MEMOIRS: Damien Enright's enthusiasm for west Cork where he lives, and his unconventional family, bursts from the pages of his new book, A Place Near Heaven. Alannah Hopkin meets the writer and broadcaster.
Fintan is hardly in the door after driving himself home from school, before he is out again: "I'm off to the Frying Pan," he shouts as he passes, togs in hand. This is not a fast food joint, but a swimming place in Courtmacsherry, a short walk from the Enright home.
Fintan, now a lean, fit 17-year-old, was two and a half in 1989 when his parents, Damien and Marie Enright, and his 11-year-old brother, Dara, moved from Hampstead back to west Cork. He spent last year, his transition year, living in La Gomera in the Canary islands with his parents, learning surfing and Spanish. His Spanish is now better than that of his 64-year-old father, and his accent more Irish. He makes wicked fun of his father's Anglicised accent: "Not caw pawk, dad, car park!"
Fintan features as "the boy" in Damien Enright's A Place Near Heaven. In spite of the rhapsodic title, this is emphatically not another Year in Provence/Tuscany. It features first-rate nature writing and fresh, enthusiastic observation of the world around us. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to dust off the binoculars and the bird book and rush out at crack of dawn to see the action.
Although subtitled "A Year in West Cork", this is not a parochial account of place; west Cork is the canvas on which the larger picture of nature is observed. Curiosity, and Enright's continual excitement are evident, whether he is indoors, mesmerised by a spider descending on a silken thread from his forelock, or outdoors on a spring morning, where "the air is sharp and clean as a curlew's whistle".
His book also offers an incidental account of the life of an unusual extended family - Fintan is the youngest of seven children by three wives. Writer and explorer Tim Severin, who launched the book in Cork, compared it to Gerald Durrell's classic, My Family and Other Animals.
West Cork was not new to Damien Enright in 1989. As the son of a peripatetic bank manager, he lived briefly in Clonakilty as a child, but moved on to Thurles, Dublin (Blackrock College) and Letterkenny before leaving Ireland at 18.
In person, Enright is no rugged outdoorsman. He dresses - and moves - more like a jazz musician than a bird-watcher. He describes a certain type of dedicated 'birder' as looking "like they might live in nests rather than houses", the opposite of his own style.
He writes as he speaks, in an unstoppable torrent, where one thing inevitably leads to another. I was once talking to him on the phone, when he suddenly interrupted me to report that an ass and cart had just driven past his window with a strimmer in the back: "Did this sum up contemporary rural Ireland?", he asked.
Enright is known for his books about walking, commentaries on what he calls "easy Sunday afternoon walks", and his weekly Irish Examiner column on environmental matters, and Enright's Way, a three-part TV series broadcast by RTÉ. He is also a published poet, and the prose in his book, for all its apparent spontaneity, is highly polished - the result of what he calls "a long culling process", carried out while he was in La Gomera last year. As he writes, "it takes far-travelled eyes to see home".
West Cork, like the rest of rural Ireland, is not always heaven, and Enright is outspoken about its more hellish aspects - including the loss of walkers' access (most famously on the Old Head of Kinsale, now a golf links), ill-sited new houses, rotary saws decimating hedges in the nesting season, those who burn gorse, and house-proud home owners who destroy the nests of house martins with brooms. Yet he originally learnt about birds by stealing eggs from their nests - as one did in the 1940s.
Enright is entirely self-taught. He pioneered the freewheeling lifestyle of the 1960s - living on his wits in Majorca, then Ibiza and London, doing a variety of jobs, from tutoring rich kids, to selling antiques in Portobello Road, and importing textiles from Afghanistan.
He married at 20, and his wife Sally had twins. Divorced in 1962, he had three more children with his next partner, Anne, and combined tutoring with the writing of film scripts, some of which were optioned. An attempt to live in the Borlin Valley near Glengarriff, in a crumbling house without electricity, ended that marriage. Anne and the children returned to London, and Damien stayed on.
He had by then met Marie Hill. She was hitch-hiking home to Leap from University College, Cork with two friends. Even today, he relishes the memory: "I'd had no experience of Irish girls, and I'd had two disastrous relationships. The last thing I wanted was more heartbreak. And here was this lovely red-haired Irish girl, just out of university, very fresh, with no affectations, and it was like a new beginning."
The extended family, which now includes seven grandchildren, is unusually close, and has a reunion every year. Both ex-wives and the five children attended Damien and Marie's wedding in 1976. In spite of, or perhaps because of being separated from them, he has a strong relationship with all his children. Each one in turn has been on a camping trip, one of these with Fintan is described in the book.
The harmonious family life is largely, says Damien, due to Marie: "She's not much older than my eldest children, but she was immensely patient with all of them. There was never any nonsense about being a stepmother to them. She just related to them as people."
Marie, a teacher of English as a foreign language, who runs her own school, shares Damien's love of travelling. They spent 1977 working their way round the world, and spent 1981 in La Gomera. Before returning to Hampstead they bought a house, which they restored over the next seven years, and eventually sold to move to Courtmacsherry.
Marie is as quiet as Damien is voluble, but has a strong, calm presence. While she also enjoys walking, she must have enormous reserves of patience. It cannot be easy to live with a man who stops the car a dozen times on a short journey, simply to wonder at the view - or to pick up a newly-dead mink and bring it home for a closer look.
The Enrights have definitely found their place. Says Damien: "We could live anywhere we wanted to, as we have two skills which travel: writing and teaching English. But we decided that Ireland, and specifically, west Cork, was the best place to be - for the quality of life, but also the people, and the atmosphere the people create."
A Place Near Heaven by Damien Enright, is published by Gill & Macmillan (€16.99).