By Patrick O’Sullivan

I remember my delight when the publishers, Anvil Books, expressed interest in my book about my childhood. It wasn’t all plain sailing, of course, there were several edits and rewrites; these far more challenging than the writing of the first draft.

I was so excited about the prospect of publication, though, that I was only too happy to do the extra work, knowing as I did that it would all be worthwhile in the long run. There were meetings with the publishers in Dublin, which meant journeys by train to the capital, and one time, when they had other business in Kerry, they came to see me at home.

It was in the springtime and there were great masses of bluebells in bloom under the old sycamore in the garden, their nodding, inky blues with a magic all of their own. I remember we went for a walk along the winding country road, little patches of primroses on banks here and there, the old ringed fort on the clifftop overlooking the bay, the trees that grew around it long since slanted away from the sea.
We also paid a brief visit to the old country house and its environs, a place where my mother had worked as cook; not only as a young woman but also in later years when we children were going to school. The handsome rhododendron, years old, was in full bloom on the front lawn, its deep red flowers with a richness that had a kind of vintage feel about it.

There was no telling how many springs it had seen come and go, harking back, as it did, to the days of old Ford motors and garden parties and games of tennis on the higher lawns. It was, in its way, like an emblem of the season, so much so that we could hardly have imagined the place without it.

The publishers commissioned black and white illustrations for the book and, needless to say, when I was shown these for the very first time, I was filled with excitement too. One of them showed our little brown donkey hidden in the rhododendron that grew in one of the avenue fields; a favourite haunt of his when he did not want to be found.

The illustration was very simple, but it had a whimsical kind of feel to it that I liked at once. Eventually the book itself was published; ‘I heard the Wild Birds Sing’, the title chosen by the publishers from a short list of three. The cover, showing a wood in springtime, the hazy blues of the bluebells stretching far and away into the distance, the trees above them coming into bloom.

I had already seen the image and having a sense of depth, a way of drawing the eye into the wood, it appealed to me to me at once. Soon after the book was in the window of Duffrys in Killorglin, the local newsagents and booksellers.

Anne Bronte, sister of Emily and Charlotte, saw the bluebells having an eloquence of its own, in that it invariably evoked feelings of longing and nostalgia for times past; ‘There is a silent eloquence/In every wild bluebell/That fills my softened heart with bliss/That words could never tell’.

When she looked at a bluebell, she recalled childhood days, ‘When heart and soul were free/And when I dwelt with kindred hearts/That loved and cared for me’.
Meanwhile, it was the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote , ‘I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have just been looking at’. As with so many other aspects of nature, the flower had a spiritual significance for him, adding, as he did, that it was full of, ‘strength and grace’.

According to mystery writer, Agatha Christie, the bluebell is a flower which refuses to be captured. It does not last long in the jar or the vase and is only at its best in the woods.
There were drifts of bluebells here and there in the woods of Callinafercy so that the image on the cover of my book could not have been more apt.

It was lovely to be gathering sticks or simply going for a walk in the grove when the trees were greening and leafing again and the birds were at their song; the inky blues of the bluebells a sure and certain sign that spring would soon slip into summer and the days grow longer and warmer still.

The colour of the bluebells always reminded me of the dark blue ink we used at school so that looking back I think of them as the finest poetry penned by nature itself. After all, what other poet, what other artist, could have written and painted such beautiful things in the woods of spring?

Sometimes in my mind’s eye I am back in the grove again, the bluebells inking the place with delight, the sunbeams falling in slants from above, and the blackbird singing in some green leafy nook of his own. n

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