Reality in Fairy Tales..

This is the post I had intended to write for Saint Paddy's day last month, but I got sidetracked by the election of a new pope. However, April sadly finds Chicago drenched in a weeklong chilly, grey drizzle which happens to be the perfect segue to Ireland and fairy tales...  

In Ireland, magical things can happen. Generally though, magical things didn't happen in flat cornfield towns outside of Chicago. Nor were magical things known to happen to slightly rebellious average young girls from  dysfunctional poor families. But in Ireland, magic was in everything and around every bend. I grew up fascinated by Irish lore and music, I devoured folk tales and dreamed of fairies and changelings. And I waited.. 

A few years out of college, I realized that I was still waiting, waiting to be swept off my feet and carried off to faraway lands. Quite frankly though, I had had enough of waiting, and so I booked my ticket, packed my bag and headed off on the first of many treasured solo adventures. 

 After a few days of peat fires, hot tea and a bad case of the flu, I left my little cottage for a drive along the coast between Donegal and Sligo, passing beautiful little villages, freakishly lush green rolling hills, and kind Irish souls frantically waving me back to driving on the proper side of the road.  Byways zig zagged off of the main highway and blind curiosity had me turning onto a particularly tiny winding road leading towards the sea.  

Following a couple miles of steep drops, white knuckles and sharp bends, I slowed to a stop, set the parking brake, got out and simply stared. While the wind whipped and dampened my hair, the drizzle from the grey clouds above mingled with the mist from the white capped waves on the rocks below. At my back, the startlingly green fields dropped sharply into a lively churning Atlantic, while the smells of grass and dirt merged with fish and salt.  My eyes fixed ahead as clouds shifted and parted over the spires of a distant castle, boldly perched to challenge the sea while offering sanctuary to the mythical Fianna warriors . My romantic heart sighed and in those awed moments I fell in love, weaved stories, composed songs, wrote poems, ached for a paint brush and talent, and crafted dreams of chivalrous lords and beautiful ladies. 

Great-grandson of Queen Victoria and great-uncle to Prince Charles, Louis "Dickie" Mountbatten had a young love for his first cousin Maria, daughter of the last tsar of Russia and sister to the much rumored surviving Anastasia. From the time of the imprisonment and brutal assassination of 19 year old Maria and her entire family to the time of Mountbatten's own death, he kept her picture near.  At the naive age of 23, Mountbatten married the beautiful young heiress Edwina Ashley who then promptly, publicly and frequently made a cuckold of him. 

World War II found Mountbatten fatally orchestrating the failed Dieppe Raid in which thousands of Canadian soldiers were senselessly lost and the Allied forces learned everything not to do when storming the beaches of Normandy two years later. after WW II, Mountbatten was sent to India to act as the final viceroy in the handoff of British power to a newly independent India. Despite agreeing with Gandhi that a united India was the best path forward, Mountbatten's attempts to convince the powerful leader, Jinnah, were met with failure. Lines for a separate Pakistan were hastily drawn, eventually causing the loss of up to a million lives to murder and ethnic cleansing. And through it all, Mountbatten turned a blind eye to the long standing love affair between his wife, Edwina, and India's first prime minister, Nehru. Even so, when Edwina died at age 58, her body was buried at sea, mourned by Mountbatten and accompanied by two indian destroyers sent by Nehru. 

I stared at the beautiful Classiebawn Castle, knowing nothing of her owners, Lord Mountbatten and his wife, Lady Edwina.  I had no idea that on one rare sunny day, an elderly Mountbatten took his wooden fishing boat, clandestinely strapped with a fifty pound bomb courtesy of the IRA, out on the Atlantic. As the explosion rocked the quiet coast near the feet of legendary Benbulbin and Classiebawn Castle, the lives of Mountbatten, his 14 year old grandson, a 15 year old local boy an 83 year old dowager and a family dog dramatically ended.  Mountbatten said goodbye to this world just a few weeks after I had been born and some 20 odd years before I would travel around the world to stumble upon his lovely home, seeing only romance while forgetting the simple fallible humanity.

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