Patrick Kavanagh – Arthur Hofn

Authentic Tour Guides

In various blogs I’ve extolled the works of authors who write about the very different worlds they grew up with. Both Patrick Kavanagh’s The Green Fool and Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie tell of almost idyllic rustic childhoods of yesteryear, in a world so different from our own. There is a fascinating bit in The Green Fool where, in his Irish village in the early 1900s the author speaks about his family having “the only clock in the townland” and that “all the neighbours passing our house called in to inquire the time.”

Likewise Lee’s England, even though probably somewhat enhanced, is more of a foreign land to me than some of the places abroad that I have visited in the 21^st century. I’ve been to the Cotsworlds a good few times, it’s lovely, but I still see the other visitors at Stow-on-the-Wold more than I know what it would have been like to live there now, let alone a hundred years ago.

This is the wonderful ability of books. I love travel, being in lock down has meant I’ve not left the country since my expedition to Albania in January 2020, mentioned on here at the time. Whilst that might not seem a big deal I have a very strong sense of wanderlust, and whilst I have adventured to some amazing places in England, the urge to see foreign locations, whilst always strong, is getting stronger.

The thing is, travel guides and tour guides aside what does the traveller really experience? Most of the time it’s a tourist view of that land, not the real lives. I lived in Dublin for a long time and know it extremely well (well I would do if it didn’t keep on changing). However speaking to people who visited it, even many times, the places I know, the experiences I had actually absorbed in to the the day to day living of the city is far more than just sitting outside a bar in Temple Bar, a visit to the Guinness factory and walk along the Liffey. Even then my experience compared to a born and bred Dubliner pales. Which is why, if you really want to know a place you should speak to a local. Which in turn is why autobiographies can open up a country or a culture far more than a visit (although do both if you can).

I spoke on here a while ago about the books from people who lived in North Korea, it’s not a place I will ever get the chance to visit; and, politics aside, even if everything changed and it became possible, it would be a different world to the ones that exists now. The same can be said of the past, so put those things together…

I was trying to think of a book that lets us see not only a culture we would find so different from our own, but also in a time which pushes it further from our understanding. The book Wild Swans by Jung Chang was quite popular in the early 2000s amongst my friends; having read it I can agree.

Starting in 1924 in Yixian, Manchuria it follows the life of Jung Chang’s grandmother, then her mother and then herself, all the way through the changes happening within China. History books can tell us of events, it’s books like these that tell us of the real lives, the real people who lived with them.

“As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless ‘Little Match Girl’in the Hans Christian Andersen story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say:’Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

China today is not the China of 1924, or a lot of the other periods in which the action happens, so if we were to visit and even get to properly talk to a local it would still be different (and most likely just as worthwhile) as reading what happened from a local perspective. For how we speak and think can never really be picked up in a brief visit or a short chat, it works both ways.

There are many many more works that let us into worlds we could never dream of, maybe we can’t travel physically as much as we’d like to at the moment, but we can let our minds wander.

Buy Wild Swans by Jung Chang
Buy The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanagh

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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