The artist Maria Simonds-Gooding fell in love with the Dingle peninsula four decades ago, not least because of the history washed up on its beaches. She tells Catherine Foley one of her favourite tales
Maria Simonds-Gooding has lived on the tip of the Dingle peninsula, in a tiny cottage overlooking the Blasket islands, since the late 1960s. "All I could ever dream of was coming back to this place," she says, recalling the first time she visited Dunquin. She fell in love with this "wild, desolate place", which reminded her of Baluchistan, in Pakistan, where she grew up. "I got the feel of the place. I didn't want it to have such a hold on me . . . But I knew that this was the only place on the earth to be," she says.
Her cottage, which she bought at an auction in 1968, hunkers in the slope of the land, surrounded by low stone walls, looking as if it has come out of the ground. Behind its narrow door, holy pictures put up by the previous owner still hang on the walls; a settle bed sits in one corner; on another wall is a wooden spinning wheel from one of the houses on Great Blasket, for which she paid £1 before it was thrown on a fire as fuel on a freezing night. The cupboards at each side of the fire were flotsam, washed ashore after shipwrecks.
Simonds-Gooding has always treasured the remnants that have come across her path, which she regards as symbolic of a disappearing life. "Some things have a story to tell, and it's worth hanging on to them," she says. Once, during a three-week painting trip to Inishvickillane, she found a propeller, part of a German aircraft that crashed on the rocks in 1940, during the second World War. It is one of the few pieces of the Blohm & Voss 138, a flying boat, that remain. The Air Corps is now restoring the propeller, with a view to displaying it at its museum, in Baldonnel.
"I always wanted it to be in a public place," she says. "I love it. I loved the way it was curved up at the end. Its value is about what happened to those Germans, how they crashed and how they were so respectful about what they did. And it's about what the islanders did for them and how people can have such a wonderful impact on each other."
The five Germans who scrambled from the aircraft decided to stay on Inishvickillane. After finding an abandoned cottage, they killed a sheep, skinned it - to cover a broken door - and then ate its meat. On the third day they launched their two rubber dinghies and made for Great Blasket.
As the first of the dinghies came into view, the islanders put to sea and, after throwing out ropes, pulled three of the men - Konrad Neymeyr, Erwin Sack and Ernest Kalkowski - to safety. The other two - the pilot, Wilhelm Krupp, and engineer, Hans Biegel - had a harder time. They almost drowned in mountainous seas, according to a local writer and teacher, Micheál Ó Dubhshláine. "Biegel did succeed in scrambling on to a rock, and he threw a rope to Krupp and thus both got ashore . . . Biegel succeeded in getting to the top, but Krupp found it much more difficult. He slipped and damaged his knee badly, while also being injured by a falling rock." They were saved by an islander named Tom na hInise Ó Dálaigh. "Tom was not a big man, but he was steadily built and very strong," writes Ó Dubhshláine. "They got the injured man on to Tom's back and he started off, walking a little, resting a while, until they met six or seven men on their way to meet them, with the donkeys and ropes, who brought them back to the safety of the village."
Ó Dubhshláine interviewed the islander's daughter, Eibhlín Pheats Kearney, just before she died, earlier this year, in Massachusetts. She told him about the day when the German pilot was carried in. "We put down a good fire, and my father told me to boil water in the kettle and to wash the wounds with the boiling water and a clean cloth. 'But,' says he, 'don't waste the water on the man on the floor if he is dead. Much better to use it on those who are living, that it should do them some good.' 'And how will I know whether he is dead or alive?' said I to him. 'Take off his boots and socks and tickle his feet, and if he is alive he will wriggle his toes.' I did as he said, and, sure, he started wriggling his toes. I knew then that he was alive. I cleaned him well and washed his wounds in the basin of water and made him as comfortable as I could. We made tea and gave it to them. My mother cut up a sheet and made bandages and fixed up the poor man. Of course, none of them had a word of Irish, and we had no German, and 'tis little we or they had of the English. Still, we seemed to understand each other."
She also recalled the day, some time later, when the Garda came to take them. "We were not happy for them to be leaving us, because they were nice, decent people, and they were very grateful to us that saved them and looked after them," she told Ó Dubhshláine. "Sometimes I watch the History Channel and Discovery, and there is great account of the Germans, how terrible they were during the war, that they were right blackguards entirely. But that wasn't the way that we, the island people, found them, but decent, honest people that will never be forgotten."
Krupp returned to Dingle after the war, to thank the islanders, but he missed Eibhlín Pheats Kearney. "I was told afterwards that the German called a few more times to my door to see me, but, of course, I wasn't there. Indeed, I was far from home at that time, in Springfield, Massachusetts. And it wouldn't have been so bad except that I heard afterwards that he was one of the most important businessmen in the country."
Simonds-Gooding savours a coincidence that occurred 40 years later, when Krupp and Biegel returned to Dingle. "In July of 1982 I met the pilot and the engineer of the plane, when they were visiting the site of their crash," she says. On the way to Kruger's pub, "to have a pint of Guinness and to sing a song", Krupp was spotted by Tom na hInise Ó Dálaigh. " 'I saved that man's life,' Tom na hInise said. I couldn't believe it. He was very shy. He didn't want to take a drink from them. He was hardly ever in Kruger's - only on a Sunday occasionally, and it wasn't a Sunday."
What the islanders liked most about the Germans was their practicality and efficiency in not wasting the skin but putting it to use for shelter against the wind. "The islanders loved that."