On the Sunday night, I stayed with her. Monday morning after breakfast, I waited for a shower to pass by, said good-bye to Mrs. Cooper, and set out for the long ride to Valentia Island. I hadn’t yet decided where to stay for the coming night, but as usual I’d take steps to secure a roof before dark.
Clear of Killarney town, I was soon floating in long corridors of green, between hedges taller even than I on my bicycle, with an occasional glimpse of a field, cows, a farmhouse.
Those were wonderful moments, those long spinning rides through quiet country places. I had the open road to myself because few cars were able to get fuel in the middle of the Second World War. How fondly I think of those times, the hedges brushing me now and then, a bird screeching indignantly as her roadside nest was threatened by me, a tall marauder on his high contraption.
On those whirling days I saw things, images that to this day hang in my mind’s gallery:
An old woman sitting outside her cottage, the sun giving impossible luster to her rusty black shawl. A serene farmer sitting on his cart, smoking his pipe, the blue plume curling in the air as his horse plods to the field. A muscled thatcher high on the ridge of a house, cutting the willow rod to the length of his arm, and then bunching golden straw under the willow rod to make the roof as bright as the sun itself. Barefoot children running alongside my bicycle, trying to keep up with me. The green weed smell of a roadside stream where I stopped to get a drink and found myself waist-deep in wild mint.
No war or rumors of war in these places, just scenes that could have been observed at any time in the previous hundred years in that part of Ireland. That’s what I loved about my job—I traveled also in the past. And so I went that morning, heading from Killarney down to Valentia Island, a place with nobody west of it, as they like to say, until the island of Manhattan.
Let me use this moment, as you ride along with me, to get something off my chest. Every story costs you something; as you tell it, you give it away—but that’s all right; generosity comes with the storyteller’s gift. In this case though, as my recollection will demonstrate, I’ve had to consider another element, very different from the impulse of generosity—I’ve had to weigh the anguish I’m reopening.
By telling the tale of Kate Begley and me, with its wide canvas, its wild swings of emotion, its heroes and villains, and its extraordinary conclusion, I’m opening old wounds to examine why I took the actions that I did, some of them terrible. Once more I’m hurting myself, and even though I long since traveled past all that, even though the life I’ve lived rewarded me acceptably, I’m still, as I write these words, having to calculate the control that I’ll need merely to tell you.
It’s discipline well expended, though; it’s an effort worthwhile on many levels. Whatever my protests, I was enabled by Kate Begley and by the events in which she embroiled me, and by the people with whom she involved me—I was enabled to grow into a man I might never have become. I believe that the heights I reached were greater than the depths I plumbed, and if that isn’t a recipe for a good life, what is?
By now you know, don’t you, why my direct speech is addressed to the two of you, my delightful children. And as understanding as I feel you will be, you’ll each forgive me a number of things—or so I ask.
Forgive the very indulgence of telling the tale; it’s what old men do. And forgive me too a trait of mine, of which I think you may already be aware—my Digressions. It’s a habit I picked up on the road. I spent most of my life listening to people telling me stories by their firesides, and those storytellers loved to digress; they wanted us to see not just the trees in the forest but the leaves on each tree.
I won’t burden you with digressions as mighty as that. But if I wander, bear with me—I shall probably be doing so to ease the pain, and I’ll always, I hope, take you to some interesting place. Indeed I can say now that however rambling they may seem, my Digressions will serve a purpose.
18
Apropos: The events of the next few days seem at first sight to have no bearing on the life story of Kate Begley—yet they do. My next appointment had been set for Valentia Island, where the transatlantic telegraph cable slid ashore from Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, in 1866.
James Clare, my mentor in the Folklore Commission, the man of sublime character and salvational wisdom to whom I’d been so fortunately apprenticed, told me that he’d gathered stories from the islanders of the cable’s great arrival—the mishaps on land and sea; the collapse of the first cable; the employment the telegraph company gave; and the general feelings of wonder that this great serpent could bring the voices of emigrants home from across the sea.
I, however, had a different reason for going there. Ever since reading Treasure Island as a boy I’d been interested in smuggling—the secretiveness, the atmosphere, the romance. Rudyard Kipling’s poem jingled in my head:
If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
Being an island country, and given our long hatred of authority, we must have had “gentlemen” by the thousand on our coasts. So I reasoned, and eventually a man told me of a family in Valentia.
“They’re Buckleys,” he said, “and there’s eight generations of smugglers in their blood.”
“Bawn” they called the man I met, the Irish word for white—Bawn Buckley, based not on the iron gray of his hair when I met him, but on the Viking blond locks of his youth. My hand thought it might not survive his grip; years of hauling in the nets—and contraband—had made it hard as coal, and more powerful than he knew.
Though he’s long dead, Bawn Buckley still inhabits my mind, principally because of his stillness—and our later adventures, which I’ll presently describe. I grew up an only child, and my father, an endearingly noisy man, preserved no space around himself. Bawn Buckley did, and I’ve most seen this enviable calm in the men of the Atlantic seaboard. A lifetime of being wary; a well-founded fear of the ocean, which could choose any day to take them; the daring to wrangle their living from such a power—whatever has caused it, they have that separateness around them, even in a throng.
There’s a force that goes with it, and Bawn Buckley had that too, simple and direct. Although lines of merriment crinkled around his eyes, and he seemed not to care how the world spun, he gave the impression of being in control of everything, this unlettered man who had left school at fourteen, and who had spent most of his life trying to drag food from the teeth of the sea. His face reminded me of brown wrapping paper that had been scrunched up into a ball and then smoothed out.
He rewarded my visit beyond my tallest hopes. His narratives became the early—and the most vivid—contributions to the folklore collection I’ve built on smuggling, an Irish art form if ever there were one. And his smuggler’s tales contained one surprise—plus, when I looked back on it, a reassurance that I would soon need.
For many years, his boat partner had been a man who sounded heroic—a man of strength and quick wits. In his multiple tales—some of which went on for an hour and more—he’d talk of “Flor.”
He’d say, “Flor lifted the coastguard officer by the hair,” or “Flor dressed up like an old woman hunched over her walking stick,” or “Flor jumped off the vessel that arrested him, and he swam the three miles to the rock and waited there ’til I could take him off.”
“Your friend, Flor?” I asked finally. “Can I talk to him too?”
“You can’t,” he said. “For the Atlantic got him.”
I asked, “What was his name?” because I needed it for my notes.
“I’ll tell you now who he was—he was a man called Flor Begley. His little daughter is a matchmaker over there on Lamb’s Head near Caherdaniel, and a pile of men from around here go out to her every Sunday looking for wives.”
I said, “I know her. I was
at her house on Sunday.” After a moment’s thought, I asked, “Does she look like her father?”
“More like the mother,” Bawn Buckley said. “The mother was a small, dark-eyed girl, she was from over there in Kilgarvan, lovely looking, bright as a bird. The father, Flor—big fellow, six foot four, I’d say, the only man I ever saw who had yellow hair. And you couldn’t say no to him, he wouldn’t let you.”
19
Prepare yourself now for the first brush with war.
I have found that, in times of great crisis, every occurrence takes on the power of myth. Down in the southwest that week, as I looked out to sea, I witnessed something that, at first glance, might have come from a legend.
James Clare taught me to examine every part of my life as though reading mythology.
“It’s very healing,” he said, “to tell yourself your own story as though you were reciting a myth.”
This event that I saw would soon become part not only of folklore, but of the mythic jigsaw into which I was about to be pieced. Though its outcome would be tragic, it also helped to save my life when I fell into circumstances as tormenting as West Kerry was tranquil.
Ireland’s neutrality had turned us from famous to infamous. People great and small accused us of cowardice and treachery—cowardice for not fighting, treachery for exercising diplomacy. Beneath the charges of Irish perfidy lay a hidden purpose. Stated crudely, Winston Churchill wanted to shelter his war fleet in Irish ports—because German aircraft didn’t yet have the range to bomb that far west.
Our premier, Mr. de Valera, surmised that ere long the German aircraft engineers would fix that, especially if they had fat targets such as British warships. If that happened, thousands of Irish civilians would die in bombing raids. Furthermore, under the natural law “My enemy’s friend is my enemy,” the entire island would become a target.
So, neutral we stayed, and we practiced the core protocol of neutrality—we treated each side equally. That isn’t to say that the war didn’t touch us—and in the downpours of West Kerry it touched me in person. I still wince from it.
One noontide, as I rode my bicycle through the washed and stony lands, the rain proved too much. The ocean winds had gathered behind it, and the elements were blinding me.
I idled in Ballymacadoyle and found a kind of shelter under the waving branches of a bent and skeletal tree. The rhythm of the gray waves that I gazed on and the slapping of the rain on my waterproof cape produced a lulling effect, and when two excited men waved and shouted, I had to shake myself alert. They beckoned from rocks down near the water; I parked my bicycle, scrambled down to the sands, and ran along in the rain. As I drew near them, I saw that they had fixed their focus on something out to sea.
In from the wide ocean lurched a creature, half-bent, staggering through the surf, dragging itself to land. In the slashed view through the mist and the slanting rain, it kept redefining its form as it heaved its body and flailed in the waves. It could have been a wounded sea-animal; it could have been Proteus himself, changing his shapes with each lick of spray.
The mystery lasted no more than a minute. Its image clarified as it drew nearer—a man, bending over as though in pain, dragging behind him a rubber dinghy that had half-collapsed. As he hauled, he turned now and then, trying to tip it, to get the water out of it. Not a big fellow, slight but fit, he trudged in, then dropped to an exhausted crouch in the smallest waves; he didn’t let go of the dinghy’s rope.
When the two local men and I went to help him, he all but fell into our arms. He didn’t speak, too exhausted; he was about twenty-five years old, and he bore no evidence as to whence he came. His clothes, a singlet and light pants, offered no protection; he shivered in his blue skin. The older man led the stranger out of the surf; the younger and I dragged the ruined collapsible. We hauled as with a whale onto the upper shore and stomped on it to squeeze out any remaining water.
Soaked and ragged, the young stranger squatted on the sands, his head low. None of us understood a word that he said, and one after another we shook his hand.
He seemed astounded and close to tears. Both his trouser legs flapped loose with torn cloth, and through them his legs glistened dark with blood—massive scrapes inflicted, we assumed, by the reefs outside.
Yet he stood up, turned about, and strode back like a demon into the waves. I know what frantic searching looks like, so I helped him; I stood in water up to my waist, staring at him as though to ask, “What?” The father and son (as they were) joined in.
Our wave-lashed, windblown search lasted an hour. He gestured us up one way and down again; he tried to go farther out, but the waves drove him back. Soon, between fatigue and agitation, he gave up—and the rain came in heavier than ever. I put my arms around his shoulders and led him ashore.
By now, his speech had slowed and I recognized German sounds. The two men guided him to their home up on the headland. I manipulated the rubber dinghy to a safer, higher place and followed.
20
That evening, as we sat by the fire, the young German and I tried to communicate. He wrote down his name for me—B-E-K-K-E-R. I learned that he was twenty-four—he counted on his fingers; with a wife, Alina—he tapped his ring; and a baby, Nadia—he rocked his arms. The woman of the house fed him and made him a bed for the night, and when he retired we spent the rest of our time talking about him. I told the family that I’d inform the authorities in the morning, and I stayed too.
Next day, I awoke to a shout. The people along that coastline don’t rise early, and this was only seven o’clock. Through the window, I saw the young German running in the direction of the sea. I went to the door to see what had excited him—he had gone to greet another creature stumbling in the waves.
That night in Ballymacadoyle, the locals held a little party for the pair. Nobody knew a word they were saying, but the handsome young Germans tapped their feet to the fiddlers and smiled at the girls.
Back in Dingle next day, I told the local police of the two young men and wondered if they’d heard anything of a shipwreck. They told me that they’d go “down that way in a couple of days,” and they seemed neither suspicious nor concerned. That tells you a great deal about our neutrality and the state of “the Emergency.”
What tells you a great deal about war, however, is the fact that, several months later, the slim and fit young bodies of those two German boys were found twenty miles along the coast in a disused shed. Their throats had been slit and their bodies bore the profane marks of torture.
21
Now, while those young men are still in my mind, I must reveal something about myself. It connects to one of them and I saved my own life with it, and I must write it now because I want to heal myself a little after that sad recollection.
During all the lonely years of searching, I had also been educating myself. Everywhere I went I carried books. (Had Miss Begley been aware of it she’d have said, “Books are the Storehouse of Wisdom”—or some such motto.)
In general the books sprang from Miss Dora Fay, a friend to me since I was a little boy. She and her twin brother (whom I will not discuss, as his name would pollute the page) often rented the cottage that my parents owned on the bank of the river flowing through Goldenfields.
I loved Miss Fay, her toothy, tortoiseshell-glasses awkwardness and her sweet nature. She gave me my first jigsaw; she introduced me to two of the most magical words in the English language, William and Shakespeare. From Miss Fay I learned how to make egg custard; and I learned how to tie my laces so that they lie flat across my footwear and never come undone.
And then came a day when I discovered that James Clare, my protector, also knew Miss Fay. In fact, although they never married, they belonged in heart and soul to each other, and when Venetia disappeared, they became my spiritual parents. They guarded me from myself, never asked a probing question, accepted my dumb grief, and took me on up into adulthood as safely as I would permit.
As part of this process, they gav
e me my first major reading list, and Miss Fay, with her teeth as ever in the way of her tongue, said, “Did you know that books can save your life?”
How I wish that she had met the soldier who proved my savior. But at least I was later able to tell her the story of the scrawny little fellow, and it gave her the pleasure of saying, “You see, Ben—books truly can save your life.” Miss Fay loved to repeat herself.
She had also asked rhetorically by what other means I intended continuing to learn, and at the same dinner table James Clare reminded me that many a good book would fit into a pocket of my greatcoat. So I took on every writer whom they recommended, from Chaucer to Dickens and Hardy, from Franklin to Hawthorne and Thoreau, from Balzac to de Maupassant and Zola.
And then I went on to read ever more widely, finding all the while many new friends on the page. I read Plato and tried to understand what understanding is; I read Socrates and learned how to argue with myself; I read Ovid and wished that I had been the one to collect those legends.
More important, I grew a kind of new skin—meaning, I gave myself a private identity. A librarian in a town where I’d been staying for two weeks introduced me to the work of a woman from Belfast, Helen Waddell, who had translated Chinese poems, some of which were written twelve centuries before the birth of Christ.
Then, not long before I met Miss Begley, this Miss Waddell wrote the book that became my constant companion, The Wandering Scholars: “To the medieval scholar, with no sense of perspective, but with a strong sense of continuity, Virgil and Cicero are but the upper reaches of the river that flows past his door.”