‘The bus comes at last with a great blaze of headlights, and figures emerge from the darkness and climb aboard….’
The prolific author Ethel Mannin is one of the passengers who boards the bus at Clifden, for a day’s shopping in Galway, Christmas Eve 1945.
She has until five o’clock to purchase some practical things she needs for her cottage, and with time to spare, she walks through the Claddagh and regrets the passing of the old thatch cottages. To escape the cold, she warms herself by the fire in a public house and enjoys a glass of sherry. She visits Kenny’s bookshop, where, keeping her bus fare carefully to one side, she spends her ‘last shilling’ on a copy of Keats’ poems, and a two-volume autobiography of Mark Twain.
She heads back to the bus station early, or so she thought, but to her surprise finds that her return bus is scheduled to leave before its usual time. The reason being that this is a ‘special’ going the long way round Connemara; and instead of arriving at seven-thirty, it would not arrive in Clifden ‘until sometime around nine.’ It was then half past four.
The journey was interminable. The conversation with the man beside her was erratic as he smoked all the time, but just as she was about to weep from weariness, out of the darkness Roundstone ‘blazed ‘ into view ‘like an illuminated Christmas tree’. A candle was lit in every window of every house. ‘As there were some tall old houses in Roundstone the effect, both near and far, was excitingly beautiful. It is a country custom, it seems, which continues from Christmas Eve until Twelfth Night.’
‘By the time we arrived in Clifden it is gone nine and I am completely exhausted. I decided to spend the night in the hotel. I drink a large Irish whiskey and eat a plate of ham such as they surely eat in Paradise, and which, anti-meat-eating as I normally am, makes me glad that I am not, after all, so very, very, very vegetarian.’
John Sullivan
The late Ethel Mannin was born in London, and inherited her strong socialist beliefs from her Irish born father, she at first rented a cottage between Roundstone and Clifden in the 1940s, which she later bought. She was to write over one hundred books, but probably the only two which are still worth reading today include her Connemara Journal (quoted above ) and her novel Late Have I loved Thee, the interesting story of John Sullivan SJ, who had only recently died when Ms Mannin’s friend Isabel Foyle told her his story, a story with which many readers are familiar.
John Sullivan (1861 - 1933 ) was born into a prosperous Protestant background in Victorian Dublin. Though his mother was a Catholic, it was a surprise to the whole family that he converted to the Catholic faith and entered the Jesuit novitiate at the turn of the last century.
As a Jesuit priest and teacher in Clongowes Wood College, he lived a life of real poverty and penance and had a great devotion to the sick. Miracle cures happened to many with whom he prayed, including the dramatic healing of Michael Collins, a three-year old nephew of Michael Collins, one of the founders of the Free State.
Before and after his death a huge devotion to Fr Sullivan spread across Ireland. Former taoiseach Bertie Ahern quoted Fr Sullivan’s words, at the end of his final speech as the country’s leader. The cause for his canonisation has been recently furthered in Rome as Irish people continue to tell stories of extraordinary graces experienced through their prayers to him.
‘Spiritual revelation’
It was an unusual theme for a novelist renowned for her love affairs, extreme causes such as the World League for Sexual Reform, and sometimes racy novels. She must have been a bit miffed when the Sunday Times refused an advertisement for her book ‘Sleep After Love’; and although her affair with WB Yeats was not a sexual success, they corresponded until his death in 1939.
She came to Connemara that Christmas to escape the festive celebrations planned in Britain, which Ms Mannin found distasteful in view of the devastation of Germany and Eastern Europe. She had joined a group which was demanding British people give up some of their rations fo feed starving German children. The Government would not allow it. She had objected to Christmas cards, and thought it all a commercial racket.
In Connemara, however, she eventually finds the peace she craves, and concludes, if a little reluctantly, that ‘In months of solitude in that lonely Connemara cottage I discovered in a kind of slow spiritual revelation, how God could be, for a devout Catholic people, nearer than the door.’
NEXT WEEK: The four-page Christmas Miscellany 2020.
