Wandering Aengus, the Arran Islands, and cheese and onion Tayto crisps
Time is playing its tricks with my mind again. I have been away for a few weeks, to Ireland — and now that I am back everything seems either slowed right down, or speeded up: it seems impossible that summer is almost over, or that it is a whole year since I first rolled up my fleece as a pillow, loosened my boots, laid my head down on the passenger seat, just to rest for a while, and ended up sleeping in my car for the very first time. Time seemed all scrunched up then too. I couldn’t hold it back, and so didn’t want to know about it, blanked out as much as I could — couldn’t even say what day it was sometimes; and sometimes, now, too, it is difficult to decide whether it seems ages ago since I was in the car, or more like yesterday. Seems a bit of both. Despite two massages and a hard bed, my back still holds most of the pain of it, so healing is no indication of time lapsed.
Mostly I went to Ireland to escape the hideous heat we had here at the beginning of August — all that oven-hot heat that was melting the sanity from my brain. That, and to try to give myself the slip for a few weeks, when the writing got too much. But I also went to see my dad. And though both of us had to bite our tongues a few times, and to hide our surprise at how the other now looked, as we caught glimpses of each other in the driver’s mirror, or took what we thought were quick, furtive, glances when we thought the other wasn’t looking, it was lovely to drive for hours with him through all that familiar, calming green countryside from one end of the country to the other. And to do all the other things: to brave a visit to an old friend, and stay a few nights in Trinity College where I queued in the rain next morning eating toffees, to see the Book of Kells again, and pick shells from the wet sand near where my mother lived before she went off to live in America last year, and where I always got the ferry back, and to drive through all those slow, sepia-toned villages and small towns that we stopped to eat in in the evenings (and that except for their euro's and satellite dishes and everyone huddled outside the pubs smoking — giving the impresssion that the whole country now smokes — seemed not to have changed since the holidays I spent there as a girl), and to eat corner shops out of bags of cheese and onion Tayto crisps.
Of all the places that could, Ireland feels most like home in many ways, especially in all the out of the way places and in the rain, and I was very glad I went back. It was great to make my peace with my dad — not that there was much peace to be made — but deeply satisfying, and to talk about this book and try to explain what a blog was;-) and sit with him in Yeat’s tower, in what felt like almost the exact middle of Ireland, eating apples from the apple tree in the small tidy garden beside it — apple trees which may or may not have been planted by Yeats himself. 'Definitely, they were!’ my dad said, reciting, what seemed almost word perfectly, The Song of Wandering Angus: “…the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’ Which quite uncannily is the one poem I think I have ever written out in this blog somewhere ( ‘I went down to the Hazel wood/ because a fire was in my head./ And cut and peeled a hazel wand/ and tied a berry to a thread…’) Which is one of my favourite poems and seemed appropriate at the time I mentioned it here, not because of the apples, but because of the wood, and the laneway I was in.
He recites poetry constantly, always has, in place of conversation often, and as a girl, cooped up in cars with him when he came over to England to drive me to or from school at either end of the school term, whenever we weren't sitting for much of the time locked in our complicated silences, I always pretended to be annoyed with his reciting of poetry — of his own and other people’s — in the middle, or in place of talk, much more than I actually was. But this time, driving all those hours through the rain with him I loved listening to it. And know that it will be one of the things, one day, not so many many years away, that I will long for most, to fill the big, gaping silences that will be left.
I know it was the apples in that poem, and the fact that we were sitting there biting into the sour ones from the tree beside Yeat's tower, but still, it seems weird that he should have chosen the one poem that I have ever mentioned here on this blog, to recite as we sat there. Before he got up and strode off to have a word with Yeats, whose spirit he said was definitely still around the place, he threw me one of the apples and told me to bring it back with me. So I have, but I haven't eaten it yet, it is sitting in front of me, and I am hoping that it will last until this book is written.
We also drove over to Galway under huge dramatic grey and blue skies. And one morning, in bright, flashing sunshine, took the ferry across to the Arran Islands, which is a place my dad had always wanted to visit, but never had. Me too, and I felt close to him sharing the day out there, eating ice-cream and clattering around the narrow bumpy roads in a horse and trap as if time had reeled back on itself.
There’s not a lot to do in the Arran Islands if you aren't able to cycle the few miles around it, which my dad wasn't, so after we came back from our ride, and a walk up to the fort as far as he felt able, we wandered between sweater shops and then went back and sat in the sun outside the café by the bike rental place down at the harbour — him eating baked ham, and me the shallowest, but nicest crème brulee I have ever tasted — and chatted to the Polish waitresses about how they had ended up all the way over there on the islands, and for some reason about what twelve courses went into their traditional Christmas Eve meals back in Poland.
The Arran islands are tiny and treeless and seem out of step with everything, and the ocean splashing up against their cliffs seems vast and threatening and at war with the land and leaves you with a strange, adrift feeling, almost like we weren't in a place at all, and it was hard to relax there. And although I'd like to go back one day, I was glad to leave at the end of the day and to be back with a bit more land under my feet and to be in sight of trees again.
I also drove out to see a friend that I used to work with in what seems like almost another lifetime ago now. Out of the blue she phoned me once, while I was in the car in Brighton, telling me she had moved out there with her new husband who was working in one of the colleges there. Luckily the message went straight to answerphone, and I never replied. I was living in the car by then, fallen a million miles away from their world. And I wouldn't have known what to say — or what not to say. But on the spur of the moment while I was over there this time, strengthened by a long rest and meeting my dad, I got in touch and we met. Only a brief visit, in a hotel restaurant overlooking purple mountains, and I didn’t tell her about living in the car — or the book or much else new about myself either — and felt annoyed afterwards that I hadn’t, but it was very nice and easy to be with her, and making contact felt like a start. And although for some strange reason it has always been easier to tell strangers about myself rather than go back to tell it to anyone I have known, I can see myself telling her one day maybe —or someone else from my past — and know that the sky will not fall in when I do.
Actually I almost slept in the car the night I saw her. I was planning to stay in a hotel —though, typically, hadn’t booked —and to drive on up to see my dad the following morning. Instead of driving across the country though I decided to drive backwards to the Dingle peninsular and to stay there for the night. It was further than I thought! And when I finally got there it was almost eleven o’clock and every hotel I tried was fully booked. All of them! Every little last one of them that I went in to. I had no choice in the end but to drive like a maniac all the way back to where I had just come from, and at gone one thirty check into one of the larger hotels that had a vacant room and a night porter to check me in.
For weeks after I got out of the car I played with the thought that now that I had done it — had slept in my car for all that time, and knew that I could do it — that I would be able to drive anywhere now, just take off spontaneously and go for the long drives I love, all over, whenever I chose — drive to all those out of the way places, without worrying about it getting late and having to get back. Because if I was stuck, or simply too tired to drive back, I could always park up somewhere and sleep in the car now! I’m not saying I thought I would do it on a regular basis! (I don’t ever want to have to do anything like that again!). But this time it would be my choice, and as with anything, once there is choice attached to it, it becomes a whole different thing. There was an exhilarating sense of freedom about the idea whenever it occurred to me during those first few weeks out of the car, and one day I even put an emergency sleeping bag in the boot, just in case. The idea quickly faded though and within a couple of weeks I recoiled at the idea of it. But that night in Ireland, not being able to get a hotel room, I wondered if I would be brave enough to do it again: to sleep out in the car somewhere, for just one last night.
The sleeping bag had been stored away in the boot for weeks, so that was there, and my wash things were in my suitcase, and I was an expert at sleeping with the handbrake poking into either my stomach or spine by that stage, so it was possible …? But suddenly, in that moment of being close to being forced into it again, all my bravery started to collapse, and I felt my heart thumping and palpitations starting, and drove back, in a cold, panicky sweat. There was no moon and it was a dark, empty road most of the way and at one point a few miles further on I saw a grey-white motor home parked up in the middle of nowhere, a little way in off the road. It looked so vulnerable there all on its own, against a backdrop of big black hills pleated into the darkness and a foreground of wasteland — so exposed and isolated, and I panicked at the thought of doing something like that myself, and put my foot down and drove off, praying I would find a hotel somewhere still open.
I couldn’t get the little white motor van, alone on that dark wasteland at the side of the road, out of my head though. It shook me. Just seeing it there so still and vulnerable all on its own in the dark, its owners asleep inside, unaware of me driving past staring at it. It gave me a real sense — even though my car was under tree cover in a narrow lane and I had a main road right at the top at one end and behind the trees beyond the curve in the lane at the other end, had knowledge, and sometimes sight, of a clump of houses — of what my car must have looked like parked there on its own all those nights — how vulnerable it was there, and what risks I was taking.
Although it wasn’t a cold night, I arrived at the hotel shivering and cold and jumpy, my heart racing. And when I laid down under the tight covers, all that fear about sleeping in the car that I had to hold off all the time that I was actually doing it, started to flow jerkily out of me. And I fell asleep trembling, unable to get warm, even though I had wrapped myself in towels under the bed sheets, and slid one of the big, plump pillows down under the covers, close in, right up against me lengthways, to hug. Sometimes I can’t believe that it happened — that I slept out in the car for all those months. My mind doesn’t want to process it all. I just want to put it all behind me as quickly as possible and move on. The same as I want to do with all the other stuff.
That is why I am determined to throw myself back into the writing of this book. Mostly so that I get it out of me and finished and can be over and done with it one last time. It's not easy writing about things you don't even usually want to remember, not easy at all. But I am going to blast through it this time, only think about all that old, very young stuff, one last time, and then leave it all there between the covers of the book and move on. I know it wont be as simple as that, but I am looking forward to getting closer to the end.
posted by WanderingScribe @ Saturday, August 26, 2006
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