On an Irish Island (11 page)

Part of a letter, in Irish, from Tomás Ó Criomhthain to Brian Kelly, who more than anyone else encouraged him as a writer.
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Illustration Credit ill.8
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At first, Tomás wondered if maybe Brian wanted his scribblings merely to assure himself a steady stream of Irish, to keep up his language skills—or so he said later, out of who knows what false modesty. But he
came to understand that Brian wanted the best for him. “
He said it would be a pity if I were idle.”

Tomás had told Brian about one day in his youth, on a turf-gathering expedition to the other side of the island, when he’d been waylaid by Seán Ó Duinnshlé, or
Seán Dunlevy, an island poet who died in 1889. “Well, isn’t it a pity for you to be cutting turf on such a hot day,” said the poet. “
Sit down a bit, the day is long, and it’ll be cool in the afternoon.” As the two of them lay out in the sun, Dunlevy recited a long, angry poem about a
sheep killed by neighbors:

At the end, according to Tomás, Dunlevy asked if he had something to write it down with: “The poem will be lost if somebody doesn’t pick it up.” Tomás fished out paper and pencil and, in some crude English-based
phonetic script, recorded it. Now, these many years later, Brian was making a similar plea. “
I thought it a pity that [the life of the island] would die, unrecorded, and I felt that Tomás could make it live on paper for future generations.” He needed to write about the ordinary and everyday in island life.

And so Tomás did, for five years the flow never abating. Sharply observed little stories, rarely more than a few paragraphs, a few hundred words at a pop; short gathered dialogues; moral lessons; bits of light comedy. The first to make it into
Allagar na hInise
(which represented only about a third of Tomás’s output), was dated April 1919.
“Seamus and His Cravings,” it was called in the book’s English translation,
Island Cross-Talk,
and it describes men working in the fields who stop for a smoking break. Another tells of an island character,
Tadhg the Joker, who hears a cuckoo but fears no one else has. A third pictures as many
women gathered at the village well “as there are in Killarney.… They drowned the noise of the King and the noise of the ocean too.” We learn the price of sugar, flour, and tobacco, island blessings, ornate curses. Some stories carry a bitter tang, reflect the harshness of island life. Others are warm and wise. Still others express moments of idyllic beauty. And inevitably, right in the middle of things, stands Tomás.

“
The mountains were aglow with every hue,” he writes in the spring of 1920.

A vignette recorded a few months earlier suggests how the island’s “simple life” could be anything but. A neighbor walks by Tomás’s house and the two stop to chat. “
I have the seven cares of the mountain on my shoulders,” Seán Shéamais tells him. “I need turf. I have sheep to dip. I need flour. I have a wall to repair. I have a shed to rebuild. I have a trawl-line to see to and a net to prepare.” He can’t decide what to do first and in frustration has “left the house now to have a day away from it all.” Tomás is not sympathetic.

For all the iconic status granted Ó Criomhthain’s later work,
The Islandman,
some hold
Island Cross-Talk
to be more interesting. “
I had forgotten that it contained such fine things,” observed
George Thomson after reading it again in Irish many years after its first publication. “Yes, indeed, it does recall Irish nature
poetry, and Shakespeare’s sonnets as well.”
Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, Tomás’s grandson, called it “
the great pearl of Tomás’s writing,” praising it for “nice little scenes beautifully assembled and polished,” like stones on the shore worked and polished by the waves.

“A long-distance conversation with his friend Brian”—that’s how Blasket scholar
Muiris Mac Conghail described it. But, although encouraged by Brian, Tomás probably never felt wholly free to express all that he saw and felt. His family, friends, and neighbors were crowded one on top of another in a tiny village at one end of an island. Everyone was a cousin of everyone else, the families entwined by
marriage. He had gumption to write about them as honestly as he did, but there were limits. Tomás changed names. He held back. He didn’t always “manage to describe what
was in his heart,” said
Pádraig Ua Maoileoin. “There was no way that poor man could do that and live within that community.
They lived [there] in each other’s shadow.”

But what he did he did. “
He was a mason as well as a fisherman,” Brian said of him, “accustomed to put up a house stone by stone. ‘Do the same with words as you would with stones,’ I used to say to him.” The pages of foolscap in Brian’s care piled up, 189 of them before Tomás was finished. An entry for April 1922 tells of a Clare man seeking an islander to improve his Irish, leading Tomás to mention Brian Kelly by name: “I don’t know whether anyone else in the country has as much written Irish in front of him as he has to hand.” And then he adds: “
Wouldn’t it delight my heart to be able to read a book of my own before I died.”

We enjoy here the hindsight of history, sure that Tomás’s efforts will bear fruit, that his work ultimately will get bound between covers and set before the world. But Tomás wished for this in 1922, and it would be many a long year of uncertainty and doubt, demanding more than anything Brian Kelly could give it, before he’d be able to pose for a photograph, leaning against the low stone wall in front of his house, with his own book in his own hands.

Tomás’s stories were almost all rooted in the life of the island itself—acts of kindness, foolishness, or bravery, clever repartee, chatter at the village well, accidents and injuries, and always the changing
weather. But news of the big world did sometimes make its way across
Blasket Sound. Twice a week in good weather, the king brought
mail by
naomhóg.
And the islanders were always much attuned to prices in the mainland markets, on whose whim their livelihoods depended. In June 1919,
mackerel went for four shillings a hundredweight in Dingle,
lobsters for a shilling a piece. In September, in the wake of a carters’ strike in
Dún Chaoin that kept their catch from market, villagers groused that an ounce of
tobacco cost almost a shilling, a new net four pounds. The island stood apart from the rest of Ireland—but not entirely so.

In November 1919, the islanders learned that
Éamon de Valera, a leader of the 1916 Rising, was in California, raising money for the nationalist cause. What would freedom mean? asked Séamaisín, in one of Tomás’s vignettes. “
One crowned King of England and another crowned King of Ireland—that,” said Tomás, “is something you’ll never see, Diarmaid, so
long as the sun is in the sky. If there is a crown on a King in Ireland it will be England’s crown he will have to wear.”

“I hope you’re proved wrong!” said Diarmaid Bán.

In the spring of 1920, Tomás noted the death of the Mayor of Cork, shot by British soldiers.

Then, a little later: “
A currach has come in with the news that every train in Ireland was halted.”
Food was scarce. Men were dying in a hunger strike. Serious fighting was expected.

July 1921 brought talk of
home rule, following a truce in the Anglo-Irish War. Negotiations were to follow in
London.

In fact, the years of Brian’s visits and Tomás’s
Island Cross-Talk
stories corresponded to the most tumultuous time in Ireland’s recent history. The 1916 Rising, today an iconic moment in Ireland’s struggle to become itself, began when a few
Irish republicans took over Dublin’s General Post Office and declared a provisional government. “Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.”

It was lofty talk, and most Irish didn’t at first pay it heed. But then the leaders of the rebellion were summarily executed by the British; martyrs all, they became. Public opinion shifted. A general election two years later brought loud calls for independence from the Crown. Elected Members of
Parliament representing Ireland convened an Irish Parliament, or Dáil, and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The British refused to accept its legitimacy, touching off the
War of Independence that ground on from January 1919 to July 1921. Among the British ranks were seven thousand soldiers, recruited by advertisements in Britain as willing to take on a “rough and dangerous task.” They were furnished with dark-green and khaki uniforms that led them to be called the Black and Tans. They proved notorious for their brutality.

The truce in July 1921 was followed by a treaty in December. It called for the British to leave Ireland;
Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom; members of a new Irish parliament to swear allegiance to the British Crown. Irish opinion split. Brother divided against brother. The resulting
civil war between pro- and anti-treaty forces was as terrible as the War of Independence, took more lives, and in the scale of its atrocities was just as cruel.

On the first day of January 1923, Tomás concluded
Island Cross-Talk.
“
I am writing this at the start of the New Year in God’s name, and if we spent the Old Year well, may we spend the New Year seven times better.… Since our people throughout Ireland cannot understand each other, may God grant the grace of understanding to them before the year is long gone.”

In May, a cease-fire ended the civil war.

In August, the first elections of the Irish Free State were held.

Late that month,
George Thomson, straight from King’s College, Cambridge, and bound for the Blaskets, arrived in Dingle while elections were in progress, arousing the suspicions of Irish police.

A few months before he left for Ireland,
George Thomson had finished up his first year
at King’s College, among the oldest and most storied of
Cambridge University’s two dozen or so colleges, founded in 1441. A scholarship student in classics,
he occupied rooms looking out onto Chetwynd Court, adjacent to a classroom whose leaded-glass windows whispered church as much as college. Above him lived another
classicist, below a budding mathematician admitted to King’s the same year he was. Both had gone to distinguished English public schools dating back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—one to Saint Dunstan’s, the other to Christ’s Hospital School, which counted
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Charles Lamb among its “Old Blues.” Thomson himself was a product of the similarly venerable
Dulwich College.

George’s father, William, was a chartered public accountant, not especially wealthy, but hardworking. Family lore and correspondence establish him as the illegitimate son of a British judge long stationed in India, Sir William
Markby, and a French peasant girl he’d met in his mid-thirties on a trip back to
England before his marriage. William was taken in by a Scottish carpenter and his family in the north of England; Markby contributed to his care and, later, his education.

Early in the new century, on June 6, 1900, thirty-seven-year-old William Thomson married Minnie Clements, twenty-three, daughter of a civil servant. On hearing of the impending wedding, Markby wrote William, signaling his approval—he knew the bride’s father—and sending him a check as a wedding present. George Derwent Thomson had two older sisters, but was the oldest of their three boys, born August 19, 1903; his middle name owed to the picturesque
Derwentwater area of the Lake District, which his parents liked to visit. When the family sat for a photograph in the summer of 1920—all of them clustered around the dark-complexioned paterfamilias with his big drooping mustache, the women in their long summer dresses and high collars or chokers—the five children made for a fresh-faced, singularly handsome brood.

In 1916, when he was about twelve, George set up a
lending library out of his home, stocked with Macaulay and Ruskin, Dickens and Scott, Austen and Thackeray. The holdings of what he variously called his “Select Library,” or “ ‘Den’ Library of Famous Literature,” were listed in a hand-inked catalogue, broken down into biography, fiction, and poetry, peppered with charming little graphic devices, and setting out a formidably starched list of rules worthy of libraries anywhere. Books needed to be returned within fourteen days, though exceptions, George allowed, were permitted. His library, he advised readers, comprised “nearly one hundred & fifty volumes of all that is best in English and Foreign Literature and is always increasing in numbers.” Whether slavishly following the grown-ups or poking fun at them, young George was surely adept at verbal mimicry.