Creagha Dubha

Chapter one

The bus made it's way through the marsh, on either side.
The road a causeway between solid land and where the sea ate away at the soil. As we entered the outer reaches of the village, it was a raw day. Rain drops hung desperately to the windows of the bus. Using my scarf I cleared a circle on the misted window.

As a child watching the sun rise out of the bay, I believed that the sea swallowed the sun each evening and let her go the following morning at dawn.The sea looked angry, black and grey tipped with dirty white. The scene had the quality of an Ansel Adams photograph. But I wouldn't have known that as a child, and what I saw through the window threw me back in time at least thirty years to a time when I didn't compare, because I hadn't seen the rest of the world. I felt as I did then scared and wondering why the waves didn't crash into the hillside and take the land with it. The power of the sea was angry and cruel and yet it was comforting, because it was home.

Memories come back, marching past my mind like a black and white movie, this is the place where I learned to swim, where my cousin lost his eye, where the whale got beached, where the big storm of 57 marooned us in the hot press for almost 12 hours.Up on the hill that slopes away from the sea a US airforce small plane landed bringing a while village out to watch.Of all the things I miss it is the sea that I miss most, close to the sea again I feel this surge of energy, everything was touched by our proximity to the sea.

From the house we could see the bay, boundaried by the Cooley Mountains on the north side to Dunany Point on the south, like outstretched arms in position three in ballet protecting us.The sea lay literally at the bottom of the hill I lived on. In summer we would walk in swimming costumes and flip flops to our bathing rock where we would leave our towels and wade into the sea till it came up to our waists.

In autumn and winter and spring the sea often tried to come to us. High tides would block the coast road. My mother and I walking on the sea road where high tide waves would crash over the stone wall. We would wait between waves until they subsided and run to our next place of shelter.

The sea was the pulse of our lives. Surrounding us. Sooner or later in order to leave we all had to cross water.We could smell the salt and later we would come to the shore to collect the lastest delivery of seaweed. Mammy would make jelly from this and some she would use to fertilise our vegetable plot.At low-tide I'd collect the razor shells that we used to decorate the walls inside the big green wooden gate that hid our house, garden and lives from the road.

I had it all planned. I knew exactly how to do it, thanks to my grandmother's vast knowledge of plants and herbs and their uses. The recipe was already written all that remained was the method of it's application.My anger had been in the deep freeze for years. My therapist told me you can't shelve anger - you only do harm to yourself. She was right about the harm anger can do.

When my Aunt died [the house was truly mine. I had promised my mother I would let her live there as long as she needed, and I'd kept my promise, foolishly some family members thought] and left me the house I'd lived in till I was ten I thought at first I'd sell it. Property prices were sky high and the village was no longer the sleepy little costal hamlet, it was almost a suburb and a very fashionable one, of the nearby town. I could travel the world and still have money to put by. I wasn't even sure that I wanted to see it again. I'd cut the cord or so I thought.The solicitor's letter said little. The personal one from the solicitor, who is also my cousin and childhood friend - painted another picture. - it's a museum - she wrote. - history box. That sort of fit's with Aunt Frances, she had been a librarian. And the house reflected that, tidy indexed and everything in it's place, whether according to the Dewey system or not I don't know.You have to come and see this, it, she wrote, its like the whole family history is stored in these boxes. I suppose that got my imagination going. My aunt had mostly behaved as though because I didn’t have the family name I wasn't truly one of them. In fact I was surprised that she had not already bequeathed these treasures to the nephews and neices who did have the family name. But it seems that she had not.

So here I was on the local bus for the first time in a long time. I'd chosen to arrive, unannounced and by public transport because I wanted to move back to my past, and this was the past rearing up in front of me, slowly. Had I rented a car at the airport it would have been too fast for me. As we neared the stop for Backhill road, the bus driver called out the stop.

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