Mammoth eating Cousin

Thomas Doolin had a cousin called Maura who lived by the sea. She had written novels and eaten the flesh of long extinct mammoths.

She managed the former by having a powerful DeValerian imaginary view of the world. You would have insulted her, or she would have construed it as an insult, if you had called her English, but England was the English name for the country where she was born. The Welsh called it Llogyr in Welsh, meaning the Lost Lands, or at least that was the name on some road signs, Maura would have liked that.

As to the second achievement mentioned above, Maura’s novels were not bestsellers and she worked a Secretary to the Royal Geographic Society. This august body once obtained a frozen mammoth from Siberia or Kamchatka and decided to eat parts of it in a ceremonial banquet. Maura had some; she said that it tasted alright.

When Thomas first met her, he was a small boy of eight or nine and she lived in a poky damp basement flat in West Kensington. Then looking back on it perhaps Maura was left a legacy, because she bought a bungalow in a sedate Sussex seaside town. She didn’t just buy the bungalow ready built; she had it built to her specifications in a large plot of land. There were rows of about ten brick pillars out the back with a trellis over the top. It was like a mini Roman villa.

Thomas went down to visit there on many weekends with his father, who might have been having some kind of affair with Maura. Thomas was then a young boy, who was unable to know, notice or understand this. Sometimes the three of them would walk along the seafront where waves shooshed and swooshed along the pebble beach lined with vari-coloured beach huts. Once, with no apparent provocation she cried out. A phonetic approximation of her cry is: “Nyaaa harrra ny-ny-ny hyar, eeyah,eeyah. Hwawrrragh!” Before anyone could ask her “Cousin Maura, why do you cry out so?”, she explained that she had just emitted a Spanish Muleteer's cry, but this was lost on the gulls that circled above her. No Spaniards or mules emerged from the sea, or came down from the Downs inland, in answer to her call.

Maura took her hispanophilia to the point of wearing rope-soled shoes as often as the British climate allowed. Another interest of hers was ancestry, the surname that she and Thomas shared was not uncommon but Maura concocted the theory that “Doolin” was in some way more authentically Celtic than “Dolan”. Her ancestral theorizations took various differing forms over the years, once she insisted that the surname indicated descent form Czechoslovakian gypsies.

Thomas found, by trial and error, that it was difficult to disagree with Maura. Once she was charged with care of young Thomas, (his mother had died and his father was out), and Thomas had inadvertently uttered the word “bugger”, having no idea that it might be an obscenity. Maura was deeply offended and reacted with immediate severity, but instead of slaps, rage or shouting, she insisted on only speaking Spanish to Thomas for next twelve hours. It might not sound like much of a punishment in comparison to having your fingernails pulled out with pliers or something, but it induced psychological disorientation to have someone whom you had previously only spoken to in one language that you both understood, now only conversing in an incomprehensible tongue, inspire of all pleading. Looking back on this experience Thomas now though that it might have helped when he later worked as a teacher.

Later Maura somehow traced the “Doolin/Dolan” ancestry to Miltown Malbay on the west coast of Eire and she went there to die.

Thomas last saw her when he was about thirty, just before she left England. She was striding along the concrete promenade looking out across a steadily heaving sea under a grey sky perforated by shafts of sunlight beaming down to illuminate chosen patches of the Channel. Maura looked like she had already left England in her mind. Thomas did not speak to her; he was not sure what language she would use,

Over the years he got some postcards from her and sent some back. Maura's card messages were sometimes almost offensively ultra-Irish and Thomas was moving to a position of suspicion and distance towards questions of ethnicity and nationalism. He never visited her on the coast of Clare, but he could imagine her striding along the strand, uttering strange enthusiastic cries and fortified by an ancestral diet of Mammoth meat.