Conquering the turbulence

It's a long way from Texas to Castletownsend in west Cork and former pilot, now gallery owner, Margaret Thomas Warren is well aware of the twists and ironies which have brought her to Ireland. "I think life is about things coming full circle and the ways in which circumstances leads you places," she says.

In her case, however, imagination has tended to dictate. As a child of seven living in Glen Rose, a small town in Texas, she first saw an object which in time would provide her with an extraordinary sense of freedom. In fact, it would make freedom a reality. "I was at school - I would have been in first grade at the time. The teacher had written the multiplication tables on the blackboard. She had just finished telling us a story about two men. One was afraid, the other was fearless, but both men did what they set out to do. The teacher said that was what courage was - being brave enough to do what you had to do, no matter how scared you were. She said that because you were not scared didn't mean you were brave. I liked that story."

Even at that early age, Warren possessed the logic and factual intelligence which has become characteristic of her responses to life. Moments later, as the teacher was busy writing on the blackboard, the sound of her squeaking chalk was drowned out by another noise. "It sounded a little like Mother's sewing machine, only louder. I looked out and saw something in the air, something with wings like an enormous dragonfly. I jumped up and ran out of the schoolhouse and followed the thing flying through the air until it sank from sight towards the earth."

For Warren, it was to prove one of her most important experiences, and certainly the central one of her early life. "It changed everything," as she would write more than 70 years later: "It was one of those moments as in an old tale: the magic lantern is rubbed, the right word is spoken, doors open and secrets are known.

"I didn't know the object I stared out was called an aeroplane, but I did know that, some day, I too would fly through the air." In time she did. By 14 she was already having free flying lessons at a local airfield, and at 17, in 1929, (the year of the Wall Street stock market crash) she earned her pilot's licence.

She is best known in Ireland - where she and her late husband, Bayard Warren, settled about 20 years ago, having come here to visit a cousin, "who was only visiting as well" - as the owner of Warren's Boat House, a unique and one of the most beautiful art galleries in this country. In common with Derek Hill's Glebe Gallery in Churchill, Co Donegal, Warren's Boat House is situated in glorious landscape - which inevitably means well-removed from cities. Warren remarks: "People do have to make an effort to get here. Apart from the long drive to get here," she laughs, "the walk back which is all uphill from the gallery, usually leaves them feeling they have suffered for their art."

The 19th-century, stone boathouse which she has restored is on the edge of a small quay. In fine weather, it is an idyllic spot which has also provided an excellent working space for artists. Warren is encouraging artists to come to work here in a residency situation. The first artist was composer Raymond Deane; a young American poet arrived a few weeks ago.

Warren paints landscapes in oil and acrylic and the views from here are superb. Outside, it is cold but clear. In mid-winter, the storms here can often be magnificently terrifying, with waves crashing and flying debris potentially lethal. Even the boathouse doors, now restored, were blown in by gales.

Bayard Warren purchased the then roofless boathouse to use for its original purpose. His death, 13 years ago in April, left Margaret lost. "We had been married for just over 50 years. I didn't know what to do. No, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't read, I couldn't write. I just took painting lessons. The following year, I just took my dog and went to London and stayed. I bought a flat. Then I went on a trip to China. But then, I wanted to do something with the boathouse and came up with the idea of the gallery and a general art space for music, painting and theatre." The boathouse has already been used for performance and readings.

Beckett's Molloy has been performed here. Recent shows have featured the work of Martin Gale, Dermot Seymour and Hector McDonnell. Later this year, in August, Maidi, an international art movement founded in 1946 and "dedicated to the reaffirming of the splendours of geometry", is launching an exhibition at the Boat House, which will be part of a Maidi arts festival in the village. This show will be followed by a retrospective of photographer John Minihan. "I always been interested in the arts: art, theatre. When I was a kid in Texas, I used to go to theatre every Saturday. A lot of travelling theatre companies came to town. Every city had its own repertory company. And of course there was the movies which I was passionate about - and music. I like chamber music and opera as well as Crosby and Sinatra and big bands."

Having become a patron of the arts, she has views on patronage. "The arts are supported by the government - which has to be careful with its grants - and business - but these are sponsors rather than patrons. An individual doesn't have to be rich, but you do have to be prepared to take risks because you're interested. Because you just want to do it. It's not about being a do-gooder. I do think `patron' has become a dirty word and it's not one."

Having survived recent storms, Castletownsend remains its serene self, with the aura of a garrison town without a garrison. Although undeniably picturesque, it has an old-world dignity, apparently determined to avoid artificial prettification. There are about 100 permanent residents, many of whom, like Margaret Warren, are non-nationals. It is quiet in winter, a close community with a slightly enigmatic aura. "I don't pretend to understand the social forces, but I've been treated beautifully here," Warren says. Two years ago she scripted a 30-minute documentary about Castletownsend, it was her first venture in film and is very good. "I loved doing it. I only though I'd attempt it because the subject matter is so interesting."

Situated about five miles south-east of Skibbereen, the village emerges along a small, steep street which slopes dramatically down to the sea. It was founded about 1650 by the English planter Richard Townsend, whose descendants, along with the Somerville clan, have always dominated village life. Three Harry Clarke stained glass windows feature in St Barrahane's, the local Protestant church, and in the churchyard rest Edith Somerville and her collaborator, Violet Martin. "Edith Somerville played the organ there. What do you think of her work?" she asks, remarking she prefers the autobiographical writings to the fiction - "although her fiction is fairly autobiographical as it draws on her family and people she knew". In 1984 Warren organised a week-long Somerville and Ross festival.

Warren's home is the house in which Somerville died. "I've been told what is now my living room was Somerville's bedroom and she died there." That room is now dominated by a pair of wonderful yellow curtains made from Italian fabric which used to hang in her Boston home. Coloured lights decorating the rare, bushy willow-like tree outside the yellow house catch the eye. A small, navy gate leads on to a small, neat garden boasting a fine golden oak. Margaret Warren waits in welcome. She is small, quick in her movements and direct. "How did it go? Getting here in the dark isn't funny."

The sound of Texas accompanies her every word. She is also very witty and believes that, without a sense of humour, "a person may as well give up, don't you think?" Paintings dominate the wall space, though they share it with flying-memorabilia. A painting of a plane hangs beside her framed pilot's licence. There is a photograph of her pretty teenage self in her flying gear. "Oh, I don't know, I look kind of cutesy - overly coy," she says on being complimented about it. She seems surprised at my interest in her flying career, but she was one of the original members of the Ninety Nines, the organisation of US women pilots. Formed in 1929, the year she was awarded her licence, its objective was "to encourage other women to learn to fly, and to aid in the creation of opportunities for women pilots in the field of commercial aviation". Its first president was Amelia Earhart. Not for the first time, Warren faces the inevitable question, did she know Earhart? "No, but I suppose I must have met her." For Warren, flying was "a dream I had that became real" so she seems to find it surprising that others see it as a dangerous adventure. It also became her job, as she not only flew as a member of exhibition teams, flying open-cockpit aircraft, and later demonstrated planes to potential customers. Alongside the paintings is a number of fascinating objects; painted Japanese screens, old wooden boxes, and ancient wall-clock - all interesting rather than valuable. "They all came from my husband's family. We didn't have anything." It is a remark, not a lament. When she was 12, and her family was living in Meridian, near Glen Rose, her home burned to the ground and their possessions were lost. But for Warren, complete loss had come two years earlier, when she was 10. "My mother's death left me with this fear of being left. It took me years to realise this. I think that's why I would always be the one to go as soon as I sensed a love affair was not going well.

"I know I didn't come to terms with my mother's death until I wrote about it in my book." Taking Off, a frank, unsentimental memoir about Warren's early life, was published in 1993.

The eldest of three, Warren was born in Anson, Jones County in west Texas, in 1912 but her parents soon moved back to Glen Rose, her mother's home, a small town in central Texas. There she spent her first seven years. A series of moves brought the family to Fort Worth, back to Glen Rose and then on to San Antonio. Considering how strongly Texan she still seems, would she not want to return? "Oh, I have been back, but the Texas I love is gone. It lives in my memory but like everything else, it has all changed." Asked to describe her Texas, she says: "It's a beautiful place of wild flowers, mesquite trees, live oak and carpets of bluebonnets. The sky is huge, it's vast and goes on for ever. Usually it's just blue, but becomes violet when a storm is coming. It is often a violent sky. There's an infinite feeling to the sky. The Irish sky is such a contrast. It's so much smaller, it's always changing, the light is luminous. It just seems closer." All of her family, including her siblings, is now dead.

Her mother had been a resourceful woman who had kept a cow and chickens and grew her own fruit and vegetables. Warren's father was quite delicate, and perhaps rather indulged. "His parents had both been widowed and then had met and married, His mother was over 50 when he was born." He had various jobs on small, local papers and while he battled to keep the family together after his wife's death, moving everyone to San Antonio, his health eventually broke and he contracted tuberculosis. He was sent to a sanatorium in western Texas. "My sister was put to board with a schoolteacher, my brother was placed in a home for the mentally ill in Austin and I went to work for a cousin."

Although not given to morbid pronouncements - Warren is an optimist whose harsh early life and experience of real poverty never affected her personality - she admits to at one time envying her mother the peace of death: "She was free." While working on her cousin's switchboard, a job she did not enjoy, Warren began going to night school. Life in San Antonio began to improve. "I loved San Antonio - it was looser, more relaxed, more Catholic, a lot different from central Texas where the attitudes tended towards Bible-Belt Protestantism." Her flying soon took her to New York: "There were great years. It was the golden age of aviation. I lived at Roosevelt Field" - the famous airfield Lindbergh took off from.

"It's a shopping centre now."

She was married briefly at 18, to a much older man who proved a good friend. "There was always a crowd around him, he was a great storyteller. But I wasn't in love with him." After the divorce they stayed friends, but Warren continued fending for herself. "The Depression was something no one can possibly understand unless you lived through it. It was so awful to see men who had had good jobs suddenly have nothing to do, it was hopeless. And hope now, for me, is the greatest gift God ever gave anybody."

Having been to the South and suffered a series of misadventures (including crashing her car and surviving a suicide attempt), she returned to New York and began working for a Russian aircraft firm. There she met Bayard Warren, a Bostonian. "I was the office manager, and it was his first job. So I decided `I'll give this little rich boy the lowest salary I can'." They married in 1935.

"We went to Texas and then settled in New York." When war broke out Bayard joined the US marines and fought in the Pacific. Warren failed her flying medical "by smoking about a thousand Lucy Strikes a day". She laughs and says: "It was the nadir of my life."

Having worked part-time for the US airforce as a civilian, she soon moved to California. "It was handier - Bayard was training there."

Together they travelled the world. "He was perfect; he was fun, he had a great sense of humour. He was kind, uncritical and he indulged me beyond belief. He even let me move to Ireland. Can you beat that?" In 1948 they adopted two children: "A boy and a girl. They are both over 50 now . . ." She seems slightly surprised.

She is an original. Straightforward, funny, always asking about books - "Have you read this? No? Take it." She hands me a copy of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, an account of a disaster at sea in 1991. "The bravery of the rescue people is just amazing." Among the many places the Warrens visited was Russia, a country with which she has always had an affinity: "I love the people." Burma she also found fascinating. "It was so different, so un-Westernised. Traditional dress, no Western clothes. It was like watching a ballet." Leaping on to a chair in mid-sentence to fetch something down from a shelf, she is a good talker; fast, funny, responsive and interested.

There is nothing defiant about the way she is defying time. She is curious about people's fascination with age. "I don't have any feeling about age. It doesn't impress me, never has. I have lots of young friends, old ones too. It doesn't affect my rapport with people." She does admit to always getting a shock when she sees herself in a shop window: "I see this person and I don't feel it's me. I always picture myself at about 50, but of course I don't look 50 any more."