Stones of Aran (33 page)

At Trá na mBuailte one feels almost within call of our island
capital
, Cill Rónáin, for although the village is hidden by a rise to the south two boreens lead back that way and in high summer a few tourists escape down here from the crowded bars and ice-cream shops. Usually, though, this shore is as unpeopled as the rest, and the temptation after so much desert is now to cut inland in search of human-kind, whether neighbours or strangers—but here the coast to which I am committed makes a wide loop to the northeast, and it is only after another mile of walking that a view opens up of the great bay embracing Cill Rónáin harbour.

This curved mile lies around a flat, expansive peninsula scarcely rising above sea level. Turning the headland, with the endlessly odd, angular, secretive field-walls on the right and the shore
alternating
heaped shingle and strewn boulders on the left, one
traverses
small sandy, salty, rocky wastelands given over to the rabbits and the stoats that hunt them. A stoat busy at the neck of a bloody carcass twice as big as itself may look up and eye you so boldly as you pass that the old idea, still current in Aran, of its spitting poison comes to mind, and one is relieved when it
withdraws
itself, thin as a thread of wind, through a chink in a wall.

This vague terrain around the headland is known as An Bhean Bháite, the drowned woman. She from whom it is so
anonymously
named lies buried just within the sea-wall of the last field before a track begins, that leads one on more rapidly towards the harbour and the town. I suppose it was a seaweed-gatherer who found her left by the tide on the shore here. Her clothing
indicated
that she came from Connemara, I have been told, and her baby would have been born soon. In those days (but I do not know what days they were; perhaps of a century ago) it was not the custom to bury such human jetsam in consecrated ground, for fear of mixing non-believers with Christian dead, of suicides (such as this unknown mother-not-to-be perhaps was) with good folk legitimately dead not of their own volition. Instead, some peasant more welcoming than the Churches made her part of this, his field, setting a small stone at her head and another at her feet—two more of the untold stones of Aran.

And now, after such meditative miles upon stone, one needs
company
, amusement, excitement—and by one of those coincidences it is the privilege of authorship to command, today is the island’s
pátrún
or Pattern Day, the celebration of its patron saints Peter
and Paul, and the joyous noise of the crowds assembled outside Cill Rónáin for the sports reaches back even to the graveside of the drowned woman. The track hurries us southwards (for we are turning into the great bay that embraces the harbours of Cill Rónáin and Cill Éinne now); roofs old and new jumbled together appear on the right half a mile off and ahead are the masts of
fishing
boats and visiting yachts, and the slow-moving black-
and-white
bulk of the steamer gliding into harbour with its freight of summer visitors. There are three or four bungalows near at hand, a suburb enormously diluted with broad fields and a long brackish lake stretching inland—but we can come back later on to examine the geography, for now the track becomes a seaside road, and the road is packed with people and traffic: families in parked cars, tourists with huge rucksacks, little boys on bewildered donkeys, young heroes carrying oars for the currach races, clusters of girls giggling at the kilts of a visiting pipe band, and reserved elderly Aran men in dark tweed and peaked caps.

At this moment the voice of the technical school’s headmaster, amplified into a thrilling and incomprehensible roar, is
marshalling
the small boys to the Donkey Race in a big hollow field by the road. The modern, multicoloured throng presses through the gaps in the tumbledown field-wall and flings itself on the grassy slopes within while the sombre Aran elders watch from the roadside, kneeling on one knee in their immemorially patient way, leaning a forearm along the top of the wall, sucking their gurgling pipes, spitting carefully in the grass verge. A few of their old
acquaintances
from the other islands and Connemara are among them, exchanging almost invisible nods of recognition. In the old days the three summer festivals of the region were, according to a scrap of doggerel:

(St. Cavan’s Day in Inis Oírr, St. John’s Day in Inis Meáin, SS Peter and Paul’s Day in Árainn, and St. Macdara’s Day in Connemara.) On the 29th of June, the day of Pátrún Árann, the Connemara turf-boats would bring in hundreds of people to visit the holy wells and pray in the ruined churches of Aran of the Saints, to sing and dance and drink, to have contests in smoking clay pipes, and to crack skulls with their stout blackthorn sticks. Towards the end of the last century the scandal of faction-fighting led the Church to put down many of the Pattern Days all over the country, but some, like Aran’s, lingered on until about forty years ago. In recent times many of them have been revived in more sober forms. In Árainn the Pátrún now is a weekend programme including a lecture or two in the Hall, competitions for
sean-nós
or traditional singing, a celebration of the Mass, two days of sports and currach races, and a presentation of prizes at the Sunday night
céilí
dance.

The Currach Races are taken most seriously, but the Donkey Race we are all waiting for now is the height of the year’s
absurdities
. The whistle blows, dust is raised from the shabby hides but none of the animals will leave the starting-line; in fact two of the riders have been spilt in opposite directions as a pair of donkeys makes a bid for sexual congress, to cheers and whistles from a
section
of the populace. They are hauled apart and the starter gets the race going by kicking each rump in the line-up, causing a chaos of barging and bucking from which the remaining boys-on-donkeys radiate crabwise in various directions; spectators rush forward and herd them around some approximation to a circuit. One lad can only progress by jumping off, running round behind, kicking his donkey and flinging himself onto it again, and the starter
encourages
them all with impartial kicks as they come by at the end of the lap. Nobody knows where the race ends, least of all the
rebellious
, unambitious beasts, but somehow a victor emerges, ringed around with cheers and laughter.

The Bicycle Race is next. A mighty-thighed Bun Gabhla girl has borrowed my bike for the event, my precious rusty-trusty
Raleigh that has fought the gales and grikes and muds of Connemara and the Burren with me, and my heart goes out to it as she assaults a bucketing slope, someone in the crowd shouting “She’ll break the chain for sure!” But she collapses in a heap at the bend and other slimmer and more modern models swerve around her to the finish. Now, Throwing the Weight—a fifty-six-pound shop-weight with a loop of rope on its handle, swung backwards and forwards between the legs and then launched into an
unimpressive
arc. Colm Mór of Inis Meáin, a man of extraordinary lankiness, seventy per cent of it in the legs, used to manage a throw of twenty-one feet in his prime, or so he tells me, but nobody matches that in these degenerate times.

And next come the giants of Aran shambling to the Tug-
of-War
, trawler-men in whom some studied regime of hauling nets and drinking Guinness has united the Immovable Mass and the Irresistible Force of the old conundrum. But this year they face a visiting team from a city, trim young men all wearing neat little green shorts and matching singlets embroidered with the logo of their club. Under the command of a briskly barking coach the
visitors
warm up by running on the spot; meanwhile some of the Aran earthshakers seem to be warming each other up with thumps in the ribs from fists that could sink a basking shark. The teams take up the rope, and with one highly co-ordinated tug the
visitors
have the Araners slithering and sprawling; but then the
officious
coach tries to push aside an intrusive Aran supporter, who turns on him with a roar and a swing of a bottle, whereupon the visitors become disjointed, and Aran digs in its heels and hauls them to defeat like so many mackerel.

The wonderful series of events continues all afternoon,
interspersed
with infinite longueurs of disorganization during which we lie on the grass and watch the swallows flitting overhead, or chat with Mrs. Conneely from the west of the island and reckon up with her how many grandchildren she has been blessed with since this time last year. Sometimes there are exotic birds of
passage
to comment upon; one year a hippy couple and their baby, all
wearing many beads and tassels. “Isn’t she dirty!” sniffed a Galway matron. “Are they Red Indians?” whispered a child. “I don’t know,” I replied, “Why don’t you go and ask them?” The child went over to them shyly, and came back saying, “Yes, they are Red Indians, and her name’s Heather.” Then the Ladies’ Half Mile was announced, and we all sat up as Heather shed some of her
w
ampum
and stood forth, very long-legged in her brief
chamois-leather
tunic. From the crack of the starting-pistol she left the rest toiling behind her, drifting away from them with an expression of calm goodwill to the world at large on her face, and we became clamorously appreciative. But as the last lap began another girl steadily started to overhaul her, a solid frowning girl in a bouncing white blouse, with inexorable piston-like legs. We shrieked “Heather! Heather!” (or was it Feather?), thinking of the steam
locomotive
displacing the streaming buffalo herds of the Prairies; and Heather with a backward glance through her flowing hair lengthened that lovely stride, and floated to a serene victory. We were all in love with Heather that summer afternoon, even the Galway matron.

And finally, the Currach Races. We all leave the field and line the sea-wall along the other side of the road. The children
scramble
down onto the shingle and set tin cans floating to throw
pebbles
at, while we wait for the four three-man teams to assemble and to be ferried out to the long black currachs pawing at the wavelets on the starting-line. A bang, at long last, and they row past us, the Joyce brothers of Inis Bearcháin in Connemara taking the lead immediately, then Máirtín and his mates from Cill Mhuirbhigh, then an Inis Meáin team, and another we can’t
identify
. They turn around a buoy and head off towards the lighthouse on Straw Island in the mouth of the bay; a squadron of half-deckers and motor boats follows to monitor and encourage. They dwindle with infinite slowness, and turn about another buoy we cannot see. The currachs are ants crawling the length of a pale golden arm, the sand-dunes of the Cill Éinne side of the bay. We do not need to be told by those with binoculars that the Joyce brothers
are increasing their lead, for that is inevitable; it seems the Joyces have nothing better to do all summer long than go from festival to festival winning currach races. It is more intriguing to speculate about a little sailing dinghy that appears from the direction of the harbour and shapes for the open sea. The man at the tiller does not look back. The blue wedge of his sail exactly splits the
difference
between the blue of the water and the blue of the sky. Who is this insouciant loner? How is it that he seems to be drawing away in his wake something of the brightness of the hour? Or is it just that it is getting late and the breeze has suddenly become chilly? Currach races are boring, really. After this heat there will be
semi-finals
and finals for the Joyce brothers to win; it will all take hours. We begin to think of dinner, and the hilly road home. A vast
owl-note
from the direction of the quay warns the day-trippers to hurry, for the captain of the steamer wants to have her safe in Galway harbour before darkness falls.

The long brackish lake I hurried by a few pages back is the
remains
of an inlet of the sea. At high tide small boats used to be able to sail across the bar at its mouth to anchor at its head, in Poll na bPortán, the bay of the crabs, while hookers could be hauled with ropes to a safe winter anchorage there. At low tide the bar was dry enough to make a shortcut across the mouth of the
inlet
—hence the name Loch an Chara, the lake of the ford. The building up of this ford into a causeway carrying a road was the work of the Reverend William Kilbride, who was the Protestant Minister of Cill Rónáin during the bitter years of the Land War in the 1880S. As spiritual leader of a very small and perhaps
spiritually
undemanding community of constables and coastguards, he had time for archaeological investigations and for farming. His contributions to knowledge are to be found in a couple of papers
in antiquarian journals and provide a few clues to certain stones I will puzzle over in their places. His role in the economic
exploitation
of the islanders and in the profiteering in souls, the offering of soup and salvation together, based on the misery consequent upon that exploitation, has won him a rank second only to that of the wicked agent Thompson in the demonology of Aran. I shall return to his missionary work in
Labyrinth
when I reassemble the
characters
of old Cill Rónáin, all stiffened and shrunk into a puppet-show by the passage of a century.

It is Kilbride's piece-by-piece acquisition of a useful farm of land during that time of evictions that is principally remembered against him today. A story I have heard several times about a field by the head of the pier which Kilbride wished to incorporate into his farm shows the islanders' tendency to place all the blame for their oppressions on the agent and the local Protestant
establishment
, leaving the ultimate profiteers, the landowners, in lofty
irreproachability
, far away in the nimbus of a fairytale. This field was part of the small-holding of a man called Dirrane, and one day he saw Thompson and “someone else” looking about the field. (Sometimes this “someone else” is identified as Kilbride and sometimes left anonymous, perhaps in deference to my feelings, for since I am not a Catholic it seems to follow that I must be a Protestant.) Dirrane seized his spade and ran down to warn them off, and as they jumped over the wall of the field to escape him he made a swing at them with the spade and sliced the heel off Thompson's shoe. His neighbours were very alarmed about this and told him he would surely be evicted, but Dirrane decided to lay his case before Lady Digby herself. So he walked to Dublin—perhaps it took him a month—and called on Her Ladyship. After hearing his story Lady Digby asked, “Are there many intelligent men like you in Aran? I had always heard they were savages!” She opened a chest and showed him five guineas. “That's all the money I ever got from Aran,” she said. “And now go home and tell the agent you can keep your land.”

How Kilbride created that part of his farm around Loch an
Chara, starting from the basis of a few rocky islands in the lake, is told by Pat Mullen in his book
Man
of
Aran
:

Despite Pat Mullen's rather equivocal testimonial it does seem that Kilbride cannot be acquitted of “land-grabbing.” The
accusation
of profiting from the evictions of smallholders was made against him even in the House of Commons when a question was asked on behalf of the member for Galway, about the misdeeds of the notorious Thompson, and today the folk memory is
unanimous
against him.

The “wild, powerful workman” in charge of Kilbride's drains was later superseded by automatic devices, large stone tanks in which the pressure of the rising tide itself shut the sluices; but as the land changed hands after Kilbride's time the outlets became blocked with sand, and now the lake reclaims much of the
surrounding
pasture every winter. The remains of one of the tanks can be seen where one of the old drainage channels stops against the causeway along the shore.

Pat Mullen's little history of Kilbride's farm is a preliminary to a long account of an incident from his own childhood concerning the beach on the outside of this causeway. Before the building of the road and sea-wall there, the local people had been accustomed to take sand from that shore for “making land,” but Kilbride
forbade
them to do this and had a few of them fined for trying to do so, on the grounds that the sand was a necessary protection for his causeway and his farm against the high seas of winter. So the sand accumulated year after year, and when it blew onto the road Kilbride's workmen would shovel it inside where it built up into a solid backing to the causeway. “While this arrangement was
satisfactory
for Kilbride,” writes Pat Mullen, “
we
had to live too. Our family was increasing, and we had to make more gardens.” Pat was the fourth of eleven children growing up in their little cottage in Cill Rónáin. His father, Johnny Mullen, was a small truculent man, an island “character” of whom many tales are still current (he was the first person Robert Flaherty the film-maker noticed on his arrival at Cill Rónáin pier. “The dignity of a Dook!” was Flaherty's comment, but in fact Johnny had a higher opinion of his status and called himself the King of the island). Johnny
owned a bit of crag near this beach, “a waste of rock on which nothing grew except, here and there, a white thorn bush that had found root in the deep fissures,” and he decided to make fields out of it with the aid of about “five or six hundred tons” of the
forbidden
sand. (There is an Aran Factor of numerical exaggeration at work in nearly all writing on these islands; in Pat Mullen's books it usually stands at around a hundred per cent, but in this instance surely it rises a good deal higher.) The expropriation of the
expropriator
was carried out over a number of dark winter nights. Pat and the other children would scout around the boreens of the area beforehand to check where the neighbours' donkeys were grazing and where their wooden straddles and baskets had been left lying in the shelter of field-walls, and then when the village was asleep the donkeys and their gear would be assembled and the whole family would work furiously bringing up loads of sand from the beach to the Mullen crag. Before dawn the donkeys would be back in the boreens, the baskets rinsed out and replaced, and Johnny, backtracking all the way with a shovel, would have smoothed out the beach and removed every trace of the work and of the donkeys. As the winter progressed people began to remark on the way in which stones were beginning to show through the sand of the beach, but one of the easterly gales that always
produce
an undertow sweeping sand off that shore came opportunely to divert suspicion from the Mullens. Later Johnny spread a few currach-loads of seaweed from Straw Island on the crag and the new gardens were ready for the spring planting of potatoes. The causeway did not suffer, and “all these five little gardens are now, through endless improvements, very rich and can grow all kinds of vegetables and root crops as well; and when in grass they can be mown for hay if the summer happens to be showery.”

Not long after I had read this raw little creation-myth I
happened
upon an image from the other end of the spectrum of
human
dreams. It was a photograph by Cecil Beaton, a carefully confected essence of sophistication; it showed a bar in, I suppose, Manhattan (an island about the same size and shape as Aran on
the other edge of the Atlantic), with, in the centre, Audrey Hepburn exquisitely reclined across several barstools; on the right S. J. Perelman proffers a silent New-Yorkerism, while on the left is an elegant couple in evening dress, tête-à-tête: an actor whose name I forget—and Johnny Mullen's daughter. How infinitely odd, how endlessly productive of more than root-crops and hay the world is! And yet, how inevitable all its transformations.

In 1905, at the age of nineteen, Pat Mullen left Aran like so many for whom no amount of sand and seaweed could provide a living, and he went to America. After years of rambling and labouring he married a Connemara woman, took to making moonshine, and had two daughters and a son. In 1921 Johnny wrote to say that if he didn't come back soon the old home and the little holding of land they had worked so hard to create would be sold off. Pat returned to Aran with his little son, P.J., leaving the rest of the family to run the shebeen. The younger daughter, Barbara, escaped from a Cinderella existence there by winning prizes for Irish stepdancing, and by working in a New York store. At the age of twenty-one she too came to Aran. Robert Flaherty was there at the time making
Man
of
Aran
,
and Pat was his
factotum
. Barbara met and married the young camera-man John Taylor, and went to England with him. Her career thenceforth is part of film history—which means, I am afraid, that I do not know it, but it can be looked up in books; I only remember her in her later years, as the housekeeper Janet in the TV series
Dr.
Finla
y'
s
Casebook
,
a refined and deeply feminine character we have since found re-embodied, to a hallucinatory degree of
resemblance
, in certain Aran ladies.

Barbara Mullen died in 1979 and is buried in Tír an Fhia where her mother came from. The bungalow she had built as a summer home is just south of Loch an Chara, and the gardens around it are those made from the minister's sand.