To Be where Dark Mourne Sweeps Down to the Sea  

It took a pandemic to propel me into writing about this ache for home.

And a comment from a genealogy contact online.

“What,” she says “is a girl from the Mournes doing in California?”

“It’s a long story” I say.

The question feels all the more poignant because coronavirus has broken a bargain of 40 years.

Work has taken us to many places, fifteen homes in 25 years.  But, never completely away from County Down. Yes, I’ll go to live in Switzerland but every year I will be winging my way back to the Mournes. Our children may speak French at school but they will need to know the love and raw edges of their origins.

Yes, I’ll live in America but I will always need to feel the assault of the wind blowing sideways from the shore at Newcastle.

“Your head’s cut” I hear my family say, “no-one misses an east wind!”

No pretense is allowed. Everyone knows who you are. As a young adult I left to seek the anonymity of the city; the freedom to re-invent myself. Somewhere in the reinvention I learned that roots mattered.

For many years I would talk to family about their memories of their parents and grandparents, of the fields and farmhouses scattered across County Down, in the watersheds of the Mournes, where they had spent their early years and adult lives. I loved their stories of farming and wartime and change. It all seemed so distant, an underlying landscape, so disconnected from my life which was full of the upheaval of moving from country to country, finding schools for my children, adapting to living in different cultures. This was my change, so immediate, so time consuming, but home, it remained the same.

I was wrong, of course.

Gradually, then suddenly, the loved ones and their stories were no more. In January of 2021 my father died of COVID, I had not been able to visit him for over a year because of the pandemic. I watched his funeral by Zoom. The final link was broken. All the people who remembered my childhood had gone.

The man in the supermarket will no longer say “Your grandmother and mine were at school together” because I do not have one or other of my parents by my side as a clue to my identity.

The woman serving coffee at church will not tell me that she is a distant relative on my mother’s side, unless I explain who I am.

The mountains are still there, no less beautiful but, oh, so much emptier . More than ever I yearn to drink in the clear air, to distil that sense of home, to gather in the ties of kinship. The stories I collected, the documents I recorded, the churchyards I may still visit, these are the tangible memories of all those who went before.

This is where belonging and genealogy walk arm in arm.