5. Solitude and Sea Pie

The island’s winter storm-wakes sometimes brought fog, and then solitude seemed to intensify in the attendant muffled silence that amplified the crash and back-roar of the sea. You heard the sea as clear as crystal but heard much more the silence that enveloped it and enveloped you. Enormous silence carried you on straining ears, stumbling at the end of the world, listening for landfall, dreaming of the tolling bell. It was like the end of the world when fog came down. Your mind becalmed seemed to creak and echo hollowly under its oppression. You could think yourself anywhere beyond Finistère and Malin Head, looking for Hy-Brasil or Atlantis, or Cape Cod or Nantucket. You must feel your way home, or search for it still deeper in the submarine fog induced by Guinness. You must light the lamp and skulk indoors and dry your clothes before the fire. You must retreat. You must sink down, to a kind of crustacean consciousness. But what you wanted was to be outside, harvesting seaweed or, in my case, jetsam, newly disgorged on the landward shore to supplement my coals.

We had many field days along the strand as the year sank down, by shorter and shorter strides, to the foot of dank December, when grey puddles swam in the lane and the turlough behind the bay filled and stayed, an inland haunt for the half-spent light of winter. Weed rolled man-deep in the waves and broke their fall, making the sea seem oily and slow, though it ran clear as aerated spring water through the tangled yellow-brown, red-brown fronds, and claw-footed limbs, and all the detritus of shipboards that would dry in the tide-mark among the weed and sand, or jam among the rocks that edged the bay, to be smoothed and shaped and salt-dried. The taste of brine and weed hung on the air in heavy concentrations, and dripped from the ocean fog. Distilled, you might say, it lay limpid at low tide, preserving sea-anemones among the finer weeds and barnacles, and other dormant rockpool specimens. Had you woken to find salt on your lips and seaweed draped about your bed and fishes in your piss-pot, it would hardly have surprised you at such times. Three days and nights, three days and nights, as the fisherman said, with a dead man in a curragh, soused by the mobile mineral sea. The mewling gull roosts overhead adrift upon your chimney. Wake and listen to your heartbeat, full fathom five, among the island’s innumerable drowned. Think of all the monuments to drowned fishermen along the roadsides, looking out to sea.

The survivors, for so they were, came down to the shore to gorge on the glut of weed. Homespun men, and men in miscellaneous trousers and jackets of worn-out Sunday bests, under napless peaked caps, berets and bonnets, with their mythic weed-draped dromedaries, sealed in the noise of the sea, they overlapped history, as the waves overlapped and coughed up their kelp with a crump and a long inhalation. Squelching stalks and foliage about their boots, raking and forking with their tines like beardless Neptunes, their collective motto seemed to be: ‘Seaweed for the cultivation of roots.’ Rootedness, I liked to think, was what I most desired, for all that I had so impatiently uprooted myself, for we all have roots, whatever the mix of the soil. I prized it, anyway, in the island people. Their stoical lives seemed to chasten me and I wanted to live as they did. Community, however damaged, is the angel of locality. Sometimes on the island still, as at even these latter-day free-for-all weed gatherings, its spirit triumphed over necessity and exile. You had always to think when looking on the people there how familiar they were with each other from childhood, how interwoven all their worlds, how intimate, no matter that those worlds had broken and were still breaking up, as all worlds always are, but seldom so dramatically, on such an open stage, under the wide roof of the Atlantic sky.

By far my best find at that time was the head of an old fork, discovered not by the sea but among rocks and undergrowth behind my house. I saw its purpose at a glance, and once I had banged the soil and the rotten timber of the shaft from its socket I put it to its use, across the basket of my fire. There at the full height and centre of the fire, it enabled me to balance three pots or pans in a row without danger of them tilting and spilling as the coals subsided. It made the pots more efficient, too, by keeping them clear of tar. When my coals were especially low and I didn’t want to wait for new fuel to ignite and burn, I could take the benefit of the embers by inserting the fork between the lower bars and thereby bring the kettle quicker to the boil. I found as well thrown up on the shore a square of hardboard which I used in combination with my damper board, to make my fire roar. By tailoring it a little and securing it across the open fire, braced behind a length of fishing cord slung between two nails, and removing the damper I’d constructed already, I could create a fierce updraft that made the dullest embers spark and flare. As the furnace roared it seemed to suck in air beneath the door and with it blow the starlings round the wintry sky to cool their toes. In this way I made the most of my coals and firewood, burning no more than a bucket of coal a day, except on wash days, bath days, and days of bitter weather. I consciously thought that I made the most of myself too, given the circumstances, in that dimension of life that thrives upon inventive making and patient making do, the little rhythms of simple domesticity. Often through my stay, on raw mornings, as I felt its cold metal rust-pocked haft, or at porridge hour or other cooking times, as I took a cloth in my hand to move the grill it made nearer the heat or farther from it, I relished the plain utility of my discovery.

I also disentangled from the carnage on the strand four orange marker-buoys and a broken lobster pot, and kept these by as the purest boon for future piscatorial adventures. But already I was short of line, through suffering so many early losses, and as yet could only dream of fishing five lines in the one night’s tide. The repair of the lobster pot would require wire and the discovery of pliable wood. It was of a barrel shape and caved in at one end. I could see it reconstructed in my mind’s eye and knew where I would leave it, at the farthest margin of the tide, for lobster or for crab – I wouldn’t be choosy. But for now it smelled so strongly of the sea that I put it in the pigsty. I built my shrines of timber too, and piecemeal retrieved them from the shore until I had as much as I could care to house, with a few still-resinous props of pine and hefty planks laid out upon bare bedsprings in the end room, a wooden wake, a sacrifice awaiting the saw and consignment to the flames. The first frosts of the winter made fossil and fern patterns on the panes, inside and out, and the house stood cold just a yard back from the hearth. The chasm of my kitchen drew the heat away at once and killed it dead. When the weather turned muggy and close, the rain took less than a day to sop the sacks I used to keep it out and ran across the kitchen floor from front to back.

I look back with some incredulity at those days most of all, between what you could hardly call the honeymoon of my arrival and my eventual establishment, or half-awkward standing, among my hosts. I was the archetypal uninvited stranger. They called me, in the Irish idiom, ‘the stranger’. That was both to each other and to my face, whenever I met two or more of them and my business came into discussion. It was natural to the people’s usage but being unfamiliar to mine I was amused to feel its weight the more. Otherwise I was ‘mister’ and ‘sir’ or ‘the gentleman’, but, at least, never ‘your honour’, I am pleased to say. Several weeks would go by before the Feaneys used my first name, but that was a matter of old-world manners and reciprocated shynesses. Still more time passed before I could begin to accompany Gregory about his work, or help the family, wallpapering a bedroom (together with the schoolmaster), or clipping the privet hedge (a bit of a disaster). Although I planned to connive at working in the fields with Gregory and Bartley, I was content enough for now to let things fall out as they would. If I must subsist on a verbal diet of ‘Fine evening’ exchanged upon the road, of ‘God to you’ and ‘God and Mary to you’, with a little gossip at the Feaneys’ hearth thrown in, or an occasional audience with Michael Gill, then so I would.

The unspoken part of my days was as huge as the windblown sky above. And so it was for many islanders too. We all lived in a solitude that seemed to darken the heart as winter took its hold, and days grew short, and nights were long. One man at Kil-na-cer, in his early thirties at most, living alone in the new bungalow, never spoke a word to me from November to October, though we often met upon the road and, if I did not call a greeting, I nearly always nodded to him, or gestured with beseeching glances, ready to nod, in the willing way that you do. In fact I rarely saw him detained with anyone for more than the briefest of exchanges. It seemed to me he lived a life of terrible intensity and inexplicable urgency, haring off down the island every day in a kind of madness. Such lives were conditioned not just by weather and wilderness, solitude and, in most cases, material poverty, but by relentless poverty of prospect too. Hence, for most of the older and settled people, the necessity of their ardent faith, the kneeling in the road before the cross, as I had vividly seen, the endless ill-afforded donations in small envelopes to St Martin of Porres, the promises of priests, the need to invest in some other world, beyond even America, to get by.

Little wonder then that I, reticent by nature, born into the Protestant tradition (though I’ve always scorned all organized forms of religion) and such a very young man, with a wife, or what was it amiss there? following what business precisely? – should need time to come into his own, whatever his own might prove to be. It’s easy not to realize how very young a person is at twenty-two, when you’re the person concerned. As I write this now, I contemplate my son approaching that age. He’s not half the fool I was, I’m afraid to say.

One Sunday, in those early days, I made a new acquaintance. Finding myself in Kilronan after a long walk across the island, down the lanes from the village of Gort na gCapall (garden, or meadow, of the horses), I was drawn by a gathering crowd (relatively speaking, a crowd) to the village hall and went in to see the pictures showing there: some documentary footage about life in England after the war, with impeccably manicured Ealing Studios voice-over. This quaint performance was followed by Hollywood in the persons of Tom and Jerry and, as the big feature, Glenn Ford starring in The Sheepman. Than which what better choice in an island noted for its feuds, its large-boned creamy ewes, and its cottage industry of knitting? When at last in that film the hero shot the villain, the audience rattled their chairs and cheered with delight, before dispersing home on foot, far and near, under the windswept stars. But I found I could not suspend my disbelief or sit for long without thinking of the wilderness outside as backdrop to what flashed and flickered on the screen.

By chance as we left I fell in with Dara Flaherty. A short, lean man with spectacles, a French beret, and an eager, intelligent face, he seemed deliberately to catch my eye and said hello. He lived not far from Oatquarter. In the summer we would often meet to fish, on the low Atlantic rocks below the high cliffs of Blind Sound, in the long shadow of Dún Aengus. He had been out of Aran many years and seen the world, as so many had. Although it amused him to hear of my adventure, he took it in his stride. We spoke about the recent trawler accident – it was on the lips of all the world: ‘and not so much as a splinter found’. Inevitably, it seemed, he told me of the 1852 disaster when fifteen men from Killeany were dashed against the rocks by a wave and drowned. And at once, as he pushed his bike beside me up the high hill road, he recited a song, as he called it, a pious little monody it proved, written by a visiting priest, to commemorate the tragedy. He later copied the poem for me. I have it now beside me as I received it, on four blue, lined sheets of writing paper, held together by a pin, and, with the help of a literal translation, I have since made out this version:

young-grasses rock

i

One autumn morning

When all was sweet

No malice in the wind or air,

The glorious sun

Shone warm and genial,

Gently disposed

To the whole wide world.

ii

It was the feast of Glorious Mary,

The year of 1852,

When a crowd of young men,

Bold and quick,

Went fishing at

Young-grasses Rock.

iii

They saw a great mound

Moving near them,

Easy and lazy,

A clumsy sea-monster:

A powerful wave

That now bore boldly down.

iv

Nor did they think as need was

To make it from the shore

But tended to their tackle

Till the rocks ran with a roar,

And met the power

Of the leaping wave.

v

Alas! was no escaping

The vile wild wave that hung

Heavy on high above the rocks,

And all the brave men doomed

Upon the flagstones drowned.

vi

Its power now bent and broken

Upon the flagstones bare,

The wave sank home:

My thousand sorrows’ care

But it went not empty.

vii

For it swept upon the fierce edge

Fifteen men in the flower of bravery,

Leaving sorrow and tears

And heartbreak to

The people of Killeany.

viii

Sorrow and torment

In Killeany that day,

As fathers, mothers

And loving relations,

Mournful and demented,

Wept and lamented,

Keening the strong men

Who’d never return.

ix

Early they rose that morning

Cheerful and strong,

Filled with hope

And light of heart,

But to lay happiness

Upon a bier

Before night fell.

x

O here is a sign to heed,

To judge not what is before us

Or put our souls in pawn,

For we must save the harvest

Before our hour be flown.

xi

Who knows in what place

Or on what shore

Death will come

To sweep him on his way?

So must we be upon our guard

And ready for the day.

xii

That tragedy our lesson

Swift and sudden

Upon Young-grasses Rock,

Their souls swept to heaven

Lost in the sleep of life.

When he had told it to me once, he told it to me again, translating and glossing each line as he went, halting on the hill to comment. He spoke it with a dying rhythm in a keening nasal tone that my uneven, artless version fails entirely to recapture, although I understand the original to be also wanting in art.*

‘Never trust the sea,’ he said, ‘there’s the lesson in it, even on dry land.’

The priest’s homiletic designs didn’t seem to impose on him at all. But Dara was a sceptic, of sorts.

‘The Man of Aran? You know what you can do with the Man of Aran,’ he once scoffed, complaining to me, as we stood before the ocean, at the corner of the Sound, how his wife had tried to dissuade him from his fishing to go into Kilronan for a showing of Flaherty’s famous film.

‘Fuck the Man of Aran,’ he said.

We used to fish on the low ledges as the tide came in, exposed to the sea’s vagaries, though never to more than a large seventh roller, just like those fifteen men. But then that night we reached the brow and he swung astride his bike and sailed off down the road. It was a perishing night, above a restless, roaring sea. The wind brightened the stars and my nose and ears until they too shone and rang with cold.

For myself I agree with the man who said that the only religious act we can securely perform is to wash ourselves well. I normally conducted my devotions with a kettle of hot water and a jug of cold over an old-fashioned washstand before my bedroom window. On Sunday mornings, as I stood there shivering naked, looking out at the day over the half of net curtain, I would sometimes see the Feaneys ride by bound for Mass. Raised on the side-car, just above the wall, they went aslant as the Big Fella took them carefully down the little hill, Gregory in his best jacket and cap, Mrs Feaney and Mary in their newest headscarves, a blanket about their knees. They seemed the image and epitome of stability and familial devotion. They once struck up a commotion just past my house where a neighbour had two pigs in one of the gardens. The horse wouldn’t pass the pigs, as is common with horses where pigs are concerned, especially squealing pigs. It reared up and backed away, giving Mrs Feaney and Mary a rocky time. In the end they had to dismount and Gregory had to lead the horse on. But even that required a lot of oaths in Irish before they could get off to commune with their god.

My more solemn observances were also taken weekly, in the tin bath. There I would huddle before my maker, knees up by my ears, feet out or feet in, shins scorching, back chill, until driven to disembark and turn about. Or, grinding the bath round, water slopping, I’d go port or starboard on, and, getting briefly comfortable, soak a while and meditate upon my new-found lot or merely stare into the fire, listening to the wind about the house, the little cymbal tinkling at my door, the mice adventuring in the loft. Or if conditions were favourable I’d tune my ailing radio to some talk or music.

What was I doing there? It sometimes needed to be asked. Ostensibly I had come to see what it was like and how the people lived upon the island, not in the easy tourist season but at the worst time of the year. I’d come for more obscure reasons too, to put the world behind me and the glib hot-air talk of educated work, to test myself against solitude and hardship. I had not come believing I might stay forever, though now and then I wondered how I might contrive to. ‘But avoid introspections,’ I wrote in my journal, ‘keep on the outside. The world is all outside to be seen’; and I might have pencilled it on my whitewashed chimney-breast along with my hearthstone’s questionable epigraph – ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’ – had I been so bold.

One night, quite late in December (my journal shows me it was Friday, 20 December), my bathing rites were disturbed. I’d stood up and was dripping in mid-manoeuvre when I heard voices and several people – I couldn’t say how many – jumping my stile and seeming to surge towards my door. I had neither lamp nor candle lit to suggest I was at home, only an outsize fire burning. I stepped as I was into my trousers, dragged a sweater over my head and squirmed into my boots. In my urgency I banged against a chair I’d set beside the bath and knocked my radio into the tub. It was playing through a gauze of interference an orchestral concert, transmitted I believe from Dublin. I snatched it out but not before the seeds of fatal damage were sown. I crossed and stood at an angle to the window to see, without stirring the curtain, what lay in store for me outside. But the firelight was strong enough to obscure the night against the glass. After a studied attempt at silence, broken by murmurings and whisperings, they – whoever they were – rapped at my door.

I stood upon a chair and lit my lamp and called, ‘Come in’. I had by now guessed they were a benign party, for most of the voices sounded youthful and were suddenly very audibly accompanied by cowbells. They pushed the door wide and a crowd of young red faces surged forward. At their head a young boy proffered a china pig for money. Then at some signal that escaped me they began at once to sing in Irish a Christmas carol of what I considered to be unusual duration. From the volume they produced it was clear there were several more of them and some adults gathered in the garden. I looked out what change I had and duly pressed the coins into the back of the pig as they sang, then stepped to stand before my bath, peculiarly wishing to hide it from view. The singers’ faces looked oddly immobile beyond their mouths, but their eyes swept eagerly about the room and held me under close inspection. We stared at each other, I smiling encouragement, and they singing earnestly, edging further into the room and beginning to look more freely about them. It was indeed a carol of uncommon length and both performers and audience began to feel the strain of it. I didn’t know where to look, and they began to get distracted from their words, to stumble and to mouth out of time with the more resolute, older voices outside. Then they stopped singing as abruptly as they had begun, in medias res as it seemed, and shuffled backwards into the night. I went to the door and called aloud, ‘Thank you very much’, and was met by a chorus of ‘HAPPY CHRISTMAS’ that might have been heard by the stars. I stood in my damp clothes and listened to them as they went around the village, singing at every home.

Christmas was coming but if the goose was getting fat I had no prospective share in it. Neither had I plans nor inkling as to how I would pass the festivities. Would they be the first I’d spend on my own? And why not just ignore it, if I was anything of the philosopher I aspired to be? I thought that I would dine on rabbit, having by now perfected a method of taking them through the drystone wall above Kilmurvey Bay. The rabbits had their burrows in the last steep field that ran down to the road beside the bay. At night they slipped through the gaps in the bottom of the wall and went to graze in the long fields back towards the village, a plague in a country where green was so rare a shade. Their runs were plain to see, enabling me to reduce those with access through the wall to three or four by plugging the surplus gaps with rocks. Then round about midnight, when even the latest late-night drinker was likely to be snoring, far adrift, and no one was around to stumble on me, I’d make a circuit from our village through the back end of Kilmurvey, past the ball alley, and down onto the road, to walk back towards the bay. I’d jump the wall beside the bay and, locating the gaps I’d left, set a purse net in the mouth of each. (A purse net is a device like a string bag on a drawstring. You poke the bottom part of the mouth of the net through onto the floor of the hole with a stick. Then you spread the rest of the net, tethering it by hooking its meshes on points and angles of the stone and pinning it lightly into position with little sticks. The end of the drawstring is tethered to a stake or, where the topsoil is thin, you tie it as I did around a boulder. My father had taught me such nefarious tricks in my boyhood.)

I was always elaborately cautious not to leave my scent or otherwise to scare my supper. So I walked back the way I had come, stopping off at home to steam my porridge and take a cup of coffee and maybe scribble a little, before going out again, at about two in the morning, to approach my nets from the Kilmurvey end. I walked zig-zag as fast as I could through first one field then the other, driving as I hoped my supper before me. Had I been more fond of their flesh I might have made a serious impact on the local rabbit population. But I took one only once in a while, to vary my menu, or fill a gap, when the bacon I now ordered up from Galway failed to get through, when the weather was also too wild to fish, and the butcher’s meat was finished for the week.

So I toyed with the idea of rabbit for Christmas. But then next morning I received my invitation to join the Feaneys at their table. I looked forward to nothing more. I went off to Kilronan, straight away, to buy in a bottle or two of drink that I might bring to oil the occasion. With two and nearly three months behind me now, I began at last to feel at home. In response to this feeling, or as an expression of it, finding little attraction in the ‘hurly-burly’ of Kilronan and the lure of its dim lights, I had already started, unconsciously at first, to keep my orbits local. If I walked, I found I walked westwards. Then deliberately, on into the spring, I began to say that if I ever went to Kilronan again I’d never do so more than once a month. I pledged my hours to the wilderness.

If I went a circuit for the day with my kindling and folding frying pan, my quarter of soda bread, my rashers and my Heinz baked beans, my wedge of Galtee processed cheese, I rose early and travelled at my leisure to the west, either along the landward shore, to Lough Dearg and on beyond, clambering and venturing, back-tracking here and there the better to advance around the rocky storm-beach, or outward by Dún Aengus and the cliffs, until I made the shore to the west below Bungowla, hard by the ocean or the Sound. There are really only three settlements between Kil-na-cer and Bungowla – Sruffaun, the village of Onaght, and Craggancareen – and I bypassed them all in going on my way. Nor need I set foot in Bungowla itself, coming round by the long low fields to the north, where the shore runs green and the sea can seem to lap like a lake across to Connemara. I did not care to. I craved the empty seaborne world as if it were a heaven. I cannot say I cared nothing for the weather, for the weather was more than integral to all there was: it was most of what there was, giving character to sky and sea and stone. If the day blew wild I felt different from when it was calm, just as I progressed differently, of that there’s no denying, but either way I took things as they came and welcomed the variety. Let it pick me to pieces as if I was inanimate, by still fine rain or by the teeth of the wind. I loved nothing more than to tuck myself in among the rocks with a bit of driftwood and cook my snack. No such thing as a cooked snack was needed but I made one the focus of my day, the fire at the heart of it, beside the greater fire of the sea.

Only at the edge of the world can you see what a cambered and containing place earth is, how everything is somehow hooped about it, and within it. Here the passage of a black-backed gull bent upon the wind, the plummet of a peregrine, the white sea horses galloping to or from America, or the gyrations of a stoat threading in and out among the boulders and rocks, as if it tried to hold me mesmerized, might be all the life I’d see, except for the life that light leads, in sea or in stone, making even grey disintegrate and scatter into colour. Travel now at once, if you doubt me, and sail to the island. There sit out and search for anything that is or stays a single colour and is not atomized into an entire spectrum by the falling ocean light.

Sometimes when the sea was boisterous and I was looping back along the cliffs, wall-hopping along the dizzy edge from Lough Murvey to Dún Aengus, I’d go a little further out of my way to the jumble of rocks to seaward of Gort na gCapall and walk along to see the sea glug up and down and spray out spume in Poll na bPeist (worm or serpent hole), the deep and perfectly rectangular trough, like a swimming pool, as everyone remarks, that lay cut, by some bizarre geological freak, in the broad ledge beside the open Atlantic. Returning from the hole after such a day’s vigorous adventure, a gloomy mixed bag of a day, the Sunday before Christmas Eve, I happened on a scene that led me to disaster. I had never walked straight across the island at its narrowest point before, so tempted by the novelty I cut across the desert rock into the gloaming, among the walls and crevices and glacial boulders, until I could lower myself down into the boreen that ran from Gort na gCapall to the bay at Kilmurvey. By now I was thinking warmly of home, of starting my fire and settling in, as I came along the high-walled track and round where the fields fell more openly to view. The light had almost thinned away to nothing but still veered in the turlough among the little flock of waders – oyster-catchers, sandpipers – and gulls that shrilled and whistled and harried there throughout the months of middle winter. Rain spat on the gusting breeze and shadows now grew fast below the walls and spread towards the water, touching it with a last brief intensity of light along one shore.

It was then I noticed the two men. They eased themselves over the wall, away down by the road. Any figure in the landscape would have held my attention, for I had been a day without sight of a single soul. But these two passed guns between them as they climbed into the field. So I drew back in the shadows and watched them as they came, stalking, half stooping, towards the birds about the turlough. They had no real cover and were forced to shoot as the birds began to stir and wheel in little restless arcs that touched the ground or water, only to leave again, in an instant, as if upon some current of electricity. The men fired two barrels each and then a fifth shot, wildly it seemed, into the shrill cloud as it swept in confusion about the water, above the rocks, and away to the safety of the shore. The gunshots resounded briefly before being snaffled by the air. Three or four birds lay dead or flapping in the shallow water. A single wounded oyster-catcher limped and fluttered away.

The men picked up and despatched their prey but did not seem to have seen where the wounded bird had gone to. They wandered up and down a while. I heard their voices muffled on the breeze. Night had almost fallen and it was hard to pick out the men until they moved, or make out boulder or wall from field and water. Even the water had sunk into the dark. I had kept my eye upon the oyster-catcher and taken a fix on the boulder by which I had seen it last, fifty or more yards away. I leant back in by the wall and waited. A burst of rain blew across and fell a while and at last the men retired. But I waited until they must be well upon their way before I climbed into the field. I had to circle the water in the dark and find my way to where I could – or could I? – pick out the boulder behind which I thought the wounded bird had gone to hide.

I located what I believed was the rock but the bird was nowhere to be found. I walked a little farther on and strained my eyes to see. I took a few steps more and then turned back and walked in another direction from the boulder, to the far wall, and so on, and round, tenaciously, all but blind. I returned to the boulder and upon an impulse felt round it in the grass and discovered about its base little crannies and hollows where the grass was inaccessible to grazing beasts, and that was where I found the broken creature, with splayed wing and bent neck, its long bill nose down in the grass. It didn’t so much as move as I picked it up. There was, however, just life left in it and so, knowing the shock of what had befallen it would kill it even were its bodily wounds to mend, I tapped its head on the rock and slipped it into my pocket.

By common standards oyster-catcher or sea-pie is no delicacy. But by my standards at that time the promise of fresh meat, however small the morsel, was a promise to anticipate with pleasure. Why else had the men come down to shoot, even on the Lord’s day? Weren’t we all in a similar, if not the same, boat? I had wondered, I must say. The curlew, when it has been upon the moor from spring to summer’s end, can seem almost as tasty as grouse. But once it has wintered a few weeks on the shore, the flesh turns saline. There had been no curlews at the turlough, the curlew being a wily and watchful creature, but these smaller shoreline waders would be no different case, I knew. I don’t believe the oyster-catcher ever strays far or for long from the vicinity of the sea. It nests among the pebbles and its long cry never mingles with the even longer limpid note of the curlew away in the sedgy-peat-moss salt-free air and water of the uplands. I knew all this but still I savoured the prospect of my sea-pie.

The word ‘oyster’ alone, of course, makes people nod sagely. Sometimes I forget how ill I felt, how feverish, how I could keep nothing inside me, how tender and painful; and, knowing how devious our subconscious manoeuvres can be, I have even doubted I was that ill at all. But I was more than ill enough not to trust to luck. By the time the nurse arrived – there was no doctor – it was the eve of Christmas Eve. I swear that when she leant over me, pressing my abdomen, asking did it ever hurt me here (yes), or here (yes), I could smell alcohol on her breath – a drop of something seasonal taken somewhere on the way, but hardly inspiring of confidence, unless I was hallucinating. ‘Running a temperature,’ she said, and put on her gloves. Tightening the belt on her blue gabardine, snapping her bag shut, an odd, portly figure she cut, with a face and eye that even in the failing twilight of my room reminded me of a Christmas turkey, its wattles full of faintly purple blood. She said she thought it would be wise to go into hospital in Galway. As good luck had it, so she judged, the steamer would come out in the morning, returning to Galway by the islands.

What would you have done? I agreed to go. It was my fortune’s lowest ebb. But I remembered how cousin Norman had died of neglected peritonitis, out on a remote Galloway holding. I recalled the story of the uncle in that same country, gored by a bull. He suffered so much pain he tore his mattress to shreds, and died before help arrived, to enter the family rattlebag of horror stories. It was not as though the hazards of living in remote, inaccessible places were not well documented. Done to death by an oyster-catcher? It seemed inglorious. If I must go, I tried to joke, I would go with a little more style than that. But in truth I was ill that night and had often to go outside into the lashing rain to the pigsty. I was feverish. I was sore. I slept and sweated or lay awake, cold as a corpse. Fear came upon me, and my heart lay heavier than the sands of the sea.

There are things we remember for no necessary reason and things we similarly forget, or seem to forget, conveniently or otherwise. Whether we truly forget anything or only misplace the clues to recollection is a question for philosophers and psychologists to ponder. But still I cannot bring to mind how it was I reached the pier and boarded the Naomh Eanna. I made no record of it and, scratch my head as I may, I cannot recall leaving home or crossing the bar of Aran, or any moment of that sorrowful departure, although the elements are few and their possible permutations limited enough to permit of easy invention. I remember only fragments of the voyage (much of it spent ‘below’): the curraghs coming out from Inishmaan to take ashore returning islanders, and mailbags; and the enormous gloom, for the heavens were opened (though I saw no visions of God); and the waters beaded with rain, as reluctantly I entered a new captivity. The gloom and the rain seemed ponderously unnatural. It rained and never stopped, out of a still black sky.

We ground on, I remember, as if the voyage too would never stop, on to Inishere. Sandswept and desolate in the dark light it lay, and the curraghs darted through the rain over the oil-black millpond. It cut you to think that people lived out there and depended in this way for their survival. I forget if there were any to go ashore but remember being from that point on alone on the ship as she turned for home, except for a man from New Zealand and his son, who had come out for the trip. ‘At least,’ I managed to say, across the saloon, for we sat at opposite ends, ‘the sea is calm.’

I had not shaved since reaching Aran, and must have cut a somewhat queer figure huddled in my trench-length oilskin. My rusty stubble had thickened only slowly, so that I seemed more unshaven than bearded, and thereby less than respectable. I told the New Zealanders my story as summarily as I could. I didn’t really want to talk to them, nor they to me. Tell someone you are ill and on your way to hospital and they’ll look at you oddly anyway, with a kind of uneasy suspicion, as if what you have might be contagious, as if death has put its finger on you, especially if you seem at all unwholesome, a head case, or somehow otherwise unaccommodated. So, understandably, the New Zealanders were not sure how to take me. But they soon preferred to leave me and went about the ship to watch the rain lash down upon the Burren and darken the dour headland which, even in fair weather, is known as Black Head. A crewman came in and talked to me a while, joking about the rain.

‘I wonder is it raining on the moon?’ he laughed, and at my incomprehension said did I not know there were men this moment going round the moon? ‘Two hundred thousand miles from earth,’ he said expansively, could I think of it? It was on the radio. ‘And here we are,’ he grinned, gesturing at what remained of the day outside, ‘just twenty miles from Galway.’

I went out to take a little air myself. The deluge was so great it seemed to seal the world and you could think that you were on a voyage without destination or single plane of operation. You might, for example, sail straight across County Clare, or, right up into orbit to circumnavigate the moon. Still feverish and miserable, I felt as if I was in orbit, going round and round, remote from things, travelling into space, and somehow thought it to be pointedly poignant to be there, on Christmas Eve, dreaming of the tolling bell, cursing my luck, if not the day I was born.