This Is Happiness, Page 3

  Still, whenever we arrived down there was no possibility of going elsewhere for a meal. Generosity to visitors was a helpless affliction in west Clare, and though this was a time of desolation in the west when houses were emptying and on roads lingered the sorrow of a departing people, Making the Welcome remained a kind of constitutional imperative. My grandparents, like all the old people in Faha then, preserved intact ancient courtesies. The cost of it, the way they would be living in the days after we left, was not hinted at, nor did it once occur to me.

  Then, when my mother fell in Dublin for the first time, I was sent for the first of many times like a parcel down to the old people. It was not unusual. There was significant traffic of children in the country then, infants born to exhausted mothers or young girls, sent to be raised by maiden aunts, others, to escape ravages of poverty or alcohol, transited to temporary guardians, some of whom they took to be their parents and became enmeshed in the secretive and coiled history of the time. People aspired to adhere to the teachings of the Church, but, for human beings, abstinence proved unequal to desire, and more and more children kept coming. I was seven years old. A white card with NOEL CROWE and my address was safety-pinned on to my jacket. I was accompanied by Mother Acquin, a large black-and-white albatross who smelled of bull’s eyes. Mother Acquin was a relation on my mother’s side. On that side there were several priests, nuns, and missionaries vanished into Africa who we were to pray for, because they were all praying for us, my mother said, and, with the softness of her eyes and the lamb in her voice, the boy I was did not doubt it.

  There was nothing of the lamb in Mother Acquin. She could have been second choice to command the Allied Forces. She was on her way to take the sea air with the Sisters of Mercy. She’d take all they had, I’d say. As though a significant peril lay ahead, she set up a prayer-shield over us in the carriage, black rosary beads harnessing the horns of her fingers. The ticket collector looked in and backed immediately out.

  The journey from Dublin took a full day and several rattling trains, each one smaller than the one before, with the result that arrival seemed uncertain and the country enormous. Always you were heading west, and always, in defiance of science and geography, there was further to go. All boys were schooled on cowboy stories then. Cap guns are gone now, but in my cardboard suitcase I had a small silver Colt 45 and a black-barrelled Mustang. The Winchester rifle I had to leave behind. So, when Mother Acquin left the carriage to see what inefficiency was delaying the tea service, I pressed my forehead to the glass and considered how fast the Apaches would have to ride before a Brave would slip his horse, clamber up into the carriage and come with raised tomahawk for Mother Acquin.

  In Ennis there was a long delay. We were to transfer to the narrow-gauge West Clare Railway. The engine and carriage were there, the driver was not.

  We boarded the carriage and sat. There were five other passengers, one of them a hen.

  I think the flat black eye of the hen put Mother Acquin off starting the Glorious Mysteries.

  Outside, rain was falling and not falling. It meant the coalsmoke did not rise but curled into the carriage where to the other passengers it seemed a familiar. Mother Acquin pushed up the window, but the air was already acrid and on sitting back down her fingertips were black.

  ‘Touch nothing.’

  Our fellow passengers, all quite smudged, took on the natural timidity of those in the company of a religious habit.

  We sat on the train going nowhere.

  It continued going there for some time.

  At last, Mother Acquin, who considered patience an overrated virtue, pulled me up by the arm and we got off the train and marched down the platform.

  ‘You,’ she said, to a low-sized porter in the uniform of a man two feet taller. The uniform was black, or black now, the trousers bagging at the knees and concertinaing down over his boots. Although the suit was shabby, the cap was firm and had a strap that gleamed. He was inordinately proud of the cap.

  ‘What is the delay?’

  ‘We’re waiting on the driver, Ma’am,’ the porter said, and touched the cap to assert its authority.

  ‘Is he a figment?’ Mother Acquin asked.

  The porter had known the latitude of public enquiries and considered that possibility for a moment. ‘No, no he’s not,’ he said.

  ‘Well, where is he?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ he said, and gave another little touch to the cap. ‘That’s just it, Sister.’

  ‘Mother,’ she said, and gave him the albatross glare. He lowered his head so we were only looking at the cap. ‘Is there another driver?’

  The head came up. ‘Another driver?’

  ‘Because this one is clearly not available.’

  ‘Oh he is,’ he said. ‘He’s available all right.’

  Mother Acquin looked at him. He put his cap a touch straighter. ‘What time is it now?’ she asked, pointing to the watch chain that looped like a smile across his jacket.

  He was pleased to be able to provide an answer. ‘Quarter past four.’

  ‘And what time was the train scheduled to depart?’

  ‘New Time, or Old Time?’ he asked.

  Mother Acquin just looked. The porter may have been about to explain to her, as Ganga did me one time, that during the Second World War Ireland fell out of synch with the world. The British, with breathtaking command, introduced something called Double Summertime, putting the clocks two hours forward to enable a longer working day. The Irish did not, and in fact Dublin was, is, and will always be twenty-five minutes and twenty-one seconds behind Greenwich, and as west Clare had to be further behind that, Ganga said, it stood to reason that clocks were not a true measure of time there.

  The porter looked like he might be about to attempt to explain the perplexity, but at that point the driver appeared.

  He was leading a white pony on a length of rope.

  ‘Isn’t she some beauty?’ he said, coming past where Mother Acquin had extended an arm to guard me back against the station wall.

  She was a fine pony, but as skittish as my Great-Auntie Tossie. In any case, the driver took not one bit of notice of her little kicks and jumps and general spasm but opened the door to the carriage and hup hup with a clatter of hoof she was inside and tied, her head coming out the dropped window like any other curious passenger.

  ‘We’ll be off now, Sister, if you’re ready,’ the driver said as he went past us and swung up on to the locomotive.

  An instant passed in which my guardian was lost for words.

  ‘Mother,’ said the porter softly, by way of correction and apology, touching the cap and marching away to perform his official duty of raising the signal.

  Two Sisters under mournful black blooms of umbrellas met Mother Acquin off the train at Moyasta Junction, a station without village or town where at the end of the world’s most meandering railway you stepped off into a wetter Wyoming. Rain was falling, though not exactly. Rain in Clare chose intercourse with wind, all kinds, without discrimination, and came any way it could, wantonly.

  The Sisters must at first have been alarmed by the small package of the boy at the Mother’s side. But mercy was their speciality. They parked me on a sack of meal and left.

  Ganga was to meet me. He thought it would be fun to hide from me when the train pulled in.

  The train, with pony as only remaining passenger, at last laboured away. From his cockpit the driver saluted a soldier’s salute to me and called out, ‘Pony Express,’ and then was gone with the same unperturbable air of the world’s gaiety.

  Once the train had left, I got off the crate and marched down the platform into what we’ll call soft rain. Short pants, white socks and sandals, a quiff, and my blue cardboard case containing my guns and six weeks of the Hotspur, I walked out on to the Kilkee road. I’m not sure where I thought I was going, but I was definitely going there.

  My grandfather delighted that, despite my father’s carefulness, here was the latest demo
nstration of the waywardness of the family genetic.

  I suppose in all childhoods there are pockets where you discover freedom. I kept walking towards the grey sea of the sky. I don’t remember having the slightest anxiety.

  I had walked a long way it seemed when a bicycle bell jingled behind me.

  ‘Young gentleman, could I offer you a lift?’

  As though it were the open door of a Rolls-Royce, Ganga gestured the bar of his bicycle. Joe was standing beside him.

  Ganga had no carrier and so took my case in his left hand and I climbed on to the bar. For balance I leaned back into the brown smells of his chest and there I left the world, not only because my feet were no longer on the ground but because when you’re a boy your grandfather’s chest has a peculiar and profound allure, like a spawn pool for salmon, wherein mysteries are resolved.

  His yellow-laced boot pushed us off. The bicycle ticked minutely, like a hundred tiny clocks, and with the weave and waver of one-handed cycling we sailed not back along the estuary road towards Faha, but west to the coast, because, with heart-wisdom, Ganga understood that the ageless remedy for a boy whose mother was ill was to bring him to see the ocean.

  From boyhood, in a high place where sentimental old men keep what sustains them, a hatful of Faha memories:

  Faha was where an innocent grandfather would sit with a boy and play endless games of draughts, ‘King me, Bucko,’ his eyes glittering and his smile soft and genial because he had left most of his teeth after him in Plunkett’s, the pulling dentist in town. It was where I would go with him and Joe on intrepid missions to get Hector, Downes’s bull, leading the beast back along the road by a ravelled twine tethered in its nose ring, the bull’s pace slow and his gait that of a world-weary and well-travelled gentleman, holding no apparent interest in proceedings until he reached the gate and saw the heifers kick their hind legs and run.

  It was where, though the rain was a constant veil, there was never any water, and buckets had to be carried to the well (which was not the well you see with stone wall and pulley in English picture books, but a glassy green eye in rushy ground two fields over, which was ‘cleaned’ in summertime by the antique practice of slipping into that eye an eel), and carried back again, slopping until you found that pace, old as time, by which a man or woman walks with water.

  It was where Doady, watching the sky, would call ‘Drying!’ and we’d run out with the basket, hens darting after us in hen-brained forgetfulness that they’d already been fed, and get the white sheets pegged and flapping maybe a full ten minutes before the rain, bad luck to it, would sweep in behind a herald of gulls. Those sheets would never dry completely. Evenings they’d hang on two chairs across from the fire and be turf-smoked in downpuffs every time someone opened the back door to come for a cuaird. Still they wouldn’t be dry, but what-of-it, you’d sleep in them all the same, the heat of humanity the last stage of drying, smoke and rain making other-worldly your dreams.

  It was the smell of bread always baking, the smell of turfsmoke, the smell of onions, of boiling, the green tongue of boiled cabbage, the pink one of bacon with grey scum like sins rising, the smell of rhubarb that grew monstrous at the edge of the dung-heap, the smell of rain in all its iterations, the smell of distant rain, of being about to rain, of recent rain, of long-ago rain, the insipid smell of drizzle, the sweet one of downpour, the living smell of wool, the dead smell of stone, the metallic ghost stench of mackerel that disobeyed the laws of matter and like Jesus outlived itself by three days.

  It was where you were left to your own devices, where a child with the diminished name of Noe was let off, out the door and into the soft damp wonder of the world, a piece of piping or stick his sword, and pools and drains and ditches his country, a country which yielded uncertain treasures, a half-buried boot, a verdigris coin, or the oyster gloup of tadpoles. It was where a boy of no more than eight could come clopping past on a horse, bareback, eyes wild as he clutched the mane, exulting in a speed he was not in control of as he raced past you and on into storytime, where a man might come along the road after, carrying a hames and asking: Have you seen a horse at all? It was where you lived by the clock of your stomach, came back to the house only when you were hungry, ate whatever was put before you, and ran out again, only partly aware of the privilege of solitude and the gift of time.

  It was where every field had a name, where Gairdín na scoile was once a hedge school, and Páirc na mónaigh the field of the monks, monks you all but saw with your boyhood eyes when you heard that.

  It was also where, notwithstanding your age, there was work to be done, up on the bog there was turf to be turned – ‘You’re the perfect size for this job’ – lifted and turned and footed again, and again, because with turf the rain defeated all ploys amateur and ingenious to make believe it didn’t exist, where the skin of your fingers quickly calloused from contact with a more real world and your fingernails became black-rimmed, where you lost all sense of yourself in the brown narcotic of the bog, which summoned antiquity or pre-antiquity, whenever that was, and where you only realised you were close to starvation when at noontime Joe cocked his ears because Doady was coming, There she is, look! with tea in a bottle and wedges of griddle bread that wore intricate black prints of the fire, like most of her cooking burnt, but in kindness called smoked.

  Whether in recompense for the hard work, or native alchemy, tea on the bog tasted better than any tea before or since. Ganga took off his jacket and laid it over the heather for sprung seating that would scratch your calves but not dampen your trousers. ‘Whist now, Noe, listen for the cuckoo.’

  It was where, seventy-eight years after the first arc lamp was lit outside the offices of the Freeman’s Journal in Princes Street in Dublin, and seventy since public electric lighting was switched on while Charles Stewart Parnell, addressing a large crowd, used the light as a symbol of a free Ireland, Faha still had no electricity. It was always on the way, rumoured to be coming, with accompanying stories of catastrophe and wonder, but as yet always elsewhere.

  It was where bathtime was a Saturday-night production, a general tantara of buckets and pots as a holy halo of steam rose, a prelude to the carbolic-and-Rinso-ed air in St Cecelia’s on Sundays.

  It was where there was always a cat called Sibby, the name, to conquer mortality, being both individual and general, so the cat was the Sibby and also Sibby, could be called at the back door with a vowel-less sibilant hissing of ssssbbs, and at different times be a black or black-and-white or ginger, large, middling or small cat, but like a soul in transition always remain Sibby.

  It was where flies came in to escape the weather and lived unremarked in the middle air or attached to looping honey-coloured fly cemeteries that were never full, where you sat on a three-legged stool made out of bog deal in Doady’s milking parlour, a stool constructed by Ganga and so without equilibrium, a stool with an air of advancement just beyond the Stone Age, and under your grandmother’s instruction you pressed your head hard into Gerty’s flank – ‘a cow so milky you could bring her home to your mother’ – and you felt blindly for her teat which was a thing unimaginable, large as your boy-hand, pink and coarse and somehow worn too as you coaxed down and not just squeezed out a fierce jet of milk that came hot and greyish and shot alarmingly sideways against the enamel of the bucket with an urgent milk-music.

  It was where, when darkness fell, it fell absolutely, and when you went outside the wind sometimes drew apart the clouds and you stood in the revelation of so many stars you could not credit the wonder and felt smaller in body as your soul felt enormous.

  When you came back in you went up the steep steps of the Captain’s Ladder to sleep on a mattress too thin to deserve the softness implied in that name, sleeping in the garret room up under the thatch that was like being inside a coarse brush and under which all the smells of the day were trapped. You knew the thatch was alive with life and so you resolved to stay awake and stare at it until that life would appear, but it never di
d. You fell brownly asleep and into another dimension where a ragged version of yourself plunged through a world vivid but infirm until you woke to unseen light and a bat asleep upside down just above your bed.

  It was where once, in town, I watched my grandfather come out of Brews, take a big copper penny from his pocket, place it on the path, and walk away. When I asked him why, he smiled an iceberg smile whose depths were unknown, and said, ‘The man, woman or child that finds that will think it’s their lucky day.’ He delivered a large wink, added: ‘And it will be.’

  It was where I sat inside on the back step of Blake’s, Keane’s, Cotter’s and O Shea’s kitchens on the nights of house dances, where after an eternity the adults pushed back the table and various chairs and forms to clear the flagstones for the sets, leaving stools for the musicians, where cigarettes were served on saucers and where, like a benevolent spirit, smoke hung permanently along the ceiling, where the music would take another age to start up, but when it did, Ganga and Doady would put away their disputes and lose forty years, springing into improbable steps, like figures in fables, dancing without looking at each other, her hand inside the mitt of his, faraway looks on their faces as their bodies spun and their feet kept perfect time.