Round Ireland in Low Gear (13 page)

The sun had by now gone in and it was growing darker and darker in the pub, as if someone was turning a dimming switch; soon only the old man’s pale face was visible and it too was beginning to go out, like that of the cat in
Alice in Wonderland.
By this time, Doolan’s was beginning to resemble an abode of spiritualists.

‘Is it always as quiet as this?’ Wanda asked the girl with the Paddy.

‘Not at all!’ she replied. ‘It’s always very crowded three o’clock Saturdays – then there’s a fine lot of fellers and girls in from the country.’

Waterford, we later discovered, when we could locate them in the deluge that began the moment we left Doolan’s, has two cathedrals, one Catholic, the other Church of Ireland, otherwise Protestant. Both were built by a native of Waterford and a Protestant, John Roberts, great-grandfather of Field Marshal Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Pretoria and Waterford (1832–1914), who was awarded the Victoria Cross in 1858 after leading a cavalry charge during the Indian Mutiny and was known affectionately to the great British public as ‘Bobs’.

Christchurch, Roberts’ Protestant cathedral, was built between 1770 and 1779, partly destroyed by fire in 1815, restored in 1818
and ‘re-edified’ in 1891 by the architect Sir Thomas Drew, who was noted for his ‘robust and virile Gothic’. It was then vandalized in the 1970s. With all this attention lavished on it, it is surprising that it resembles anything at all. The high spot of the interior is the Rice Monument, which shows a body in an advanced state of decomposition with toads and frogs creeping out of it. It hardly left one asking the way to the dining car.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, known as the Big Chapel or the Great Chapel, was built later, between 1793 and 1796, in what for Catholics were still Penal Times. It cost £20,000 and the money is said to have been collected from the faithful entirely at the doors of other churches. A complete statement of what the Penal Laws entailed is impossible here, but among other things Catholics were forbidden to buy land or take leases for more than thirty-one years; they were forbidden to teach in school, teach their own children or educate them abroad; mixed marriages between people of property were forbidden and any child of such a union might be brought up as a Protestant. No Catholic could be a guardian and all wards in Chancery were brought up as Protestants. It was a pretty savage system.

Architecturally, Roberts had Waterford wrapped up. He also built the Exchange and Assembly Rooms (1788), which later became the City Hall and Theatre Royal respectively, and an elegant town house with a splendid staircase (1795) in Great George Street, now used by the Chamber of Commerce and the Harbour Commissioners.

‘What are you going to do now, Author?’ Wanda asked as we stood on the steps of Christchurch, having absorbed the horror of the monuments within, and contemplating what one could see of the deluge outside in the pitch dark.

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ I said huffily, knowing that she had already formulated some plan and disliking having to try to answer
questions I can’t answer, something which happens with increasing frequency.

‘Because you have to decide,’ she said triumphantly. ‘You’re the breadwinner.’ If we hadn’t been standing on consecrated ground, I would have put the curse of fire and water on her. ‘You haven’t forgotten,’ she went on, ‘that we have to be in Cork tonight? We’re being put up in that hotel with a famous restaurant so that you can write about it.’

‘Oh Lor,’ I said, ‘I thought it was tomorrow. Well, we can probably get a train, or a bus. The timetables are with the bikes. We’d better go and have a cup of tea and look at them.’

As soon as we were able to do this it became apparent that so far as we were concerned the train was a non-starter. Years ago a railway line, delineated on the map in the 1912
Murray’s Guide
, had wound its way innocuously through the countryside from Waterford to Mallow in County Cork, a spa famous for the foulness of its youth:

From here it was only twenty-one miles on the Great Southern and Western Railway to Cork. But since then the aforementioned Irish equivalent of Beeching had torn a lot of it up. Now, anyone foolish enough to make by rail what is by road a journey of seventy-eight miles, is taken out through the back-blocks of Waterford, Tipperary, Limerick and County Cork on an immense 114-mile semi-circular peregrination.

The timings were horrific, too: the evening service, of which I had thought we might avail ourselves, left Waterford at 20.50 (no
refreshment facilities), reached Limerick Junction at 22.24, where there are no refreshment facilities either, to connect with a train which finally reached Cork at 23.55. On Saturdays the connection involved a wait at Limerick of 40 minutes, before arriving at Cork at 00.20 on Sunday morning; and Sunday was the great day when for the first leg of the journey there was no train at all, only a motor coach, appropriately indicated in the timetable by something that looked like a hearse.

The bus timetable was much more cheering and we had already decided to take a bus due to leave Waterford at 18.00 arriving Cork 20.15, when the proprietor of the café, who had become interested in our future, predicted rightly that the driver, who was approaching pensionable age and grumpy with it, would not take our bikes, exercising his right on an Expressway service to reject them, if he so wished.

‘We’d better cancel the hotel in Cork and stay the night here.’

‘Listen,’ said Wanda, which was her favourite preamble, whatever the subject, ‘if you think I’m going to give up a night in a nice, comfortable hotel for a bed and breakfast with a forty-watt bulb at the wrong end of the bed for reading with, you’re mistaken. And what about the dinner? That book you didn’t bring said, “One of Ireland’s greatest kitchens and cellars”. You read it out to me yourself. How far’s Rosslare? If there is a train, one of us should go to Rosslare, get the van and drive back here, then go on to Cork.’

To our amazement there was a train to Rosslare that didn’t first make a point of going to Limerick Junction. If everything went well we might just reach Cork in time for dinner. We telephoned our hotel. They were very nice and said that it would be all right for a late dinner, as long as we didn’t make a practice of it.

‘Let’s toss to see who doesn’t go to Rosslare,’ Wanda said. I won.

‘Oh hell,’ I said. ‘We’ve got our old-age Eurail half-price passes.
What happens if you get lost, or the van breaks down, or you just decide not to come back? I’ll be stuck here for ever. Let’s be devils. Let’s both go.’

And so we said goodbye to gallant little Waterford, without even laying eyes on a cut glass wine decanter; and goodbye to its distinguished sons, among them the young Irish leader Thomas Meagher (1823–67), condemned to death for his part in a rising in 1848. In fact his sentence was commuted to transportation to Tasmania, whence he eventually escaped to America to fight with great gallantry in the Irish Brigade of the Union Army, and eventually to become acting Governor of Montana, before falling overboard from a river steamer and drowning in the Missouri. And goodbye to Dorothy Jordan (1760–1816), notable comic actress and mistress, among other recipients of the honour being the Duke of Clarence, later William IV, by whom she had ten children, all of whom took the name of Fitzclarence. (When the Duke proposed, at the suggestion of George III, that her allowance from him should be reduced from £1000 a year to £500 she sent him the bottom part of a playbill for one of the productions she was taking part in which read, ‘No money returned after the rising of the curtain’.) And goodbye Charles Kean, actor (1811–68), second son of Edmund Kean; and to William Vincent Wallace (1813–68), a voluminous composer and author of the operas
Maritana
and
Lurline
, both performed at Covent Garden with great success. An adventurous traveller, he visited Sydney, where the Governor paid him a hundred sheep to take part in a concert; Tasmania; and New Zealand, where he narrowly escaped being murdered by Maoris, thanks to the intervention of the daughter of a chief. Later, he took part in a whaling cruise in the South Pacific, in the course of which the crew murdered every European on board with the exception of himself and two others. In India he was made much of by the Begum of Oude, and visited Kashmir
and Nepal; in Santiago he gave a concert for which he was paid partly with gamecocks; in Lima he was paid £1000 for a single appearance and in Mexico he wrote a Grand Mass for a musical fête. He put a lot of money into piano and tobacco factories in America but lost it all, before returning to England where he wrote his operas and became famous. Before embarking on this odyssey he married a Miss Kelly of Blackrock, near Dublin, but she left him in Sydney and he never saw her again.

Goodbye Miss Kelly and goodbye Waterford. I love you, I think; but I would have loved you even more if you had not been under water.

Arbutus Lodge, Cork, at which we eventually succeeded in arriving at ten-thirty after a 130-mile drive from Rosslare, was a two-storey mid-nineteenth-century Italianate house, with touches of Romanesque here and there, perched on the side of a hill in the labyrinthine suburb of Montenotte. Architecturally, Montenotte resembled parts of nineteenth-century Torquay and Newton Abbot. Far below were what had once been lush pastures on the banks of the river Lee, downstream from the city, and in more recent times became the site of the Ford automobile and Dunlop tyre works (both now only of interest to industrial archaeologists), a power station, oil tanks, distillers, chemical works, etcetera.

Fortunately, distance lent enchantment to what had become a pretty ignoble view. The Lodge, like dozens of other residences in Montenotte, was the sort of place one expected to find oneself drinking Lapsang Souchong in company with some Irish Jane Austen and spreading crumpets with Gentleman’s Relish. Dinner was delicious, as promised; the beds were comfortable and the breakfast excellent; anticipating a long day I had porridge, scrambled eggs, bacon, drisheen (black pudding), soda bread with very good marmalade and gallons of tea.

We left the van at the hotel and walked into the city along the quays that line the river Lee, which flows through the city in two main streams, making part of it an island. It was swathed in mist and spectral swans floated on it, motionless. These quays, which once sheltered dozens of ships, had an air not only of departed glory but of departed activity, having lost their traffic to the car ferry terminal downstream, and to the deepwater port at Ringaskiddy in Cork Harbour, where the transatlantic liners used to come in. Even a short list of signs on some of the now semi-decrepit buildings that line them suggest another age – ‘The Cardboard Box Factory’, ‘The Cork Button Company’, ‘Drummys’, ‘Booth For Tools’ – but some of these quays seen across the water were beautiful; and there were fine Georgian houses at the upstream end of the island on which the main commercial part of the city stands. Down at its eastern end, where the North and South Channels meet, there is a fine classical Customs House built at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in a similar position to that occupied by the Dogana di Mare, the Custom House of the Sea, in Venice, at the junction of the Giudecca with the Grand Canal, but not looking so good being, now, unfortunately partly obscured by more modern constructions.

In Cornmarket, off Coal Quay, was the Old Market, according to those trustworthy compilers of the
Shell Guide
, ‘Cork’s only example of the Grand Style of the 18th century’. It was not market day, but some desultory selling was taking place of assorted junk and cast-off clothing, some of it cast off a great many times. And there were empty stalls by the roadside, between a couple of which a beat-up old van was parked, containing a couple of tinker men, two tinker women with thin, lined faces and a band of tinker children of indeterminate number, all with runny noses. Suddenly, as if obeying an unpremeditated summons, the two men got out and made for one of the empty stalls, where one of them without preamble began
laying out the cards for the three-card trick, while the other stood close by keeping a look-out for the police and at the same time putting down stakes to encourage the rest of the crowd.

Almost at once the owner of the stall appeared, a big, tough woman of about fifty with her hair in a greasy, grizzled bun and with a big apron out front; the sort of woman who would enjoy a good fight with another woman outside a pub on a Saturday night.

‘Get to hell off my place!’ she said, breaking through the crowd to the tinker and brandishing a big red fist under his nose. ‘May you die roaring! Get off it!’

And although the tinker looked as rough as she did he didn’t stop to argue. He simply picked up the cards and moved off to a nearby open site covered with rubble, and the crowd re-formed around him, rather like a swarm of bees about a queen.

Cork was famous for its beggars, who were reputedly as noisy and good-humoured as their counterparts in Dublin were insolent and unattractive. Back in the 1830s Mrs Anna Maria Hall, author of
Ireland, Its Scenery, Character &c
, described how difficult it was to resist them: