THANK God November’s nearly over. I hate it.
This is not the month of the year when most people die – that honour goes to January for a variety of reasons – but for me, November is the death month.
Loss. Grief. Wandering souls. Dead leaves. Dormant trees. Wasps crawling sluggishly out of crevices, belatedly realising it’s the wrong month, and, well, dying.
Dying, death, graves, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day. Wholesome but depressing. So, it’s no surprise that November invariably reminds me of the time I saw the ghosts. (More of this later).
This is the month for remembering and praying for our loved ones. It’s about grieving, about loss and the blessing of graves.
Most of all, though, November is associated with the most horrendous torture. Take the Catherine Wheel, one of the world’s most popular fireworks. Today, November 25 is also known at Catterntide, or St Catherine’s Day, in remembrance of Catherine of Alexandria, a scholar, princess and patron of the academically inclined, who converted many people to Christianity.
The 18-year-old virgin (oh, how they loved their virgin martyrs back then) was martyred in the fourth century by being bound to the spokes of a breaking wheel and rotated while an executioner shattered her limbs with a hammer. Well, the firework is named after her. God, I thought, when I read about poor Catherine, how I wished I hadn’t started this. Last Thursday was St Clement’s Day, the anniversary of the martyrdom of the man who was reputedly the first to refine iron from ore and shoe a horse. For his trouble, he was tied to an anchor and tossed into the sea.
Then of course, there’s poor Guy Fawkes, the unfortunate soldier who was persuaded to lead a bunch of angry Roman Catholics furious at the repression visited upon them by King James 1. They plotted to blow up the palace at Westminister during the state opening of parliament. The plot was discovered and poor Fawkes was tortured on the rack, following which he faced being hung and disembowelled, but he jumped from the gallows and died from a broken neck (though they were so mad they still disembowelled him.) To this day the British celebrate Guy Fawkes Day on November 5 with fireworks, masked children begging “a penny for the guy,” and the burning of effigies.
Anyway, November and the ghosts. I was in sixth class and my parents, concerned by my lack of ability in Irish had decided to pack me off to the West Cork Gaeltacht, in the depths of winter, for a three-month immersion in the Irish language.
It was a long journey the picturesque seaside village where I lived with my noisy squabbling siblings to the home of a farmer and his wife up a West Cork mountainside. My father silently drove me up the long, lonely winding boreen with bogs on either side of it. It was probably cheerful enough in summer but this time of year everything looked macabre.
I cheered up when I saw my bedroom – it was pink and had its very own sink and hot and cold taps, which was pretty darn posh for those days. The Bean an Tí was kind. She made a fuss of me, and fed me home-made brown bread and porridge made with milk in the mornings for breakfast and went out of her way to serve nice dinners.
Each morning I trudged glumly down the boreen, my ears full of her warnings not to fall into the bogs on either side.
At the end of the lane, I met the children from the house across the road and we all went down the road together to a tiny one-teacher school. There was an open fire and buckets of coal. The sixth-class students were in charge of laying the fire and keeping it going throughout the day.
I made friends, and life wasn’t too bad, but there were many days after school when I roamed the fields above the farmhouse with just the dogs for company.
Higher up the mountain were clusters of ruined stone cottages. In one field, far above the farmhouse, I saw a decrepit stone house on its own and larger than the rest. I approached with caution. The Bean an Tí hadn’t mentioned anything so I didn’t know if there was anyone living there but it looked interesting.
Then a glimmer caught my eye and I saw a woman in a pale dress in one of the upstairs windows waving at me. I waved back. Deciding not to break into her house after all, I called the dogs and went on my way.
At dinner than evening I asked who was the lady who lived in the house above. Which house, they wanted to know.
I described it. The Bean an Tí and her husband looked at each other.
There’s nobody living up there anymore, love, they said.
There used to be a village up there, long, long ago, before the Great Famine, but everyone died, or left and the houses fell down.
“Yeah I know but who’s the lady living in the big house,” I insisted.
“Nobody, love. Nobody. Nobody lives up there now.”
It must have been a trick of the light, they told me. Maybe it was. Light has a lot to answer for.
A few years earlier I had been driving, one dark winter’s night, with my aunt and uncle down a quiet rural road, when a person all in white flew over the bonnet and crashed straight into the windscreen. I screamed with fright. My uncle pulled in to the side of the road. What was wrong, my aunt and uncle asked, concerned. I told them they’d hit someone. They looked at each other.
“Someone hit the windscreen,” I gabbled.
We all got out and looked at the road around the car. There was nothing there.
It must have been a trick of the light, from an approaching car further down the road, they said.
And, sure, maybe they were right.
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