ARE you coming to Ireland for the summer?
How many of you still come back?
The tourist industry is crying out for you but its a bit more than that isn’t it?
Do you still come back?
When did you last come?
I remember the boat and I remember the journey to the boat. But mostly I remember two things. I remember the taste and I remember the light.
When we got to Ireland that is what I remember most. It tasted differently. I don’t mean the food. I don’t mean the Tayto and the Tanora.
I mean the country itself. It tasted differently. It smelt differently.
The air was different. It tasted like Ireland. And the light. The light was different.
We didn’t get a light like that in England. England didn’t look like this. Ireland and England looked nothing alike.
I remember lots of places. I remember one place now that no longer exists. I often think now did it ever exist at all?
My cousins and I would walk out from the house on the edge of Cork city.
It’s not the edge of the city anymore.
The countryside was on the doorstep then but it is far away from that house now.
We would walk out and the hills were there.
You could nearly touch them. It wasn’t like that in the city in England. There were no green hills to be seen there.
The countryside was far, far away from our street there. We came out and walked. There used to be a slaughterhouse nearby, an abattoir.
You could smell it. Sometimes you could hear it. You could hear the pigs screaming.
Beyond that was the city dump and very close to it, down a small by-road, some Travellers lived.
The tinkers, we called them. They had dogs, lots of small, barking dogs.
My cousins were urban boys. I was over from England.
We skirted the lane where the tinkers lived. I never saw them. They were like a myth. The city dump with great swirling crowds of seagulls.
An abattoir and the city dump. It doesn’t sound like romantic, old Ireland does it?
But it was all part of it. It was all different. It was all raw and real. It was all far away from my city.
We went out past the dump and soon we crossed some fields.
We walked a short while but not far. It didn’t seem far at all. And there it was. In the middle of it all there was some kind of big, old house but it wasn’t that that drew us. It was the land. It was the woods and the water.
There were acres and acres of woodland, stretches of dark trees and fallen trees and glades and clearings and birds singing and paths that never quite led anywhere. And then there were the lakes.
We would come out from the trees, somehow finding it even though we never followed a remembered path. Deep, black pools of water. Boggy paths. Bushes and old, leaning trees.
The water was as black as coal. By one of the pools there was some kind of old cabin and my cousins said a man lived in the trees and bathed naked in the black water. A hermit.
I think of that place now. I think of what it might have been.Was it some old demesne?
Was it a government woodland, a plantation?
Or was it something else?
Was it like it still appears in my mind?
In my childhood imagination, my city boy mind, it was an old, old place, with old trees and deep, dark pools. The kind of place a hermit might live.
Was it? Was it really ancient Irish woodland with old dark, Irish waters? I don’t know. It was childhood. I don’t know.
And I can’t tell because now that city dump is being closed. The tinkers have gone.
There is a dual carriageway leading to a motorway running alongside it.
The roads we walked are gone. The land is no longer there. I can’t see where it was.
I can see a golf course in those hills now and when I looked I recognised nothing. I think those pools have gone. The trees. The hermit.
So why is all of that so magical in my mind?
And are you coming back to Ireland this summer?
Are you getting on the boat?
Do you miss the taste, the light?
Are you coming back?