Surely I made little or no progress into the windy chapter on ‘The Bleak West’. I am not sure I ever did much more than glance at it for the sake of Paul Hogarth's sketches. There was a copy of Brendan Behan's Island: An Irish Sketch-book (1962) on the bookshelves at home, received as a gift to my father, from my sister, in its year of publication.
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I had no idea as I wielded my whitewash brush that Behan, an expert with the paint-brush, a hero of mine from youth, rebel hero of Borstal Boy and star of the Muggeridge TV interview, had any Árainn connections, until a little later in my stay. They knew too about Brendan Behan who used to stay just across the way from my house in what was then – and is now no more than a derelict shell: Conneely's Guesthouse, once the life and soul of ‘the West’, presided over by the great O Conghaile matriarch Maire née Gill. Like anyone else the islanders knew what Dublin signified to one and all beyond the pale. All I know is I never heard mention of either through all but a year there. You can take nothing for granted in that place. (There are even fewer there now.) How familiar they were with Georgian architecture or the tenements of North Dublin, I can't say.
Scarcely twelve souls lived at Cill Mhuirbhigh in those days. I am writing of more than forty years ago. Though ‘world’ is a great exaggeration in this case. By which he meant the front of the property, the facade the world sees as it passes by. Quite early in the summer of 1969 at Cill Mhuirbhigh on Árainn Mór, as I stood atop a ladder whitewashing my place, up at the gable, on a bright airy day, Pat Mhicalín (aka Pat Whiteley) Hernon passing called to me to say, ‘Well, you have the Dublin End done, anyway’.
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