Free On an Irish Island by Robert Kanigel

“ ‘You’ve got good eyes,’ but what I said was, ‘You’ve got pretty eyes’ (which by the way is quite true). Cáit’s answer was ‘So have you.’ ” Abruptly, he realized his error, and they both burst out laughing, agreeing it was “a pardonable mistake.”
    Flattered by the islanders that his still-fumbling Irish at least boasted “the proper island
blas,”
or accent, he was plainly making progress. Hewould be leaving on Saturday, he concluded his letter, and back at work the Monday after that. “Remember me to everybody and tell them I am working hard, learning Irish from the prettiest girl on the island.”
    When he returned the following summer, Flower brought with him his new wife, Ida Mary Streeter, the youngest sister of a friend from Oxford. They had met and fallen in love while he was still a student there and she attended an art school in Hertfordshire of which Flower’s father was director. They went on to meet atLondon’s Royal Academy, or the National Gallery, where art students needn’t have chaperones. While enjoying his island lessons with Cáit, Flower may already have been engaged to her. He’d been back in London just a few months, living near Leicester Square with his friend Vivian Locke Ellis, a poet, when, in January 1911, the Museum granted him a specialtwo-week leave to be married. The ceremony took place on February 4. The couple went to live in a Chelsea flat, and that summer he brought her to the island.
    Later, Flower wrote Richard Best in Dublin of their “glorious time there. The weather was too hot, and I was too tired for any serious work, but I got to be able to speak and understand pretty well.… My wife enjoyed herself thoroughly,” he added, “and did some rather nice sketches of the island.”
    They were better than nice; our feeling for the village in that summer of 1911 owes as much to her as to him. While he worked on his Irish, Ida, who was pregnant at the time, roamed the island with pencil, sketchbook, and drawing board, making finely detailed renderings of the village and its cozy interiors. Together, they bathe the village in a balmier, more settled light than that by which it’s more often seen. Maps and surviving photographs don’t suggest a place that could have leapt intact from a Hollywood soundstage. Ida Flower’s drawings do.
    Apen-and-ink she made of the interior of the king’s house suggests all the comforts of home, rudimentary though they were. In the middle, the
croch,
or fireplace crane—the sturdy, trusslike structure from which pots were suspended over the hearth. The settle, a bare wood bench, off to the side. A beam reaching across the breadth of the room, supporting a loft, a kind of rude attic, bearing household gear. All modeled by soft window light. Three years earlier, Marstrander judged the house to represent “as good lodgings as I found in Ballyferriter,” meaningWillie Long’s place, a commercial inn. It still was.
    Islandhouses were truly
homes,
some imperfectly maintained, others neat, warm, and snug. Floors were of beaten clay, the area around thefireplace stone-flagged; sand brought up from the White Strand would be scattered on the floor and, with any animal waste, swept out daily. The largest houses were about twelve by twenty-five feet on the inside; most were smaller. With a few exceptions, they were oriented the same way, their front doors facing south, one of the short sides dug into the hillside, offering the smallest target for prevailing westerly winds and rain.
Cluthair,
meaning cozy or snug, was the ideal. On the sheltered side of the house it was as if you were “in another country,” poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who spent the summers of her youth across the sound, inDún Chaoin, has noted of similar houses on the mainland. “The old houses had their own charm and they were very comfortable. Mind you, when you got out of one of those westerly gales … into the warm kitchen it really was the height of