A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
JOHN HOLLOWAY
Co. Mayo—The days are past, over here, when an Englishman and a black Protestant could seem all part of the same thing, so the people I know talk readily enough to me about the troubles in the North. Yet I suspect that there's only a limited interest in the whole affair. This is very far from indifference. Partly, there isn't the same bad habit as we have, avid for thrills and dis- cussion, of hanging on every news bulletin and newspaper. Partly, it's all very difficult, because everyone looks forward to the end of Partition one day, but everyone knows also that at present this would be a mill- stone round the neck of the South. Easy. in that people here have a deep and real sense of values: so violence and destruction are self-evident evils, and this dwarfs everything merely abstract and doctrinaire. And I agree.
Quiet town
There appears to be fewer visitors to the west this year; or that's what it seems like in the main street of my little local town, the last one before the Atlantic. The monthly cattle fair, when the men come in from the islands, and the beasts stand up both sides of the street that they hose down in the afternoon, isn't getting in the tourists' way—or them in its way—as usually happens. Not that quiet or busy 'in town' makes much difference to me. 'If you see a man in from the far west', I heard a voice say as I strolled into a bar-cum-shop last summer, `Tell him I'd like a lift'. 'Here's a man from the far west', said the barman, pointing my way. So I added that to being taken, at various times, for a Celt, a gipsy, a Levantine, a Wykehamist, and a sergeant.
Not everyone's choice, over here: the strand we like best is a great stretch of lonely sand, with the terns and cormorants and dunlin all tame from the absence of the danger species (us). But there's always a chill wind off the ocean, and water far too sharp to bathe, at least for my taste. The children paddle, but not for long at a time. Somewhere down on the dunes, beyond the thyme, pink thrift, and prickly sea-holly, are the walls of the cabins engulfed in the Night of the Big Wind a hundred years ago, but the old people still remember hearing about it first-hand. 'Wind' they pronounce the way Shakespeare did; recently a man said it this way to me, and his son set him right—I mean, told him to say it the way you and I do, and Telefis Eireann as well
A day at the races
The races last week were a great day for me, though I believe the connoisseurs didn't think overmuch of the horseflesh. Sure enough, it was a modest affair: a course knocked up by knocking down a few field- fences, and not many riders. But the open race was a classic: one rider flogging his mount all the way round the last circuit, and the other winning by twenty lengths, just through whispering in the horse's ear, would he stop going half speed. That horse's back legs must have been twenty foot long. The whole thing was enhanced for the local people because the re-play football match between Mayo and Galway cii e over on the loudhailer between the races. For me it was enhanced by the weather: the ring of mountains round the racecourse in a dozen steely greys and wet silvers, with paler patches for the great fall- ing showers in the distance, and broad bright stubs of rainbow among the hills, broken off at cloud-level.
Rainbin‘s go on all day here, right and left in the sky. sometimes short stumps like the races day, sometimes complete arches high overhead. I drew back the children's curtain one morning lately, and the window was full of one that came rocketing straight up from our spring. lf, to a Sassenach's idea of things, it's going to rain on and off all day. the people here say, 'there's no rain on it today only showers'. A shower is a colossal if brief rainstorm that swallows up the whole landscape. Shower-clouds in the distance engulf and release the mountains in spectacular transformations of purple, brown or blue as often as grey; then a few moments later, one of the mile-wide flakes of orange light arrives, and the hills go tourist green again.
Pastoral
A day or so ago I drove through to the next valley for a sheep-gathering: time to collect the lambs so as to collect the sub- sidy. Seven blue-eyed, milk-skinned red- heads, all the same, the family I was with. 'You've got some Celts with you there'. the blacksmith had said to me some time ago, when I called, ferrying two of the youngest, to collect something he was making for me. The great sheep-pens. built on the same principle as early Irish forts or Tiryns and Maecenae. were a mile off the road. The midges were fiendish. 'Daddy always comes out there', said the big girl, pointing to a vast green slope a mile or so away. An hour or so later, after he himself had had six hours mountain walking, making the circuit with his dogs, Daddy and the sheep began to trickle over the ridge; as the flock thickened, it looked for a moment like snow. Then followed six hours more of work in the pens. They had to think and judge all the time as they sorted the sheep and fetched out the ailing ones. At the same time, you could watch their tanned forearms tensing. over and over, hour after hour, as they man-handled the big animals, hundred by hundred.
Mixed farming
Much is done by machines now. A new trac- tor, gleaming red. comes over the skyline to get the turf out (from the bog, that is).
mow the hay, and—with its three murder- ous five-foot prongs--shift the hay-cocks. But the awkward bits and steep corners are still scythed. and so are the oats if they've been lodged when there was rain on ir. Oats used to be reaped with the hook, the stalks going over into the crook of the left arm, and the base of the 'share' ending up like the butt of a new-sawn log. -The sheaf is still bound up with a rope twisted from the oat-stalks themselves; and the hay- cock with a rope of hay, twiddled out of the cock itself; and the shman. as this is called (I'm sure I'll not have spelt it right) is by local standards work for a big child and nothing more. Yet these farmers now regularly make silage and use sophisticated medical remedies for their cattle.
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