IT seems incongruous standing in a garden glittering with the butterflies of autumn, laden trees in their last green flush, the sun hot on the stone that lies before us:
"Here lies buried the body of Liam Hourican, born Roscommon 1944, died in his beloved Kerry August 1993."
In italic script the lettering runs:
. . . the laughing lip
That shall not cease from laughter
Whatever rise or fall
The hand that loves to scatter
A life like a gambler's throw."
We are at Castleredmond House near Midleton, Co Cork, on the day before this incised slab of Kilkenny limestone is brought to Cahirciveen where it was to be laid, very slightly, tilted, over the grave of Liam Hourican. All sorts of times and places and people have come together over this ledge of stone in this quiet garden: the lettering is by the hand of Cornelia Bakkum of Schoorl, in the Netherlands; the house is the home of her fiance, Damien McGovern, with whom she is shortly leaving for St Petersburg.
Her commission is from Pat Hourican, wife of Liam, whom Damien met in Brussels when he acted in a play directed by Pat, who still lives and works in that city. And the stone was laid in the old graveyard in Cahirciveen where Liam Hourican, one of Ireland's most travelled, most erudite, and most nationally conscious journalists died suddenly while on holiday there three years ago.
Art School
There are not many young women able to cut letters in stone; after art school in Amsterdam, Cornelia Bakkum decided she wanted to learn the techniques and principles of lettering and restoration and went to work and study for three years with the David Kindersley studio in Cambridge; Kindersley's widow, Lida Lopes Cardozo, is herself one of the few letter cutters in Britain.
After that, Cornelia went to work with the stone carver and sculptor Ken Thompson in Midleton where she became particularly aware of the properties of the Kilkenny limestone which is available in every size required and which is still of excellent quality.
Like skinning one of the radiant butterflies, clinging to the buddleias in this garden, letter culling on stone is a dying art, in Ireland. Seamus Murphy immortalised it in Stone Mad a book with which Cornelia is familiar now that she has come to know Cork and the traditions of its stone workers through her time with Ken Thompson.
Stone itself is hard to get because once quarries are blasted, it becomes impossible to take whole slabs out of them; all the stone frets, with tiny little cracks and is used only for roadworks.
Headstone Fashion
There is, too, a fashion in headstones, a fashion which is driving the craft out of existence. The demand is for granite, the red and black stone with its highly polished surface which is too hard to cut by hand. This is often foreign stone, an irony which is not lost on Cornelia, who sees Irish people laid to rest in Irish soil under alien rock. Yet importing the granite is cheaper than quarrying Irish stone; local stonemasons have little or no choice but to follow the fashion, which also means that machine powered tools have to be used for inscriptions.
Cornelia's tools are a dummy hammer and chisel, a pencil, a sharpener and a stick, of chalk. She doesn't use stencils, devising the design in her head and then drawing the letters by hand. Getting the spaces right is the really important thing in work of this kind and Cornelia has the confidence of one who was taught by sympathetic experts.
In Midleton, the stonemason, Michael Sheedy, has done all the hefting and carrying for Cornelia; the workers in his yard got to know her when she was with Ken Thompson's studio. These are men who love and respect the stone; Midleton once had a fine tradition and a famous quarry which produced a rich red marble, some of which was used for Westminster Cathedral in London. These are the men who will lift the slab, five inches thick, six feet long, 3 1/2 feet wide, which was taken to Kerry and set over the double plot on a limestone base seven inches deep.
Rustic Script
Along its edges, the words in rustic script tell the story: "The stone is erected by Pat, his loving companion and wife, and by Michael, Emily, Bridget, Francis, Martha and Myles." It commemorates, too, little Aengus, who died aged four months in 1974. For Pat, the verse on the stone is magical, a phrase she heard Liam use time after time to express the headlong, life enhancing recklessness of the heroic ideal. He used them a lot, she says of Daniel O'Connell, and she believes they are true of Liam himself.
But she didn't know where, the words came from. She asked everybody she could think of and everybody was vague about their source. Eamonn Grennan in Harvard said it had to be Yeats - but from a play rather than a collection of poetry, perhaps On Baile's Strand. That wasn't it, but Pat left the volume of plays lying open for a few weeks and when she took it up again she found the lines jumping at her from The Green Helmet. They occur when Cuchulainn offers himself as the human sacrifice to the monster from the sea, and the monster responds by saying that, of all the men alive, Cuchulainn is the one he would have chosen, because of the hand that loves to scatter a life like a gambler's throw.
Although Pat still holidays in Kerry, she has not gone back to the house where they were all staying when Liam died. Now the stone instead commemorates those days as well as that life. At Liam's death, she knew that this was where she wanted him to be buried, but the cemetery of her choice, the old graveyard under the mountain looking over the water, was closed. Suddenly, as she talks, the brightness of the search for the words, the pleasure of the stone, the success of the lettering fall away. Instead, there is desolation, and under it the kindness of the Kerry undertaker, Mr Daly, saying he'd find a place for her somehow, and find it he did. It was his way of helping, of making a way through the grief of the time.
Commemoration
They have never gone back, until now when the stone must be laid. Next year, there will be a commemoration there for family and friends. By next year, Cornelia and Damien will be in St Petersburg where, because the Cryllic alphabet is so lovely, she will keep on culling letters. She won't begin with that, though. She begins at The Hermitage, at the Winter Palace, with the restoration of two pedimented figures gazing out over the Neva.