Under the Bridge and Over the Moon by Kevin Ireland

Author:Kevin Ireland [Kevin Ireland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775532224
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2014-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

23: KNOWLEDGE IN THE BLOOD

Throughout the whole of my childhood I think I met only the one boy whom I could describe as utterly beyond the help even of a teacher as brilliant and determined as Biddy. He was the boy on the neighbouring farm who was soon to be moving on, and I felt honoured to become his friend for the short time I knew him.

This anti-prodigy’s name was Alan, and though it is easy now to recognise how secretly attractive his uncompromising resistance to my aunt’s determined efforts must have seemed to me at the time, I didn’t have the insight to be fully aware of this factor. He was willing to associate himself with me, despite the fact that I was a ‘townie’, and that was enough.

Alan’s absolute refusal to learn wasn’t a case of being dull, for he was quite the opposite; it was simply that he was astutely single-minded about his nature and the inevitability of his fate. He was only ten years old, yet he seemed to be more ancient than anyone I had ever known. In some strange way it seemed that he belonged to the land and the long ages of its transformations and the plants that have grown in its soil and the animals that have foraged over it or flown in the air above it.

School had no meaning to him. It was merely a place of occasional incarceration that he would one day be old enough to be allowed to escape from. There was nothing he could be taught by Biddy that he wanted to know. His family had ‘sometime’ come from ‘somewhere’ in England, where they had always been farmers – and farmers were all they would ever be.

As Alan explained his situation, in a phrase that mystified and thrilled me, farming was ‘in his blood’. Immediately I could picture his heart pumping this strange rural liquid through his body. It was green and sludgy, and it smelled of cows and horses. I hoped he would cut himself sometime, though not too badly, and that I would be fortunate enough to be there to see what it really looked like.

His father, whom he always referred to a ‘me old man’, was illiterate, except to the extent that, when he had to, he could close one eye, clench his teeth, clutch a pen in his fist and slowly scratch out the few connected letters of his name. Alan’s mother – ‘me old woman’ – could not even manage this feat, but I never got an answer to my questions about whether his uncommunicative but compulsively grinning elder brother could read and write. All enquiries about this mysterious member of the family were always deflected by the repeated assertion that he would be ‘all right’ so long as ‘no one was silly enough to ask him to wipe the smile off his face’.

Alan’s two sisters could both manage to decipher the statements and accounts that occasionally came in the mailbox, and

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