I’d seen her get on a train in Galway city February of the previous year. A chiffon scarf wrapped around her plentiful white hair. A stout woman carrying a small bag. On the way to Dublin she piped a mysterious song: ‘If you sit on a red hot poker it’s the sign of an early spring.’
‘Your memory must have gone with your looks.’ she told a small, bespectacled man, standing over him, after having challenged him about some historical data. We never spoke but on the train from Holyhead, which had been greatly delayed, she sat near me, having been befriended by some Dublin boys who were emigrating. One of them had a penchant for 1950s songs and delivered ‘My Wild Irish Rose’, out in the aisle, a fashionable white polo neck on him, troubadour’s thick quiff of blond hair on his forehead, in tribute to her. She and the boys left the train together at Euston. They were going to have bacon and eggs in a caff and then she was going to bring them to a nun in Wimbledon. She was on the deck of the boat that morning as it neared Dun Laoghaire, but as I got a lift to Galway that was the last I saw of her. First part of our town is Our Lady of Lourdes church in Creagh, standing up, alone there, like a tombstone. That is on the Roscommon side of the town. Then you cross a bridge and are in Galway. The mental hospital, which they started building in 1833, is on the Roscommon side of the town, but that doesn’t save Galway from having the highest mental illness rate in Europe.
The smaller river which runs into the Suck had run dry – water-mint growing all over its basin, I found when I inspected it later on. This is where I used to meet my friends as a child. By the rivulet. A sanctuary. On the other side of it a carriageway, which circumvents the town, runs parallel to it now. The church near by had to be built in a marsh by decree of the local landlord but its steeple rose in spite higher than the spires of the Protestant church which sits on a hill. Cardinal Wiseman was borne on the shoulders of local people for its consecration and Napoleon III sent a vestment with the Bonaparte badge on it for the occasion. These were the stories we grew up with, stories that have stayed alongside stories of local people: the Czech women who ran a jewellery shop in town once. They had shunted and shifted all over Ireland, finding peace here for a while, then retired, lived in a house in Clontarf, Dublin, the eldest leaving me a tablecloth in her will, the youngest having died recently in an old people’s home on the other side of Galway city among the rocks, the anarchic cabbage seed.
I’d visited Prague since last I’d been in the town. In the old Jewish cemetery there I’d thought of them and in the suburbs of Prague, under high-rise flats, a gypsy family on a bench waiting for a bus, I’d thought of the gypsies, the tinkers who’d encircled our town in winter when I was a child. They’d created a pattern for the lives of many of my contemporaries, a pattern of moving on, always moving on, nomads.
‘Ah, Dagenham,’ a woman had said in a buffet in Prague, ‘Dagenham,’ pulling at a hair on my naked arm. She’d been there once. I lived not far from Dagenham, near by a settlement of Irish travellers. I sometimes went there and heard stories about County Galway. How families of tinkers were turned away from cinemas there and spent the night instead reading comics by rural campfires. How tinkers got married there with rings made from teaspoons. Matchstick barrel-caravans were produced, possibly as memorials to County Galway. My town was quietly referred to, renowned and sacred because of its annual horse fair. In Gill’s Hotel in Ballinasloe the local dignitaries gathered each year during the fair to celebrate the town, its achievements in the previous year. Now the town has meandered way outside its former tight nucleus, lizards of new streets, new avenues, a new type of child on their pavements, the streets, the avenues cutting into Garbally estate. The heir to the manor, much to the chagrin of his father, had once married a Cockney music hall artiste, Isabel Bilton. She was loved by all when she became lady of the manor and her legend lingered right up to my childhood in the 1950s. I think I was very lucky. Galway imploded with stories, many of them too intense ever to write down. Perhaps the best stories we carry with us, within us, never to be written down. But there was always a sense of making something from experience. In Naughton’s pub in Galway city, as I entered, a young man on a bar stool belted out a song he might have made up himself.
There’s not enough work in this country,
There’s not enough land to go round.
Galway Arts Festival was on, at night the streets around the Claddagh jammed with young people drinking beer, wine, the odd guitarist among them, crouched on the ground, drawing his audience. On the walls by the canal the sexuality of Jesuit boys was impugned, the IRA praised. A giant puppet of Gulliver, which had recently taken part in the Dublin millennium parade, was outstretched on a beach near Salthill. By Claddagh Bridge were a newly sown wild cherry tree and Italian maple tree. They might have been sown, in this city of youth, for some of County Galway’s defeated and exiled, the Czech lady who’d ended her days west of Galway city when in fact her home had been east of it.
For years when I got to Galway, Clifden, in the north-west of it, was the first place I headed to. Another garrison town like Ballinasloe to the very east of it. But this time I’d dallied in the town I was from, in Galway city. I’ve stayed with the same old lady for years in Clifden. She’s become my great friend. In her mid seventies, much of the time on buses in Ireland, on her way to see Oliver Plunkett’s head in Drogheda, making a pilgrimage to Lough Derg. You’ll often see her between buses, at a bus stop, in a tracksuit. In Drogheda once at the opening of a disco the DJ asked her if he could put blue in her hair and dance with her. She was after a day’s praying so why not? But the blue didn’t come out for six months. One of her many stories. Like the story of how, in her négligé, she was attacked by a fox and her only fear was that her dead body would be found naked. A picture of Our Lady of Medugorje, the latest Lady, over the mantelpiece. ‘I could have filled the field with all the boyfriends I had.’ The stories continued into the night. She was married twice but both her husbands are long dead. Her children live in Galway city. One of her sons, his wife and two adopted children went to London the previous Christmas, intending to stay, but returned after a brief sojourn to poverty in Galway. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out,’ James Baldwin wrote somewhere. There may be few jobs in Galway city but there is an enfolding, a mantling sense of community.
In Galway city I’d seen a former heroin-addict friend dance in an old church converted into an arts centre. It might have been a dance from a Yeats play. The Herne’s Egg, for instance. He was alone there in the centre of the floor.
The real world, the otherworld, is behind us and beyond us, out of our ken, and all we are aware of is the vague shadow of reality flickering in the things we see.
One of the last lines of the Ballinasloe poet Eoghan O Tuairisc came back to me as I watched the boy dance, for he too was from Ballinasloe, Eoghan O Tuairisc having been a shoemaker’s son who saw a notice pinned on a tree one day that he’d got first place in a scholarship examination for Garbally Boys’ School, then was told he couldn’t take up the scholarship for unstated reasons, only being allowed in through the backhand intercession of powerful people in the town, a renowned headmaster at Saint Grellan’s National School for instance. He went on to a life of poetry, switching between Gaelic and English, part of the immaculate, the healing heritage of this boy who danced in the arts centre.
Clifden was ragged on a summer night. Harp music coming from a hotel, a ballad being bawled out from a pub opposite the hotel. A few old ladies, scarves on them, walking the streets, picking up bits of gossip from one another. There’s no shortage of gossip in Clifden in summer and even in winter sometimes there’s excitement – like the winter when an American woman bought the old gaol-house, intending to open it as a hotel for American ghosts. But the plan never worked out and the ghosts stayed on the other side of the Atlantic.
Beyond Clifden, north of it and still in County Galway, is Cleggan. About fifteen years ago I went to a wake in the Pier Bar, the ninety-year-old proprietress laid out, and I said to her sprightly daughter, ‘Sorry about the death of your sister.’ Tall candles burned about the corpse. Another time in the same pub I saw two small, squat men dance a jig together to celebrate May Day. Seven miles out to sea from Cleggan is Inishbofin. Theodore Roethke lived there for a while, one of the most westerly parts of Galway, but was carted back after a few months, drunk out of his head, in a straitjacket, to the most easterly point of Galway – Ballinasloe Mental Hospital. The conundrum being that Ballinasloe Mental Hospital is actually in Roscommon. Despite this catastrophic vignette there’s a serene lyric by Roethke on a plaque in a pub on Bofin:
I suffered for birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death.
About six o’clock in the morning, my third day in Clifden, the phone rang. My friend’s brother-in-law had just died in County Roscommon. There were phone calls made to relatives all over the world. The subject changed. ‘The wedding was out of this world.’ And by seven one of her sons had arrived in his car and shortly we were racing through the Connemara morning. There are many stories that this county had given me, stories that tumbled out at the worst of times; the story of a ninety-year-old tinker woman who insisted on being brought from Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe, to the side of the road in Aughrim because she said she wanted to die in the open air, and then rose and lived to see Croydon again; my friend the guard in Galway city who on his retirement, only having been out of Ireland once before, working as a labourer on a building site in London in his teens, packed his things in his car, drove to Portugal, and purchased a hut on a beach there where he still lives.
‘He brought in a good crop of turf the summer before he left,’ the same man had recently commented to me in Portugal about the boy who’d left Ballinasloe when he was sixteen and had since prospered in London – as if his prosperity was a reward for his diligence with the turf. The former guard had been posted in Ballinasloe then. Would that such pleasing omens attended us all. But there is a sense of strength from such language, a trustfulness that mistakes, misfortune can be absolved and that we can start all over again.
‘There was a man who lived in a remote part of County Galway and he wasn’t very bright and he slept on a hard board. So he got very bad arthritis. The advice he got was to sleep on a feather bed. He put one feather on the floor and slept on it. His arthritis became much worse and he shouted out, “But what would it be like if I slept on a whole bed of feathers!”’ My friend told a story as we raced to the house of the dead man, tinker encampments more profuse in north-east Galway – oilskins thrown over random armchairs – half-wrecked gateposts bearing shaven posters for showbands, pilgrimages to Lourdes, bingo, national schools more isolated and perished-looking, homesteads more beseeching, a congestion of car tyres in one field, and the stories kept coming, long after we’d crossed the border into Roscommon.