The winter I was 25, I spent three months hitchhiking around the entire coast of Ireland for a travel book I was writing. I talked to hundreds of characters. I stayed in hostels, and cooked in their kitchens. I spent a lot of the time drying myself and my rucksack out from the incessant rain. It was a brilliant experience, and also a deeply unglamorous one. I wore the same charcoal woollen jumper, the same pair of jeans and the same red rainproof (it was not rainproof) jacket for most of those three sodden months.
Dermot Bolger, who had given me the go-ahead for this project, and promised he would publish it if the eventual manuscript got his approval (it did, and was one of the first titles New Island Books published), also gave me an introduction to Jennifer Johnston. I had read all her books, and was a fan of her spare, elegant and elegiac writing.
The famous and successful Jennifer Johnston had gone out of her way to spend time with me, and what greater gift could I possibly have had on that winter journey back then?
Before I set off, he told me he had mentioned my name to her, and the nature of my hitchhiking adventures, and that I would be passing through Derry at some point. Then, like a rabbit from a hat, he furnished me with a telephone number on a piece of paper. When I got to Derry, I was to call this number, which was the landline at Brook Hall, where Jennifer resided with her second husband, David Gilliland.
Several weeks into my trip, I arrived in Derry. I stood in a phone box with a pocketful of coins and tentatively called the number I had kept safe all that time. What interest could a bedraggled and unpublished young woman roaming the winter highways and byways of Ireland with a hare-brained writing project possibly be to a famous author such as Jennifer Johnston?
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“Come out and stay the night,” she instructed me when I told her my name. I don’t know what I had been expecting: a meeting over coffee in Derry perhaps. It was definitely not this invitation.
And so I hitched out of Derry to Brook Hall. Until I was dropped at the gates, I had not known that this beautiful white house overlooking the river Foyle was what I would describe as a mansion. It was David Gilliland’s ancestral family home.
The welcome I received from Jennifer and David that day was something I will never forget. After months of bunk beds in hostels, and cooking pasta in communal kitchens of varying hygiene, I had unexpectedly arrived in a kind of paradise. There was a fire roaring, fabulous things to look at everywhere, books galore, and, by far the most amazing of all, two hosts who were kindness itself.
I was shown to a room overlooking the gardens and river with a bathroom hung with original Martyn Turner cartoons, and instructions to come down shortly for a pre-dinner drink. Rain beat at the windows. I wondered if I was hallucinating. In another world, I’d now be in a dormitory in a hostel in Derry, waiting my turn for the shower and for a spare ring at the electric stovetop in the communal kitchen.
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That evening, there was a fabulous dinner, wine in sparkling glasses, and conversation that didn’t stop. Jennifer and David wanted to know all about my hitchhiking adventures. It was crazy to me that anything I had to say was of interest to them, but they were indeed genuinely interested. I took a breath, and told some stories from my experiences over the last few weeks.
In my turn, I had so many questions for Jennifer about writing fiction that I didn’t ask any. It was too daunting. I was star-struck. I never dreamed sitting there at their table that some years into the future, my career would involve asking questions for a living, and many of those questions would be directed at writers.
After dinner, David showed me into a room which he had set up as a gallery. He was a talented photographer in addition to all his other lives. There was so much creativity in the house it was practically humming with ideas and the making of work, and the exuberant living of two good and generous lives.
I left the next morning feeling uplifted in a way I couldn’t describe. It wasn’t just the lovely, lovely experience I had had in Brook Hall. It was something like having had a vote of confidence in my ramshackle enterprise, and my desire to write a nonfiction book: to write stories about people I met. The famous and successful Jennifer Johnston had gone out of her way to spend time with me, and what greater gift could I possibly have had on that winter journey back then?
Jennifer and David are both gone now, but I will never forget their kindness, generosity, and hospitality to a young woman whom they literally welcomed out of the rain and into their home for a night. Thank you, Jennifer, for giving me your phone number all those years ago. Rest easy.
