Bryan Gallagher recalls a magical day spent in a place so special he's never dared go back...
 Bryan Gallagher |
I have a boat. It's fibreglass and there's a big engine on the back of it, and I often sail up Lough Erne past the island of Inislucht. Inislucht means the Island of the People, and apparently there used to be a lot of people living there some time ago. I was taken there once many, many years ago when I was about six and a half years of age. There was a brother and sister lived on the island, and the woman collected me by arrangement with my parents from the school.
She came on her old-fashioned bicycle and she had two bags of shopping on the handlebars. She seated me on the carrier behind the saddle, with my short legs, I remember, dangling over the side. "Mind the spokes", she told me, just in case I get entangled in the spokes. And we wobbled off. The road was rough, and it was gravelly, and when we came to the steep hills she walked, wheeling the bicycle, and and she kept up a constant flow of conversation all the way.
To this day, I can never travel that road without hearing her voice as she looked over the rushy fields and named the townlands we passed through. They sound like poetry in my mind - Kilnakelly, Coragh, Tirraroe, Coratistune, Dragh, and Cornanoe. The road became abit narrower with a mane of green grass up the centre and finally round a bend it ran straight down into the lake and I could see it sloping away underneath the water.
She yelled "Tommeeee, tommeee", and it seemed to me out of nowhere a boat came. There was one oarsman in it, and he shipped his oars as it grounded on the shore and got out. Nobody spoke. He lifted the two bags of shopping into the boat and looked down at me. He was huge.
"Were you ever in a boat before?" he asked. "No," I said. "Are you afraid?" "No," I said. "Good lad" he said and he picked me up under one arm and stepped into the boat.
"Sit down at the end," he said. And he started to row, and with every one of his mighty strokes I could feel the heavy wooden boat surge forward. It was surge and then glide, surge and glide. It was years later when I felt the same sensation in a boat, but there were eight of us rowing, and the boat was a sleek, light university racing boat, it wasn't the heavy, wooden boat with a single oarsman that now took us to Inislucht, the island of the people.
We walked up a cobbled green lane and in through a half-door into the kitchen. There was no ceiling. I sat at a table, and it was covered with an oilcloth. She busied herself unpacking the shopping while he took a round black pot and carved off, yes, carved off a chunk of solid porridge put it in a bowl with some milk and ate it.
He saw me looking at him. "Do you want some?" he asked. I hated porridge, and never ate it at home. "Yes," I said – and he handed me a bowl and spoon. I ate every bit, and scraped the spoon round the inside of the bowl as I had seen him do.
"Would you like to go outside and look around" they said. Even though I was only six and a half years old I realised that what they wanted was a bit of privacy, they wanted to talk about something private, and I obeyed. When I went outside the hens came over to me expecting to get something to eat. One of them actually stood between my feet, and a black and white collie came over wagging its tail, and he sat on the ground at my knee. There were two islands in the distance, and in that light to me they seemed to be floating above the horizon. And I could see the passage between them, and I could glimpse the lake leading on and on it seemed to me forever.
I don't think I've ever been as happy. I wanted the day never, never to end. When we got to the mainland he lifted me out. "You’re a toppin’ wee lad" he said. "Will you come back? We’ll make a lough man out of you yet." Nobody lives now on the island of the people. Tommy the boatman now lies under six feet of clay in Knockninny graveyard, and I regret that I never once told him of the wondrous, magical day that he gave a six year old boy half a long century ago.
I have a boat of my own now, fibreglass with a seventy horsepower engine. But I have never been able to bring myself to land on that island ever again.
