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Gaiety and Magic

Perhaps some of the best moments in a book-lover’s life are when you chance upon something that turns out to be a real find. The first of many such discoveries for me was a well-used Penguin entitled Twenty Years A-Growing, which I came across nearly sixty years ago, in the back room of a junk shop. I bought it for a penny, read the whole book that day and loved every word of it. I have it still and often revisit it.

First published in 1933, the book is a lively and lyrical account by Maurice O’Sullivan of his early years on the island of Great Blasket in the far west of Ireland – so far west, indeed, that the church in Dunquin, the nearest town on the mainland that served the island’s needs, had listed as its closest parish to the west ‘Boston, America’.

It tells of a life of virtual subsistence in a hard place, where the weather, the money earned from selling mackerel and lobsters on the mainland, and the treasures to be found on the beaches should a ship founder at sea dictated the pace of life. The outside world could only be reached by rowing across two and a half miles of open sea in a curragh, a flimsy coracle made of wood and tarred canvas. A hard place, yes, but also one of freedom and adventure. To me as a small boy living in suburban North London it seemed a paradise.

Great Blasket’s inhabitants burned turf for fuel and ate everything from fish and mutton to puffins pulled from holes in the ground and thrushes caught in caves at Hallowe’en. They even scaled sheer cliffs to look for gulls’ eggs. There were whales and porpoises in the sea and huge flocks of gulls and other seabirds on the rocky cliffs.

For entertainment they made music, danced and listened to stories in the original Gaelic recounted by old men and women, often illiterate, who had heard them at the feet of their forebears and had committed them to memory. It was a place largely untouched by the outside world.

At the start of the book O’Sulli

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Perhaps some of the best moments in a book-lover’s life are when you chance upon something that turns out to be a real find. The first of many such discoveries for me was a well-used Penguin entitled Twenty Years A-Growing, which I came across nearly sixty years ago, in the back room of a junk shop. I bought it for a penny, read the whole book that day and loved every word of it. I have it still and often revisit it.

First published in 1933, the book is a lively and lyrical account by Maurice O’Sullivan of his early years on the island of Great Blasket in the far west of Ireland – so far west, indeed, that the church in Dunquin, the nearest town on the mainland that served the island’s needs, had listed as its closest parish to the west ‘Boston, America’. It tells of a life of virtual subsistence in a hard place, where the weather, the money earned from selling mackerel and lobsters on the mainland, and the treasures to be found on the beaches should a ship founder at sea dictated the pace of life. The outside world could only be reached by rowing across two and a half miles of open sea in a curragh, a flimsy coracle made of wood and tarred canvas. A hard place, yes, but also one of freedom and adventure. To me as a small boy living in suburban North London it seemed a paradise. Great Blasket’s inhabitants burned turf for fuel and ate everything from fish and mutton to puffins pulled from holes in the ground and thrushes caught in caves at Hallowe’en. They even scaled sheer cliffs to look for gulls’ eggs. There were whales and porpoises in the sea and huge flocks of gulls and other seabirds on the rocky cliffs. For entertainment they made music, danced and listened to stories in the original Gaelic recounted by old men and women, often illiterate, who had heard them at the feet of their forebears and had committed them to memory. It was a place largely untouched by the outside world. At the start of the book O’Sullivan writes:

I am a boy who was born and bred in the Great Blasket, a small truly Gaelic island which lies north-west of the coast of Kerry, where the storms of the sky and the wild sea beat against the wrinkled rocks which stand above the waves that wash in and out of the coves where the seals make their homes.

This sets the scene for an exuberant account of life in a world that has now vanished. It is a story full of adventure, drama and laughter. In one splendid chapter Maurice and his friend Tomas spend a day at the Ventry curragh races – a wonderful boyish romp described with verve and humour. In another he and his father are fishing in their curragh when it is nearly swamped by a whale that surfaces beside them. Maurice recalls vividly the stink of the whale’s breath and how he fears he will have to throw his much-loved dog, which is in the boat with him, into the sea to distract the giant creature as they row desperately to safety. My favourite of these tales, though, is the description of how Maurice, going into a crowded pub on the mainland to find his father and brothers after a wedding, bends down to retrieve his cap which has fallen to the floor and is unable to get up again because a big man standing alongside will not move. ‘As he gave me no heed I got angry, so that when I found on the floor a pin sharply pointed I thrust it into his thigh.’ The man kicked out in pain and struck the man in front of him who spilled his beer and fell to the floor. A huge fight ensued and as Maurice slipped away he saw ‘blood flying to the rafters and some foolish fellow encouraging the man from whom it was flowing, shouting, “Your soul to the devil, don’t let down City-cow-titty. Remember your ancestors! Strike the bostoon!”’ The story of how the book came to be written is equally fascinating. Great Blasket was of interest to scholars because it was one of the last places in Ireland where Gaelic was still the common language, and the islanders had retained their oral folklore. One of these academics, an English classicist called George Thomson, befriended the 19-year-old Maurice while on a visit in 1923, persuaded him to write his story and arranged for it to be translated into English. Thomson also asked E. M. Forster to write a foreword to the book in which the novelist said: ‘All this – both the gaiety and the magic – can be sample in the opening chapter, and the reader can decide for himself quickly, so that there is no need to say to him “this book is good”.’ Forster thought the book described ‘a neolithic civilization from the inside’ and that the author ‘keeps our world in its place and view sit only from his place’. He’s right: there is an other-worldly quality about the life of the islanders surviving against huge odds while the wider world rarely intrudes. When it does – as when they find the washed-up body of an officer from the Lusitania, torpedoed off the Irish coast by a German submarine in 1915 – the difference is stark. And when steam trawlers arrive in their waters, literally to hoover up the fish the islanders depend upon for their livelihood, reality bites hard. As the old way of life crumbles, the younger inhabitants turn their thoughts to emigration. For many the dream of travelling to America becomes a reality. They leave by curragh to go to Dingle where they catch the train to Cork and then a ship that will take them across the Atlantic. In time it is only the old men and women who are left. Maurice’s departure from the island was of a different order. Not for him a new life in America. Instead he went to Dublin to join the Police, the Garda Siochana. His journey was not exactly without drama though: he managed to team up with a brother and sister who were also going to the capital and relied on them to show him the way. He little knew that the boy was as ignorant of the route as he was and they ended up in Cork. He made it to Dublin eventually, was looked after by Thomson and stayed with Moya Llewellyn Davies, who was to become the translator of Twenty Years A-Growing. For the first time in his life he saw street lights and motor cars, visited a cinema and enjoyed the luxury of indoor plumbing. He duly passed the Garda selection board and in 1927 was posted to Connemara, where he would eventually make his home. His book was published to great acclaim in 1933. In 1950, aged 46, he tragically drowned while swimming in the sea with his family. In 1953 the last inhabitant of Great Blasket left the island and it has been uninhabited ever since. One or two cottages have been restored so that descendants of emigrants can return and get a taste of the life their forefathers led, but the rest are in ruins. There are other books about the Blasket by men and women who grew up there, written under the auspices of other academics. But for me Twenty Years A-Growing remains the best of them. O’Sullivan wrote it for those who knew him and his home, not for a wider audience. It is this that gives it the elusive quality of what Forster called ‘gaiety and magic’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 47 © Richard Davies 2015


About the contributor

Richard Davies is busy rewriting his self-published novel After Adlestrop with the encouragement of a real publisher. He has also put together a slim volume of his poetry for family and friends.

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