County Monaghan – Arthur Hofn

Whole New Worlds From The Memoirs Of History

One of the wonders of reading is being taken in to a different world. I love history so love a book that can show me the past in a way I can feel what it must have been like to live there. How much better if the book was written in times gone by and was referring to its own near past, which to us is so much further away.

Contemporary fiction that has aged lets us see the real world back then more so than any amount of research done for a novel set in the past. Having just finished reading Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog by Dylan Thomas* (published 1940) I’ve had just a glimpse of what growing up in South Wales in the early part of the twentieth century was like. This is a coming of age selection of short stories, or moments from the “young dog’s” life – an actual voice from back then. How true they are, or if anything was added for artistic license I’ll never know. Regardless, sometimes it strikes a chord as boys will always be boys (the making of a friend from a pointless fight is very entertaining), but at other times it paints a picture of a life so much simpler than our own.

*My copy was printed upside down and backwards, which is really cool, but I think a mistake.

Thomas was born in 1914 and the earlier short stories are based in his childhood. Just the simple exploration of his families’ rural land in “The Peaches” lets us amusingly into the mind of a boy who has got the wrong end of the stick as he learns his Uncle is selling the piglets to fund his drinking. Soon he’s convinced it’s not just the pigs that are at stake.

“Where’s Uncle Jim?”
“He’s gone to market,” said Annie.
Gwilym made a small pig’s noise. We knew where uncle was; he was sitting in the public house with a heifer over his shoulder and two pigs nosing out of his pockets.

There is nothing ground breaking in this, but what a wonderful snapshot of rural Wales so long ago.

Later as an early teenager, with a group of lads, he goes hitch hiking to a rural spot to camp; just a handful of young lads in the middle of nowhere with just a tent for a fortnight. How times have changed.

Last year I read The Green Fool, likewise a collection of accounts of growing up, this time from Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. Where Thomas intersperses obvious short fiction with his childhood memories, Kavanagh tells us a chronological account of growing up in a rural village in County Monaghan. Born in 1904 his book was published in 1938 and recounts his very early days with his family in a small house where his father was a cobbler and for the most part they were happy, through to his becoming a writer. Again there is probably a mix of the artistic licence, faded memories and truth, but it conveys so well what the real people who lived then and there were actually like. Rural living in Ireland (and for most of the Western World) is now so much closer to urban convenience.

Neither works are the stories of the rich and famous as the days recalled are before each author made their mark and so we get both these worlds from the perspective of the everyday people lived them. It’s easy to write a world where you take phones, cars and the internet out. But these are worlds that never had them in the first place. They don’t evoke the past, they are the past and so tell a far more tangible account of the history then anything we can write now.

Buy Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog
Buy The Green Fool