6. Christmas (Christmas!)

‘Religion?’

‘None.’

The young woman, in her white uniform, exchanged a glance with her colleague, then looked superciliously across the counter at me, through the divided window.

‘You must have a religion,’ she said, resting her hands on the register, twiddling her biro.

‘My religion is to have no religion,’ I said as clearly as I could.

What kind of an answer was that? A new one on her, evidently. She wasn’t pleased. She had other things to do.

‘Protestant?’ she asked impatiently. ‘I have to enter a religion in the book. In case anything happens.’

‘What?’ I asked.

She frowned and then, finally, laughed.

‘Why?’ I continued, thinking I’d now got the upper hand, queer fellow as I must have seemed.

Her colleague giggled and turned away.

‘I have no religion,’ I insisted.

It was a matter of importance to me. But ‘Protestant’, she said, and wrote it down, and sent me on my way, too feeble to protest, with directions to the ward.

In those days, it seems to me, hospitals dwelt in a special kind of light, a kind of bleak fifties fluorescence, and an odour of stale flesh, subdued by the tang of sanitation. And now, I found, they dwelt in sanctity too. I was no expert on the subject but this one definitely seemed to me also to belong to another age. It belonged anyway to another world, as they all do, to no man’s land, to limbo, to the world of thin partitions, fragility, tragedy and comedy, age and grief and deliverance, and every cliché you ever heard concerning our mortal condition, including the indomitable human spirit.

I slept brokenly that night but when I went, I sank submarine-deep, from the moment I got into my long shift and lay myself down. Questioning by nurses and doctors, to undergo prodding and probing (up my arse), to provide blood samples, to bare my poor lean rump and take a shot, and another shot, awoke me in a daze. They dragged me up. I looked into their earnest faces and sank back down. But I stirred too at hearing in the dead of night the coughs, splutters and ramblings of my fellow patients. Here were old men a-dying, some of them – old men complaining, joking, cursing, groaning, rambling, farting, snoring, old men with side rails round their beds to stop them falling out, or roaming.

I hadn’t been in such terminally moribund society before, except once when I was a boy visiting my dying grandfather, who had cancer of the throat and could speak no more the bagpipe music that I used to love, whose favourite I knew I was. All he could do was creak and wheeze and gasp through his ruined chanter. Here were men like that on their last wind, forget their legs. Or had I in fact died en route and was now in a purgatory I’d never believed in, next step the operating theatre, and so on, out again to the island and back, and round and round for ever, in fair and foul weather? After my two months of solitary, I might be excused a bit of lunacy. Anyway, bedlam and babel reigned on the ward, especially with the likes of Loughrea’s own uncontainable Pat Bourke there to wake even the dead, loud and vociferous, making his defiant nightly progress, bull-necked and pyjama’d, thrusting his arms into his dressing gown, rolling his burly way down the long ward bound for home, defying all comers in the politest terms. He was always keen to go home in the early hours of the morning, as who might not be, though first he had to call at such and such a place in Galway, Athenry or Ballinasloe where his sons were at a dance. It was always two in the morning and the cows hadn’t been milked. Those boys would be the death of him, haring about the country.

Every night the ritual was the same. They said he’d taken a knock to the head. He had a fine head, a high – but now slightly puzzled – brow, and he held it up as he went, fixed on some private far horizon. During the day he’d calm down and talk quietly to the man next to him, telling him where he’d just been, reeling off names – Craughwell, Ballydavid, Portumna, Kilreekil, Kilchreest, Kilimor, Derrybrien, Gort, Aughrim … looking for his sons, buying a horse, selling sheep, seeing a man about a five-barred gate. He was never quiet for long. I expect the drugs he was on waxed and waned in their effects. Soon he’d be calling to the man across the way, shouting out to know the news, and if there wasn’t any news, then ‘a few lies’ would do. Anything was better than nothing. He spoke, he seemed to think, for the benefit of us all, for the collective morale, despite the occasional despairing cry to the contrary. ‘Och, shtap, shtap, won’t you ever!’ Then he’d maybe sleep but, once midnight came and went, up he’d stagger and away he’d be bound for Loughrea, the mere mention of which would bring derision to the lips of two or three who kept the long watch on the road to death and never seemed to catch more than a cat’s nap. Loughrea to a Galwegian? Ask a Parisian what he thinks of Brussels. But they turned him about at the double doors, the two sallow-skinned night orderlies, one of them a gentle, coaxing man, the other a bit of a brute who enjoyed his strong-arm opportunity too much.

Beyond the doors, at who knows what ungodly hour, resounded another rude awakening, some rumpus with a tinker tribe cavorting in the corridor, trying to get one of them a bed for the night, a soft billet for the duration of the ‘festivities’, it was said. Was it for this they had a cattle grid, a first line of defence, at the entrance, or to keep us in? I remembered the taxi thuddering over it. But what hour was it now? I’ve no idea. A lost hollow hour before midnight or equally featureless space before dawn, disjoined and without end. One thing I remember feeling most was a miserable sense of failure, of a dream lost. Now there was no way I could truly say I’d spent a year on Aran when I was a wild young man, a wild colonial boy. Perhaps I’d never get back there? I lay envisaging the island and my house and pined for them and for the broken plot of the story I’d written for myself. Imagine my hearth cold, and the rain running, like nature before the invention of the pitchfork, wild beneath my door. Imagine the wind soughing and blathering, the cymbal frantic at my doorknob, and the sea drawling and crashing and cascading on the rocks all the way from America. I imagined it, in fits and starts, but most of all I felt the rolling waves that took me down vertiginous depths of purest sleep into a morgue of stillness and repose. Was I exhausted? Was that what this was all about?

‘Rise and shine!’

It’s a false and cruel dawn indeed that calls the sick to muster, with mock cheer and banter, before even the hint of Christ’s daylight has touched the sky. ‘Rise and shine,’ they called in self-parody, the swing-doors wagging wildly behind them, the lights flickering to blinding attention, trolleys laden, bed pans rattling, ‘Rise and shine, boys! HAPPY CHRISTMAS!’ I looked out from one eye across at the man next to me. Dead or alive? He didn’t stir, jaw clenched in jaundiced sleep, a sleep like death, from which he roused at last as they returned and called again, and came by and said, ‘Come along now, Joseph Prendergast,’ as his mother might have done on a school day seventy or more years ago, pulling the covers from his clawed grasp, turning him, lifting him, bringing round the screen. For sure he’d need another note from mother today, asking to be excused games. I rolled over and peeped at my other neighbour, Tom the boy from Tuam, who’d chopped off his thumb under the edge of a refrigerator: Tom Thumb. He grinned and winked and gave me the thumb up.

I hauled myself onto my elbows and gazed around. Across the way another young man, from Sligo, with his leg in plaster suspended from a hook, waved at me, enquiring, ‘You are the one from Aran off the boat?’ I smiled and nodded and muttered inaudibly to him that I was. I realized his mistake. He was a lobsterman, he said; and he had a ruddy face like a cooked lobster, sanguine as a bowl of blood. He thought I was a fisherman, a trawlerman. I didn’t disoblige him and it gave me special heroic status with him through my stay. I was into acting, it seems. He liked to wink hard and wave across at me and ask me how I was, me with my rusty stubble and wild eye, waving and winking back.

The able-bodied walking wounded among us made shift with our towels and washbags. Wisecracking and grumbling along to the wash area, catheter tubes in one hand, plastic bladders in the other, stiff-legged but game to the last, the codgers gathered, from all the wards together, and I a fly-by-night among them, waiting to brush my teeth. It was no good lamenting, I quickly saw. Here was the unforeseen, relationless, perfection of being, the thing itself, bare forked animal, boarding in death’s border country, the common life, the poor people. What better? What had the world to offer that was more disencumbered, more real than this? Would I end up thanking my lucky stars to be there? I’ll leave you to be the judge of that. All I know is that the exertions of the washroom put me to sleep. How long I slept I can’t say but I woke not to the tinkling of a cymbal, as I might otherwise have done, but a small bell, heralding the priest on Christmas Day. I could see him from the corner of my eye coming down the row, blessing each patient, planting a wafer on one sleek or furry tongue after another, muttering a few words by way of blessing. As he came towards young Tom Thumb I shut my eyes and clamped my mouth. I heard him try to come to me and then a flurry and swish of his skirts and a nurse whispering something as she interposed herself between us in the little aisle beside the bed. What was it she whispered? Nil by mouth? Infidel? Anyway it was a moment of spiritual crisis allayed and he passed on about his master’s work, leaving me to my fate, dealing out wafers as if there was no tomorrow. Who’d know if there were? So the day swam on, in and out of sleep, up and down the tide of noise that ebbed and flooded, as round followed round, as one was wheeled out to die, they said, and another wheeled in. Doctors and nurses came and went, asking questions, taking down stories.

‘What happened?’

‘I fell off a wall.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Clifden.’

‘Did you pass any water?’ asks the doctor now.

‘D’you mean a bridge?’ puzzles the grizzled old codger, eyes staring.

(The whole ward seems to have heard and erupts in laughter. Even the dead come briefly back to life, to laugh.)

‘Did you eat at all? …’

‘Shtap, shtap!’ protests another, at the prospect of an injection. ‘Don’t be telling me it doesn’t hurt. I am me and I know.’

‘Come on now, Michael,’ two nurses circle the railed bed, one with hypodermic poised, and struggle with eighty-year-old flailing arms and kicking legs.

‘No, you don’t, look! … I’m warning you. I’ll break your faces if you come near me.’

‘Oh, Michael …’ He wrestles with one of them, clinging on to her wrist with his bony hand, and the other darts in with her dart.

‘Ach, you … bitches,’ he subsides, defeated, drawing up his shift to look at the spot.

‘Now you’re not going to say that hurt.’

‘Don’t you tell me what hurts me.’

‘It’s for your own good, Michael.’

‘You’re poisoning me, damn you, the pair of you.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘It’s for your own good. There now,’ drawing the sheet over his scrawny flank.

‘Good? Don’t tell me. I am me and I know. I never had one in my life before and I was never on my back in bed like this.’

‘Shtick, shtick,’ the boys from Tuam are urging Tom Thumb, suddenly come of age by a digit.

‘I am from Shpiddle,’ a grizzled old terrier calls across to me out of the blue. ‘I was in the Aran Islands myself fetching turfs in a hooker, forty years ago … All gone now … What age am I? Eighty-four. Eighty-five in the month of April. I will be going home in a week.’

Soon midday visitors rolled up, brazenly smuggling in bottles wrapped bottle-shape in crumpled brown paper, laughing and chattering, wishing happy Christmas to all and sundry.

I slept lightly after that and had a peculiar dream that I’d landed the Naomh Eanna on the moon. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. But I was brought back down to earth with a bump, the rap of drum, the not-so-Elysian strain of accordion music rehearsing, and a general commotion as a combo installed itself at the head of the ward. Beds were shunted side on to make a bigger dance floor. A snare-drum rapped and rolled, and purred sedately, under the brush, a fiddle and a whistle played, and the accordion squeezed in and out, jigs and reels for doctors and nurses, priest and visitors, and walking wounded to surge up and down the widened aisle, with shrieks and whoops and cries of pleasure, as the dancers sped faster and faster, louder and louder, now and then careering into a bed, jolting awake its slumped corpse, on and on, over and over, round and round, the musicians upright, deadpan in a daze, their faces seeming the only immobile features in the room.

‘Entertainment for the troops,’ one nurse declared, renewing the rise-and-shine stand-by-your beds military metaphor of the hospital regime.

Another, halting by me, called wildly for ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’, the old English country dance tune. But Sir Roger de Coverley was nowhere to be found. Bottles went the rounds unwrapped. Hippocrates turned a blind eye. Symptoms took a back seat. The old terrier dog from Spiddal lit his pipe. The dancers danced. The drinkers drank. Then abruptly on the turn of a heel, the music halted, with one of those miraculously timed caesuras, and the band took itself off and most of its revellers with it to the next ward. The rest of us fell back wearied onto our matresses, as if ready for post-mortem’s slab, to snooze or resume our vigil.

Whatever had ailed me (six of the soma and half a dozen of the psycho’s my diagnosis now), I was a whole lot better the next day, a quieter day, the highlight of it for me provided by two freckled tinker boys who suddenly materialized beside my bed and began chanting rapidly, not quite in time together:

The wran, the wran, the king of all birds

St Stephen’s day got caught in the furze

So up with the kettle and down with the pan

And give us a penny to bury the wran.

They paused while the bigger one proffered a little waxed sweet box with a few coins in it, harps and hounds and hares to chase in the wake of the wren. I turned and fumbled for some change while they continued. I gave them what I had, more than they expected, I saw, by the mid-verse look they shot at each other:

Dreoilín, dreoilín, where’s your nest?

It’s in the tree that I love best.

In the tree, the holly tree,

Where all the boys do follow me.

So up with the kettle and down with the pan

And give us a penny to bury the wran.

Dara, a short bald man from Inishmaan, came in to find me, asking to know was I the one from Aran? I was so, I said.

‘I’m out of it these three weeks since,’ he said, gently.

He had fallen after a wake and tapped his head. They brought him across in the army helicopter from Casement Aerodrome.

‘They did find me in the morning. Nothing I knew at all but the next thing was, I was in this place.’

He paused and then asked, quizzically: ‘You have been in England?’

I had, I said, playing my cards close to my chest. I had. A few months. As indeed was true. But on my saying my surname I think he’d misheard, possibly MacNeelish or maybe ‘Conneely’, a celebrated name on Inishmore. Why I should have wanted to masquerade I can only guess. Later the steward of the Naomh Eanna, in to see Dara, called by to say hello and know how I was, if not who I was.

Three of us then ended up that evening moved to a side ward down the corridor, myself, Tom Thumb, and P. J. O’Connor, a local publican and accordion player, a very big overblown man, grim-looking but genial at heart, an enormous acreage of pyjamas, in an agony with ‘fluid in the legs’. He spoke through gritted teeth, but wouldn’t be quiet. He’d had the ulcers fixed in October. ‘The old barium meal, you know. Very tasty, I don’t think.’ Then it was a slipped disc, November – ‘too much accordion’ – and all manner of fierce stretching for a few weeks.

‘I was only just off it Christmas week, and then the legs went. Fluid,’ he declared.

See how he couldn’t wear his trousers. See how his knees were swollen fit to burst. He drew the sheet aside.

‘Even the least touch of that sheet’s murder, you know, murder.’

P. J. was a man of influence. He knew everyone. He worked on the ward sister to get us a television and that’s how we spent the next few days, talking about fluid and knees, discs and accordions, thumbs and fridges, Inishmore and finishmore, and watching movies: ‘One-Eyed Jacks’, and, in two parts, either side the ‘Nuach’, one specially chosen for me, ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ – call me Ernest.

After a week in there, seven days at ten shillings a day (I kept careful count), I grew restless and discharged myself, though there was no boat due to sail until the following Saturday (4 January). I found B&B at the Castle Hotel, the islanders’ hotel, though it was as empty and silent as the grave that week.

It was a sign I was well again that I preferred to be out mooching round the town, killing time on foot, lurking here and there, rather than sitting cosy in hospital, for all that the sister, with evident pity in her look, tried to persuade me to stay. I was quite a sight now: some weeks unshaven, in full-length oilskin and my old cap (older than me, one my father had long ago discarded). There were places, like Lipton’s tea rooms, that would not admit me, it amused me to discover. It’s a strange experience, and one I’d prescribe for everyone, to be untouchable, for folk to back off at the mere sight of you. But I could catch up with my journal-keeping, sketching what I give you here, sitting in my hotel room, and I could look at the latest issue of the Connacht Tribune, for news of the wider western world, between excursions out along the shore down the bay, straining to see the islands, or round the harbour looking at the vessels there, feeling the tug on the heart’s hauser, wishing to be away.

What news on the western Rialto? (Nurses offered nearly £2.10.0 per week extra to live on lonely Inishmaan, population 300. Galway County Council always has difficulty because nurses are reluctant to live on the islands, cut off from almost all the usual social activities of the mainland.) What news? (But things were even worse to the north at Inishturk, where despite an all-night vigil two curraghs were smashed and a quantity of turf for transport to the mainland washed away. There are seven houses on the island and thirty-five people, mostly bachelors, and eight school-going children. All the inhabitants are anxious to leave.) But it wasn’t all bad in the western world. (Scientific knowledge has been piled on scientific knowledge. Man has orbited the moon and returned safely to earth. Fifty years ago the crossing of the Atlantic in a two-seater plane was man’s greatest achievement. John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Browne landed one May morning in the bog at Derrygimla near Clifden, Co. Galway …)

As for me, knowledge piled upon knowledge, I had my feet on the ground in my fashion, and set off when the day dawned for the harbour again, to board the Naomh Eanna. This voyage home was a slow one, the reverse of the route I’d come in on, though faster than it might have been, at this quiet time of year. You’ll know by now all you need to know about the poignant, lyrical beauties of leaden and pewter light at scraich of day, of the sea silvered and shadowed, gulls mewling in the rigging as they glide and the crash of bow waves for accompaniment, the threshing out of the wake as the universal dimmer switch is opened up, making the lights inboard look jaded, like lights left on after a party, but somehow amplifying and enlivening the ceilidh music on the tannoy, as you chase home, in a chill wind, hanging on the rail, taking now a port, now a starboard watch, to see the Burren, to see the islands. I couldn’t conceive of it ever being an unexhilarating experience for me, the most exquisite experience.

There was scarce a body aboard. Kate – the lady who’d suspected me of stealing her chickens – had made an early dash for the sales, if dash was the word in her case. She’d sat her great bulk in a corner of the saloon and drawn all her bundles round her, like a defence against the world’s attentions. She acknowledged me just. Others there I didn’t know, from Inishere, where we’d call first, and Inishmaan, our second port of call, or from the metropolis of Kilronan. I’d watched, as we wallowed and slurped, the curragh slip back with its freight to Inishmaan, and then we powered up and headed for Kilronan. As we did so, a few people came out to take the air and enjoy the view, to savour, as I thought they must, the pleasure of completing their voyage home to Ithaca. A bird-like woman in a scarf and belted navy gabardine came out and stood by me.

‘Are you on holiday?’ I asked, for she had a little suitcase with her.

‘Pooh …’ she started, ‘holiday did you say? If it was holidays I had I wouldn’t be here, I’m telling you.’

‘Is that so?’

‘It is indeed,’ she snapped, ‘it is indeed.’

‘It’s a fine day,’ I said, inanely.

‘Ah, sure, the day’s all right … It’s a day, like any other. But it’s where you are and where you’re going makes a day. I am going to that place,’ she nodded ahead, ‘and I hate it more than any place on earth. Thank God it won’t be for long.’

I chuckled at her spleen. But she wasn’t laughing. On she went, with intensity.

‘I never did like it even when I was a young girl. I couldn’t get out of it fast enough. I’m back now to sell my brother’s place – that’s Seán Gill’s, do you know, in Mainistir. He died last summer and I have been there since October, staying with the brother-in-law.’

She’d got the wind behind her now.

‘He’s a comedian, forever persuading me to stay and keep house for him. But believe me, when I’ve finished my business I’m going back to civilization … to London.’

Had I the means, I might have bought her brother’s house from her, I felt tempted to say.

As I’ve said, I think the stigma of having been ‘ill’, of not being ‘healthy’, is one the world loves to batten on if it can. Your place in the scheme of things is altered. You’re now rather less than the next man, for a time at least, and there’s something people quite like about that. If you were a social challenge or any sort of threat to the daily order of familiar things, in any sense, you’re less of one now. Men give you a wider berth when you’re on the sicklist. Women, if they don’t want to care for you, may look more askance than usual. You might not prove dependable, in your weakness. I sensed something of that Darwinian outlook, anyway, briefly on my return, a kind of embarrassment maybe.

Not that I wasn’t welcomed back at the village as warmly as I could possibly have hoped to be. (I hadn’t hoped at all.) I’d come back in relatively detached mode. But the idea of my ‘illness’ seemed to serve in my slow conversion from stranger to guest, which in the end would go further to find friendship. I had the predictable jokes about ‘having had enough of the Aran Islands now surely’ (‘That’s what I’d say, anyway,’ said Stevie McDonough, like the lady on the boat a devotee of the ‘gaol’ school of thought, driving me home). But Mrs Feaney, Gregory and Mary were relieved to see me and to know I was all right. Of course it was an occasion. I had to have a tot of whiskey. Even old Maggie the crone came by to hear the crack. What had it been like? she wanted to know. She’d been in the same hospital herself, they told me. Which made her roll in her chair with laughter, like a child, so that the shawl fell back off her head, revealing a mass of grey and yellow-grey hair, an unruly stack, propped up by pins, and tied at the back with a black ribbon.

‘And they did have men in with us,’ she said, as we downed our drinks. ‘Sure they did, men in with the women,’ she shrieked and laughed and slapped her knees with her great work-thickened hands. ‘Yes they did too. Kind of old men, you know, all bald. But there was cages round the beds, so they was stuck in, d’you see?’

‘They must have been old women, sure, with no hair on their heads,’ old Mrs Feaney reassured us, in an aside, tears of laughter in her eyes.

‘Aye, there was men in it too,’ Maggie carried on to herself, picking up her glass, ‘sure ’twas great. And was there any women in with you?’ she teased and flirted, all but toothlessly. ‘There would have been, I daresay.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it was all women, you know. Except for me. I was the only man.’

‘Ah, begob, the tongue on him!’ she shrilled off into another fit of laughter.

And that was how I was welcomed home. But it had now grown late. The sky was turning blacker, from both a change in the weather and the approach of night. Maggie went off home. A Land-Rover (it must have been from Kilronan) came up the hill from the bay.

‘I wonder is it the post?’ asked Mary softly, almost to herself, as she cleared the glasses from the table and put the bottle in the cupboard.

That night I sat by my fire and read my mail. It was a Christmas bumper pile, including two cheques from magazines to which I’d sent articles on Aran, several weeks back, pieces about fishing. So I had a bonus I hadn’t really expected, one of them for $165.00. A good friend from my Liverpool days and by then on Fleet Street sent me a copy of The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien (I don’t think O’Brien’s classic The Poor Mouth, so much more appropriate to my circumstances, had been reissued by then). But what intrigued me most in the post was a little booklet, a catalogue, that had got delivered, belatedly, among my things by mistake, as I supposed, selling Christmas cards, devotional objects (rosaries, crucifixes, 50-hour candles, Sick Call sets), etc. It wouldn’t have been a surprise me to find it postmarked Rome, and dated the Middle Ages. But its sales language – the language of the sell as opposed to the cell – fascinated me and made me laugh aloud. It was of a kind you’d be hard put to invent, unless you were Flann O’Brien. Judging from the three sides of close copy in my journal, it went like this:

‘There are really only three reasons why you should buy your Christmas cards from us. One reason is because they are exquisite. Another is because they are great value. The third is that you’ll be helping the Missions. If these reasons do not appeal to you, fair enough. But we believe the radiant splendour and delicacy of these cards from various Irish firms will bewitch you. Their price and quality will magnetize you. …’

Then there were ‘Medals’:

‘The St Martin Medal, the St Martin you know and love, with the cat, dog and mouse in the background, all feeding from the same dish. These medals will enchant you with their elegance and delight you with their splendour. Even if you don’t wish for the gold medals, the sterling silver ones are something to dream about. Five shillings the carat …’

And candles:

‘The St Martin Christmas Candle burns for 50 hours and we have never received a complaint about it in the eleven years since it appeared. Last year we sold more than ever and everybody loved it. No wonder. The usual Christmas candle is nice, the St Martin Christmas candle is majestic. Why not get one for your friends? They’ll be in the seventh heaven with delight and will be enraptured with your choice. It costs only eight shillings. In short, it is perfection.’

And rosaries:

‘Have you ever seen a Black Diamond? Well, the beads in this rosary sparkle and dance with the fire of black diamonds. On the continent they cost 25/– some years ago, but manufactured in Ireland and in a special box we still sell them at 15/–. We have rosaries in cut-glass crystal, or mother of pearl, the hallmark of quality. We have a world-quality bead for men on silver wiring, with pater beads capped and a glorious crucifix. Or a Connemara Marble Rosary made of the age-old marble. These will last for ever, particularly if kept in a rosary purse. Almost as old is the wood that is found in the bogs of Ireland. A Bog Wood Rosary costs 25/– and the wood from which they are made is calculated at being 8,000 years old. If your friend is fond of antiques, where will he get anything older, and for only 25/–? Or we have the Exile’s Rosary. These are made of green durable material and the shamrock is stamped on every bead. With a Celtic cross attached they’re a lovely gift for an exile at 10/6.’

I pondered the idea of the islanders studying these catalogues and putting in their orders. Later on in the year, out in the summer, a tinker came to my door, a three-day-stubble pedlar man, as wild in the eye as if he’d just stepped out of the eighteenth century. I’d seen his like in engravings. He had a very big cardboard box on his back, in a harness of postal twine. The box was by now only a quarter full of pegs and dishcloths and novelties. He came round to the back door where I was working in the August sun, untangling some fishing line. By this stage in my sojourn a character like this wasn’t going to know me from a native and that’s how I liked to play it. He set the box down and dipped in, to produce one item after another for my delight: a nativity scene in a globe, which he shook to make it snow and patiently showed me how the flakes fell; a wooden spoon; and so on; but I wanted nothing. (I wondered if he might have a world-quality bead in there for men on silver wiring?) At last, in desperation he came up with a metal tea-strainer, the kind of thing you put over your cup to catch the leaves, a very plain little sieve.

‘Here, sir,’ he said, as if writing copy for St Martin, twiddling it round under my nose, ‘all gilded and silver-dashed.’

Worth all the tea in China, I thought. Each cup poured through this strainer would be better than the one before, the purest nectar. How could I resist? And off he went with my florin, round the houses, on to the next village. What kind of a world was it still? How poor the poor in the western world?

We had a very cold snap, numbingly cold, for a few days, and there was nothing much to do but burn fuel and go out on the road meanwhile, to warm the soles of your feet as if they were the cockles of your heart, for exercise and diversion, notably now to spot for geese. Geese had flocked in great numbers into the west at the year’s turn, with the cold and wild weather, and the prospect of seeing and hearing them rise from Oghil Lough was more than worth the bitter cold. Folk remarked on them, they were such a phenomenon. (Though not one did I see.) Then we had greenhouse weather. But Gregory assured me cold days lay ahead, make no mistake, and I decided, with my cheques to put in the bank and an unaccounted surplus to spend, I’d go to Galway to attend to some business. I had already broken the pledge I’d made to myself not to set foot on the mainland for a year. Besides, I now saw, voyaging to and from Galway was integral to island life.

Until I began to examine my journal and letters and to write this up, I had always in my mind conflated my return from hospital with the return leg of this subsequent journey. It improved a good tale in the telling. And that’s how we prefer things, as you know. Autobiography, oral or written, is everyman’s genre, the impoverished genre of the people, the genre of the poor (of means as well as wit?), the democratic genre. That’s what makes it the worthiest of them all. Who’s not got a story to tell? Who won’t be silenced? (Every bore on earth.) But no wonder the autobiographer tries so persistently to compensate for his plight, his imaginative poverty, his inability to figure other worlds of mind and soul from the template of his own, consciously or unconsciously, straining at the leash of fact and haring off, unruly, unskilled, and even remorsefully, into the true fresh woods and pastures new of fiction. Or so at moments of reflection (enemy of promise) he might think or fret. As if our memories are any more than tea-strainers, gilded and silver-dashed in the mind’s eye. As if it isn’t all made up, and skill or the lack of it the issue.

My journal makes it absolutely clear. On Wednesday 15 January, at 3.30 p.m., I sailed from Kilronan to Galway, to start a new regime regarding provisions, to order bacon and other supplies direct from Galway, once a fortnight, for two or three months, from Naughton’s; to have some peat delivered, for the poetic flavour of the smoke and quality of embers; to order a pair of heavy island-style tweed trousers, slapstick trousers they turned out to be, from Padraig O’Maille, for £5 (they chafed so much they proved unwearable; I used them to patch my old ones); and to buy in new tackle for the coming months’ attempts at fishing. I sailed in with Mrs Feaney and it was dark when we got ashore, a blustery night with gobs of rain on the wind. Mrs Feaney went off to stay with friends. I went back to the Castle and on Thursday pursued my usual course in alienation studies, mooching round the town, haunting the docks, where boats and cargo vessels, like La Roche from Bordeaux, were moored and mooring, and thinking, as one of the seamen called down ‘C’est bien ça’ to the Irishmen ashore, how next, maybe, after Aran, I should go to sea, seriously give up everything and go to sea. Like the archetypal stranger, I recognized no homeland and, though I had friends and family, I had a cold streak in my heart that made me care for no one and nothing but the possessionless possession of the voyage. Or so I thought, guided by the kind of things I’d read.

I set off for home (how natural that ‘home’ began to be: I was more at home and less) at 7.30 on the Saturday morning for the eight o’clock sailing. At the harbour that morning wind scudded among long puddles and the rain made the lamps at the roadside and on the various vessels bleary-eyed. There was a real thickness to the dark. It was like walking into the bottom of a sack. One or two taxis and vans swished heavily to the end of the jetty. A great corrugated iron dome nearby, housing some kind of processing plant, rattled and banged, creaked and groaned on the wind, the way a dutch barn will out on a hill farm, geese clanking in the yard, gloomy oak trees rocking round the steading. I had tons of stuff in a couple of unwieldy sacks and struggled along, joined as I went and passed by little groups or individuals absorbed in their own struggles, wading through the glistening dark, out of the streets of the town. They were nearly all women, heavily laden with stuff from the sales.

By the time I got aboard, the saloon was already quite packed about with rolls of carpet and lino, broom handles, boxes of china, and so on, stuff sent down the previous day. Many of the women went below to sleep. Others – all of them arriving now, in ones and twos, their hands full – chatted and turned, clearing spaces, like poultry pecking and clucking away: the womenfolk from every tribe and faction on the islands. There was old Mrs Feaney, buttoned up, headscarved, half hidden by her bundles. Apart from the women and myself, there were a few old men, a Guard returning to Kilronan after a spot of leave, and a nurse, bound for Inishmaan. The concern of all was would we sail at all, would we be home that day? After three days’ excitement ashore, out of their element, the women were all impatient to have the sea about the island and their four walls around them and the joy of their goods to unpack. There was some worrying delay. The weather forecast promised a gale eight, rising to severe gale nine, and the first signs of it were lunging in the rigging and spluttering about the town.

We sat stoically, with the boat creaking and heaving against the timbers of the pier. The radio came on as we waited for the jury to return and pronounce its verdict, playing regular jigs and reels, and already the Naomh Eanna jigged and reeled and beat her foot at the wallowing quayside, as if drunk, and the day scarcely dawned. The Guard went out to be sick, poor man, and we hadn’t gone a yard. Then word went round that we’d cast off. We were edging out into the bay. Everyone visible was visibly pleased, as at last we pitched up, and crashed down, and wallowed, and rose and crashed. The old men, omertà in their hearts, packed down their pipes and smoked, elbows on their knees, and stared at the floor, as if this were merely a short bus-ride upon a steady road. The tannoy blared. We were due in Kilronan at two-thirty, such a long time because we were going round the islands. I seemed to adjust to the boat’s motion without ill effect, and, because it was such a dramatic morning, I went on deck to watch the storm. Great black waves with tall and very white breakers raced towards us. It was the most dramatic sight, with a delayed dawn breaking over the hills of County Clare and sea birds grabbed by the wind and taken away past us at breakneck speed. (Downrail the Guard spewed and spewed what by now could only have been thin air.)

They took a very dim view of it indeed when the captain announced, an hour out, that we must turn back. He had no choice. It was too bad and getting worse. They couldn’t cross.

‘Of course they could,’ said Mrs Feaney, ‘sure, they’re no good.’

It was ‘cutting off Kilronan for the sake of the islands’, people were saying, in the usual way, as if Inishmore was a continent half the size of America. It wasn’t crossing the bar of Aran was the problem, as the crew maintained, but standing off the islands for the curraghs.

The women who’d gone below, whether they slept or not, had no way of knowing whether they were coming or going. So when they were summoned up as we stood moored again at Galway pier, some of the more sleepy-eyed thought for a moment they were home. But when the word got round, the more belligerent of them exploded. They demanded to see the captain. They called his manhood into question. They railed and mocked and jeered, scolding like fishwives, stranded with their shopping on Galway pier. There was much hectic rummaging to find joints of meat, sausages and rashers, to get them to a fridge. (I stored my meat in the ship’s fridge, after some whispering with the steward.) We would sail on Monday, 9 a.m.

I’d had enough by now of Galway, reading in the hotel, or flâneuring round the town. Sunday was a day of perfect, pristine sunlit aftermath; out along the bay you could see the islands, thirty miles away, so clearly you felt you might be there in a stride. A lot of the women, old Mrs Feaney among them, had got wind of P.J. Mullen’s trawler at Rossaveal and taken taxis out there. They were already at home when I landed, to be greeted by Gregory, busy in a commotion on the quay, arms flailing, stick waving, as skidding and complaining cattle were manhandled into the sling and lowered, bellowing to the bleak sky, into the hold. Gregory had just sold some stock to a Galway jobber. (Bullocks on the hoof were going in Galway market for between £8.10s and £9.5s the hundredweight, and heifers £8.5s and £8.15s; and even with the jobber’s commission taken off, he’d done well. So he told me. It was great money.) A belated insert in my journal, prompting me to remember an unusual scene, impossible to forget, seems to show that this was the day the children returned to school on the mainland. Anyway, as the Naomh Eanna crossed the bar, the girls – one leaden morning of farewell and tears – all gathered in the stern, shrieked in a single orchestrated keening, so shrill and clear it stopped the day (to dwell upon exile, past and future, or hope lost, and boats missed). It was the most dramatic thing, resounding away up through Kilronan to the hill above.

We got my sacks and Mrs Feaney’s bundles into the back of Stevie McDonough’s pickup and ran off home for another homecoming, a fry-up, more whiskey, and an excited unpacking, the high point of the year. Brooms and other larger items – carpets and rugs, lino – apart, Mrs Feaney had three very big cardboard boxes of excitement to reveal to Mary: plates and cups, cornflakes (she laughed), tins of paint, wallpaper, turpentine, towels and sheets, pillows and napkins. Each item was taken out and unwrapped, unfolded, examined, shown to Mary. Advice as to quality was sought from both Mary and myself. There, she had one-and-six off these plates and tenpence off those and that was twenty-five shillings but she got it for seventeen-and-six. What did you think of it? (Have another drop. Mary, pour the man another drop to drink. Mary huffed, turning from the frying pan.) She liked the stair-carpet very much and it was rolled out across the floor. They had some with blue in and one with a light colour but she preferred the red patterned and it wouldn’t show the dirt. The scatter rugs were not very satisfactory. They looked as if you might have made them yourself. Here, now, look at this – a bit of frivolity – a plastic coal bucket. It’d be good enough if you kept it from the fire and didn’t rest the iron in it, observed Mary, managing in her inimitable way to find something deflating to say about most of the purchases. She sat now by the stove with a light teacup in her hand, plucking the rim between finger and forefinger, indicating without a word but a look of disapproval that it wouldn’t be long in being broken.

‘Sure we do break a lot in the summer,’ said Mrs Feaney, looking at me, opening another box of dishes with unalloyed enthusiasm, as if the whole business were a preparation for the summer sport of crockery breaking. Then I had to look at this. Two rolls for only seven-and-six, the last two they had. And these two and here a bit of border for three-and-nine the yard, but it’s good and deep. Could I hang wallpaper? We’ll do a little hanging later on and some light painting.

‘Ice-blue,’ said Mary, holding up a tin of paint, with a shiver of disapproval, before going off to the scullery.

‘Well, that’s the lot,’ said Mrs Feaney, sitting back triumphantly, among the litter of boxes and entrails of newspaper packing, ‘and what a lot there is.’

And so I imagined all the womenfolk who had been aboard, at that moment, up and down the island, regarding their spoils, in January, the women’s month for conspicuous pleasure and consumption, their heart’s delight to hit the waves for grey Galway’s rock-bottom sales, their hearts raised on return, to unwrap new crockery, bed-linen, carpets, oilcloth, cutlery – with winter yet to come, in frosty February, with biting cold from dawn to dusk, and storm and fog, and sinking gloom of submarine shadow (crustacean consciousness, unmentionable sexuality), time to endure. As to the menfolk:

We had no milk today until gone nightfall. [I scribbled over the fire that night, porridge piping.] Gregory only got back from selling his cattle at 7.30. ‘He’s a drap taken,’ said old Mrs Feaney indulgently, ‘he’s only now come in and gone out again to milk the cow just the same, poor man. Mary’s in a fit!’ When he came back he was in a high state, joking about women’s work, how he could make cakes, and how there was no money in the land, and how he’d got a bloody soaking on the way to Kilronan that morning. On my nocturnal rabbit netting trips I’ve started to go up to Dun Aengus. Gregory said to take care, there are big crevices where you could break your leg. Mrs Feaney said there are fairies. (The second time I’ve heard her say so – now ad 1969.) At this Gregory changed his attitude and said – in a phrase he seems to like – ah, sure, the night is like a day on account of the moon.