All travel is a kind of quest, though what you are looking for and what you find rarely coincide. And now, decades on, I wanted to return, to rediscover not just the island I had loved, but all those western islands. I have carried those memories of Valentia with me as my parents carried memories of the Antrim Coast and the villages of County Down. At the end of my stay, in the dying days of that distant autumn, I was heartbroken to leave, for London and for real life.
I wrote short stories, mercifully unpublished, from a desk by a window in my little cottage, overlooking the channel, watching the cloud shadows sail across the mainland mountains towards Doulus Head. I went to sea with the fishermen and drank with them in the evenings in the island pub. I clambered over the rocks beneath the lighthouse where the waves threatened to engulf me. For six months, I walked and cycled the length and breadth of this little world. I came to Valentia, the island of the photograph, the island I did not remember. The opening of Yeats’ famous poem captures this notion of an island paradise - ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree’Īnd so when I was 20, I set off to get my own Ireland. I absorbed my parents’ nostalgia as less fortunate children might absorb parental anxiety or anger. I spent hours with the old photograph albums, peering at landscapes more intimate, more beautiful, and far more romantic than those of southwestern Ontario. Sometimes I wondered if I remembered Ireland at all or if I merely invented it. I was young when we left Ireland to emigrate, and my own memories of home were illusive. Every fortnight, the Irish papers arrived, despatched by my grandparents, so after dinner my parents would sit reading about the news of the agricultural show in Donegal or the construction works on the Malone Road, as if they still lived there. Tales of the sisters at Glen Farm and the shop at the top of the hill, of the Ballygowan Halt, the manse in Ahoghill, and the wet summers at Portstewart were the stories of the dinner table. When I was a child, growing up in Canada, Ireland was the absence in our lives. On the back of the photograph, in fading pencil, is written “Valentia Island”. It was a family holiday on a rare trip home to Ireland. In an old family album, there is photograph of my father and me, standing by a donkey loaded with peat.