Our house for the first year or so was on the top of a cliff, so that in
stormy weather the spray would sometimes soak my bed at night, for I had
taken the glass out of the window, sash and all. A literary passion for
the open air was to last me for a few years. Then for another year or two,
we had a house overlooking the harbour where the one great sight was the
going and coming of the fishing fleet. We had one regular servant, a
fisherman's wife, and the occasional help of a big, red-faced girl who ate
a whole pot of jam while my mother was at church and accused me of it.
Some such arrangement lasted until long after the time I write of, and
until my father going into the kitchen by chance found a girl, who had
been engaged during a passing need, in tears at the thought of leaving our
other servant, and promised that they should never be parted. I have no
doubt that we lived at the harbour for my mother's sake. She had, when we
were children, refused to take us to a seaside place because she heard it
possessed a bathing box, but she loved the activities of a fishing
village. When I think of her, I almost always see her talking over a cup
of tea in the kitchen with our servant, the fisherman's wife, on the only
themes outside our house that seemed of interest--the fishing people of
Howth, or the pilots and fishing people of Rosses Point. She read no
books, but she and the fisherman's wife would tell each other stories that
Homer might have told, pleased with any moment of sudden intensity and
laughing together over any point of satire. There is an essay called
"Village Ghosts" in my "Celtic Twilight" which is but a record of one such
afternoon, and many a fine tale has been lost because it had not occurred
to me soon enough to keep notes. My father was always praising her to my
sisters and to me, because she pretended to nothing she did not feel. She
would write him letters telling of her delight in the tumbling clouds, but
she did not care for pictures, and never went to an exhibition even to see
a picture of his, nor to his studio to see the day's work, neither now nor
when they were first married. I remember all this very clearly and little
after until her mind had gone in a stroke of paralysis and she had found,
liberated at last from financial worry, perfect happiness feeding the
birds at a London window. She had always, my father would say, intensity,
and that was his chief word of praise; and once he added to the praise "no
spendthrift ever had a poet for a son, though a miser might."