I first went to Annamakerrig in 1984, and it was there, among exotic people and exotic flowers that I found a roadmap for the journey to becoming a writer, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I’VE ALWAYS been intimidated by artists, so I’m usually nervous about going to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annamakerrig, where they all sit around a dinner table in the evenings eating fancy salads and exotically cooked lentils, and brown-bread ice cream.
I didn’t know that there was such a thing as brown-bread ice cream; apparently you get all the crusts of brown bread in the bottom of the bread basket, and spin them in a blender, with peanuts, and then roast the lot on a tray in the oven, lash on the cream, and whatever else you want, and stick it in the freezer. The ingenuity of this typifies the imaginative attitude to cuisine at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre; an artists’ retreat, and once the home of Sir Tyrone Guthrie.
No matter how good the food is, I always feel inadequate when in the company of erudite and sophisticated artists. I’m rooted in rural Ireland, whereas other artists are usually well-travelled, and have a wide experience of life. In Annamakerrig over the years I’ve heard people discuss the most exotic of topics, including restaurant menus in Tokyo, sunsets in Bombay, and the fun to be had flying first-class to Australia, for one night, and then coming back again the following day.
I first went to Annamakerrig in 1984, when the ghost of Guthrie, the famous theatre director, was still about the place. His mugs still sat on the worktop in the kitchen. His fingerprints were still on the binoculars that lay on the table at the bay window in the drawing room, where he once drank wine with Alec Guinness. Rhododendron bushes still masked the lake where Guthrie and his wife once picnicked, naked, like two lovers in the garden of Eden, and the piano still stood in the corner of the front room, where his broken- hearted wife used to hide her gin, after he died, when she had no one to play with any longer in their shared paradise.
In 1984 the director of Annamakerrig was Bernard Loughlin, a man who taught me the names of trees. He had bushy eye- brows, and a hat like an upturned pot for geraniums, and he stood in the garden like an old scarecrow, with a ragged coat flapping about him as he dug his onions, or fondled his courgettes. He would often lure some passing novelist into the furrows just to admire the size of his cabbages. After a while, the place was so full of flowers and vegetables, that when his pet dog Jeff died, it was hard to find a corner of the garden to bury him, without disturbing some exotic or beautiful plant.
At the dinner table Loughlin’s intellectual rigour made him a formidable opponent in any argument, and he relished the style of adversarial discourse without which Europe wouldn’t be Europe.
In fact, he loved Europe so much that he eventually abandoned Ireland and took refuge in the Pyrenees, and though I have never seen him since, I will always remember one particular night when I knocked on his door, seeking shelter from a storm.
Not far from my front door in Fermanagh, an off-duty UDR man had been shot dead. I was the local curate, so I condemned the killing and went to the funeral. But then a politician denounced me, in the local newspapers, for going to the grave, and alleged that Catholic clergy were just as much the enemy as the IRA. I was horrified to be the recipient of such a bigoted tongue-lashing, and one night I crossed the Border to Annamakerrig, for advice.
“Just answer him back,” Loughlin declared. “You’re a writer; and it is writers and artists who are already imagining a new Ireland; reconciled and enlightened, which will one day make the bigotry and buffoonery of those politicians obsolete.” He put the pen in my hand, and the words in my mouth and we fashioned an open letter to the politician in question, denouncing his bigotry. It was published in the local newspaper. And that was the end of the matter.
The incident helped me realise that the only way to deal with a bully was to speak out: name the truth, or write the truth. And I suppose it was in that moment, that I took my first fumbling step on the road to being a professional writer. And it was in Annama- kerrig that I found a roadmap for the journey.