I can’t say when the foundations of my grandparents’ house were laid. Some ancestor of mine has lived without distinction or fame on the same patch of heavy, unproductive land for at least 200 years. When the first full-scale assessment of property in Ireland was carried out in the years immediately after the famine, between 1845 and 1849, my family was already there in County Offaly, probably surviving hand to mouth in bog-side hovels. Their houses cost them one pound and five shillings annually, and land to farm was extra.
Two homes were recorded there during the census of 1911: one where the house still stands today; the other possibly where the cattle sheds are. By the time my grandfather, John Joe, was born in 1933, the main house was thatched. Forty years later, the thatch was removed and the house was crowned with its current slate roof.
It is a house that was made by adding one room on to another until there were enough. Outside, it boasts pebbledash walls, painted white, with a trim of something warmer along the bottom and around the windows. Inside, the house is compact: boxy rooms, narrow halls, all centred on the kitchen and the fireplace. When Nana first moved in, 50 years ago, part of the kitchen was a bedroom. My great-grandfather slept there. Nana told me that he once threw a knife at her from across the kitchen; it stuck in the wooden door of the cupboard beside her head, quivering. He was found dead behind the cattle sheds in March of 1972.
All the living is done in the kitchen. It is a long, rectangular room, split in two. The smaller section – where the bedroom used to be – contains the sink, the fridge, a dresser and the cupboards, where the cups and plates are kept. The larger part is arranged around the fireplace. For many years there was a white tin range against the wall, with a metal shelf above it for drying clothes. When John Joe came in from work, he would lean his arms against the shelf and allow his then-giant frame to soak up the heat from below. Today, there is a thick, black iron stove, with four minuscule legs and a glass door. It is much more beautiful, and warmer, too. Every day starts with the lighting of the fire, and it burns until after everyone has gone to sleep. Nana cleans the glass every morning, so the flames are clearly visible.
During the final two or three years of John Joe’s life, I made many surreptitious recordings as he sat by the fire in the kitchen. He was in the process of forgetting almost everything he’d known. He was fading out of the world, and I began to grieve long before the death was final. I wanted to record whatever it was he might say before it was too late. Not because what he had to say was particularly significant or even memorable, but because no one would ever say anything like it again. It occurred to me that, while there would be many pictures of him from throughout his life, there would be few recordings of his voice.
The recordings I made of John Joe suggest a depth, a duration and a movement to what photographs of him have frozen flat and static. A photograph of a person who has since died does not make them seem alive again, but a recording of their voice can make their presence felt.
My favourite recordings are those where John Joe sings along with the radio. He sang old songs: Carrickfergus; Eileen McMahon; I’ll Be Your Sweetheart. He sang songs they’d later play at his funeral, songs like The Rocks Of Bawn. He had forgotten most of everything, but scraps of melody remained. They were hidden in that part of the brain where treasures are kept, alongside the name of his wife, Kathleen.
My grandparents’ house was a place where everyone felt equally comfortable, equally at home. It would have been much more difficult, particularly in more recent years, to convince Nana and John Joe to come even as far as my house, at the other end of the garden. They were happy in their own place, with their family around them; everyone else had the freedom to come and go.
I sometimes think of the image of their house at night, seen from ours, with the porch light on, a yellow glow in the kitchen window, and half a dozen cars sleeping outside. The last stop on a narrow road to nowhere, the last house before the wastes of the bog. Birthdays, Christmases, anniversaries, engagements, flying visits, fond farewells, births, deaths; all were marked by the coming together of people in that house, the last light in the dark.
The house, even now that Nana is there by herself, has a lived-in quality that encourages more life to pass through, and to linger. It isn’t comfort exactly that creates this; it is more like an accumulation of energy over time. People gather there and bring that energy with them; a restorative energy, but also a force of potential. I am a product of that energy, and its conduit also.
These gatherings are occasions to think, briefly and not unhappily, about the passing of time, about how all these tall young men crowding the kitchen were, not so long ago, crawling around on that floor and being bathed in that sink. You might find yourself thinking about marriages that have fallen apart, or the ones that lasted; friendships half forgotten, or the memory of those who have died. I think it is a house where the past lives as a peaceful tenant of the present. My grandparents’ house makes change and loss seem bearable, because you know these walls will remember, whenever people gather here.
An ideal house is a place to live in peace with everything that has happened. It’s a structure to help us bear the weight of all that is past. I dream of my grandparents’ house now because it is the strongest shelter I have experienced against time’s many erosions. It has withstood so much change, and the marks of those who have inhabited it are engraved in its walls. It is simple, but it is not primitive – if a house could be said to be wise, you could call it wise.
My grandparents’ house is not an escape, or not just that. Rather, it gives us back to life. Its routines and procedures are resolute, despite our comings and goings; they bend, but they do not break. Its structures, its habits, have given me a foundation for thinking about how I act in the world, and the strength to think I can survive what comes my way. And still – because it is not the place where I slept each night and woke each morning, because there is no part of it to which I could lay claim – it retains its difference, its distance. It has a history that precedes me, and a symbolic register that transcends me. It remains always something other than just a property.
• Ian Maleney is the author of Minor Monuments, published by Tramp Press, at £12.99.
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