“It’s amazing what a lot there is in an old man’s head when somebody else starts him talking and puts questions to him.”

The quote is from the final chapter in Tomás O’Crohan’s 1929 book, The Islandman, translated from the original Irish by Robin Flower. After putting his life story together, having been encouraged by others to do it, Tomás O’Crohan sounded a bit surprised at what the process of remembering had produced.

I read the book three years ago after having learned about the Blasket Island writers from a Great Courses lecture series on Irish history and literature. I like stories from people who lived through the transitions from earlier ways of living to our modern world, so set out to learn more.

O’Crohan was the first of a series of writers who came from the Blasket Islands, just off of the Dingle Peninsula on Ireland’s southwest coast, and who wrote about their lives there. So I started with him.

After reading the book, I wanted to visit Great Blasket Island for myself and see the places he told about. I didn’t expect to see the exact spot where as a boy he killed a giant seal in an encounter worthy of Beowolf vs Grendel, but wanted to get a feel for the place. The island was evacuated in the 1950s and the buildings have fallen into ruin, but tourists can now go out to visit, if they don’t mind the lack of electricity or internet service.

We had already planned to visit Ireland that fall, but decided it wouldn’t work out to go to the Blasket Islands then. The chance of weather good enough for a trip to the island was not very good in late October. It’s only 3 miles from the mainland, but as in Tomás’s day, the weather is not always suitable for crossing. In the days when the islanders’ way of getting across was by rowing their small boats, the island was often isolated from the mainland for weeks at a time. Motorized boats now cross more easily, but there are still plenty of days when it’s not suitable to be out, especially in fall and winter. So that October we went to other parts of Ireland instead.

Nor did it work on a visit last August, though I still had the Blasket Islands in mind.

This year I mentioned several times that if it could be worked in, I’d like to go there. Finally, on May 1, at our B&B breakfast in Dingle, the women in our party decided that I should do it. My brother-in-law likes being out on the water, so he was on my side. I had learned of a nearby tour operator that took people out for whale and bird watching, with an option of being dropped off for 3 hours on the island. So I called and asked about going out the next day, even though 20 mph winds from the northwest were forecast. As I expected, they didn’t plan to go in that weather. But they still had room on the day’s tour, which was leaving from Ventry harbor in an hour.

There were at most a dozen people, including the captain and a marine biologist who doubled as first mate. It was at low tide, so we were ferried out to the tour boat in a rubber dinghy, in two batches. When we arrived at the island an hour later, the four of us who had opted to go on the island were taken in the dinghy to the landing place–a big crack in the rocks–and reminded (not for the first time) that we needed to be back and ready to be picked up at 2pm. We had three hours.

Tomás and the others had written a lot about that landing place, which was sometimes dangerous and tricky, especially for loading and unloading their boats even when they weren’t trying to untie sheep or a cow they might have brought from the mainland. And there was a steep climb up to the village. There is now a chain rail to hold onto, but I could see it was good I hadn’t tried to convince Mrs R to come. She was still recovering from knee surgery, and could not have made her way across the rocks. (Nor could she have climbed the ladder from the dinghy into the boat, for that matter.)

It was well before the height of tourist season, so we almost had the island to ourselves. There were a few people over by the sand beach, taking photos of the seals sunning themselves. There are more seals now that they are in no danger of monster-slayers such as young Tomás O’Crohan.

The photo at the head of this post is one I took on my way down from the high point on that end of the island. If you click on it to to make it larger you can perhaps make out the house Tomás O’Crohan built. It has been repaired, re-roofed, and whitewashed for visitors.

O’Crohan had written about the thatched roofs on most houses, where chickens might roost and lay their eggs. He didn’t say much about the resulting dust and droppings, but I am somewhat familiar with the underside of a chicken’s roosting place, and would not choose to have my dinner table in such a location. Tomás had thought he could do better, so when he built his own house he put a canvas roof on it. That is more or less the kind of roof that his old house has now.

Although there is a lot more I could tell about my visit to the place of O’Crohan’s memories, I had planned to stop here, because I next wanted to tell about another old man’s memories, of life in a Polish village up to and during the Holocaust. The quote at the top of this post was a good fit for him, as he, too, was amazed at some of the odd memories that came to mind.

But a glitch came up while writing this post. I learned that there is a more recent, unabridged translation of Tomás O’Crohan’s book, which attempts to preserve the earthy language that the first translator deemed unsuitable for general audiences. And that sentence of the top of the post doesn’t appear in the new translation.

Here is the more recent translation of the paragraph it came from:

Well, I have slithered along to the end of my story. There is nothing in it but the truth. I didn’t need to make up anything because over a long life I’ve gathered a lot of memories — and there are still more in my head, if anyone wants to ask about them. All the same, it was those things that interested me the most that I jotted down. For ages I’d been mulling over everything I was most interested in.

There is nothing in that paragraph to express surprise at what he has remembered, and no emphasis on the questions that provoked the memories, as there was in the older translation by Robin Flower, which goes as follows:

Well, I’ve slipped along thus far to the end of my story. I have set down nothing but the truth; I had no need of invention, for I had plenty of time, and have still a good deal in my head. It’s amazing what a lot there is in an old man’s head when somebody else starts him talking and puts questions to him. All the same, what I’ve written down are the things that meant most to me. I considered the whole course of my life, and the things that had meant most to me were the first to come back to memory. [emphasis added]

It may not be a coincidence that Flower was one of the questioners. He had spent many hours with Tomás, learning old Irish at his feet, so it may be that at some point Tomás actually said something like that quoted sentence, and that Flower therefore felt free to add it.

Whether or not Tomás said so, it’s not uncommon for old people to find themselves surprised that way when something or someone triggers an old memory they didn’t know they had. It has certainly happened to me.

And there is also that other book, or pair of books, that I wanted to tell you about. But I think I’ll leave the Polish/Jewish example, and the connection to my own travels, for another time.

References:

The Islandman, by Tomas O’Crohan (Author) and Robin Flower (Translator). 1928.

Tomas O’Crohan wikipedia page. It was here that I learned that there is a more recent translation of his book that is unabridged and that attempts to better preserve some of his earthier language.

The Islander, by Tomás O’Crohan (Author), Gary Bannister (Translator), David Sowby (Translator, Contributor). 2012.

Blasket Island Eco Marine Tours is the tour operator we used. I highly recommend this one, but there are also others that take people out to the island for longer day visits. Maybe there will be another time for that.