Hook Head lighthouse is one of the oldest working lighthouses in the world. I remember as a boy being allowed into the inner sanctum of the light room and sitting inside the space between the lenses, looking out at the world through the bevelled glass. I saw my father, larger than life, and the Irish landscape, skewed and magical, framed by curved, shining bezels. I think I have seen the world that way ever since.
A ribbon of flat road, called The Road that Killed the Beggarman, bisects the Hook Head promontory, in the far west of County Wexford from base to tip. Legend has it a beggar travelled the length of Ireland, always in optimism, because good fortune could be around the next corner. But when he saw these miles of ruler-straight road, he dropped dead from shock.
Loftus Hall is reputed to be the most haunted house in Ireland. The story is the devil dropped in on the locals for a game of cards and, after he had won every shilling in the pot, played for souls. The local boyos scalded the devil with holy water and he shot through the roof on a pillar of fire, vowing to return one day. Every year tourists flock to the hall, hoping he’ll make good on his promise.
My brother and I made good money selling fishing lures back to the amateur fishermen who had snagged them on the rocks hidden below the tide. We’d scour the red sandstone nooks and limestone crannies to find them. The next night, we would display our wares on a cork board and usually made what we called “disco money”. In any other sphere of enterprise, this might be called thieving but, in the Hook, it was salvage: law of the sea.
The slipway in the village of Slade was where I learned to gut fish – my equivalent of being in Lord of the Flies. Fish gutting is a serious business and there are various schools of thought as to how best to go about it. Most favour sawing off the head and then down along the stomach. Others rip upwards, allowing the fat red, purple and grey of the innards to spill onto the flagstones. But the real experts can fillet the fish without exposing the guts and come away clean. Those are the real boyos.
The Saltee Islands are world-famous seabird sanctuaries a couple of miles off the Hook coast, often shrouded in salt mist from the waves that batter the cliffs. As a young dreamer, I sat and gazed at those hazy islands and wondered if they were even real and, if they were, did some strange tribe act out pagan rituals on the high ground? I certainly hoped so. Perhaps they’d developed a fantastic way to gut fish that I could learn, then return to the Hook to claim my rightful place as leader of the real boyos.
Once every few years the sprats come into Slade harbour, a shoal of shimmering silver pulsing between the dock walls. Then come the mackerel, flashing in the shallows. Doomed they are, at that point, though they don’t know it. Every man, woman and child is pressed into service, scooping the fish from the water to get them into a barrel of salt before they can rot.
My father bought an old lifeboat and refurbished it. The entire family went out one summer afternoon and the engine died half a mile out. We were circled by sharks for the half hour it took my dad to fix it – they were either protecting us or waiting for a sacrifice. I remember half hoping that we would disappear and no one would ever know what had happened to us and we would become legends.
• Once upon a Place, a collection of short stories and poetry by Irish writers, compiled by Eoin Colfer and illustrated by P J Lynch, is out now (Little Island, £11.99)
