An outsider searching among ancestors

CO SLIGO: In a continuing series in which writers reflect on the county they call home, DERMOT HEALYconjures up characters and scenes encountered over the past 20 years

FROM THE 1960s onwards I used hitch from Cavan to Sligo to music festivals at Ballisodare and elsewhere, and then I became a regular at the Yeats Festival, and each day I roamed and got lost in the landscape.

On one of those expeditions we encountered a teenage girl on the Leitrim border driving cattle along the road. She had on a man’s shirt with all the buttons open. She waved and went on. We were headed west on a mission. Time was running out, but we made it eventually over towards Easkey in south Sligo, and into the hall in time to hear the opening jazz rallying cry of Mister Acker Bilk on the clarinet playing with the Paramount Jazz Band. And soon we were listening to Stranger on the Shore. Afterwards Acker took us pair of lads backstage for a glass of wine.

Another June we’d arrived, hired a couple of bikes and were camping out at Rosses Point. That evening we cycled into town to hear a famous girl rock star of the day. Afterwards she came out to the bar and my mate asked me to read her a few of the Liverpool poets – perhaps Adrian Henri. Next thing we were on High Street, and she was climbing up onto the bar of my bike. On you go, she said, and we headed off down the hill. Suddenly a car passed, swung out in front of us and blocked the street.

Oh dear, she said.

The door of the car swung open.

Come on, the driver shouted, where do you think you’re going?

It’s my manager, she whispered.

She patted my shoulder and sat into the car, while I slowly pedalled off back to Rosses.

Over the years I made many trips to Tubbercurry, the home of the one-act play, and Gurteen, where you might be lucky to hear the dons of Irish music: Fred Finn, Peter Horan and Seamus Tansey.

In the early 1970s I was staying with a friend and I went off on a Sunday morning to hear the early session. It was wintertime, and I had to take a small road through a bog. It was about an hour’s walk.

Around four o’clock I stepped out only to find the street was covered in snow. I got through the first mile slithering to and fro, reached the bog and the road disappeared under the thick blanket. The whole place was pure white. Each step I took, I landed up to my knees in mire and muck. I went back a couple of times and started out again prodding ahead of me with a stick I tore off a tree.

And still I was lost.

Darkness fell. I was going in circles. Time was passing. The sound of the bodhrán and the flute and the fiddle raced through my brain. Then by luck I hit the tarmac again under the snow. With the stick I inched forward. Around nine o’clock I at last reached the pub. My friend was inside waiting patiently at the bar. He looked at me astounded.

We were going to ring the guards, he said.

Another time I received an invitation round Christmas to read at a festival on Inishbofin off Mayo in what I thought was the month of January, only to find when I arrived that the festival was in June.

I took off hitching to Sligo, walked to the outskirts where I found a car with a Cavan registration. So I knocked at the door of a nearby house, and writer Michael Harding stepped out, offered me a bed, and took me down for a night in The Tradesmen’s Club, a place I would return to over and over in the years ahead, to listen to Joe O’Dowd, the fiddler, another Gurteen native, and his son Seamie O’Dowd, among many others.

In 1983 my first home in Sligo was in Glencar. We’d take these old walks – now closed to the public – across the Swiss Valley and under The Stream in The Face of the Heights where, when the wind was from the south, a great shard of water rose in the sky. Like in the early years, to get to town I had to put the thumb in the air to reach Sligeach, meaning the shelly place. And a postman, Mister Silberry, was very kind to me; he’d sit me out of sight in the back of the post van, and drop me at the outskirts.

It’s a beautiful place you live in, I said.

We don’t talk landscape here, he informed me smiling, it would only fool ya. One of his stories was how as a child in the 1930s he’d walked up the stairs in his parents BB and saw through an open door of a bedroom these pair of bare feet sitting on top of each other. He looked in – this elderly man was lying back on the eiderdown viewing the ceiling.

Who is that man? he asked his mother later.

That is Mister Yeats, the poet, she told him.

Those days I began dropping into Hargadons pub in the centre of town. One Tuesday an old fellow entered and someone said in a whisper: He’s just in off the Cavan bus.

I looked at the time on the clock as my mother was asking me to come home to visit. The following week, a young fellow entered the pub and up came the same quiet voice: He’s just in off the Cavan bus.

What time does the bus leave for Cavan? I asked.

You poor fellow, said a man in a blue suit at the bar.

The crowd broke out laughing. Then later I realised that the term ‘just in off the Cavan bus’ meant you were drunk.

Once a famous actor and friend who lived just down the road from us gave myself and my partner a lift home. We were living on the side of Ben Bulben on a steep fall. He turned the sports car, and just as he did one of the wheels swung out over the drop.

Carefully he climbed out. We’ll sort it out tomorrow, he said and he headed down the hill. In the early morning I knocked on the door of a jockey who lived up the road. He drove down in his van, and tied the car to his tow bar, and pulled away. For a second the vehicle hung in the air, then the four wheels hit the ground.

The jockey took off, and I sat in and drove my friend to work in town. I shot back out and down to my neighbours, rang the bell and he called me in.

It’s gone, he said sadly.

What? I asked.

The car, he said, it must have slipped away. I was up at your place with a farmer on a tractor and there was no sign.

Forgive me, I said, come outside.

And there he saw the car.

Ah dear, he said, and he shook his head, and looked at me.

I drove herself to work, I said.

Never mind, and he shook my hand.

When I moved into Sligo town, the Arts Festival was on the go.

As far as I knew back then, I had no blood relationship with the north west, but after a few years here, I suddenly discovered that my grandfather, James Slack, and grandmother, Muddie, came from Aclare in south Sligo where he was a sergeant in the old RIC. The house, now a ruin, is known locally as Slacks Corner.

Then came the day that I was on the verge of buying an old cottage out on a small deserted island called Dernish, just out past Streedagh Strand, where three boats of the Spanish Armada went down with 1,200 lives lost.

I’d go over by boat to view the ruin, then at certain low tides I was able to walk from Streedagh, and the place began to haunt me. I had even priced the cost of buying a local boat to get us over and back, when all of a sudden we took off to Ecuador.

When we came back, it was on the verge of being sold. I went to look at a house in the Bricklieve Mountains, which is the site of Carrowkeel, a place of megalithic tombs, cairns and barrow. We’d step into some of the few remaining Neolithic cairns and head back centuries through the summer solstice and the winter solstice as the tomb looked way across the land to align with Knocknaree and Carrowmore, and then with St Molaise out on Inishmurray, and back again to head towards the pyramids.

I talked to the owner of the house and we were on the verge of shaking hands. I was to call out soon to see him and do the deal.

All my neighbours are Healys here, he said.

A few days later I would discover that, though my own father grew up in Elphin in Roscommon, his Healy family originally came from out there at Ballinafad at the foot of the Curlew Mountains.

So now I was determined to buy the house, but that evening Seán McSweeney, the painter, introduced me to a cottage here in Ballyconnell west by the sea where we now live, myself and Helen with the wind and salt as our constant companions, eroding and rusting all before them, and not a tree in sight, except inland. I bought the home by the light of a match.

And the house in the Bricklieves has since become a donkey sanctuary.

Mentally, over the years, I have lived in both these houses. On most Christmas mornings I head up the mountain road to catch a glimpse of Dernish, and drive alongside a stream into the heights, then on sometimes to Gleniff where the car rolls magically backwards uphill, while in the distance is the valley of Glenade, the valley of jealousy, where one lover hated nature because the other had fallen in love with it, and when the nature lover died, the one left alive could not wait to get to the far side to see who the lover was.

You don’t mention the landscape is a law I’ve learnt, but ever so often I’m on a secret drive to the gap, and onto Loch Talt to take the wild road over through the Ox Mountains. A stop off at the sea baths, and another stop off to pluck a few leaves of lavender that are grown along some of the side walks in Sligo town. But the truth is when you live amidst it, you learn to take the beauty for granted and step into an interior for a pint that’s teeming with the words: ‘absolutely’, ‘recessions’, ‘how are you’, ‘how is the craic’, ‘look at that boy on the box’, and ‘see you later’.

In the old days we could go occasionally to Lissadell House for breakfast, and buy our organic vegetables there.

Not any more. But I still can hop into town on Sunday mornings to hear the magnificent Jazz Lads at the Harp Tavern, playing together now for more than 50 years, or head to a play in The Factory or The Hawkswell, or follow Jack Yeats through The Model Arts Centre.

And if you step down onto the beach from the house here, you encounter the Serpent Rock, which is a riddle of corals about 339 million years old, from tropical times, imbedded in limestone.

A Stranger on the Shorewould be a great tune to hear as you stand out there, still an outsider, searching among the ancestors.