McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (7 page)

Once in a while when I was younger, my mother would deplore the pagan values of the English, adrift on a sea of sin with no moral compass to guide them. I now realise this must simply have been a subconscious expression of profound regret for having given up the incomparable natural beauty of West Cork for the chemically enhanced wasteland of south-west Lancashire. Ironic, really, that my mother—and many other Irish people of our acquaintance—should have chosen to live in Warrington, a town that has as its centrepiece a statue of Cromwell, the most hated man in the history of Ireland. Anyway, on this particular occasion, she had been outraged by the foul language she’d heard being used by a group of young people hanging out on a street corner, in particular an obnoxious ginger-haired kid with glasses.

‘Terrible language,’ she said. ‘You’d never hear swearing like that in Ireland.’

Mum thought the Irish didn’t swear; and to be fair, I suppose the ones she knew didn’t, which is why they never made it into a Roddy Doyle book. But the vivid use of language that has put the Irish right up there among the greats of English-speaking literature has also made them world-class swearers.

Of course the Australians, as well as being brilliant and colourful users of the English language, are also absolutely top-notch swearers, and I imagine that’s all down to the Irish. A large percentage of the first convict settlement of Australia was Irish; some say their deportation was another failed British attempt to solve the Irish Problem. Forced labour in unnaturally hot sunshine must have rapidly expanded the average Irishman’s vocabulary of profanities beyond its natural limit; with the result that today the Australian sportsmen descended from them are able to defeat English teams simply by swearing at them.

The little boy in Baby Hannah’s has just crept closer, still staring, to try and see what I’m writing down. Fair enough.

FECK OFF, SON

That seems to have done the trick.

I’ve been planning some kind of late-night snack back at the hotel, but as I leave the pub I pass a tiny and dimly lit Chinese restaurant that had escaped my attention earlier. One look in the window, and I’m in. ‘Singapore Noodles,’ says the menu, ‘£5.80.’ Bargain.

It’s not till the bill comes that I realise that was the takeaway price. Inside, sitting down, they’re £8.50. Add tax, plus service, drinks, rice, vegetables and a pineapple fritter, and I could have taken a family of four to the Seychelles for Christmas and New Year and still had change for a curry.

Eight miles north of Skibbereen is Drimoleague, the village where my mother grew up and where my grandfather laughed as I was chased by the pig. It’s only a short distance, but the countryside gets wilder as soon as you leave Skib. There’s a more rugged feel, compounded by the fact that Drimoleague is off the main tourist beat, and consequently devoid of any cosmopolitan fripperies. We’re beyond the noodle belt here. It’s only another ten miles to the wild mountainsides behind Dunmanway where the English travellers are camped.

I’ve decided to drop in unannounced on my aunt, who still lives at the farm. As I approach up the tree-lined drive, I get that curious feeling of everything being the same as it always was, only smaller. From the pig’s gate to the back door is twenty yards, but at the time it seemed a mile and a half.

As I knock at the back door—which I never remember being closed before—I have a heightened sense of anticipation; so it’s a pity my aunt’s gone to Dublin for the weekend. Of course, I only find that out later. For now, I hang about for five minutes waiting, trying to conjure up the spirit of those summers.

My earliest memories of travelling to Ireland are of the
Glengarriff
, which sailed from Liverpool Pier Head to Cork. There haven’t always been drive-on car ferries with reclining pullman seats and discos and tax-free perfume. This was a cattle boat, with berths for thirty or forty passengers as a sideline. I remember my father taking me below decks to see the animals. They were in a sort of stable, with straw. No nasty crates in those days. It all seemed perfectly natural; it was hard to tell whether the cows were going on holiday, or whether they’d already been and were on their way home.

We’d leave from Pier Head at night, in what now seems like a scene from a period movie playing inside my head: men in hats, fog, customs officers wielding pieces of chalk. The crossing would turn rough in the early hours of the morning, as we rounded the south-east comer of Ireland, and the swell of the Atlantic hit the Irish Sea. The seasickness was spectacular. Today’s ferries may be sleek and comfortable, but they deny young people the unforgettable experience of witnessing at first hand a cow throwing up. I suppose we can’t stand in the way of progress, but holiday travel’s a duller business without bovine projectile vomit.

The poorly priests and nauseous nuns were good value, too. You didn’t usually see the clergy so vulnerable. But by mid-morning the puking would stop, as we entered the calmer waters at the mouth of the magnificent harbour at Cobh, known as Queenstown in the days of the British Empire. This was the last port of call of the
Titanic
; it was also the major point of embarkation for the Irish emigrating to America, more than 3 million of whom left from there in the course of a century, my own uncle among them. The tears of their relatives have left an unmistakable air of melancholy about Cobh today, though it has its lighter side too. A couple of years ago, a local unemployed man won the Irish lottery. One of his first acts was to buy the premises occupied by the dole office, and double their rent. He’s planning a
Titanic
theme restaurant on the harbourfront. Disaster is widely predicted once again.

From Cobh, the
Glengarriff
would head up the River Lee into Cork. I recall fields on either side, and people waving to us as we wiped the carrot from our chins. They always lay on a welcome, the Irish, but you can’t help noticing they don’t seem keen on waving a Union Jack. A lot of English people still can’t understand that.

A while ago I found myself wondering whether I might have imagined the cattle boat and the nuns; but a few nights ago, in a pub on Winthrop Street in Cork city, where large joints of meat are carved on industrial slicers by homely women in white overalls, many of them with a full complement of fingers—I found corroboration of my memories.

Framed on the wall is a copy of the
Cork Examiner
, dated Thursday, 23 October 1952. On the front page is an advert:

DIRECT SERVICES—PASSENGERS, GOODS, LIVESTOCK CORK TO LIVERPOOL SATURDAYS, LIVERPOOL—CORK THURSDAYS CITY OF CORK STEAMPACKET CO (1936) LTD TELEGRAMS ‘PACKET’, CORK

I was about to say that those childhood crossings are like looking back on a different era of travel, but of course it
was
a different era of travel. Pre-1960, you only went on holiday in another country if you had money, or relatives to stay with.

We had the relatives.

Down in the village, I visit the graveyard in the grounds of the not over-pretty modern church. I find my grandfather, buried with Great-Aunt Hannah and Uncle Jack. His surname is spelled ‘MacCarthy’, with an extra ‘a’; like many names here, it’s a translation from the Irish, so the ‘a’ is optional, and may appear and disappear with the generations.

A man is tidying up a grave nearby, his car parked next to him with the doors open and the Spice Girls blaring out. I’d been hoping for a spot of transcendental graveside ancestral contact, perhaps a piercing insight into why I should feel I belong out here. Instead, the DJ has just started a phone-in about cat-flaps.

For old times’ sake, I go inside the church for a bit of a mooch, and anyway, it’s much uglier outside than in. And almost straight away, there on the notice-board, I see it, half A4 size, held up by two old-fashioned drawing-pins. You don’t see them as much as you used to, do you?

Then, in small print at the bottom:

ALSO 1 DAY RETREATS WHICH DO NOT REQUIRE FASTING OR WALKING BARE-FOOTED.

Purgatory?

Walking barefooted?

This could be just the job: a high-octane blend of fundamentalist Catholic flagellation and Celtic New Age whimsy, with no food. If anything can give me an insight into my sensation of metaphysical Irishness, this might be it. And even if it doesn’t, at ₤20, three days’ accommodation and a boat trip comes in cheaper than two plates of noodles, once you’ve added the tax.

I jot down the phone number, and head for the phone box in the village. After twenty, or perhaps even twenty-five rings, the phone is answered by someone who sounds like a priest with grazed knees. I ask him how much barefoot work is involved, and whether it’s very rocky out there.

‘Ah, now don’t you worry about that. We have ladies of seventy, and young boys of fifteen.’

An unpleasant image wells up, which I suppress immediately. But then there’s the bad news. ‘Retreats don’t begin until the first of June.’ As he puts the phone down, I fancy I hear his scar tissue creak.

It’s only March. My sado-masochistic epiphany will have to wait.

In the meantime, I’ll go and visit the dole-scrounging, pot-pushing, soap-dodging, poteen-guzzling New Agers in their caravans on the wild side of Dunmanway.

‘And is it true that English people are fearing you will meet many Germans when you are making holidays?’

My questioner is a German who is making holidays. We’ve had breakfast, and now we’re sitting in the lounge. He has just finished playing the accordion, accompanied by his son on trumpet. He’s holding a leather-bound pad in which he’s taking notes.

‘And what are you usually calling us? The Hun? Fritz? Or Krauts?’

Gunter is a professional musician from Bavaria, over here on holiday with his family. In spare moments he’s working on a song he’s planning to perform in London later in the year. So, instead of having breakfast in the farmhouse where my mother grew up, as I’d been hoping, I’m in a feng-shuied bungalow acting as English Language Consultant on a satirical piece called ‘Please be nice to the Germans’. In Ireland, the unexpected happens more often than you expect.

Please be nice to the Germans

We are different than you think

Our favourite colour isn’t brown, but pink

Please don’t fun at us poke

German humour is no joke

But it is well organised…

After drawing a blank in Drimoleague, I headed back towards the coast to find somewhere to stay for the night. I stopped near Ballydehob, at a tiny lino-and-Formica pub with a niche market of dung-encrusted farmers, and dined on the Irish national pub dish, the Toasted Special—a sandwich of ham, cheese, onion, tomato, and anything else that’s in the fridge or on the worktop, all served at the temperature of lava. There was a card on the wall advertising ‘B + B—Organic Produce’, so I phoned ahead and booked.

We are really very sensitive people

Since the last war we don’t march, only dribble

Bumptious and presumptuous, stern without a sense of fun

All this is just a rumour

You could learn a lot from our humour

Though in 1939, our gags didn’t run…

I was expecting an old farmhouse, but instead fetched up some time after eleven outside a large modern bungalow down an eerily dark lane. Doreen, the owner, had waited up to welcome me and to tell me her life story.