Graignaspiddogue: A Setting in More Than A Muse

This is the opening chapter from A Life Before, a prequel to Her Secret Rose, which I published some years ago--and which has now morphed into a series of seven books, the first of which will publish in July 2024

“Always remember, a grá,” Nana used to say, as if foretelling the day I’d find myself among the murderers and ne'er-do-wells, “everyone arrives here helpless, crying out for their mother's milk. And no matter how black-hearted a person turns, their soul is still yoked to the beating breast of the world. Aye, and the great mother has hopes for them yet.”

Nana loved motto talk like that. And fairy-tale scenarios and pishogue advice. Most of all, she loved telling stories. Fadó, fadó, she’d begin, her Irish way of saying: Once upon a time.

“Fadó, fadó, long ago, when birds made nests in old men’s beards, there was a girl… there was a boy… there was a creature…”

And then she’d be off, and you along with her, into a new tale about the heroes and gods she saw hidden in the forms all around us. The bygone days were as present to Nana as the teacup cradled in her old hands and those who peopled them as alive to her as ourselves, her flesh-and-blood kin.

The Tuatha Dé Danann they were named, the people of the goddess Dana. Outsize champions and heroes of old, who’d once walked Ireland but been bested by their foes, and diminished. Now they were but little people, seen only in flashes and hidings, and those who knew no better called them fairies.

Nana saw sightings of them everywhere. A hare darting quicksilver across the meadow was the warrior queen Bé Chuille, sharp in her dealings and swift in her wit. A rook perched in the old oak was Éber Donn, the old wise king, renowned for the magic and healing perfected during his reign. A skylark leaping into the sky and spilling its song was a hymn to the morning spun by Amergin, one of the old bards.

“Would you look at him, shooting up like he was fired from a slingshot,” Nana would say, pointing. “And look how he hangs there, hovering, perching himself on an invisible branch that only he can see. He’s observing the doings of the world, so he is. Gathering in tomorrow’s tale while he sings about what he saw yesterday.”

Yes, I grew up in a twice-peopled place, where the dead were folded into the living, invisible guardians of the land they’d once ruled. And it wasn’t just the beasts and the birds that got the Nana treatment. By night she'd invite you to look at the stars, and see how the more you looked, the more of them you saw, until they swarmed into your heart, and you could feel the beating pulse of the other world that breathes so close, and hear the tinkling of the little people on the wind.

Nana was my mother’s mother and had lived all her life, like her mother and grandmother before her, in the place she made magic for us. A place in the south-east of Ireland, in the province of Leinster, in the County of Carlow, in the Barony of Forth, in the parish of Tullowmagimma called Graiguenaspiddogue.

I know. The name’s a mouthful of tongue-trippage when said the English way—Graig-na-spid-ohg—but in the Irish language, it’s a name both simple and sweet. Graig na Spideóg, the hamlet of the robins. Our place was encircled in the blessing of those little winged messengers, as they darted from branch to branch, the gleam in their eye so bright and curious. From what I’ve told you, you won’t be surprised that Nana had no end of spidóg lore to impart.

The robin was a favoured bird with the Tuatha Dé Danann, the messenger between gods and people. One of their jobs was to usher the souls of the dead into the hereafter, and bring them water while they waited in anxiety for their sins to be forgiven. In the doing of this duty, they sometimes had to fly so close to the fires of purgatory that they scorched their breasts. For this devotion, the great goddess Danu herself blessed them putting the orange-red mark of the eternal flame on their breasts, the males and the females, by summer and by winter, alike.

One of those blessed birds landing near you meant good fortune. One entering the house though brought bad luck. One tapping on the window-pane said someone in the house was soon to die.

I carried those stories around like precious stones, and when it came time for me to go to school, I carried them there, eager to share. But the other children had never heard those tales and cared nothing for them, especially after the teacher, who prided himself on knowing a thing or two, decided to hold a court over them. Nana’s stories were like old lace, pretty enough in their time but serving little purpose in the modern day. The robin—that was the proper word, the English word—was just a bird, not a supernatural messenger. Its red breast was a simple quirk of nature, no more a mark of divine blessings than his red cheeks were a sign of consorting with fairies.

Everyone laughed, as the tone of his voice had told them to, and for the first time, worms of doubt were set loose and wriggling in my life.

"Don't be paying that fella too much heed," Nana said at home that afternoon, the wooden spoon stopped over the pot she’d been stirring at the stove as I told my tale of woe. “His head is crammed full of facts, to be sure, but ask him a why and he has barely a bit of because. Calls himself a master while he lets the English rip the old stories out of young Irish mouths.”

She dipped her spoon in the stew she’d been cooking and turned to offer me a taste off it. “Mind now, it’s hot.” Her warning was soft, wrapped in the aroma of herbs and secrets. I was too young to understand that she was inviting me to choose between ways of being in the world. All I knew as I swallowed the warmth it spread through me was that it was delicious.

“They’re knocking our place-names senseless, too, and writing up their falsifications on their new way-markers.” She meant the signposts that had been erected at the start and end of our village.

“It’s as well they are,” my mother, Agatha, threw in from across the room. “Without them we didn’t know where we commenced or completed.”

My mam had a soft spot for the English and loved lord-of-the-manor ways of going on, a sentiment unpopular with her parents, Nana and Granddan.

It was true for her that Graignaspiddogue was a place of indefinite borders. Twenty-eight houses it was then, haphazardly straddling a mud road, with the dwellings leaning this way and that, as if they'd had one too many and decided to rest wherever they fell. We had neither church nor grocery, not to mind a barracks or dispensary. No village hall to gather in, no public house even. It was like whatever made a village a village had gone for a wander and forgotten to come back.

O’Neill’s forge, planted firm at the crossroads, was our gathering place. My uncle Mick, or “Mick the Tip” as he was known on account of the steel tips on his boots, was the master of the anvil at the forge, and husband to my Auntie Kate, who was Nana’s second daughter, only sister to my mam. Everyone went there, at one time or another, for mending or meeting, including us children. We'd spend hours perched or swinging on his gate, watching him coax life from the red-hot iron, shaping horseshoes and iron nails, ploughshares and pitchforks, and fireguards for the big house.

Sometimes he’d let us “help” him, and we’d make a great commotion of lifting a heavy mallet with determined grunts, or blowing on the bellows with our cheeks puffed out.

According to the English map, the forge and its dwelling was House 23. My family—me, Mammy and Daddy and Uncle Paddy—lived a five-minute walk away in House 11. Across the road from us, in what the map dubbed House 14, dwelled Nana and Granddan and all the Cullen uncles and aunties who had yet to leave home. But numbers for dwellings didn't hold much sway in Graignaspiddogue. We named our houses for the families who peopled them. Our cottage was Cross’s, Nana and Granddan’s was Cullens’s, and the forge was O’Neill’s. Even the big house a quarter mile beyond the village—Rochford Hall—was named for the family who lived there.

I’ve been a keeper of the echoes of that time for a hundred years. The clang of hammer on steel, the crackle of warmth and work from the fire, in the forge or in the hearths in our homes, the dance of traffic and talk between our cousins’ house and our grandparents’ and ours. That whole way of life now gone, its memory too is now leaving us, like a mist more than half-burned off a morning field.

That’s what I want to capture for you in these pages, and leave behind me. How our ways collided with the ways of the wider world. It’s a story-and-a-half, and to tell it we must weave our way through the lush landscape of seven different kinds of love, taking the scenic route of poetry one minute and the cunning path of politics the next. By my reckoning, I'll need to be given another seven years to tell the full length of this tale.

Do I ask too much? I’m already the oldest woman in Ireland, with my birthday bounties from two presidents to prove it, first from Dr Hillery and now each year from the woman herself, our great lady, Mary Robinson. Seven more years?

There’s a man in America of 114, and a woman in France even older. I saw them both on the telly. A right yankee-doodle yer man was, full of beans and divilment. If they can do it, why not me?

I'm always being asked what I've done to get this far, especially from the journalists who get sent down to Graignaspiddogue on my birthday with their notebooks and cameras, to write down my recipe for a long life. Good food and lots of tea, I tell them. Good family and friends. And always looking on the bright side. “Chin up, chest out, chug on!” I say, with accompanying actions, and they lap it up. Eeejits.

It’s a queer thing to be congratulated on staying alive, as if you had the giving of it. Look at Maggie, Honoria’s friend, taken by cancer at 48 after all her running the roads in pasted-on pants. Look at Lily, Honor Bright, taken at 25 in a starburst of blood. And here’s me, with m’daily small bottle and cigarette, not to mention danger scrapes every bit as close as poor Lily’s, still going strong.

None of us can ken the hour of our passing, nor gets much sway in the matter. And just as well. Imagine how lost we’d be in our living if we did.

Oh great mother, grant me time to see my big book done, to tell the world what it needs to know. What those four dear souls unearthed for us all. Let me see the dawn of this new Millennium more enlightened than the last. Then happily shall I lay down my bones under the soil of Graignaspiddeog and bid this earth goodbye.

Next time: WB Yeats fights to save the society he founded, The Dublin Hermetic Society, and to trace his lost love, Laura.