B L I N D M A N ’ S B L U F F AIDAN HIGGINS OTHER WORKS BY AIDAN HIGGINS Felo de Se Langrishe, Go Down Images of Africa Balcony of Europe Scenes from a Receding Past Asylum & Other Stories Bornholm Night-Ferry Helsingor Station & Other Departures Ronda Gorge & Other Precipices Lions of the Grunewald Flotsam & Jetsam As I was Riding down Duval Boulevard with Pete La Salle A Bestiary Windy Arbours Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air ABOUT AIDAN HIGGINS Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form ANECDOTES, CARTOONS, COLLAGES, and PICS For the Semi-Blind Compiled with the Aid of Neil Donnelly, Matthew Geden, and Alannah Hopkin. Part the diamonds and you’ll find slug’s meat. Djuna Barnes CONTENTS Cover Title Page OTHER WORKS BY AIDAN HIGGINS ANECDOTES, CARTOONS, COLLAGES, and PICS Flood and Fire My Mother and the Cat Education with the Nuns Road Kill The Suicide of old Jem Brady Jesuit Casuistry Lord Nelson’s Hat Handy Andy Compass Hill A Tiff with Mary Ann Quigley In the Psychiatric Ward The Enigmatic Publisher John Calder Contretemps in the Chinese Restaurant The Japanese Intruder Speer’s Secret Garden West View Incident on the Hill A Walk in the Dark Robinson Crusoe A Footprint in the Sand About the Author Copyright Flood and Fire Nothing was ever as familiar as the mile-long road from our front gate (two lodges, seventy-two acres, grazing for horses or cows) to the village a mile off. It seemed forever in existence and could never change. At the corner was Brady’s farm. Next was the Collegiate Girls’ School. The Protestant orphans seemed to spend most of their free time in the hockey field instead of the classroom. They were taken crocodile-fashion in double file for walks at regular intervals, their teachers striding behind. I was acutely embarrassed when I had to pass this file of chattering girls, and blushed to the roots of my hair. One day came a strange disruption of the ordinary. As usual I was being pushed in my black-hooded pram, that most funereal looking thing, into the village and found water up to the approaches of Marlay Abbey, then occupied by nuns. The village was flooded, the Liffey had overflowed its banks, the bridge with five arches was under water. No one was about. We had to turn back. What must the deluge have been like? It was a day of prodigious happenings, never to be repeated. Nothing predictable was to be expected. It was to become a time of stupendous occasions. First the flood, then the death of the postman and old Jem Brady. For days it was noticed that he behaved peculiarly, he wasn’t himself. Then one morning his bed was empty. My Mother and the Cat Years went by and Papa Hemingway hobnobbing with Castro in Cuba had tamed an owl for which he could find no adequate pet name. Papa was a great inventor of cruel nicknames, called Marlene Dietrich “the Kraut.” Not finding a suitable pet name for the owl, he called it OWL, wise old owl, and this suited the bird as no other name could. No other word would do. You might like to know how it all began, what induced me to write in the first place. Why, where everyone began, with one’s mother, herself a voracious reader, with access to banned books. The light romance, Without My Cloak, and Brinsely McNamara’s The Valley of the Squinting Windows that my wife wittily renamed The Valley of the Squinting Widows. My mother put a pencil in my hand and pointed at the cat that was watching us intensely, and said, “Write down CAT for me in capital letters.” She tried for days to get me to write CAT but I could feel no affinity between the observant dumb creature and the word CAT. My mother tried Hat, Fat, Mat, Bat, all to no avail, until one day the miracle occurred. Animate and inanimate merged. I could now make the connection between words and a living being. Eventually my mother’s patience was rewarded, and I could read Christopher Robin and the likes. In a few years I had advanced to Robinson Crusoe and would never look back. My mother took me to a garden sale of books in Marlay Abbey and I came away with Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, while she confined herself to Beverley Nichols’s Down the Garden Path. Voracious readers will read anything, from trash to profundity. Later, I contracted measles, which was duly passed on to my younger brother, dead before me like my two elder brothers. The curative for measles in those far- off times was to put the boy to bed for six weeks in a darkened bedroom and let him amuse himself as best he could. My mother, the great reader, went to a Dublin book-shop and bought Hans Christian Andersen. I was away.