Here is another story about arriving.

My great-grandmother was little more than a girl when she arrived on the good ship 'Pride of Erin'. She had been named for a flower, the Iris. And yet in Ireland, where she was born, and where her local renown as a singer of popular, sentimental ballads had earned her the soubriquet 'The Nightingale of County Clare', she was also a bird. (In her new country she should, perhaps, have been a bellbird!)

This is how my great-grandmother tells of her arrival in The Tartan Isles, in a letter written home to her family in Ireland.

'You have asked me to describe our first sight of the land ... I shall say then that it appeared to me like a shawl, spread across the ocean, fastened at both edges and billowing in between.

'A shawl, a token, a sign to shipping, the land of the long white tablecloth ... later there would be time to think of what might be spread before us when we came to land. For the moment it seemed enough merely to feast our eyes ...

But there is no record of the words she exchanged, on closer acquaintance, with her new land. I do not know what messages she addressed to the hills and valleys where my great-grandfather strode, his mind a collecting bottle, gathering the words which he took home and arranged in mute, alphabetical ranks in the back of the family bible. Arranged, with either supreme confidence or an equivalent lack of imagination, on the blank pages which follow The Book of Revelations!

Was he handsome and stalwart, silent and strong?

Was she young, spirited and inwardly vulnerable?

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Once, I saw their portraits: matching daguerreotypes in frames of polished wood, backed with velvet the colour of plums. From my great-grandfather's likeness I retain only a memory of whiskers; of a lichen-like growth concealing the lower part of his face, of hair, which though thinning, was bushy about the temples, and eyebrows that resembled wiry gorse. Probably he was a pink and white man, susceptible to freckles, wrinkling easily, with fair hairs sprouting along his fingers ... The nightingale, in contrast, was dark, although her portrait was pale, faded almost to a silvery absence, its surface more that of mirror than of photograph. I recall the sinuous line of her back, curving from shoulder to bustle. Her eyes, which had been hand-coloured by the photographer; faded violets. The fall of lace from her throat, like the perfect bells of foxgloves.

Together they lived in the house that my great-grandfather, who made his living as a builder, raised on the edges of the tartan. Over time, they filled the house with children. The place was called 'Katote'. Once, it had been forest. Did they know, I wonder, that one of the meanings of its name is 'quake'?

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