Colm Tóibín - A Guest at the Feast

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Colm Tibn was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels, including The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award 2009, and an earlier collection of stories, Mothers and Sons. He lives in Dublin.

There were no artists in the town, but there were rumours and odd mention of a writer and a painter who had been born in Enniscorthy and had left. My uncle had written poetry in both Irish and English and he had died in his early twenties of tuberculosis. He was the youngest of my fathers family and left behind an afterglow which was strong enough when I was growing up - he had died fifteen years before I was born - that I took his name as my Confirmation name. He was the cleverest of them all, they said, and the funniest.

My mother wrote poetry too in the years before her marriage; some of the poems were published in the local paper, and one, which she often quoted, was reprinted in one of the Dublin papers; others were published in a small, short-lived and cheaply printed periodical which my father also worked on.

In the 1930s, each county had two or three university scholarships. My father studied at University College Dublin on one of these scholarships, having come first in the county, and returned then to the town to work as a teacher. My mother was seven years younger. She saw him for the first time as he rode his bicycle past her mothers small shop in Court Street on his way to give a Latin grind to a woman called Nancy Connolly. Her father pointed him out and she remembered going out to the footpath in front of the shop to look at him. She was thirteen then, and within a year, on the death of her father, would leave school to go to work, and this would make her hungry all her life for books and learning and impressed by anyone who had access to them. In 1946 at the age of twenty-five, having walked out with him for seven years, she married him, the man on the bicycle who knew Latin.

The plaque to my father is on the left-hand side of the door, and the plaque to Fr Joseph Ranson, with whom he founded the museum, is on the right-hand side. I have put both of them into my novel The Heather Blazing in the years when they worked at making the castle into a museum. I am not quite sure how much I imagined and how much I remember. But I remember fragments, I suppose; none of it made any sense then, it didnt need to, it was complete and perfect and fascinating. It seemed natural that a model threshing machine should rest on a table in a room where a copy of the execution warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots, hung on the wall. There was a room full of old carriages. There was a back stairs which was wooden and an older stone stairs and from the battlements you could see the entire town.

Upstairs there was a l9l6 room, with a postcard on display which my grandfather sent to my father from Frongoch prison in Wales where he was interned after the l9l6 Rising. My father could have been only two or three years old, and the postcard addressed him as Big Fellow. I remember that he didnt want this side of the card displayed because he was a teacher and his students had already one nickname for him The Boss and he didnt want them to have another.

Behind this was the l798 room, with pikes and maps of how our side had escaped through Needhams Gap. Old ghosts walked freely in the castle, wondering, I imagine, if they should let the Queen know what dreadful use the building had fallen into. I remember discovering the dungeon, cut into the rock in the very bowels of the castle. It was airless and dark, with a smell of damp and mould. Soon, they put a light down there and distempered the walls, leaving a space for the etching which someone who was imprisoned here had made in the wall, a crudely drawn figure with armour and a sword.

Some of the great Tudor adventurers stayed in this building. In 1581, a lease of the friary and castle was granted to Edmund Spenser, but he passed it on after a week. In 1594, there is an entry in the diary of the Lord Deputy, dated 17 December: Sir William Clark and Mr Bryskett went to Enniscorthy to the Lady Wallops for Christmas. Mr Bryskett was the poet Lodowick Bryskett, an intimate friend of Spensers, whose most famous poem was written on the death of Sir Philip Sidney. Bryskett owned a great deal of property along the river. Lady Wallop was the wife of Sir Henry Wallop, who came to Ireland in 1579 as Treasurer of War for the Elizabethan administration. He made a fortune from the forests that stretched away to the north and west of Enniscorthy. In one of his several petitions for further rewards for his services, he wrote: I presume I have deserved favour in greater measure for having planted at Enniscorthy, among so wild and barbarous a people. In the 1960s, as we, the descendants of the wild and barbarous, played around the castle, we were led to believe that the word wallop had entered the language courtesy of Sir Henry and his violent disposition. There is no way to daunt these people but by the edge of the sword, he wrote in 1581.

I have never seen a building with the same small, squat, determined shape as Enniscorthy Castle. How could they ever have imagined that we would, some day, have their castle as the museum for things we deem important. (Sweet Slaney run softly.) But this is literary, a game you can play with history, and I feel no connection with it, as I feel no connection with l798 other than as an event in the past which was regularly commemorated. l9l6, the War of Independence and the Civil War are much closer, more real and genuine.

The Roches, who sold the castle to the museum (I remember the figure of l,l00, but I could only have been five or six at the time of the sale), also sold their gardens, and a modern ballroom was built on the site. I know that the Roches had a tennis court and a daughter called Betty because once upon a time one of the more unmannerly natives of the town was invited to play tennis with Betty and began the game by roaring down the court: Balls to you, Miss Betty, or so it was reported.

Dodo Roche, the last of the Roches to live in the castle, went to live with her maid on the Mill Park Road. She was extremely polite and worked for the blind. In the old days, local people pulled Roche wedding carriages through the streets, but now the castle was ours, and visitors wrote their names in the Visitors Book before they went to look at all the exhibits. And if you wanted something which your parents could not afford, someone always said to you: Who do you think we are, the Roches of the castle?