John Purser: A cruel tale heard in Ireland decades ago has never left

Bonner country was harsh but very beautiful, full of granite outcrops. There were many donkeys. They would carry in the turf for the peat fires, and their owner on top as well; and they could be used for ploughing.

It was the composer Eddie McGuire’s mother who told me that a mother and daughter pair of donkeys made an excellent ploughing team. There were no tractors then, and horses were few and far between.

In the distance, across the rocks and swaying oats and neat little hay cocks, were the Gweedore Mountains, Errigal their champion, its quartzite glowing pink in the evening sunlight.

At its foot is the Poisoned Glen – probably named from a mistranslation of the original Irish. That’s what happens when a dominant culture imposes its language: the interface is geologically disturbed, the local culture subverted, and ignorance prioritised.

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Original Irish was what we heard when we went to Arranmore Island the day Eamon de Valera was delivering a speech from the top of a cart. It being 1947, I was just five so it wouldn’t have mattered to me what language it was in, but my father could follow it alright.

His own parents, a Dublin neurologist, Frank, and his suffragette wife, Mabel O’Brien, were great Sinn Fèin supporters in the early days of Ireland’s struggle for independence from that “mother of parliaments” whose reluctance to give birth has been matched only by her dislike of her own offspring.

Told that Frank and his colleague, Dr Colonel Dawson, were awarded OBEs at the end of the First World War, Granny O’Brien exclaimed: “My God, Mrs Dawson, must they accept it?”

When, in 1920, Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died after 74 days on hunger strike in Brixton prison, his death mask was brought to Frank and Mabel’s house for safe-keeping.

So, for my family de Valera represented the battle for Ireland’s freedom and it was a bit of history to witness him as Taoiseach speaking in Irish in a remote part of north-west Donegal, just west of Burtonport.

On Arranmore Island, Ireland 1947, Photo E. H. Purser. 

The Bonners lived just north of Burtonport with its fine little jetty from which we would dive at midnight into the most spectacular phosphorescence, emerging streaming with liquid light, the trails of our bodies and our swimming strokes still visible in the sea.

By day, the sky was always alive with huge clouds and glorious patches of sunlight and needless to say, hours of unrelenting rain. The air was always in motion, and the sound of the Atlantic was just over the next rise where you could lie in the sand dunes or shelter among the powder-blue harebells, breathing in the cleansing Atlantic air.

Not cleansing enough – many in Donegal had died from tuberculosis and more were yet to die. TB was rife and streptomycin was not yet discovered.

I was young and healthy and taken up the stairs (it was a two-storey house) to see an old lady who lay propped up in bed, a shawl round her shoulders and all the many expressions of her face creased by decades of experience into her skin so that her sorrow and her smiling were all mixed up together.

I can still hear her quiet voice accepting of the fate of so many as she named the dead, one after the other: “Ah, ‘tis the will of God!” All the while she was touching me, a young living creature. You do not forget such things, not even when you are only five.

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My aunt Honor Purser, who was well known to the Bonners, got married because of TB. She had contracted it herself, recovered in South Africa, and returned to study medicine, becoming the first woman fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, going on to treat TB patients in Dublin.

One of those patients, Charles Eyre-Maunsell, had already had a lung removed. Aunt Honor, being as plain a speaker as the rest of the family, told her patient that unless he went to a dry climate, ideally at altitude in the Alps, he would die. Charlie said he had no money for that. Dr Purser said she had recently come into a small legacy and would pay for him. Why she singled him out, history does not relate.

He was, it must be said, extremely good looking and debonair, but in a hospital bed dying of tuberculosis his charms, one would have thought, were somewhat limited. Of course, he said he could not possibly accept the offer and Aunt Honor left him to think about it.

Well, he thought about it and said he would accept on one condition – that if he survived and came back Honor would marry him. She agreed the deal. He survived, came back, and they married.

Charlie drove racing and rally cars, with Honor beside him as his navigator. He also built his own racing car and called it the Stubai after a holiday spent in that valley in the Tyrol – but also, I suspect, in honour of the Alpine air which had saved his life.

Boatman to Owey, Photo E. H. Purser. 

By 1960, after one of the greatest medical achievements of any century, streptomycin had emptied the TB hospitals all around Europe, and that included Donegal. So one story at least ended as positively as one could hope for.

But the story I must tell is of a different nature and belongs to Owey Island and the Torr a’ t-Snaimh. Owey is not far from where the Bonners live. It’s out beyond Cruit Island and defends itself from the full force of the Atlantic Ocean with spectacular cliffs which, at least back in 1947, hosted thousands of seabirds.

The name means “Cave Island” and there are several sea caves. My parents longed to see the cliffs and an islander agreed to take us out in a curragh. There was a huge swell – 30 feet or so – but it did not break; it simply rose up the cliff face and subsided, rose and subsided. There was no white water.

A curragh is made of tarred canvas stretched over an open frame made of willow or hazel; it has no keel and a very shallow draft, and the whole vessel flexes with the sea. Lying on some straw in the bottom of the boat as a little boy, I could feel the push and pulse of the sea. The curragh we were in was a small type, which is sculled with a single oar. The man at the oar was whistling away most of the time, until he pointed out a huge rock towards which we were headed.

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“Keep your eye on that, now!” I was more or less prostrate on the bottom but I could see the rock alright – then it vanished. Your man then asked us to look behind us. “See that big rock behind youse now! That’s the one we just went over.”

And so we had. A couple of twists of the oar at the right moment and he let that tremendous 30-foot swell take us right over.

The world is much changed. My parents thought nothing of going out in an unlicensed boat without an engine and not a lifejacket in sight. We had a great time and we saw lots of seabirds (though I was too young to name them), and we got back safely. I know we did because I know we were going clockwise with the Atlantic out behind me and the cliffs right above me.

Torr a’ t-Snaimh means The High Rock of the Swim. I only learnt its true name recently from Dan McGinley who has mapped hundreds of place names around Owey and Cruit Islands.

I knew there was a story about a rock there that my father had told me many years later – at the age of five I would not have understood it; but our passing that rock being sculled by a local man may well be how my father heard it. Given that nobody comes out of it well, it is surprising that he heard it from anyone at all.

One thing for sure, he didn’t make it up, nor was he easily gulled. He spoke Irish and had an astute, penetrating mind and this kind of tale is the last thing he or anyone else would have dreamt up. It is salutary to say the least.

The story goes back to 1847 at the height of the Famine years when the Rutland barracks at Meenmore were briefly occupied by British soldiers.

A girl from Owey let herself be hired as a laundress, so the other islanders disowned her. The soldiers also used her as a prostitute and when the time came for them to leave, the poor girl begged to be allowed to go with them. Her own community would not have taken her back.

Whether the men were ashamed of what they had made of her, or simply tired of her, they refused to take her with them, and it was decided the simplest solution was to shoot her.

One of their number, however, pleaded for her life and it was agreed as a kind of bet that if she could swim out across the savage tide rip between Cruit and Owey Islands and reach Torr a’ t-Snaimh then they would spare her life.

So they took her out to the strait between the islands, watched her dive in, and watched her swim against the tide. She did well. She was, no doubt, very fit. Finally, she reached the rock and found a place to grab on to and haul herself up.

You would have thought the men might have raised a cheer – at least those who bet she would make it. Instead they raised their guns and shot her. She must have slipped back under the water the way a seal does when humans come too close.

It would not surprise me if those soldiers turned their backs on her thinking they had performed some moral act. I can verify none of it, save that there were British soldiers at Meenmore barracks in 1847. Perhaps the year we were there being the centenary of the girl’s murder is why it was told.

According to Dan, my father’s telling is the only instance of the story, and as far as I know I am now its sole bearer. But as regards the credibility of its viciousness, at the time of writing there is no need to call witnesses, nor, I fear, will there ever be.