THE MISFITS
THE MISFITS (An Irish Story )
Some years ago, we built a house with a large garden near Dundalk in an area close to the Gap of the North where warring chieftains had invaded each other for centuries in the past. My older son, Steve, had started at the local art college the previous summer and we were enjoying having him stay at home instead of away at university. He showed me a book of art and philosophy in the garden one day.
“That’s a weird looking picture of a guy painting a line of identical guys, what’s it about?” I asked.
It was a puzzling illustration of a man painting a landscape and fitting
himself, the painter, into the landscape. Carried to its absurd limit the book showed a painting of an artist doing a painting of an artist doing a painting of an artist,...and so on.
“I’ve only just only just started flicking through the book, dad, and I can’t really explain what it’s about.” So we were both mystified.
We both found out later that it was a well known illustration. The point seemed to be that no matter how hard you try you can never achieve true reality in creative art, and it tends to become illusory. It struck me that in an odd way it threw some light on the four year stint we did in that house.
Our new house was on a low hilltop between the big old trees on Paddy’s farm and Peggy's cottage behind the next field's hawthorn hedgerow. My wife loved it because the area comprised her youthful haunts, and the attraction of the long country walks to the ‘fairy hill’ was irresistible.
She would often say, “It’s just two miles up the road from mum and dad’s place in Dundalk, and at the first crossroads is old Grace's cottage.”
That turned out to be a two-hundred year-old gatehouse in mock Elizabethan style on a road into the old Heynestown estate. It would be easy for the casual traveller to miss this road, and so the landscape around the ‘fairy-hill’ remained a sort of private preserve of a few locals including my wife.
The fairy hill was in fact the remains of a motte and bailey, one of a number in the locality, all located at about the same distance from the ruined Roche's castle a quarter- mile away. Rumour had it that a tunnel led from the top of the fairy hill all the way to the castle: and I often wondered if there hadn’t originally been some kind of network of lookout posts related to the defence of the castle, on guard against invasion from north or south. God knows, enough invaders had swept each way through the Gap of the North, laying waste to vast tracts of the countryside in the process.
From the fairy hill you could easily see Dundalk Bay to the east. The northern horizon was blocked by the Cooley Mountains and Slieve Gullion, with the Gap of the North looking like Finn McCool had taken a bite out of the mountains – perhaps on some day when he wasn’t busy chucking the Isle of Man or Rockall into the ocean. Early in the year you could feel the cold wind funnelled from the Gap too, and it killed off my new buddlia which I’d ordered specially from England.
Paddy sympathised, but wasn’t surprised, “Ah sure, ye’ll get used to de cold from de Gap. Ye won’t be makin’ de same mistake next year.”
Our hilltop house seemed to make the wind-funnelling even worse. I thought it ironic how the shelter belts protecting the adjacent old houses so well had the effect of bringing our house so much extra wind. So I planted hawthorn shelter belts and added in local elderberries to stop the wind. That was the start of the battle.
“Sure why would ye be draggin dat ould rubbish up to your garden? ‘Tis only elderberries - and dem needin cuttins in de middle of winter, not now,” Paddy added, shaking his head, but reaching down at the same time and helping me drag the weight uphill.
I also transplanted some of Paddy's lush yellow dandelion-type type plants that his cows loved to graze if he led then out along the fairy-hill road.
“Weeds, sure ‘tis only weeds!” I wished I had a penny for every time he said it.
Yes, I tried to save stuff, but I caused losses too. When we first moved to Heynestown, there were foxes, pheasants, magpies and rabbits in abundance. But after a while they all migrated away from human company. Except for the crows. Like some 1940s nazi luftflotte, the formations of black cawing crows high up in the trees on Paddy’s farm always appeared when I put out the basket of crumbs intended for the robins. The outgunned robins left to find better pickings elsewhere.
Our timber framed house was the first in the district. It went up fast and took all the locals by surprise.
“Come up overnight it did, like a mushroom,” offered Peggy and Paddy.
Nowadays the Louth countryside is infested with new houses and it hasn't had time to digest them. Nor have the locals had time to adjust to strange new people, urbanites with different attitudes to theirs. No sooner were we in the new house than the neighbour, Roseanne, proved very friendly, and asked if we needed babysitters. “There’s a weekly dance and bingo session in the church hall - I can easy look after your kids and let yeez go...”
Roseanne’s sister, Maureen, who lived at the crossroads, often came round with candles when the electricity was cut temporarily, and she would be forever yoo-hooing across the field to us, but once our two-metre wall was built to meet planning requirements we rarely saw her. Our urban reserve was gradually diluting ordinary country qualities.
The country landscape reached its worst about eighteen months after we moved in, when they started to build a motorway close by. I went out for a stroll one morning to find that the road to Knockbridge had been rudely blocked by barrels painted in fluorescent yellow saying "Diversion". In no time after that, the road was ripped up entirely and the land turned into a gigantic construction site with enormous flooded holes filled with grey concrete and rusting steel reinforcement for bridge abutments. Gargantuan machines roamed the landscape at will, destroying familiar features in one sweep of great claws or blades, laying waste to vast tracts of land. It reminded me of H G Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’ with the unstoppable Martians and their destruction of Surrey; and I found little comfort in the words of one engineer with his heavy Liverpool accent -
“Don’t you worry yer ‘ead, mate, we’ll be in and out in six months and you won’t reco’nise the place. You’ll have a fast new road to Dublin,”
Driving one day on the still-slow roads, we spotted a field hedgerow which had been overgrown by periwinkle. The rambling mauve flowers had escaped the confines of some neighbour’s garden. Maybe some old timer had planted it and he was now dead or gone. But periwinkle is an indigenous survivor and the plant had lasted longer than its planter. We fell in love with it, spreading itself vigorously in full bloom through the surrounding hedge.
“Oh, look,” said my wife, “that’s the periwinkle we used to have years ago back in grandad’s house, isn’t it? It sure looks like it. Oh, I’d love some in our garden to remind us of grandad.”
“Ok, I’ll get me spade and collect some,” I nodded with enthusiasm.
So I came back later that day to dig it up. One of the engineers with a yellow hard-hat and a Birmingham accent was friendly, and happy to allow permission, but plainly thought I was crazy to waste my time on "weeds". Each time I returned to dig, some site engineer would radio in to the police the presence on site of an unknown person, and they would arrive casually but purposefully a few minutes later and I would explain what I was doing on the construction site. They always left with incredulous and humouring expressions -
“Collecting weeds. . . uh huh. . .now I’ve heard everything.” It probably amused everyone in the garda station during their long tea-breaks.
The periwinkle took quite well and climbed happily up among my thorns especially along the roadside hedge because it faced the setting western sun, even though it cast a dark shadow over the road to the fairy hill. It became well-established and after our four year stint it was the only part of the new garden that looked genuine.
But overall, we never really did get to enjoy the countryside the way we had imagined we
would. The landscape was changing daily in front of our eyes. The country lanes disappeared, the trees brought wind problems, the non-nazi wildlife emigrated. The lovely walks to the fairy-hill were finally made impossible when a big black doberman with fearsome teeth was acquired by the people in another new house. My wife's fairy-hill memories fast became more like fairy tale memories. The secret tunnel from the fairy hill to the castle became open to the public and was advertised as a tourist attraction, and what remained of the secluded character of the district was finally destroyed. Steve finished his stint at the local art college and moved away to Dublin to do a master’s, so the family became fragmented.
We had become part of the process of change and destruction. Just like the invaders of the past, we had swept rapidly in to the district from the north, changing all before us. The more we tried to fit in to the landscape features, the more they defied our efforts and turned against us. It was almost as if the landscape refused to have us. Yes, I managed to help the periwinkle survive the onslaught of the Martians. But then, it was a proven survivor anyway. I cannot help thinking about my son's picture with the artist included as part of the landscape itself. We didn't anticipate the impact we ourselves with our new house would have on the countryside. We just didn’t fit.
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