The Whitest Flower. Brendan Graham. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Brendan Graham
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008148133
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       Chapter 27

       Chapter 28

       Chapter 29

       Chapter 30

       Chapter 31

       Chapter 32

       Chapter 33

       Chapter 34

       Chapter 35

       Chapter 36

       Chapter 37

       Chapter 38

       Chapter 39

       Chapter 40

       Book Three: GROSSE ILE

       Chapter 41

       Chapter 42

       Chapter 43

       Chapter 44

       Chapter 45

       Chapter 46

       Book Four: BOSTON

       Chapter 47

       Chapter 48

       Chapter 49

       Chapter 50

       Book Five: IRELAND

       Chapter 51

       Chapter 52

       Chapter 53

       Chapter 54

       Chapter 55

       Chapter 56

       Chapter 57

       Chapter 58

       Chapter 59

       Chapter 60

       Chapter 61

       Glossary

       Quotations

       Author’s Note

       Bibliography

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       An introduction to the 2016 edition

      When, almost twenty years ago, I walked into the boardroom of HarperCollins Publishers and told a roomful of executives the outline of what was to become this story, little did I realise the journey that particular morning would take me on.

      Three years previously in the summer of ’93, I had been made redundant. A manager in a clothing manufacturing company, at 48-years-old I wasn’t re-employable in what was then a shrinking industry in Ireland. Life as I had known it had stopped and I thought the world would cave in, but it didn’t. By default I became a full-time songwriter − what was once my hobby would now, I hoped, become my bread ’n’ butter!

      My ‘office’ became the poet, Patrick (Paddy) Kavanagh’s bench along the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal, with the statue of the poet sitting to one side, offering room for any wandering soul needing respite from a weary world. Whether it was a statement of intent or whether I was hoping for Paddy’s inspiration and blessing, I am still unsure.

      The following year a bittersweet song about the changing nature of life and love became the unlikely winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. With Rock ’n’ Roll Kids, I began to earn a living again. Two years later, in 1996 another quite different song, The Voice, repeated the winning experience. A song of the elements … of the connectedness of all things, past, present and future, it was leading me in a particular direction − history.

      With time on my hands and lots of it, I began writing not one-off songs, but a series of connected songs set in the time of An Gorta Mór, Ireland’s Great Famine of the mid 1800’s. Why, I don’t know. I guess some things are preserved in a kind of national consciousness – even though at that time there was never much written in school text-books about the Great Famine. An even stranger thing was happening in these songs − a female character began to emerge, one who was the connecting force between them. She was edging me towards what was then the somewhat out-of-date notion of the ‘concept album’.

      At a meeting in London in 1996, with music publishers, Warner Chappell, they seemed fascinated by both the story and in Ireland’s Great Famine, of which they knew little more than I did, though I had already begun my research. Back in Dublin the following morning, the phone rang − it was Stuart Newton the A&R man at Warner Chappell.

      ‘Could you be back in London for a 9.00am meeting on Friday at HarperCollins? Oh, and could you send over that story you told us about the woman and the potato famine?’

      With nothing to send to anyone, I made some ungracious songwriter remark about publishers in general and said, ‘I’ll bring it with me!’

      For the next three days and nights, I scarcely darkened the bedroom door. Somehow I scratched out fifteen pages of a stream-of-consciousness story, which had no title but did have a beginning,