Away from the Islands by Penny Dolan.

A short while ago, I read and enjoyed Katherine Langrish’s post about storytelling from the Blasket Islands at the “end of the world” or at least the end of the Dingle Peninsula in Co. Kerry, Ireland. 

The post reminded me about “Hungry for Home”, a book I’d read in early summer, after I’d found it on the shelves of Sammy’s Shack on Inch Beach.

My book isn’t as romantic and satisfyingly old a volume as Katherine’s discovery, of which I feel most jealous, nor is it a totally wonderful book yet I did like the history that the writer, Cole Moreton slowly uncovers. In “Hungry for Home” (OUP 2008), he interweaves a story of the changes within a community, told as a “present” narrative, with the account of his own search, begun in 1998, to discover what happened to all the lost inhabitants.

 He shows a small group of people, changed by forces outside their control, which seems to me to be the kind of interesting knowledge that can feed deep into any writing of fiction, but he also shows a place both blessed and cursed by the gift of its voice.

“Hungry For Home” begins with the sudden illness of Seainin O’Cearna, one of the last young men on Great Blasket. It is Christmas Eve, 1946, and the weather is so wild and the sea so fierce that no doctor or priest can be reached from the mainland. When January comes, it is still as bad. The men can neither fetch a wooden coffin across Blasket Sound nor return the poor body across for a proper wake and burial - and if the weather stays so bad, they are all likely to starve.

This tragic incident was the one that led to the final wave of emigration that, by 1953, left the Blasket Islands deserted. The death was taken up by newspapers and became a cause.

By July 1947 opinion and questions raised in the Dail, had brought the wily De Valera, the Taoiseach or Prime Minister of Ireland, to the shore.  “Today he chose to dress like an islander, in a jacket of homespun wool cloth, black trousers and a round black fisherman’s cap.” 

Clearly, our current politicians are not the only ones to milk a photo opportunity to the maximum.  Dev asks the islandmen how he can help, and suddenly the treasure of these bleak islands shows on the pages. Even the words of the men’s complaints have music in their telling:

“It is this way, your honour. The young men and woman of the island are after going to America and those that have not done so are already thinking about it. You see for yourself that there are not many souls left here. The years are upon us, the energies of youth are gone like the flowers in winter. We are too old to fish, we are too old to work in the fields and we are wondering what will become of us.”

Dev listens and then walks the potato fields with them, noting how poor the crop is that year. He praises their industry and leaves, promising to help them. Eventually, he sends two ministers, not with any practical help, according to this book - by now the islanders are losing faith with the man -  but to assess a particularly tangled problem. This was an area where “the language of the Gaels” was spoken: the truest Irish. These wind-blasted lumps of ground at the end of the world carried a deeper national significance than mere fields and rocks.  De Valera’s ministers reported that all the inhabitants should be moved across the Sound and housed in Drumquin on the mainland in order to preserve the language

How had the language of the area gained such publicity, such status? These voices were native voices; they were not English. They had become famous, Back in 1905, J. M.Synge had visited the Blaskets and become so entranced by the daughter of the King of the island that she was said to be the model for Pegeen Mike in his controversial drama “The Playboy of the Western World”, which then hit the Dublin stage.

The recognition that the oral tradition was alive in the Blaskets brought various students of Gaelic, all eager to find ways of recording their inheritance, among them the classical scholar and Marxist George Thomson. The islanders were, in their way, “uneducated.” The few teachers who came to the schoolhouse did not stay long. The community retained its own voices and ways of telling and that is what the many scholars wanted to preserve, especially at a time when a nation was wanting to reclaim its own language.

One autobiography, “The Islandman”, published in 1929, came about because Tomas O Criomhthain, a man from the Blaskets, was shown Gorky’s writing and encouraged to write down his own stories. In 1933 came “Twenty Years A Growing” by Muiris O Suilleabhain who had been brought to the isolated islands as a young child.

Even more influentially, the Blaskets were home to Peig Sayers, a remarkable old woman who was a great storyteller. Over a period of time, Peig told three hundred of the Gaelic stories she knew into an early recording device for the National Archive.

Unfortunately Peig’s stories – some funny, some savage, some earthy - were laundered to a new state by those who wanted to save them. The tales were dictated to her son and then edited by the wife of a Dublin school inspector. The Irish stories that eventually appeared in “Peig”, her 1936 autobiography, had been turned into homely and pious tales to make a set text that, according to Moreton, bored generations of Irish school children. 

His book shows that many of the young Blasket islanders don’t stop at Drumquin, but away to America, with one sibling following another, using the money sent home. Morton traces families to Hungry Hill, a poor Irish ghetto in New York. There the immigrants survive by working hard in the roughest jobs, andby banding together to protect themselves and all their children against any dangers or intimidation. Within this tight social network, they prosper enough to gradually infiltrate positions of civic good and power. For a while, Moreton suggests, they actually recreated the intense self-reliance of the Blasket community.

 

However, their immigrant story doesn’t end there. Gradually, they are able to feel comfortable. Their children take on American values and habits. With prosperity, some families move away, others follow and the children even further. It is the story of successful immigration the world over, with both the pride in doing do well and the sense of loss and separation from.

Just as the harbours of the Blaskets were once left behind, so is the old neighbourhood of Hungry Hill - and this time the island community has truly been dispersed. 

As for the stories and the storytellers? Surely they’ve been spread to other voices and maybe to other pages?

Penny Dolan

On putting words into the mouths of the departed, by Jane Borodale

Popular myth has it that the hollow stalks of certain umbelliferous plants lead straight down to the place of the dead. I’m transfixed by this idea, that you might pour yourself through their narrow, jointed tubes, to arrive in the otherworld.


The virtues and dangers of individuals from the Umbelliferae family through history range from poison to plague cure – hemlock, fool’s parsley, water parsnip, lovage, alexanders, pepper saxifrage, sweet cicely, fennel, sanicle, angelica. These plants can be difficult for the unwary or careless to identify: see how similar they can look.

Hemlock Water-dropwort © Valerie Hill

Hemlock Water-dropwort © Valerie Hill

Hemlock Water-dropwort (not for nothing once called Dead Tongue, or Horsebane in Somerset) is so highly poisonous it could take you quickly to the otherworld in person, bypassing all metaphors. Mrs Grieve in her 20^th-century classic A Modern Herbal describes how in April 1857, ‘two farmer’s sons were found lying paralysed and speechless close to a ditch where they had been working. Assistance was soon rendered, but they shortly afterwards expired. A quantity of Water Hemlock grew in the ditch, where they had been employed.  A piece of the root was subsequently found with the marks of teeth in it, near to where the men lay, and another piece of the same root was discovered in the pocket of one of them.’

Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill

Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill

But the channel between worlds could go either way. In the 16^th century (when my new novel The Knot is set) the umbellifer Angelica archangelica with its fat, crisp, candiable stems and potent properties against the plague could actively help you return from the dead, offer you a hand back up those hollow stems. Henry Lyte’s Niewe Herball or Historie of Plants (1578) is one of many that points out how, ‘the late writers say, that the roots of Angelica are contrary to all poyson, the pestilence, and all naughty corruption of evill or infected aire.’

And I like to think of writing about the dead, too, as being a two-way possibility. On the one hand we take from them and give them voices they didn’t necessarily have and they have no say in the matter, yet there is also an obscure reciprocal kind of deal whereby the living pay attention to the dead for a while, warm up thoughts towards them, listen harder maybe? I like to think it is an acceptable practice, if the unwitting participant is approached with utmost diligence and respect and a certain kind of openness to unspoken things beneath the surface – resonances, textures, fragments of things left over from the past that might be so small that they can’t easily be pinned down into immoveable ‘truths’. Isn’t it this gap that historical fiction can animate so effectively?

Even as I write this I can see a tangle of metaphors emerging that I don’t quite mean. Words – like plants, weeds, umbellifers – can rapidly get out of hand, and paths to questions of identity are fraught with hazard…

Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill

Jane Borodale’s new novel The Knot is about the botanist Henry Lyte (c1529-1607) and his translation of an influential 16^th-century herbal.


Her website is here

Holding on to the Past by Penny Dolan

At one time, when working with children in a cross-curricular way, I used to ask what was the oldest object – the oldest “thing” – they had in their homes. Then, gently, I expanded the question, asking for the oldest thing they had held or felt or seen. It was a way of leading into the idea of traditional stories coming “from long ago” and of offering children a way of telling their own stories.  However, as make-over frenzy spewed from the small screen into homes, followed by minimalism with or without storage cabins, the question became harder to answer. Old old was out. New was “in”, even though the decorative style might be brand new “old”.

I have always loved objects with stories or even part stories attached to them, to uncover the how or why or even when. It’s a way of trying to classify things, evident in the Tradescant Cabinet of Curiosities in the Ashmolean Museum, although the objects there are more to do with the natural world than historic artefacts.

Touching, holding, observing, imagining: such valuable occupations! There’s always a special happiness in the museums where children can handle or be close to some of the exhibits, to bring the past within reach.

One of the oldest things I own is this shell, with its band of swirls and patterns and the word “Coronation” piercing the pearly surface and is about the size of a largish tea-pot. The only clue about the shell’s age is the knowledge that it was brought back from India by my grandparents sometime around 1918, and is one of several objects my grandmother owned and that I got to know when I lived in her house.

So the Coronation celebrated won’t have been that of the unhappy Edward VIII, because they had been in England too long by then. It might have been from the Coronation of George V in 1910 but having mulled over various family dates and the fact that my grandmother kept the shell when so many other items from her life were discarded, I feel the shell is likely to be a souvenir from the Coronation of Edward VII in 1901, which would have been around the time of my grandparent’s marriage.

Was the shell a wedding present? If so, don’t know the giver. Was it a present from him to her? Or from someone who was a superior officer? This was an army marriage, after all. Was it a gift from a group of his fellow soldiers? The shell never felt a beloved thing, even though she always displayed it in the glass cabinet in her best room. It iwas not loved like her favourite green glass witch bowl, which could be filled with roses. The shell was and is an almost hundred year old mystery.

Nobody ever told its story. We were not a family that believed in the re-telling stories. Stories could stir up trouble or sorrow or memories best shut away. The two World Wars in the first half of the 20^th Century quietly buttoned up many mouths. “Telling” never changed anything anyway – and wasn’t “telling stories” what liars did?

Yet I loved to wonder about all the special treasures my grandmother kept in her own glass cabinet and elsewhere. There were many: this carved shell; the tiny leather shoes; a stuffed alligator; a beaded snake, a pair of tiny china dolls and even the “beautiful white palace”, which I’ll write about another day. Not forgettign the box of not quite so ancient grease-paint that led me into a love of the theatre.

I’m sure my need to fix stories into the past grows from a curiosity about these “old” and found objects.

So now, do tell. What’s the oldest object you’ve ever held in your hand?

TALES OF THE PAST: Penny Dolan.

The drive was always a kind of journey into the past. The road leads up and along a ridge of moorland, skirts the reservoir that sits like an overfull saucer above the Aire Valley and its sprawling industrial towns. Eventually, the route drops down steeply and joins the old level road, now edged by pebble-dash semis, occasional newsagents, tyre fitting services and one room hairdressers.

I turn left through open gates and there, fronted by a large pond - treacherous in snow - stands a seventeenth century manor house. This is East Riddlesden Hall, owned by the National Trust and where, occasionally, I told stories to young audiences.

Well, what does one tell for such a gig? The problem with history is that real life stories often aren’t story-shaped, as all writers of fiction know, and there were experts in the house who could describe all the objects better than I could.

I had read guidebooks on the property, but I also spent ages wandering around the Hall musing and imagining, trying to find objects that interested me, and to work out what, for children, was different “then”. What would develop historical awareness?

The venue itself wasn’t the easiest to clothe with children’s tales. East Riddlesden Hall was built by James Murgatroyd, a wealthy clothier, in 1642. Although there were Royalist symbols on one of the walls and a priest’s hiding hole, the family also became known for “profanity and debauchery”.  The Hall is said to be the inspiration for Gilbert & Sullivan’s gothic opera “Ruddigore”, and is haunted by the ghosts of several wives, lovers and visitors who met sad or violent ends.  Not quite light fun, and in practice, one ghostly story per family session is enough. Small horrified faces at one’s knee are worrisome as are outbreaks of bawling. Ghost stories needs both shaping and rationing.

So I chose and adapted tales that highlighted some aspect of life at the time, embroidering the tales with emphatic historical descriptions. I included the blowing out of candles and lanterns; the turning of spits over the fire and the weary back from crops that must be planted and gathered; I gestured the gathering of herbs, flowers and fevers; the putting on of fur-lined cloaks and shawls, of gloating over petticoats and finery; I listened for horses, carriages or carts, and ordered servants, true or mistrusted, to bar the door against the dark.

My tales, however, were mostly folk tales.  The Hall contains important embroidery and fabric. So I chose The Three Spinners - a variation of Rumpelstiltskin - where the plot works out extremely well for the reluctant bride. As a clumsy child, I adored that tale and the three ugly aunts.

I offered Mossycoat, where the mother races to stitch the daughter a coat in time for her to escape from the dreadful pedlar, even as she steals all the fine dresses he’s brought her. No quick trip to Top Shop for that young Mossycoat.

Occasionally I used a tale that might have been heard in the house:  the bold brave Molly Whuppie. Her retort to the Giant “Once more, twice mor, I’ll come to Spain,” always suggested the time of the Armada, when England was at war with Spain.

I did make my own variation of the Riddlesden “ghostly rocking cradle” legend. The ailing mother lies alone in her four-poster bed, the house emptied of servants by sickness, but is calmed by seeing her child’s cradle rocked by a mysterious old lady who she takes to be her absent husband nurse.  A kindly ghost felt omewhat happier for young listeners than a spooky stranger by the bed!

If the group seemed older, I might mention the need to check who it was your family wanted you to marry, moving into another favourite tale, Lady Mary & Mr Fox. Somehow, the hints of gambling and new money always make it feel very “Restoration” to me.

There was always the fun of telling the story of King Charles escaping by hiding in a big tree, which might have been a little like the one we were under – and then I’d watch their eyes look upwards.

There were other stories of course. I always tried to introduce each one by referring to some item or place in the house, making it clear that what I was telling were “only fairy tales.”

The original idea was to tell stories at different points in the house. However some rooms and staircases were so small that regular visitors found it hard to squeeze past the bundle of children and parents. Besides, one or two of the volunteer guides also felt the enthusiastic tales disturbed the ambience of “their” rooms. So I was moved outside.

During spring and summer visits, I told stories out on the lawn, under the huge mulberry tree.  The weather was always uncannily good, as if it was an enchanted garden. I carried my small basket of props, my storytime bell - of a size to be heard anywhere in the garden – my notice board, giving the session times and settled myself on the broad bench ready to start.

I spent a few magical times there, including Halloween tellings in the big tithe barn. Then one autumn, the lovely lady who organised my story-times moved to a distant site. A new person took over that post, and from then on, invitations came there none.

I believe I was supplanted by someone dressed in an overlarge “character” costume. So very much more believable than stories.