GRAHAM GREENE'S OTHER ISLAND

an interview by Pierre JOANNON

Your first visit to Ireland was in 1923, just after the Civil War. What were your impressions ?

It seems very distant now. I went with a cousin and we walked from Dublin to Waterford. The impression remains of broken bridges all the way along the route. It was a week after De Valera had issued his order to dump arms. We didn't find any enmity except in one town where people threw a few stones at us on the road and in a pub where the owner pretended that there was no food, although we could notice people eating eggs and bacon. That was all.

As a young undergraduate, I had no introduction whatsoever. We knew nobody. We did stop at the house of, I think it was, the poet Katharine Tynan on our way down. She was living quite contentedly in a rather big house but she was boycotted by the local people who claimed that there was a ghost in her drive. They didn't wish to offend her by giving any other reason.

But of course it is very dim in my memory now. I wrote an article on my first impressions of Dublin in a paper called The Saturday Westminster which was a very good weekly paper of the period : I suppose it was one of the first things that I ever got published.

— Later on, you were a frequent visitor to Achill Island ?

— Yes, at the end of the forties and in the early fifties, I used to go nearly every year to Achill with a friend who had a little cottage. There I met Ernie O'Malley, the author of On Another Man's Wound who had been Assistant Chief of Staff of the I.R.A. in 1922. He was an enchanting man. I remember, one day in Achill, I asked him at what time high tide was. He hesitated a long time, a look of caution came into his eyes and his attitude became typical of the Old I.R.A. man determined not to give any information to a possible enemy. « Well Graham, that depends »,