Word: blasket
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Maurice O'Sullivan was born and bred in the Great Blasket, a small Gaelic island just northwest of the coast of Kerry, "where the storms of the sky and the wild sea beat without ceasing from end to end of the year and from generation to generation against the wrinkled rocks which stand above the waves that wash in and out of the coves where the seals make their homes...
...soul and the souls of the dead, so Maurice was sent to a school in Dingle since his older brothers and sisters had little more sense in them than he had at the time. In school he spoke only English. His father came to take him back to Blasket when he was half grown. Maurice was given a couple of half-crowns, his first long breeks and felt he was a great sport for fineness...
...father catch mackerel and lobsters, tended the clotted sheep on the uplands. He remembers a brush with a shark, when the slimy brute followed their small boat, his breath smelling like that of the devil himself. He recalls even more vividly the War, not because any of the Blasket people were fools enough to fight...
...English) army, but because ship after ship spilled its soggy treasure on the Blasket shore. Sometimes there were corpses. Once a bloated officer from the Lusitania. After the War the day came when sorrow was on the island. The fishing was gone under foot. More and more wakes were held for the young people going off to America, and the old ones wondered who would be left to bury them. Maurice went to Dublin, joined the Civic Guard...