Our Ethereal Eden

The annual visit en famille to my father's native bit of east Galway was an essential fixture in August. My mother liked to venture further afield so would spring a rented house on us occasionally. This led us one year to a farm near Gorey as guests of a delightfully eccentric spinster called Aggie Fisher, another year to a redbrick terrace near the Phoenix Park from where we sallied forth every day into the city maelstrom in search of exotica such as the National Museum, the National Gallery or Bewley's Cafe.

But the place to which we were constant as the swallows was Galway because my father loved it with a deeply patriotic fervour and sang its praises at every turn. He had a bevy of nieces for instance, whose saintliness and loveliness were declared to be peerless and should have made us loathe them for life. It says a lot for Galway's charms that it survived his proselytism and that we fell into line behind him and became firm little Galway tribalists ourselves.

His homeplace was only 70 miles from where we lived in Tipperary, but to move from one county to the other seemed sublime as it was later to go from pastoral Yugoslavia into the sudden heat and white stone of Greece. This is an unlikely comparison since it was just as liable if not more so to be raining in Galway as it was in Tipperary. But that is how it was.

The journey too had its hazards. I was prone to travel-sickness so "have you the jam-jar for Anne" was always a last-minute cry. I travelled with the heightened perception of imminent queasiness, my sick-jar at my feet. We had one car that found it hard to climb hills and there was a notoriously steep hill to be climbed at the last. The dangerous prospect of negotiating that was another intensity that hung over the journey for a few years.

The first mark of the "border crossing" was the great wooden bridge over the Shannon outside Portumna that breaks in half to let boats pass. It was a coup when this was happening as you came up to it and you could get out and watch the ponderous manoeuvres; and then the thrill of fear as you drove on over the perilous-seeming slats with the water swirling below. Soon after that was the first sighting of a stone wall, the elemental symbol of Galway, hailed with reverential joy by all except my poor mother who saw little beauty in the stone walls of the west and must have been put out by our failure to recognise the beauties of Tipperary. We did see them of course but took them for granted.

In those days, everything about Galway was clearly superior. The nets of stone walls formed an Edenic landscape. The aunts were better bakers of apple tarts and ginger cake, the priest in the barer chapel more holy. The dogs were more workmanlike and so more admirable in their dogginess. The accent was more pleasing to the ear, the home-churned butter had a taste and tint particular to each house, the apples were sweeter, the air more blessed.

For a few days we progressed from house to house, with their aunts and uncles and their different qualities and myths. Pake's and Babe's, Winne's, Harry's. Dining in one, supping in another. One house had romantic fields of "Galway rock and thorn". Another was soft and Hellenic with a spring where you went in the evening to fetch the coldest sweetest water in the world. Each house had lots of cousins, older, glamorous girls, handsome boys on whom we had crushes and were observed avidly from a slight distance.

There would be a trip to Galway town to visit an eccentric uncle in his pub near the Spanish Arch and to swim in the sea at Salthill, warmer of course than the lakes and rivers of Tipperary. Then my parents would depart, leaving a couple of us to stay in one house or another for a week or two.

This was bliss. You settled into farm life. Squirting milk from a cow's udder at a passing cousin. Sliding in the grain in the corn-store. Chasing hens, taunting the fierce pig, imagining you were a cow-girl astride the broad back of the plodding horse. Taking cupfuls of cream from the churn, eating one's way through the orchard of Beauties of Bath, picking mushrooms to be roasted with salt and butter of the top of the range.

BUT perhaps why we loved it all quite so much was because all this was encouraged with a warm and loving indulgence. The aunts and uncles and cousins, one and all, made us feel honoured and special guests. The day the parents returned to take us home was bittersweet. There would be sniffles as we sped down the steep hill. How would the dogs manage without our ministrations? Who would find the eggs in the secret nest by the cowhouse? The last vestige of stone wall would be mourned as we sped through an autumnal dusk towards the boring pastures of Tipperary and school and normal life. Even then it would seem as ethereal and ancient as it does now, all more or less vanished into history. No more churning, no more hens, no more pigs. I had a Tipperary cousin who also did the Galway thing and loved it so much that finally he refused to go any more, because leaving was so sad, I understood that. I still do.