The Heather Blazing (30 page)

“I'd love to spend the morning down on the strand,” Niamh said. “How do you think he'd react to the sea?”

“Have you not tried him?”

“He can just play on the sand. Maybe you would carry his basin down?”

After breakfast they set out for the strand. Michael still refused to wear a hat, and when Niamh tried once more to put it on him he threw it on the ground. They carried a rug and some cushions, a flask of tea and some biscuits and a bottle of milk, in case Michael grew hungry. They also brought towels and togs.

When they came to the turn in the lane they looked over the cliff at the short strand and the sea stretching out for
miles, like bright frosted glass, smooth in the strange heat of the September sun. Eamon carried their things while Niamh carried Michael part of the way and then let him down to walk when he insisted. On the strand she tried to put his hat on him again, but he refused.

As he unfolded the rug on the strand and changed into his togs, Eamon wondered which of his children had refused to wear a hat in the sun, or was it he himself. His father, he remembered, wore a straw hat. He saw it once blowing off as his father sat at a table and paper blowing as well in a sudden gust of wind. He could not remember where this was: he went through each corner of the garden in Cush in his mind, unchanged since the days when the Cullens lived there, but he could not see his father sitting at a table and the wind coming suddenly and blowing his hat off. Where had it happened?

Niamh interrupted his attempt to recall.

“Michael wants you to get him a basin of sea-water,” she said. She had taken the child's clothes off and was rubbing him with sun-tan lotion.

He walked down to the sea with the basin and filled it. The water was warm, much warmer than he had expected. He played with Michael while Niamh went in for a swim. She did not spend long getting used to the water. Her movements were swift and decisive. Michael became absorbed in the sea-water and the sand until he turned over the basin and covered himself with water. Eamon lifted him and held him in his arms. He got a towel and dried him. Suddenly he turned when he heard Niamh's voice shouting to them. She was urging them to come into the water.

“Your mama wants you to go into the water,” he said to Michael. “What do you think?” The child rubbed his eyes and squirmed and then smiled. He put his arms around Eamon's neck.

Eamon knew that the water would be a shock for Michael.
He stood at the edge for a while, drinking in the sun and watching Niamh as she swam out. Then he began to wade into the water, talking quietly to his grandson, as though to soothe him. He jumped as each wave came in, until Michael began to watch for waves and laugh as each one approached. Michael's feet were in the water now and his grip had tightened around Eamon's neck. Niamh was swimming close by, and telling them to come out further. Eamon held his grandson under the arms and lifted him high so the sun was on his back and then he dropped him into the water until his legs were wet, holding him firmly all the time. Once more he dropped him slowly, wetting him more this time, and lifted him quickly out of the water. A wave came and he held him high above it. Michael began to laugh; Eamon lifted him and ducked him down into the water and out again, but this time it was too much for him. The child gripped Eamon around the neck and tried to raise his body so that the water would not touch him. He was frightened. Eamon began to carry him slowly in towards the shore.

In the autumn of 1983, when I was editor of the Irish current affairs magazine
Magill
, I was approached with an idea by the journalist and feminist June Levine. It was for a story surrounding the murder of the prostitute Dolores Lynch. A friend of Dolores Lynch, Lyn Madden, was ready to give evidence against a man called John Cullen, accused of the crime. The story Lyn had to tell was deeply disturbing, a portrait of an underworld in Dublin which had been previously dealt with only in some sketchy court reports and in the tabloid press.

As editor, I became involved in the story and met regularly with June Levine. I also witnessed Lyn Madden giving evidence in the court. The case depended on the jury finding her credible. In the end, the jury believed what she said and returned with a guilty verdict.

The following week, as we were getting ready to go to press, I was informed that John Cullen, who was appealing his conviction, had won an injunction preventing us from publishing. When I contacted our lawyers, I discovered that even though his case would be heard by the Court of Criminal Appeal, a three-judge, non-jury court, it was, Cullen's lawyers were claiming, still
sub judice.
When we went to the High Court to have the injunction lifted, we lost. We then appealed to the Supreme Court, who agreed to an early hearing.

While I realised that some members of the Supreme Court disliked the article, it became clear that they did not want to ban its publication. This partly came from an interest in
freedom of the press, but it also arose from their belief in their own independence. If a magazine article could influence them in their consideration of points of law in a court of appeal, why were they so special? Surely they were above being influenced by a mere journalist?

The Chief Justice, in the case which became known as
Cullen v. Toibin
, spoke for his colleagues: “The Court of Criminal Appeal will be asked to consider pure questions of law relative to the appeal. It cannot be suggested that in considering such questions, publication of this or any number of articles in any number of periodicals would have the slightest effect on the objective consideration of legal arguments.”

I watched the judges carefully and I became interested in how the Supreme Court functioned. I realised that its systems and judgments would be fertile territory for a long, investigative article in the magazine. I worked on this article at the same time as I wrote some of my first novel,
The South
, in between intense bouts of production work which publishing a magazine entailed. I began to contact the Supreme Court judges as well as judges of the High Court and prominent lawyers. Some of the judges agreed to see me. Among the first I met was Brian Walsh, the most senior member of the Supreme Court who was also Chairman of the Law Reform Commission and a judge of the European Court. He was gruff at the beginning, but soon became friendly, almost warm. Walsh had a formidable mind. The more I saw him the more he reminded me of my father, who had died in 1967, and my uncle, my father's older brother, who had both been active in the political party Fianna Fáil. I began to take an enormous interest in Walsh's tone, the aura around him, although I knew that in my article I would only be writing about his judgments.

In Ireland at independence in 1922 a civil war was fought over matters both simple and complex. My father's family, who had been involved in the 1916 Rebellion and the War of
Independence, were on the losing side of that war. They were founding members of the Fianna Fáil party in 1926. Fianna Fáil, under Eamon de Valera, came to power in 1932 and held power most of the time until 2011. Both my father and my uncle remained faithful members of the party which managed to represent rich and poor and the spirit of the nation, all at the same time.

As I worked as a journalist, I was not a supporter of the party. I found its rhetoric old-fashioned and thought its leading members stupid or venal, or both. Since I lived in Dublin, away from Enniscorthy where I was born, and had lived in Spain, the old semi-tribal loyalties from the Irish civil war meant nothing to me. It was strange then to be reminded of them as I interviewed judges and barristers in Dublin, and to find the Fianna Fáil judges more sympathetic and indeed more intelligent than the judges whose families or whose loyalties were closer to the other side.

Over the months as I worked on the piece, the shadow of the 1983 referendum on abortion in Ireland loomed large. In the magazine we had been vehemently opposed to the idea of the referendum itself, which would enshrine into the Constitution the legal ban on abortion. In that period you judged people by what side they were on in that debate. I knew, for example, as I sat in the chamber of one High Court judge, that he had been in favour of the referendum and may even have had a hand in drafting the wording of the amendment. A year earlier he had been for me a great demon. Now, as we spoke, I found him remarkably likeable. Such men reminded me that I was not from Dublin, that I was brought up in a conservative, deeply nationalist and patriotic household in provincial Ireland in which the Fianna Fáil party and Ireland were synonomous. I had a great deal in common with some of the judges, and slowly from my encounters with them and my reading of their judgments the idea of a novel began to emerge.

In my first novel,
The South
, I wrote a chapter called “The Sea” which featured a stretch of the coastal landscape of County Wexford in the southeast of Ireland where we had gone every summer as children. I was surprised by the amount of emotion writing about that place had evoked in me and surprised also by the ease with which the images came. It was clear that I could return there—to that eroding coastline with its washed grey light, to the subtle drama in the contours of the landscape and the mild good manners of the people who live there. I would put my judge in the house where we had spent every summer, the house to which we did not return after my father died. As I thought about the book, the images emerged as haunting aspects of memory and loss. The novel became a strange way of recovering them.

If
The South
was full of Mediterranean light and glamour, this novel I dreamed of now was filled with scarce Northern light. If
The South
dramatised a sense of displacement, this new novel would dramatise rootedness. The two novels were a diptych about the generation who came after Irish independence.
The South
dealt with Katherine Proctor, whose life was changed by the burning of her family's house;
The Heather Blazing
dealt with Eamon Redmond, whose father or uncle may have been among those who came to set that very house on fire, the men whom Katherine refers to as “the locals.”

I thought of the grey seascapes and the sense of isolation in the black-and-white early films of Ingmar Bergman. I tried to find a calmer style for
The Heather Blazing
than I had used in
The South
and a more stable structure. As I worked on the first chapters of the book in the Hotel Continental in Tangiers in the late summer of 1987, my mind was filled with images of Enniscorthy in the years before I was born, the death of my grandfather in 1940, for example, and the death of his youngest son, my uncle, from tuberculosis, a few weeks later. I mixed these in with my own life in the time when my father, who was a teacher, founded the museum
in Enniscorthy Castle and I went with him and a local priest to visit houses in the countryside that had artefacts from the past, including pike-heads used by the rebels in 1798.

In Tarkovsky's
Mirror
and Bergman's
Persona
I had noticed how powerful the idea of the blurring of identities was, or letting memory and imagination fade into each other. I let that happen in
The Heather Blazing
as I blurred what had happened to my father in his life with memories of my own. Eamon Redmond was both of us in some ways, and neither of us in others. But the atmosphere of the town and the coast belonged to a life I knew as much as the protagonist of the novel did.

As with
The South
and the novel I wrote next,
The Story of the Night
, and later
The Master
, I wrote some early chapters of
The Heather Blazing
and then left the book aside, unsure how to proceed, uneasy about the emotions which the early chapters had stirred up. I spent 1988 in Spain without writing a word of the novel, and then spent a year writing a book about Barcelona and travelling in a new expanded Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Finally, towards the end of 1990, I went to Budapest and moved into a small room in a cheap, modern hotel near the railway station. It was freezing outside. I did not speak a word of the language. I did not know anyone. The streets were filled with Romanians and others looking for work, but the cafes and the opera house were from an older world, with echoes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In that place of old tensions and loyalties and new freedom I worked every day and most nights on my novel, conjuring up people I had known, or half known, or heard about, and houses I had lived in before I went to Dublin. I used the eroding cliffs at Cush not as metaphor, but as themselves, exactly as they were when we went there each summer, but with all the resonance which lost things can have, things which cannot be recovered except in words.

In 1992, when a proof of the book had been printed, I gave
it to a lawyer to read. I was warned by him to remove Chapter One of Part Two which contained material which might suggest that my judge was based on a real judge still presiding at that time. I hastily re-wrote the offending chapter. Since twenty years have passed, many of those who served on the bench have died. The character of Eamon Redmond, in any case, was not based on any one of them. That original chapter is published here for the first time in its proper place.