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Angle-sloping barrack shed, big tree strung behind it, before it, big thick logs of wood. They’ve been saving them and piling them up. I’m afraid of the saw, it reminds me of the French Revolution. The old garden gates, fortress gates, one of them opened, the laurel hedge clipped quite low along the barrack wall. After mid-summer I don’t go out there any more with the insects, red bites that are painful all night. I stay in the yard. The wood is piled up, it takes up a quarter of the space, someone has put a bicycle against the logs, a lady’s bicycle. The black Ford is in the shed, it is usually out to patients or the golf club. Daddy must be in the Dispensary getting his things in the black bag together, making up the little bottles of medicines. Lots of cough bottles. They swear by it. The dogs run around: Ginger, Mi-Wadi; golden paws and ears, gold wag of tail in the month of July. Month of roses framing the doors and windows on the yard. Clematis gone now from the barrack wall on the drive, the stones in the wall are always loose. Lilac trees in the front, purple and white equally balanced, the red drops of fuchsia alongside. In the sheds, dead car batteries and pictures of dead jockeys and horses, the swallows make a mess when we leave the car in at night. I think of horses in here and their hay, that must have been a fine sight and a fine smell. Because there are no cars on the road, except the priest’s and the doctor’s, people travel by trap; with the logs, sometimes there’s no place for the patients to park. The Condrons of Castletown come in the biggest and shiniest trap.
Our house is near the bottom of the village street, it’s in a hollow, Wexford is full of hollows. You get the sun, but there’s no view. A kind of trapped feeling. Mammy talks about Jordan’s Hollow, by a bridge off the main road; Daddy visits there now to attend Liam Mellows’s mother who is sick. Mammy says she thinks Daddy doesn’t know who Mellows is; he has no politics. We had ghosts in the yard today, the wardrobe Mammy bought at Bauman’s arrived in a big van. She says she is sure there are ghosts hiding in it; I hope they don’t try to get out. The auction there was wonderful, a lovely white cream house, Mammy says it definitely dates from Queen Anne. Stables and rolling lawns and trees created by Protestant refugees from Bohemia. A man came up and showed us where a man had been hanged in 1798 on a spike on the gate of the yard. Strange noises never stop in the house, it’s haunted a hundred times over. The last of them who just died, Miss Emily, is supposed to run up the avenue as a hare. Miss Lee, in Castletown Post Office, a patient of Daddy’s, used to put Miss Emily’s letters in a special bag and the postman delivered them before other mail.
Mammy keeps repeating that Daddy is a good doctor. She tells me he drinks tea with his patients; she drinks only Bewley’s coffee. Every morning in bed, with maybe a poached egg and several cigarettes. He drinks tea in selected farmhouses - with the Symeses up in Wingfield, and with the Halpins in another hollow near the village. Nearby is Kinsellas of the Mill where he goes too for his cake; men in that family are still called Master, country people go there for the mill, it’s very up-dated, it’s just been electrified. Daddy is always on the road; he’s gone for hours. With all these country lanes, I think sometimes of hiding away, I’d like to fly away, run away maybe, getting out of the hollows and all. I have the best and most beautiful times dreaming of this. When you put your mind to it, you can hear imaginary bells ring in the hedges and among the foxgloves. The friends you can’t make around here are now yours. There is an end to imagining, though, because the Irish sing that at the furthest point of all roads the cemetery waits. That’s where you escape to: the overgrown silence of the grass on the graves. Mammy never visits her mother’s plot in Glasnevin, didn’t even put up a headstone to her, I’m sure I will be the same when the time comes. All I’ll want is the silence of the person that’s gone, and I’ll dream about that. That’s walking the roads more than lovers, that’s saying your prayers with your heart doing the walking. Mammy gets a Mass said for her mother every November, that’s when Fr. Shine comes to afternoon tea. It’s also afternoon coffee.
We are going for a swim today via Castletown. Croghan, gold-bearing mountain, the hamlets, tilt towards the sea. The narrow roads are full of potholes and small, sharp, stones. We cross the main road at Inch, not by the rambling house of the Rector, who comes to dinner with his wife, but by the gunner’s cottage, (he was wounded in the Boer war), then past Hyde Park. The beaches are stoney some years, some years not. The little road winds at the sea’s edge from Clone; a farmhouse or two. Down the lane through the open gate to Kilpatrick; park the car on the grass by the sandhills. Pull out the swimming togs and towels on the back seat, jump down on the sand, take off your shoes for the soft feeling, but mind the stones. The chimneys of the burnt-out Coast Guard Station prop over the highrise sandhills at the end of the strand. There’s a marsh, a silky pond with reeds, rushes; sometimes ducks. Over the wild flower hills and bunkers there’s a different world, ocean flat as a bog with white crests; a ship or trawler far away. Say a prayer before water, you walk out quite a way before it gets deep, at the start, it’s piled-up stones hurt your feet. You dip in or a wave comes, it freezes you for a long moment, you kick your feet, you plough your hands, you float looking up at the blue and white tent.
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