The Blood Remembers the Tune
If not the words to the song
Age 15, I swore I would never return to Australia unless I had permission from an Aboriginal authority.
Age 37, I broke that oath, and phoned the Australian Embassy in Dublin; the very next day, I crossed the entire country by train, made it to the Embassy before it closed, got my emergency passport, and caught the train home again.
I think it helped that my (estranged) father had been Australian Ambassador to the U.S.A. So much for my principles, eh?
I had to go. My sister’s husband had tried to kill her. She was, miraculously, still alive and I was the only one in the family who was free to go and mind her two children. The husband was in jail, and she was in hospital fighting for her life.
Everyone on my end was sympathetic. I got a raise on my credit limit, quit my lucrative seasonal job washing dishes at The Singing Salmon, found someone to mind the cat, and flew from Kerry to Melbourne.
A Back Track (6 years, 10 years)
Age thirty-one, I had fulfilled a lifelong dream to emigrate to Ireland. The luck of the Irish must run in my veins, because no sooner was I free to emigrate than a house and a job in Dingle had fallen in my lap, and so often did things just fall in my lap in Dingle that I began to suspect that I was a favoured plaything for the Gods.
Here is the first coincidence: Dingle was the very first place I had ever visited in Ireland, four years previously when I was twenty-seven. My first ever girlfriend, Cate, who was visiting us with her partner, had chosen this destination. Hourieh and I were both mad into Irish Traditional Music, learning the tin whistle and going to trad sessions in London, so we were completely in tune with that choice! Cate had a friend with a restaurant in Dingle (The Singing Salmon), and the four of us plus Liba the cat drove, in our 1962 VW bug, from London to Dingle. We spent two fabulous sunny weeks camping in Baile na nGall, back west of Dingle town. Four years later I emigrated, living in and keeping a hostel in — drum roll — Baile na nGall!
Back on Track to Australia
My sister survived.
As it turned out, I hardly saw the children, because my mother and step-father flew over from the States and whisked them back there. They were worried that the husband would get out of jail and steal the children back to Egypt, never to be seen again.
My return flight to Ireland was two months away, so I had nothing to do but mind my sister. We had kept in touch, but this was our first chance to really catch up. We are each other’s only one. The only one who shared the exact same peripatetic childhood, with the same cast of thousands who briefly peopled it. Our brains work the same way, we sound alike, look alike, and even her children often mistook me for her, though we are not twins.
We had a wonderful time together, and near the end of my stay, we drove to visit our grandmother, Dearest, who I had not seen nor heard from since I was fifteen. Maureen Hogan Cook was my Dad’s mother, a hard woman, though I had fond memories of staying with her and Cookie near the sea as a child.
Dearest, like us, was a Bendjesserit, for though she was born in Australia, she was raised in many countries as a child. Bendjesserit is a term my sister invented to describe the confused ‘nationality’ of someone who was brought up in more than three countries as a child. We Bendjesserits have a psychology all our own, and much of my writing explores international childhood reality.
Dearest was 89 and ill. She lived alone in a tiny ground-floor flat. When we arrived, we made tea and at her bidding I fetched a box of old photographs from the cupboard. (Get ready now, for here comes Big Coincidence number two.)
Dearest turned to me and said, “I hear you are living in Dingle, in Ireland now Lucinda, is that right?”
“Yes Dearest, I emigrated there six years ago.”
“I was there ten years ago, looking for where my grandmother was from.”
“What? Not in Dingle??”
“Yes. In Dingle. She came from somewhere round The Connor Pass, and my friend and I hired a car and drove up and down, up and down The Connor Pass, but couldn’t find the place.”
“No! No way! Your grandmother came from Dingle?????”
“Yes. Don’t you remember?”
“?”
“Don’t you remember all the stories I told you when you were small? All those stories that my own grandmother used to tell me, about growing up in Ireland?”
And suddenly, I did. Vaguely. I remembered frequenting Dearest’s bed of a morning, snuggling up and she telling us stories.
I was stunned. I was in disbelief. I felt like I was a character in some romance novel, you know, where the main character was an orphan, visits an oddly familiar island, only to find she comes from a long line of local witches and has inherited their gift of the second-sight, so only she can restore the magic to the standing stones but of course not before she finds her local prince and marries him. I mean, you could only make it up, right?
I asked what her grandmother’s name was.
“Mary Hogan.”
And that is all I asked. What was her husband’s name, her parents’ names, where were they born, what did they do, how did they come to Australia, when was her birthday, could she read and write, what language did she speak, how many children, where in Australia did they live….nope, none of that; attention turned to my convalescing sister. Neither of us could take on the offered box of photos, then we left and I never saw Dearest again.
Back home to Dingle, I picked up the local phone book, and looked for Hogans. There was one. I mentioned Dearest’s revelation to a local friend of mine, and repeated what others had told me, that Hogan was not a local name.
“Oh yes it is. There are Hogans in Baile na Courty”, he said. I visited the Baile na Courty grave yard, but the stones were sunken and illegible.
Another friend of mine asked around, and found out that long ago there had been three Hogan sisters living in the back hills above Brandon, off the Connor Pass.
The library was no help. Most Kerry Catholic records had been burned or destroyed by water, I was told, and with no more information other than the name Mary Hogan, that was that.
Except it wasn’t. It changed me. Mary changed me. Dearest’s revelation that I actually had ancestors from Dingle validated me, — rooted me — on a most profound level. I felt them. They were with me. They had been with me all along. I belonged. The music that beguiled me to come here ran in my veins, and now it made sense that I always had a tune running in my head; tunes popped in, unbidden, and playing music was all I wanted to do, first the whistle, then the wooden flute, and then the uillean pipes.
I felt grief. A deeply chilling and helpless grief. I felt robbed of my heritage in the same measure as I felt gifted with it. Robbed of Irish, the most wonderful language in the world but I could never be fluent in it; robbed of my living cousins, my roots, continuity, the family stories. Grief that I would never get on a cross-country bus, get chatting to my neighbour and find our connection within one minute, which is what happens with Irish people: “Oh yes, but we’re the other Moriartys…” or “Oh, my aunt must teach your sister, …” Grief that I only had a nebulous, unvalidated claim.
I met with the anti-colonial “We’ve enough bloody cousins!” attitude again and again. I felt grief for the hunger, for being torn asunder, for the brutality of famine, and for the scars and festering wounds of “a nation like a child who’s been kicked in the face,” as Sinead O’Connor sings.
Over the decades, my sister and I have found some records, we have found DNA matches and cousins in Australia, and more Hogan ancestor’s names and dates, but it is all so incomplete. The best proof I have was from a psychic, Tom, (who fell in my lap), and I made an appointment with him to ask about something else entirely, but when I saw him I also mentioned Mary and her father Andrew Hogan to him.
I told Tom that I got the feeling that my ancestors here didn’t want me to find them. He tuned in to the spirits and he spoke. “ Yes. They were from here. I see them. Two children, walking away together….There’s a woman from Ventry, name Welsh….not married…uncle and aunt waving goodbye from a mud house. They don’t want you to find them. They are ashamed.”
This was a hammer blow. “Why? What are they ashamed of? Me?”
“No. No. They are ashamed of themselves. Because they had nothing. Their lives were completely and utterly wretched. They had nothing.”
I struggled to understand this for months. My indignance on their behalf has no significance. They had no pride whatsoever; meek and humble doesn’t even get close to describing them; they were so miserably destitute, so abject, that they were ever and utterly ashamed of their very existence. They were so wretched that they starved to death and no-one remained to mark nor mourn them.
I strap on my pipes, and they wail.