Touching the River

Tom French's address at the launch of 'The River Boyne - hidden legacies, history and lore explored on foot and by boat' by Anthony Holten, at the People of Meath's boathouse, Meath River Rescue Centre, Navan, on 4th February.

 

'I Do Not Know Much About Gods But I Think That The River Is A Strong Brown God'

I have been waiting twenty years – without knowing it – to read a poem in this very place. The title of it is 'Touching the River', and it recounts the story of an incident in the life of Moling, the saint (who gives his name to the place known as Saint Mullins in County Carlow); and the poem was prompted by two lines in a radio news report on 10 November 1998 which said
‘The child has been missing since yesterday evening.
They are dredging the river bed in search of him.’

*

Before I say anything, I have to consider in what capacity I am speaking this evening. I’m delighted that Meath County Council Library Service was helmeted and life-jacketed on one of those boats that set out from Trim that Saturday morning at an early stage in this project. But, this evening, I’m not speaking as a librarian. Truth be told, I thought I knew something about books. But this book has taught me things I didn’t know.

It has taught me that you never say ‘we’re sinking’ when you are in mid-stream; that the correct terminology is ‘we are taking water’. I learned that, on water, you experience a different kind of thirst. I learned that a book about the river cannot be written without getting a wet arse. Mostly, it taught me an important lesson about single-mindedness.
I’m delighted, too, that the writer that is also me was on that boat.
But it’s also not as a writer I am speaking this evening. Many of us here this evening started out as, or, in the process, became friends of this book.

This evening it is as a friend that I want to speak.

*
On an evening such as this evening I incline to believe
that even the spirits gather round in the same way
that the living do – to hear the good words being said,
to see the fruits of all those years of work, and to celebrate
the making of that most human of artefacts – the book.

When a friend of Tony Holten’s saw the book the other day, his first reaction was to exclaim – ‘It’s almost as thick as yourself.’ Which is not just funny; it also contains a strong element of truth.
By another name, the writer Samuel Beckett calls that characteristic ‘tenacity of purpose.’ Our friend – I think it’s fair to say – was not hiding behind the door when that quality was being handed out. It is fair to say that he has it in spades.

And mention of spades puts me in mind of other implements you would not normally consider tools of the writer’s or the researcher’s trade. I am thinking of the bill hook, the oar, the anchor, the outboard engine, even the humble crowbar. I was reminded of the playwright Seán O Casey who would take a roof slate and write with chalk in capital letters – GET ON WITH THE BLOODY PLAY – then set that slate up on the mantelpiece to act as a goad to him whenever his spirits were flagging.

And, when I came across the phrase ‘the humble crowbar’ in an early draft of this book, I suggested to Tony – as a guide to style, as a reminder not to waver into language and to keep the sweetness out of his sentences - that he could do worse than imitate the great O’Casey and to write in bold capitals on his own slate – NO CROWBAR IS EVER HUMBLE.

I like to believe he listened to me.

But, in my heart of hearts, in the small hours, when I can’t sleep and the day is still running through my head – I know he did it the way he was always going to do it.

*

Nobody knows better than the author of The River Boyne: Hidden Legacies, History and Lore Explored on Foot and by Boat about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I have heard him say that any day you can put you two feet on the floor and stand up, is a good day. I’ve seen him fall over in fields close to the river, and get up and carry on as normal – looking at what there is
to see, interrogating the sources, making friends along the way, striking up conversations, learning things, making mental notes, photographing, recording, storing information away.

*

Tony Holten would be the first person to talk about the collective effort that was involved in the making of this book. He would tell you about the help he received along the way, about the team of people who were involved. He would be the first the sing the praises of so-and-so who gave him some little snippet of information that proved to be vital – a date on a piece of stone obscured by ivy, the last vestige of a weir or a eel trap, the keel of a scuppered lighter.

But, I’d like to say it once and clearly – our friend has gone and done, single-handedly, what would have daunted whole teams of writers and researchers and publishers. What person in his right mind would set out to put down all that he knew could find out about one of the most mythic rivers in these islands?

There is, without doubt, an element of madness in this enterprise, which he would readily admit. He has put down in black and white, and lavishly illustrated, and beautifully presented, all that he knows and all that mortal man could find out.

It is also true that he has form.

In 2007, with Nonsuch Publishing he published A Stroke of Luck: One Man’s Struggle with Diabetes and the Irish Medical System.
In 2008 he published Where Toll Roads Meet: Exploring the Road Network Around Tara from Olden Times to the Current M3 Controversy. I remember a fraught launch evening in Navan Library when protestors were attempting to present the then Minister with a pig’s head and Tony managing to be a model of tranquility and diplomacy and to be a living embodiment of the spirit of enquiry.

But there was unfinished business with that book, so he followed that up in 2011 with On Ancient Roads: Recollections, History and Folklore of County Meath. In 2014 he published Of Other Days: recollections of an Irish country childhood 1948-1958 and High kings to Sea kings: a tale of three ships and the landlubber who went to sea. In the process of writing tonight’s book on the Boyne he casually fired of, under the auspices of Navan & District Historical Society, a work titled The Bridges of Navan.

In the process of writing this book, he has also – quite by the way -inspired his friends with his determination, his inexhaustible appetite for life (and for the Boyne), his curiosity, his sheer spirit.

*

I know many of us here this evening have our own stories associated with this book. My abiding one happened between Trim and Bective when the boat I was travelling in surprised an otter. The creature looked at us and we looked at it ... and that’s all that happened; until later, when one line, followed by a second line, came. And I wrote the two of them down, and they looked like a couplet.

All I had to do then was find out what it might be called, and the title came from the river and from that journey. Tony had written already The Middle Reaches

And the two lines went

It’s taken half my lifetime to come
eye to eye with an otter;
it’ll take the next half to forget
how we regarded one another.

Later again, when I wrote to Seamus Heaney to ask permission to use a phrase of his in an essay in which that two-line poem appeared, he replied in his generous way and said that Ted Hughes would have loved the otter. Which got me curious. So I went looking and found what I wasn’t looking for. Hughes had written, in a book titled River

the river is a god

knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.

And then I found what Seamus Heaney had hinted at. There was Hughes’ otter –

Underwater eyes, an eel’s
oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter:
Four-legged yet water-gifted, to outfish fish;
with webbed feet and long ruddering tail
and a round head like an old tomcat.

[He] wanders, cries;
gallops along land he no longer belongs to;
[he] re-enters the water by melting.

Suddenly, that creature of the Boyne, whose eyes had rested on me briefly – with a simple glance, in a couple of lines – was connected to all of English literature, to everything that has ever been written about rivers.

*
To return to where I started, and to conclude, what I have learned from this book about the book is that it is may be made of pages and ink, but what go into its making are heart and soul. He has put his heart and soul into this book. It sustained him in the dark times. It is a testament to his spirit.

I am grateful to my friend, not just for The Middle Reaches.
I am grateful to him for his example.

He has done, I believe, the barely imaginable.
And yet, he has only gone and done
what we knew he was capable of.

He has given us this strong, brown god.
It give me great pleasure, to say to you – his friends –
that he has given us the Boyne.

*