Jaywalking with the Irish (9 page)

Perhaps inevitably, Clonakilty produced Michael Collins, the War of Independence commander who cracked the British
intelligence system and orchestrated the insurrection’s relentless campaign of ambush, sabotage, and arson, including burnings of many of the great nearby houses of the Anglo-Irish. As ruthless as he was charismatic, Michael Collins was also responsible for the fatal ambushes of numerous agents of the Crown as they slept in their beds. To his generation, the Famine was
yesterday
and they therefore felt no qualms in treating the British to a helping of the same quagmires the Americans would later discover in Vietnam and, ultimately, Iraq. But Michael Collins was also forced to negotiate the thankless compromises that led to the formation of the Irish Free State, the bitterly rued pill ever since being that the British retain control of the heavily “planted” (in other words, deliberately stocked with chiefly Scottish colonialist farmers) six Protestant counties of Northern Ireland. For his troubles, Collins was promptly murdered just down the road from Clonakilty in the 1922 Civil War, during the brief carnage in which dissident IRA guerrillas rebelled against their Free State brethren for having acquiesced to the notorious “treaty.”

Modern Clonakilty, we could quickly see, had shaken off its brooding on its Famine past and now embodies the brightest aspects of the Republic’s burgeoning progress. It is an amazingly thriving place, with geranium-bedecked restaurants, tasteful shops, and stone-fronted guesthouses arising in such an outburst of civic pride that the community was recently named the winner of Ireland’s national “Tidy Towns” competition. At the center of the main street sits O’Donovan’s Hotel, one of Ireland’s numerous comfortable, independent hostelries which are so much more engaging than the mass cut-rate hotel franchises that provide accommodation in too many countries. O’Donovan’s also boasts an Asian café in the back alleyway where Irish peasant women used to spend their days skinning and salting fish for daily wages that wouldn’t buy a fork of fried rice now. We decided to order a restorative drink in the hotel’s pub, motioning the children to mill about in the rumpled lobby.

The call was for two pints of Murphy’s, the softer, mellower Cork version of the better-known Guinness, which is no longer owned by that august Anglo-Irish family but rather a Spanish
conglomerate called Diageo that also controls other important international cultural icons such as Burger King and the Pillsbury doughboy. Murphy’s – long managed by a powerful Cork family of that name – has become the property of the Dutch brewer Heineken, which has predictably re-baptized its stout operations as “Heineken Ireland.” This is equivalent to the Japanese taking over the American national landmark the Rockefeller Center, which they in fact did some time ago. In both cases, nobody complained. Such is progress.

We moved into the cafeteria with the kids and assembled trays of fried fish and sandpaper-surfaced chicken nuggets, called “gougons” in Ireland, complemented by the usual mountains of chips. A young woman impassively waited at the till.

“Are you okay?” the teenager asked, which did not help my road-frayed nerves. Did we look terminally ill? The phrase was dumbfounding, and in this country, where language is so often wielded with a fine brush, such mindless utterances fall with a deafening thud. For the last few weeks we had heard, ad nauseam, the same words greeting shoppers who approached Irish cash registers with their arms wrapped around masses of expensive clothing or toys. In most countries, people thrusting wads of cash over checkout counters are not asked, “Are you okay?” but rather, “May I help you?” We couldn’t help wondering if the phrase “Are you okay?” really was a nod to the old indolence of the land, meaning, “Why the hell are you bothering me?”

“I’m grand. How are you?” I responded, waiting for the inevitable three-beat response. Ever-observant Laura, knowing my hobbyhorses inside out, caught the sarcasm and scowled. Variants of such amiable how-are-yous are asked all over the world, and in many places are even answered brightly. In Ireland, no positive reply can be offered – that’s bragging. Better to feign unhappiness.

“Not too bad,” the clerk said right on cue. Irish people always say that to inquiries regarding how they are faring. The words convey that the people mumbling them are not yet dead, nor have they had their entrails recently cut out by invading Norsemen, nor their entire family stricken with typhoid only to depart in the night on a pestilential Famine ship. The response expresses the
Irish infatuation with poor-mouthing, meaning a stoic sharing of life’s miseries with the rest of the unfortunate inhabitants of their godforsaken wet bog of an island. “Not too bad,” I knew by now, is never, ever to be rendered with a smile. The point is to convey that one’s as miserable as everyone else, even though public opinion polls consistently show that the Irish today are actually among the most cheerful and optimistic people in Europe. The phrase is undoubtedly a remnant of the post-Famine psychology that has never caught up with the “Smartie” age.

Eating helped my mood, and we ventured outside, by now forgetting the frenzy on the roads. The music festival was materializing, with traffic diverted and the town’s main thoroughfare flooding with pedestrians. A great cluster of them gathered in front of a bevel-windowed old pub called De Barra’s, which, Ireland being what it is, has hosted as its most celebrated regular and provider of Friday night entertainment the former wah-wah amplified bass guitarist for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Noel Redding. Today, three trad musicians sat on stools on the sidewalk, all as clean-cut as bankers, tuning wah-wah-deprived fiddles. As it turned out, their first song was based on a series of letters a heartbroken father had written to a son who had emigrated to Boston in 1860 – never, like millions of participants in the Irish diaspora, to be seen again by his family. The words could have as easily been penned to one Owen Monaghan, namesake of the little son I’d just hoisted onto my shoulders, who departed forever from County Monaghan in 1844 to a miserable factory job twenty miles deeper into Massachusetts. They could have been directed as well to millions of others who would never return from Australia and South Africa, Argentina and Ontario, anywhere at all that would have them.

The ballad was so poignant, its mournful fiddles and tin whistles and aching words so expressive of the terrible exodus from places just like Clonakilty, that I began brushing away tears. Jamie, I saw, was doing the same thing. Laura looked from one parent to another and caught our emotion; even Harris stared off wistfully. Here lies then, ye transplanted children, another sad initiation rite to your past, I thought. Yet the level of literacy and devotion
to history that resonated through the singers’ rich baritones, and through the crowd’s rapt appreciation, seemed immensely reassuring to me, a sign that even the young Irish remained steeped in the tragic poetry of their past.

On this gentle afternoon, the band, called Natural Gas, had no intention of dwelling on a mordant note. Their next offering concerned the universal pub musicians’ impatience with donkey-eared listeners, and it started with a refrain epitomizing the disrespectful “foostering,” or fool’s play, of loudmouthed drinkers.

“Hey you with the head! Put down your bloody
bohdran
! Pick up your pint instead!” the number begins, referring to the tambourine-like skin drum (pronounced BOW-ron) used by Irish traditional bands. “Say two acts of contrition for the poor pub musician. If I had a son, that’s not what he’d be, for they have to put up with hooflers and tricksters and chancers dropping ten quid in their fee.”

This flourish coaxed forth a peculiar dark-eyed man with a loud red-and-white-striped shirt, enormous yellow tie, and brace suspenders holding up a pair of floppy vaudevillian trousers. Transported by some private reverie, he butterflied his arms forward as if swimming through waves of incoming visions. Fish-mouthing all the while, he laboriously worked his legs in various directions as if his pants contained stilts. For reasons known only to Clonakilty, this impromptu entertainer, whose face was as rigidly unchanging as a Noh actor’s, is called Chicken George. When not performing, he’s said to be a great conversationalist. But head-scrambling contradictions are the rule in modern Ireland, for De Barra’s has also served as a favored venue for David Bowie and Paul McCartney. How could one not love the place?

Joining the crowd outside was a coven of barefoot individuals in brown sackcloth topped by mangy rats’ nests of hair. The women, with blackened teeth and blue whorls and lines smeared across their faces, looked like hundred-year-old hags and cackled accordingly. The even wilder-haired and possibly uglier men sported ten-foot pikes.

“These festivals get over the top,” I whispered to my wife, for in Ireland festivals break out in dizzying variety. Every town with
enough children to fill a school can muster a pair of August festivals without a second thought, and the bigger localities keep it up for nine months – folk, food, fiddle, and farm festivals, dance, jazz, film, choral, art, literary, heritage, matchmaking, midsummer, spring, and autumn festivals keep coming at you and one sometimes imagines hordes of festival merrymakers changing their costumes behind the next ridge and descending like a thousand Comanches on every unsuspecting crossroads that has not fenced them out.

“They’re a bunch of crusties,” Jamie said, using the Irish term for a certain wave of recent New Age immigrants who are alleged to be soap shy. “Festival crusties.”

There was no doubt about it. Not long ago, the west of Ireland was full of native Gaelic speakers who lived in a timeless world into which the Creator seemed to breathe an inordinate share of the world’s dreams. The waves moaned on briny rocks and old women heard the terrible cry of the banshees; a mouse moved in a hayrick and the fairies were heard to be back at their mischief; a woman died young and her suitor saw her image in the moonlight for the rest of his forlorn years. In modern Ireland, loads of New Age people still see, or try to see, such visions, often sitting cross-legged before the few remaining stone hovels buried in the depths of some hollow or bramble-ridden boreen – which means a little lane, though a Cork City avenue is called Boreenmanna Road, which translates into “Little Big Lane Road.”

These pike-wielding cacklers were indeed crusties, or in other words hippies yearning for a return to the land. The crusties moved in droves to the secret spaces of Ireland’s west in the 1970s and 1980s to forge more spiritually rooted lives than they believed possible in the mass population centers of Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany. Many have acclimated nicely and are tipping away now at producing superb cheeses and organic vegetables, along with the usual baskets, clay pots, and water-divining trades. But some of the newest Rastafarian-styled recruits sit on Cork corners banging bongo drums with an irritating monotony. An aging troupe called Skibbamba will dance in place for hours in tie-dyed pajamas, with some of the mothers sporting babies in papooses
who jolt their heads backward and forward in perfect, if helpless, time to the beat. Anyone so inclined can rent the entire bunch for a party, which just last week I’d promised Laura I would do for her wedding celebration in, oh, another decade or two.

“That’s not funny, Dad,” she stammered in disgust. Natives in West Cork, however, retain a tolerant balance in dealing with such exotics. Clonakilty recently suffered an interminable visit by a Californian who screeched rock anthems at otherwise harmonious street corners that the Lord expressly created for Irish people to complain about the weather and their aches and pains. Worse still, he began posting announcements of his forthcoming lecture on The True Meaning of the Age of Aquarius. When the hour of illumination arrived, not a single person showed up. Such is Cork cuteness, and the man vanished.

But modern Ireland is actually hugely enriched by the presence of myriad foreigners – from the actor Jeremy Irons, who recently painted his Cork castle pink, to Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones playing Buddha in the Wicklow Mountains, and the Swiss wheelers and dealers who in the 1980s bought an estate outside Skibberreen as a refuge for their government to weather nuclear war. In fact, a four-room schoolhouse not far from Clonakilty now educates nine different nationalities among its seventy pupils, including kids from a family who had just fled their ranch in troubled Zimbabwe. Through a mutual connection, we stopped at their rented farmhouse on our way back to Cork City and found a party in full tear. Inside, young Dutchmen with shaved heads were making horrible noises on their electric guitars, but on the lawn we were charmed by an aristocratic English writer, whose debut book had to do with the bank robbery he committed when fresh out of Oxford.

Next, a dark-tressed, dimple-cheeked young woman slunk our way, her bare midriff sporting a gold naval ring. She was Una, and it transpired that she had been raised on a crusty houseboat captained by a tin-whistle playing American mother.

“How interesting,” I said. “Where does she live now?”

“Well, she’s a divinity student these days and lives in a tiny little town called Cornwall, Connecticut.”

“Una,” I guffawed. “Your mother’s eaten dinner at our house there several times.”

Ah serendipity – Ireland is thy name.

Return to beginning of chapter

September dawned. “Hey, you with the heads, it’s show time!” I called to the sleeping boys in their bunks, it being the first day of school.

This fateful morning is of course uneasy anywhere, but now our beloved boys, God save them, were about to be served up as not only the new kids in their classes, every child’s worst fear to begin with, but – and here comes another initiation rite, kiddoes – also shoved forward for public inspection in strange uniforms amidst a gabble of accents, backgrounds, and expectations entirely foreign to their own. Even in the intimacy of his tiny American school, Harris the Procrastinator had always dreaded this turning point, so resolutely in fact that he had utterly refused to relinquish his grip on my leg when I tried to usher him into the first grade in the U.S. On that traumatic day, I had to bring him back twice. So there was no mystery regarding his motivation in fussing “for just another minute” over a Lego creation beside his pillow.

Owen is different: he adores any challenge that appeals to his particularly opinionated, and sometimes self-set nature. Fascinated since he was two by the inner workings of all things, he had recently unfolded a paper clip and driven both ends into a power point so he could be sure about the live power of circulating electrical currents. Never mind that his fingers were serrated like barbecued meat, he’d found out what he needed to know, and didn’t cry. So he was raring for a crack at a new Irish school, was in fact eager to study his ancient ancestral tongue.

Porridge – what else? – was served and then the boys struggled into their new Catholic school regalia of gray trousers, white polyester shirts, and black clodhoppers. They were then tourniqueted with striped ties and black blazers ennobled with priceless braided
rings of gold and school crests embossed on their breast pockets. A door-stoop photograph was quickly choreographed, with Laura, whose first day at school would be tomorrow, reluctantly appearing in the soon-to-be requisite black tights, gray skirt, red blouse, and striped tie of her more distant school, with her long strawberry hair falling over the shoulders of her official blazer. For years we had endured pitched morning battles about who would deign to wear what to school. So the simplicity of consigning the ingrates to unchanging uniforms was a relief. But the big question was whether Ireland’s academic strictness, religiosity, and fierce attention to basics – the latter long since softened over in self-esteem-obsessed American schools – was about to consign them to a thousand emotional deaths, or expand their horizons.

We scarcely had a clue. Sure, I’d completed a frenzied sampling of nine different Cork schools a few months before, wrapped a blindfold around my head, spun around three times, and stuck a pin on an institution that said Christian Brothers College. Everyone said that the primary level of that private school, a ten-minute walk from our house, was A1. The crème de la crème of Cork went there, starting way back with the offspring of the “Merchant Prince” class who weren’t much bothered by the Famine at all. Adult graduates of Christians’ various institutions around Ireland were still complaining bitterly at the moment about the arbitrary humiliation and harsh corporal punishment they’d experienced long ago. “But sure, it did us no harm,” lots would say in the next breath. “I’d never have learned a thing had I not been sufficiently scared of my teachers,” a friend, who was a graduate of this system, once told us.

In fact, the principal of Cork’s Christian Brothers primary school, once exclusively the domain of celibate priests, was now not only a female but a middle-aged mother of captivating warmth who had recently lost a young son. Deeply compassionate, Síle (pronounced Sheila) Hayes had even called at our door to extend warm greetings the day after our arrival in Cork. She was a breath of reassurance, especially because the Christian Brothers order, racked by scandals of pedophilia in the eighties, had not attracted a single new novitiate in the last five years. Cork’s Christian Brothers
College – the primary school a feeder institution to an adjacent nine-hundred-boy secondary school that places many of its students into Ireland’s best universities – has no Brothers at all on its teaching staff, not a one.

As we headed down the Wellington Road, it wasn’t hard to keep the boys’ minds diverted, the first day of school in Ireland being a bizarre testament to the creativity of the Celtic spirit. Mothers and fathers were all hand-delivering their kids to this rite of passage, shared by four schools within a thousand-yard nexus, and many were so overcome during their last-minute embraces that they parked in the middle of the road, on sidewalks and crucial intersections, and lost sight of the half-mile-long string of cars stalled behind them. Nothing moved and pandemonium ruled. Our fellow Corkonians handled this predicament with aplomb, however, by not honking or shouting but hitting the mobile phones for a thousand lamentations to other drivers stuck like themselves, half of them perhaps only a couple of hundred feet away. A
garda
or police officer (versus
gardaí
, the name for a rare gathering of two or more of them in one place) ambled from mist into reality, but it was instantly apparent that he had no rule-enforcing intentions beyond chatting with a friend recognized through a rolled-down car window just ahead of ours. Ireland has not tossed aside its implacable patience and forbearance, not yet. Everything will eventually be “sorted,” if one just sits and waits, as our fidgeting boys were consigned to do, even if their hair was nearly standing on end.

Getting into the swing of things, we double-parked and ushered our anxious progeny into a holding-tank-like front room, where a grim painting of the Last Supper had absolutely no calming effect on the squirming masses of nearly 200 five- to twelve-year-old boys. Jamie and I folded our arms serenely and waited for the welcoming first-day-of-school speeches we’d by now heard for a good number of years.

But the pedagogues had a neat Cork trick for us this time: they said nothing. I looked at my shoes for a while, then Jamie’s. I always thought her feet were nice, but still – there wasn’t a lot new to see there. Meanwhile, the teachers and students watched
each other with mutual dread, and one could envision spitballs being worked into readiness. Suddenly, a whistle blasted through the stillness, as deafening and shrill as a call to order at Alcatraz or Sing Sing. I looked at Harris – he looked at me. Don’t leave me in this place, his eyes seemed to plead. But there was an unmistakable message to the parents in that whistle – go away.

“I liked what they said about nurturing the whole child,” I muttered to Jamie as we walked away, baffled to the core.

My wife looked set to kick me where it hurts. “This isn’t the time for sarcasm. I just hope you knew what you were doing with this place,” she moaned, with a small tear streaming down her cheek.

The next day, it was Laura’s turn. We set off to her venerable, 361-year-old Bandon Grammar School, which is a coed secondary school teaching kids aged from twelve to eighteen. In Ireland, children begin high school in the seventh grade in a belief that they are already equipped to master a greatly expanded range of subjects, including foreign languages, and more in-depth mathematics, geography, and world history than is sanctioned in the more hand-holding middle schools of North America.

Naomi Jackson, a vivacious niece of Bun, had ardently recommended her alma mater, without dwelling on the logistical challenges of getting Laura twenty-three miles down the road every dawn to the always congested small town of Bandon. This was the moral equivalent of telling new arrivals in Vienna to try an academy in Bratislava, or doting parents in Baltimore to make arrangements in Washington, D.C.

On tourist maps and brochures, Bandon appears to be about twenty minutes from Cork, but the reality is something else. After driving a half-hour with Laura fretting in the backseat, we slowed before one of Ireland’s more puzzling roundabouts at a place named, apparently appropriately, Half Way. No new traffic was arriving or departing from the lonesome feeder roads stuck into this ring of motorized jabberwocky, but here was a very handsomely laid-out roundabout indeed. Had young roundabout trainees been given the chance to test their skills in this forlorn spot? No other explanation was apparent. But then we hadn’t grasped that speculators had stealthily acquired a patchwork of nearby farms as part of an
£800 million scheme to create an overnight town of ten thousand inhabitants squashed into four hundred acres.

A few miles farther, the highway abruptly narrowed through the village of Inishannon, once the scene of repeated failed IRA attempts to blow up the local barracks of the British police constabularies in 1921. Every go fizzled like a vision from a
Road Runner
cartoon, but 315 of these outposts of the Crown were bombed and burned elsewhere. Historians tend to pay more attention to the IRA’s fatal ambush of sixteen British auxiliaries about three miles away on a boggy stretch by the village of Kilmichael, the work done by a handful of ill-equipped rebels under the command of General Tom Barry, age twenty-one. Surprisingly, this skirmish is celebrated as the most pivotal battle of the Irish War of Independence.

The fertile soil of this part of Cork has always been prized in comparison to the barren ground of Ireland’s extreme west, and thus attracted determined cultivation by the carefully planted Anglo-Irish. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ascendant gentry systematically annexed the best small holdings of the native Catholic peasantry in the vicinity, a great number of whose owners were bled dry by the harshest landlords’ tithes during and after the Famine. The Georgian-styled plantations grew stately, and their protective walls formidable, owing to the willingness of destitute masons to work for a penny a day, while the thatched hovels of the natives were reconstructed ever deeper in the barely tillable hollows. The rank-and-file citizens of Bandon, the once walled garrison town four miles past Inishannon, didn’t fret. Their attitude was so virulently anti-Catholic that the place became known as “Bandon, where even the pigs are Protestant.” The peasants’ livestock, having some value in local eyes, were allowed to spend the night upon common grazing land within the town’s domain, while their owners were banished to the hinterlands at dusk.

Bandon Grammar School’s promotional brochures didn’t mention that the town used to boast a sign by its entrance gates saying: “No Catholic, nor free thinker, nor dissenter may enter here – only Protestant gentlemen.” One night someone with a different perspective scrawled, “Whoever wrote it, wrote it well, for the same is written on the gates of hell.”

Until about a generation ago, no Catholic in the Republic of Ireland would have dreamed of sending his child to a school with a Protestant pedigree like Bandon Grammar’s, nor would such a child have been admitted. Indeed, it wouldn’t be long before one of Laura’s new friends would take her aside and advise that she should never tell her classmates that she had been raised as a Catholic – “Papist” is the way it used to be put in the Republic and still is in the North. The truth, nonetheless, is that the bitter religious divides have largely evaporated in southern Ireland, where elite Protestant schools tend to call themselves “non-sectarian,” and now draw 30 percent or more of their students from the once reviled Catholic masses. A very different situation still prevails in the troubled North, with Protestant mothers stoning and spitting at their Catholic counterparts seeking to infiltrate a supposedly “mixed” school in the Belfast neighborhood of Ardoyne.

But in the Republic, little enmity or even notice is paid these days to sectarian distinctions, although the punctilious Protestants do have some distinctive qualities. For one thing, being naturally more organized and respectful of authority, they are much better than Papists at managing traffic. Numerous speed bumps slowed our progress up the tree-lined drive into Bandon Grammar’s seventy-acre campus, and not one parent stopped to gab in the middle of the road.

Laura looked edgy, nonetheless, which was disconcerting. This was a girl who had played ice hockey the past winter on a team of nineteen boys with but one other girl, who had ridden horses five times larger than herself when she was six, and relished lead roles in school plays that thrust her before packed auditoriums. An expert-grade ski slope coated with ice was a piffle as well, even though she wasn’t particularly athletic. Laura, the dear heart, prided herself on trying anything. But where were we bringing her now? A few weeks earlier she had a brief tour of her new school under the wing of the personable young headmaster. But the place was empty then, and now the seventy-five “first-years” were spilling this way and that out of cars, all decked out in their immaculate uniforms, but carefully looking over their shoulders.

We parked near one of the modest concrete outbuildings
that fan out beside the somewhat dilapidated former manor house and patronage once belonging, like all of Bandon, to the Duke of Devonshire. His former pile was long since converted to classrooms, a meal hall, and library, with cramped
Madeline
-style dormitory rooms for the boarding girls on the upper floor. The school has quite decent facilities, with a floodlit, all-weather playing field; a soccer “grit pitch;” tennis courts; and an enormous gymnasium complex. Although sitting prettily on a cow-dotted hill, it bears little resemblance, however, to the grandiose visions of mock-Gothic campuses that the top American or British preparatory schools passionately pursue. But to our relief, Bandon charged a fraction of its foreign counterparts, and seemed, at least superficially, to sacrifice little in the transaction.

Many of the incoming students spoke with the reedy trill of the first- or second-generation English, called “West Brits” in Ireland, who still find their way into the grandest remaining country houses in these parts; and very few betrayed the lilting singsong of the euphonious Cork accent we had come to love. But filing into the convocation hall, they all seemed as vulnerable as kids anywhere struggling with their first day in a new school. After a few minutes, the headmaster issued a call for attention, and I readied my eardrums for another horrendous whistle blast. Mercifully, there was none. We ushered Laura forward to where another new girl with strawberry hair and freckles just like hers sat alone on an empty row of stools, looking like she would rather be anywhere else in the world. “She looks like you, Laura. Sit down there and make her comfortable,” I urged. It turned out that this girl – despite sharing with our daughter the most classically Irish coloring of anyone in sight – was English. Quickly, they would become best friends. In fact, once Laura sat beside her new friend, she never looked back at the strange beings who had created her. Our daughter’s adolescence, the go-away time, had begun. It didn’t take a whistle for my wife and me to depart now.