THE FIRST CONEY ISLAND
By OWEN TWEEDY
WHEN I was a little boy at my English Public School the Psalm I liked best was the one hundred and fourth. It reminded me of Sligo and of freedom. "The sun ariseth. . . . Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening." The smell of hayfields was in that verse, and I could ace the swathes of meadow falling before the scythes and Tosney Foley with his pitchfork and the making of the haycocks when we children were always in the way. But the verse I sang loudest was: "The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats ; and the rocks for the conies." That was real Sligo. For in those long-ago days Coney Island in Sligo Bay still belonged to the family.
Once when my youngest sister was asked in a general knowledge examination, " Where is Coney Island ? " she quite naturally replied, " In Sligo Bay, and it belongs to my father." I bet she got no marks ; but I would also bet that her examiner didn't know the Sligo story of how the American Coney Island got its name. Here it is. Some two hundred years ago the good ship ' Arethusa ' used to ply between Sligo and the western Continent ; and it was her master, a Sligo man, who baptised the American island after his own Coney island because it, too, was swarming with rabbits.
Sligo's Coney Island is perhaps a mile long and half a mile wide. Round its northern end races the treacherous• sea-channel to Sligo Port and to the south is the rabbit country. And beyond, still southwards, the Cumeen Strand stretches to the mainland. It goes dry at low tide: So twice a day Coney Island isn't an island at all. And that takes me right back, to St. Patrick. For, about the year 450, the Saint lived for a while on the island. His well, where he planted his staff, is there in the rabbit country, and at the other end of the island in his " Wishing Stone," a huge grey " three-decker " boulder on which anyone can and everyone does sit and make one wish a year. But the island's great St. Patrick legend is the story of the Widow Mulclohy and the cat. When St. Patrick lived there, he ..—like the islanders of today—felt terribly cut off from the world. So he started building a causeway across the Cumeen Strand to the mainland. One day he sent word to the Widow Mulclohy on the island asking her to give him a rabbit for his dinner. But she was lazy or mean or both ; and instead cooked him a well-grown cat, which she served up under a large cover. But when the Saint called a blessing on his food, up jumped the cover and from under it—alive and spitting—leaped the cat. St. Patrick was furious. He abandoned the causeway and left the island for good.
There arc other talcs, too—tales of the "Little People." How one night—it was All Halloween, when no one should be out working —three of the islanders forgot and went fishing. And at midnight in a dead calm what did they hear ? The whirr of the new mowing machine on the dreaded Long Rocks, with a horse pulling and a whip cracking. They turned in panic for the shore, and didn't a storm spring up from nowhere and they were nearly drowned ? And the Mysterious lights by night—along the shore, in an abandoned house and in the three grass-grown forts where everyone knows that the "Little People" live and work.
But these stories are dying ; and dying, too, are the memories of on Elizabethan silver-mine on the Island and of the wreck of the Armada galleon. But there still survive other talcs of the sug- gestively named " Tobacco Hole " in a cliff on the northern shore: of hidden island " look-outs" for expected contraband cargoes: and of that night in 1828 when the police caught the last of the smugglers' racing clippers red-handed out beyond in the Atlantic. Then, too— though this, I am assured, is the basest of libels—there is the sug- gestion that all those innocent and romantic fairy lights in the forts and elsewhere were not altogether unconnected with illicit stills and poteen. All that is now of the past. And my thoughts when I arrived to stay on the island this summer were also of the past. Of my great, great, great grandfather, George Doran, who in 1784 first acquired the island ; and of his daughter, Olivia, who in 1788 brought it as her dowry to my great, great grandfather, Tom Meredith. It remained in the Meredith family until early this century. Then, before I was old enough even to sec it, it was sold to the Irish Land Commission.
The cottage where I am staying is the last of a straggling row sheltering from the Atlantic under a low hill. Today many of the cottages are empty, roofless and overgrown. The old have died and youth has fled from island isolation to the mainland or America. Above the cottages to the west are the small cultivated stone-walled fields. In the centre of the island is bog-land—good grazing and the haunt of countless curlew, plover and snipe and, surprisingly, of four magpies. Then open country to the southern shore with sand- hills all round, and inland deep springy turf and great carpets of dwarf yellow pansies and, of course, myriads of rabbits. Two roads —now grass-grown tracks—suffice the island's needs. One skirts the north and passes south along the row of cottages where I live. The other branches across to the Atlantic ; and at its end, just above the lovely sweep of the White Strand, nestle three white thatch-roofed cottages where for centuries the Carty's have lived. This miniature settlement rejoices in the proprietary postal address of "Carty's Town, Coney Island."
And this delectable island has a delectable setting. There is the Atlantic to the west, unbroken all the way to America, and all round in a great semi-circle the panorama of the Sligo mountains. In the south towers green sloping Knocknarea, where some say Queen Maeve—Shakespeare's Queen Mab—is celebrated ; and dominating the blue horizon to the north, mighty Benbulben with its battleship prow and long rock-ribbed back.
" Under bare Benbulben's Head In Drumcliffe churchyard, Yeats is laid."
My personal life on the island is simple and full. So are my meals. The cottage is comfortable and intimate ; and the one and only "pub" is next door. When I get up I brave cold water in a Victorian " slipper " bath, which is a longer version of the much more uncom- fortable " hip." After breakfast I watch the post-boat leave for the mainland at Rosse's Point, and then wait on the share for it to come back with the day's mail. (The other day the postman returned me one of my postcards for re-addressing. The fat old snail who lives in our only pillar-box had overnight eaten the address off.) Then I walk and talk. Both arc lovely. The walks because it's such grand, bracing walking, the talks because on the island everyone talks and knows how to talk. One will be thatching, for the winter storms play Old Harry with the roofs ; or haymaking in the tiny stone-walled fields ; or at our one drinking-water pump ; or digging potatoes ; or milking the cows ; or feeding the hens and the ducks and the turkeys and the geese. One is building a grand boat ; another is out all weathers fishing and after his lobster pots (lobsters 2s. 6d. each and excellent). And we all pass the time-of day in a nice lingering leisure ; and no telephones and no police, and time doesn't matter a hoot. And when it gets dark a friend may drop in, and over the turf fire we swop yarns. And, maybe, we listen-in to the news on my wireless: but how remote—even odd—it all sounds on our island. And then to bed by candlelight with the music of the Atlantic in my ears from the White Strand half a mile away to the west.
But what of the islanders themselves and their life ? For them times have been and arc hard. 1833, the Cholera ; then the " Hungry Forties " and the Famine ; and then the " March of Time." Gone the days when sixty and eighty boys and girls from the mainland would flock over for dancing on the springy island turf. Gone the singing and the card-playing and—almost—the story- telling in the cottages. Today there are dance-halls at Strandhill and Rosse's Point on the mainland, and buses take only twenty minutes to the Sligo cinemas. That is why there are the derelict cottages and why the island school is closed. Today youth wants more than the island can now are; and the population has dwindled to a mere twenty-six souls. Time marches on.
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