All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ we intimated, possesses pre-eminently, one distinction for which it has long been famous, the ardour with which its natives acquire and communicate knowledge. It is by no means rare to find among the humblest of the peasantry, who have no prospect of existing except by daily labour, men who can converse fluently in Latin and have a good knowledge of Greek.

      From Listowel and its Vicinity (1973)

      by FATHER J. ANTHONY GAUGHAN

      My father’s country begins on the shores of the River Shannon. The river is wide here where it meets the Atlantic and the currents twist and race as fresh water, from the distant mountains, washes into the ocean. On one shore there are the hills of Clare, on the other the flatlands of North Kerry. Kerry and Clare are separated only by a few miles of water. But they are immeasurably different. The Clare people – my wife’s people – are quiet, modest and watchful, they wait before sharing their opinions. To me there is something stolid, almost puritan about them, born of generations of tough living on small, flinty farms.

      On the other side of the river, my father’s side, are people who call their county ‘The Kingdom’ and regard it as just that: not a collection of townlands and villages, mountains and rivers, but a place set apart from the rest of Ireland, by virtue of its beauty and its characters – writers, politicians, footballers and dreamers. Football and politics are the twin religions here. In his youth my father was a good footballer. He played for Listowel in fierce matches against teams from neighbouring villages.

      There is a photograph of my father, taken when he would have been around seventeen, playing for Listowel. He is standing in the middle of the group, but I recognise the expression in his eyes. He is with them, but he is far away, already thinking of elsewhere. Soon after the photograph was taken he left Listowel to find his dream in Dublin. ‘He just upped and went,’ an aunt remembered.

      But the villages of childhood rang in his memory. Names shaped by Irish words, names such as Moyvane, Duagh, Lisselton, Knocknagoshel, Asdee, Finuge, Ballylongford, Cnoc an Oir, the mountain of gold where Finn McCool fought the King of the World. The Norsemen ravaged here, and the Normans after them, followed in time by the armies of Elizabeth and Cromwell, and later still the Black and Tans. A country of ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, all the history of conquest and dispossession poking out from beneath thickets of brambles.

      When my father spoke of Kerry there was always a tenderness in his voice, a caressing of the names which took him back to a world before the city. The city was the only place to be if you wanted to be an actor. But my father was always a countryman, never truly at ease with the noise and pace of Dublin.

      As a child I would sense the beginning of that magical country through the sweet smell of burning turf, watching from the car window the smoke curling from the chimneys of isolated cottages; the ricks of freshly dug peat stacked near the roadside, or standing like the cairns of some lost civilisation across the acres of bogland; the black surface of the bog, crisscrossed with pathways made by generations of turf diggers, interspersed with clumps of snipe grass, and sometimes, in the right season, white wisps of bog cotton.

      For several miles after Tarbert it was a country of small horizons; I remember the distant shimmer of the Atlantic against low clouds and then the road pushing inland, the bog giving way to small farms as we climbed into the hills above the River Feale, travelling back to my father’s beginnings. Coming down into the valley, I would see the river, and badger my father to take me fishing there. There were deep pools upriver, he said, where if you fell in you would never be seen again. But in those pools were the biggest salmon. Once I followed him with siblings and cousins up the path by the river, across the ditches, and along the edge of Gurtenard Wood. This landscape had been a place of escape for him as a child. He had wandered there alone, reciting aloud the poems of Wordsworth and Shelley, already planning a life on the stage, burning with belief.

      There was a place where the trees leaned over the water and a small, sandy beach extended almost to the middle of the river. This was one of the salmon pools, he said, and my heart thrilled. We fished with a line, a tiny hook and a worm I’d rooted out from the bottom of a ditch. How long passed without a bite that afternoon? It might have been one hour, two hours, more. I didn’t mind at all. I loved the sight of him there, happy in a place he loved, with the river dreaming its way past us. And then there was a bite. A flicker on the line and my father became alert, slowly moving to the edge of the water. ‘Sssh,’ he said. Then whispering, ‘We have one.’

      He tugged hard and brought it in. It was a brown trout, small, the brackish colour of the river. When it was directly beneath us, twisting at the end of the line, my father said, ‘Watch this’ and put his finger under the white stomach of the fish. I swear that after a few moments of him stroking it stopped its frantic movement, and sat suspended between his hand and the surface of the water. I remember feeling so proud of him then, my father, the least practical of men, metamorphosed into a skilled hunter on the river. We cooked it later in my grandmother’s kitchen, sizzling in butter, tiny now that the head and tail had been removed.

      Before a trip to Kerry he was excited, like a child. Coming into town he would point out the Carnegie Library, where he dreamed over books, and St Michael’s College, where his genius for language won him first prize in Greek in the national examinations; the cemetery where our people were buried, and the police barracks where the Royal Irish Constabulary mutinied against the British in 1921.

      My grandmother’s people farmed at a place called Lisselton, a few miles away in the green valley between Listowel and the Atlantic Ocean. To get there you drove down a small brambly lane and into a wide whitewashed farmyard. This was in the time before Irish farms were mechanised, and I milked cows by hand and saw the curd churned into butter. My instructor was one of the gentlest men you could hope to meet, an old IRA man, my grand-uncle, Eddie Purtill.

      After the day’s work had been done cards would be played in the kitchen, and then stories would be told. There was no television; the magic box hadn’t yet colonised the homes of much of rural Ireland. It was a large and airy room and life congregated around the big hearth where food was cooked and clothes dried. My father told stories too. I asked him to tell me those I had heard a thousand times before. ‘Tell me about the Knight of Kerry’s castle, Da.’ And he would. They were true stories and made-up stories; stories he had heard from his own father or the men and women who’d told their legends of ghosts and old battles around the firesides of his youth. He could keep an audience spellbound, whether they were farm labourers or the Dublin intelligentsia.

      Kerry was my father’s inspiration, a country of magic. But I could tell he was haunted by it too. It was the place where he had known uncomplicated happiness but it was also the source of much of his pain.

      Éamonn was born there in 1925; his parents, Bill Keane and Hanna Purtill, had married in 1923, the same year the Irish Civil War reached its terrible apogee. The country of his birth was devastated by war. His mother had fought with the IRA against the British and been a marked woman. She smuggled guns and communications. Her brother Mick led the IRA Flying Column in North Kerry. A Black and Tan named Darcy called the beautiful farmer’s daughter ‘the maid of the mountains’. When she refused to go walking with him he gave her twenty-four hours to leave town. Hanna laid low but refused to leave Listowel.

      In the civil war that followed the British withdrawal, my father’s people took Michael Collins’s side. They were tired of war and believed the Treaty he signed with the British was the stepping stone to freedom that Collins promised. Hanna worshipped Collins. When he was shot by his former IRA comrades she wept inconsolably. Years after, when the IRA began attacking meetings of Collins’s supporters, she joined an outfit called the Army Comrades Association, better known as the Blueshirts.

      Depending on who you talk to the Blueshirts were a legitimate self-defence organisation forced into being by IRA intimidation, or a quasi-fascist СКАЧАТЬ