A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (38 page)

Over both these ports and the Tchadaudja Oil Harbour (over the hill from Nakhodka) and also over the city itself, an air of super-secrecy and security brooded. The whole place was crawling with frontier guards. When foreign sailors wanted to go ashore for the evening they were met at the gangplank by buses which took them straight to the International Seamen’s Club and, when the evening was over, straight back to the ship. In winter the only thing that doesn’t freeze at Nakhodka is the sea, which is why it was built there.

‘I’ve had enough of Nakhodka,’ Wanda said. Her teeth were chattering. ‘It’s a hell of a place. What’s more I’ve had enough of Siberia, and we’ve all had enough of Mischa, and I’m fed up with your damn maps. I want to go home.’

So we did.

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One of the three prisons in or near Moscow which housed political prisoners, and since December 1917 the headquarters of the Secret Police.

IN NOVEMBER
1985, more or less on the spur of the moment, we decided to go back to Ireland and travel through as much of it as we could, in the space of three months or so, starting in the south. The north could wait. If things improved there, so much the better. We were not going to travel in the guise of sociologists, journalists or contemporary historians. We were not going there, we hoped, to be shot at. We remembered it as it had been twenty years previously, when it had been idiosyncratic and fun. In short, we were going there to enjoy ourselves, an unfashionable aspiration in the 1980s.

We decided to begin our journey at the end of November. The reason we chose to begin it in this dead season was simply that at home in Dorset in the not-so-dead seasons we are engaged in extensive gardening operations, including in them a large kitchen garden in which we grow all our own vegetables.

We decided, Wanda with some reluctance, to travel by bicycle.

The heart of rural Dorset is not the easiest place to find out about the latest developments in the world of bicycles, but by good fortune our local newsagent in Wareham had a copy of a magazine called
The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible, 1985/6
on its shelves. By this time the question of what sort of bikes we were going to take with us if we were going to get moving before Christmas was becoming extremely urgent.
The Bible
gave detailed specifications of about three hundred machines with prices ranging from £105 to £1147, and £1418 for a tandem.

The machines that interested me most were the mountain bicycles, otherwise ATBs, All Terrain Bicycles. Everything about a mountain bike is big, except for the frame, which is usually smaller than that of normal lightweight touring bicycles. They are built of over-size tubing and have big pedals, ideal for someone like me with huge feet; wheels with big knobbly tyres which can be inflated with four times as much air as an ordinary high-pressure tyre; very wide flat handlebars, like motorcycle handlebars, fitted with thumb-operated gear change levers; and motorcycle-type brake levers connected to cantilever brakes of the sort originally designed for tandems, which have enormous stopping power.

Most of them are fitted with 15- or 18-speed derailleur gears made up by fitting a five- or six-sprocket freewheel block on the rear hub and three chainwheels of different sizes on the main axle in the bottom bracket where the cranks are situated; a sophistication so conspicuously unnecessary that it would have had Thorstein Veblen ecstatically adding another chapter to his great work,
The Theory of the Leisure Class
, had he lived to see it. This equipment produces gears ranging from 20” or even lower (which can be a godsend when climbing mountains) or 90” or even higher for racing downhill, or with a following wind on the flat.
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Not all these gears are practicable or even usable, however, for technical reasons.

These mountain bikes looked very ugly, very old-fashioned and very American, which was not surprising as they were the lineal descendants of the fat-tyred newspaper delivery bikes first produced by a man called Ignaz Schwinn in the United States in 1933. To me they looked even older. They made me think of Mack Sennett and Fatty Arbuckle and Jackie Coogan. If I got round to buying one I knew that I would have to wear a big flat peaked cap like Coogan’s. Eighteen gears apart – perhaps she would settle for fifteen – and providing we could find one with an open rather than a man’s diamond frame model, this seemed exactly the sort of bike, in the absence of the beloved conventional Italian Bianchi bicycle that Wanda had owned during the war, that she now needed to carry her the length and breadth of Ireland and even up and down a holy mountain or two.

“‘To buy a mountain bike now”,’ I read, ‘“is to win yourself a place in the first of the few rather than the last of the many.”’

It was a wet Sunday evening in Dorset. We were in bed surrounded by the avalanche of catalogues and lists I had brought down on us by clipping out the coupons in
The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible
. One dealer, in what seemed to me an excess of optimism, had also sent order forms which read:

PLEASE SEND … MOUNTAIN BICYCLE(s), MODEL(s) … FRAME SIZE(S) … COLOUR(s) … PLEASE GIVE ALTERNATE COLOUR(s). I ENCLOSE A CHEQUE/ BANKER’S ORDER, VALUE …

‘I don’t want to be one of the first of the few,’ Wanda said.

‘Shall I go on?’ I said. ‘There’s worse to follow.’

‘Okay, go on.’

‘“From prototype to production model they have been around for less than a decade. In that short time they have been blasted across the Sahara, up Kilimanjaro, down the Rockies and along the Great Wall of China.’”

‘Isn’t it true that the Great Wall of China’s got so many holes in it that you can’t even walk along it, let alone cycle along it?’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘but there is a picture here of two men sitting on their bikes on the top of Kilimanjaro. And anyway, just listen to this: “With each off-the-wall off-the-road adventure, with each unlikely test-to-destruction, the off-road-state-of-knowledge has rolled the off-road-state-of-the-art further forward.’”

‘Read it again,’ she said. ‘More slowly. It sounds like bloddy nonsense to me.’

‘There’s no need to be foul-mouthed,’ I said.

‘It was you who taught me,’ she replied.

I read it again. It still sounded like bloody nonsense and it came as no surprise when I later discovered that some of the early practitioners of this off-the-road-state-of-the-art mountain bike business hailed from Marin, that deceptively normal-looking county out beyond the Golden Gate Bridge on the way up to the big redwoods, which gives shelter to more well-heeled loonies to the square mile within its confines, all of them into everything from free association in Zen to biodegradable chain cleaning fluid, than any other comparable suburban area in the entire United States.

‘Read on,’ Wanda said.

‘“You don’t have to be some gung-ho lunatic to get your kicks”,’ I read on. ‘“Take a mountain bike along the next time the family or a group of friends head off for a picnic in the woods. There’ll be plenty of places to put the bike through its paces and it sure beats playing Frisbee after lunch [interval while I explained the nature of this, I thought outmoded, pastime to Wanda]. Or take the bike on a trip to the seaside – rock-hopping along the beach is a blast.”’

‘That’s enough,’ she said in the Balkan version of her voice. ‘I can just see you on your mountain bike, a gong-ho (what is gong-ho?), Frisbee-playing, rock-hopping lunatic’

‘I say,’ I said, some time later when the lights were out, ‘I hope all this isn’t going to make you lose your enthusiasm.’

‘Enthusiasm for what?’

‘For these bikes, and Ireland and everything,’ I said, lamely.

‘Not for these bikes, I haven’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had any. Nor for Ireland in winter. If I come it will only be to make sure you don’t get into trobble.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘In Ireland all sorts of trobble,’ she said, darkly.

The whitewashed cottage we were to stay in at Ballyvaughan (looking at it no one would have guessed that it was built with breeze blocks), at which Wanda had already arrived in the car of a local man called Tom, with her bike strapped precariously on top, had a thatched roof and a green front door with a top and bottom part that could be opened separately so that if you opened the bottom and kept the top closed, or vice versa, you looked from the outside as if you had been sawn in half.

The ceiling of the principal living room went right up to the roof and was lined with pine. The floor was of big, olive-coloured grit flagstones from the Cliffs of Moher, and there was an open fireplace with a merry fire burning in it, fuelled by blocks of compressed peat. There was a large table which would have been ideal if I had actually been going to write a book instead of thinking about doing so, which I could do better in bed, and traditional chairs with corded backs and seats. To be authentic they should have been upholstered with plaited straw, but straw had apparently played hell with the guests’ nylons.

The rugs on the floor, all made locally in County Cork, were of plaited cotton which produced a patchwork effect, and there were oil lamps on the walls with metal reflectors behind the glass shades, but wired for electricity. A wooden staircase led to a room above with two beds in it, the equivalent of a medieval solar. Leading off the living room was a very well-fitted kitchen, and there were two more bedrooms on the ground floor: altogether, counting a sofa bed and a secret bed that emerged from a cupboard, there were eight, a lot of beds for the two of us. The rooms, primarily intended for the visiting Americans, could be made fantastically hot: they had under-floor heating, convectors, a portable fan heater upstairs, infra-red heating in the bathroom, plus the open fire. Gary, Tom’s son, was bowled over by all this. He was even more pleased with it than we were. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘in all my born days’ had he seen anything like it.

‘When I get married,’ he confided, ‘I’m going to bring my wife here for our honeymoon.’

‘How old did you say you are?’

‘Eight.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘is there any girl you really like?’

‘There’s one in First Grade. I like her.’

‘How old is she?’

‘About six.’

‘But would you marry her?’

‘I would not.’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’

‘Because she’s an O’Hanrahan. You can’t marry an O’Hanrahan in the parts we come from.’

Later, after he had eaten three apples, a banana and a large plate of salted nuts and drunk three large bottles of Coke, left as a welcoming present by the proprietors (together with a bottle of gin for us), Wanda asked him if he spoke Gaelic.

‘No way!’ he said firmly.

‘But I thought they taught you Gaelic in school.’

‘No, they only teach us Irish,’ he said.

After this we went to a pub where he ate all the nuts on sale there and drank three large orange juices.

The next morning was cold and brilliant with an east wind, and with what looked like a vaporous wig of mist on the mountains above. While we were eating rashers and eggs we received a visit from an elderly man wearing a long black overcoat and cap to match who offered to sell me a walking stick he had made – one of the last things I really needed, travelling on a bicycle. ‘I’ll bring you a pail of mussels this evening, if you like,’ he said, negotiations having fallen flat on the blackthorn. The whole coast was one vast mussel bed where it wasn’t knee-deep in oysters, but as the tide was going to be in for most of the morning and it was also very cold, it seemed sensible to let him gather them for us.

Our destination that day was Lisdoonvarna: ‘“Ireland’s Premier Spa,”’ I read to Wanda in excerpts from Murray’s
Guide
(1912) over breakfast. ‘“Known since the middle of the 18th century … situated at a height of about 600 feet above the sea … its climate excellent… the rainfall never rests long upon the limestone surface. The air, heated by contact with the bare sun-scorched rock of the surrounding district, is tempered by the moisture-laden breezes from the Atlantic three or four miles distant, and is singularly bracing and refreshing owing to the elevation.’” It also spoke of spring water conveyed to the Spa House in glass-lined pipes, thus ensuring its absolute purity. More modern authorities spoke of a rock which discharged both sulphurous and chalybeate (iron) waters, rich in iodine and with radioactive properties, within a few inches of one another, the former to the accompaniment of disgusting smells.

The town was equally famous as a centre of match-making. Farmers in search of a wife were in the habit of coming to stay in the hotels in Lisdoonvarna in September after the harvest; there they found unmarried girls intent on finding themselves a husband. The arrangements were conducted by professional match-makers, in much the same way as sales of cattle and horses are still concluded by professional go-betweens at Irish fairs. This marriage market is still said to thrive, although to a lesser extent than previously. Professional match-makers, masseurs and masseuses, sauna baths, sun lounges, springs, bath and pump houses, cafés, dances and pitch-and-putt competitions, all taking place on a bed of warm limestone – it all sounded a bit like Firbank’s
Valmouth
. With the addition of a black masseuse it could have been.