I am sitting on the floor in the dining room. Mammy is in the kitchen at the kitchen sink washing up, or perhaps doing the weekly laundry by hand, in those days before we got a washing machine. I am playing with my toys, perhaps with my favourite farmyard and its animals and beside me the radiogram is on and a record is playing. I am sitting there in a peaceful house on a new estate, built in the fields a mile from the coalmining town of Tyldesley, but the music is telling me something very different. It is calling me away from here and beyond a blue horizon to go again to ‘the little friendly places on the coastline of Mayo.’
The air is full of this Irish noise, every day, as my mammy works away in her house, and while my daddy is deep down a mine digging for coal, coal which will find its way, ten bags full and all counted, to our little coalhouse shed out the back. This gritty, grimy land where I live is in total contrast to the land I have met and will continue to meet for the rest of my life, beyond the blue horizon.
The little friendly places that I know are called Glencullen and Bangor Erris, Ballina and Barnfield and Knockmore. These are the places belonging to my mother, where she came from and where her oldest sister lives. As the years go by we will add many more names of many more places to this list, as first we meet with my father’s father’s native place, Slinaunrua between Newport and Westport, and then all the other towns and villages that I will drive to as I play taxi driver for mammy and daddy in later years.
Belmullet and Broadhaven,
Achill Island o’er the wave
Now in my older years I suddenly begin to realise just how much that radiogram and those 78 speed records entered into my soul, how much that music formed me into a person who could not get enough of Mayo. The lilt of the music dances in my dreams.
Clare Island home of Granuaille
Old Newport well I know
Music can do something to the soul that spoken words very often fail to do. Music can carry you away, away from the here and now, away from the dreariness and drudgery that daily life can sometimes be, and transport you to another world, to a place of loveliness and beauty, and if you have been to the coastline of Mayo you will know that the music does not lie.
To be again in Westport
Is a wish I oft recall
It is only yesterday that I recalled the song I had listened to so frequently as a child on that dining room floor. Things I have not done since I was a child are coming back to me now in these latest years. I have eaten jam roly-poly for my tea, something I have not done since school day dinners. Yesterday I bought Shredded Wheat and had some for breakfast this morning, the first time I have done this since I was a child. And yesterday I sat down and began a poem that I just called ‘Coastline of Mayo’ and immediately the tune came back to me and I was once more a child on a dining room floor.
I may not get back to Mayo – never say never – but as the song says…
If that wish cannot be given
May God grant me as I go
One last look from heaven’s casement
On the coastline of Mayo
Brian Fahy
Stirling
14 July 2017
Erris Poetry 