This Is The Why

I was in Ireland in November, driving down from Belfast to our house in North West Leitrim. Everywhere I looked the countryside was ablaze with colour – the yellow gorse flowers, the golden leaves of beech and maple, the skeletal orange larches, the vivid hawthorn berries and the occasional outlandish splash of purple from some imported prunus. It was a magnificent sight.

When at last I arrived, I opened the door of our house and stepped inside. The air was as cold as in a tomb. No one been there for months and in the meantime the radiators had filled with air. But we soon had a fire going and for the next few days we did little else but sit in front of it, reading books and only getting up to throw on another log.

The house stands on an isolated spot. My father grew up on that land, though not in that same house. When he left it as a young man to come to England the old house tumbled down and later on the new one was built.

He and I did not often see eye to eye and whenever I asked why I should carry out some order, my father was fond of raising his right hand and saying, 'That's the why,' meaning that I would feel the weight of that hand if I didn't do as I was told.

I was thinking of this as I wandered down a little path that leads away from the house, seeming to end up nowhere at all. The path was spread with golden leaves and when I reached the end I suddenly felt as if I stood upon the brink of that Other World of which so many stories have been told. I could almost see it trembling before me like a picture painted on silk.

All my life I have looked for such a path. As a child growing up in London I searched for it in deserted places wherever buildings conspired with their shadows And here it was at last.

'This is the why,' I said to myself and to my father too, in case he was listening.