Letter from a Lincolnshire exile By
Joe Horgan
It used to catch me many a time when I was in England. Over a pint sometimes. On hearing a piece of music. On occasions just hearing a certain name or catching an accent in some British city or other. Ireland would suddenly flood through me. I still don’t know why the sound of the uillean pipes can alter my mood in an instant or just how Irish traditional music can manage to sound so wildly joyous and so heartbreak-ingly sad at the same time.
I don’t know why the memories of my parents’ lives in Ireland can affect me so profoundly. It truly feels at times as if our parents gave us something otherworldly when they gave us Ireland.
I don’t know whether it was the sorrow of the exile or the lingering yearning for a rural existence, or indeed something truly magical about the country but Ireland became a powerful infection.
Perhaps, without being too romantic, it was the culture of loss that leaving Ireland became in our parents’ lives that we felt the force of.
In a 1913 poem called The Exile, Joseph Campbell wrote, Hills of heather, fields of stones, And the hungry sea that moans, Endlessly beyond them they, Hold my heart till Judgement Day. Why that survives so much in successive generations I don’t quite understand. Why do so many long for a land they were neither born nor reared in. Those generations that left must have kept strongly to the one thing they had, their identity, for it to survive through their descendants.
A while back someone who’d read some of these articles and who like me had returned to live in the land of his parents’ birth sent me a letter. There is no name on it and no address so I hope he will forgive my presumption in recounting some of the letter here.
It is just that he wrote so movingly and so eloquently that I felt his thoughts on Ireland should be heard. As an immigrant’s son, he writes ‘we really do have double dislocation, especially if, as in my case, you return to rural Ireland. This was brought home to me when our daughter visited us this summer with her new baby. As we walked with her I reflected upon the changes in rural Ireland since 25 years ago when we had brought her on the same journey to visit my mother.
Then we were able to wander at will along the sea cliffs and mountains, by lakes and rivers, through woods and valleys. A charming countryside where friendly farmers once waved a greeting. This generous peasantry, once described as the finest in Europe, has been largely replaced by a meanspirited land-owning class.
Now all is fenced off, there are no styles, walkers are not welcome. Unsmiling youths drive huge tractors towing slurry tanks or silage bailers along once peaceful lanes now lined with the dreadful slatted cowsheds, surely the ugliest rural buildings in Europe.
There seems to be a JCB every mile tearing up the land yet despite all this subsidised activity the rural population continues to fall.
Rural Ireland is fast becoming a green prison, less attractive as a place to live in, and to the returning exile an unfamiliar place. The people of Ireland have been excluded from their own countryside.’
And yet, this immigrant’s son concludes, ‘I can still find a pub at the butt of the mountains where the music of my Ireland can be heard long into the night as the set dancers nimble feet beat out ancient rhythms. And returning home at the break of the dawn along the rocky western shore there is a beauty that is a gift from god to the Gaels. Yes, it is still there for those who seek it’. He signs, Slan, Lincolnshire exile.
What is it that makes us feel like that? Entranced and bewildered and captivated by this small country on the edge of Europe. I remember sitting as a young lad in our house in Birmingham listening to my father and mother and my uncle, who being our only uncle in England, apart from my godfather who was not a blood uncle, was referred to by that seemingly immigrant nomenclature as simply Uncle, and listening as they talked about Ireland. About going to school, about farmers, about endless names and where they’d ended up and it was honestly like listening, in a big English city, to stories from some imaginary land. Something beyond the everyday.
And later I was amazed at how little English people seemed to mix across the generations and at how surprised they were that as a teenager I would have a pint with my parents. Or at how we would talk to our older relatives and listen to them.
Recently I was chatting with a woman in her eighties and she talked of her youth on a farm. There were idyllic summers but harsh winters. School was a two-mile walk along the road. The only person she knew who had a car was the schoolteacher who was hard and at times beat the children.
She had when young caught the bus up to Cork city and then the train to Dublin and the boat to Holyhead and then a train on to London. She went that day to work in a pub The Tankard in Shepherds Bush run by cousins and sat in her room and cried out of loneliness. Was it part of being Irish to go away so that your heart would be broken?
Sometimes I look out of the kitchen window across the fields and the radio plays in the background. I used to sit in my grandmother’s kitchen and before that in my paternal grandmother’s house in Blarney. I would see the black crows flying in and out of the fields. I would feel that all belonging to me were standing at the shoulder of this child from England.
I couldn’t have run from Ireland if I’d tried.
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