Читать книгу Atlantic Britain: The Story of the Sea a Man and a Ship - Adam Nicolson - Страница 7

We drank our Murphy’s and sank into the lush of southwest Ireland. The place oozed comfort, salmon on every plate, scallops for every dinner. We took the Auk in and out through the maze of islands in Roaring Water Bay: to one side an English actor’s castle, on the other an American sculptor’s island. A deep change had occurred: there were now more ex-pat Europeans living here than native Irish. I went to buy some fish from the cutting shed on the quay in Schull. Eight young aproned women stood around the steel table, knives in hand, the bodies of the fish flipped and sliced in front of them. They stood in total silence. I asked the manageress, a white-skinned woman with hennaed hair and a creased face that had once been beautiful, why no one spoke. She was from the Loire valley, outside Tours, and had lived here eight years. ‘We do not speak,’ she said, ‘because none of us can speak the same language.’ Lithuanians, Estonians, Germans, Portuguese and Poles: they were all here. In Baltimore, sixteen different nationalities now lived and worked. Or so the French grocer told me. The southwestern corner of Ireland had shifted from edge to centre, filled to the brim with organic veg, face creams and lovely ‘Irish’ knitwear. It was scarcely the place I had left home for.