Читать книгу Barefoot in Mullyneeny: A Boy’s Journey Towards Belonging - Bryan Gallagher - Страница 11

I have a boat, fibreglass with a big engine at the back, and I often sail up Lough Erne past the island of Inishlught, which means ‘the island of the people’. I was taken there once, many years ago when I was six and a half years of age. The woman who lived there with her brother collected me from school by arrangement with my parents. She came on her old-fashioned bicycle with two bags of shopping on the handlebars and she seated me on the carrier behind the saddle, short legs dangling from either side.

‘Mind the spokes,’ she said as we wobbled off.

The road was rutted and made of gravel and when we came to steep hills, she walked, wheeling the bike, and keeping up a constant flow of conversation. To this day I can never travel that road without hearing her voice as she looked over the rushy fields and named the townlands we passed through: Kilnakelly, Coragh, Tirraroe, Coratistune, Dragh and Cornanoe. They were like poetry in my mind. The road became narrower with a mane of green grass up the centre and finally round a bend it ran straight down into the lake and I could see it sloping away underneath the water.

‘I’ll just give Tommy a shout,’ she said. ‘Tommeee,’ she yelled. Sound travels well on water, she explained. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a boat came. The oarsman shipped his oars and got out. Nobody spoke. He lifted the two bags of shopping into the boat and looked down at me. He was huge.

‘Were you ever in a boat before?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Are you afraid?’

‘No.’

‘Good lad,’ he said, and he picked me up under one arm, and stepped into the boat. ‘Sit at the end,’ he said.

His sister pushed us off, stepping easily aboard as the boat floated. Maybe it was the contrast with the bumpy bike ride but I had never experienced such a sensation, smooth, velvety, silken, gentle. And then he started to row. With every one of his mighty strokes I could feel the boat surge forward. It was years later when I next felt the same sensation in a boat only this time there were eight of us rowing in a sleek university racing craft, not the heavy wooden boat with a lone oarsman taking us to his home in Inishlught, the island of the people.

We walked up a cobbled green lane and in through the half-door into the kitchen. There was no ceiling and I looked up at the smoke-blackened rafters supporting the scraws of turf which carried the thatch, with the pointed ends of the hazel scollops sticking through them, holding the thatch as a hairpin holds a woman’s hair.

I sat at the oilcloth-covered table. She busied herself unpacking the shopping while he took a round black pot and carved off, yes, carved off a chunk of solid porridge, put it in a bowl with some milk and ate it. He saw me looking at him.

‘Do you want some?’ he asked. I hated porridge and never ate it at home.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He handed me another bowl and spoon. I ate every bit and scraped the bowl with the spoon as I had seen him do.

‘Would you like to go outside and look around?’ they said.

I knew they wanted to talk privately and I obeyed. The hens came around me expecting to be fed, and one of them stood between my feet, and a calf nudged me gently in the back. A black and white collie sat on the ground at my knee. In the distance, there were two islands, close together with a passage in between them. In that light they seemed to float above the horizon and I knew that the passage led to Tir-na-nOg.

There is a line in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ which says:

…All experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move…

When I read that for the first time I thought of the passage between those two islands with a glimpse of the lake beyond, seeming to go on and on for ever. It was so quiet that when a fish jumped in the water, I jumped too. I wanted the day never to end.

When we got back to the mainland, he lifted me out.

‘You’re a toppin’ wee lad,’ he said. ‘We’ll make a lough man of you yet.’

That night in bed my mind was full of images of what I had seen, and I fell asleep dreaming of water lapping at the bow of the boat, and water hens with their quick jerky movements among reeds bending in the breeze, and tall herons standing so still you could hardly see them, and supercilious swans gliding disdainfully out of the way of the boat, and the road disappearing under the green water leading to some mysterious underwater kingdom, and the passage between the islands that led to fairyland.

Nobody lives now on the island of the people. Just one sad ivy-covered gable remains of the house where myself and the big man ate the porridge. Tommy the boatman lies under six feet of clay in Knockninny graveyard and I regret that I never told him—I never once told him of the wondrous, magical day that he gave a young boy half a long century ago.

Yes, I have a boat of my own now, fibreglass, with a big engine on the back, but I have never been able to bring myself to visit that island ever again.