McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (26 page)

A couple of hours later I’m in Dingle town looking for somewhere to stay.

Dingle’s Irish name is An Daingean, meaning the fortress, which it was long before the Anglo-Normans arrived here. I read on a leaflet that, ‘It is often called the most westerly town in Europe,’ which suggests there may be some dispute, though I can’t spot any other likely contenders for the honour. There’s just a handful of tiny villages, the Blasket Islands and then America.

Leaving Tralee this afternoon, I headed west along the peninsula, with the Slieve Mish Mountains to my left, and Tralee Bay to my right, which gradually gave way to the less sheltered waters of the full-tilt Atlantic. After half an hour or so I was driving parallel to an apparently endless stretch of sand. Waves a mile or more wide were rolling in, ten deep, white-topped, on to the vast sandy shallows. I followed a sign down a dirt track to Gowlane Strand. I like that word, Strand.

The trek ended at some sand dunes, fenced off from the adjacent field with old barbed-wire. There was just one other car there. A family with Belfast accents were sitting around it having a picnic. Beyond them, I had the entire beach to myself. The sense of space was astonishing—sand stretching away for more miles than I could tell, fields behind, dotted with farmhouses, then mountains beyond. The sky was blue, the sun hot on my skin, the clouds high and fluffy and impossibly photogenic. I do believe I ran and shouted and jumped for joy. But if you go there tomorrow, expecting it to be as I’ve described, it will be lashing it down, and the wind will hurt your face. If it’s a predictable climate you’re after, try the Sahara.

Back at the car, the Belfast family were playing volleyball, parents
v
kids, using the barbed-wire fence as a net. This probably had some symbolic significance, but I couldn’t work out what it was.

Half a mile along the road I stopped to pick up three young women who were hitch-hiking. There was a flurry of American accents as they tried to pile their bags on to the back seat.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘Let’s put those packs in the trunk,’ because ‘trunk’ is the American word for boot, and I wanted to demonstrate my relaxed familiarity with their country. Two of them got in the back, one in the front, and we set off.

‘So what part of the States are you from?’ I asked urbanely.

‘Er, I’m not American, I was just having a bit of a laugh,’ said the woman in the front. ‘I’m from Tralee.’

‘And I’m from Galway,’ came a voice from the back, ‘but we were pretending to be American all day just for the crack. She’s really American though.’

The real American, who could also do a very convincing Irish accent, in case they needed variety in their hoaxes, was travelling round Europe. So far, she’d been to Paris, the Loire, the Côte d’Azur, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy including Venice and Florence, Prague, Normandy, Brittany, the Camargue and then my pen ran out. She’d met the other two in Tibet last year and now they were showing her Ireland, or at any rate Dingle. So what sort of people have the time to travel round Tibet, and are crazy enough to go around their own country pretending to be American just for the fun of it?

‘We’re teachers. Sad, isn’t it?’

Not as sad as going round the Kerry Experience on your own.

We headed south over the Connor Pass, the highest road in the country. At the summit we got out to admire the astonishing view north across the loughs to Mount Brandon. On an outcrop of rock, a gentle-eyed, bearded man was playing the harp, an act of truly selfless beauty, I thought, until I saw the CDs, tapes and Celtic jewellery his girlfriend was selling. He’d left the T-shirts and the satin tour bomber jackets in the car until there was a bigger crowd.

From the top of the pass, the descent to Dingle is sudden and direct, as if you’re landing a light aircraft rather than a heavy and increasingly rattly car. I dropped them in a field at the water’s edge, near the Norman tower, where they planned to camp for free. Jen, the American woman, thanked me, and said she never usually hitched, it was just this once, because she was with the others, and they said Ireland’s safe and it would be okay. But she clearly felt very guilty, and didn’t want anyone she knew to find out about it—especially her mother, retired schoolteacher Mrs Hilary Iverson, of Lake Side Drive, Madison, Wisconsin.

Twenty years ago it used to be a problem getting a room for two in Ireland. Stern-eyed ladies would give you the once-over. Immorality was suspected; and, if you claimed to be married, where were the children then? Sorry, no sinners. Today, though, as I’d already discovered in Killarney, it’s finding a single room that can be a problem. That revenue thing, I suppose. After half a dozen refusals, I was resigning myself to finding nowhere in town, and being exiled to some bungalow in the middle of nowhere with carpets on the walls, when I spotted some slightly out-of-focus photographs by the front door of an old terraced house. They showed rooms that weren’t big, stylish, or comfortable, just 1950s functional, bordering on the austere.

Five minutes later, I’m taking the key from my landlord, a nervy little baldy guy in his forties; single, I think; gay, perhaps, with wire-rimmed glasses that make him look a bit like De Valera. His house is plain and unshowy and I like it a lot. It reminds me of staying with relatives when I was a kid. There’s also a pay phone in the hall that has no receiver, just bare protruding wires. He should use all this as a selling point and put a sign outside like the ones in Killarney. ‘No Rooms En-suite. No TV. No Radio. No Hairdryer. No Phone. No Tea and Coffee Making Facilities. No Frilly Duvets. Just Sheets and a blanket. A Touch of De Valera’s Ireland in the Heart of the Celtic Tiger.’

Up the street there’s a restaurant with an illuminated sign proclaiming ‘Celtic Food’. I wander up and go in. I’m intrigued at the prospect of authentic recipes, resurrected from the twilight of our Celtic past. A waitress brings me a menu. There’s liver pate and toast, garlic mushrooms, pasta of the day, fish and chips, mozzarella sticks, and cottage pie. Interesting. Perhaps these dishes once had some ritual or ceremonial significance that’s been lost with the passage of time. We know the Celtic tribes originally came from central Europe. I suppose it’s possible they brought cottage pie with them. Those lines drawn in the mashed potato with a fork could be based on a pre-Christian pagan design.

As I cross Main Street after my mystical meal, there’s an old fella sitting on a window ledge near the post office. He tips his cap to me and enquires, ‘How are ya?’ then begins to sing. A shiver goes down my spine. The song is ‘The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill’. It was my grandfather’s favourite song. I remember him singing it on the farm in Drimoleague. I learned to play it on the piano when I was eight. My teacher was called Sister Theresa. She used to follow the notes on the sheet music with a bent knitting needle.

So that I can listen to him sing, I stop and feign interest in a shop window display that consists entirely of tweed caps. It’s an eerie moment. Either this is one of those meaningless coincidences in which we invest meaning because it makes the world seem a more ordered, yet at the same time more mysterious, place; or he’s the reincarnation of my grandfather. Come to think of it, the old boy does look familiar. I take a good look at him, and suddenly I realise who he is.

When I first came to Dingle in the 1970s, its recent, and indeed only, claim to international fame was that the movie
Ryan’s Daughter
had been shot a few miles out of town, at the tip of the peninsula, near the village of Dunquin. The stars of the film, apart from the stupendous landscape, were Robert Mitchum as the village schoolteacher, and Sarah Miles as the wife who has an affair with a shell-shocked English officer. But their thunder was stolen by an Oscar-winning performance from John Mills as the amiable, slack-jawed village idiot, who limps and grins and slobbers his way through the film in one of the finest roles of his career.

And that’s who’s sitting on the windowsill. John Mills, as he was in
Ryan’s Daughter
. The dead spit. Except that this fella’s singing, and the Mills character was mute. Still, it’s been thirty years since they made it, plenty of time for him to learn to sing. And he looks like he’s still wearing the same scruffy old clothes he wore in the movie. It must be him. Perhaps the local shopkeepers had a whip-round to keep him on as a tourist attraction. Strange that he knows my granddad’s song though. Perhaps all these years in the wilds of west Kerry have given him some kind of psychic Celtic vibe that enables him to tune in to my innermost thoughts, and my granddad’s favourite song.

This is the kind of worrying stuff that goes through your head when you’re travelling on your own. I head off down a side street towards the harbour. To ward off the crazy thoughts, I talk aloud to myself as I go, and this makes me feel much saner.

The bicycle shop that is a pub also sells vegetable seeds and items of hardware. I go inside for an inner tube and some cabbage seeds, but I don’t really need them, so I have a pint instead.

I take a seat at the tiny bar, on a stool next to two conspicuously-veined old Kerrymen.

‘How are ye enjoying yer holiday?’ one of them asks me.

‘It’s grand, thanks. I’d say the town’s changed since I was last here though.’

‘Sure, it has.’ He takes a sip of his whiskey. ‘I blame that feckin’ dolphin.’

A hundred yards away is Dick Mack’s, Dingle’s most famous shop/pub—half cobbler’s, half bar. The right-hand wall is lined with alcohol, the left-hand one with repaired shoes awaiting collection. At night, the shoe worker’s wooden counter doubles as extra drinking space. The taste of stout filtered through the smell of leather is a wonderful thing; but I get the feeling that tonight I’m at least five or six pints, or a bottle of wine, behind everyone else in here. There’s a manic energy to the two or three conversations into which I’m hoisted, then discarded. Suddenly a young woman bursts through a door from an adjoining room. From inside, I can hear the sound of the kind of uninhibited drunken revelry I’ve always imagined went on at public executions. She lurches up to me, tries to focus, and says, ‘Jeezus Christ, first-class honours, would ya believe that? I got first-class feckin’ honours.’

Naturally I congratulate her, because it’s always heartwarming to see young people taking their education seriously. It seems polite to ask her what her career plans are.

‘So, what are you planning to do now?’

‘Have ten more triple vodkas,’ she says, lurching violently against a shelf and dislodging a pair of Hush Puppies.

On the street outside, gold stars with names on them are set in the pavement, honouring famous drinkers who have visited the pub. Robert Mitchum, Julia Roberts, Hothouse Flowers and Charles Haughey are all there. Pol Pot, Ian Paisley and Lee Harvey Oswald are expected any day now.

All that Celtic food has made me sleepy, and an early night beckons. I’m almost back at De Valera’s when I see a sign: MacCARTAI’s BAR. I drop all plans for bed, apply the rule, and enter.

It’s clear that nothing’s been changed for years. The ceiling is that nicotine colour that used to be cream. The floor is bare. There are old photos on the wall, not for that fashionable, old-world effect, but because no one’s ever taken them down. On the downside, there are no other customers, and the TV and stereo are on simultaneously. No matter. This pub has my name on it, and I will stay for a drink and wait for something to happen.

The woman behind the bar doesn’t give me a glance, let alone a word, as she serves me. She seems grumpy, but I expect she’s just shy. She’s sure to loosen up when she finds out we may be related. It’s difficult to strike up a conversation, though, with the last known copy of
Santana’s Greatest Hit
s booming out of big speakers on the wall,
Coronation Street
on the telly, and her reading the
Daily Mirror
with her back to me. She bursts momentarily into life when two local lads come into the bar for some lager and swearing, but I’m left in the corner like the Invisible Man. I say goodbye as I leave, but no one seems to notice. I trudge back to De Valera’s with my tail between my legs, but, really, what was I expecting? That it would be the landlady’s birthday and I’d be invited to an all-night party?