[This post continues a discussion that began in my February post, Fantasy 1939: Patricia Lynch, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels, which you can find here. However, it can also be read independently, I hope!]
In Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels (1939) relatives are always going missing. The child protagonists, for example, disappear into the past, get turned into eagles or find themselves trapped in magic mushrooms, to the understandable consternation of the family members they leave behind. But Eileen and Seamus at least have a family, which lends their disappearances a kind of holiday air, since they are safely tethered to the small but comfortable bog-side cottage they share with their parents, the home to which they always return no matter how far their travels take them in space and time. One of their earlier books of adventures, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Goes Visiting (1935), is even cast as a vacation on a nearby island, ending in a homecoming to the family cabin they left a few days earlier. The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels focuses on moments between episodes of work, of which a holiday is an extended example: trips to town to buy seeds for the garden, trips to the agricultural show to display the children’s flowers and vegetables, a trip to the circus, the family festival of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It is also full of accidental digressions from labour, such as the trip through time to a Danish invasion of Ireland which takes place when Seamus drives the family’s donkey-cart along the wrong road on an errand from his father, or the trip that ends in imprisonment in the magic mushroom, which takes place when Eileen gets distracted from her work of picking nuts for the family larder. Useful work and family life frame each adventure, lending it a stability and security it would not otherwise possess.
The other novel Lynch published in 1939 – The Grey Goose of Kilnevin – contains similar ingredients, including people who go missing, digressions from work, and even a circular narrative structure, taking the child protagonist away from and back to the house from which she set out at the beginning of her adventures; but it has a very different atmosphere, largely thanks to the different circumstances of that child protagonist. Sheila lives in the House of the Four Swans with an unpleasant woman called Fat Maggie, who treats her like a slave and sends her on an errand from which she hopes the little girl will never return. If Sheila does come back, she expects to be in trouble with Fat Maggie for one reason or another, since every errand she is sent on ends in a telling-off. At the same time, all her adventures are haunted by the idea of a loving family home of the kind enjoyed by the child protagonists of the turf-cutter’s donkey series, Eileen and Seamus. Sheila has made a small corner of Fat Maggie’s house her own – a ‘tiny cubby-hole under the stairs’ where she has her bed, and in which she keeps her precious story books and two or three other treasured possessions.[1] This is her home, in her imagination, and it’s this small corner of the house that endures to the end of the narrative, making it something like the miniature damaged Noah’s Ark which is her only toy, adrift in a flood of mysterious happenings but offering stability and a lifeline to those who desperately need them.
Sheila’s story is immersed in strangeness like a land immersed in mist, or an ark immersed in the heaving waters of the flood. Indeed, mist and other difficult weather conditions – rain, snow, darkness and another flood – pervade the text, hiding the land from the child who is travelling through it on her seemingly endless errand for Fat Maggie. The mist stands in, perhaps, for the obscurity of the past; Sheila has no memory of her parents or origins, while one of the fellow travellers she meets, the Ballad Singer, has forgotten who he is altogether, which means he is never named. Another fellow traveller is only ever known as the apple woman, and though her name is mentioned once – Mary Anne (p. 121) – we never find out where she is from or whether she has a family, unlike the apple woman in The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels, who has a good sense of her own origins. A third is a boy named Fergus, who once travelled with the tinkers (pp. 255-6) but knows nothing more about himself, it seems. Even the two named children, Sheila and Fergus, do not have surnames to attach them to relatives or places; only the grey goose of the title knows who she is and where she came from. The four human travellers wander through a landscape bereft of names or distinguishing features apart from fallen trees and the occasional body of water, along roads which seem to be constantly changing direction, through towns that don’t exist on any map. The Ireland of The Grey Goose of Kilnevin has lost itself, and Sheila’s unwritten task is to help it find its way to a new identity.
In this quest for coordinates, and hence for a history and a satisfactory way of living, Sheila is assisted by her love of stories: the story books she keeps in her cubby hole, the stories she tells herself to earn food and shelter on her travels. The reader will recognise some of these, as they have echoes in the story we’re reading, helping us to map its incidents onto templates provided by our memories and so to accept them despite their strangeness. Fat Maggie’s desire to be rid of Sheila, which prompts her to send her on what seems an impossible errand, echoes the hostility of the stepmother in Hansel and Gretel, who is always trying to lose the children in the forest. When Sheila first meets the young grey goose of the title, who is barely more than a fledgling, she keeps calling her a duck, which echoes Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fable ‘The Ugly Duckling’ – though the duckling grew up to be a swan, of course, and the grey goose never does. Later, Sheila compares the goose to the bird that laid the golden eggs in the tale of Mother Goose, because of her uncanny ability to lay eggs to order (p. 18, pp. 46-49).[2] When Sheila tastes a few drops of golden water and finds she can understand what the goose is saying, Irish readers will be reminded of the story of the salmon of knowledge, which was caught by Finegas and given to the boy Fionn to cook on a fire. Fionn burned his thumb on a drop of the fish’s fat, sucked it, and thereby acquired all the knowledge that had once been stored in the salmon’s flesh, just as Sheila acquires knowledge of the language of birds and beasts by tasting the liquid she was sent to purchase by her abusive employer. Towards the end of her adventures Sheila meets four children who have been transformed by magic into swans by another hostile stepmother, and Irish readers will remember the Children of Lir, who were cursed to live as swans for many decades, wandering up and down the island of Ireland till released from their curse by a friendly saint. They may also remember an alternative version of the story told by Yeats in his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), in which the four swans are replaced by twelve wild geese, who must be liberated from their enchantment by their courageous sister. The little grey farmyard goose who is Sheila’s closest companion is always hearkening after its relatives in the wild, tempted to join them on their travels despite the weakness of her wings; Irish readers will know that ‘wild geese’ is also a term for emigrants who left Ireland to serve as soldiers in other countries, and who could therefore stand in for the wider Irish diaspora. Many of these stories deal with one or more people who lose their homes and must go through many adventures before they find a place for themselves, if they ever do. The very fact of being one among many wanderers helps to give Sheila the sense that she is part of a wider community; and this sense is reinforced by the way the little group of travellers she teams up with – the grey goose, Fergus, the Ballad Singer, the apple woman – gradually become her found family, as they help each other survive through their special skills and mutual affection.
The magical world encountered by Sheila, however, differs from the world of myth and fairy tale in the sheer ordinariness of the magical things and episodes it contains. The golden water tasted by Sheila, for instance – the water that gives her the power to understand the speech of birds and animals – is taken from an ordinary rock pool in Kilnevin harbour. The ugly duckling in this story turns out to be a small fat goose, not a regal swan. The goose in question, Betsy, lays eggs to order, but these are not golden eggs; just ordinary goose eggs, which furnish Sheila and her friends with the best of suppers (pp. 46-8). The flock of wild geese which Betsy the goose and the old Ballad Singer choose to follow are simply that – a flock of wild geese, not altered children – though miracles accumulate around them, as when they carry Sheila to safety across a bridge of mist (p. 56), or help Fergus fly to Sheila when he has lost track of her whereabouts (p. 242). The residence vaguely remembered by the old Ballad Singer as his first home, and the place he is looking for throughout the story, sounds palatial – ‘a mansion wid silver walls an gleamin roof’, as he tells Sheila (p. 37) – but turns out to be the ordinary house from which Sheila set out at the start of the novel, though transfigured by a humble act of magic into ‘a fine square house with freshly whitened walls and a grand tiled roof, gleaming and sparkling’ in the morning sun (p. 283). Each of these ordinary objects and creatures drifts easily in and out of a state of enchantment. At times Sheila can even bring about these gentle transitions from the ordinary to the magical and back again through the sheer force of her imagination, as when she gets frightened by a talking scarecrow and makes believe with all her might that it can no longer talk or move – something that duly happens a few sentences later (‘The scarecrow stood still and silent without ever answering a word’, p. 70). In this she exhibits the power of the storyteller, whose work, as Lynch conceives it, is to demonstrate the wonderful strangeness of the everyday, rather than to lose itself in the more nebulous wonders of the weird, the other-worldly or the ideal.
It’s worth quoting Lynch on the storyteller’s work to get a grip on what she’s reaching for in her fantastic writing:
Critics have said that they find in my writing a blend of ordinary life and of fantasy. I appreciate the compliment, for usually it is meant that way. But I have always considered that ordinary life – all life – is a fantasy, though it is certainly reality as well. What can be more fantastic than those bonds of friendship and affection that spring up out of nowhere and bind people together? What is more fantastic than our world of sea and sky, of red sunsets and golden moons. Yet if among the waving white bog cotton (canavaun), I spy just one little leprechaun, people who accepted all the other wonders as ‘ordinary’, think that this is most fantastic. It is time we saw life as a whole and realized its magic. What I have tried to do in my books is to reveal the magic of ordinary life.[3]
To this end, Lynch has her child protagonist reject the chance of a life beyond the bounds of ‘ordinary life’ on several occasions. When Sheila completes her errand for Fat Maggie, for instance – collecting three pounds of butter from a magical woman called Bridgie Swallow, who can change at will into the bird whose name she bears – she is offered the chance to stay with Bridgie for ever in a kind of fairy land, where she can visit a fairytale castle whenever she wants to, and perhaps make permanent friends of the princely Children of Lir. But Sheila quickly comes to the conclusion that she’d rather go back to her found family, the Ballad-Singer, the apple woman and Fergus the sulky boy, than inhabit this unchangingly perfect environment. Again, when she helps the Children of Lir they offer to reward her by granting her a wish, and she chooses to be made as beautiful as they are, transformed in her own eyes from an ugly goose to a lovely human swan. But when Fergus sees her in her new form he at first does not recognize her, then expresses disgust at her appearance: ‘You’re not the Sheila I know,’ he tells her, ‘You look like a doll[!]’ (p. 244). He goes on to explain his disgust in detail:
Look at the colour of your hair! It’s like straw! Look at your eyes! They’re like bits of blue glass! Look at your mouth! It’s like a squashed strawberry! You used to have brown hair and brown eyes and a mouth that looked like a mouth. You used to be a proper girl! (p. 245)
So when Betsy the goose agrees with Fergus (she likes Sheila best in the ordinary form she took when Betsy first met her, ‘when I was tired and harashed an parched wid the drought, an ye were very good to me’, p. 245), Sheila decides to go back to her old appearance, discarding her metaphorical swan-form and remaining a ‘proper girl’ for the rest of the novel. In the process she revises the ending of Andersen’s story of the ugly duckling, choosing to retain her ‘ugly’ ordinariness because that’s what people associate with her best qualities: freely-given affection, hard work for the good of all, and generosity to strangers, whether beast or human.
In fact, revisions of Andersen’s story occur on several occasions in the novel. First, as we’ve seen, Sheila mistakes the grey goose Betsy for a duck when she first meets her, and is perfectly happy when she finds she’s a little fat goose instead of a swan. Later Sheila tries to tell the story of the Ugly Duckling in return for food and lodging at an inn run by a hostile woman who recalls Fat Maggie; but she cannot finish the story because the woman keeps ‘glaring’ at her, and the narrative peters out without achieving its happy ending (p. 80). Finally, on returning to her starting point – the House of the Four Swans – she finds that the building has burned down, leaving intact only her cubby-hole under the stairs and most of the kitchen. Shortly afterwards, however, the house is miraculously restored to its intact state, and at this point it is renamed ‘the House of the Grey Goose’, with a sign carved by the boy Fergus, who has displayed his talent for carving many times since Sheila met him (p. 285). The old Ballad Singer celebrates its restoration by announcing a ceilidh, which at once marks the house as a gathering-place for the local community, like the house of Mrs Rafferty in Lynch’s realist novel Fiddler’s Quest (1941). At this point the regal swan of Andersen’s story – Lynch’s Four Swans – has been transformed into an ordinary goose, without royal associations but with rich folkloric properties of its own. Meanwhile the story of the Ugly Duckling has acquired a different moral (and as the Ballad-Singer affirms, ‘No story is complete widout a moral’, p. 49). Instead of the protagonist being revealed as a member of the privileged elite, with their graceful curving necks and dazzling whiteness – as it is in Andersen – a community of ordinary geese (Sheila and her friends) finds a permanent habitation, a home to which other ordinary creatures are drawn by their instinctive liking for its kindly residents. Everyone is welcome at the House of the Grey Goose, and the creativity it fosters – the old Ballad-Singer’s singing, Fergus’s carving, Sheila’s talent for telling stories – is freely shared with those who choose to come inside.
The world, of course, had great need for such a community in 1939. Ireland as Lynch depicts it in The Grey Goose of Kilnevin is a place lost in the mist, unclear as to the relationship between past and present, uncertain how to address itself to strangers, or indeed to its own citizens. Kilnevin, the town of the title, is a bustling, cheerful place; but when Sheila and the grey goose set out from there on their travels they find themselves wandering through eerie nameless zones without a geographical or moral compass. On first leaving Kilnevin, Sheila and her companions – at this stage the grey goose, the Ballad Singer and Fergus (they meet the apple woman much later) – soon lose their way, crossing an insubstantial bridge of mist which leads to a foggy mountainside where a misplaced scarecrow stands; misplaced because it isn’t protecting any crops and because it’s unable to scare away crows. The scarecrow is surrounded by jeering birds on its rock-strewn island in the mist, like a bedraggled St Brendan on the Island of Birds (‘There were rooks and magpies, hedge sparrows and wrens, swallows and starlings’, p. 58); but although the birds show no fear of its stick arms and rusty gun, Sheila quickly learns to distrust the scarecrow’s intentions, noting that ‘The longer she looked at [it] the less [she] liked it’ (p. 62). The scarecrow is joined at nightfall by a host of rabbits – ‘too many’, as Fergus darkly observes (p. 63) – and starts to behave like a despot, first demanding that Sheila give it the goose to keep as a pet, then separating her from her companions and plunging her in darkness; no wonder Betsy describes it as a ‘fearsome creature’ (p. 69). Later, though, Sheila seems to think of it more as a wonder than a monster; and it bequeaths to the Ballad Singer – who himself resembles a scarecrow – its neat green coat, which he exchanges for the ragged coat he was wearing when Sheila first meets him. A green coat has powerful resonances, of course, for the Irish, and by passing on this symbolic garment to Sheila’s travelling companion the scarecrow could be said to pass on to him and his party the task of representing Ireland in the gloomy final year of the 1930s. The scarecrow, in other words, could be read as a dilapidated Ireland of the present – or perhaps the recent past – and Sheila and her friends as an Ireland of the future, seeking out some corner of the country in which to put down roots for a better and more fruitful existence.[4]
Along the way, Sheila and her companions pass through several communities which are actively hostile to travellers like themselves. In one town, the female innkeeper begrudges Sheila, Fergus and the Ballad-Singer the most basic of shelters in a howling storm, and later tries to steal the little grey goose from Sheila to cook for supper, thereby aligning herself with the cannibalistic witch in Hansel and Gretel. In another town Sheila finds that she is wholly invisible to the occupants, who spend their time quarrelling and buying unpleasant goods such as cough lozenges, carbolic soap and boot polish under the watchful eye of an oversized policeman, who enjoys ‘swinging his baton and glaring about him’ in a threatening manner (p. 200).[5] This is a ‘neat, tidy, cleaned-up town’ which defines itself in hostile opposition to what lies beyond its borders: the encroaching forest, the winter snow, and homeless wanderers of every description. Both towns have all the ingredients for pleasant living – in the first, a hostelry that advertises ‘FOOD AND LODGING / FOR MAN AND BASTE’ (p. 74) and resounds with song; in the second, fine shops, a market place, pavements and neat garden paths (p. 196) – but both choose to fill every available space with selfish people, nasty lyrics, squabbles and fights, unnecessary artefacts and harsh regulations (as embodied by the policeman). It’s as if Kilnevin had been warped by the likes of Fat Maggie into a dystopia from which the poor, the old and the orphaned young have been excluded, left to endure the vagaries of the weather with only ruins to protect them.[6] In the middle chapters of the novel, in fact, Sheila and her companions take shelter in a ruined cottage, and contrive with their creativity and friendly conversation to transform it into yet another version of the ideal home, echoing Sheila’s bedroom under the stairs at the start of the book and the utopian House of the Grey Goose in the final chapter. This version of that home is only temporary, however, and the companions are forced to flee through the roof when they get snowed in. The ideal Ireland is always potentially present in Lynch’s novel, but only comes into being in the final pages, when Sheila and her traveller friends find a permanent home in its only named community, the seaside town of Kilnevin.
To understand what has happened to Ireland in this book, it will help to turn to the final novel in the Turf Cutter’s Donkey sequence, Long Ears (1943). In this book Lynch recounts the titular donkey’s adventures from birth to the day he meets his future friends, the turf-cutter’s children Eileen and Seamus, who are his inseparable companions in the other three books of the series. The farm where Long Ears is born is a happy place, where animals of different species live in harmony, a little girl acts out fairy tales with her dolls, and the adults are ‘dacent people’ who say ‘Never a harsh word from dawn till dark’.[7] But young Long Ears is lured away from the farm by a wily cat, and soon finds himself on a long, hard, weary road – first with a community of tinkers, some of whom treat him harshly, and afterwards with other wanderers on a mysterious ‘Road of Dreams’ – the same road to which he returns with Eileen and Seamus in later life – populated with lost souls from the distant past and the unhappy present. On this road he meets a red-haired dwarf from Irish legend, Fer Fi, who plays tunes on a magic harp which can make its hearers weep, sleep, or laugh. The dwarf informs the donkey that all his troubles arise from the fact that he has strayed onto the ‘wrong side of the mountain’ – presumably at the precise moment when he wandered away from the farm where he lived with his mother. ‘We all spend our lives climbing,’ explains Fer Fi, but ‘If we’re foolish, we take the wrong path’ (pp. 213-4), finding ourselves in the barren, troublesome place through which Long Ears has travelled ever since. On this ‘wrong side of the mountain’ the young donkey meets sad rabbits, haughty sheep, and a stag who fell asleep in a magic cave at a time when Ireland was covered with forest, and woke to find itself in an Ireland covered instead with bustling towns ‘full of dogs and fear’ (p. 207). The stag leads Long Ears to one of these towns, which is just as strange and forbidding as the nameless towns in the Goose of Kilnevin. Surrounded by a high wall, its streets are empty and neglected, its inhabitants fast asleep, and its streets plastered with posters bearing a sinister message:
NO BALLAD SINGERS ALLOWED.
NO STORY TELLING PERMITTED.
CIRCUSES KEEP AWAY. DANCING PROHIBITED.
NO FAIRS HELD IN THIS TOWN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. (p. 209)
Soon afterwards Fer Fi suggests that the sentiment on these posters led directly to the town’s decay. ‘It all began,’ he tells Long Ears,
when they shut out the ballad singers and the story tellers. Then they built a wall to keep out the musicianers and the apple women, the balloon men, the toy sellers. When a circus came along they shut the gate and then they stopped the fairs! […] They were trying to be grand and proud. They wanted every one to be like themselves – working in shops and offices and living in the town. Soon their shops were empty and their kitchens, too. The children had no toys and all of them were cross and hungry. (pp. 212-3)
When Fer Fi was shut out, too – banned as a ‘musicianer’ because of his ‘three-stringed harp’ – he avenged himself by playing the ‘tune of sleep’ and setting the whole town dreaming, like a dismal version of the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. They can only awaken into happiness and prosperity when they learn to welcome travellers again, among them the ballad singers, storytellers, toy makers and apple women embodied by Sheila and her friends in the Goose of Kilnevin. Ireland, it’s implied, must embrace the whole of its culture if it’s to retain its vitality; its travelling folk must be welcomed into its settled communities, its traditional arts must be celebrated and nurtured, and the drab uniformity of the capitalist marketplace must be kept at bay. For Lynch, the Road of Dreams that leads to the ‘wrong side of the mountain’ is the road or dream of capitalism, from which the land must be urgently woken if it’s to free itself from the sterility of the nameless towns depicted in both novels. As a storyteller herself, her task is to alert her Irish readers to this necessity by luring them onto a different Road of Dreams: the road that teaches its travellers to make the most of what Lynch calls ‘ordinary life’, and to respect the mythical past that underpins every aspect of the Irish present.
‘Ordinary life’, for Lynch, refers to the lives of ordinary working people: not the ruling or middle classes, nor the church authorities, but the kinds of economically disadvantaged folk her stories focus on to the exclusion of all others: the folk who expend their creative energies in building happy communities, from cheerful families and towns to knots of mutually supportive travelling companions. Sheila and her friends are particularly adept in this art of community-building, setting up house in caves or clearings or ruined cottages as happily as in a well-appointed house, and inviting all comers to share their space. Excluding such friendly home-builders from its civic streets and houses – consigning them to the mercies of the wilderness or the windswept country roads – ensures that Ireland as a whole exists in a dreary nothing state, a nameless wasteland where the ‘bonds of friendship and affection’, as Lynch calls them in her essay, are devalued as merely ‘fantastic’.
Where Long Ears identifies that dreary condition as the ‘wrong side of the mountain’, in The Grey Goose of Kilnevin it’s the wrong road; and roads, it seems, are difficult things to navigate or assess. All the problems encountered by Sheila and her friends arise from ‘straying from the road’, or so Fergus believes, and the boy spends much of his time searching for a ‘proper road’ for them to take in place of the wrong one (p. 99); but roads are so many and various that a ‘proper road’ seems hard to identify. The companions find themselves travelling along many strange paths in the course of their wanderings: from a fox’s road, which is marked by certain distinctive trees in a trackless forest, to the path of the wild geese across the stormy sky, or the invisible road across the floodwaters which Sheila must follow to recover the swan-feather cloaks of the Children of Lir. Even when they find themselves on an indisputably ‘proper’ road – a racecourse or a railway – the travellers inevitably use it in the wrong way, straying across the racecourse in the middle of a race, for instance, to the rage of the massed spectators, or boarding a train without a valid ticket, to the outrage of the ticket collector. At one point Sheila comes across a fork in the road marked by a mysterious signpost whose arms point in two directions – up and down – exhorting passers-by to ‘dig’ or ‘fly’ (p. 90). Neither of these options seems the ‘proper’ one to Sheila (who insists ‘I can’t fly and I won’t dig’), but later both she and Fergus find themselves digging a path through snow to escape from the ruined cabin (pp. 163-4), then flying with the wild geese through the sky, seated on the apple woman’s ‘good shawl’ (p. 264), on the way back to the House of the Four Swans. By the time Sheila finds Bridgie Swallow – the woman whose butter she was sent to fetch – she has no idea which road she was meant to have taken, or indeed whether there is any ‘proper’ road at all for her to take:
‘Are you lost?’ [Bridgie] asked in a tiny voice.
‘I’ve been lost a long time,’ sighed Sheila. ‘But if I could only find the road now I wouldn’t say a word.’
‘Which road are you looking for?’ asked the little woman.
But that was just what Sheila couldn’t tell her. (p. 223)
Ireland’s roads have become a bewildering maze for the little girl, largely because she has become defined as a homeless traveller, an outcast from the capitalist economy that governs the country’s settled communities. She is not an animal like the fox, or a bird like the wild geese, but she is not seen as wholly human either, and so has no direction, no recognizable coordinates in the land of her birth.
But Sheila’s outcast status, it emerges, is another fantasy; a potentially deadly fantasy imposed on her by those who seek to commandeer her rightful inheritance. Her conversation with Bridgie takes place in another variation on the ideal home: the ‘green cave of tree-trunks and bushes’ where Bridgie lives, its greenness marking it out as a version of Ireland. But though Bridgie invites the little girl to share the cave with her, Sheila knows it isn’t the place where she should pass the rest of her days. She tells herself she should live instead with her newfound family, Fergus, the Ballad Singer and the apple woman, and Bridgie later tells her exactly where: ‘[T]he House of the Four Swans is yours’, she explains (p. 231), which is why Fat Maggie wants rid of her, since with Sheila gone she can claim the property as her own. Sheila’s ‘proper’ road, in other words – the road that is her own, which is what ‘proper’ means, at least in French – is the road that leads to the House of the Four Swans, her proper home as well as the place where she was mistreated by Fat Maggie. After getting this important information Sheila quickly meets up again with Fergus and the others; but first Bridgie Swallow gives her some clothes, having noticed that the child’s own clothes have been worn to pieces by her travels. Sheila’s new clothes are green, the same colour as the coat given to the Ballad Singer by the scarecrow (p. 248); and in putting them on she identifies herself as an embodiment of Ireland, seeking the home that has always been hers despite its rejection of her.[8]
The stage is set for Sheila’s return to claim her birthright from Fat Maggie, a final act that also establishes her travelling companions as both her real and adoptive family, encouraging Irish readers to do the same with any outcasts or strangers they meet on the Irish roads. The road home turns out to be as eccentric as the roads away from home – flying with the geese on the apple woman’s shawl, as if on a magic carpet, or tumbling down a mountainside into the middle of the Kilnevin marketplace. But the bond of friendship between the companions ensures that they finally succeed in achieving a happy ending, despite the maze of eccentric routes they have followed on their adventures. Their familial relationship is first acknowledged by the people of Kilnevin when they recognise the old Ballad Singer as Sheila’s grandfather, the man who forgot his identity long ago and left his home in the House of the Four Swans to wander the roads, abandoning his grandchild to the untender mercies of Fat Maggie. By extension, the people of Kilnevin also assume that the apple woman is Sheila’s aunt and Fergus her cousin (p. 278), refusing to listen when the boy denies his kinship with any of them. When the travellers reach the gate of the House of the Four Swans, Sheila’s three human companions reluctantly set off on their wanderings again, assuming that the little girl has finally reached the place where she belongs and that there will be no room in it for vagrants like themselves. But an attack on Sheila by Fat Maggie brings them hurrying to her rescue, and at this point it becomes clear that all their roads lead in the same direction. Sheila insists that the House of the Four Swans ‘is your home as well as mine’ and that ‘I’d never be happy without you’ (p. 278); and so the familial relationship between them is finally confirmed. At this point the reader might notice that there are four human travellers in this little party, corresponding to the four swans of the Irish myth, and that like the birds they have just made the transition from a quasi-animal state to full humanity. Friendship has worked its magic on them, and it’s also the magic of friendship, it seems, that restores the House of the Four Swans to its pristine splendour after a fire has burned it down, shaking the ‘burnt-out ruin’ like an earthquake and refashioning it into the mansion remembered by the Ballad Singer in his visionary moments.
The restoration takes place after Sheila has returned from another shopping expedition, this time to fetch food and other necessities to make the ruins of the House of the Four Swans habitable again. Throughout this second shopping trip the little girl is repeatedly reminded of her earlier errand for Fat Maggie. Before Sheila sets out, the apple woman checks to make sure she will not ‘be goin off on adventures the way ye did when Maggie Fagan sent ye’ (p. 281); and a bookstall owner in the Kilnevin marketplace gives her a similar warning: ‘Sure, ye don’t want to go down in history as the girl that took till Tibb’s Eve to do a message’ (p. 283). This time, however, Sheila manages to avoid the unmoored wanderings that followed her first shopping expedition, and hurries home secure in the knowledge that she is now indistinguishable from the other children at the fair, since ‘I’ve a grandfather, and next door to an aunt and a brother, as well as a pet goose’ (p. 282). As she enters the ruined building where her found family awaits her she tells herself, ‘It’s really home now’ (p. 284, my emphasis); and it’s at this point, when she recognises the ruined House as ‘really’ her home – made so by the loving community assembled there – that the building miraculously reconstitutes itself: ‘The air was filled with flying sawdust. The walls were shaking. The door leading into the passage swung open, then slammed’, and moments later
The sun was shining, not on a burnt-out ruin, but on a fine square house with freshly whitened walls and a grand tiled roof, gleaming and sparkling. The windows were open to let in the morning air and the green paint on the doors was fresh and gay. (p. 285)
Echoing Sheila, the old Ballad Singer exclaims ‘Isn’t it well to be home at last’, and the usually sceptical Fergus confirms the secular miracle by means of a close examination of the structure: ‘Fergus rubbed the walls with his hand. He poked the doors with his fingers and felt the glass in the windows’ (p. 285). The greenness of the doors, like the greenness of Sheila’s new clothes and the greenness of the old Ballad Singer’s coat, confirms this as a specifically Irish house and an Irish miracle, and assures Lynch’s Irish readers that such a transformation could be worked on their own battered country, given the right conditions and the right collective attitude on the part of its citizens.
The restoration of the House is fantastic, of course, since the speed and ease with which it’s accomplished are impossible; but it’s no more fantastic, Lynch would claim, than the ‘bonds of friendship and affection that spring up out of nowhere and bind people together’. Those bonds may be a fantasy, in that they have no material existence, but Lynch insists that they are ‘certainly a reality as well’; and her book is designed to make that fantasy real, that is, to make it seen, so that it’s no longer invisible as Sheila was in the ‘neat, tidy, cleaned-up town’ overseen by the menacing policeman. The moment when the House of the Four Swans becomes ‘really home’ is the moment the fantasy of friendship and affection makes its realness felt, even as its effects seem most fantastic. The open doors and light-giving windows it fashions are solid ones, no matter how impossible the means by which they were ushered into existence.
In my account of the final chapter I haven’t paid much attention to the ‘pet goose’ which accompanies Sheila throughout her travels. This seems particularly neglectful given that the little fat bird lends her name to Lynch’s novel, much as the legendary Mother Goose lends her name to many collections of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. As we’ve seen, The Grey Goose of Kilnevin is a kind of story collection as well as a novel, much like the story-books Sheila carries with her on her adventures: it’s packed with fairy tales, myths and legends, many of them containing geese, and it has a fairy-tale ending, too, though a modest one involving a house instead of a palace or castle. When the bookstall owner gives Sheila a story-book she has always coveted – a story-book bound in green and gold – she might almost be giving her a copy of Lynch’s novel, or something like it. My own copy is bound in grey, to match the colour of the grey goose Betsy, but many of her other books were published by Dent in green bindings with gold lettering stamped on the spine (my own copy of her quasi-autobiographical A Storyteller’s Childhood [1947] is bound in this way), no doubt to underline their Irish content. As well as a book, however, The Grey Goose of Kilnevin refers to a house, the hostelry run by Sheila and her friends, to which the people of Kilnevin are invited for a ceilidh in the final chapter. The title, then, brings together a loving and quasi-magical little person (Betsy the goose), a fantastic story-book and an enchanted hostelry or inn, which offers food and lodgings for everyone who walks through its door, homeless or propertied, human or nonhuman, old or young. It combines, then, every major concern of Lynch’s socialist vision – kind human beings, imaginative writing, wholesome habitations – and so stands as a working model of good living in the dark days leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. It can serve as a working model for us, too, I think, guaranteed to make our own dark days a little brighter.
NOTES
[1] Patricia Lynch, The Grey Goose of Kilnevin (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1939), p. 39. All references are to this edition. It should be mentioned that the most widely available version of this novel, first published as a Puffin Book in 1951 and reprinted by other publishers since, has been cut to fit the standard length of early Puffin paperbacks, and so leaves out some of Sheila’s adventures. These include (I think) her meeting with a talking scarecrow and her visit to the ‘neat, tidy, cleaned-up town’ ruled over by a large policeman.
[2] It seems likely Sheila knows the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs from the popular pantomime Mother Goose rather than from Aesop’s fable, which has the same title but ends in the death of the goose. For an anonymous early poem that tells the story of the pantomime, ‘Mother Goose and the Golden Egg’ (c. 1860), see here.
[3] This quotation is taken from Lynch’s account of herself, here given the title ‘Patricia Lynch (Mrs Richard A. Fox)’, at CatholicAuthors.com, here.
[4] The episode recalls the second stanza of Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which famously runs: ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing, /For every tatter in its mortal dress’. The old Ballad Singer is an aged man who sings; while the scarecrow is more the type for studying ‘Monuments of its own magnificence’, being worshipped by rabbits and having a high opinion of itself in every way. Incidentally, Yeats died in 1939, the year of the book’s publication.
[5] This garda is one of several threatening policemen in Irish fantasy, from the policemen who arrest the Philosopher in James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold (1912) to the terrifying constables who populate Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (c. 1940).
[6] ‘That is no country for old men’, begins Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, but Lynch’s Ireland is no country for young or old.
[7] Long Ears: The Story of a Little Grey Donkey (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1943, reprinted 1944), p. 2. All references are to this edition.
[8] In Lynch’s day Ireland was often represented in literature by a girl or old woman, most famously Cathleen ni Houlihan in Lady Gregory’s and Yeats’s 1902 play of that name, a role first performed by Lynch’s friend the celebrated nationalist Maude Gonne. Sheila’s green clothes make her a diminutive version of Cathleen, who is also a wanderer.