At the Edge of Ireland (49 page)

“Just like you do?”

“Ah well, they had to be a lot more talented than us modern-day
seanachai
. People expected a hell of a lot from them then. They were often the prime entertainment at fairs and in remote villages. When a
seanachai
arrived, everything stopped and everyone came to listen to his stories. Mesmerizing they must have been—theater, radio, TV, movies, all rolled into one man and his magic ways of making people forget their troubles and just listen. Letting his words and their own imaginations take over…and—well, allow them to fly…fly to places like Hy Brasil—that mythical enchanted isle floating somewhere in the haze off the west coast here…or anywhere at all. Anywhere he wanted to take them. And to some extent—that's still going on. There's quite a Celtic revival at the moment…all over the country, in fact y'might say all over the world.”

While Anne and I were in Dublin at the start of our Beara odyssey, we were amazed by the number of young bard-singers—some call them balladeers (others were less complimentary)—on the street corners, guitars rampant and guitar cases littered with the confetti of coins. We talked to a few of them between their spontaneous gigs. One young girl told us how she'd never forgotten her grandfather's old “street songs,” the musical cries of hawkers and barrow boys, the children's skipping chants her mother used to sing, and all those beautifully sad and lilting Irish love ballads. And of course—always—the songs of the great battles expressing courage and fortitude invariably in the midst of disaster and doom. She laughed—“so typically bloody Irish—always celebrating defeat!”

Tom O'Ryan

And so typically Irish too was the fact that many of the ancient songs were almost lost. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the ruling Protestant “Ascendancy” of Britishers issued edicts banning the use of the “barbaric” Celtic language and the singing of “superstitious and silly songs” about fairies, leprechauns, and a host of other folklore “little people.” But, spurred on by the remarkable success of such books as
Grimm's Fairy Tales
, a Celtic cultural renaissance began in the early nineteenth century. Thomas Croker of Cork published one of the very first books of Irish folktales—
Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland
in 1826.

Later in the century Oscar Wilde's parents—Sir William and Speranza Wilde—became enthusiastically involved in recording authentic Celtic music and stories. They in turn encouraged William Butler Yeats and his creative philanthropist-partner, Lady Augusta Gregory, cofounders of the Abbey Theatre in 1903, to publish
The Celtic Twilight
(Yeats) and
Visions and Belief of the West of Ireland
(Lady Gregory).

Yeats also went on to celebrate Ireland's mystical Celtic heritage in his beloved and world-renowned poems—in particular “The Wanderings of Oisin” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The two of them also embarked on numerous “collecting expeditions” in Connemarra and Sligo and realized that the preservation of Celtic songs and poems required a renewed nationalistic retention of the Irish language. So eventually the Gaelic League was formed, and by 1906 it boasted almost a thousand branches and more than 100,000 members. The Irish government then reinforced it by creating the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935.

“
SO
it was things like that, y'see, and a new pride in our land and in our ancient Celtic culture that allowed people like me to do what we do today,” said Tom, “retaining and respecting the role of the
seanachai
and keeping the Gaelic revival alive and well—thank you very much!”

 

“K
EEPING THINGS ALIVE AND
well is not always an easy thing,” said Teddy Black, one of Beara's most notable “mod'rn-day”
seanachai
. His name had been mentioned to Anne and me on various occasions when the old Gaelic tales were floating about during evenings of
craic
—tales of fairies, tinkers, lovely naked ladies on horseback, the perils of drink, vows of eternal abstinence, and the like.

“The man's a living miracle,” a young Teddy Black fan had gushed after a particularly raucous evening of Irish folk songs at Twomey's. “He reminds me of m'dad—he's got stories galore. People come alive when 'e tells 'em. Y'can see his characters an' what's going on in the tale. M'dad had Beara instincts buried deep inside him. He could forecast the weather for a week just by going down on the shore here an' listenin' t' the sounds an' lookin' at the sand—the slap o' the surf an' the crack o' the wind-chop, the tone o' the pebbles growlin' an' grindin' in the shallows, patt'ns on the wet sands, the way the dry grains moved higher up the beach. He was hardly ever wrong. An' Teddy's like that—Beara's folk historian and much more besides.”

So obviously I went off in search of Teddy Black and finally traced him to his home on the eastern edge of Castletownbere set on a high bluff overlooking Bere Island and the narrow channel and the town's small, enchanting (but difficult, so they say) golf course.

His bright-eyed wife, Ann, greeted me and invited me in. I needed no further inducement, as the hallway was full of the most delicious baking aromas. Almost every time we went to visit someone at their home, there was always some baking going on. Very odd…there was definitely some kind of grapevine messaging system here that had signaled our fondness for just-baked cakes and the like?

“I'm hungry already—and I've just had lunch!” I said.

“Good—because somebody's got to eat these new-baked biscuits an' it might as well be you,” said Ann with a chirpy laugh.

“I'll only protest through politeness. Then I'll finish the plate.”

“That sounds like my kind o' fellow…” A voice boomed from the adjoining living room. And out stepped this stocky, blue-eyed, white-haired gentleman, radiating auras of energy and good humor, and I liked him before we even got to the hand-shaking ritual.

The next couple of hours raced by in a welter of stories, punctuated by Ann's plates of still oven-warm cookies. Apparently Teddy had sort of “slipped sideways” into the
seanachai
's role after spending much of his life as an insurance salesman. “I could always tell a pretty good tale—but so could a lot of people on Beara. It was part of the local tradition, really—before the days of radio and TV and videos and a dozen other demonic distractions! Y' had t' find something t' keep y' going through those long dark winter nights, an' I guess I learnt it through m'grandfather. He came from Oban on the west coast of Scotland and worked on some of our southwestern lighthouses. Ann's grandfather was one of those who survived that terrible disaster at the Calf Rock Lighthouse just off Dursey Island.”

“What disaster—I don't really know that story. Penny Durrell mentioned it briefly to me, but I never heard the actual details.”

Teddy's eyes gleamed with delight and a broad grin almost made an ear-to-ear leap across his happy round face. “Oh!—so y'don't know about Calf Rock. Ah well…I suppose I should put on my
seanachai
hat an' give you the official version. Or at least,
my
official version!”

And so he proceeded to do precisely that—relishing the rich details of the saga from the very first day the project was conceived in 1846 (“very stupid…you couldn't have chosen a worse, more storm-battered place than that pathetic little piece of broken rock off Dursey”) to its arduous construction from 1862 to its first lighting in 1866. “An' o' course—like everythin' else connected with this crazy project an' all its disasters—the light rotator didn' work and the lens had t'be turned by hand by one o' th' two keepers. An' then a couple o' years later durin' a terrible gale someone misread the signalin' flags from th' lighthouse an' thought they needed urgent rescue. So seven men set out in a small boat an' the storm got worse an' worse an' finally they capsized jus' a hundred yards or less from the rock an' all seven men vanished in a flash, never t' be seen again. Not a single body was ever found.”

When the traumatic events reached a gripping climax early on Sunday morning, November 26, 1881, Teddy's eyes were ablaze and his speech increased in speed and timbre. He was a true storyteller, telling the tale as if for the first time with none of the stagy antics I might have expected from a professional
seanachai
. He raced me through the deadly phases of the event—a terrifying hurricane with winds from the northwest over a hundred miles per hour; the enormous crashing waves leaping over the top of the little lighthouse; the sudden disappearance of the lantern and the whole upper level; the dash by the keepers for the tiny lighthouse cottage across the rock, and their imprisonment in a ten-by-fourteen-foot kitchen awash with stormwater for…and at this point, Teddy became almost purple with excitement…“for twelve days…can y' imagine, twelve whole days until Thursday, December eighth…they were in that horrible dark, wet, foodless, waterless—at least in terms of freshwater—hole. For the first six days their families thought they'd all been killed. The storm was so bad the men couldn't even open the door of the kitchen to signal rescuers. In fact, they didn't know if there were any rescuers! But all the time they were trapped, their story was being transmitted around Ireland—and the world. And when they were finally rescued during a lull in this storm to end all storms, their names and the names of their rescuers had become almost legendary. In fact, Michael O' Shea, a fifty-three-year-old fishing boat captain from Ballynacallagh, was so revered for his bravery in leading the rescue, that he was awarded a special medal for gallant conduct and became known locally—and proudly—as ‘Michael O'Shea of the Medals.' And,” continued Teddy, “like I said, Ann's grandfather—God rest his soul—was one of the men rescued by Michael and was never short of a pint at the pubs for the rest of his long life!”

I congratulated Teddy on a fine tale superbly told. He laughed. “Oh, I always love t' tell a tale—and listen to the stories of others. It started, I suppose, when I was very young. We had a boardinghouse, and over dinner in the evenings there'd be all this wonderful storytelling by the residents. I guess I learned a lot from them. I learned—most important—to adjust the telling—the pace, the tone, the punch line, the humor—to the audience. I'm not one of these rigid storytellers, but it's still very important for me to be called a storyteller—as opposed to a yarn spinner or a raconteur. I bring in modern tales too—not just the grand old tales. Some do that and they go on the American circuit, and big names they are too. But I love Beara as much as any man and I love to tell its tales and legends here. Once a month I go to a place in Cork called the Yarn-Spinners Club and they have storytelling gatherings that bring people in from all over the country. Last time we had three from New Zealand—wonderful storytellers. I've done radio an' the like an' so I've been invited to join many of these kinds of groups.

“I think if I'd taken the whole storytelling thing more seriously, I would've done quite well. ‘On the circuit,' so to speak.”

There was something about Teddy that reminded me of our folksinger friend Danny Quinn. Maybe his genuine modesty coupled with a rich bedrock soul tingling with humor and Irish benevolence.

“I admit I like a little bit of adulation now and then, but there are others who deserve it much more than me. The real traditional
seanachai
—like just down the road—is Mary Madison. She reflects the heart 'n' soul of this place—the days when storytelling was an important part of communicating at
céilís
and between different parts of the country. An' it kept the old deep earthy pagan Celtic soul alive. Kept us proud. Helped us celebrate this amazing treasure trove of archeological sites we have here and all our amazing legends. A sense of entitlement to the richness of our history and all the tales and legends behind it.

“It was hard because, when I was younger, we had a town here that had closed up completely. The mining was dead, the navy and army had pulled out of Bere Island, Dunboy Castle and the Puxley mansion had been destroyed by the rebels. We were living in what you might call the ‘tumbleweed era.' Every second house on the street was empty. Everything was dying out, all the old traditions. But—thank the Lord—things are a lot better in that area now, and I've got so many stories in my head that have been passed on to me. I see myself as like a bit of a folk historian—being responsible for trying to keep them—keep the old oral traditions and the people whose lives they reflect—keeping them all alive. For us—and even for the blow-ins too. They're desperate to identify with something and somewhere because they've lost their own roots—forgotten where they came from, if they ever knew. And they reach out to us and our stories, trying to find an anchor. Americans particularly. They're very ‘rootish'—always looking for their own histories over here. Well, it's hardly surprisin' is it, in a country that—let's face it—is less than two hundred years old in terms of real emergence as a power—
the
world power! And I don't have any problem with that at all. We need all the stories we can get nowadays. And when I watch the faces of my audiences—when I see the stories grab 'em and carry 'em and excite 'em or even make 'em cry a little—why, then I'm a very happy fellow—a very satisfied
seanachai
!”