EXHIBITION:Paul Lynam's Kilkee photographs recall vivid childhood memories for the writer ANNE ENRIGHT
I MET SOME of my cousins recently and it shocked me to think how little I know about them, now that they are all grown up. Shocked because I know such madly specific things about them from the time when we were children. I know, for example, what colour they each would go, after an hour or so swimming in the Pollock Holes; whether blue from nose to chin, or deathly white and shaking. I myself went orange with purple dots; it bloomed under my skin in the same sort of ring pattern as the ABCs you got from sitting too close to the fire in winter. My hands used to go a bloodless white. The great thing about being 11 and numb from the wrists down is that you don’t worry whether it is terminal. And the pain, as the blood returns, is fantastic.
This, the colour of their hypothermia, I learned about my cousins in the summers we gathered on my grandmother’s farm near Kilkee. We lived by the tides, waiting for sea to roll back from the reef, getting up later and later, until the day we realised we were swimming at night. Some grown-ups came through the rain in their togs, giggling, and we saw that they were drunk. One of them slipped and tore his back. I was very shocked. It was time for us to get up early, catch the first low tide and be dragged around the clock once again.
Those barnacles really hurt, and they were everywhere, but children are lighter on their feet, I suppose, and we didn’t even wear sandals. We walked past the first, Ladies’ Pool, to the second pool which was deeper and had an excellent diving rock. It also had some pink stone underwater, which I fancied to be coral, as well as baby pollock and starfish suckered in the crevices. You could make your way into a shallower side pool through the slither of bootlace weed, breathing through your snorkel like Jacques Cousteau. There were all colours of seaweed, the purple tips of black sea urchins, and the wine-brown florets of sea anemones, who gulped themselves back from your touch.
The third pool, deeper and larger again, was, in those days, men only. It was also, when you had prised up every starfish and collected every dead sea urchin from the other two, very enticing. There were – you could tell, even from a distance – many fish in its depths, also small forests of kelp. In the end, it all got too much for me. I went over there, in a feminist frame of mind (this being 1973) and was told by a sunbathing gent to, “Run along home, little girl.”
Which I refused to do, of course. I strolled. I left at my own, leisurely pace. The man might have been a shopkeeper or a farmer or a priest, but he seemed to own the sun itself that day, along with all that enviable water. That is what I remember, how he looked, in his nakedness, so well got. The water of the Pollock Holes comes from the chilly depths. This isn’t the sand-warmed surf you find on the strand of Kilkee Bay. Scoured by the reef from the underside of a retreating sea, this is water that is surprised by the light; still, profound; the creatures who live in it suffer a peculiar weather. Abandoned, twice a day, by the wide ocean, their world becomes both smaller and more open. The weight of water grows less. The tiny fish look confused, in their twitching shoals, by never finding a way up and out. “The country behind the mirror,” say the Chinese, “is the land where fish is king”.
I don’t know what children see of natural beauty. At the age of 10 or 11, landscape, even the idea of it – the Sunday walks and “look at the lovely gorse” – bored me stupefied. I do think I learned something about beauty in the Pollock Holes, however. I learned by living in it, diving into it; by being permeated, frozen, pickled by it. I learned in the stillness underwater, and the wildness above.
Ireland is such an overwritten country, it does no harm just to look at it, once in a while. Paul Lynam has been going to Kilkee for nearly 50 years and taking photographs of the reef for the last four. It is such an amazing resource, he says, and so underestimated – this habitat that is not just replenished by the sea, twice a day, but also changed by it. Lynam’s passion for landscape plays between the open and the underwater light of the rock pools. His photographs give us the double vision I learned in this place as a child. Here is ambivalence, frozen. And with that ambivalence comes some kind of lesson – about tenderness, and what the countryside has to teach us, if we have the patience to learn.
Paul Lynam’s exhibition of photographs of Duggerna Reef (or as it is known locally, the Pollock Holes) is at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, until May 14th.