to beat it out of her, if the truth be told—my memory began to stir about the organisation of this Irish village. Here I was in the presence of a living, breathing modern day shanachie. She spoilt it, of course, by having the unmistakably Scottish name of Ailsa and genes that go back to the rocky west coast of that ‘land o’ the leal’, but sticking to details never has nor ever will distract me from a good tale.
So here we all were sitting over the San Choy Bau. We had the shanachie and the priest, but alas neither of our two other charming guests could be vaguely mistaken for a police officer. Perhaps one of them may have had some odd member of the constabulary tucked away in the family tree but they kept mum about it.
Although I must admit that I lack watertight evidence for the veracity of this Irish legend, I can claim to have once met and been entertained by a genuine and contemporary shanachie. The place was in the wild north-west of Ireland, in the little Donegal village of Derryveagh. It was the birthplace of my father’s father, whose family had been forcibly ejected from their tiny cottage by a rapacious landlord named John Adair, who in April 1861 evicted 250 tenants from his property.
I had travelled there with an Australian film crew that was visiting the village to research and record the history of this now quite famous eviction. Half a dozen villagers directed us to the keeper of the 140-year-old story, who turned out to be an ancient Donegal widow—probably 90-something—with the name of Kitty Duddy. ‘Kitty will sing you the story. Her own mother did and her mother before her.’
I sat at Kitty’s kitchen table in front of a fuel stove and a heating kettle, and she sang the story of ‘The Ballad of Cruel John Adair’ as the camera rolled. Kitty had no pretension about her voice, she had no sense of stage or lighting, she just sat on the kitchen chair and sang. For me it was mesmerising. It was the sacred scripture of my family’s life, and from then on the indispensable role of the storyteller was etched in my mind.
Stories, indeed, are life itself. They bring together the elegant dance of memory and imagination in all of us. Of all the fun and frivolity of that first meal with Ailsa, and the connections that surfaced between us, it was the power of story and the sheer joy of shared tales that linger with me. That was the fuel that motivated our continuing exchange of letters. It still does.
Happy days.
Tony