Chapter 20: Being Home
When I fly into England I feel the pull of my past. This is where was I was born. I understand these people (I probably don’t), I know how things work here (I definitely don’t anymore). England is where I came from and it is rooted in me. But when I fly back to Ireland, as the plane lands my soul is lifted and I smile and I think, Ah, now I am home.
It took me quite a while to get here! Here, as in Connemara. Here, as in on my own. I spent my first 24 years living with my parents. Then I was married to Martin for 27 years, until 1999. It was three years later that I first came to Ireland, and I have now been living on my own in Ireland for 14 years.
After I left our family home in Shepshed in the Midlands, I moved to Loughborough, a few miles down the road. My daughter Amy was with me. Her older sister Emily was away at college in London and then carried on living there before going to France for 10 years.
The house in Loughborough was a terraced house on three levels. It reminded me of the first house I had owned with Martin, also in Loughborough, 20 years before. Amy and I made it nice. Our family home in Shepshed was very big, so there was plenty of furniture for Martin and I to share and, thankfully, there was no argument over the splitting up of the contents.
The Loughborough house Amy and I moved to was a couple of minutes’ walk to the centre of this small market town. The leisure centre was round the corner to the house, as was Sainsburys.
Everything was within walking distance – the market, the restaurants, the cinema.
Having lived there for the first three years of Emily’s life, then a few miles up the road for the next 17 years, I was very familiar with Loughborough and really liked it. And I had lots of friends there whom I saw regularly.
David came into my life a few months after the move to Loughborough. In the August of that year – 1999 – there was to be a total solar eclipse and there was much excitement about where it could be seen. The South West of England seemed to be the place to be, so off I went to Devon to see it. As luck would have it, the South West was overcast and there was nothing to be seen at all! En route to Devon I had stayed with a friend, Jude, and it was there I met David. He was an old friend of Jude’s and had fallen on hard times. His marriage had broken up and he had left his wife everything. He had been a nurse, a social worker and then had run his own business training people to be witnesses in court and representing children who had no one to speak for them. He was working all hours all over the country and drinking a lot. Finally, he crashed and his business also folded, so he was working out what he was going to do next while staying with Jude and, meanwhile, doing local gardening and delivery jobs.
David was friendly and funny. His first sight of me was me sitting in a chair with a towel round my neck and purple hair dye all over my head. He didn’t seem to notice. He made breakfast for us. He was different from Martin in every way. He was shorter than Martin, always smiling and very easy going. It would have been hard not to like him.
About a week later when I was back home he called me out of the blue. I had left Jude some poems I had written about the break-up of my marriage. David asked if he might read them and I agreed. He called me again after he had read them and said they very much resonated with him and could we meet. He came to see me in Loughborough. We sat in my lounge while we talked, drinking endless cups of tea. He told me the background to his marriage and his business failings because he said he wanted me to know the truth from the beginning. I was struck by this transparency in a relationship – I wasn’t used to it. He had a strong feminine side that I found very attractive. He saved wrapping paper and ribbon, as I did, to use again. He had a drawer of greetings cards, so he always had an appropriate one to send, as did I. He loved cooking, as did I. And he was a great companion.
We both had two daughters who were about the same age so there seemed to be lots of synchronicity at play.
By the time we had started dating he was living in his own flat. He knew about my business and wanted to become a freelance trainer for my consulting company, Domino. He had run equality training sessions before. He attended a couple of training sessions I did for new trainers and observed me doing a couple of sessions. I observed him a couple of times. He was great in the classroom and was able to relate to people of all ages and backgrounds. In some ways, it was an advantage having an older white man doing equality training as he could challenge the participants, who were often older white men like himself, in a way that would have been more difficult for a woman or younger guy to do.
The first time we had sex it wasn’t great. I assumed this was because I had been used to great sex with Martin. I assumed it would probably get better with David. It didn’t. And I wasn’t in love with him. One would have thought that I would have learned my lesson after not being in love with Martin, yet here I was again. To be fair, I don’t think David was in love with me either and if he was, he never told me. But it was so easy being with him. He was a great companion. I had been traumatised by the last few painful years of my marriage and the marriage break-up and I needed respite from the tension and exhaustion of it all. I didn’t have the energy for high passion and just valued kindness and fun much more. Friends said that we would have a steep learning curve finding out about each other.
“No, there will be no rows or tension or ‘having to work things out’ in this relationship. It will be easy and fun and the minute it stops being that, I’m out,” I would tell them. David felt the same.
I think he saw me as his route back into work and, like me, he was recovering from a difficult marriage break up. Neither of us wanted to get married again. I had always said I would only get married once in my life and I had married Martin. Having stood at an altar and made vows which included ‘til death us do part’ there was no way I could stand at another altar and say that again.
My marriage broke up so, in all honesty, I couldn’t promise someone else that this time it would be forever.
How could I ever be sure?
David was born north of Donegal in northwest Ireland. His father had died when he was a baby and he and his brother were raised in Scotland by his mother, returning to Ireland every summer for holidays. Within a year of our meeting, David was spending most of his time at my house in Loughborough. He didn’t really feel at home there, or in England, in fact. He had always had a hankering to go back to Ireland, so when he suggested we get a holiday home there, I was happy to look. It would be a chance to build a home together. I had no connection with Ireland and no affinity to the place. I had flown in and out for work, never once thinking that I would love to go back there. There had been a lot of Irish girls at the college I had been to but I had never been close enough to any of them to be invited back home with them.
We took a holiday in Ireland to look round. We travelled south east and looked at Wexford and Waterford, then down to Kinsale, which was a quaint place on the water with boats rocking in the harbour and tiny streets with brightly painted houses. Then we moved west to the Ring of Kerry, then up into County Clare. In every place I looked I only asked myself one question, “Is this where I want to wake up?” I actually meant literally, Did I want to get up in the morning and look out of the window and be glad that I had a second home here? My more enlightened friends attributed far more meaning to my question than I did!
Finally, we drove into Galway, then west out of the city into the Connemara region. As we drove I felt something change.
“Oh my God, can you feel the energy coming up through the car?” I said to David.
There was a wildness and beauty about Connemara that I hadn’t seen anywhere else: majestic mountains; water everywhere you looked; ancient huge grey stones rising up out of the bogland. It wasn’t pretty but it was stunning.
We knew it would be Connemara where we would look for a house.
We thought we wanted an old Irish cottage. We definitely didn’t want a new house. When we returned to the UK we researched online and contacted an estate agent (they’re called ‘auctioneers’ in Ireland). He arranged some viewings for us, so we flew over for the weekend. Michael O’Toole stayed with us the whole day – unheard of in England. He took us to some old Irish cottages which were hugely disappointing. They were all dark and small and not insulated. I became despondent.
Then Michael said, “Well, we have time before our next viewing so why I don’t take you to see this new development first?”
“No. We definitely don’t want a new house.”
“He’s only building a few and it’s on the way to where we are going so we might as well take a look,” he said.
We followed him from Oughterard, then turned off the beaten track. The land seemed flat and uninteresting. There was nothing here: very few houses; hardly any trees; no towns or villages; no people.
“We are going to the ends of the earth,” I said to David. “Where is he taking us?”
Finally, we turned up a little track on a slight rise and through an opening where one solitary half-built house stood. But, as we got out of our car, I caught my breath. Wherever I looked, I could see the sea. The sun was shining and the tide was in and the water was so blue and sparkling. The mountain range towered over the sea to one side. There was nothing to block the view on each side of the peninsula.
On the one side, your gaze stopped at the mountains, which would comfort me in the future with their majestic presence.
On the other side you would see an expanse of sea in front of the end of the mountain range. I would come to love this view in the evening before I went to bed – black water shimmering with white streaks in the moonlight; twinkling lights from a village way across the water; absolute silence.
We stepped into the half-built house and saw that it had a very large lounge with a tiled floor. The whole house would be fully tiled downstairs with underfloor heating. There was no upstairs built yet but the floors upstairs would be hardwood. There was a huge open fireplace set into a stone wall and two windows on each wall with a stunning view from every window. It would have three bedrooms and three bathrooms. Suddenly, a new house didn’t seem such a bad idea. Michael said we could meet the builder the day after, so we agreed to return. We went back to Oughterard for the night, already excited. I phoned an engineer friend to find out what we should ask the builder. He gave me three A4 pages of questions, most of which I didn’t understand.
The next day was also a beautiful sunny day. We arrived at the site and the builder, Paraic Conneely, arrived. He was stocky, with a cap on his head. He was puffing on his pipe and every now and again as a thought occurred to him, he would pull on his cap and puff away. He had brought the plans to show us and the positions of the nine houses he would build. He would only build five in the end. He answered all my questions while I scribbled away, telling me when he didn’t know the answer and promising he would get back to us. He always did. We asked him which would be the best position for a house, which would he have if he was going to live here. He walked us down to the end of the plot.
“Here,” he said. “If you have a house there you won’t see any other house unless you’re driving in and out.” Then he said, “Would you like to come home and meet my wife and family?”
I could not imagine anywhere in England where you would view a house then be invited back to the builder’s own house.
Paraic and Brid and their family lived in the next house down the lane in a small stone cottage. Brid put on the kettle and got out the brown bread and jam and scones. This was my first introduction to the warm hospitality that is offered in every Irish home. We chatted and asked them where the nearest beach was so we could go and see it. Brid remembers this meeting well. I was wearing a long lilac knitted coat I had bought in Ireland, together with a long lilac scarf. And I was still in my purple hair phase, so everything about me was purple or lilac.
After we had left, Brid said to Paraic, “Well, they seem very nice. I don’t know about him, but she will never come and live back there.”
How wrong she was!
We decided on the way to the beach that we would buy one of his houses. We sat outside with a coffee and phoned our daughters to tell them. Then we phoned Paraic. The house was built over the next year and, as Paraic got to know us, he knew what to suggest that would be to our taste. There was great excitement the day we took possession of the house. It was June 2002. Brid and Paraic saw the removal van trundling up the narrow lane. The house was spotless. Brid had spent hours getting all the labels off the baths and sinks and toilets and cleaning the whole house. Everywhere was gleaming. There was a fire in the grate and they had brought a kettle to boil for tea.
As Paraic opened the front door to us, he said, “Welcome home.”
It brought tears to my eyes. And home it became.
One year later we bought another of his houses to rent out. We were living between England and Ireland, which proved to be troublesome, trying to remember what we had left where. I found I was loving being in Ireland. So, in February 2004, David and I relocated completely to Ireland to start a new life here.
Given that I thought I had no resonance with Ireland, I was very much at home here from the beginning. Rosmuc is a tiny place, typical of rural Ireland. The centre of activity is the local Post Office, which sold everything from groceries to paint to baths. Two pubs, two churches and a community centre completed the village amenities. Our little complex of five houses (still referred to as ‘the site’) was on the tip of a peninsula, which is why I could see the sea from all sides. The nearest supermarket was a 45-minute drive from me and Galway city was an hour away. I soon got used to thinking of Galway as ‘local’. And given that it was such a remote area, the services were excellent. The doctor’s surgery was five minutes down the lane and there was a wait of only a day or two for appointments. The internet service was provided through a radio mast and reception was excellent. Electricians and plumbers are local guys and everyone knows everyone!
Rosmuc is in one of the Irish speaking parts of Ireland called the Gaeltacht. Everyone round here speaks Irish but, luckily for me, they speak English as well. The schools in the Gaeltacht teach in Irish and you get more marks in the examination system if you do your exams in Irish (or ‘through’ Irish, as they say here). You need to have Irish to work in the government or in the media.
We became very friendly with Paraic and Brid, born and bred in Rosmuc and extremely well thought of by the whole community. I know that David and I were accepted much more quickly by the locals because we had been so easily accepted by Brid and Paraic.
Most people in Connemara have open door policies. Brid is a great example of this. Any number of people can drop in during the day and evening. There is always a welcome for them and always food. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t dream of calling at someone’s house uninvited and expecting to stay for hours. I don’t even like it if people phone me if it hasn’t been pre-arranged!
Clearly, I’ll never be properly Irish, even though I became an Irish citizen in 2018.
But now my permanent home is here. I pay my taxes here. And I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
David and I parted in 2007. We had had a commitment ceremony in 2003, but it was a commitment to ‘the dance’ – the dance we are doing together until the dance is done. And the dance is done when one person says it is and then the other will bow and say, ‘Thank you for the dance.’ Now I see our seven-year relationship very much as if we had created a huge box in a field and we each stepped into it and crouched in a corner. We both needed to recover from our respective marriages, so we sat in opposite corners and smiled and waved at one another and every now and again one of us would say, “Would you like a cup of tea?” It was peaceful. It was calm. It was stress-free. Then there came a day when I wanted to stretch my legs, so I stood up. I realised there was land outside of the box. I could step out of the box. I didn’t want to be in there any longer. David realised the same thing at about the same time. We decided to part but neither of us wanted to leave the area, so we laughed and said, “Ah, that’s the real reason we bought two houses!” I asked Paraic to extend the rented house to give me a huge office and a huge kitchen and I moved next door. David and I lived as neighbours for a few years and then he moved to another part of Galway.
I’m still here. I look out every day at the wild, majestic, beautiful landscape. I’m surrounded by the energy of the land. I don’t even need to be out walking in it. I am enveloped in it the whole time.
The presence of the land has entered me and fused with my soul. I see God everywhere I look.
The home where I was raised was a place of warmth and security. A place to go back to and recharge. A safe haven. ‘Home’ in Ireland is these things too but now in a much larger landscape somehow, even though Ireland is much smaller than England. My identity seems embedded in this landscape now and it contains who I am and who I want to be.
Every time I look out of the window, the scene has changed. Maybe the sky has changed colour, changing the hue of the sea. Sometimes the tide is out and strips of black rocks lie just above the water line. Or the tide is in and there is just a sheet of water, still and blue. At sunset, the sky can be streaked with different shades of yellow and orange. Another day it might be all crimsons and pinks. Beauty everywhere you look. When I first came here there was always a wind, a still day was worth a comment. But the weather patterns are changing. Now there are many calm days and fewer winds that whistle round the house. There is not endless rain as people think, but when it comes, it can bring the mist which slowly descends over the mountain tops and everywhere becomes white. When that happens, I feel like I am sitting inside a huge ball of cotton wool. Then, ten minutes later, I look out of the window and the mountains are clear, the sun is out and the sky is blue. Always changing and always beautiful.
I was never one for going out for a walk. “You all go, I’ll have the kettle on when you get back,” I would say to friends. Yet here, I can go to my favourite beach with sand and rocks stretching round the headland, with cows looking over the fence in the field onto the beach, with friendly dogs that want to come with you as you walk, with a huge grassy mound on the rocks which rise out of the sea. I love to walk across the beach when the tide is out, round the rocks and the rock pools and climb up to the top of that grassy hump.
From there I can see the sea in every direction – and the sand and the grass and feel the wind blowing my hair.
I feel peaceful and powerful at the same time. A friend of mine who knew my resistance to walks in the UK walked with me when she was visiting. We were wrapped up standing on the grassy mound and she said, “What are you doing here? What’s happened to you?”
I couldn’t really answer.
I see Brid regularly. She has become a close friend and I know that the quality of my life would be affected if she wasn’t around. But I have also learned the glory of solitude and silence. Both of these things have been key in developing a sense of my spiritual individuality. My life is not lonely or empty but full of intimacy and shelter. My trust in my inner belonging has lessened my outer belonging and taken away neediness. Solitude shows me the dazzle and the darkness, which are both part of me and I fear neither of them. Soul connection requires space and time and silence and solitude. All these things I find in Connemara.
On a practical level, I can be entirely selfish. I think I have become unliveable-with. I get up when I like, I go to bed when I like. I eat what I like, I watch films that I like. I don’t have any radio or TV or music on during the day. I can go three days without leaving the house and without speaking to anyone and I am still happy.
I was 58 years old before I lived alone. Everyone told me I would hate it: I loved company too much; where I lived was too remote; I was too extroverted; I would be so lonely. In fact, I have loved every minute of it and can’t imagine I will ever live with anyone again or in any other place.
Ireland called me and I came home.
Photo
Beautiful Connemara.
Questions For Reflection
Where do you think of as ‘home’? Is it where you were raised as a child or where you live now? How important to you is it to have somewhere you call home rather than somewhere where you live? How do you make somewhere you live into a home? Where is your ideal home? Are you living in it now?
A Blessing While You Reflect
“This is where your life has arrived,
After all the years of effort and toil;
Look back with graciousness and thanks
On all your great and quiet achievements.
Now is the time to enjoy your heart’s desire,
To live the dreams you’ve waited for,
To awaken the depths beyond your work
And enter into your infinite source”
From John O’Donohue: Benedictus
