I have been reading my diary from 1974, when I first came to Ireland. I had a better pen back then, the nib medium oblique, the diary octavo, ruled feint. I was staying in the annexe at Glenmore, outside Cobh, with a soft and worthy family, Swantons, in their longtime place, writing lectures about French poets I didn't like, waiting for the rush of light at the end of the day, the start of teaching, the next encounter, and the foghorn across the harbour. I picked up hitchhikers, talked, walked, drove about, all eyes, ears and interiority, picked watercress and carragheen along the beach, ate windfall apples.
A diary is a fine place to build a life. Reading myself fifty years ago I can see that. I can see who I was and who I still am. In the same country. Such a distance between Glenmore, outside Cobh, in Cork Harbour, and Inniscarra, where I went next, where I still am.
On Sunday I went to Glenmore to mark the anniversary, I walked along the beach and up the grassy path to the house. As with the fortieth anniversary, ten years ago, there was no one there. I knocked and rang defunct doorbells, noticed the geraniums and the windfalls, apples and pears, on a table outside. Went back down to the beach and had some bengal spice tea from my flask. It was a flat grey day. A sharp wind off the refineries. Ten years ago there were dead fish; I read Virginia Woolf and remembered the rowboat that used to be on the beach.
This time there was a pale pink fleece dropped on the grassy path up. I never fail to be moved by the path up from the stony beach, the mowed grass, the hydrangeas, the stone steps up to the terrace in front of the house. Just as my friend Annette said that my mother's kitchen was the model for hers, perhaps the setting of the Swanton house was the model for Inniscarra, though there is no sea, no harbour, here, I have wanted to find the mean level of this side of the hill, to plant it as it deserves, as we all deserve.
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