McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (8 page)

One day, five years ago, her husband walked out after twenty-five years of marriage. No warning, just left one afternoon and didn’t get in touch for eighteen months. He’s living in San Francisco now with a lap dancer. There were crystals and wind chimes and New Agey books around the place, and a small pagan shrine to the Goddess, in the corner where the Sacred Heart or Blessed Virgin should have been.

‘This is a non-smoking house,’ she said. ‘I do smoke myself, mind, but I do it outside. Would ye like to see the garden?’

‘Maybe in the morning, when it’s light.’

She said there was a German family staying, but they’d all gone to bed very early.

‘Lovely people. He’s a musician. He was asking me to help him with a song he’s writing, in English like, but I wouldn’t have an idea. I’d say he might like you to help him in the morning. Now, so, would you like some sandwiches? A piece of cake? I’ll be watching
The Late, Late Show
, if you’d like to join me.’

My bed was fitted with one of those vile plastic undersheets, originally designed to make life easier for carers of the terminally incontinent, that are now found in more and more hotels and guest-houses. These things draw sweat from your pores like suction pumps. It’s like sleeping in a plastic paddling pool full of horse sweat. My dreams of drowning in lukewarm brine were interrupted at seven thirty a.m. by Teutonic warbling, accompanied by accordion and trumpet.

Two world wars? Three world cups, that’s what counts

We’d even eat English food

And afterwards pretend it was very good…

Breakfast was a huge plate of free-range eggs, organic bacon, vegetarian sausages, wild mushrooms spiked with garlic, and a dandelion. Gunter and I got talking, and within half an hour we were working on the lyrics. In fact we’ve just agreed on the final couplet.

The time for humility is over

So thanks for Rolls-Royce and Rover.

I tell him I’m sure it’ll play well in London. I give Doreen £18, and she gives me a receipt, and a small crystal. As I set off for Dunmanway she’s in the garden doing tai-chi, while Gunter improvises on flute.

Before I can meet the travellers, I have to find Dominic. Since my last visit he’s moved out of the caravan into a house with no address. ‘It’s sort of complicated to explain,’ he told me a few months ago in Brighton. ‘Best just ask in town.’ He’d been visiting his parents, and turned up with them at my birthday party, wearing one of those white neck braces for whiplash injury, and black jumper and jeans. Twelve years in Ireland, and he comes back looking like a pint of Guinness.

I know the eight-mile stretch of road between Drimoleague and Dunmanway pretty well. When I was a kid there was a cattle fair in Dunmanway, on Tuesdays I think, and I’d go along with Uncle Jack. We’d sit on the flat cart-back behind the horse, and sometimes he’d let me hold the reins, a huge thrill for an eight-year-old townie obsessed with the Lone Ranger. But then he sold the horse and got a tractor, and fantasy died. Mechanisation has made small farmers more prosperous, but now children grow up in a world without horses and carts and haystacks. Where’s the romance in silage?

Halfway between the two villages is a small petrol station and shop. As I’m paying for fuel, I notice a cardboard box of still-warm soda bread and fruit scones on the counter. I’m full from breakfast, even though I didn’t finish the dandelion, so I just buy a paper and head on my way.

I’ve gone a way down the road when it strikes me I’m turning up to see Dominic empty-handed. And I’ve heard he’s been ill, a nasty bout of pneumonia caused either by working as a roofer in bad weather, or by passing out and spending the night on the ground in a tepee at a party, he couldn’t be sure which. There was a spell in hospital with the nuns in Bantry, who wake you each day for prayers at first light; but apparently he’s recovered now, and he’s recovered from the pneumonia as well. The least I can do is turn up with something nutritious.

I do a U-turn and go ten minutes back up the road. The same woman is behind the counter. ‘Hello again,’ she says, wondering how I’ve managed to use up so much petrol so quickly.

‘Hello. I just couldn’t resist your bread.’

‘Well, it’s very good all right. There’s a lady out the back there, used to be a confectioner, and she bakes it for us Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.’

I ask for a loaf and four scones; then, as she wraps them, I’m surprised to find myself revealing intimate details that aren’t strictly necessary for the transaction. Perhaps my Irish genes are coming into the ascendant, and I’m beginning to go native.

‘Yeah, I’m just going to visit a friend of mine who’s been a bit ill recently, and I thought, what could be nicer for him than the smell of fresh warm bread. So I came back.’

She hands me the bread and scones.

‘Well now, you tell your friend the bread’s a present from us, and we hope he gets well very soon. Just give me a pound for the scones. Goodbye now.’

As you enter Dunmanway, you pass a sign saying: ‘Best Kept Village 1982’. There’s no mention of what’s happened since.

The town is essentially a busy little square where three roads meet. The fairs my uncle used to bring me to, when hundreds of farmers packed the streets and pubs, are distant history. These days you’ll see the West Cork company car—a tractor—parked up among the Toyotas and VWs, while its dishevelled bachelor farmer owner buys frozen meat and tinned vegetables in the supermarket, but that’s progress for you.

Like many West Cork towns, Dunmanway was developed in the seventeenth century as a plantation, or settlement, by the English; records show that, by 1700, thirty English families were living there. In recent years the town has once again been settled by the English: not the well-heeled yachties you find in nearby Kinsale, Glandore and Schull, but by alleged Crusties, hippies, druggies, pagans and New-Age travellers. In both cases, you could say an English politician was responsible for the influx: first Oliver Cromwell, and then Margaret Thatcher, whose gimlet-eyed disapproval, and riot police, caused many unconventional young Brits to take their troublesome lifestyles across the Irish Sea. This must have pleased her no end.

On an Irish talk-show recently I watched a millionaire businessman describe how he had once met Mrs T at an official reception in London. ‘And where,’ she’d asked him, ‘are you from?’

‘Cork,’ he replied.

‘Yuk!’ exclaimed the Iron Lady, and turned on her heel.

‘Never mind, old chap,’ volunteered Denis, by way of consolation, ‘have a G and T.’

I check into a small hotel and bar on the edge of town, variously described as ‘family run’, ‘two star’, and, more worryingly, ‘Class B’. My room has a small TV, mounted on a metal bracket so far up the wall you’d have to sit on the wardrobe to watch it. Tea and coffee-making facilities, including those tiny sachets of UHT milk that have done so much to make the world a happier place, are there, as advertised. I have an unobstructed view of the roof of the disco. I wolf the complimentary custard creams, one of which is broken, and hit the street in search of Dominic.

Here’s my plan. I’ll wait until I see someone with dreadlocks, or any scruffy bastard with an English accent and a dog on a piece of string, and ask if he knows Dominic. I’m intrigued that of all the places they might have chosen, the new-wave émigré English have turned up here, in a backwater from my past. Walking back towards the square, I realise I’m passing Auntie Annie’s house; she was my grandmother’s sister. She lived here, always dressed, in my memory at least, entirely in black, in what seemed like medieval poverty: no running water, cooking range fired by turf, poor old invalid Uncle Willy under a blanket on the sofa.

We went to visit her one Sunday afternoon, straight after a massive lunch of chicken and ham and cabbage and potatoes back in Drimoleague. The moment we arrived there were bottles of stout for my dad and me, even though I was only fourteen, and hated it. There were soft drinks for my mum and sisters and little brother; then Annie served us a massive lunch, of chicken and ham and cabbage and potatoes. Pogged to the eyeballs from the lunch we’d just finished, and racked with guilt at being given enough food to keep her and Willy for a year, we forced it down with clenched fists and the backs of spoons, while Annie looked on, smiling, desperate to serve the trifle. There was just time for a quick pray, then it was back to Drimoleague, and a table groaning with cold meats and hot potatoes. Sandwiches were served at bedtime for anyone who was peckish.

After half an hour wandering round without spotting anyone remotely resembling a drug-crazed hippy, I give up, like many an intrepid explorer before me, and go to the pub. Anyone unfamiliar with south-west Ireland, and most Americans, will presume this indicates an alcohol problem; but I can’t see that a pint or two during the day is a sign of moral turpitude, especially far from home. It’s certainly better than going to some unique and exotic island, as so many eejits do these days, and playing golf. And instead of the depressingly corporate environment offered by pubs in the English countryside these days, where a retired estate agent or policeman presides over a muzak-polluted repro-furniture showroom in which furtive couples sit side by side eating microwaved baked potatoes, in Ireland you can still find idiosyncratic, family-owned hovels with no food, or decor, that remain temples to hospitality, conversation and drink. They’d be priceless institutions even if they only served coffee, but I can’t see that catching on.

I’m the only customer, so I sit at the bar and read the paper. The landlady adopts the unusual conversational gambit for this part of the world of letting me make the first move; but I doubt she’ll know Dominic. She’s of an older, more God-fearing generation, and seems unlikely to be intimate with a bunch of pagan English party animals. Mind you, she is selling snuff behind the bar, 69p a box, so you never know.

It’s a big day for alcohol-related stories, LONGER DAYS BRING THE PROSPECT OF LATE-NIGHT OPEN-AIR BOOZE PARTIES enthuses a front-page headline, though on closer examination it seems to be suggesting that this is a bad thing. There’s also a court case that sheds interesting light on official policy to late drinking. ‘A publican who allowed people to be on his premises after hours was fined £50…Delaney had nine similar convictions for similar offences.’ He’ll be terrified about getting caught again, then.

But the landlady can’t resist her natural curiosity for long. I ask for a packet of nuts and she’s in like a flash, wondering if perhaps I’m on holiday. If you’re the sort of person who likes to project an air of cool and remote mystery, or even if you just prefer to keep yourself to yourself, you should avoid small villages in south-west Ireland like the plague.

‘I’m looking for someone I know from England. I don’t suppose you’d—’

‘One of the lads from Wild Mountain, is he? They’re not a bad bunch. Marvellous places they’ve built up there. Sure, all this nonsense about them living on the dole. Well, fair enough, some of them do, but they’re getting a lot less in subsidy than the farmers, and you don’t hear anyone complaining about them. And at least it’s all going back into the local economy. I see it as God’s way of redistributing wealth from Dublin, and anyway aren’t they a lot better for the place than these rich English and Germans buying up the houses and leaving them empty fifty weeks of the year. I’d say they’ve got their own ways of relaxing and having fun, but haven’t we all, and did you know now that they have their own cricket team? First year they entered they won the league. Look!’

I’m struggling to keep up. She takes down a framed photo from a shelf by the gin optic. There they are, eleven hairy men in white cricket flannels, smiling, enthusiastic, and, as far as you can tell, as straight as Bob Marley.

‘You don’t know someone called Dominic, do you?’

‘Wasn’t he in here last night playing with the band. Been very ill, you know, with the pneumonia, but he’s looking better now. Lovely boy.’

‘Could you tell me how to find him? He said it was a bit complicated.’

‘Sure, it is, I suppose. But I’d say it’s easy enough to find once you know where it is.’