On an Irish Island (15 page)

Island
children.
Mary Kearney, George Thomson’s girl, is fourth from the left in the middle row.
(
Illustration Credit ill.10
)

Mary’s fisherman father, known as Peats Tom, a trim, handsome man with thick eyebrows and a big fluffy mustache, was apparently the soft touch of the family. One time at dinner, the children were horsing around, making a god-awful racket, when their mother, the sterner of the two, decreed silence. So there they sat at the table, silent, obedient, stifling their giggles … until Peats Tom stage-whispered a barely audible “
tee-hee” that reduced them to hilarity all over again.

Mary’s younger brother, Seán, remembered her as a sweet,
lively young thing who delighted in the
animals of the island. A day off from school and she’d be roaming the hillside to play with the sheep and lambs. As a child, she and her friends played with homemade dolls that used hair made from frayed rope. She may always have had something of a religious bent; her brother more than once found her on her knees, praying to the Virgin Mary. One day, a framed image of the Virgin fell off the wall onto her as she slept. The glass broke, but Mary came away unscathed. This, anyway, is the story Seán told much later.

When Swedish folklorist
Carl von Sydow visited the island in 1920, he photographed Mary. She was twelve then, and wore the white pinafore with lacy decoration most of the girls her age wore. When von Sydow returned in 1924, he again took a picture of her, this time in a dark dress, signifying a young woman, no longer a girl. Mary had brown eyes, thick black brows set below a high forehead, and black hair. But her smile! She smiled as if she couldn’t hold it back, and wouldn’t want to, and why would you ever? In an audio recording made when she was much older, her laugh is
fresh, strong, and youthful.

She was fifteen when George arrived on the island, and his bewitchment may have come early. A photo of the two of them together survives from that first summer. They sit in the sun, their backs against a “ditch,” or embankment, lined up for the camera beside two other islanders. Mary squints, her head cocked a little to the side, her thick hair pulled back into a bow, hands set demurely on her lap. George, beside her, looks less like the young man he really isn’t yet, more the boy he still is. He wears a suit of what appears to be heavy wool, a jacket button cinching
him at the waist. He looks as no Blasket boy ever looked, as if he were just off the boat from college, which is about what he was. It is the summer of 1923, and he seems perfectly delighted to be where he is.

From the moment he stepped onto the island, George had been a hit, falling in easily with his age-mates. If at age twenty he showed even a dash of the sincerity and intelligence his friends unfailingly remarked on, he could hardly have failed to excite interest. He was handsome and, in his way, exotic, certainly in those years before the island saw so many visitors from beyond Ireland. It’s not surprising that
Mary Kearney would be drawn to him.

What happened between her and George in whispered conversation on the White Strand, or on paths along the back of the island, or while dancing at Peig’s or above the
Gravel Strand, or in chance looks or tender moments amid the crowded company of the others, is lost to us. “
I remember the times on the Blasket Islands very well” was all Mary would say years later, on a tape she knew he’d hear. “We had a great time, George.”

Certainly they spent plenty of time together. He met her family, her sisters and brothers, sometimes played chess with them. He must have learned early on that Mary’s father, in his early forties at the time, was
something of a celebrity. Back in 1909, he’d jumped into the water and helped save
Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s daughter Cáit at the time of the
Eveleen Nichols
drowning. He had a
bronze medal to show for it, from the Royal Home Society, patronized by the King of England himself, “for having saved life from drowning.” He wasn’t shy about wearing it. Mary’s father must have seemed to George no idle, clever talker, like some of the effete boys and men he knew at King’s, but an authentic Irish hero.

Mary Kearney and
George Thomson are at the right.
(
Illustration Credit ill.11
)

For George, a new world was opening up, and an extraordinarily happy time. He was not by nature carefree. His sister-in-law would later recall him as a formidable presence, with scant time for idle chatter and “
no patience with the frivolous or mediocre.” His idea of a good time at age twelve, remember, was setting up a lending library. And in later years, as we’ll see, he took nothing so seriously as, by his lights, setting the world aright. “
Deeply serious, dedicated and preferring silence to small-talk and frivolity”—that’s how one respectful obituary judged him. In family photographs, he always looks about the same—placid, earnest, his even features rarely corrupted into a smile, his great thatch of straight hair flopping down over his forehead. In one photo from about three years before he went to the Blaskets, younger brother Hugh has a winsome look to him, whereas George is all sharp, straight lines; as well as you can tell from an
old studio portrait, he seems
closed.
He is certainly good-looking, but in a way more befitting an older man than the seventeen-year-old schoolboy he was at the time.

It is unlikely, then, that, before reaching the Great Blasket, George was ever much the life of the party; or that the mischievousness, the sheer antic frivolity, of young Maurice O’Sullivan could have seemed to him anything but welcome counterpoint to the stresses of school; or that the convulsive, spirited laugh of
Mary Kearney—his “black-haired Deirdre laughing in the breeze”?—could have seemed to him anything but captivating,

“
I’d say he was in love with her,” said one of the old islanders. “He was very fond of her. He’d’ve married her if she would have had him.”

Would he? Would he
really
?

George from London, fresh from
Cambridge University, his academic career primed to take off, was giving serious thought to marrying this barely schooled young girl from the island? She was Roman Catholic and he was not. How could they marry? Through some mysterious alchemy of love, a summer flirtation had bubbled up into a full-blown crisis—for George, certainly, and perhaps for Mary as well.

At one point, Mary’s brother Seán reported, George approached their
father, who did nothing to scuttle the match. “Well,” Seán has his father saying, “
it’s not me that will marry you.… If you like her, and if she likes you, you can’t be kept apart, and I suppose it’s a mortal sin to keep two people who are in love apart.”

But even if George was smitten, and her father willing, Mary herself may never have given herself over to the idea. The island was the only world she’d ever known. He was from a faraway world she could scarcely imagine—perhaps not someone, ironically, to take seriously. Her faith, meanwhile, she took very seriously, and George’s
religion, or lack of it, erected a formidable bar. At some point, or perhaps several—the chronology is muddled—George told her just how he felt. Either she rebuffed him altogether, or simply explained to him she could never marry a non-Catholic. Probably on one of his visits to the island—
1926 is as good a guess as any—George, lost and lovestruck, looked into converting.

“
I remember him coming to our house in
An Cill. He wanted advice from my uncle Pádraig as to whether he should convert to
Catholicism. The girl wouldn’t marry him unless he became a Catholic.”

The speaker was
Máire Mhac an tSaoi—Mary McEntee—one of Ireland’s most distinguished poets and writers. An Cill was the house her uncle had had built in
Dún Chaoin—on the mainland, within sight of the Blaskets—in 1925. Her uncle was one of the leading intellectual lights of Ireland, Monsignor Pádraig de Brún, otherwise known as
Paddy Browne.

A Roman Catholic priest and holder of a doctorate from the Sorbonne, de Brún had in 1913 taken a position teaching mathematics at Saint Patrick’s College in Maynooth, Ireland’s premier seminary. He was brilliant, the proverbially smartest person in the room, a true polymath, his mind ranging freely over an intellectual landscape encompassing mathematics, the classics, poetry, and the Irish language. He would long serve as president of one of Ireland’s national universities, and near the end of his life was named chairman of the council of Dublin’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

He had built An Cill, his niece explained,
as refuge, balm for the grief he’d experienced in Dublin with the 1916 Rising and the execution of a friend,
Seán MacDermott, one of its leaders. The house was of modest size but glorious prospect. Made of creosoted wood, virtually unknown in those parts, its front door green, its pyramidal roof bright-red felt, it stood on a hill near the ruins of an old church, overlooking the Atlantic. Its rear windows faced the Blaskets. From the front door you could look out at the hills rising above Dún Chaoin, and, from anywhere else, hear the seas
crashing below. And here it was,
Máire Mhac an tSaoi remembered, that George Thomson came to talk to her uncle.

In the doorway of his house in
Dún Chaoin, mathematician-scholar-priest Father
Paddy Browne about the time George Thomson approached him for advice about his relationship with Mary Kearney
(
Illustration Credit ill.12
)

In Dún Chaoin, with its few score houses scattered across the landscape, everyone knew everyone; George would certainly have known of Father de Brún. With his dark hair, deep hooded eyes, and rich baritone voice, the irrepressible de Brún would come to be seen as a
“maverick … altogether uninhibited and irreverent, caring not a fig for theological caution … impish and mischievous in his humour,” fond even of off-color limericks. But that was later. More recently, he had been reproved for his open support of the republican cause by his superiors at the seminary.

He was no average country priest, yet he
was
a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Just what did young George expect of him? How did he frame his request? With what hesitancy or conviction did he, at twenty-two or twenty-three, assert his love for the island girl and seek an opinion, a ruling, a morsel of advice, that might leave her his?

Máire Mhac an tSaoi was only a girl at the time—her memory of George Thomson, she reports, extends only “
from the knees down”—and her recollection may have been enriched by later accounts of the story
from her uncle, who died when she was in her late thirties, and with whom she was close. In any case, here is how she told it in her old age:

George did not convert.

At some point, Mary left the island, to take a position as servant to a doctor outside Dublin.

Later, George went to see her there.

At first, George’s times on the island with Mary, Maurice, and the others must have been just so much raw, undigested experience;
he,
barely in his twenties, was still raw, awash in the alien sounds of a new language, trying to make sense of so much else that seemed exciting, novel, and strange. In the end, though, his Blasket summers changed his mental makeup. They influenced his scholarship. They tinted his writing; they gave him a stock of raw material that would find its way into his stories, poems, and translations. They would shape his values and help make him the man he was to become.