When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut?
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
I can’t say when the foundations of my grandparents’ house were laid. Some ancestor of mine has lived without distinction or fame on that patch of heavy, unproductive land for at least two hundred years. When Richard Griffith conducted his Primary Valuation – the first full-scale assessment of property in Ireland – in the years immediately after the Famine, my family was already there, probably surviving hand-to-mouth in bog-side hovels. Like everyone else in the area, they were paying rent to the Rev. James Alexander of the local Protestant church. Their houses cost them one pound and five shillings annually, and land to farm was extra.
Two homes were recorded there during the census of 1911: one where the house still stands today, the other possibly where the cattle sheds are. By the time John Joe was born in 1933, the main house was thatched. Forty years later, the thatch was removed and the house was crowned with its current slate roof.
It is a house that was made by adding one room onto another until there were enough rooms. Outside, it boasts pebbledash walls, painted white, with a trim of something warmer along the bottom and around the windows. White gutters, white window frames, a white front door. Inside, the house is compact – boxy rooms, narrow halls, all centred on the kitchen and the fireplace. Fifty years ago, part of the kitchen was a bedroom. When Nana first moved in, my great-grandfather slept there. Though I never met him, I’m fairly sure he also had some form of dementia. Nana told me that he once threw a knife at her from across the kitchen; it stuck in the wooden door of the cupboard beside her head, quivering. He was found dead out behind the cattle sheds in March of 1972.
All the living is done in the kitchen. It is a long, rectangular room, split in two. The smaller section – where the bedroom used to be – contains the sink, the fridge, a dresser, and the cupboards where the cups and plates are kept. There are two countertops now where the old dividing wall used to be, with the gap between them opening out onto the rest of the room. The kettle is next the sink, and between it and the television there is a clear plastic box filled with colourful medication.
The larger part of the kitchen is arranged around the fireplace. For many years there was a white tin range against the wall, with a metal shelf above it for drying clothes. When John Joe came in from work, he would lean his arms against the shelf and allow his then-giant frame to soak up the heat from below. Today there is a thick, black iron stove there, with four minuscule legs and a glass door. It is much more beautiful, and warmer too. Every day starts with the lighting of the fire, and it burns until after everyone has gone to sleep. Nana cleans the glass every morning, so that the flames are clearly visible.
Sunlight pours into the kitchen through the square box-window set into the front of the house. At certain times in spring and autumn, when the days are just the right length, the window catches the setting sun for a few moments before it disappears. The light is weak, but it is enough to make the room glow for a while before the lights are turned on. The shadows grow long on the pale linoleum floor, the fire burns muted and warm, and there is an incredible sense of stillness. It’s a room where you can really feel the night falling. There’s a clock above the table on the opposite wall, and beside that, the ruby glimmer of the sacred heart.
—
My grandparents’ house was the first place outside our home that my two brothers and I had licence to explore. There is only a hundred yards between the houses, but their place felt like a different country to us as children. It was close enough to home for it to be safe, but still distant enough to encourage adventure and imagination. Unlike home, we had no responsibilities there, no chores or duties, and no space designated as our own. We were less supervised there, and we had permission to roam, to pull things apart, to construct whatever we desired. Mostly, we desired huts.
Our most basic huts were hollowed-out stretches of roadside ditch, barely wide enough to slip our tiny bodies through. We had one such hut on the hill that rises around Nana’s house. The bushes on the hill were little more than tangles of briars. Clearing out the middle of this almighty knot meant getting thorns lodged in your skin, and coming home with scratches all down your arms and face. We probably used a hacksaw borrowed from my grandfather’s shed, and a wire-cutters too. At one point – I’m sure of it – we had a scythe. We cut and chopped a tunnel through the bushes, sawing off branches and casting them behind us. The floor of the hut was bare earth, with a few old pillows scattered across it. A rug was co-opted at one stage, just thin and long enough to fit. The walls were the rough edges of the bushes, and they folded over us to create a thick roof that wasn’t quite rain-proof. The whole effect was that of a cave, which widened a little at its deepest point, and we spent most of one summer in there.
I can’t remember now how it smelled or how it felt to touch; it exists only as a memory of rough shapes and abstract sensation. I do know it was warm, most of the time, and lit just enough by the strong summer sun. I suppose it could fit about half a dozen children, none more than ten years old. Mostly it was me and my brothers. There would be our two cousins from up the road, and the neighbour’s kids too. There weren’t many houses around, and fewer again with children, so we were a small group, all near enough the same age. I was the oldest, except for a few weeks a year when my American cousin, ten months my senior, would visit. With just one exception, we were all boys. We played card games and board games. We complained about not being allowed to watch television. We fought and argued and fell out. We talked about plans for other, better huts most of all; we were always moving onto the next thing. It doesn’t really matter what we did or said in the hut – it was never meant to be remembered.
What I do remember is that feeling of carving out a space of our own, away from the eyes and ears of our parents. Transgression was latent in the arrangement, and nothing had to actually occur for it to seem illicit. Just being in a place where they couldn’t quite control us, where they wouldn’t know exactly what happened, was enough of a thrill to make it worthwhile. The nascent realisation that our lives were our own prompted us to build the huts, and in them we could explore our emerging identities, try out new words or poses, say and do things that would be embarrassing or forbidden in the house just a few yards away.
—
Nana complains often that houses are not as open as they used to be. She had an expectation, in her younger days, that she could knock on any door and be invited in for tea. Anyone who showed up at her door would have received the same courtesy. In part, this is down to her growing older, not knowing the people who live around her so well. But it’s also due to the changing ways that people work, the greater distances they travel every day, and the decreasing likelihood that the house would contain a permanent homemaker.
When Nana was younger, most of the people she knew followed similar schedules throughout the day, and across the year. When a certain task on the farm needed extra hands, she would end up feeding everyone that came to help. When they became the first in the area to have their own television, half the parish would show up on Sunday afternoons to watch football and hurling, and Nana would spend her time bringing them tea, biscuits, and cake. In the evenings, friends and family would come rambling for drinks and chat. My grandparents and their friends worked together in fields, ate together in each others’ kitchens, and drank together in the same pubs. Their lives were far more intertwined and co-dependent even than my parents’ generation.
The most formal gatherings were station masses, held by each house in turn. Our corner of the parish had a strictly regulated circuit which brought the priest to a different house every six months. One mass in spring, the next in autumn. When I was young, the circuit took about six years to loop back around to the start. That circuit isn’t operational any more, and I’m not sure that anyone really takes a station mass now. Though I found them boring as a child, particularly if I had to serve at them, I think now there was something positive about the ritual of the station, the way the private space of the home was opened up in a manner both formal and welcoming. Once you got the mass out of the way, it really wasn’t that bad. It is a pity that nothing more secular has replaced it; the occasion made homes, and the people who lived in them, much more approachable – less walled off, less like castles.
The gatherings I remember best were family occasions. My grandparents’ house was perfect for these because it was a place where everyone felt equally comfortable, equally at home. It would have been much more difficult, particularly in more recent years, to convince Nana and John Joe to come even as far as our house at the other end of the garden. They were happy in their own place, with their family around them. Everyone else had the freedom to come and go as they wished. I sometimes think of the image of their house at night, seen from ours, with the porch light on, a yellow glow in the kitchen window, and half a dozen cars sleeping outside. The last stop on a narrow road to nowhere, the last house before the wastes of the bog. Birthdays, Christmases, anniversaries, engagements, flying visits, fond farewells, births, deaths; all were marked by the coming together of people in that house, the last light in the dark.
I don’t think just any house can achieve this. It’s a function of the people who live there, not a by-product of design or architectural intent. The house, even now, has a lived-in quality that encourages more life to pass through, and to linger. It isn’t comfort exactly that creates this, it is more like an accumulation of energy over time – a human energy which has sprung from this place and periodically returns. Maybe it never truly left. I think of it like lines leading outward from this centre, lines that can always be followed back to their source. People gather there and they bring that energy with them; a restorative energy in some ways, but also a force of potential. I am a product of that energy, and its conduit also.
The gaps between these gatherings invite reflection on how each differs from the last. They are occasions to think, briefly and not unhappily, about the passing of time, about how all these tall young men crowding the kitchen were, not so long ago, crawling around on that floor and being bathed in that sink. You might find yourself thinking about marriages that have fallen apart, or the ones that lasted; friendships half-forgotten, or the memory of those who have died. I think it is a house where the past lives as a peaceful tenant of the present. My grandparents’ house makes change and loss seem bearable because you know these walls will remember, whenever people gather here.
—
Our hut-building didn’t stop when we were teenagers, but it changed in character. My brother and I began to play music – loud music. Soon after he bought his first drum-kit, we took over one of the smaller cattle sheds at the back of my grandparents’ house. It really was a cattle shed: concrete floor, bare block walls, tin roof, two sliding metal doors, and a pen for sick or calving animals. No heat, a single naked lightbulb. When my dad eventually agreed to let us have the place, he rewired the shed to give us plug sockets. A little later, he built a dividing wall to cut the shed in half and permanently separate us from the cattle. We foraged for scraps of old carpet to cover the floor, and secured a long, ratty couch that a neighbour was throwing out. John Joe came across a filing cabinet somewhere and brought it home for us. We covered one of the walls with pale green paint we’d found on a neglected shelf elsewhere in the sheds. On this base we painted our names in bright orange, with thick black outlines, and dated it. Those names are still there.
That shed was our last and most perfect hut. It was a place we could go to close the door, to make noise and dream. It was a hideaway from the world that allowed us to imagine different lives, to think up sounds and words and ideas without anyone looking over our shoulders. I can remember some of my earliest moments of real teenage angst in there – sitting in the dark with interminable feedback rising from a dirt-cheap electric guitar, half-coherent sentences filling up notebooks at a prodigious pace. I was not a happy teenager: I was stubborn, and nervous, and I was jealous of my brother because he had friends to play music with, and I did not. I hovered around the shed when he and his friends were there, acting like I was doing them a favour when really it was the other way around. He was, and is, a talented drummer, while I have never had an aptitude for instruments. We had very different tastes in music, and we fought all the time, but we also discovered ways for us to be around each other; ways for both of us to get something useful out of working together.
The shed at the back of my grandparents’ house was not just a temporary lab for personal experimentation, but a testing ground for the ideas we would take with us when we outgrew it. What we did there, the rules we made for ourselves, the ideas we came up with – gradually, they became things we wanted to keep.
—
All of our huts existed in the orbit of my grandmother’s house, not our own. I think now that the incredible durability of the place, the sense that it had been there for the longest time, and would be there for a considerable time yet, allowed us, even as children, to imprint ourselves upon it without worry or consequence. My grandparents and their home made us feel like we would be supported. We couldn’t break what was already there, and it was solid enough to let us build on top of it. As soon as we went inside at night, the sheds, the yard, and the fields would revert to normality, unflustered by our designs. They would all be ready again tomorrow.
An ideal hut is a place that allows us to act as if nothing has ever happened before. As if we were living at the dawn of time. It’s a form of primitivism that affords us the privilege of reassembling the world as we wish it to be. In a hut, we can create and enforce our own rules on virgin territory. Huts are temporary and private – what happens in one seems to be forgotten as soon as it is broken up, as it must eventually be. A hut can never last, nor can the transgressions, however mild, that might have happened within. The sin disappears with the structure. It is not just forgotten; it is as if it never happened at all. For me, huts are the physical mirrors of childhood summers.
By contrast, an ideal house is a place to live in peace with everything that has already happened. It’s a structure to help us bear the weight of all that is past. I dream of my grandparents’ house now because it is the strongest shelter I have experienced against time’s many erosions. Though it is small, it has accommodated so much. Lives come and go there, same as anywhere else, but it’s like everything given to that house has been preserved, or everything vital at least. It has withstood so much change, and the marks of those who have inhabited it are engraved in its walls. It is simple, but it is not primitive – if a house could be said to be wise, you could call it wise.
My grandparents’ house is not an escape, or not just that. Rather, it gives us back to life. Its routines and procedures are resolute, despite our comings and goings; they bend, but they do not break. Its structures, its habits, have given me a foundation for thinking about how I act in the world, and the strength to think I can survive what comes my way. And still, because it is not the place where I slept each night and woke each morning, because there is no part of it to which I could lay claim, it retains its difference, its distance. I can inhabit it imaginatively, without the duties and responsibilities of a place I would call my own. It has a history that precedes me, and a symbolic register that transcends me. It remains always something other than property.