On an Irish Island (12 page)

West Dulwich, where George lived at the time he went up to King’s, was one of a cluster of towns bearing the name “Dulwich” spread across the far southern limits of London. He and his family lived in a two-story semi-detached house on Lovelace Road, one among a gentle sweep of similar houses with bay windows and stained-glass detailing built soon after the war; it was new, comfortable, and amply scaled, though hardly palatial. From the front windows, or anywhere in the house, really, you could look across the street to All Saints Church, a towering Victorian Gothic extravaganza in red brick with stone accents that, when going up in the 1890s, had for a while been envisioned as the Anglican cathedral for all south London. Though ultimately scaled back, it was hard to miss, for its arches, its flying buttresses, the sheer mass of it.

Before moving to Lovelace Road, the family had lived nearer to
Dulwich College, the old public school around which the Dulwich communities
had grown up. It had been founded in 1619 by a well-known actor of his day,
Edward Alleyn, a regular in
Christopher Marlowe’s plays, and possibly Shakespeare’s, who made a big success of it as part-owner and manager of the
Fortune Theatre, rival of the more famous Globe; Dulwich College graduates were called Alleynians. By George’s time, the school was housed in a cluster of buildings that had gone up during the Victorian era, all cloisters and spires. If it was not first among English public schools, like Eton or Harrow, Dulwich had a distinguished enough pedigree of its own. Along with the usual admirals, archbishops, and cricketers, author Raymond Chandler had gone there. So had Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. So had that quintessential observer of English manners,
P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves novels, whom college records show in cricket flannels in 1900. Instead of the adolescent angst more characteristically suffered by writers in school,
George Orwell once said of Wodehouse, Dulwich was for him “
six years of unbroken bliss.”

George Thomson’s time wasn’t so idyllic, though he seems not to have been acutely miserable, either. He had little use, it is true, for school sports; one time, his wife would remember him confiding, he’d
forged a letter saying he was to be excused from some intolerable game or match. He bristled at school discipline, too, sometimes slipping out of homework. But on the whole, he was not being stuffed into academic garb that didn’t suit him. The first of his family to attend university, he truly liked to learn.

George was enrolled in what at Dulwich was called the Classical side—as distinguished from the Modern side, for boys intent on business and civil-service positions; the Science side; or the Engineering side. The Classical side aimed expressly for admission to Oxford and Cambridge, and was loaded up with Latin and Greek, mathematics and modern languages. In his first year, George was introduced to Greek grammar, and in time was reading
Thucydides,
Euripides, and
Homer, along with Caesar,
Cicero, and
Virgil. Each year in June, on Founder’s Day, students put on a classical Greek play in translation. One year they did Aristophanes’
Clouds.
Playing one of
Plato’s disciples was George, photographed for the occasion with the other boys, sprawled on the grass in
chiton and sandals.

Sometime in 1921, just eighteen and still at Dulwich, George saw
a production of the
Oresteia,
Aeschylus’ classic trilogy of murder and revenge. It was directed by
J. T. Sheppard, an Alleynian from the previous generation.
Sheppard had gone to King’s, where he’d become a fellow, and then to renown as a classical scholar. “A missionary for the Classics,” someone once called him, known for a “dynamic personality and his histrionic gifts as a lecturer.” For thirty-five years, he would direct productions of his own translations of Greek plays, and it was one of these George saw in 1921. “
At the risk of appearing sentimental or gushing,” he wrote to Sheppard a few years later, “I feel I must write and tell you how much I owe to you in the study of Classics.” That production of the
Oresteia
had fixed him on learning Greek, he said. During his three years as a King’s undergraduate, George saw much of Jack Sheppard, whom he would esteem as mentor and credit with influencing his whole approach to the field. “Ever since I have been at college the chief enjoyment I have had from reading has been due to you.”

Still, his daughter
Margaret Alexiou insisted later, “
Classics was second best” for George Thomson. At King’s, where he held a scholarship (thus ensuring his name would be permanently enshrined on the Honours Board in Dulwich’s Great Hall), he might have preferred to study Gaelic. But there
was
no Gaelic Studies at King’s in those days. George would go on to earn a permanent and distinguished name in the classics; in doing so, he endured no serious deprivation. Still, this other, seemingly discordant thread, Gaelic and all things Irish, would wend through his mental universe always.

It must have happened early, while he was still at Dulwich. During his first years there, until he was past fifteen, the Great War raged. Notices of Alleynians killed in action, five hundred of them by war’s end, darkened the life of the school. One Alleynian was killed leading an infantry charge, in October 1916, about the time George first enrolled. Another’s plane crashed on return from a raid, killing him, in George’s third year. Yet, as close to home as it must have seemed, the European war apparently did not afflict him as much as other events partly coincident with it but cresting later. By these I mean the seven years of trauma in Ireland, from the
Easter Rising in 1916 through the end of the Irish
Civil War in 1923.

“
During the last years of my high school studies,” Thomson wrote later, “the Irish rebellion against the English colonial occupation began and the hard struggle of the Irish people for their liberation moved me deeply.” He asserted, and it was repeated later in the family, that his mother’s ardent Irish
nationalism—she was of Northern Irish descent on her father’s side—accounted for Ireland’s hold on him. That doubtless figured in. But just as important was that these struggling Irish represented an
oppressed peasantry, chafing under the boot of a great monolith of an industrial power. In George’s adolescent imagination, it was not abstract Ireland with a claim on him, but its suffering people.

The home library George catalogued when he was twelve or thirteen included no works of
Thomas Hardy, in particular not his novel
Tess of the D’Urbervilles,
which George read later, when he was sixteen. It was the formative literary experience of his life.
Tess
tells the story of a peasant girl, daughter of a farm laborer, in Wessex, the fictional rural landscape Hardy created for his novels. She is seduced by a local squire, then “
rescued”—this was George’s word when he wrote about it later—by a parson’s son, Angel Clare, who has decided to educate himself about the realities of rural life. Living there among the peasants, he falls in love with Tess. For a time it seems they will marry. But the story darkens. He forsakes her. She kills her original seducer, a D’Urberville, and goes to the gallows. The book’s last paragraph tolls an ironic bell: “ ‘Justice’ was done.…” George would recall “
the burning anger with which I read that last paragraph,” his hatred for a society whose cruelties led to Tess’s tragedy “and contempt for those who tried to justify it.” When he read
Tess
again, in the 1950s, while visiting
China, he needed to ingest it only a little at a time, he wrote, because it “
evokes so many forgotten memories.” It was just too intense. “Again and again I find myself recalling my feelings at the very first reading.” It, and indeed Hardy’s whole oeuvre, with its grand narrative of a peasantry laid waste by the modern world, would resonate through George’s life.

Hardy’s fictional Wessex was a thinly veiled version of his ancestral home, Dorset, a largely rural and agricultural county on England’s south coast. “As a schoolboy,” George would write, “
I spent my holidays in Dorset, cycling around and staying with the poorest cottagers I could find”—descendants, very likely, of those who had inspired Hardy a half-century before. Later, he adds, “I came to know the Irish peasantry as well as anyone could who was not one of them.” There is perhaps a boastful tincture to this claim to hard-won knowledge of plain folks. But more significant is the close mental link it suggests between the Hardy-like figures from Dorset he met as a boy and the Blasket Islanders he’d befriend later.

The Irish tragedy playing out in the newspapers while he was in high school and in his first year at King’s consumed him. Later, he’d cite particularly “the
Black-and-Tan terror in Ireland,” which he connected in his mind to the injustices visited on Tess. He became “
an ardent
Sinn Feiner,” referring to the militant nationalist movement that, beginning late in 1917,
came under the dominion of a new chief,
Éamon de Valera. When George was
about seventeen, he joined the
Gaelic League and began attending Irish-language classes at its
London branch.
“As soon as he’d get home he’d throw off his cadet uniform” and head off, his wife recounted later. The
West Dulwich train station was a short walk away. Fifteen minutes later, he’d be in central London’s Victoria Station.

Meanwhile, he amassed texts and literature in Irish. Like
The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne,
which joined his library around Christmas 1921. George’s edition of this ancient Irish tale of three-cornered love was published by the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, in Irish and English, with a notes section and glossary to help new students. Invariably, George would write his name in these volumes, often with rather a flourish. Much as teenagers often try out different signatures, George tried out different names. Sometimes it was just “G. Derwent Thomson.” But often it was one or another version of his name in Irish.

Into the front cover of his
Concise Irish Grammar,
George recorded this poem:

He wrote the poem in March 1922, while still in Dulwich.

One day probably early the following year, his first at King’s, George was in Jack Sheppard’s rooms in Wilkins Hall when he met another Kingsman,
Arthur Waley. George said he was thinking of heading off to the
Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part of Ireland, to learn the language. Waley, thirty-three, was no Celticist, having trained in the classics at King’s and then gone on to teach himself Chinese and Japanese. But just then he
was at the
British Museum, as its assistant keeper of Oriental prints and manuscripts. If George wanted to sample the
Gaeltacht,
Waley suggested, he’d probably want to meet a colleague of his at the Museum, a Mr. Robin Flower.

When the two men met, Flower urged George to go to the Great Blasket. The term at King’s was over in May, so George doubtless went home to Dulwich first. But late that summer, on a wet day in late August, a little after his twentieth birthday, he
arrived in
Dingle. It was the day of the general election marking the first real peace after seven years of war. George asked directions, in English. Who
was
this Englishman who spoke a little Irish, worried the police, and what was he doing there? He was stopped, questioned, perhaps arrested, though if so not for long. The issue was soon settled; apparently he was no spy or provocateur.

The next day—Sunday, August 26, 1923—George reached
Dún Chaoin. At some point, he made his way down the steep snaking path carved into the side of the cliff that led to the slip. From there he was rowed across
Blasket Sound to the island.

Máire Maidhc Léan, aged fourteen and “
just a slip of a school girl,” as she remembered herself, saw a boat approaching the island that day and went down the hill to greet it. “Out of the currach,” she recalled, “stepped a courteous, slightly built young man with dark hair and a pleasant smile.” George wore a raincoat, something she’d never seen. She “gave him a thousand welcomes and was delighted that he understood me, that he had some Irish.”

That evening, at her family’s whitewashed stone house midway up the hill, across a path from the king’s house, George was shown to the room where he was to stay. They sat him down at the table, served him tea, invited him to sit by the fire. Soon, Máire recalled, he was “
pointing to the pot rack and asking what it was called in Irish. I told him. He continued asking me the name for this and that.” Her father sat on the long wooden bench nearby, the settle, and soon was likewise being pelted with questions.

The children had a school assignment, to memorize Tennyson’s “The Brook”: “For men may come and men may go,/But I go on forever.” At the end of that long day, George was exhausted, but couldn’t sleep, was too tired to sleep, didn’t
want
to sleep, charmed as he was “
by listening to them reciting it by heart.”

•   •   •

So, George was staying with the Maidhc Léans. Or that, at least, is what the family was called on the island. In fact, no census recorded any such name. In English,
their family name was Guiheen. In Irish, by one spelling, it was Ó Guithín. (The prefix “Ó” or “Mac,” literally “son” or “grandson,” means “descendant of”; “Ní,” “daughter,” does the same for women.) Máire was formally Máire Ní Ghuithín, the interpolated “h” altering her surname’s pronunciation from the familiar hard “g” to something like a French rolled “r” and, grammatically, representing the genitive case, making Máire
of
that family. On the island, though, she would more often have been called Máire Maidhc Léan.