AFTERWORD

She then the citties sought from gate to gate

And every one did aske, did he him see.

(Spenser, The Fairie Queene.

An encapsulation of The Ikon Maker.)

Ewan MacColl adapted another line of Spenser into contemporary song:

Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.

Song was nearly always on my mind when I was writing The Ikon Maker. Maybe a Traveller boy bawling out ‘Spancil Hill’ on Shop Street, Galway, or maybe a song the Johnstons sang, words of which I used at the beginning of the book:

The men in the forest they ask it of me

How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?

Bishop Thomas Percy saved a manuscript of fifteenth-century ballads from being used to light a fire and that song may have been among them.

I started the book after a weekend visit in early June to Galway city.

There was cherry-coloured bunting in Quay Street in Galway city for Corpus Christi, red tulips blown and damascened in front of pictures of Mary, tulips, roses, babies’ breath outside a custard-coloured café where teddy bears were having a tea party in the window.

The bombs had gone off in Dublin a few weeks before and I left for Europe, hitchhiking first to Sweden, and then south to the north of Spain, writing along the sides of motorways.

I saw the fields of Denmark filtered with red of strawberries; I saw the trees they nearly cut down in central Stockholm but which mass protest saved; I slept in a room in the Stockholm archipelago, a reproduction of Carl Larsson’s Breakfast under the Big Birch on the wall, first time I saw that painter’s work – images of happiness.

I saw the Bastille Day fireworks go off in the sky above the sea near Bandol, in the south of France.

I finished the book in a grim London setting some weeks before the Birmingham bombing.

Mr R.R. Zanker, a teacher and poet from Cheshire, who lived now near Burton-on-Trent, who used visit Ballinasloe as a fisherman, typed it for me.

A youth with pitch-black hair in a North seaman’s grey jersey and an Afghan coat pressed Aldous Huxley’s Brief Candles with Augustus John’s sketch, Portrait of Alexandra on the cover, into my hand before I returned to Ireland that Christmas and I stuck the Irish Christmas stamp of that year into it, Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini from the Borghese in Rome.

Surrounded by water in Venice, his figures were placed against landscape, especially landscape with water; ‘the best painter of them all’, Albrecht Dürer called him. And I’d seen the watery Piazza San Marco on a return visit to Europe that autumn.

The young Albrecht Dürer walked from Nuremberg to Colmar once to meet his hero Martin Schongauer and found that he’d been dead for six months.

The Connaught Tribune printed an obituary I wrote for Mr R.R. Zanker when he died the June after he typed The Ikon Maker: ‘For many years he arrived in Ballinasloe in springtime – drawn by the market place, the pike stream …’

‘We seek each other little, but fate takes our lives in her hands,’ wrote Varlam Shalamov, who spent seventeen years in Kolyma, ‘Mine were the berries … and I didn’t die.’

A jettisoned book, it was Ronan Sheehan, a relative of Sarah Curran, the subject of the song sung on a night-crossing in the book, who said The Ikon Maker was good and recommended publication.

Song was never far from my mind when I was writing The Ikon Maker, a Traveller boy bawling out ‘Spancil Hill’ on Shop Street, Galway.

A voice that rose up from the streets,

Singing and dying little by little into the distance,

Seized my heart fiercely, as it seizes still.

Giacomo Leopardi

Desmond Hogan, January 2013