The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep.
Underneath is daub, a blue-grey modelling clay, or channel, a
compacted gravel. Neither can absorb the heavy rainfall. Rich crops
of rushes and wiry grasses keep the thin clay from being washed
away.
The fields between the lakes are small, separated by thick hedges of
whitethorn, ash, blackthorn, alder, sally, rowan, wild cherry, green
oak, sycamore, and the lanes that link them under the Iron Mountains
are narrow, often with high banks. The hedges are the glory of these
small fields, especially when the hawthorn foams into streams of
blossom each May and June. The sally is the first tree to green and
the first to wither, and the rowan berries are an astonishing orange
in the light from the lakes every September. These hedges are full
of mice and insects and small birds, and sparrowhawks can be seen
hunting all through the day. In their branches the wild woodbine and
dog rose give off a deep fragrance in summer evenings, and on their
banks grow the foxglove, the wild strawberry, primrose and fern and
vetch among the crawling briars. The beaten pass the otter takes
between the lakes can be traced along these banks and hedges, and in
quiet places on the edge of the lakes are the little lawns speckled
with fish bones and blue crayfish shells where the otter feeds and
trains her young. Here and there surprising islands of rich green
limestone are to be found. Among the rushes and wiry grasses also
grow the wild orchid and the windflower. The very poorness of the
soil saved these fields when old hedges and great trees were being
levelled throughout Europe for factory farming, and, amazingly, amid
unrelenting change, these fields have hardly changed at all since I
ran and played and worked in them as a boy.
A maze of lanes link the houses that are scattered sparsely about
these fields, and the lanes wander into one another like streams
until they reach some main road. These narrow lanes are still in
use. In places, the hedges that grow on the high banks along the
lanes are so wild that the trees join and tangle above them to form
a roof, and in the full leaf of summer it is like walking through a
green tunnel pierced by vivid pinpoints of light.
I came back to live among these lanes thirty years ago. My wife and
I were beginning our life together, and we thought we could make a
bare living on these small fields and I would write. It was a time
when we could have settled almost anywhere, and if she had not liked
the place and the people we would have moved elsewhere. I, too,
liked the place, but I was from these fields and my preference was
less important.
A different view of these lanes and fields is stated by my father:
“My eldest son has bought a snipe run in behind the Ivy Leaf
Ballroom,” he wrote. In some ways, his description is accurate. The
farm is small, a low hill between two lakes, and the soil is poor.
My father would have seen it as a step down from the world of civil
servants, teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen, tillage inspectors
to which he belonged. Also, it was too close to where my mother’s
relatives lived and where I had grown up with my mother. The very
name of the Ivy Leaf Ballroom would have earned his disapproval.
A local man, Patsy Conboy, built it with money he made in America.
He first called it Fenaghville-it was the forerunner of the
Cloudlands and the Roselands-and later it became, more
appropriately, the Ivy Leaf. All through the 1950s and into the
1960s he hired famous dance bands. In spite of being denounced from
several pulpits, the ballroom prospered and Patsy Conboy became a
local hero, dispensing much employment. People came by bus, by
lorry, hackney car, horse trap, on bicycle and on foot to dance the
night away. Couples met amid the spangled lights on the dusty dance
floor and invited one another out to view the moon and take the
beneficial air: “There wasn’t a haycock safe for a mile around in
the month of July.” All the money Patsy Conboy made on the dancehall
was lost in two less rooted ventures: a motorcycle track that turned
into a quagmire as soon as it was used and an outdoor, unheated
swimming pool amid the hundreds of small lakes and the uncertain
weather. They were not rooted in the permanent need that made the
ballroom such a success.
Patsy was more than able to hold his ground against the pulpits.
When he was losing money digging the unheated swimming pool out of
daub and channel, men turned up for work with letters from their
priests stating that they had large families to support and should
be employed. Patsy was unmoved: “My advice to you, Buster, is to
dump the priest and put a cap on that oil well of yours. They have
been capping such oil wells for years in America. Families are
smaller and everybody is better off.”
He was living close by when we bought the snipe run. The Ivy Leaf
was then a ruin, its curved iron roof rusted, its walls unpainted,
and Patsy had gone blind. Nothing about Patsy or his ballroom or the
snipe zigzagging above the rushes would have commended themselves to
my father. We settled there and were happy. My relationship with
these lanes and fields extended back to the very beginning of my
life.
When I was three years old I used to walk a lane like these lanes to
Lisacarn School with my mother. We lived with her and our
grandmother, our father’s mother, in a small bungalow a mile outside
the town of Ballinamore. Our father lived in the barracks twenty
miles away in Cootehall, where he was sergeant. We spent the long
school holidays with him in the barracks, and he came and went to
the bungalow in his blue Baby Ford on annual holidays and the two
days he had off in every month. Behind the bungalow was a steep
rushy hill, and beside it a blacksmith’s forge. The bungalow which
we rented must have been built for the blacksmith and was a little
way up from the main road that ran to Swanlinbar and Enniskillen and
the North. The short pass from the road was covered with clinkers
from the forge. They crunched like grated teeth beneath the traffic
of hoofs and wheels that came and went throughout the day. Hidden in
trees and bushes on the other side of the main road was the lane
that led to Lisacarn where my mother taught with Master Foran.
Lisacarn had only a single room and the teachers faced one another
when they taught their classes, the long benches arranged so that
their pupils sat back to back, a clear space between the two sets of
benches on the boarded floor. On the windowsill glowed the blue
Mercator globe, and wild flowers were scattered in jamjars on the
sills and all about the room. Unusual for the time, Master Foran,
whose wife was also a teacher, owned a car, a big Model-T Ford, and
in wet weather my mother and I waited under trees on the corner of
the lane to be carried to the school. In good weather we always
walked. There was a drinking pool for horses along the way, gates to
houses, and the banks were covered with all kinds of wild flowers
and vetches and wild strawberries. My mother named these flowers for
me as we walked, and sometimes we stopped and picked them for the
jamjars. I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to
school. There are many such lanes all around where I live, and in
certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I
have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in
which I feel that I can live forever. I suspect it is no more than
the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an
intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and
loss. These moments disappear as suddenly and as inexplicably as
they come, and long before they can be recognized and placed.
I don’t think I learned anything at school in Lisacarn, though I had
a copybook I was proud of. I was too young and spoiled, and spoiled
further by the older girls who competed in mothering me during the
school breaks. I remember the shame and rage when they carried me,
kicking and crying, into the empty schoolroom to my mother.
Everybody was laughing: I had sat on a nest of pismires on the bank
until most of the nest was crawling inside my short trousers.
I am sure my mother took me with her because she loved me and
because I had become a nuisance in the house. I had three sisters
already, the twins Breedge and Rosaleen and the infant Margaret, not
much more than three years spanning all four of us. Our grandmother
had been a dressmaker and stood arrow-straight in her black dresses.
My handsome father, who stood arrow-straight as well until he was
old, was her only child. She had been a local beauty and was vain
and boastful. She was forever running down the poor land of Leitrim
and its poor-looking inhabitants, which must have done nothing for
her popularity. It was true that my father’s relatives were tall and
many were handsome: “When we went to your mother’s wedding and saw
all those whoosins from Cavan-Smiths and Leddys and Bradys and
McGaherns-we felt like scrunties off the mountain,” my Aunt Maggie
told me once laughingly. The McGaherns set great store on looks and
maleness and position. There was a threat of violence in them all,
and some were not a little mad and none had tact. There was a
wonderful-looking first cousin of my father’s, Tom Leddy, a guard
like my father, who had also married a teacher. He was stationed at
Glenfarne on the shores of Lough Melvin. Years later, out of the
blue, he called soon after my father had remarried to find my
stepmother alone in the house, a clever, plain-looking woman who
adored my father and was both his slave and master. Having
introduced himself forthrightly, he demanded, “Who are you? Are you
the new housekeeper?” “I’m Frank’s wife,” she responded. “Frank’s
wife,” he looked at her in amazement and broke into such
uncontrollable laughter that he had to sit down. “Frank’s wife.
That’s the best one I’ve heard in years. The whole country must be
going bananas.” When he rose, he repeated, “Frank’s wife. You have
made my day. Well, whoever you are, tell Frank that his cousin Tom
Leddy called and that I’ll call soon again one of these years,” and
left as abruptly as he came.
Whether my grandmother was a little mad as well, I was too young to
know. She either had a great influence on my father or their
temperaments were similar. Who can tell whether certain temperaments
are ever influenced by nurture? They were both violent and wilful.
Once, when she caught me burning bits of paper in the open grate of
the small range to watch them blaze in the fascination children have
with flame, she caught and thrust my finger between the glowing
bars. She disregarded both my cries and my mother’s horrified
protestations. “You have the child half ruined already. There’s only
one way he’ll learn.” Neither she nor my father had any sense of
humour, and they hardly ever smiled or laughed, and they looked on
any manifestation of enjoyment in others as a symptom of
irresponsibility. They also saw it as diverting attention from
themselves. The difference between them was great as well. My father
was intelligent and could be charming, even gallant, when he wanted.
Though he was as vain and proud as she, he was never boastful:
“Nobody blows themselves up other than fools. If you need praise,
get others to do it for you.”
I was a single star until the twins arrived, and I became insanely
jealous of the natural transfer of attention. On dry days, when my
mother was at school, my grandmother often left the twins out in the
sun between the house and the forge, high on the sloping pass of
clinkers that ran to the open gate on the road. I was forever around
the forge, and she would warn me to mind them before going back into
the house, having locked the brake on their big pram. I must have
been planning how to get them out of my life for some time. I
learned to unlock the brake, and one day, after careful checking
that nobody was watching either from the forge or the house or the
road, I pushed the pram down the slope. The pass wasn’t steep and
the wheels would have bumped and slowed on the clinkers, but before
it came to a stop the pram wheeled off the pass and overturned. The
twins weren’t hurt, but all this time my grandmother had been
observing me from behind a curtain, and made not the slightest
attempt-she had only to tap the window-to protect the twins, though
she was out of the house and able to seize me as I was watching the
pram overturn in terrified dismay.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from All Will Be Well
by John McGahern
Copyright © 2006 by John McGahern.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2006
John McGahern
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-4496-0
