3. The Missus and the Modern Man of Aran

The morning dawned so still it stopped you at the door, as if there were a sheet of glass between you and the day. Many mornings, with distant accompaniment of breaking waves, began in such a fashion, in the pure sea-light of winter, but most unreally after storms such as the one I had arrived in. Stand still and you might wait an hour to hear a sound of human life. Sometimes you’d wait a morning, the village growing eerie in its emptiness, every dwelling a foundered Marie Celeste. Then you would know it was probably a Sunday and you’d slept late. The rocks glistened with wet, tarnishing only as the day grew and the rainfall drained away. Among the lichen growths of grey and yellow and furry brown patches of moss, above the waltzing sea, salt crystals grew by afternoon. Like faint hints of quartz within the stone they left irregular snail trails. Right through the year (even at times in the bitter months of February and March), for several days on end, the erratic climate could be hothouse warm, or, as they call it, soft, bringing on ferns, or gentians, or primroses such as I found high among the sheltering rocks in December and January.

The island was too porous to be damp and in summer there were often droughts. Gregory carried precious spring water to his stock as if he were a Cretan. He had a homemade barrel, like a barrel cut in half, sealed at either end but with a large bung in the top, and a rope sling by which he bore it on his back the last stages from his cart, through narrow ways to corner fields. The previous summer had been unusually dry, resulting in a poor potato crop, which even as late as November men were now attending to, making clamps with bundles of rusty bracken and sand. But in the wintry ruins of Kil-na-cer, with a leak under the door and another near the ceiling, dampness is all. It must be driven out. And that is what I set about on my first morning. I drove not with a pitchfork but a shovel, stoking my grate as if it fed a steamship. I propped my mattress against two chair backs and stood it before the blaze. I boiled saucepans of water in the grate and scoured a selection of crockery from the dresser. Most of it had begun to crumble, its glaze being cracked and worn, and was unusable, but I found a tall milk jug and a mug and three or four plates, cobwebbed relics of some long-gone January sale in Galway. I unpacked my trunk and stored my things away. As the ashes spilt and gathered in the hearth I carried buckets of coal from the pigsty that now doubled as a coal-hole and lavatory and sent up new smoke signals in declaration of my occupation. The fire drew straight up to the sky. On cold days starlings would line up around my chimney and burble and bicker there like guttersnipes. On wet days the rain would hiss in the coals, and if it hailed, as once in a while it did, the hailstones bounced straight into the room. What heat there was that didn’t go to heaven, rose to the roof and up into the loft. Soon I would devise ways of preserving my coals and make my fire serve me rather than its own gods, wherever they resided, now in a flock of starlings, now in a bowl of stars.

So I began in ignorance to discover the pattern of my life ahead, to learn about time as space, whether night or day, and forget it as linear tyranny. I became absorbed in domesticities. Not only was my husbandry a satisfaction in itself, in good times seamless with my days and nights, it also helped eke out my balance at the Bank of Ireland. There a too-familiar, inexorable time still ticked away in fatal columns of credit and debit, like a bomb on a long fuse.

Discounting the little lean-to against my back door, constructed by Gregory with the aid of a government grant and housing a sink and a tap, my house had five small rooms: three on the ground floor and two lofts. The loft to the south-east, behind the chimney-breast and above my bedroom, lit by a draughty gable window, was reached by a crooked wooden stair that ran up the back wall of the kitchen. It contained on its bare boards an iron bedstead with a horsehair mattress. The other, north-westerly loft – once a turf loft – was boarded off and blind dark. The boards, and the door set in them, accessible only by ladder, formed a bulkhead against the draughts, and contributed much to the timbered magnificence of my ark-like, upturned boat of a kitchen. The kitchen ceiling itself rose to the roof’s apex timbered with narrow tongue-and-groove planking. Stained and additionally darkened with soot, the boards ran from the height of the walls (perhaps seven foot) in a perfect sweep to meet in an arch about the roof-high, whitewashed chimney-breast at one end and against the planked bulkhead on the other. In workmanship this cavernous enclosure – otherwise a poky affair with a bare stone floor, a dresser, a table, two wooden and two old lounging fireside chairs – was as uncharacteristically professional as the lavish use of timber was untypical. So much timber seemed unreal on Aran where scarcity of wood is so marked, the island being almost totally treeless, with only a few stunted hazels and sallies in hospitable hollows.* The limestone-loving fuchsia might burgeon on a village wall or an ornamental evergreen throw a rare wind-bent shadow in a garden or against a house-side (but I can remember only one outside Kilronan). Blackthorn on the rocks grew surreptitiously, serpentine, flattened out by the wind in long arms or bent queerly around boulders.

Foraging for timber became a main task of my days. If I found none on the shore I could always climb to the Dún and reach in among the ragged fringe of rocks for the thorn branches that subsisted there. I was always on the lookout for wood. I developed a nose for even the least resinous sea-dried spar buried in the tidemark’s tangled seaweed or jammed between the seaward rocks. I came to regard the merest fish-box splinter with exaggerated enthusiasm, as a superstitious believer might a piece of the true cross in Rome. Nor was I alone. Along the shore there was often to be found a bevelled plank or spar, or a hoard of miscellaneous pieces great and small, stacked together, like a quaint shrine, an altar to some obscure deity, and topped by a stone with which its finder marked his claim. Such claims would stand for months respected, indeed might, I supposed, stand for ever, if their claimants died having never found time to bear them home. Gregory would instance the practice as an illustration of the islanders’ scrupulous respect for each other’s property and labour. (A cynic might add that the chances of getting caught at even so disguisable an offence as stealing driftwood, of being seen and of being known, were too high to contemplate. There were always invisible eyes on the island to see who came and went and when and where, a case of closely observed lanes.)

I hoarded my timber with my coals and in a tea-chest in the alcove by my fire. When too sea-cured it burnt like tinder but always with a peacock-tail eye of vivid flame. More resinous spars and logs, though hard with my blunt saw to reduce to grate-sized pieces, might burn like fireworks at first, with a fizz and a crack, but they burnt well and made my eventual ton of coal (£14) last through the year with more coal to spare at the end of my stay than I’d inherited on my arrival. There being no true surface soil to the island, let alone bogland, peat had to vie with coal and coal was the more economical fuel, if infinitely less pleasing to the nose. Sometimes I found a turf or two washed ashore but I had to strain to believe that it burnt at all well once soused. The days when it came by hooker to Kilmurvey were gone and peat now belonged with the picturesque, though I sometimes caught a whiff of it on my increasingly rare visits down the island to Kilronan.

That first day slipped away to sea almost like a dream, and evening found me taking supper at the Feaneys’ table. Our agreement was simple. For £12 a month I had my house, all the potatoes I could eat, and all the carrots and turnips I might want from the garden abutting my own and old Maggie Faherty’s cabin, which stood upon its other side. For 6d a day I filled my jug with milk, and when there was soda bread to spare, a loaf or half a loaf was put aside for me. Old Mrs Feaney had insisted that I take my meals that day with them. So we sat round the table to eat our salt ham, potatoes and vinegary beetroot, and when we had done and Mary had cleared away, her lot being to skivvy, we drew up to the stove. Pacified by his labour, Gregory reclined to one side of me, and Mrs Feaney sat to the other. Mary eventually, in her choric role, settled behind us, at the table, with an impatient sideways air, as if she might depart at any moment.

‘Well, and how are you liking Aran?’ the old lady began, as she would often begin, and I made an account of my day. (Her other habitual enquiry was ‘Any news?’ News being even rarer on Aran than wood, the merest splinter of information might serve to excite the mind and make time run. I must myself have been a bonus.) Gregory had been out on the rocks from dawn rebuilding a wall levelled by the storm. There was some talk of walls and the labour they entailed and what pitiful nothing they enclosed. They marked out property, whether acres of stone without covering, or cultivable loam, and mapped its troubled history. The land wars had been bitter on the island and left an ineradicable trace in memories much given to grievance. Gregory, being an economist of the old school, believed in ‘land’. It may not have been the way of the future but it was an article of faith with him. He framed his life upon what he knew and scorned those from whom he bought – a crooked field of rocks here, a garden there – to increase his store, which also grew by inheritance as family lines died out. He believed in land and he believed in hard work. Let those who would idle on the dole, with a grant for this and a grant for that and scarce a hand’s turn to help themselves, do so if it pleased them.

The talk of walls caused Mrs Feaney to recall one that ended abruptly in the middle of the rocks (her children knew its location all too well, not far before the ball alley, this side of Kilmurvey).

‘Because Paddy did lift a stone there once and heard a voice speak from under it, would you believe?’ she appealed to me, peering over her glasses, ‘and he set it back where he found it and never went back there and there the wall is standing to this day.’ She laid her hands in her lap, and paused for emphasis, ‘And the stone itself –’

But Gregory had grown restless until his impatient nature got the better of him.

‘Sure that’s all imagination,’ he butted in abruptly, ‘just imagination.’

You could see it was a routine they’d been through more than once before. But the old woman had seized her chance and stubbornly had her fling at the story once again. If she could, she would have drawn me in upon her side. Had I known the humour of the family better I might have let her, to encourage more talk, for which prize almost any position might justifiably be sacrificed. But Gregory wanted nothing to do with it and, having laid the ghostly voice, smiling at me in a confiding way, he now propped his sandalled feet upon the fender and asked to be excused should he doze off.

‘Poor man,’ his mother granted, unruffled by their skirmish, ‘he’s working all hours, late and early. He has no holidays like yourself, sir.’

I smiled to show, as I hoped, that I understood. But Gregory spoke what appeared to be a mild reproach, and Mary threw in her few Irish pence. They all regularly discussed what I took to be minor niceties regarding me from their Irish vantage in this way. Later, when we knew each other better, they would hold the same court in English, sometimes switching between the one language and the other. This time their mother, smiling benignly at me, dismissed them with just a couple of words and looked back down at her work. She was crocheting something from a ball of coarse cream wool. Not, it seemed, as tired as he thought, Gregory now pulled a copy of the National Geographic magazine from the side of his chair. In a moment, without preamble, he began to read aloud an article on the Indian tribes of Latin America. He read steadily, in a monotone, stumbling only, as anyone might, over foreign words and names like ‘Guarani-Tupi’, and we all listened, until, touching upon the annual rainfall in the Amazon basin, he provoked Mary to remark with a snort of mock contempt that it was wetter on Aran, anyway.

‘But it did not rain today,’ I said.

‘It was a great day,’ said Gregory, well-being personified, setting down his magazine and yawning, ‘a great day entirely.’

‘’T’will rain tomorrow, I’d say, anyway,’ scoffed Mary and sat with her mouth briefly but characteristically ajar, halted by a sudden self-consciousness that sent a flush through the pallor of her cheek. We sank into silence, as if allowing each other pause for reflection. In the end, less comfortable as a guest to sit and say nothing for my supper, I asked Mrs Feaney what she was making.

‘Ah, nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing. ’Tis only a bonnet for Sonny. I have the wool over from a sweater and it will be handy for him out in the month of February. We get no winter in Aran until the month of February, isn’t it funny? When the wind is not up it is very soft altogether. It is rainy too,’ she threw in, nodding at Mary, ‘but the rain is healthy.’

Gregory was now snoring, his toothless mouth a little ‘O’ between the upward jut of his chin and the downward hook of his nose. (Combined with his ruddy complexion, his features always put me in mind of the face on an old cock salmon.) Mary soon departed.

‘That girl is fearful cranky,’ said Mrs Feaney and continued her crochet.

I made to go but then, looking up, she said, ‘And you will be missing the missus now?’

Had she been waiting her moment? If a man has a wife no mention of her should take him by surprise, unless he has a bad conscience. The problem was I was not married. In a flash of naïvely tactful idiocy I had written, while making arrangements about the house, to say my wife might join me in the summer. I didn’t want to offend anyone by going against the local mores, so I ended up testing them by lying. In the meantime my girlfriend had landed a job she wished to keep and, though I held out hope, in the end it gave her wiser, second thoughts about taking a holiday. Things cooled. No further shuffling coils of explanation will I give you. But be advised, if you must sow a lie, make it a decent one. Boast, for example, that you killed your father. The impulse to patricide is forgivable in anyone. As a metaphor it knows no equal in the Freudian calendar or in the Roman. Steer clear of marriages.

If the lying hurt me, that was no more than I should have expected. (I’d rather suppress it here as trivial absurdity but it has too nice a denouement for that.) I’d explain nothing. I’d not dwell on it. I’d ride the emotional weather out in the lee of my larger adventure. My error remained with myself. It is an iniquity to be punished by the judges, I told myself. So I stepped out into the starless night, and made my blind way home, feeling, as I shortly told my journal, that this moment marked the true beginning of my stay.

Indoors I struck a match and lit a candle. The darkness seemed to thicken about me and then to thin and to shadow. I lit another, stirred the embers, threw some driftwood on the fire; in a sudden instant, flame lit up the room, almost to its height, and seemed to concentrate everything. That night too I began a ritual I would keep of making my porridge for the morning. I had two saucepans, one fitting the other like a sleeve, and so could steam a perfect porridge of the thickest oats I’d been able to buy. While the porridge bubbled and puttered and the saucepans steamed and rattled I also began by the light of my Calor gas globe to write my journal, noting things I’d heard people say and things I’d seen and done. I scribbled that night, for example, of a visit to Kilmurvey strand:

In the wake of the storm I collected an armful of driftwood. The sea was still wound up and lunging after being driven so hard. The silver crescent of the bay lay enveloped in its booming. Waders scarcely audible shrilled and flew and realighted at its mouth. Its mouth was full of churning seaweed. On my way back I saw a man zig-zagging slowly on his bike behind three red calves and two red cows, along the old road beneath the dune. (This I later realized was Gregory’s brother Bartley.) Two women came the opposite way, from Kilmurvey, coated, head-scarved. One climbed right down onto the sand to pass the cattle safely. At the far end, where the road comes down from Kilmurvey, a tall youth emerged from the dune with curragh oars over his shoulder and lugging a box. He crossed the strand and set his burden down just out of reach of the waves. I went up and spoke to him. He was deeply self-conscious but explained that he was going out to get some lobsters from a store cage in the bay, the catch of the past month, the last of the season. They were going over to Connemara on the boat that evening. They’d get 15/– a pound for them. Some would weigh 2-3lb. Another, shorter, older man in a peaked cap arrived. He greeted me in a cursory way as if to let me know he was busy. They got under one of the beetle-backed curraghs that lay above the strand and set off, making it look easier than it must be to carry such a vessel off the ledge and down through the soft sand to the water. They put their box aboard and, the young man rowing already, the older one skipped deftly in and began to pull upon his oars. The curragh reared up once, twice and three times before they skimmed away. (One meaning I’ve read somewhere for the word ‘curragh’ is ‘unstable’.) When they returned – with 38 lobsters (suppose they averaged 2lb = 76x15 = 760+380 = 1140/– = £57, at a minimum = £14.5.0 a week) – I carried the oars back up the strand for them. (The oars have no blades to speak of and are square for much of their length, scarcely even bevelled, with a hole for the thole pin, through a triangular wooden flange. They call them sticks.) The youth delayed me and gave me three crab claws, ‘to be putting in the fire, like’. His boss railed at him, over some detail regarding the storing of the lobsters. ‘Don’t be making a haims of it, now,’ he said twice over. What is ‘a haims’, however you spell it? The sky kept clear. The Twelve Pins in Connemara looked unreal on the horizon. I took my wood home to tend my fire before it might go out. Outside the corner house, an incident. Two young men were bending over a mo-ped, from which they’d removed the chain wheel, one helping the other whose machine it was. (A young girl with brilliant red hair played on the doorstep, stepping up and down, on and off the bottom step, her back straight, her hands stiffly at her side as if dancing a jig.) I greeted them and stopped to pass the time of day. But the black-haired one most engaged in the problem was gruff. I stayed a while, leaning on the wall in what I thought was a friendly, hail fellow way. But in a moment the black-haired one came round the wall and, squaring up to me, demanded a fight. He nodded in the direction of a nearby field and said we should go there. For some odd reason I found myself looking out of the corner of my eye at the little field, as if involuntarily sizing it up, instead of exclusively sizing him up. I shrugged at him and said I saw no reason why we should go to such trouble. I was in no doubt that he meant business, until he turned away and went muttering back to his work. I saw his companion smirk. The girl kept playing on the step, and I went on my way, saying (absurdly) goodbye.

That was Colm and we were almost coevals, he being perhaps a couple of years older than me. Colm resented me and always spoiled to fight me. We would have our day, in the end, and make an uneasy peace, a sort of friendship. He lived literally between a rock and a hard place, a recipient of doles, part-sharer in a small fishing boat without means to make it seaworthy, with nothing you could call a creature comfort, not a thread of carpet but cold floors, and draughty windows, no wife for company, no hope of one upon the horizon, a father in the mental hospital at Ballinasloe, a mother ostracized for the love-child she’d had by a visiting labourer, who rarely stepped out of doors, whom I never saw until one evening in the spring. ‘Somebody has to stay, boots or no boots,’ Colm would say when talk of another’s opportunity arose. ‘We can’t all be leaving.’ To him I was a fool and my presence an idle affront. And could you begin to question his position? But I am surprised now to think how little perturbed I was by his hostility. The Connacht fashion is or was to come to blows, for your enemy or enemies to waylay you on a black night and give you a clattering, a kind of folk justice that led to vendettas, such as the one much later in my story I discovered Gregory to be embroiled in and in which I played a minor part. There were subplots and intrigues in the island that a stranger might never discover, whose roots found nourishment where nothing else might flourish. But I came on to be shaken from a pensive mood, induced by Colm’s welcome, because I met again with old Michael Gill. Hailing me as he rode towards me, perched sideways on his mare’s rump, off to gather seaweed, with two panniers on a straddle, he called, ‘All Dublin knows you’re in it, mister.’ He often hauled in Dublin in this style. Its metropolitan incongruity seemed to amuse him and to point to the vanity of life. When in the better weather he came by and saw me at the high gable, reaching from my ladder, having whitewashed the front of the house and now working round, he gibed, ‘You have done the Dublin end, anyway.’ On another sortie that first day, this time to spy out a suitable fishing ground for setting a line over night, I re-encountered Michael:

The shore being littered with fresh wrack or ribbon weed, Michael had come down to load some for his garden. His real interest was in the long claw-footed stalks. He gathered these into bundles and forked the bright, translucent ribbons into the panniers, his mare standing steadily as the load mounted. Once he had filled one pannier, he led her round and filled the other. Then he forked a load across her back, artfully, for almost none slipped off and it was as slippery as eels, until the horse looked like a dromedary. The hump was secured with cords, from corner to corner, as it were. Before he led the mare back up the strand, he stooped and gathered armfuls of the long, rubbery weed stems and carried them up to the ledge and laid them there. ‘Sea-candles’ he called them, and seeing what he was doing I helped him. This was idyllic Aran, the sea pounding, the waders whistling, the air as clear as air can be. I’m not sure he appreciated my uninvited assistance but he bore it with patience and explained the seaweed business. How he would set the sea candles to dry through the year and sell them to the agent, for £13 a ton. ‘But if another man did work here, I would not. There would not be enough in it for two men, you understand? That’s how it is.’ Normally he worked along the shore, a little to the west, he said. He pointed it out to me, round beyond the cottages. I asked what the agent did with it. ‘They do send it to Holland for making ladies’ stockings. That kind of way.’ ‘Holland?’ I asked him, for some reason thinking it odd. ‘Holland amn’t I telling you,’ and picking up a bundle he exclaimed, a little testily, ‘and how it is I cannot tell you …’ In the old days they used to burn the kelp for iodine. The mare struggled up onto the road, the seaweed hump rocking wildly as she made the last step up off the sand. I went on to find some winkles on the rocks, picking them out from among the bladderwrack, and prised off limpets with my knife. I thought I’d lay a line across a delta of shingle and sand between some rocks and see if the tide would bring me luck. But really the tide wasn’t right and I held off. I’ll need to wait, for low tide to turn in late evening.

*

You soon find in a new home, especially when it is an old one, and above all at night, a gamut of noises, inside and out, that habit and familiarity will silence. They are the ground bass of solitude, and the grace notes. In the blare of modern life who hears them through the cacophony and cotton-wool? Only the unfortunate, the misfits, and the mad, or whoever might be disturbed by love or grief. As I sat scribbling, absorbed in my efforts, my porridge cooling on a ledge in the hearth, the coals subsiding, I became aware of a perpetual, almost inaudible tinkling noise at my door. Although so very quiet, its persistence, once I noticed it, made it sound loud. In the end I had to go to see what it was and, closing the first pages of my journal for the night, rose to inspect my door. Of course the moment I opened it the noise disappeared. So I shut myself out with it and bent my ear. Some part of the doorknob, a ring, a thin loop of brass, had worked loose and in the slightest breeze it tinkled like a cymbal. This little noise, drowned only by boisterous weather and only still on breathless days, kept me company through the year.

I went back in. You can imagine how it felt to close my door for, as I thought, the last time that night, to stir the embers, to extinguish the gas globe, to carry a wobbling and shadowy candle flame across the room, and so to bed. The door seemed oddly light and insubstantial against the press of the night, a not quite still and never a silent night, which sounded as I’d stood upon the threshold, staring out, taking the ocean air, like a giant conch shell at my ear. And so I went to bed, but as I sank through the sea of unfamiliar sounds I kept resurfacing. Nor was it simply the mice that disturbed me, though they rattled overhead and tinkered in the kitchen and sent their advance guard across the linoleum to inspect the tundish on the chair beside my bed, to explore the central massif of my couchant form, to gnaw, as I discovered next day, the end off my fountain pen. What bliss it must have been in the days of that other visitor from Wales, Giraldus Cambrensis, who found the island mouse-free.* Was it the same island? But mice or no mice, tinkling cymbals or no tinkling cymbals, I couldn’t sleep. My mind raced and I didn’t feel tired. So I rose and dressed, put on my boots and oilskin, stuffed into my poacher’s pocket three rashers in a piece of newspaper, a little folding pan to fry them in, a corner of soda bread, some kindling, some cheese, some biscuits, and went out. Did I say scarcity of wood? The island night resembled nothing better than a tall wood hushing and soughing in the winter air. As I stole and stumbled my way down onto the metalled road by the corner house at Kilmurvey, the augmented roar of the sea rose up to meet me and with it the pungent smell of seaweed. I could see nothing, not a star, but knew the cloud was low from feeling it damp upon my face and hands.

As I had done the previous night, but now at a much later hour, I found my way down beside the graveyard on its promontory and onto the road beneath the dune, and there I loitered a while listening to the sea and watching for the flash of breakers which like a silvery lighthouse beam penetrated the murk as the waves swept along the shore. I had it in my mind to walk the low road to the east, perhaps to see the dawn from Dog’s Head, near Straw Island where the lighthouse stood, beyond Killeany, and turned that way at last; but as I turned, a voice, a cough (a sheep perhaps?), nearly jumped me out of my skin, filled me with a momentary terror. Then at my back in a gap in the retaining wall a figure slid down. ‘God to you,’ he said to me in Irish, an unearthly notion at an unearthly time of night, to which I was lost for speech to return him the correct response, ‘God and Mary to you’. It was doubly dark under the wall but light enough to tell a man’s bulk (not great), and you don’t need eyes to know if he is sober. He asked me for a light (in Irish he would ask for ‘a reddener’, something to redden the end of the cigarette, as readers of James Joyce will know) and although I didn’t smoke I had my matches, to make a fire, or to ease my way to a candle should it still be dark when I went in. I struck a match for him and attempted to cup it but it blew out at once, making everything darker in its brief aftermath. I fumbled and struck another and held it while the man, cupping his own hands half about mine, nursed the flame to his half stub of a Sweet Afton. I saw not enough to know him by but a glimpse of the cigarette pack in his horny hand.

Though we walked half the island together in the dark, talking sporadically, mostly about how and why I had come to be on Aran, on which he passed no comment, I could never know him again, by sight at least. He would have been able to pick me out as the stranger beyond at Kil-na-cer, but if he ever saw me on the road he chose not to show it. By chance I did in the end identify him, one wild night in Kilronan, in the summer months, in Conneely’s American Bar. I recognized his drunken, semi-coherent story, with its memorable refrain: ‘Three days and nights … three days and nights … with a dead man in a curragh before we were washed up on the shores of County Clare.’

It was a classic story. They’d been fishing when the seas uprose. A man went overboard and was swept away. By a miracle they came (but too late) upon his body. They heaved him aboard, but were now an oarsman short, and a drowned corpse the heavier, and the sea took them, but could not capsize them. I had spoken, inevitably, of my crossing, it still looming large in my tender mind, and said I hoped one day nonetheless to find someone to take me out in a curragh. It launched him on his tale of what the sea had done to him, and how I should be wise and keep my feet upon the land and not be tempting fate. Even the dry land had its sea-perils. ‘I think I know every … or a lot of things and every drowning that ever happened in this island,’ he advised me, and he spoke of an incident when fifteen men had drowned, in the year of 1852 on the flagstones by Killeany. It was an incident of which I would often hear tell. The only drowning of which I heard in my time was of a youth on Inishmaan, swept from a rock while fishing. By the time my companion came to part from me, down some obscure passage on the outskirts of Kilronan, he had entered into the jocular island-of-doom mode. ‘Ah, but it does be a Mickey Mouse country now, altogether, and no mistake, all Mickey Mouse, amn’t I telling you? Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. They do be the men of Aran for you now.’

The watches of the night are long and made to sap your wildest waking dreams. By three or surely by four in the morning who would not regret being still upon the road, who set out from home at half past midnight to find the morning? When is the dawn? When will the thinning day begin? I walked until I ran out of road and, stumbling hopelessly upon the dunes, turned and walked the way I’d come, through the tucked-up shadows of Killeany and Kilronan, my new boots galling. With the night at last blowing fitfully clear and starry I found the old road and set out upon it, a road that seemed interminable but one with scarce an incline.

I heard the morning before I saw it, rattling with rain at my window, droning and clattering round the house, pushing the rude day in my face, reproaching me for a malingerer without use or purpose. Your own company can seem at times to be too much like the middle of the night for comfort, without a star in sight, and the rain coming on, cutting a swathe across the kitchen floor. So I roused myself to stir the grate and get my porridge warming, and went to my oilskin’s copious inner pocket to retrieve the rashers of bacon, but mysteriously I failed to find them there, nor any kindling, nor cheese, nor bread of any kind, as if I’d dreamt about them. But then, as I puzzled and wondered if I wasn’t going mad, or if I hadn’t indeed risen from a peculiarly potent dream, I found them swinging in the bottom of the lining.

The rain fell, and would continue to fall all day and night and for three days more. It blew upon a gathering storm, and flattened the view against my window, so that the sea shooting high above the distant rocks looked as if it erupted from Bartley Feaney’s garden.