Sketch of an Island

By DILYSROWE

THE island is Irish, and it has one adornment—the rugged coping of the sea. The islanders who have not been able to leave it dress in shawls and homespuns, coloured woven belts and cow-hide shoes, and live unconcerned among the relics of saints and chieftains three hours and a prohibitive fare from the mainland. The film-makers have been and gone, and America is not so far away in spirit as it is in space. Airliners for Rineanna pass over the island regularly, but there are people on it who have never seen a car, for none has ever braved the unsurfaced roads. Coming to the island was more than a visit ; it was an act of faith.

The island rises on two sides into the long slender fort in the middle. From it the land falls away on one side into fields of stone, and on the other, after making two small clefts to steady itself, sheer into the sea. This beautiful shape of straight lines has been seen by only a fraction of the people who might think it familiar. For slightly blacker, slightly steeper, it was on the screens of two continents not so long ago. Someone who has seen its picture might have failed to recognise it ; someone might have found the reality. disappointing ; and again Nature .would have copied art.

Wherever you are on the island the fort of Prince Aenghus looks down. No path leads to it. No directions point the way. You climb the walls you think are the lowest, and are glad when they stop in despair, and you walk over the fissured slabs of limestone to the Dun. A weathered notice-board tells you that it is under the protection of a body which cares for ancient monuments, but the board itself looks more in need of care than the monument. The island is parcelled by walls of loose stones into small squares, and smaller and smaller squares within squares, against the wind, and in the searing light walls graze the eyes everywhere until the sea begins. The green squares have been made with sand and sea- weed from the shore ; but here and there the walls enclose nothing but a patch of green in a surrounding despair of limestone or a stone formation left by another age. The narrow roads struggle between engulfing walls. Six or seven villages are incidents in the tight-fisted land. And all around the folding, foaming sea.

The MacD.s' cottage, used to such visitors as come, is under the eye of the Fort, and distinguished from everything around it by a slate roof. Its furnishing is a stone floor, a long deal table, a bench, some wooden chairs and holy pictures ; its decoration oilcloth, brown paint, horsehair, a sideboard and a painted tea-set. The walls record the weddings of islanders in America—spats and gloves and bridal veils against backgrounds of pasteboard panelling or cardboard book-backs. Nothing now distinguishes them as island men, but in the prominent shoulders and in sturdy arms held away from the sides there is a memory of cow-hide shoes and limestone roads. There are three books ; two about the archaeology and gecdogy of the island by venturesome Victorians much photographed in their bowlers, the other a volume of essays by Goldsmith. The clock stopped many years ago, but since it is not so much a time- piece as a stage of progress (like the slate roof), it is a treasure not to be lightly exposed to a journey to the mainland.

Every morning at more or less 10 o'clock, for even the cockerels on the island are indifferent time-keepers, the two children, five

and seven, set off on the two-mile walk to school. They carry the

books they buy out of the ten pounds a year the Government gives them for speaking Irish, and the slices of bread to eat with the milk the school provides for lunch. When it is wet their mother takes a telescope to see that they are keeping their hats on all the way along the road. Life is surely one long, methodical, seasonal struggle, but the incidental hardships seem fewer than those that

harry more comfortable households. The MacD.s, however, are facing one at the moment. The hen is refusing even to supervise

the Dillons, as the poor little waif chicks bought out of the Govern- ment's incubators at 2s. 6d. a dozen are called, and they stray about the cottage, bizarre and obviously maladjusted, pecking at any un- promising thing from a horsehair sofa to a coconut mat.

The film-maker's empty ,cottage is a field or so away, 'its door

a royal blue, its roof pegged down efficiently against the wind. From it the land dips into fields and nettles again, and among the nettles is the beehive of a saint, looking even now a sound place for a penitent, fitting perfectly the cramped shape of a small human body. Among the shawled women on the quay on a day when the boat came in the fashionable girls wore the styles of three years before. The young girls arrived from the smaller islands for their first Ceilidhe in calf-length sprigged muslin dresses and red sashes, long hair drawn back in ribbon like a Victorian nursery picture, brought up to date by gilt-backed combs and plastic slides. The islander who has been twenty years in America was walking in exotic hat and tie with his shawled sister on the quay. Among the cottages

of this capital village a stucco-fronted house stuck out its chest to the sea. " That's called the American Guest House—American,"

Antony MacD. told us, and his old man's look of pride and awe tickled into his face by the sound of the word was something we had not seen before.

We were drawing sad conclusions about finding a well-known brand of cheap perfume in the island's general store when the deafening sound of a cuckoo reached us at ear-level from one of the two trees ; and wa thought that if the American Guest House aches for hydrangeas, at least it is not everywhere that a cuckoo sits low singing in the almost bare branches of a stunted tree.

The MacD.s' village has no general store, but the back room of a cottage sells unfashioned stockings (" Perhaps they're not good enough for ye ") and tins of baked beans. But the tins are not in much demand. For rare occasions meat comes from the mainland, an occasional fowl js killed ; paying guests have girdle cakes or jelly out of a packet ; but if none of these things appear, there is coarse nutty bread, eggs, milk and potatoes, and the same again. The possession of a pig or a cow makes a rough division of this classless community, but the cows go to the mainland butchers, the pigs to the bacon-factory; hides for shoes come back, and the islanders, if ever they can, buy bacon at 2s. 6d. a pound.

A girl. had brought her two-week-old baby from the hospital on the mainland, and one more creature came to live off the hard land. We wondered if a death had made way for it, and remember- ing the light-footed walk of the ninety-year-old King of the Island and Antony MacD.'s seventy years of raw bone girdled jauntily with his coloured criss, we thought how hope for the living and grief for the dead must be two locked hands of anguish. Down in the ruins of the Seven Churches a 1944 grave, like_all the rest, was overgrown with nettles, but the dead man's memorial, the tall Celtic cross they had raised for him at the road-side, had its head in the winds. In a less secluded burial-ground Antony MacD. showed us a marble cross from Connemara—" £30 they say it cost." But we, of course, had never seen anything so becoming to death as the wind-weathered autumn-coloured crosses on the roads.

What we saw on the island that was strange to us was not, after all, the homespuns, the shawls and the relics. The girl had held her new baby to her as conscious of it or as unconscious as if it were another curve of her reticent body. She scarcely looked down at it, yet her look away brooded over the child like an Epstein figure. The boat we left on was taking a girl away to go to America. We watched the full restrained tears of, the father, the calm sadness of the mother and the girl's impervious gaiety, for the emotion of losing is grief and the, mood of hope is simply happiness. Mass in the bare school-room was a pattern of angular shoulders and the jagged outlines of old limbs that could not be enclosed by the children's desks. The rhythm was the slow movement to the knee on the 'bare boards. 'The face of the gathering was utter pre- occupation, the beads were the mysteries, and there- was 'no sur- rounding miasma of distraction. It was as if the aching brightness of the island light in stripping bare walls and sun had taken a layer of pretence off emotion. ..../ This lovely place of straight lines has one undulation in my memory. The sun was setting in a red cone behind twelve sym- metrical peaks, and as the sea darkened porpoises started a path across the bay, trimming it with a scalloped edge ; their hooped black bodies were the life of curve, and they paraded them round the

island, giving it one short sight of ease. .