MinxterBLOOM

John McGahern, Irish writer and farmer, wrote this about remembering his mother in Memoir, published by Faber and Faber; Rev Ed edition (2 Nov 2006):
❛My relationship with this landscape extended back to the very beginning of my life. When I was three years old I used to walk a lane like these lanes to Lisacarn School with my mother. Lisacarn had only a single room and the teachers faced one another when they taught their classes. On the windowsill glowed the blue Mercator globe, and wild flowers were scattered in jamjars on the sills and all about the room. Along the lane there was a drinking pool for horses, gates to houses, and the banks were covered with all kinds of wild flowers and vetches and wild strawberries.

My mother named these flowers for me as we walked, and sometimes we stopped and picked them for the jamjars.

I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school. There are many such lanes all around where I live, and in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace in which I feel that I can live for ever. I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss. These moments disappear as suddenly and as inexplicably as they come, and long before they can be recognised and placed.❜