Everywhere you go, everyone has a story, and every story is tinged with some sadness – the sadness of regret, perhaps. The sadness that accompanies the memory of a special summer’s day; the sadness of remembrance of a loved one. The sadness of what’s been and what might have been. Mrs. Sheehy (at whose B&B I was staying) and her husband moved to their new house in Listowel a handful of years ago. It was a well-raised, seven-year-old estate, nicely architectured and neatly landscaped. A quiet quarter less than five minutes’ walk to the town square, and a minute or two more to the rugby grounds and golf links. The Sheehy’s were close to moving in, indeed they were putting up the curtains, she told me, when her husband collapsed and died from a heart-attack. But hers is a bright and busy house. the town itself is intermittently busy with festivals of one type or another and there is always the need for another B&B house.
Walking towards the Square, I can see the spires of the two churches reaching above the rooftops and, away to the west, beyond the rooftops, fields that telescope together near a treed horizon. The town – the evening – is on pause, as though waiting for the Writers’ Week action to begin. David Browne, Writers’ Week chairman and brother of broadcaster Vincent, is no doubt fine-tuning his speech; so also, I assume, is Garry Hynes. David is also staying at Mrs. Sheehy’s. Next door’s curly-haired toddler plays in the garden shed, oblivious to the great world of literature around her. There was a sense of Listowel taking a deep breath and clearing its throat. I don’t of course mean the sort of throat-clearing one might have heard emanating from the dressing room of Enrico Caruso preparatory to sending his tonsils soaring after la Traviata; or, indeed, our Rector in the Vestry prior to Sunday morning Service. No: Listowel’s throat-clearing is the kind that conceals its own art. You only think you hear it. But what other town could put such a thought into your head? It’s part of the genius of the place.
Listowel is the benign smile of John B. Keane; the clinking of Magic Glasses in the kingdom of George Fitzmaurice; it’s Bryan McMahon, up there somewhere, leaning out of a classroom window, beaming down at us, fronting the honeyed hum of Kerry schoolboys. And if someone, sometime during Writers’ Week starts singing ‘Red-Haired Mary’ – and most assuredly they will – the spirit of the old ballad-maker Sean McCarthy won’t be a hundred miles away. But it’s not about dead writers. Listowel is alive and lively. Writers’ Week is no Dead Poets Society.
Nevertheless, I half-expected to see John B. on that Opening Night platform, and I had to remind myself that he’d passed on to the great Writers’ Week in the sky. His absence hung over the proceedings to such an extent that it seemed a kind of ‘presence’. You certainly couldn’t sojourn in the Listowel Arms hotel without meeting the man in drawing, painting or photograph, and quite often, in the general conversation. North Kerry’s departed literary luminaries must only be in heaven part-time, for their spirit is so much in and around the town. Is there any other town in the English-speaking world that has been the home and birthplace of so many artists and writers? And, even if there were, could it even begin to celebrate them half as well?
The town’s road map looks like an elaborate free-to-air TV aerial or the antlers of an Irish Elk gone beyond history into hyperbole. I’ve no idea how long the road is, but it wouldn’t come as a total surprise were someone to tell me that it was an Irish mile or, better still, a Kerry kilometre. You know what the TV advert says about an inch being a mile in Kerry. You’re really going places if you’ve got a house or estate named after you; or a cul-de-sac, or an access road. But if you’ve got a road named after you, you’ve really arrived. Or, perhaps, departed. Mizzled. To blue heaven. ‘John B. Keane Road’ is no cul-de-sac. It stretches along the entire western flank of the town of Listowel, mirroring on the one hand, the esteem and affection with which he is held, and on the other hand, his literary journeys. They’ll have to be careful not to overdo it, though. There’s a danger that Writers’ Week may become a kind of commemorative event for the departed John B.
The Keane family themselves are, I understand, acutely aware of this prospect. What may well happen- indeed I ventured to make the suggestion – is that there may be a separate John B. Keane Week or Weekend. The minutes and agendas of committee meetings held by the banks of the Feale river, are generally served up with more than a modicum of Kerry wisdom. It’ll take an extra-large dollop of that wisdom to get the balance right on this one.
At the heart of the Garden of Europe, ten minutes from Mrs. Sheehy’s home, the Holocaust Memorial makes such considerations seem almost trivial. I took a stroll there one bright sunny afternoon. There’s the Arch, and a river walk takes you past the rugby grounds, and down to the golf links. Seats along the river bank invite you to tarry. They’re wooden seats with initials carved on them. ‘M.D. and C.K.’ paused here long enough to carve their initials on the weathered wood. How long since they carved ‘M.D. 4 C.K.’? Perhaps they’ve got a home-full of children by now. Or, dare one say it, a Wildean household? A leafy lane winds up by the rugby club, lined with sycamores and oaks. It’s not a long walk, and there’s a wayside seat, not yet discovered by initial-carving lovers. And then the sign announces the Garden of Europe, opened May 27th 1995 by the Minister for Equality & law Reform, Mervyn Taylor. The garden was developed by7The Rotary Club and has over 2,500 trees and shrubs.
A little further on, up a short flight of steps, made from railway sleepers, I come upon ‘Bryan and Kitty McMahon’s Tree’. And then, encircled by a bed of yellow roses, the bust of Schiller, composer of The Ode To Joy, looking benigly from its plinth across towards the Holocaust Memorial. The memorial, which must be about fifteen feet in height, is dedicated to ‘the memory of those who died in the Holocaust and to all victims of in justice and oppression.’ It stands in a semi-circle of wooden stakes driven deep into the earth and lined by a crescent of red roses. Standing there next to it is a strange experience. Why do I suddenly find something welling up inside me? Is it the words, the sculpted wood, the rusted chains, stakes and roses? Maybe. But it’s much more than that. The wells of our humanity spring from such a deep, dank place, where hope lives and truth waits. And the terrible, sad truth – and our tragedy - is that holocausts flow from a source not far from that place where hope gestates.
Schiller’s words seem to echo back off the granite on which they are carved: ‘Sein umschlungen millionen! Diesen kuss der ganzen welt! Buder-ubern sternen zelt. Muss ein lieber vater wohnen.’ (I embrace my million brothers/and greet the world with a kiss/knowing that our loving father dwells above the stars).
Each country here has its own sector, its own bed bordering the perimeter. It’s the Garden of Europe, and you could easily forget that you were on an island off its Northwest coast. But stray from the gravel path onto the well-kept grass, and it squelches to the rhythm of your footsteps – just to remind you that, although you might be standing next to ‘Italy’ and looking across at ‘Spain’, you are , after all, still in North Kerry. Evening brought more people in around the garden. The hum of a distant tractor mower is an ‘ode to joy’ of sorts as I made my back to the river walk, under the Arch and out onto Listowel streets again. An elderly lady in a soft pink cardigan stoops with the business-end of a serrated kitched-knife, winkling out a little tuft of green grass from a crack in the pavement outside her terraced home. It never dawned on her, I suppose, that the little tuft of grass might have been trying to compensate for an imperfection in the pavement.