On the Moon?, Stan McWilliams
On a balmy airless night in July 1969 I sit with my Grandmother on the edge of a concrete water tank looking up at the moon; Apollo 11 is on its way home.
My Grandmother, Annie Davis was born in 1889, Annie Gillmor in post-famine County Leitrim, the eldest of eight children. As a young woman she read the poetry of Longfellow, The Romantic Poets and later the War Poets when her younger brother and cousin fought in WW1. She had strong religious and Victorian values, protecting where she could, her shrinking Protestant community.
I am her first grandchild. When Apollo 11 lifts off to the Moon I am 17, going into my A-level years; dreaming of being an airline pilot, a head full of rock songs and riffs, playing in a small band, in a garage mostly.
We travel from Ballymena to Larkfield near Manorhamilton in County Leitrim on the 12th of July, the start of the Twelfth holidays, avoiding the traffic snarls around main Orange demonstrations.
The sun shines all summer; the hay is fresh and sweet smelling, made without rain and worry. A Sunday afternoon trip to Bundoran is a teenage heaven; the base beats of “Mony Mony” and “Baby Come Back”, drive out above the lights in the packed arcade; girls in short skirts lounge in the summer heat.
News filters through of escalating conflict since the 12th; the first deaths of the Troubles, riots in Derry and Belfast, families fleeing their homes in fear.
I follow the progress of Apollo 11 from Cape Canaveral to the Moon and back. RTE’s daily coverage taking me to the heart of it. The scratchy voices and broken fuzzy images add to the drama. I am mesmerised by the magic of it.
Late one evening after the Apollo 11 programme ends Granny asks me to go with her to fetch water; the large kettle and pot on the range are all but empty. There is no indoor plumbing; drinking water comes from the well below in the meadow, the rest is drawn from a large open concrete storage tank at the top of the yard. We take two buckets apiece. Granny is now 80 has had osteoporosis for years; she gets smaller each time we visit.
The moon, nearly full, lights the farmyard and surrounding landscape. We walk the 25 yards up to the tank, our buckets clinking, breathing in the warm air of a long summer dusk.
“Do ye hear that?” she asks.
“Listen!”
There it is, faint in the distance, a cuckoo, soft and velvety as the evening.
I pull out the wooden stopper from a pipe protruding from the tank and fill the buckets from the spout of water; Granny’s I only half fill. She sits on the edge of a small tank where the cattle drink, and when I finish, I sit down beside her.
“The beauty of God’s world.” she says with a sigh, as our gaze is drawn to the sky.
“You’re enjoying it? The Moon on TV?” she asks me after a time.
“I am. It’s a great adventure.”
“Well,” she replies dryly, “Whatever I’ve seen on that box in there, I don’t believe they’re up the there.”
And with that she picks up her buckets and walks towards the farmhouse.
As the end of the holidays approach and our return to Ballymena is imminent, the news brings word that violence continues to spiral. There is widespread sectarian rioting; British troops are on the streets of Belfast and Derry, taking control from the Stormont Government. At Larkfield there is an undertow of tension as we think about getting home.
Stan in a Donegal based writer who grew up in Ballymena. A parent of 3 grown children, a farmer and wind farmer, he lives in rural Donegal and takes inspiration from his environment and a wide range of life experiences in Ireland, UK and abroad.
He started creative writing in 2019 and has produced a series of short stories, a mixture of memoir and fiction. His first story was published in the Leitrim Guardian 2019; another was delivered at a Tenx9 event in Derry. He is a member of the Derry writing group “This writing thing …”.
This and other stories can be found at https://thecurlewscall.home.blog/