IT is that time of year when everything seems a little different, especially after the summer we’ve just had.
The evenings are a little chillier. The mornings too. The light is changing — that beautiful western light that has drawn so many artists and dreamers.
You can’t eat scenery, they say here, and that’s true. Thousands and thousands of Irish emigrants can testify to that. But year after year, you can still look at it with wonder.
The black crows are starting to flock late in the day and, in the lazy afternoon, the swallows are beginning to gather on the telephone wires. The moon seems that little bit more obvious. The year is definitely changing.
I knew an old fella here who, before the first week of January was out, would say: “The year won’t be long going.” I often smile, remembering him at these times of change.
In the spring, they say the day is lengthening by a hen’s step each evening; in the autumn, that the days are drawing in.
The days are drawing in.
This time is very evocative for those of us who are children of those ’50s emigrants. This is the time of year when we would be getting back on the boat: taking a last walk along the beach and up the lane; saying goodbye to those best mates of six weeks — our cousins; leaving the auntie’s house we’d taken over for the summer; getting an extra-long hug from Granny.
This is the time of year when we’d be back in England. School was about to start and the house we lived in, and the street we lived on, were suddenly strange for a few days.
We’d come home. And that was where it was strange.
Because at the start of summer — the final day at school, Mum rushing us down to the coach at the Irish Centre, a big trunk carrying clothes for six kids, not a day to be wasted now that we could leave, the journey through Wales and on to the ferry, Cork Harbour waiting in the soft morning light — we were going home too.
We went home for the summer. And we came back home at summer’s end.
So where was home?
There was talk of home throughout the year. There were jokes about my Uncle Micheál, who lived three streets away from us, not having been home for 20 years; about Uncle Jerry coming home more often than him — and he was in America!
There was talk of news from home. There was talk of home as it was in memory. There were songs about home in the Emerald Club and talk of a cousin from home coming to visit.
There was talk of home everywhere, and home was Ireland, while we were in England.
But then, at the end of summer, we came home too. Home was where we lived, where we went to school, to Mass, Irish dancing, the social club and the pubs. It was the sing-songs, the football matches, the terraces, the bus across the city, the closed-down factories, the English voices, the weather and the sky above us — an English one.
There were no black crows on the city streets, no waves in the distance and no western light fading.
We went home at summer’s start and we went home at summer’s end — to two different places.
The immigrant has a life that only an immigrant knows. This is not the expat living in the sun in Spain, or the wealthy with their houses here and their houses there. That is a different experience altogether.
The immigrant — the economic migrant, if you like — has a psychological life that only other immigrants would understand. The thousands and thousands of Irish who left knew this intimately.
This is not the luxury of two homes, but the schism of two homes. This is not choice, but necessity.
Not that it didn’t feel like luxury at times: being able to escape inner-city England for a beach that curved around a bay, and to eat fish straight off the boat. And we had a laugh, because that is what those people insisted on.
Emigration, though, was — and is — a division in the mind: a loss of so much, a different life, a division. It is home, and home somewhere else too.
It’s no wonder we go on about it.
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