Soon it will be time to head for Portugal again, with hopefully some more serious cruising coming up next year. Here is another despatch From the Fractal Frontier, about our early times in Glencolmcille. Sorry there are no photos this week; whatever kind of but has got into my chromebook, it is refusing to display photos.
FFF XXII, To the Hills of Donegal.
The first summer of 1973, we basically camped in our cottage in Braide, the children eventually sleeping in a huge two level bunk bed that I made in the room, with its floor of puddled clay, which indeed was a nice dry and warm floor which raised very little dust. The chickens roosted under the kitchen table with a cover thrown over it, and even Paddy the goat had to be brought into the house at night. She was tied to the bedpost of our bed in the corner of the kitchen. Our Somerset goats were still lodging with a friend in Wales, but wild Irish Paddy came our way to give us a supply of milk. I have a vivid memory of her with her long horns up on the banks above the house and silhouetted against the full moon rising behind her.
The vegetables one could buy locally were mainly carrots, onions and rather tired cabbages, so an early move was to start growing some ourselves. The best bit of land for a garden was over the fence belonging to a neighbour, but he let us use it. I also learnt to save turf, so what with fish, and meat from our neighbours, we were soon beginning to meet many of our basic needs. The support we had from our neighbours was however vital. We were lucky with the weather, those summers of the ‘70s being exceptionally good on the whole. However, we moved into a rented house in Druim on the North side of the Glen when the winter came in.
John Maguire and I built the road across the bog when there was no fishing to be done, so in the Spring we were able to get a small caravan in for the children to sleep in. Rory showed up and we started to build a new kitchen/living room and two small bedrooms, one above the other, onto the West end of the cottage. Fr Clem from Downside came for a while, and made some fine A beams for the roof. It was all done in the traditional style, except for things like putting roofing felt under the thatch; Big John was up on a ladder laying on the thatch, while we forked up the bundles first of rushes and then of straw, which had been bought from a neighbour and thrashed by dashing it against a bicycle wheel on its side over a big sheet to catch the grain. The straw was tied down by a criss-cross of sisal rope, tied to the projecting stone pegs that had been built into the top of the walls. It was a good roof with built-in insulation.
The loo was a bucket with a fine wooden seat over it, made by Clem, in a little block-built closet out the back. I built a small catchment reservoir up the hill and piped the water from it down to the front of the house, where it flowed into a kind of stone sink before rejoining the stream. ‘The best water in Ireland’, Big John called it. Fiona did the washing there for the first summer, and washed the children too in good weather. Otherwise it was a tin bath-tub in front of a big turf fire. Its equipment consisted of a crane for the kettle and the pot-oven that Fiona baked in.
One Sunday we went off to visit Ailne and Charlie Gallagher near Port Noo, the other side of Glen Gesh. Ailne was a sister to my Dad’s friend Jimmy Hamilton; they were the children of a landowner at Rosbeg. Jimmy never went back there; he didn’t want to spoil his idyllic memories of boyhood. ‘Things are all so different now!’ I should think so. His father had had one of the very first cars in West Donegal - they had to go all the way to Derry for petrol. But I have already told the story of how an uncle of Jimmy and Ailne had been shot by the IRA in Ardara. Now Ailne and Charlie had been sweethearts in their youth, but Charlie had been in the IRA. Ailne had gone to London and spent her life working as a nurse there, until finally she had come home and married Charlie when they had turned sixty; and a lovely couple they were!
They lived in Charlie’s fine old two story farmhouse, mostly around the range in its big country kitchen. The land was a good bit kinder there, making me wonder if we were overdoing it among the boulders and rocky screes of Braide; but it was the people of the Glen who held me. Our children were mightily impressed with the Gallaghers’ bathroom, and especially the pull-and-let-go loo with its high tank. The chain got pulled rather a lot!
Our Bella came away looking rather solemn. “Yese are very odd!” she announced. “When I grow up, I’m going to have a proper house with an upstairs and a downstairs and a barfoom.”
“Can we come and stay?” asked Fiona.
“No.”
“Can we camp in the garden?”
“No.”
Oh well! I thought of my Dad’s exasperated question - “What are you trying to prove?” - although it was more of a comment than a question at the time. But was I putting Fiona and the children through undue hardships? It all just happened, one thing leading to another, but I must admit that I did want to prove that one did not necessarily have to follow a career, ‘get one’s foot on the ladder’, engage in the rat-race or even get a job at all in order to live the good life! I also found it therapeutic to get down to the basic physical necessities of life, hard work indeed though it was.
The economic and social conditions in the ‘70s were not so very different to today; one could see that we were headed down the road to where we are in danger of arriving today. The countryside was being emptied, while the already over-crowded and expensive cities were drawing people into a highly problematic future, with little inherent satisfaction for anyone. Automation, unemployment and environmental pollution only looked like making things worse. Now and again someone had to get off the treadmill and look for alternatives! Quite a few hippies and so on were trying, but were they onto anything viable? If one refused to base one’s life on making money and ‘getting on’, how was one going to structure it? Where was the necessary framework?
Both Fiona and I wanted to make our home the focus of our lives, restoring it to its ancient role as the place where as many of life’s necessities as possible were produced. This way there is never any shortage of work for anyone, and the quality of life is likely to be much enriched all round. How feminists had managed to convince women that becoming an employee and a consumer was superior to being mistress of one’s own house was a matter of bemusement to us, which we suspected of being in fact a capitalist plot! However, questions do arise about how one is to relate to each other, to others outside the home, and to gain access to the many resources that one does need to draw on beyond what one can produce in the home.
We could not have managed without the support of friends and neighbours, but then again, what was that Sartre said about Hell being other people? It was difficult to cope with Rory and his alcoholism, and indeed with our next-door neighbour wandering into our house every evening. Old cultures such as that of the Glen had their ways of coping with such inter-dependence, but it has always been problematic and will remain so. It is difficult to run an ‘open house’, partly because we remain somewhat selfish and lazy, but also because of the legitimate need to have our own space and privacy. Fiona and I rather liked the old adage from the Tristan da Cunha bible:- ‘To every person their skin, and to every family their house!’ It is a bit extreme; it seems we need quite a bit of divine help to get the balance right.
I had not ceased to think of myself as a Catholic, but we had drifted away from the practice of any religion, as young people tend to do in the quest to establish their autonomy. Now we were realising that in fact we could not survive like that. Fiona decided that she too would become a Catholic, and we started going to Mass and the sacraments again. It was fortunate really that Fr McDyer had moved to Carrick, and in the Glen we now had a more spiritually minded man in Fr McCauley, who formally instructed Fiona in the Faith.
As we began to settle into our new life, Fiona was only too happy to give up contraception, and another five gorgeous babies were to come before we made any attempt at natural family planning. As for the question as to whether it was responsible for someone with pretensions of ecological concern, I can only say that the place we were in was anything but overcrowded, and indeed my wider family had been a bit of a disaster in the line of reproduction for the past two generations. Having grown up with just one sister and no first cousins, I reckoned it would be a fine thing to get a bit of a clan going again. If we could manage to support each other rather than depend on banks and the State to keep out of trouble, it would be a very fine thing indeed!
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