Introduction to A Life Before: Extract for Patrons

My latest patron-only extract from “A Life Before” is the very first pages, which will soon be on their way to the editor to produce a sample. They introduce the key characters who will drive the series: the activist Maud Gonne and her daughter, Iseult; the poet WB Yeats, and Rosy's own Irish family including her cousin Lily, who was murdered by a bullet through the heart “by one who knew what he was doing”. Sign up here on Kickstarter to be notified about the launch campaign and statue for Maud Gonne “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, “No matter how black-hearted a person turns, their soul is still yoked to the beating breast of the world. And the great mother has hopes for them yet.” I was a grown girl who'd come home after getting myself into a bit of trouble over in England, and Nana and I were lying on the grass out the back, looking up at the stars. She'd just told me about Maud Gonne. How she was then the talk of Ireland for the way she’d played Caitlín ní Houlihan, as symbol of the old country, in a play. There’d been a picture of her in the paper, dressed to look like an old woman, but at the end of the play, she threw off the costume of age and emerged with the walk of a queen. Martin Keane had gone to Dublin to see the play and laid eyes on her himself, and was pure full of her, ever since he came back. “She was a sight akin to the sun in the sky,” Nana said. “Displayed her red-gold hair and set her grey-gold-eyes flashing, like a storm-tossed sea at dawn.” Having been born to great wealth, Maud could have had an easy life enjoying the fame and fortune that were her due, holding court among the highfalutin. Instead she chose a path of stones, giving all her skills and strength, not to mention most of her money, to the cause of Ireland. Beautiful and talented enough to grace the grandest theatre, she chose to play on a stage not built by human hands, as she rallied all to the cause of Ireland. Artists tried to ensnare her beauty in their works, but Martin said even the photographers failed her, for they could never reproduce her great height, her colouring, or her presence, which made you feel like you’d fallen into a holy moment. Writers tried to pin her into words, but even Willie Yeats, the best of poets, could only describe her as “a burning cloud”, and admit to how she was always out of reach. "Only God could have produced such a creature," Nana said, but then she said no. "No actually, I believe she is a goddess herself, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann made large again and sent amongst us to walk in mystery and magic." The land of mystery and magic was where Nana lived, and I loved her for it. She seemed to me to know everything, though she’d never spent a night outside our village. That’s what I want to capture for you in these pages, and leave behind me. How the old ways collided with the ways of the wider world, as told through the lives of the Gonnes—not just Maud Gonne the beautiful English heiress turned Irish revolutionary, but also her daughter Iseult, a creature of ink and dreams, illegitimately conceived and often disowned. If you’ve time to spare and ears to lend, I’ve a story that's ripe for the telling, about the tangled threesome between Maud Gonne and her daughter and the poet WB Yeats, and its bearing on another beautiful young woman, a lass by the name of Lily O’Neill. Real name, that is. You’ve maybe heard of the other three, or of Maud Gonne or WB at least, but if you’ve heard of our Lily it won’t have been by that name, but Honor Bright, the name she took for her work. The name given to her by the newspapers in her infamy. *** I was going to take an alias myself to write this book. I have 46 in my family now, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Forty-six young beings, all outstandingly good to me, each of which would fall out of their standup if they were to read the things old Rosy got up to, back in her day. Dear descendants, if you’re reading this I’m glad, I surely am, and you'll soon see how I couldn’t have given the Pandora’s pot of my youth to you, face-to-face. From the shelter of the afterlife I’m well happy for you to open out the dead secrets. Now I’m gone, I can step out as myself. Isn’t that a strange thing? Myself meaning the skin bag of blood and humours that drove me through my days but more than that besides. As WB put it, even when we seem most ourselves, when we write ourselves up we are "never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast". We are "reborn as an idea, something intended, complete." True but myself, my whole self, and nothing but myself is what I plan on giving you here. What’s the point of writing a book, otherwise? So: Rosy Cross at your storytelling service. It’s a name that suits me a hundred ways round, for I had a cross mother, and three cross fathers, and I was saved by the holy cross of the secret rose, and thereby came up rosy. Rosy.

Rosy and Lily: I’ve always liked a flower name on a girl but Lily O’Neill was more than just a girl with a name plucked from the garden. Known to both Gonnes, known better to WB, and known especially to me. For Lily O’Neill, Honor Bright, was kin, my first cousin. Daughter of Aunty Kate and Mick-the-Tip, and sprouted from the same soil as me. Child of Graignaspiddogue. Blood of my blood.

Four souls woven into Irish history, three women and a man, each marking the world in ways I only now understand and the world has yet to grasp.

Before I start you’ll want to know who I am, I suppose, to have the telling of such a tale. I’m an Irishwoman who gave the first half of her life to the cause of Irish freedom, in the days when it was dangerous to do so. I was no better than I could be as I made my way in the world.

Like my cousin, I was no Holy Mary, but unlike poor Lily, by the grace of the great Goddess I was given enough turns of the calendar to cast off the chaff of poor choices. If you live long enough, life will show you how to live it.

For most of us to truly live right, we must first live wrong, and then admit it and be humbled by it. Otherwise, you become one of the righteous and I’d rather be a sinner any day than that.

Having pulled myself out of my sins, and remade myself as servant to my nation and to my family, it's now my goal to see in the next century, which brings us also into the third millennium. I want to stride across that threshold with this big book finished. 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. * * * Sign up here on Kickstarter to be notified when this book launches in July 2024