On an Irish Island (37 page)

Soon after the tragedy, islanders wrote to
Éamon de Valera, the Taoiseach, or Prime Minister: “S
TORMBOUND
D
ISTRESS
. S
END
F
OOD
. N
OTHING TO
E
AT
. B
LASKETS
,” read their telegram. De Valera, hero of the earliest days of the Irish Republic, visited in July. On his return, he set up a panel that decided there was nothing to do but abandon the island and
resettle its inhabitants on the mainland.

For a while, rumors flew in Dún Chaoin of a motor ferry to better link the island to the mainland, or even a bridge. These, of course, came to nothing.

On May 20, 1953, Lís wrote Chambers: “
Two men from the ‘Land Commission’ Dublin visited the Blasket Island lately about [islanders] transferring to the mainland. They have signed for them that they are satisfied to get cottages on the mainland,” soon to be built for them. Her own mother and father would be among the last to leave.

They didn’t come over all at once, only when a mainland house was ready. From the top of the cliffs in Dún Chaoin, recalled
Críostóir Ó Floinn, he’d see them rowing in. “
I’d go down to the slip and I used to help the lads bring in the stuff.” Wardrobes, cattle, whatever, they all came in on the same little boats, men leaning to one side or another to balance the heavy loads in the surf.

November 17, 1953, was the day designated for the
final migration of the twenty-one people then remaining on the island. Cameramen were on hand to record their passage across the sound and onto the mainland.
Breandán Feiritéar, a mainlander born in 1943, remembered from his boyhood
those last few islanders. It was a bleak time in Dún Chaoin. “
A black gloom hung over the valley and remained there into the early 60s.” They couldn’t so much as muster a football team.
Marriage was rare, the local school almost empty. Meanwhile, across the sound stood that “string of islands majestically rising out of the sea.” When islanders came over, they stood out from the grim mainlanders. Among them, he remembered no “cantankerous faces or careworn countenances. I can only recall to memory the smiling faces of Seán O Súilleabháin or Paddy Daly, or Peats Tom Ó Cearna.…”

When he saw them in Dún Chaoin, they always walked in single file, “one after the other, looking over their shoulders to talk to the following Islander,” as they did on the island’s narrow paths.

Sometimes, returning by taxi from
Dingle after selling their lobsters or sheep’s wool, they had money for a pint of Guinness or two. “Watching them stumbling, staggering and reeling their way down the steep path to the pier, some singing songs,” he could scarcely imagine them not falling on their way down, much less navigating across the sound. Yet soon their boats were smoothly slipping from the cove. Anyone “watching them rowing in unison and riding the waves on their way home could swear that not one drop of an intoxicating drink ever passed their lips.”

One Sunday when he was seven, he was taken out to the island by one of its last inhabitants. He duly recorded “the little white-washed
houses with their black felt roofs leaning into the hill.” But what struck him more forcibly was how the islanders treated him, how everyone spoke to him, asked him who he was, how the “old ladies gave me slices of home-made bread and jam and fistfuls of raisins or currants. I never felt so grown up in my life before. These islanders
talked
to children.”

Finally, late in 1953, the last families were coming across the sound. “As they approached the pier we could see the three curraghs laden with house-hold furniture and goods. Two oarsmen rowed the first curragh that
had across its transom a maroon-painted dresser. An old lady in a black shawl sat in the bow and as the curragh approached the slipway we could see that she was crying profusely.”

Later, he and the other children trudged slowly up the path with her to the top of the cliff. “She cried every step of the way.”

A U.S. passport issued in 1951 to “Mary Kearney known as Sister Mary Clemens,” an American citizen since 1943, gave her occupation as seamstress. Records furnished by Sisters of Providence, the convent in Massachusetts where she spent the last fifty-eight years of her life, list her work for most of that time as “Sewing—Habits.”

Sisters of Providence presided over numerous hospitals, residences, and care facilities and was a large, respected institution figuring prominently in its community. Its imposing new Mother House, all brick and churchly arches, the name Providence spelled out in gilded letters above the entrance, had opened in adjacent Holyoke in 1932. Ten or a dozen young women entered the order each year.

After she joined it in 1930, Mary
first went to work in the kitchen at Saint Luke’s Hospital, then in a refectory, then in a nurses’ dining room. In 1937, she took her perpetual vows. Two years later, she began her years-long service as seamstress, first at Mercy Hospital, Springfield; then at Saint Luke’s Hospital, then Holy Family Institute. She sewed habits beside one or two other nuns, a convent spokesperson takes care to explain, not in a factory.

Much later, in her mid-fifties, Mary became a “cottage mother” at
the newly opened Children’s Center, an orphanage, where she worked with troubled children. “She was fantastic with the boys,” her niece, Kathleen Arduini, recalls. In her seventies, she volunteered at Saint Luke’s Home, where what was recalled as her “
infectious laugh” left those around her feeling somehow all was well, dispelling their woes, earning her the unlikely nickname “
Troubles.”

In 1951, Mary, then in her early forties, visited Ireland. “
One of Pats Kearney’s daughters from America—the nun—was home for a month,” Lís wrote George Chambers in May. Mary and her father, still living on the island, were driven around the mainland and dropped by to see old friends, including Lís and Seán. One day she went in to the island. “It made her very lonely, she told us.”

Her thick hair in old age forming a crown of almost angelic white around her head, Sister Mary Clemens would be remembered for her faith, and for the joy she seemed to draw from life. Nothing in the record of her service over a span of more than half a century, however, suggests the church ever singled her out for any position demanding talent, leadership skills, or intellect beyond the ordinary. When she died, she was
laid to rest on church property set apart for the order’s own, each among that formidable field of headstones identical save for a family name set in the center, a religious name inscribed in a gentle arc across the top.

Before Mary’s death on January 13, 1987, several students of Blasket Island life succeeded in tracking her down and interviewing her. She received such attention, of course, not in recognition of her service to the convent, or for her religious faith, but as a native of the Great Blasket whose life happened to intersect that of George Thomson, who died three weeks after she did, on February 3.

One of these Blasket enthusiasts was
Tom Biuso, an American scholar of Irish extraction (with a Sicilian stepfather) who, one October day in 1983,
convened a reunion of immigrant Blasket women, all once playmates together on the island, now living in New England. Sister Mary Clemens, he wrote, was “a small woman who is towered over by her sister Eileen.” He remarked on the blue habit that set off her white hair, her eyes as bright as the silver crucifix suspended from her neck. “God’s world is so beautiful,” he took down her words. “If we’d only realise that He made the mountains and the valleys and the lakes and the streams just for us,” the world would be better, with “less sadness and war and hatred.” Otherwise, Biuso recorded little of Sister that might rank as memorable—nothing, certainly, of her years-earlier relationship with George.

Breandán Feiritéar, the mainland boy who’d witnessed the island exodus in 1953 and then grew up to become an accomplished filmmaker, managed about as well when he visited with her. He was in America working on a documentary,
Blasket Roots, American Dreams,
hoping for reminiscences of George, or memories, or comments, or thoughts, or
something.
But Mary, half a century in America, didn’t want to talk about George, didn’t want to talk Irish, didn’t want to say much of anything to him. “I found her very difficult to deal with,” certainly as far as George was concerned. She was “
a tough, hard lady,” simply unwilling to talk about George if she didn’t want to.

Ray Stagles fared a little better. In 1940, Stagles, a nineteen-year-old university student, heard
Robin Flower, then ministering to British Museum treasures in Wales, give a talk about the Blaskets. Beginning in 1966, Stagles visited the island with his wife, Joan, many times, and co-authored a book with her. On a
trip to America, for a lecture tour, he met up with Blasketers in Springfield. Introduced to Sister Mary Clemens by
Tom Biuso, he got her and her sister Eileen in front of the microphone to talk about leaving Ireland and becoming a nun. The tape was prepared at least in part with George in mind, for Stagles at one point asked her to send him a personal message. She did. The one in which, her voice fresh and light, she said: “I remember the times on the Blaskets Islands very well. We had a great time, George.” And that was all.

Some time later, in
Birmingham, Thomson had the tape played for him. “
He listened very intently,” a witness to the moment recalled. At one point, the tape whirring, Thomson’s daughter Elizabeth entered the room. “Come listen, Liz,” said George, “this is the woman who might have been your mother.”

Of course, the woman who
was
her mother, and that of her sister Margaret, was
Katharine Stewart Thomson. And it’s hard to conceive any alternative history working out more satisfactorily than the real one did.
Sean Cahillane, the American-born son of Mary’s sister Eileen, tells of banter around the table at the family house in Springfield about how, yes, George would have made quite a catch. But the would-have-beens didn’t materialize. Mary’s life took one turn, George’s another.

After moving to Birmingham, the Thomsons settled into a house on Goodby Road, which they came to dislike soon enough, in part because their neighbors played the radio
loud and incessantly. So, in December
1938, George, Katharine (now six months pregnant with Margaret), and Liz moved to a five-bedroom house on Oakfield Road, in nearby Selly Park, fifteen minutes by city bus to George’s classes near Chamberlain Square. They would remain there for the next twenty years. To this house on Oakfield Road, Margaret dates
her most loving memories of her father.

For years, the family read together, the four of them, Mum and Dad, she and Liz. Before about 1950, they’d gather in her father’s bay-windowed study on the second floor, overlooking the garden. Later, it was the music room. “Last time …,” George would begin, recalling where they’d left off, then plunge into the book for an hour or so. Maybe
Sir Walter Scott, or the
Bible, or
Thomas Hardy, or
The Pilgrim’s Progress,
the choice keyed to the ages of the children. To this day, says Margaret, a Greek scholar herself, anything she writes, any translation she attempts, is inexorably influenced by the sound of her father’s voice, the rhythms of his speech.

Her father was not physically demonstrative, any more than was her mother. “But he didn’t need to be,” she says; the bond among them all was so close. He had no patience for small talk, yet when it came to children, to her and her sister, to people they met outside their immediate circle, he could be downright garrulous. With children, “he had a way of getting into their heads.” His parenting style, she says, was no 1940s version of
Well, let’s set up your next play date,
but engaged and responsive to anything on their minds.

According to Margaret, he had few practical skills. He didn’t fix things around the house. He didn’t swim. He didn’t drive a car. He wasn’t particularly graceful; when he rowed, his movements could be a little jerky—not the smooth, flowing strokes of a seasoned rower.

With his brothers and sisters, he maintained dutiful relationships, but was not especially close.

As for his colleagues at the university, he did not always hold them in high regard. He’d come home sometimes, Margaret says, complaining to anyone who’d listen of someone “pompous, mediocre, or both.”

Always he held definite views. Always he expressed them doggedly. Popular culture arising from peasant roots, Margaret remembers him asserting, was good. That arising from the influence of American mass culture was bad. He did have American friends, but had no use for what he characterized as American
imperialism. In 1941, he got into an extended and vituperative epistolary debate with his friend
F. M. Cornford, a classical scholar and poet, in which he pictured Plato offering views of education
in
The Republic
“
indistinguishable from the theory and practice of fascism.” Just after the war, he fell into a correspondence with Marxist historian
Christopher Hill, in which he described Shakespeare, later in life a landowner, as “
exploiting wage labour, possibly when he wrote Hamlet, and certainly when he wrote Troilus, Othello,” and others among his plays. You might not want to slip into debate with George Thomson. Katharine didn’t. “
You’ve got the words,” she’d say to him as some argument wound down, “but that’s my view on the matter.” He was relentless. He’d never back down, though he did grow mellower as he aged, says Margaret, ultimately coming to recognize some of the excesses and cruelties of Stalin and Mao.

In 1955, he visited
communist China, writing long letters home to Katharine about his trip. “
Yesterday evening I went to give my third talk to the Foreign Languages Institute,” he wrote in June. “This time I told them how I became a communist, and we had a very good discussion.” A friend of the family—Jane Scott, then a child—would remember how after his return he’d sometimes wear a Chinese suit around the house, how the children liked to visit him in his study. “This was no gloomy sanctum,” she reported, “but a room full of little treasures, hung with pictures and pieces of Chinese silk, with leaded windows and an elderly gas fire hissing away in the background.”