FROM THE ARCHIVES:Writer Benedict Kiely described in his inimitable style a trip to Sligo for the opening of a new art gallery at Drumcliffe and on to Mullaghmore, almost exactly a year before the IRA assassinated Lord Mountbatten there. –
BUT I go as far as Mullaghmore and walk back to the main road along a path by which, like Jeremias, not only may I not return, but on which I first walked 45 years ago. Behold the short years pass. The thought gives me pause. Life and the good weather are still around me. That mysterious avenue to Classiebawn castle will never again lead to India. The sea, the flat sand, the whistling dunes are on my left.
Spread out before me in the shine are the mountains from the tip of Rossinver and Dartry to Ben Bulben; all at their most beautiful except where those heroes, known to a colleague as the Whitewashed Warriors have obscenely scrawled “Brits Out” on the nose of Ben Bulben. They’d daub on the Ark of the Covenant or the backside of the Poor Old Woman if they could locate them.
What I was doing here 45 years ago was going to the horse races on the sand (Jack B. Yeats could have been there that day) with Charles Fergus of Ooragh and Stracomer and his wife, my cousin, and a young lady, all of 13, with a freckled elfish face and a Lincoln-green coat with cape.
The stones in the fences are talking to me, the bent grass, the swans floating on that reedy shallow lake.
Heavy showers swept in from the sea that day and went on to wrestle with mountains.
Under a parked lorry I sheltered with the father of the captain of the present Dublin team. Who won the final that year?
One of the horse-jockeys had distinguished himself, on a former occasion. Losing his nose. There are many ways in which a sporting gentleman may lose his nose. Andrew Marsh recently reminded us how Fighting Fitzgerald cut the nose off an Englishman who said he smelled an Irishman so, said Fitz, that he’d never smell another.
The short years pass and the noseless horseman must now, following his nose, have passed by into eternity and I pray for him and all men, with or without noses, as I wait for the bus half-way between Mullaghmore and Ballintrillick. The Galway express goes by in high style. Fair enough.
But the noonday bus for Sligo goes by, half-empty, the driver dismissing me with one wave of his hand, which the lady in the shop at the crossroads cannot understand. Neither can I. That evening in the old rectory [at Drumcliffe] I listen to great talk from my Sligo friends. Dusk gathers over the mountains. Behind some hedge some Whiteboys, the Whitewash Warriors, muster with another coat for their sign on the mountain.
Ah well and, as the man said, an ancestor was Rector here long years ago, by the road an ancient cross, and cast a cold eye, and busman pass by, and all the rest of it.
http://url.ie/79h2