Murder on Achill: a writer excavates her own past

Nineteen eighty-four. The year of Purple Rain and Born in the USA, shoulders pads and big hair, computers and COBAL. The year a few brave teachers volunteered to bring our fifth-year class to the Achill Island Education Centre for a few days.

A lot more fun than its name suggested, these Dublin city slickers had their first experience of orienteering, surfing, hill-walking and canoeing. In our new or borrowed hiking boots, we explored the boggy terrain that makes up most of Achill’s landscape. Despite the aches and pains, it was a lot of fun.

Being young and a bit mad, the highlight of the trip for me was not found in the scenery or in the wildness of the place but in the illicit drinking, the teenage dramas and my bat-eared ability to overhear the dead-of-night whispered secrets between the popular girls. It was a coming of age of sorts and one of those times in life that sparkles a little bit more than others, the memories seem richer and sharper. In the three days I spent there, the island stole a little piece of my gritty urban heart.

Fast forward two years, I’m in UCD’s great lecture theatre in the Arts Building. Gus Martin, that wonderful master of the English language, is reading Seamus Heaney’s Punishment, a poem about a 2,000-year-old body unearthed almost intact from a peat bog. As the lecturer’s voice rises and falls, the “flaxen haired girl” of the poem burns herself into my mind.

Class war: a teacher takes us to school

---

The Prisoner’s Tale, as told to Christy Lefteri

---

Inishowen: capturing the spirit of this end of the Earth

---

When Gus Martin goes on to discuss how bogland preserves that which is buried in it, I have a sudden flash of memory. Me, standing with my orienteering map, hopelessly lost on some bog in Achill, the land stretching far into the distance and underneath my feet all those buried secrets. In the distance, carried on the breeze, the voices of my classmates.

Twenty years later, I was back. Not to walk the bog but to perform a play in The Valley House Hotel. As I crossed over from the mainland into Achill Sound, old memories of my 15-year-old self rose up to greet me. If I looked hard enough, could I rediscover that youthful joy we all had back then?

And yet, tempered with that was the knowledge that this island was almost completely bogland, that layers and layers of history lay in the soil of the place itself. That somewhere, a flaxen-haired girl could be buried. A strange dichotomy of past and present threaded itself into the fabric of my stay.

The play itself was set it in the past, a modern-day enactment of the events of long ago. It was a great success, two nights of full houses. The cast became minor celebrities, after show drinks were purchased for us by our appreciative audiences and on the last day of our stay, the weather being kind, a few of us ventured onto the beaches and threw ourselves into the waves.

The drama of the weekend, I realised, didn’t only lie on the stage, it lay in vast sweep of Keel strand, in the scary cliff journey down to the cove at Keem, in the deserted lands and desolate houses of the abandoned village. The tangibility of time seemed all around me, so much so that I fancied I could touch it.

Many years on, I come back again. No longer a mad thing of 15, I’m more mature, reflective and confident. I’ve survived the way life has lifted me up and beaten me down. The dramas of youth and the highs of the stage have been diluted by the things that make up my life now. Children, husband, friendships forged and lost, death, grief, success and health scares.

The health scare was one of the reasons I was here. Three years before, I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. And in the aftermath of treatment, I’d had the urge to take myself out of the self-imposed isolation of novel writing and throw myself headlong into life. I wanted to channel my creative energies into producing a living breathing thing, I wanted to be with friends and share the success or failure of the venture with them. And so, together we created theatre. Lots of theatre. And it was with the germ of an idea for a show in my head, that I took a trip down to Achill with my husband.

We crossed over onto the island in September 2018. Rain was beating on the window of the car. The wipers were screeching as they cleared it. The roads were deserted, not even a sheep to be seen. I wound the window down and inhaled the fresh Atlantic air. To the heavy beat of the ocean, we drove out of Achill Sound and on to where we were staying. Little fingers of sun started to poke out from behind the clouds illuminating spots on the dark tracts of bog on one side of the road. “If I was writing a murder mystery, this is where I’d set it. Right there. On the bog,” I said.

In that moment, DI Lucy Golden was born. Or maybe part of her had always been with me, ever since that first visit. DI Lucy Golden, a child of Achill, whose creation is as a result of the layers of my own past, but who lives and breathes a life all her own between the pages of my novel.

Achill, an island of savage beauty, has become my muse.

Once more, I am that 15-year-old girl, hoping to unearth the whisper of juicy stories in an ancient landscape.

And it feels great.

The Night Caller by Martina Murphy is published on July 15th by Constable, £14.99