Читать книгу On an Alien Shore - John Tully - Страница 7

2

MICHAEL WAS TWENTY-ONE years of age and a shipwright by profession – a highly skilled marine carpenter and joiner. While he was capable of building and repairing wooden boats and ships, he had been employed in the Tyneside shipyards laying the keel blocks of iron ships and fitting out the cabins, crews’ messes, officers’ wardrooms, galleys and so forth of their interiors. His family lived in Gateshead, within sight, sound and smell of the River Tyne. There were many families like them in the town; so many indeed that the quarter where the family lived was sometimes called “Little Ireland”. Like other industrial cities, it had sucked in immigrants from every corner of the British Isles and beyond.

His childhood world had been bounded by the black and silver waters of Loch Feabhail and the hills of Inis Eoghain, a ragged promontory that jutted out into the Atlantic and stretched west to Loch Súili. Baile a’ Chaolais they called his hamlet – “the Village of the Narrows” – which the English military surveyors had interpreted as “Ballycoolish”, which means precisely nothing at all. Similarly, they had renamed the broad estuary on which it sat “Lough Foyle” and the peninsula as “Inishowen”. The beautiful fjord of Súili became “Lough Swilly”, its waters an occasional haven for British warships.

You can imagine the English nomenclature wallahs clattering importantly into Baile a’ Chaolais on their big horses, all decked out in their red coats. At their head is an officer with mutton-chop whiskers and imperious eye – Captain Carruthers-Bligh or some such doublebarrelled moniker.

“I say, my man, what d’ye call this place?” Carruthers-Bligh demands of a passing villager.

“Baile a’ Chaolais, sir,” replies the man.

“Bally what? snorts Carruthers-Bligh. Then, barking at a corporal, he snaps “What tommyrot! Write it down as Ballycoolish!”

Earlier, not content with rendering Doire – the town at the head of the lough – as Derry, the English had renamed it Londonderry. As the Ballycoolish savant Seamus MacDubhghaill – or James McDowell – observed, to be sure, they would be outraged were their own towns redubbed as, say, Dublinlondon, Moscowbirmingham or Berlinmanchester, but then Perfidious Albion hadn’t been invaded since 1066. After that, McDowell ranted, they had gone in for invading other people and could inflict any such nomenclatorial atrocities as took their imperial whims and fancies. This extended to the Anglicisation of Irish family and given names. Michael’s family – his father Pádraig, his mother Brighid, his brother Tadgh and his sister Máire – became Patrick, Bridget, Timothy and Mary respectively. His own Christian name, Mícheál, became Michael. Such were the politico-lexicographical facts of life in John Bull’s Other Island, where the English had zealously set about civilising the natives.

For Captain Carruthers-Bligh, Ballycoolish was the godforsaken back of beyond, but it was all Michael knew and all he ever wanted, not that he thought much about it at the time. Ballycoolish simply was. Looking back, he realised how beautiful it was, winter mud, ice, poverty and all notwithstanding. They had no way of comparing it with the rest of the world and they mostly took it for granted. Yet for Michael’s family, it was the world. You could sneer at the villagers as ignorant culchies, he told Father Minahan, but nothing he had seen since leaving it could convince him of the superiority of the world outside. Ballycoolish, he told the priest, was a straggle of whitewashed cabins along an unpaved road; mud when it rained and dust in the infrequent times the summer sun shone strong. But it was also life, love, and community.

The English people, the Grimshaws, lived in the Big House on the hill, an eccentric confection of disparate styles around a seventeenth century core. They owned most of the land. Two steeples stood sharp against the sky; the Church of Ireland’s tall and slender one, the Catholic’s the short and stubby one, and although the congregation of the latter was by far the largest, their church was the smaller and poorer of the two, which was the normal state of affairs in Ireland. At the centre of the village stood McDowell’s shop and pub, with Doherty’s forge and the stone-built National School overlooking the village Diamond – as such village squares are known in Ulster. Up a boreen behind the village were the hill farms dotted with sheep where Michael’s grandparents had scratched out a bone-hard living; sharecroppers on what had once been their own land. On the rich, flat lands along the lough were the Protestant farms where fat cattle grazed the grass, their owners the descendants of the English and Lowland Scots who had settled during the 17th century Ulster Plantation.

It being Ireland, it often rained, but Michael’s childhood memories, he told Minahan, were mostly of gentle winds blowing clouds the colour of cream across the blue skies of infinity. Michael could never encounter the smell of cut grass without being transported back to the fields of his childhood. They were such a vivid green that you sometimes caught your breath when you looked at them. He loved to walk with his pals in the meadows behind the village, catching butterflies and slashing at the stinging nettles with a stick. If you accidentally stung yourself, you could pick a curly dock leaf on the spot and rub it on the sting to make it better; where you found one plant you could invariably find the other.

One day Michael hiked with his friends Mickey Gallagher and Sean MacDonnell to Newburgh Castle and clambered on the sun-warmed stones. It had been built long ago by the Normans, Mr McDowell had told them. Another time, the boys rambled to Magh Bhile – Moville to those who didn’t speak the Irish – to watch a big ship taking on passengers for America. There were no snakes – everyone knew St Patrick had driven them all out of Ireland – so you could walk safely in the long grass. You could catch tadpoles and minnows in a lochán by a cluster of ruined cabins in the foothills where frogs croaked incessantly, but his mother bade him avoid that place and crossed herself as she spoke. It was a sad place, full of ghosts, she whispered, and he’d understand when he was older.

One summer’s evening he stood outside McDowell’s and heard an old blind man recite a poem, which began “M’atuirse ghéar, mo phéin, mo bhrón, mo bhruid” – “My great sorrow, my pain, my sadness, my need …” There was all the sorrow of the world in that keening lament for the victims of the Great Famine. A shadow passed over Michael’s child’s heart, but it soon faded, for larks soared in the skies, rooks cawed in the woods and doves, linnets and nightingales sang their gentler songs. Rabbits sat among the shamrocks, noses twitching, ready to take flight from the wily fox or villager intent on turning them into dinner. There were salmon in the dark brooks, though Michael and his friends were seldom in luck when they dangled their crude hooks off the parapet of the military bridge.

The seasons turned. Atlantic gales howled down the boreen and churned the lough with waves that crashed over on the County Derry shore. Snow settled like a shroud on the hills. The summer sun sometimes smiled through the curtains of rain, which were drawn most days, it must be said.

The seasons dictated the rhythms of the villagers’ lives; the digging, the planting and sowing, the harvesting. Old Sean Dougherty had a watch that looked older than him, but it only had one hand, and why should he want the other, he asked, pausing to wipe his brow before plunging his slane into the turf. It was as it had always been in Ballycoolish. The people were baptised, confirmed and wed in the Roman church and when they died the priest solemnly intoned the Latin prayers as they were laid in the earth. Generations of Michael’s family slept in the churchyard, the Celtic crosses lined up above them like chessmen on the turf; but if life were a game, it had a predictable outcome, as inevitable as the taxes and tithes. Life could be hard, too, unspeakably hard, as Michael’s parents reminded him, shuddering at mention of the deserted village in the hills, but there was also a sense of belonging and purpose to it all.

When he was old enough, Michael was prised from his mother’s skirt to creep unwillingly to the National School where the lessons were always in the English. “Ach, why must I learn the English?” he demanded of her. “Do the Grimshaws ever speak to us, or the Protestant farmers, save when they are in McDowell’s shop!”

By way of an answer, his Mam merely sighed, her sigh redolent of life’s sorrows, stupidities and injustices. “Ach Michael, mavourneen,” she finally replied in her soft voice. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Her words did not satisfy his curiosity. Much more forthcoming was Mister McDowell who had lived in America. It was the Famine, the dread horror of which hung permanently, a true nightmare on the brains of the living people of Ireland. Afterwards, many people had forgotten the Irish, bade their children speak English only. It was only a matter of time before everyone forgot the tongue of their ancestors.

McDowell’s shop: oh how Michael loved McDowell’s shop – a dark cave that smelled of tea and spices, tobacco smoke, oilskins and paraffin. There were barrels of flour, salted fish, dried fruit, oats, salt and sugar. There were boxes of baking soda and sides of bacon. The walls were festooned with kettles, buckets, slanes and spades, and there were drawers with cutlery, needles and threads, tools and pens and scissors and the like. You could even post or receive a letter there and buy the paper to write it on and the envelope and stamp and sealing wax to send it on its way. Down at one end there was a bar where, when they were older, Michael and his pals drank their first black pints and the men of the village would gather of an evening for the craic.

The villagers reckoned the old shopkeeper to be an educated and well-travelled man, for hadn’t he lived in America and worked on a newspaper there? He looked funny, but he was sharp. If you ever wanted to know what a leprechaun should look like, then James McDowell was your man. His round and wizened old apple of a face scarcely reached above his counter and he served you with hands all knotted like tree roots. He peered through wire-rimmed spectacles and the remaining white hair on the dome of his skull stuck out wild as the long grass in the wind. He was a kindly man; if he found children admiring his line of sweets in their jars behind the dusty old window, the chances were he would give them some for free. He was an honest wee man too, for unlike some others he never cheated on weight or quality.

He was not a natural shopkeeper. A journalist by profession, he had taken over the shop and bar late in life so that he could live in the land of his ancestors. His shop also served as the unofficial headquarters of the local Land League, which displeased the English people in the Big House no end and set him at odds with the greenuniformed policemen who appeared at intervals from the RIC barracks, Corkmen and Dublin jackeens most of them, Michael’s father said. Mister McDowell had never married and the story was that his sweetheart had jilted him at the altar. Not that he ever went near the altar in the village church, for people said his religion was Ireland and his saints were the Fenian dead and the rebels of ‘98. He lived alone in a couple of rooms above the shop. Michael feared he might soon die there, for he had a fearsome cough from smoking a pipe big as a blunderbuss and fouler than a Belfast linen factory chimney.

McDowell was a great one for the reading and it was said that he knew more than Mister Aloysius Byrne the schoolmaster or Father Breslin the priest. It was James McDowell who first opened Michael’s eyes to the beauty and wisdom that was in books, for múinteoir Byrne at the school was a sour-faced martinet fond of the strap who judged the village children incapable of any real learning. He’d even strap you for speaking Irish. Father Breslin with the dandruff all over his soutane was too distant and aloof to pay attention to the boys and girls of the parish. Breslin would rather visit the Big House, drink sherry, play charades and eat cucumber sandwiches on the lawns than spend time and effort on his parishioners. Mrs Cleary, whose daughter skivvied there, said he was tutoring the Grimshaw children in Latin, but he never set foot in any of the village houses unless he absolutely had to.

James McDowell inhabited a different mental universe. He received packets of books and papers from Belfast, London and Dublin, and as Michael grew older he would lend them to him. Many was the time with the winter rain and wind lashing the house that Michael would be curled up before the turf fire with a recommended book . What a world was in them! And Mr McDowell was there to explain what he could not readily understand. “It’ll surely turn the boy’s head,” scolded his Mam, but his Da stoutly defended him – for was it not education that would save old Ireland? he demanded. He was a great friend of McDowell, and Bridget admitted James was a good man, if a heathen.

If there was something the villagers needed that James McDowell could not provide, they could walk to Derry and back in a long summer’s day to get it. Derry was a giant of a city for them with its high city walls and maze of streets, though Michael later realised it was only a middling sort of a town. Still, for the villagers, it was an urban marvel indeed. It stood on the edge of their world. There are those, no doubt, who are restless and believe that the grass is greener elsewhere. Some young men went to sea and travelled as far as America, Cape Town or Australia, but they mostly never came back, unlike Mr McDowell.

Michael’s Uncle Vincent was one who never came back. He wrote to tell the family of the wonders of America, where he’d found work in a shipyard in Baltimore (perhaps because it was also the name of an Irish town, though one at the other end of Ireland). There would be work for the family, he urged. They weren’t convinced; how could any grass be greener than that of Ireland, Michael’s father demanded, though his mother waspishly reminded him of the time not long past when many died with their mouths stained green with grass and their stomachs empty, family among them. “To be sure, they did and all!” his Da snapped, his grey-flecked hair sticking up on end, making him look like an irate bird. “Isn’t that the reason the picture of Michael Davitt is pinned to the kitchen wall? And the one of Mister Parnell, tú bean amaideach?” That caused his Mam to purse her mouth like she’d sucked a lemon, for wasn’t Charles Stewart Parnell after living in sin with that Kitty O’Shea woman?

Michael’s parents were fond of an argument and Bridget had a tongue on her that could scold the varnish off a table. When exasperated by her, his father sometimes ranted: “Biddy, I don’t know why in God’s holy name I ever married you!”

“Ach, well, Patrick, if only you knew the suitors I had,” she would reply in a mock-sweet voice. “And instead I was after ending up with a man as silly as you!” But they loved each other for all that. While there were men who beat their wives and children, Patrick would rather have died than stoop to that.

The family house was a rented cabin next to Grimshaw’s boatyard and slip with the lough slapping at the foot of the garden, and always clean and comfortable. Bridget could not abide a dirty house even though the floor was of beaten earth and all manner of creatures roosted in the thatch. She was always busy, explaining her industry with well-worn proverbs: “Many a day shall we rest in the clay” and “Poverty waits at the gates of idleness”. There was always enough to eat, for she grew spuds in a lazy bed fed with kelp, along with turnips, carrots, herbs and greens, and there was even a goat for milking. Dulse, too, they would collect from the shore, though Michael never cared for the dried seaweed.

His wee sister Mary was often there to help Bridget with these tasks, and although she didn’t smile all that often, she did at Mary when she thought nobody was looking. Mary was the apple of her parents’ eyes, the sweetest child, with a great cascade of auburn hair and eyes the colour and sparkle of emeralds. Like Michael, she had inherited their mother’s slight build. Patrick, in contrast, had a stocky and powerful frame that had made him the terror of the Gaelic football games. And although Mary perhaps knew she was beautiful, it hadn’t turned her head, for her nature was as sweet as her outward form. To be sure, she could be naughty and flighty but there was no real harm in her.

There had been another child who would have been Michael’s older sister, but she had died not long after his birth and he had no memory of her. Caitlin was her name and Bridget never spoke of her. Patrick said the memory of her was a constant knife in Bridget’s heart; she’d never have done with her grieving.

They were a small family by local Catholic standards; there was only one more family member and that was Michael’s older brother Tadgh – Taig – or Timothy in the English, or so they say, as there’s little sense in it. Tim was one of the restless ones. Even as a wee fellow, he had liked to wander. The family gradually lost touch as a result of him moving round so often, much to their sorrow, for he’d been a lovable, if impish child, and a lovable rogue as a young man. He never settled at any trade; he was a real Tadhg an mhargaidh – Taig of the market, the equivalent of jack-of-all-trades – able to turn his hand to any number of jobs but never mastering any. The last they heard he was working as a curate in a San Francisco bar and saving to go to Mexico with some Cornishmen who wanted to dig for silver.

None of the rest of the family, apart possibly from Uncle Vince, was a restless creature. Michael was content to learn the shipwright’s trade, though his mother had wanted him to become a priest. It was in Ballycoolish that he was apprenticed and it was all the work he ever wanted to do. He had to thank the Grimshaws for that, he admitted, though he seldom had a good word for the family.

*

“As I say, we never wanted to leave Ireland,” sighed Michael, shifting his legs to ease the weight of the manacles on his ankles.

There was a sudden rattle of great black keys grinding in the lock and Warder Mulgrew stood in the doorway.

“It’s time for you to go, Father,” he said, apologetically it must be owned. It was time to escort Michael back to his cell, for the light was dying at the window. Soon it would be time for the stewed tea and the slice of bread they called supper before darkness fell and the ghosts came crowding into Michael’s cell.

“It’s been a great comfort talking with ye, Father,” Michael said as the two men shook hands; the shy and diffident priest and the young man on appeal, watched over by a little turnkey from Belfast who by now was convinced that the prisoner was innocent and not the killer his colleagues believed him to be.