At dawn in Bantry Bay, I dawdle in the still green sea, pushing out from the pontoon, gliding over meadows of weed. It’s a dreamy sensation made anxious only by the organisms with which I share the water. Every now and again I raise my head, looking out for the jellyfish that drift out of the dark like spectral umbrellas, gently opening and closing, luminous in the gloom.
This summer they’re here in great number, brought by the Gulf Stream to Ireland’s Atlantic coast. Locals tell me their appearance is good news, but large blooms of jellyfish often indicate disruptions elsewhere. Warming waters are sending their predators – such as turtles and ocean sunfish – further north; overfishing and reduced diversity mean that animals which should be eating jellyfish and their spawn are not there. Jellyfish populations expand to fill this gap, and in turn eat the fry of other fish. As fragile as they seem, they are great survivors, like cockroaches. They have outlived all five mass extinctions of the past; they’ve been around for six hundred and fifty million years. Harbingers of a new extinction, one day they may be all that’s left in a simplified sea, the ghosts of what has been.
I had come down to the harbour as soon as I arrived, almost as though I was ready to leave again. It was early evening and the sun’s heat was just beginning to abate. The sea was even calmer then, as if the day had flattened it down. I stood overlooking the water, wondering if I should get in. Everything felt deep and still. A man in a wetsuit appeared, walking down the boat slope with his children. He greeted me openly, as everyone does round here, and responded to my enquiry.
‘Sure it’s safe enough.’
His children splashed about at the edge of the slope, not quite ready to leave its security. He didn’t seem eager to get in either. Then I noticed again what I’d noticed at first: his twisted hand, held at an awkward angle to his body like a dog’s injured paw; and I thought, ah, he can’t swim properly. I felt that pathetic ache, the sort of love imperfection demands. I had visions of him flapping about in the water on his side as a sunfish does, so directionless with its odd, floppy dorsal fin.
Moments later he dived in like an otter, more elegant in the sea than out of it.
Another man appeared out of his car, tugging on a wetsuit. He asked me to zip it up for him. As I yanked the teeth together tight across his shoulderblades, I thought of Robin Robertson’s poem, in which a selkie shrugs off its skin like neoprene, joins a dance, then slips back into his hide at dawn, leaving with a ‘famous grin’.
‘That’s me away.’
Slowly, I realised there were two or three wetsuited people in the water, gently working their way through it under the soft evening light. On this island, which I was visiting for the first time, having waited all my life to be invited here, swimming was a tradition. My usual tentative, if not secretive approach – expecting someone to tell me off, or ask, ‘Is it cold?’ – was unnecessary. I was among friends, fellow selkies.
Encouraged by their presence – as if their bodies made the sea safer – I swam out into the dark water, aware of the weeds as they swayed like slimy whips, each trailing tendril coated in white fur and insistent in its attempt to entangle my limbs. The sea was warm, and tasted only slightly salty. It felt old. The water of saints.
Then my hand brushed one of the jellyfish. I shuddered: it was like feeling a corpse in the water, the great fear of an out-of-hours swimmer. Uncertain of the underwater terrain, I soon swam back, and padded up the slope to join the others. One by one they were returning, all with the same story, their evening swims curtailed by venomous caresses, by tentacles delivering sly pink weals to bare faces and necks.
I realised I had to come to terms with these gloopy aliens that had parachuted in, falling up instead of down, as lazy as the days were long. I went back to the water morning and night with the tides, greedily storing up luxurious summer swims against the hard winter to come. I tried to forget about the jellyfish.
One evening I found another family there, a mother and her three children. The kids stood hesitantly on the pontoon, next to a sign which instructed us that swimming or diving from there was forbidden. Come on, I said, as they hovered over the edge, it’s lovely. And braver than I pretended to be, I jumped in.
You remember some swims for no obvious reason. There’s some conjunction of conditions, of spirit and intuition; the realisation that a place is ready for you, and you are ready for it. That moment, the surrender of no-going-back, the instant of transition, the leaving of one element for another. The sunny evening turned white and green. The rush of bubbles came up like a sheet and I caught a brief glimpse through my naked eyes of the blackness below before I bobbed back up like a bottle.
Then the kids leapt in too, hollering as they did so, and I thought how much I liked to share the water with children. How they don’t muddy it with rational thoughts and worries. They are up there one minute, and down here the next. No assumptions. Just instinctive shrieks at the shock of the cold, followed by ecstatic shouts.
Unable to stay away, I was back there at dawn. In the complicit quiet of the morning, with no one about, I undressed on the pontoon and lowered myself in, sliding into the water so as not to disturb its gelatinous spirits. I was becoming reconciled to the jellyfish, even rather fond of their company; they too made the sea seem less lonely. The waves I created lapped the sides of moored boats as I wound my way in and out of the animals’ paths. They moved mindlessly, mantles embedded with corneal flashes of orange and brown. Cloudy as cataracts, they peered unseeingly through the ocean’s skin to the sky; I saw through them like lenses, down into the deep below. Trailing their bridal trains, they were ready to reward my bravery with a tingling stroke.
They stung me, again and again, each sting less painful for being expected, almost loving, the sensuous water made manifest. Maybe I was on the way to becoming a jellyfish myself, de-evolving, with all this time spent in the water; as if my spine and the other bones that held me upright on land might dissolve, leaving me blissfully at sea, little more than a bit of human zooplankton to be carried out to the open ocean, with no momentum of my own.
I like the common names of the sea, the way they gather by stories as much as by taxonomy. Jellyfish are no more fish than starfish or shellfish, but it suits us to think of them that way. Someone called these creatures compass jellyfish because their markings resemble a compass rose as seen through the glass dome of a ship’s swinging gimbal. But given their wandering nature, it’s hardly an apt name. Chrysaora hysoscella sounds more mythic – Chrysaor was the son of Poseidon and Medusa, ‘the one with the golden armour’, glowing from within. When he first encountered jellyfish on the Cape, Thoreau thought that they were ‘a tender part of some marine monster, which the storm or some other foe had mangled’. Yet they are inescapably, intrinsically beautiful: to me they resemble elaborate Victorian puddings confected by Mrs Beeton, quivering dishes of aspic turned out of copper moulds for the delectation of well-dressed guests.
As I watched them at eye level they began to coalesce, summoned by some silent signal like clouds forming and re-forming; as much weather as animals, nebulous medusae. More and more emerged out of the darkness, their pearly colours complemented by another species, their fellow cnidarians: moon jellyfish, Aurelia aurita, canopies flushed with pale mauve and shot through with deeper purple-blue gonad rings, all but flashing with fluorescence, as though powered by an electric current running through the water. In their floral nothingness, they were flowers come to life: hallucinatory, floating out of the end of the world, anodyne yet venomous, born male, becoming female. Gliding by my side, powered by their expanding and contracting bells, they were barely there at all, composed as they are of ninety-eight per cent water, often ending up as sad puddles on the beach to be poked at by passing children whose parents pull them away, anxious that the evaporating blobs might yet retain the power to harm even when reduced to a spat-out wine gum in the sand. Yet these animals are complex products of evolution, their languid tentacles reacting to danger or seeking prey with an extraordinary speed that belies their jellyish nature. And nearer us than we know: they are our common ancestors, in whom nervous systems first evolved.
As successful as they are, these creatures cannot survive our scrutiny; and they only become more unreal in the exquisite models made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. In 1853, Leopold, who came from a family of Bohemian glassmakers specialising in artificial eyes, was prescribed a sea voyage after suffering the loss of his wife and his father. Sailing to America, his ship became becalmed for two weeks off the Azores. Leopold looked down into the dark sea and saw ‘a flashlike bundle of light beams, as if it is surrounded by thousands of sparks, that form true bundles of fire and of other bright lighting spots, and the seemingly mirrored stars’. This phosphorescence resolved itself into tiny, jellyfish-like siponospheres, whose cousins, Portuguese men o’ war, I have also encountered in those waters, their lurid purple-frilled bladders dangling their venomous colonies like bulging varicose veins.
Sketching the invertebrates he saw, Leopold returned to recreate these creatures in the medium of which he was a master, passing on to his son Rudolf this passion for turning oceanic organisms into miniature Tiffany lamps. Together they read reports from the Challenger expedition – busy plumbing the world’s oceans – and kept an aquarium in their home in Dresden, stocked with marine animals and plants from Trieste Zoological Station and the famous aquarium merchant, R.T. Smith in Weymouth, England, as well as specimens they gathered themselves.
The Blaschkas’ extraordinary techniques died with them – even now, no one really knows how they made their delicate, impossibly twisted and shaped models – but their creations have survived, caught in time like insects in amber. My friend Mary once took me to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, promising something amazing. I walked into the gallery to find the Blaschkas’ frozen plants and animals shimmering and glistening in rows under glass vitrines. They had been commuted into immortality, entombed in their own beauty.
Behind me, Bantry was still asleep. On the shore, there were two pairs of children’s shoes left behind at the water’s edge.
Pulling myself back onto the pontoon, I dressed as the sun rose. Clouds slipped off the mountains and into the sea as though the land was breathing. I wheeled my bike up to the cemetery, its gravestones so shiny they looked as if they were polished every day. They marched up the hill, these neat slabs, tidier than the town’s sprawling terraces, their black marble reflecting the dark water that they overlooked.
At the brow stood a cross, high above all the others. In an English churchyard such a monument would have commemorated a war. This memorial was dedicated, not to the lost sons of the Somme or Ypres, but to another generation.
+
TO MARK THE
FAMINE-PITS
OF
1846–8
MAY GOD GIVE REST
TO THE SOULS OF
THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED
The events of those few years happened only two lifetimes ago; my own ancestors left this island because of them. Their consequences are still felt, like the ripples around my body in the water. Held out to sea as a silent reproof, the stone cross is dumb. It cannot tell the real story, even now.
If this is the end of Europe, it is its beginning, too. Like Cape Cod, from which it is separated and joined by an ocean, a man might stand here and put all the continent behind him. And as with other places where the land runs out and the rest of the world rushes in – like Stornoway or Rotterdam or Lisbon or Galle – Bantry has the sadness and the beauty, the brutality and the abandonment of the sea. Its streets were once flooded thoroughfares that coursed as canals through the town. Now its harbour has been reclaimed as a car park, although on market day it is taken over by ducks and hens in feather-strewn cages, a dog wearing a hat, and a man with a brown paper bag over his head reciting his own poems. The public houses are still public houses, with their shelves of groceries and round tables, but the panelled front parlours, where the respectable ladies of the town once drank, are empty.
People have lived here for millennia. A medieval manuscript, Lebor Gabála Érenn, the book of the taking of Ireland, suggests that Bantry was the site of the island’s first settlers, landing at a place which became known as Dún na mBárc, the Fortress of the Boats. In this account, Cessair, granddaughter of Noah, leads fifty maidens and three men to the western edge of the world forty days before the Flood in the hope that the waters will not reach them there. Only one, Fintán, survives the inundation. He turns into a salmon, then an eagle and a hawk, and lives for five thousand years before resuming human shape, to tell the story of Ireland. But in the mid-nineteenth century these mythic shores were invaded by a new species: Phytophthora infestans, a fungal pathogen brought over the same connecting sea, and its spots appeared on the potato’s leaves as a sign of things to come. The first report was published in the Dublin Evening Post, 6 September 1845:
We regret to learn that the blight of the potato crop, so much complained of in Belgium and several of the English counties has affected the crop, and that to a considerable extent, in our own immediate locality … We are assured by a gentleman of vast experience that the injury sustained by potatoes from blight on his domain is very serious – that they are entirely unfit for use; and he suggests potatoes so injured should be immediately dug out for the use of the pigs.
With three million people dependent on potatoes to survive, disaster soon followed. They died in numbers so great that only individual cases can hint at the suffering of the whole. On 11 January 1847, The Times reported from West Cork with an opening line that might have come from a Dickens novel: ‘The last accounts from this district are of a most dismal character.’ Such dispatches would have been unacceptable if they had emerged from Hampshire or Devon; distance and disdain allowed them to exist, separated by a fatal sea. In the first year of the Famine, forty-two thousand tons of oats and eighty-five thousand tons of wheat and flour were exported from Ireland, while ministers in Whitehall declared trade had to be healthy to sustain the country during the crisis.
These were feudal scenes out of a new Dark Age, enacted at the outer limits of the industrial world. In Bantry, six inquests agreed that their subjects ‘came to their deaths by starvation’, including two-year-old Catherine Sheehan, who died at Christmas, having spent her last days eating only seaweed, ‘part of which was produced by Dr M’Carthy, who held a post mortem examination on her body’. One mother and her three children were pulled from a freezing dyke; the post-mortem showed that the woman had not eaten for over twenty hours beforehand; she appeared to have drowned her children with her.
Other bodies were turned partly green from eating dock leaves, partly blue from cholera and dysentery. Dignified human beings began to resemble feral beasts, reduced to foraging in a landscape patrolled by packs of dogs scavenging on the dead.
Catalogue? Photograph? The Illustrated London News published eyewitness drawings by its artist, James Mahoney. He portrayed skin-and-bone beings – like the children of Want and Ignorance that challenged Scrooge’s Malthusian enthusiasm – living in a land laid waste by some terrible, undeclared war. Evicted families set up shelters in the ruins of their own homes; known as scalpeens, they were little better than pits with canvas roofs. Others put up structures like whales’ bones. Still more meagre were scalps, mere scrapes in the ground like the nests of shore birds.
Ireland was being ethnically cleansed, as New England had been rid of its Native Americans or Van Diemen’s Land of its Aboriginal Australians. ‘In such, or still more wretched abodes, burrowing as they can, the remnant of the population is hastening to an end, and after a few years will be as scarce nearly as the exterminated Indians, except the specimens that are carefully preserved in the workhouse.’ Invoking the kind of images that Elizabeth Barrett Browning used in Aurora Leigh, the magazine saw it all as a by-product of industrialism, an act of imperial vivisection, ‘a sort of Majendie experiment made on human beings – not on cats in an air-pump, or on rabbits with prussic acid’.
Imprisoned by the sea, at the edge of everything, the land allowed such scenes. With its liminal bogs and uprearing shores, its primitive rites and its infestations of spores, Ireland’s insular fate was written in the water.
As a boy, I sensed a sort of Irishness in myself. I felt exiled in England – even though it was the only place I had ever lived. It was an otherness doubly bequeathed by being Roman Catholic, as if I weren’t of my country at all.
St Patrick’s, my primary school in the waterside suburb of Woolston, was physically and spiritually aligned around its Edwardian tin church, a somehow temporary building ready to be packed up should pagans overseas require its ark-like presence, or should the locals object to its Papist presence on English soil. Painted dark green, with a wooden spire and an interior fitfully lit by cheap stained glass, it was a colonial survival in a parish created in 1879 by the Irish chaplain to the nearby military hospital as a mission to this area of shipbuilders. Importing God into their lives, it looked a little like a ship itself, but was now used as our school hall where we attended assemblies and prize-givings. Across the playground stood another tin building, also dark green, imported from the field hospital at Netley. It is odd to think that my first classroom would have been familiar to Wilfred Owen.
Other classes were conducted in a cylindrical hut from the nineteen-forties; I thought its corrugated iron ribs were constructed to resist ordnance falling from the sky. In the summer, the grass grew tall over an underground air-raid shelter, a burrow built to protect schoolchildren from bombs. Now it housed our rufous and irascible caretaker, a cigarette perpetually in his mouth. Together, church and school occupied a block of their own, an island of faith in a sea of industry. At the bottom of the road lay the shipyards and a floating bridge, little changed since Titanic sailed from here ten years after our tin church was built, taking with it six parishioners who worked below its decks, men from Cork and Dublin. Their apartness was underlined by the nickname for the area where I grew up and where I still live: Spike Island, a convict depot in Cork Harbour; a slur on Irish workers, who were seen as little better than criminals.
Next to our school was the new church, built in the nineteen-thirties. Over its entrance stood an eroding stone statue of St Patrick, after whom I was first named. Inside was a huge painting of him, dark and brown, a crozier in one hand, the other casting out the snakes slithering at his feet. On his feast day, fresh bunches of shamrock, stems wound with silver foil, appeared at the back of the church, miraculously imported from the Emerald Isle. They seemed seaweedy to me, grown in holy water. I never got to wear them; they were claimed by the black-haired ladies who mumbled the rosary through Mass as a never-ending chorus while the priest, faceless in crimson and yard-deep lace with his back to us, intoned Latin at an altar whose core was charged with the relic of a saint like a holy battery.
With its tall narrow windows of green and yellow glass, the interior had a watery light, like a giant aquarium. In an anteroom was the font in which my two sisters were drowned and reborn. Stone stoops contained that same irradiated water, which looked and felt and smelled like ordinary water but was, we knew, molecularly different. I waited for my turn to enter a cupboard where I knelt at the partition between me and absolution, confessing my sins through a grille as though to a cashier. Head bowed, the priest listened in the darkness, and sent me out forgiven in exchange for some penitential prayers. Ours were elemental rites: the anointing oil of chrism might have been whale oil as far as I knew, and the ashes scraped on my forehead at the beginning of Lent ground down from human bones. As we lined up to receive communion, the parquet floor yielded to the stiletto heels of young women, leaving fossil traces of their fashion in the herringbone pattern.
I may have had an overactive imagination, but nothing to a child is merely what it is, and I gave all these things other meanings. Perched on a leatherette kneeler, unsteady in my grey shorts and bare legs, I’d peer through praying fingers at the pair of double-height altarpieces made of stained glass set, not against the light, but in shallow niches either side of the nave, where the votive candles flickered on iron stands. They were unseeing windows, through which I might enter another world.
To the left rose the red-robed Christ, His Sacred Heart exposed in His holy chest and outlined in glittering tesserae of gold mosaic; He held one hand over us in a closed-finger gesture of blessing. To the right was the Virgin, enfolded in heavenly blue – more origami than gown – floating on a pale-green background imitating marble, two wavy blue lines at her feet symbolising the sea of which she was our guiding star. She hovered over the waves, calmer of storms, saviour of the drowned, star of the sea. It was she to whom we prayed, mourning and weeping in our vale of tears as we sheltered under her mantle. And in her bone-china hands she held the Christ Child, beatific in a purple tunic, suspended in front of His mother, an icon within an icon.
These altar images may have been made from stained glass, but nothing could be more pure. Their suspended figures and perfect doll-like heads surrounded by golden haloes bore little relationship to any reality. That is why I loved them and lived in fear of them. They could have come from Constantinople or another world; their open, almond-eyed faces and folded bodies seemed androgynous and eternal. I didn’t know then that these larger-than-life-sized confections – which shimmered in the candlelight of winter afternoons as we recited the rites of Benediction, drugged by blue incense dragged across the altar in a swinging censer – were created after the smoke and fire of the Blitz had left the church a smouldering ruin, its ribcage roof reduced to blackened shards. Nor did I know that they were commissioned for the restored building from the Harry Clarke Studio in Dublin, as were our Stations of the Cross, fixed around the walls – fourteen square-framed scenes of Jesus’s journey from judgement to crucifixion, depicted in painted glass jigsaw pieces held together in soft lead strips; fourteen stops of condemnation, torture and death, from station to station.
Christ had walked off the altar and into a cartoon strip. As Pilate washed his hands, Christ shouldered His cross; Veronica wiped His bloody face, leaving a ghostly image of suffering on the orange-brown cloth; He was stripped by the centurions and nailed to the wood and raised to the stormy stained-glass skies; and His body was laid in the sepulchre, as a lurid Palestinian sun set in the distance.
These glass pictures were a narrative shattered by trauma and put back together again. As the never-ending liturgy was intoned in unintelligible Latin I knelt in reverie, reflexively genuflecting, sinking in incense and hypnotised by Te Deums and heretical tedium, following the stations around the walls, heretically lusting over the soldier undressing Jesus, with his green cloak, shiny helmet, body-moulded breastplate and bare brown legs poking out of an armoured skirt, and fantasising that I might levitate into the air, defying gravity as the holiest saints could, hanging there like an angel to the amazement of the congregation.
These images anchored me to ritual itself. I would never escape them. I did not realise then what they meant for my body and soul: the Lamb of God, whose human sacrifice replaced animal sacrifice as He died for my sins. Like my blue notebook, their stories foretold my future. As if I’d already given up my own body, before I knew what I could do with it.
Henry Patrick Clarke was born in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day in 1889. He was to grow up to be a reserved young man, his shyness at odds with the Beardsleyesque figures that he drew and which looked rather like him, with his huge dark eyes, angular face, slender hands and aesthetic air. After art school, he had joined the family firm and worked on church commissions. But his stained-glass, symbolist saints were decidedly secular and androgynous, almost opiated in their wide-eyed reveries; looking at them now, it is extraordinary that he was allowed to install them in university chapels, parish churches and convents, shedding their stupefying light on sacred sites. W.B.Yeats acclaimed Clarke, and the writer and mystic George Russell, ‘Æ’, called him ‘one of the strangest geniuses of his time’, who ‘might have incarnated here from the dark side of the moon’.
Operating in the Celtic Twilight, Clarke’s secular art grew ever more weird, from dreamy mermaids and staring revenants and ambiguous angels with red-gold hair, to Caliban figures with cloven hands and finned feet and etiolated, pale femmes that looked as though they’d grown in the dark, while dangling in the background, octopus-like phalluses peered through all-seeing eyes at the tips of their tentacles.
Caught between the fin-de-siècle and the new century, neither one thing nor the other, Clarke’s figures tumble out of Wilde’s Salome, the Russian Ballet and Keats and Shelley’s fantasies of hermaphrodites and fauns, their gender and species undefined; equally, they might have emerged from one of Owen’s poems. In their stained-glass incarnations, squeezed into gothic frames and psychedelic compositions as though the Abbot Suger had taken acid, they were born in the First World War and the Jazz Age, but their lux nova was medieval, evoking a pre-Reformation mystery. Their saints are elaborately faerie-like, folded in jewelled costume-coffins as stiff as the glass out of which they were wrought, contained by poisonous lead strips. Elaborate flowers interbreed with sea urchins on the ocean floor, clustered like the dizzying patterns in a painting by Klimt or the beads embedded in a Baccarat paperweight.
Ever since 1909, when he was twenty, Clarke had spent his summers on the remote Aran island of Inisheer, with ‘nothing between him and America’. Staying on this ‘very primitive place’ with his friend and collaborator Austin Molloy, Harry wore the Sunday-best white felt suit and rawhide pampooties of the people of the sea; another friend, Seán Keating, depicted him reclining among the ruins of an ancient church like a languid monk. Painting and sketching by the shore each day, he became fascinated by the island’s marine flora and fauna he saw in rock pools. Back in Dublin, he created a series of windows based on Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, painting lunettes – half moons – entwined with seaweed and jellyfish. He was working with light and water. His images were stained, acided and etched on glass made from kelp and sand from the sea, just as glass itself is a liquid formed of amorphous molecules through which we see light slowed down. Clarke’s fabrications were environments as much as artefacts, as complex and fragile as the Blaschkas’ creations. Indeed, he would have been familiar with the glassmakers’ work: Dublin’s museum of natural history owned more than five hundred of their models.
From sandy Atlantic shores via museum vitrines, those same medusa tentacles found their way into his illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Creating islands of his own, his work was set against nature as much as part of it; its blackness out of darkness dependent on the rising and setting sun. Filtering the sea light outside, his windows are inundated with gulf-warmed waters and studded with semi-precious reefs, while Christ’s disciples slumber on the sea bed, pillowed by jellyfish and anemones.
In Dingle, the westernmost tip of Ireland, a peninsula that tapers into the Atlantic under a mountain named after Brendan the Navigator and in whose harbour I’ve just watched a lone, psychotic dolphin swimming endlessly from one boat to another, I wander through a decommissioned convent, its empty corridors smelling of institutional confinement. The sun forces through its chapel windows, loaded with Clarke’s images. I wonder what the nuns made of these perfervid evocations of their faith, reimagined by a young man from Dublin who, stripped to a loincloth, had himself tied to the beams of his studio to pose as a living model for the Crucifixion.
With his puny body and bony ribs and his closed eyes he seems to have entered a transcendent, sacrificial state like one of his soporific saints, suspended in ecstasy, with flames all but issuing from his fingertips. He looks as emaciated as a famine victim or a shell-shocked soldier under observation, or the malnourished bodies he saw in Dublin’s public baths. He was already a martyr. Weakened by the fumes of chemicals used in the production of his miraculous glass and by a near-fatal bicycle accident, he was sent to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, in 1929 in an attempt to repair his consumptive lungs. He died two years later, at the age of forty-one.
And although Clarke had no physical hand in our suburban church – his son and daughter continued to run his studio, and it was they who supplied our stained glass – our Christ had Harry’s dark eyes, his angular face, his unwrapped body. I look up at those images now and don’t wonder at my childhood fantasies and all those creatures I drew in my book. All these saints were alternative stories for me, darker than any fairy tale. They held their fates before them – and before me too, in a world where war hung over my head like that nuclear sunset over Calvary. I had an overactive imagination, but what use is an underactive one? All that got you was a cheap suit and a briefcase. You might say they were the instruments of my oppression, but I thank God for glorious St Patrick, the saint of our isle, and for all the bleeding, martyred saints.
Bound up in my subversive faith, my intimations of Ireland were absorbed from a sense of obscure wrongs played out over the sea. I felt part of a separate and not entirely accepted caste. My school uniform was green; my mother knitted me an emerald-green jumper that I loved. I insisted that my eyes were green, even though people now tell me they’re blue; perhaps they’ve turned blue from all the sea they have seen. Blue was the colour of conformity; I associated greenness with rebellion. My Irishness, as far as I suspected it, was another disguise; but I seemed to feel instinctively that I was an alien too.
My great-grandfather, Patrick James Moore, was born in 1856 in Blanchardstown, then a village six miles from the centre of Dublin. His father, Dennis, a blacksmith, and his mother, Rose Halpin, had been married in 1848, the year in which the Famine reached its peak. I imagine Patrick on his visits to the city, passing another young man in the street: Oscar Wilde, on his way to swim in Dublin Bay. And like Wilde, my great-grandfather would leave Ireland for England in the eighteen-seventies, albeit for wildly different reasons. Wilde would replace the hunger and disease of his homeland with decadent consumption as a gesture of unnatural defiance; my ancestor was driven out by the consequences of famine, and struggled to establish himself in a strange land. He moved to the port of Whitby, once famous for its whaling, where he worked as a seasonal fisherman along with the herring quines, gathering the fish before they too ran out. My grandfather, also named Dennis, was born in Whitby in 1886; the harbour lay at the end of their street. But economics forced the family to leave the sea for the mills of Bradford.
There, in 1914, Dennis married Josephine, the daughter of Michael Wall, a sail-maker from Limerick. He too had left Ireland in the wake of the Famine, from a port which witnessed the emigration of thousands. One newspaper reported people leaving Limerick ‘as fast as sails can waft them from the shores of their fathers’.
These two Irish families came together in an English attempt at industrial utopia. Saltaire was Titus Salt’s model mill town on the river Aire, outside Bradford; for Michael the sail-maker and Patrick the fisherman its name may have suggested the salt and air of their origin. Their children, my grandparents, were married in Shipley on 18 June 1914. Dennis and Josephine’s wedding photograph might as well have been taken in Dublin, so Irish are its sitters. Framed by a bare painted backdrop, poised on wooden chairs set out on the studio rug, the new family are convened for a new century. At the centre sits my grandfather, a tailor-to-be in his elegant suit, pinned tie, boots shiny, moustache twirled and trim. He was little and bony, like me, with bright eyes. Into his memory I read my own Irishness.
Next to Dennis sits his handsome bride in a billow of lace, a twist of white flowers in her dark hair, a bouquet of red roses in her lap. Standing behind them is Bridget Wall, a veiled matriarch; her younger daughters, Rose Margaret and Kathleen, sit at either end. They look into the future. In a year’s time Rose Margaret will be present at my father’s birth, easing him out into this world in an upper room. Bound as much by otherness as by family ties, they all look confident enough; although my grandfather’s knuckles are clenched around the brim of his hat.
Someone must have looked at this photograph and thought how life was better then, before the war, when three Irish brothers had married three Irish sisters. They had to become English in a country that looked on their old one with suspicion; plaster saints and the shame of famine were not wanted here. The Irish priest wrote out the register in Latin, converting my grandparents’ names to Denyius and Josephinus, as though their Irishness were something to conceal. No one could imagine what was to come. In 1915 my father, Leonard Joseph, was born, a year before the Somme; his son would watch the starman on television; my nephew would see it all on his smartphone.
One evening, after dancing around the room with my father, Josephine went upstairs to bed and died of a heart attack. She was forty years old; she left behind five children. My father was just nineteen; he had to help bring up his younger siblings during the Depression. He would accompany his father on missions to give food to families, many of them Irish, so hungry that they snatched the bread out of his hands. He hardly ever spoke about those days, but he did recall a nest of rats running down the street, and a man whose body was found hanging in an outhouse on waste land.
Soon after, my father escaped the sooty streets of Bradford for the southern air of Southampton as surely as his grandparents had left Ireland behind. He was going back to the sea. He arrived at a station where the waves still lapped at the platform edge, although the port was busy driving its water away, reclaiming great stretches of land; the factory in which my father would work was built on that new earth, where giant cables rolled onto drums and onto waiting ships, tethering one country to another. He too had reinvented himself.
A photograph taken in the nineteen-thirties shows him as a young man, his hair slicked back, neat and handsome, standing on the coastguard lookout at Netley, close to the gates of the military hospital. He is posing to impress the photographer, my mother, whom he has just met and who knows this shore well; she was brought up here, walking this beach with her father. In the background is a four-funnelled liner. Its silhouette is the same as Titanic’s; the one was the ghost of the other. In the same way I would wear dead men’s clothes, dead women’s, too, as if I were an amalgam of my mother and father – which I am. The way they were then, what they aspired to be. Yearning for what we never had.
My father came alive by the sea. On day trips to Bournemouth he would exhort us to breathe deeply as if to get rid of the soot of those blackened houses up north where our aunts and uncles lived and in one of which, one dark morning, I watched a man step out onto the moon. But we never visited the country to which he owed his genes and his faith.
It has taken me this long to realise that my father was, to all intents and purposes, an Irishman, yet his connection to the island, and ours, had simply disappeared.
The city of Cork is Ireland’s great exit point. From here sailed convict ships such as HMS Java, bound for New South Wales in 1833, with a cargo of two hundred transportees, among them twelve ‘Whiteboys’ from Kilkenny, violently opposed to Protestant tithes and guilty of swearing an illegal oath resolving to have a limb amputated rather than betray a brother. Their passage was recorded by Robert Dickson, the same surgeon who had placed the hermaphroditic Sam Tapper under observation; he noted in his journal that the Irish prisoners suffered far more than others during the voyage because they were so undernourished.
Transportees had no choice but to leave Ireland; the hungry and dispossessed had a choice, but not much of one. Thousands left from Cork’s harbour at Cobh, their possessions parcelled up in brown paper, wearing their best, perhaps their only clothes. Melville recorded such scenes in Redburn, based on his first voyage to England in 1839. In Liverpool, Redburn sees a starving woman and ‘two shrunken things like children’ in a pavement vault, representatives of the refugees who lived in the streets and cellars, the sort of place that the young Heathcliff was found.
On Redburn’s return journey, hundreds of migrants board his ship. The English passengers are protected by their twenty-guinea cabins ‘from the barbarian incursions of the “wild Irish” emigrants’, stowed away ‘like bales of cotton, and packed like slaves in a slave-ship’. Even before they leave British waters, the refugees’ spirits sink. Deceived by ship-owners about the length of their passage, they mistake the coast of their own island for their destination as they cross the Irish Sea: ‘America must have seemed to them as a place just over a river.’ One old man is only distracted from his search for land by dolphins riding the bow, shouting at them, ‘Look, look, ye divils! look at the great pigs of the s’a!’
All this was so much invention. No such crowds boarded Melville’s ship, and there was only one Irish name on its passenger list, Thomas Moore. Yet as a New Yorker, Melville was used to such sights; and to those who asked whether ‘multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores’, he replied, ‘if they can get here, they had God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world.’ Melville wrote Redburn in 1849, as refugees from the famine were arriving in New York in their thousands, many more dead than alive. They would resort to squats in the waste lands of Brooklyn, ‘lying in the very heart of the city, and given over to hogs and cows, and to the squatter sovereigns who have erected wretched shanties upon it’.
From 1845 to 1855, two million migrants left Ireland for North America; it seemed as if the entire island was being transplanted across the Atlantic (just as its turf was exported to Cape Cod). In Black ’47 alone, the year of the coffin ships, fifty thousand Irish died en route to America or shortly after they reached it. Vessels which had brought timber, tobacco or cotton to Britain were restocked with desperate people and overpacked to maximise profits on the return journey. The imperial British may have abolished the slave trade, but in this new fatal triangle, human ballast was dumped overboard and drowned, as Africans had been a generation before and are still drowning today. In scenes which might have been painted by Turner or filmed by CNN, other emigrants sidestepped the inevitable and threw themselves into ‘the seething waters’.
The sea does not care. It never did. On his journey to the Cape in October 1849 – at the same time that Melville was sailing back to England – Thoreau came across the aftermath of another shipwreck. At Boston the Provincetown steamer was delayed by a violent storm; the same high seas had caused the brig St John from Galway, loaded with migrants, to wreck on the Grampus Rocks off Cohasset, across the bay from where Sylvia Plath would experience her own sulphurous storm as a child. Nearly one hundred and fifty Irish people had been drowned and were being washed ashore. The remains of the ship lay about in pieces; it was clear to Thoreau that it was rotten and rusty even before it foundered. Sightseers – drawn by a broadsheet handed around Boston, ‘Death! one hundred and forty-five lives lost at Cohasset’ – were milling about, gawping at the spectacle.
Thoreau – who appeared to relish his role as a deathly, transcendental beachcomber, as if he might find America’s lost innocence there – watched as the bodies were recovered. ‘I saw many marbled feet and matted heads … and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl, – who probably intended to go out to service in some American family, – to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, – merely red and white, – with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand.’ When he found a large piece of the brig on the rocks, he was told that most of the victims lay beneath it.
Locals, as unconcerned as the figures in Brueghel’s painting, were collecting seaweed washed up by the storm; to one old man the bodies were ‘but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him’. Thoreau concluded, ‘This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society’; the dead were so numerous, so strewn among the seaweed and their clothes so entangled with the wrack that, laid out in public, they lost their humanity. ‘If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity?’ he reasoned, ironically.
But one image stayed with him, like a nightmare: that of something white seen floating in the water days later, ‘and found to be the body of a woman, which had risen in an upright position, whose white cap was blown back with the wind’. This vision darkened the beach for Thoreau. These desperate people had come in search of a new life, ‘but before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of’.
On the other side of the Atlantic that same year, 1849, Victoria, dubbed the Famine Queen, arrived in Cork on her first visit to Ireland. Her royal gaze was carefully screened from the countryside’s more terrible sights, from people whose hair stood on end as a side-effect of starvation, a precursor of some future dreaming. She declared Cork ‘not at all like an English town’, that it looked ‘rather foreign’. Yet it was part of her empire, and even now its port – which was renamed Queenstown in her honour – retains a colonial air. Its Victorian terraces are dominated by the gothic spire of Pugin’s cathedral, and out in the bay are the traces of naval installations which remained under British control until 1938.
The ferry chugs over the water, pop music crackling from tinny speakers. It is not a long trip. Spike Island soon looms up, greener than I expected, hanging in the harbour in the way Whale Island lies off Portsmouth, or Ellis Island off Manhattan. This was the famine prison, Ireland’s Van Diemen’s Land; the largest penal colony in the world.
The island has only recently become accessible; visitors are issued with safety warnings and informed about where and where not to go. Many of the buildings are decrepit, and on this sunny Monday morning we are told not to enter them. Peter and I pass crumbling grey barracks whose troops once manned the star-shaped fort. The grass has grown long and soft in high summer. Stonechats sing sweetly on concrete posts – although, as Peter points out, they are probably warding off interlopers to their territory. The tide is low, revealing a rocky shore, as good a barrier as any to men who could not swim.
Originally called Inis Pic – perhaps a reference to the Island of the Picts – its name was anglicised as Spike Island. This sliver of land, once a monastic settlement, had long held Ireland’s unwanted; all the devils were here, too. Shakespeare may have seen Ireland as a model for Prospero’s island – England’s nearest, most troublesome colony as a plantation to be tamed and its wild people conquered – and Edmund Spenser, the author of The Faerie Queene, stationed in the county of Cork under Elizabeth’s rule, thought the land should be subjugated and even consume itself, describing the victims of repression and famine creeping out of the woods and glens: ‘they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spake like ghostes, crying out of their graves’. During Cromwell’s campaigns in the sixteen-forties, thousands were transplanted from Spike Island like some invasive crop to the West Indies, to be superseded by enslaved Africans. In 1847, reacting to the onset of the famine, the island became a prison for men reduced to stealing food or defying unpayable rent. From August 1847 to August 1848, 2,698 sentences of transportation were meted out. Those unable to afford a migrant’s passage stole to receive such sentences. In 1849, three seventeen-year-olds brought before Westport assizes accused of stealing hemp ‘requested to be transported, as they had no means of living, and must do the same thing again’.
Two thousand men at a time were confined yet open to the harsh ocean and its weather, as though being readied for voyages to come. As near as it was to the land, the island appeared ‘as isolated as if in the middle of the Atlantic’. Inmates were set to work in acts of useless labour; locals believed that they were made to carry buckets of water from one side of the island to the other, emptying and refilling the sea. Serious offenders were kept in darkened cells, converted from latrines. Those who worked outside wore caps with veils to conceal their faces as Wilde would do; many were made ‘moonblind’ by the whitewashed walls. Weakened by malnutrition, one in ten died of disease. Others, already traumatised by the loss of their families to the famine, went insane; the hopeless hanged themselves, or jumped off the cliff. Those who tried to swim away were recaptured and more heavily chained than before, as though to anchor them to the island. For some, their only resort was each other: in 1850, the Catholic chaplain, Fr Timothy Lyons, criticised for being too liberal, was admonished for failing to report ‘indecent practices’ between inmates in the privies.
On the far shore of the island a clump of trees conceals another decaying building, once the settlement’s hospital.
‘They call it Bleak House,’ says Peter.
It has been entirely overtaken by undergrowth; to reach it we have to trample down chest-high briars and nettles. I remember such sites from my childhood; Victorian houses left empty, and yet not. The upper windows are boarded up, but at the rear, the outhouses stand blatantly exposed. Their roofs have fallen in on old toilets and baths, their glaring white ceramic obscenely spattered with rust and rot. The place is repellent. I use my camera as a kind of defence, quickly taking images before leaving it to its darkness. I feel as though I am visiting a dark version of my home, my Spike Island; a place where alternative histories were played out.
On the other side of the field a low stone wall encloses the graveyard. A team of archaeologists are digging in the dirt. Peter points out the dark stains in the exposed soil, each six feet long. The top layer is being carefully scraped away to reveal the remains of humans who long ago leaked into the earth. Twelve hundred convicts died on the island, but this small corral could hold two hundred at most. No one knows where the others lie.
Mara, a young American leading the gang of students clad in fluorescent vests and sweltering under the July sun, shows us where the wooden coffins were found, neatly carpentered and painted white by their fellow prisoners. Their contents left scant clues as to whom their bones belonged, beyond a few fragments of textiles. On one man’s upper arm was a brass ‘A’, its significance a mystery. The only skeleton that may be identified – because of its size – is that of a boy who, according to the records, was just fourteen when he died here. The student chain gang digs on, in the same place where burial parties sweated two centuries ago. It is the unknown dead’s fate to be constantly disinterred; these exhumed inmates will be commemorated in a service of remembrance, although no one remembers who they are.
Behind us, the parade ground is surrounded by three-storey Georgian barracks. In the nineteen-eighties the prison was reopened to deal with a new crime wave of car thieves and substance abusers. When Peter was a boy, sailing in the bay, the island was out of bounds: convicts being ferried across would swear violently at him and his friends. In the hot summer of 1985 the inmates rioted and took over for a day, setting fire to one of the blocks. The burnt-out building is left eviscerated, its windows empty, its wooden floors gone. I peer into a tunnel-like space pierced by the sun from above. Trees have grown up through three storeys, reaching up to the light. Rubble and rubbish strews the floor. It looks like a war zone, a place for a strange meeting.
It’s still early as I cycle up Rope Walk, high on the hills outside Bantry. Emerging from a green corridor of trees, I miss the turning at first, and backtrack to push my way through a farm gate, onto the open moor. At the brow, a slender post stands proud of the long grass, leaning to one side like something left behind. Only as I get closer does it resolve itself into a single shard of sandstone, about the height of a man. Isolated in the field, it draws me nearer. It hums with power.
There are carvings on its face, barely there at all; it might be a memorial to a dead horse from its grieving rider. But the Kilnaruane Stone is all that remains of a High Cross, dated to the eighth century. The horizontal wooden beam which once held its sacred status against the sky has long since gone, leaving only this gnomon, telling off the millennia like a sundial. The stone seems striated, stripped, as if it had spent centuries in the sea and having been cast ashore, got stuck in the ground like a bit of driftwood. I try to make out the shapes, marks on a signpost to heaven, a wayside indicator to eternity. I need a map to read them.
An archaeologist’s drawing shows a quartet of beasts, species unknown, although any reader of Revelations would recognise them as symbols of the Gospels: ‘The first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle … each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within.’ Above is a sinuous, sinister form that could be a sea serpent or the writhing red dragon which menaced the woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet.
Across the valley is a holy spring, Lady’s Well, where water gushes from beneath the feet of the Virgin, her toes resting on a crescent moon, stars and a snake. It is the same statue reproduced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – I remember it from May Day processions at school, when we carried it on a bier, singing to our star of the sea – the same statue you see from suburban Surrey to Sri Lanka, from the back streets of Brooklyn to the mountains of Mexico. Future historians may wonder at its meaning, just as they wonder at cryptic tattoos of the moon and stars on the bodies of transportees sent to Van Diemen’s Land.
A mid-nineteenth-century antiquarian believes the Kilnaruane motifs to be one thing; a nineteen-forties archaeologist another; a contemporary researcher yet another. The shapes shift through history, even as I look at them, these saints and beasts setting off on their eternal journey. Cut into the stone cross beneath its synoptic creatures is a curragh, a skin boat rowed by four men, with another at the tiller, through a sea of crosses. It is the earliest representation of such a craft.
Some speculate that this scene shows Christ calming a tempest at sea, or His people navigating the storms of this world into the safe port of the next; His church as a ship, and its voyagers in the vault of heaven. Others see a similarity to the boat in which Brendan the Navigator sailed from these shores in the sixth century; hence the stone’s local name, St Brendan’s Cross, and the statue of Brendan in Bantry’s town square, his arms outstretched over the prow of a boat. Just as Christianity first entered northern Europe through Ireland, preaching to seals on remote islands, so Brendan took the faith across the Atlantic. His adventures are recorded in a ninth-century manuscript contemporary with this stone: Navigatio Sancti Brendani, one of the immrama or holy tales of saints who set sail in search of isolation and peace. It may aspire to the power of a parable, but it reads like a medieval Moby-Dick.
As Brendan and his monks set out to find the Promised Land of the Saints, the Islands of the Blessed, they face mountains hurling rocks, griffins doing battle with dragons, and a rock on which they seek refuge and light a fire to celebrate Easter Mass, only to discover they have landed on the back of a whale. Brendan was unconcerned. (One chronicler claimed that the saint spent seven years on a whale’s back: ‘It was a difficult mode of piety.’)
The sea was alive. And far from leaving them adrift, whales followed the faithful throughout their voyage, swimming around and under their boat, reassuring them of God’s grace. It was for this service that Brendan became the patron saint of whales (oddly enough, at birth he was destined to be named Mobhi, until other signs intervened). On another holy day, the feast of St Peter, the apostle of the sea, a whole school of monsters appeared, attracted by Brendan’s singing. His monks took fright anew, peering down into water that was terrifyingly transparent, as if they were looking into eternity itself.
Sing lower, Master; or we shall be shipwrecked. For the water is so clear that we can see to the bottom, and we see innumerable fishes great and fierce, such as were never discovered to the human eye before, and if thou dost anger them with thy chanting, we shall perish.
At this Brendan rebuked his men; the Lord would deliver them from danger. ‘What are ye afraid of?’ he said, and sang louder than ever.
‘And thereupon the monsters of the deep began to rise on all sides, making merry for joy.’
This Christian Prospero had conjured up familiars to accompany him across the infinite sea. On the other side of the Kilnaruane stone is a knot of knitted serpents, which to some historians suggests the ancient sea god Manannan, often depicted as a sea monster. Perhaps he was the pagan creature Patrick cast out.
Below is the figure of a saint with his hands held outward in the orans attitude of open prayer; and underneath that, a pair of desert fathers, Anthony and Paul, sit at a table while a raven delivers their breakfast, the bread still in its beak. The raven abides here, in its western refuge. On other stones, notched with the Celtic alphabet of Ogam, these whalish clicks become the clonks and caws of the corvid, Brani, and a warrior named Brandgeni is a man born of a raven.
None of these images have definition any longer; they have been lost to dark time. It is eight hundred years since this cross stood in a wooden church, itself the shape of an upturned boat. Long after the worshippers had left the site was used as a cillíneach, a burial place for unbaptised children. Later it became a famine pit.
Standing by the stone on this lonely morning, I feel godless and godly. As if this human-high pillar were a petrified me. As if it had all come down to this rock, driven into an island. I had to wait to be asked here. As I leave, my place is taken by the black shapes of hooded crows, riding up and down with the wind.
That afternoon we sailed across the bay on Mark and Eoin’s family boat, with Tara and Sinéad and newly-born Anne Marie, under low summer cloud that promised to disperse. There was a sense of imminence and potential to the day, of things waiting to begin, needing only some invisible cue.
Out of Bantry’s harbour, rocky peninsulas rose on either side of us, jagged edges of land pointing out to the Atlantic. The sliver of Whiddy Island – named by the Norse Vod Iy, Holy Island – slipped past our starboard, its green slopes supporting oil silos.
‘Apparently they hold enough emergency supplies to last Ireland two weeks,’ said Mark. A rusting jetty marked the site of a terrible accident in 1979 when an oil tanker, Betelgeuse, exploded, and fifty men lost their lives.
We sailed on, beyond the island. Manx shearwaters swept over the waves; cormorants spluttered into flight as we drew near. The dark stubby dorsal of a harbour porpoise moved through the surface, rolling on its own axis.
Deftly, having sailed these waters since they were boys, the two young men steered the boat into an inlet, cajoling and persuading it, as if it were innately part of them. Then Mark stood up and with a serious look, one hand over his chest and the other held in the air, made me swear a solemn oath. He was about to take me to his favourite place, and I was not to divulge its location to another soul.
Slowly, we drifted into a narrow inlet overlooked by lush trees and enclosed by rocks on which seals lolled like sunbathers waiting for the sun to come out from behind a cloud. In 1934 Virginia Woolf visited this bay, and saw its soft light and stretches of virgin shore as the original land. It reminded her of her childhood holidays in Cornwall, and she imagined it was how the rest of England had been in Elizabethan times, when Orlando was a young man. She felt that here, life was receding. But renewing, too.
This was where the Celtic spirits were driven, westwards to the ocean – or to the other world. As Yeats, another kind of magician, wrote, ‘the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image … We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.’
Could water be haunted, homeopathically retaining the memory of what it has witnessed? Do all those shores remember me, as they remember those who went before? What trace do we leave? What have we done?
I looked down: the water was so still that you could hear any selkie sing.
It felt like home.
There was a tint to the afternoon – perhaps that was in the retrospect of Sinéad’s snapped photograph – an extended summer longing, an intimation of autumn’s slow recess. Tara, suckling six-week-old Anne Marie at her breast, told me how they’d sailed here last year during a heatwave, and were vaguely annoyed when another, smaller boat followed them. The lone occupant drew alongside, saying, without introduction, ‘Lovely weather, great spot. There’s a lot of people dying.’ He meant that in the heat, swimmers unaccustomed to the sea had drowned.
Ignoring his warning, Mark and Eoin and I stood up on the side of the boat and jumped in.
The water was deep and dark, and the seals took to it too, rolling over on their ginger-spotted bellies and slipping into the sea, their puppyish heads bobbing just beyond us, peering at us with curiosity in their big black eyes. Jellyfish floated past while we trod water. Anything might have lain below us, down there. The rest of the world had ceased to exist.
Or rather, it all came down to this: a clear, cold, reflecting pool, languid with life and the sense of its continuance; of all the summers that had ever been and were yet to come.
I shivered from the water as we sailed back; the sun was just beginning to set. Mark lent me his Aran jumper, and asked me to take the tiller. I steered the boat inexpertly but steadily through the islands, back to Bantry.
The light was already falling over the town as we pulled into the harbour.