On a clear Clare day, you can see forever.
I
I was brought up in Dublin, studied and started my professional career with the Department of Foreign Affairs there and expected to spend the rest of my life alternating between spells in Dublin and other capital cities around the world. I was content with that prospect but, as I moved through my 20s and settled into a more sedate mode of living, the thought grew on me that, while living in Dublin was no penance, rural Ireland would offer a more congenial life.
So, when a job opened up in the aircraft leasing company, Guinness Peat Aviation in Shannon (GPA), in 1989, the prospect of being able to enjoy a calmer, quieter, countryside existence was almost as much a motivation for taking it as the likelihood of earning a great deal more money than I would get from public service. It was also a time when promotion prospects in the Department of Foreign Affairs correlated closely with the dreary progress of the Irish economy. Stagnation reigned.
As events transpired, the job side of things proved a mixed bag. GPA went quickly from riches to rags, effectively bust, within three years. I was able to scramble from one position to another within the industry, continue to earn a decent living, and enjoyed most of the professional journey. But I did have to spend a lot more time working in Dublin to where the centre of gravity of Ireland’s aircraft leasing activities shifted from Shannon after the mid-1990s. I commuted weekly up and down to the capital for almost a decade, though supported by accommodating employers who supported “hybrid working” before that concept had even been verbalised.
Through all that unsteady period, one pillar of life remained constant. We were not moving home from Clare no matter how much time and location had to be juggled with. That was because we were never less than content with it as “home”. Every passing year reinforced our attachment to the lifestyle and the place as more conducive to physical and mental health. Our local roots were deepened, literally and probably especially, by the gradual development of our own garden. In any event, the juggling diminished as I retreated gradually from day-to-day involvement in the industry and spent less time away from home.
All of us are confronted at various stages of life with what I call “framework” decisions that are specific but have heavy ripple effects on life in general. The choice of a marriage partner or of professional specialisation are examples of framework decisions. Exchanging urban for rural living is clearly another one — and it has worked well for us. But, when we took that decision, the superior job opportunity associated with it was something of a “hedge” against it working less well than we hoped.
II
Bear with this apparent diversion.
I attended secondary school at Oatlands CBS in Mount Merrion. Alongside Dermot Morgan, Eamon O’Cuiv, TD and a sprinkling of members of the successful Dublin football panel of the past decade, the college itself lists as one of its “famous alumni”, the writer Niall Williams, best known as the author of several novels. History of the Rain was nominated for the Man Booker prize in 2014.
Niall was a fellow student in my year and he grew up not far from us in Kilmacud. My acquaintance would have been limited to a vague but benign awareness of him as a conscientious, compliant student and I am sure that I impinged no more strongly on his consciousness. And, as happens, most secondary school relationships, big or small, are swept away by the transition to the next stage of life which occurred for the two of us in 1975.
Niall re-appeared on my mental horizon only after I had come down to Clare 15 years later when I came across the accounts written jointly by himself and his wife, Christine Breen, about their own move to the Banner County in 1985, a much more radical transition than ours. Niall and Christine had been enjoying a perfectly satisfactory life in New York but chose, somewhat precipitously, to up sticks and return to Ireland to occupy the cottage in Kiltumper in west Clare from which her grandfather had emigrated 80 years before with the objective of cultivating a living from the land and from writing. That was a big bet without any hedges at all. They burnt the boats they left behind them.
For those with some knowledge of Clare geography, the townland of Kiltumper lies very roughly half way between Ennis and Kilkee on an East-West axis and between Lahinch and Loop Head going from North to South. Kilmihil is the closest village.
The account of their early years in Clare is captured in Niall’s first two ventures into book-length print. O Come Ye Back to Ireland, published in 1987, is a record of their first year. When Summer’s in the Meadow, published in 1989, takes things on another while. They are both easy and enjoyable reads without ever trimming tougher truths. The graph of progress is uneven but they make the cottage more habitable, get better at taming and harnessing their small patch of land and gradually integrate successfully and satisfyingly into the local community. As Christine recorded: “We have found the framework for a peaceful life.”
A core strand of the second book is the lengthy transition from the low point of coming to terms with being unable to have their own children to the high of introducing their newly adopted daughter, Deirdre, to Kiltumper after a lengthy and winding adoption process.
In the 1990s, Niall’s focus switched mainly to fiction. He has written 10 novels and 3 plays, but also, in 1995 what might be called, from the perspective of long hindsight, an interim progress report on life in Clare — which I have not read — called The Luck of the Irish — Our Life in County Clare. That title suggests tentatively that things were still going okay.
Three decades and more since they first arrived, they are still in Kiltumper. Deirdre and later arrival Joseph have grown to adulthood and flown the nest.
This year they delivered an update on which the print is barely dry. The title is In Kiltumper — A Year in an Irish Garden and the book is largely what it says on the cover. Each month of the year 2019 gets an individual chapter with a bonus coda under the heading “Summer 2020” capturing the impact of COVID. Niall and Christine contribute alternating passages within each chapter.
What the book most definitely is not is a detailed blueprint for how to manage a garden from January through December, though it might spark a few ideas along the way. Rather, it conveys how cultivation of a garden can contribute to a more wholesome existence — the peace and fulfilment that comes from moving “in synch” with the rhythms of the garden, rhythms dictated by the sequence and particular characteristics of the seasons and of the full annual cycle.
You can see photographs of the garden on Niall Williams’ website[i], no doubt ones chosen to present it to advantage, and also concentrated on flowers in the pomp of their bloom rather than the more humdrum vistas of vegetables roosting in soil. But just as it can take 20 years to become an overnight success in entertainment, it takes many years of diligent labour for a garden to look natural, settled and beautiful.
Applying the same division of labour as in our house, Christine is the composer, conductor and curator of most things to do with flowers. Niall is the supporting cast, providing the brawn required to do donkey work, especially for food production. Like ourselves too, their food production is supported by both a polytunnel and a small greenhouse, delivering similarly generous abundance and variety from early summer through late autumn. A snippet from July:
Tonight, a feast of vegetables for dinner all from the garden: courgette, yellow squash, kale, spinach, basil, shallots, parsley and the first of the four different kinds of peas…
With the exceptions of the yellow squash and peas, we do all of the above too during their season and, when it passes, their place is taken by root vegetables that can wait in the soil at least through the early months of winter — in our case leeks, cabbage and sprouts. The annual cycle has already begun again before they are all out of the ground with the planting of next year’s garlic in November.
III
But, as said earlier, the book is more about life itself — for which the engagement with the garden is largely a backdrop, a source of evidence and illustration — and more about life’s dimensions of wistfulness and melancholy than their opposites.
First, Niall and Christine are now both in their sixties. Contrary to what one might think, literary success is not always a guarantee of economic prosperity, so anxiety about financial security lingers. Working the garden is by no means beyond them, but they are aware of the finitude of their capacity, that it is ebbing and will eventually be exhausted; not now, nor even soon, but no longer can they sustain the illusion of never. This awareness is heightened as well as eased by the unfolding of the final stages of Christine’s long recovery from cancer, a relief of course, but also a reminder that the same relief is only a deferral.
However, the garden provides a counteracting infusion of optimism. As Niall puts it at the onset of winter in November:
There is in all gardens this sense that next year’s expression will be an improvement, because the garden itself has taught us, we have learned that little bit more. There’s an inbuilt optimism, and more than anything the sense that we live within a round, the world’s journey cyclical, and the winter a grace, a pause-time for redrafting and putting right all that we have got wrong.
We would echo that big time. Repetition makes enduring tasks easier, refining our methods and correcting our mistakes — as well as creating the space to make new ones!
Then there is the question of whether their baton will be taken up after they are gone, their children having long since spread their wings for elsewhere. As Christine reflects:
But will anyone come after us?… We are not different to other ageing couples all along the west of Ireland — the Wild Atlantic Way — who, for countless generations, have seen their children emigrate… It’s part of the nature of this rural, empty place… although there are exceptions… …there is some hope that if broadband ever comes — ever — it will make a difference. …it will take a lot more than broadband.
We share that boat with them — though we have good broadband at least. Our only child, a sprightly 22-year old, is building his professional expertise in economics, finance and oriental languages. Very few occupational matches for that skill set around Quin, County Clare — even if he had any interest in the garden.
But, above all, there is a sense of a fissure opening up between Kiltumper and the wider world; of touch being lost, that the former is more of an oasis of escape from rather than an integral part of the latter. This is captured in the couple’s smouldering resentment of the installation of two wind turbines just over 500 metres from their home, a continuing thread through the year. Niall and Christine had fought and lost the battle against the progress of the development through the planning process before the year covered in the book.
The installation process involved heavy lorries lumbering noisily back and forth along their road from early morning to late evening transporting the materials to set the foundations and then to bring the turbine components to the site for assembly and installation. Completion of the assembly confirmed the turbines as the visual eyesore they had expected, intruding malignly on almost every vista from their garden. And soon after 2019 gives way to 2020, the blades begin to turn delivering the eerie and unsettling “whoosh, whoosh” noise they had feared. West Clare does not suffer from a shortage of wind, so they are rarely quiet.
To rub salt into the wounds, their road, which had had to be widened because of the size of the turbine pieces, was cracked and crumbled by the lorries, the stone wall opposite felled and the ditch in front of it destroyed, all of which damage remained unrepaired when the curtain comes down on the book, six months after the turbines were already in place.
Niall’s objections to the turbines are not simply selfish disgruntlement and even more certainly not a denial of the fact of climate change or of the need to substitute renewable energy sources for ones based on fossil fuels. They run deep.
Do we race ahead and fill the countryside with wind turbines? Is this the purpose of wild and remote places? To be employed in the cause of keeping the lights on in the urban ones? This seems less about changing the way we are living, taking responsibility for resources and how we use them, and more about simply changing where the energy is to come from. Replace the fossil fuel with wind and sun and the cities of the world can carry on as before, illumined through the night. It seems to me a caustic irony that in the rush to embrace a greener way it is the actual green places that count least.
Easy to dismiss as a contemporary Don Quixote tilting at modern windmills, but he has a point.
But, if their lives are “out of step” in one sense, they remain very much in-step in others. He concludes the December chapter with this.
…turning over those thoughts today, I came to a sense that who we are, what we are, and where we are, all sit at ease, organically, harmonically, like all those plants I can see outside… …my life, the writing, the living, the loving, my truest friend in this life, Chris, the children, the garden, the house, the whole entirety seems momentarily at one, seamlessly in step in fact.
If that injection of uplift reads like a manipulative conclusion, our hero and supportive spouse, strolling tranquilly, arm in arm towards the setting sun, that suggestion seems to me belied by the fact that this is only the latest year in a 36-year journey to which their commitment has never wavered. They don’t need to offer an alibi for allowing a final note of optimism to break through the clouds of pessimism that immediately preceded it.
We have been on our rural sojourn for a mere 31 years and, though beset occasionally by the same irritations with the present and worries about the future, there’s still plenty of pep in our step and few regrets about the past.
[i] https://www.niallwilliams.com/in-kiltumper/
[THIS BLOG WILL BE TAKING A BREAK UNTIL 2022. NEXT APPEARANCE: WEDNESDAY, 12 JANUARY]
