Oscar Wilde said that the tragedy of being old is that one is still young.
I am eighty-six, going on nineteen. Is this a record?
I’ve been pruning and wood carving with my chainsaw for years. There is no shortage of wood from the trees that I planted thirty years ago. The resultant grotesque heads are visible all around my garden (all wearing face masks – you must keep a sense of humour). Now they mock me.
In the week before Christmas I took out my chain saw to clear away two full-grown pine trees that had fallen on our oil tank.
Everything went well until I became ambitious. For the first time, instead of placing the machine on the ground with my foot on it, I tried to start it as they do in the movies: hold the machine in my left hand, push it down while pulling up on the starter with the right hand. That’s what the pros do. I had never tried it before.
The result was dramatic. There was a sharp crunch in my left shoulder, plus pins and needles in my hand. A month later that is still my painful condition.
On that day before Christmas I admitted for the first time that I’m old and it got me thinking about the disparities between age and youth.
Demographically speaking, we oldies will soon outnumber youngsters. This is because young females are postponing reproduction until their mid-thirties. The costs of childcare and housing are prohibitive, there is a lack of confidence in the future. Also, many want an independent career. It’s a first world scenario.
Women traditionally reproduced at about 25 years of age. Now it’s their mid-thirties and two kids are the ideal. However, since 1981 the worldwide replacement rate for us humans is down to 1.58 kids per woman. Ultimately that is not enough to prevent the extinction of the race.
Demographics is destiny
Thanks to modern medicine we superannuated oldies will soon outnumber fit young workers; the latter group’s taxes keep our health service going. We non-taxpayers (if you overlook VAT) will soon consume over 50% of health costs.
Will this trend continue? Probably. The young don’t vote enough. The seniors vote early and sometimes often. Governments know that older voters tend towards the status quo and shape their manifestos accordingly. This ensures that conservative policies preserve existing evils as distinct from liberal policies which wish to replace such evils with others. In the end the government always wins.
We used to worry about overpopulation in the world; now we are in reverse gear, or at least the wealthy West is. I’ve cooperated in the production of six children, so I can’t really be blamed.
But the centre cannot hold.
The gaps in the supply services, witnessed by the shortage of truck drivers during the pandemic, are a symptom of the new malaise. Older skilled workers are retiring with few to take their place. Employers are desperate for employees.
Don’t worry, I hear, the immigrants will eventually make up the numbers. Already they are the prime carers – for us, the oldies! Now a world of opportunity is there for immigrants (and about time too). Instead of denigrating them, fighting to keep them out, we will have to compete for their services, especially the skilled tradesmen.
How many of us can fix a puncture, replace a fuse, stop a leak, change a tyre, do any of the tasks that were once second nature to my generation? Very few. We have all become a dysfunctional, middle-class burden on the young and fit. Have we passed on these humble skills? No, the young have been too absorbed in their screens to learn such mundane tasks. Now we don’t repair; we replace with newer models which are programmed to break down after the guarantee expires. Thanks to the advertising industry the world of the consumer is chasing its tail. Everybody knows.
Is this an argument for despair? Not at all. Some oldies have opted for the Zurich solution but most of us will cling on desperately to the last vestiges of our functionality.
Unless euthanasia and trips to Zurich become mandatory…
Featured Images: Carvings by Boby Quinn: ‘De Profundis’; ‘After Brancusi’; ‘Me Worry’.
As evidenced by fossilized pollen, it was once covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, It was green, verdant, populated by antelopes, giraffes, rhinoceros, supporting all life forms including settled human beings. Cave drawings in southern Algeria (Tassili) testify to this lifestyle.
Disaster came in the year 3,440 B.C..
According to carbon-14 dating of cores from the Atlantic coast of Senegal as well as from Lake Koa in Chad, Summer temperatures increased sharply in the Sahara region and precipitation decreased. This event devastated the people and their socio-economic systems. The recently-introduced farming techniques no longer supported life.
It was a case of global warming in a specific place.
According to climate theoretician, Dr. Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institue, the disaster was partially initiated by one of the regular changes in the Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis (earth wobble). July happened in January!
The ensuing warming and feedback effects on Vegetation and Atmosphere in this particular area combined to produce a sudden, localised desertification which resulted in the Sahara.
This transition to the Sahara’s present arid climate was not gradual, but occurred in two specific episodes. The first, which was less severe, occurred between 6,700 and 5,500 years ago (4,700 B.C. and 3,500 B.C.). The second, which was brutal, lasted from 2,000 B.C.to 1,600 years ago.
What has this to do with Ireland?
Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne)
Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne), the finest and greatest Megalithic structure (earlier than Stonehenge) in Europe, was built by ‘unknown farmers’ in approx. 3000 B.C.
At the same time the first Egyptian dynasties were founded.
It is my thesis that Newgrange and the Egyptian dynasties were developed by a long-civilised and cultured people whose origins were in the Sahel of North Africa.
Where to?
Once their lifestyle was destroyed, where did the people of the Sahara go? Many escaped northwards to the still fertile coasts of North Africa and eastwards to the Nile. This sudden incursion created extreme pressure on the existing inhabitants of the thin North African coastal littoral. Something had to give. What did they do?
In approx. 3000 B.C. they took to the sea. Their DNA traces (E1b1b1- Y) are to be found in the southern regions of most Mediterranean countries. Far from being a far-fetched idea, a North African Berber DNA haplotype is shared by, among others, people as faraway as the the Pasiegos of Cantabria in Northern Spain and the Saami people of Finland!.
Newgrange in Ireland is the oldest and finest example of a megalithic culture that spread along the Atlantic coast from North Africa to the Baltic.
Newgrange has been dated to 3000 B.C. and is slightly older than the Pyramids of Egypt. It and Ireland’s impressive megalithic heritage were built in about the same period as the desertification of the Sahara. The megalithic culture spread up the Atlantic coasts from North Africa where similar structures proliferate.
Thirty years ago this writer found the equivalent of Newgrange in Larache, Morocco – which was also colonised by Phoenicians after 800 B.C. – and indicates a continuity of Atlantic coastal movement.
Medina of Larache, Morrocco.
The Sea is Key
Professor John T. Koch of the University of Aberystwith wrote the following in Celtic from the West:
No one has taken the possibility of Celtic coming from ‘Hispania’ to the other Celtic countries seriously since we stopped taking Lebor Gabála Érenn seriously, but it is now at least worth pausing to review what it is we think we know that makes that impossible.
Professor Barry Cunliffe (Oxford) co-editor of the same collection of essays, repeats his long-held advocacy of the reality of an Atlantic coastal trading community, active at least as long ago as the Bronze Age – and probably much earlier – along which people moved and shared languages and cultures. The area in question stretches from Scandinavia as far south as Mogador – which was once a Phoenician colony. The sea is, as always, the key to such perspectives. The sea connects, does not divide.
Linguists such as Heinrich Wagner, Pokorny, Orin Gensler, Vennemannet alia have long held that there is a substratum of North African languages (Hamito-Semitic) underneath the first official language of Ireland – Gaelic.
The Grandfather Clause is a legal entity in Western Law. It is an exemption in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations. Sometimes, the exemption is limited; it may extend for a set period of time, or it may be lost under certain circumstances.
It means that traditional customs and rights cannot be arbitrarily abolished by new legislation.
The simplest example is a claim to a traditional right-of-way through private property. The courts often entertain such claims.
Suppose that a North African appeals for asylum in Ireland, is refused and threatened with deportation. Might he/she invoke the Grandfather Clause?
He/she might perhaps claim that when the ice melted his/her ancestors were the first tentative inhabitants of Northern Europe – including Ireland – 10,000 years ago and that in Ireland there exists physical, linguistic and literary evidence of a continuity of such seaborne immigration and occupation by his/her ancestors down the years – seven thousand years! This continuity would embrace the first Neolithic farmers, then the Phoenicians, then the Algerian Corsairs of the seventeenth century. Could it be recognised as a legal, or at least a moral, precedent?
The science of genetics i.e. evidence from the human genome project would support such a proposition.
The argument would be that his/her ancestors arrived here long before we were the ‘Irish’ and took possession of the island. Therefore he/she, as a putative descendant of, say, the Fomorians, the Fir Bolg’s or the De Dannan, the Phoenicians, had a right to stay here! The fact that their occupation predated the concept of Land Deeds is relevant. (Of course the abused rights of native American Indians – who also had no land deeds – are also relevant to the case.)
he Irish Gaelic chieftain receives the priest’s blessing before departing to fight the English.
A More Recent Analogy
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Elizabethan and Cromwellian soldiers came to Ireland and were paid off with stolen tracts of Irish land. Nevertheless, after four centuries of such (often absentee) ownership no one could realistically take a case challenging the rights of the Anglo-Irish descendants of those soldiers. The suggestion that the Irish State might repossess such lands and forcibly deport the descendants without compensation would be treated as absurd – as well as inciting violence! It would be a stretching of the Grandfather Clause which only a despairing defense lawyer might use as a persuasive metaphor.
However, the rehearsal of the above asylum seeker’s argument – before being laughed out of court – would be an opportunity to reveal the complex background of colonialism and racism that has resulted in attitudes to immigrants of colour. In Ireland, native biodiversity is considered sacrosanct. Foreigners (esp. black) are considered an invasive and basically threatening species.
The ancient Europa is now Fortress Europe!
Sarcophagus of Ahiram, which bears the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet (Beirut, Lebanon).
The Phoenicians
The Phoenicians were a classic case of a such a blackguarded culture and people. Although prominent in the Bible, they were written out of history by Greek and Roman authors. However, an ancient and deep-rooted anti-semitism also informed the historical prejudice against those Canaanite pioneers whom some accounts say reached these northern islands in the late Bronze Age – approx. 600 B.C. An extensive tin trade with Cornwall is widely believed.
Examining the Phoenicians can be an illuminating approach to Irish identity as well as European attitudes and racism in general.
Irish passports have in the recent past been doled out for cash, thereby entitling rich Saudis and their families to come and go as they please. This is not an unusual practice. At one time the Cypriot president Präsident Nikos Anastasiades is offering citizenship as compensation to rich foreign (i.e Russian) investors. In modern usage, Irish international sports teams liberally use the ‘granny rule’ to acquire talented non-Irish players.
There is nothing immutably sacred about Irish or any national citizenship. The arguments for excluding or including certain ethnic types are implacably economic but can raise questions of discrimination on ethnic grounds.
After working and living in Ireland for a certain number of years many ‘non-nationals’ are granted Irish citizenship. What is the essential difference between these favoured ones and those asylum-seekers who may have endured living for three/four/five years in prison-like circumstances on this island? Those who are forbidden to work, who are given pocket money of €19.10 per week?
A court hearing as hypothetical as the above might reveal the shaky grounds on which our historical assumptions of identity are based.
Suppose the old, once-sacred, Irish legends of immigration from Africa and Spain, the Fomorians from Africa, the Milesians from Spain, the De Danaan, the Fir Bolg are not entirely mythical?
Suppose that seventeenth and eighteenth century Irish scholars who believed in the literal truth of those legends were not entirely mistaken?
Suppose that modern Irish writers (Heaney, McGuinness, Friel, Durkan et al) were not entirely taking artistic license or imagining things when they invoked the Carthaginians as an anti-colonial metaphor?
Tradition is never entirely true but never entirely false.
Rabbit Beach in the southern part of the island of Lampedusa.
In recent years the island of Lampedusa and the ancient island of Ireland have had this in common: the incursion of desperate people from the other side of the Mediterranean, particularly from North Africa.
Note
The changes in Earth’s orbit occurred gradually, whereas the evolution of North Africa’s climate and vegetation were abrupt. Martin Claussen and his colleagues believe that various feedback mechanisms within Earth’s climate system amplified and modified the effects touched off by the orbital changes. By modelling the impact of climate, oceans, and vegetation both separately and in various combinations, the researchers concluded that oceans played only a minor role in the Sahara’s desertification. The earths axis wobbled. The desertification of North Africa began abruptly 5,440 years ago (+/- 30 years). Before that time, the Sahara was covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, as evidenced by fossilized pollen.
The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition between the Sahara desert in the North and the Sudanian Savannas in the south, having a semi-arid climate. It stretches across the north of the African continent between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. In Arabic the word Sahel means ‘a coastline’ which delimits the sand of the Sahara.
The Sahel covers parts of (from west to east) Senegal, southern Mauritania, central Mali, southern Algeria and Niger, central Chad, southern Sudan, northern South Sudan and Eritrea.
In the history of this planet geologists say there have been five major Ice Ages, each lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. There have been periods when this entire planet was covered in ice. At other periods the tectonic plates supporting continents were all jammed together in the southern hemisphere and Ireland was located below the equator – beside the African tropical zone. We were all neighbours once.
An ice age is defined as when both polar caps are covered in ice. We are presently in an ‘ice age’.
There have been hundreds of ‘inter-glacials’ or global warmings. During one of the interglacial periods – perhaps fifty million years ago – conditions favoured the emergence of the first primitive life forms.
In another, more recent, period the sudden desertification of the Sahara occurred. This event had a dramatic and long-lasting effect on population movements around the Mediterranean.
Featured Image: Landscape of the Erg Chebbi, Morrocco.
Unaware of the roaring cataract ahead, a small boy splashes in the dark river named Dodder, cheap buoyancy aids on his arms, flailing them in the manner called the dog’s paddle, eyes and mouth squeezed shut, neck stretched to keep his head above the surface. I shout a warning, which he must hear because he squints one eye open, manages an uncertain glance at me before he drops in slow motion towards the froth and blackness below, not screaming. An unseen piano makes clichéd sounds in the background and this musack is the main element that irritates me awake. I already know that all the children are safe in their beds, and this can only be a cheap movie scenario in which I am the small boy.
Even my nightmares are cinematic clichés, retribution for spending most of my life trying to avoid them. It’s a bit late for me to invent a new scenario in which life itself might be a dream, the music not potently cheap, the mise-en-scène not too close to the bone; too late to wake up and start all over again. Best to count my blessings and face the end of my ninth decade with equanimity.
Not much older than me, my island home has survived the past hundred, vaguely independent years before falling over the economic cliff. Despite having lived the greater part of my life in a contented region called Conamara in the waste of Ireland, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that my personal and cultural identity are also falling to bits.
My fellow-citizens and I have shape-shifted from being the credulous members of an imperial Roman Church, then being shanghaied as reluctant subjects of the British Empire, finally citizens of an embryonic European Empire, which looks like ending up as the Fourth Reich. But unconsciously we are, and have been for many years, carriers of the most recent imperial virus, this time North American. Now, as Hubert Butler predicted many years ago, ‘…there is nothing but Anglo-American culture to unite us.’
In this chameleon state we exist, of course, less in the literal sense than imaginatively which, in the Irish psyche, certainly in mine, tends to be more real. Our new masters’ films – pardon me, movies – and TV shows have filled our waking hours and daydreams.
Not many years ago I counted ninety cinema screens in Dublin in which not a single Irish film was to be seen. The bulk were American. Although I now require subtitles for the more recent manifestations of their staccato, one-phrase dialogue I have not quite mastered the Tarantino fashion of peppering my scripts with four letter expletives. Must try harder.
The empire’s audio-visual avalanche has forged mine, my childrens’ and my grandchildrens’ dialects and tastes. We of an older generation cannot be excused; Jack Nicholson was for long my ideal actor and Humphrey Bogart taught me to smoke fifty years ago.
It should not upset me that my grandchildren prefer Rap to O’Riada. The truths of the three Williams – Faulkner, Saroyan and Goulding – were once gospel to me. American playwrights Arthur Miller and Edward Albee were in my mind long before Brian Friel became my favourite.
We are now fortunate to speak the American dialect of English because we need go no more with our bundles on our shoulders to Philadelphia in the morning. Philadelphia has come to us in the form of Google, Facebook, Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard and the rest of the multinationals, which are now the core of our island’s economic wellbeing as well as a reminder of our anxious dependency.
The fact that up to seventy five percent of the resident I.T. multinational employees are non-Irish, while four hundred thousand of our youngest and brightest have in the last five years slipped quietly away only confuses the matter, but must not be brooded over. At least the multinational surveillance company (SGS) from which I must beg renewal of my driving license is harmlessly Swiss.
Apart from the last exception, our cultural credentials are impeccable. If forty million United Statesians are deluded enough to call themselves Irish we must be entitled to return the compliment and claim documentation as Yankee Doodle Dandies. Unfortunately the US immigration authorities now screen us potential emigrants at source, literally on our native soil in Shannon airport. As Peter Fallon urged – and I know very well I am retooling his context – in a recent poem:
Say never again to The Wild Irish Rover,
No more to The Minstrel Boy.
Give us back our sons and daughters,
Say that Ireland is over.
How fragile our illusions of sovereignity have been, how transformed has been this trading post in the last century, since a teenager named James Toner – along with 200,000 other Irishmen who needed a job – ran away from his home in Dublin to join the British Army. As a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps young James’ task was to collect the body parts of his fellow youths killed among the bloomin’ roses in Picardy. He survived the horror and grew up to be my uncle Jim.
I just looked him up in the British Military Archives.
Conferment of the D.C.M. gallantry award was announced in the London Gazette (1920) and accompanied by a citation:
Award Details: 61586 Pte. J. Toner. During the period 17th September to 11th November, 1918, while acting as a bearer, particularly at the capture of Bohain. There being a congestion of wounded, he repeatedly led forward squads of bearers over very difficult country during the night and greatly assisted in the evacuation of them.
This means that Jim did something foolhardy, at least under cover of night, in the midst of a carnage that was never revealed to us, his nieces and nephews.
Back in Dublin with a small war pension, Jim married, begat no children and endured Irish patriotic resentment at his fighting for the Old Enemy. Even his brother-in law disapproved of him. When my father made the drawing of four-year-old me, Jim was not impressed. He acidly pronounced: “The boy may be alright, but he has the head of a bloody rogue.”
I overheard that remark and worried about it. Surely he was joking? Or was he envious because he had no children himself? I now surmise that it was general bitterness because nobody, especially not my father, wanted to hear about the horrors Jim had witnessed in France. He had been informally decreed an Irish traitor in the British army.
Sometime in the 1950s he decided to abandon his golf, at which he was local champion, and his buoyancy aid, whiskey, and put an end to the pain that was identified too late. It is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is applied to the euphemism ‘veteran’. Uncle Jim put an end to his pain with the aid of a gas oven.
There are other associations. When the British army abandoned our sacred soil in 1922, Uncle Jim’s sister Kathleen ran away with her boyfriend, a Tommy named George Thomas.
A possible fatal attraction was the fact that both of their fathers kept pigs; science now says that personal odour is a most powerful sexual signal. I met the ageing lovers in their home at Abingdon, Berkshire in 1964 when Uncle George unexpectedly said to me: “I glory in you, Bob.”
I think he meant that I appeared not to have inherited my father’s prejudices against the English. He was wrong; our parents’ prejudices are lodged in our DNA but, as a form of energy, can happily be redirected at more fitting targets, such as the English Public School system and all their imitators closer to home. Oh, the bitther word!
When World War II (like War Number 1, a civil war between blood brothers, the Germans and the English) came along, one of Uncle George’s sons, Sidney, enlisted as a teenage frogman and acted, at nineteen, as one of those cockleshell heroes who attached limpet mines to enemy ships. He became a hero of mine and survived to produce a pretty daughter named Cathy whom I subsequently persuaded to elope with me briefly to Ireland where we had midnight swims at Killiney beach and were referred to as kissing cousins. Cathy later married a Red Devil, one of those RAF people who put on daring aerial displays.
These connections make me wonder if I am not still a bloody rogue and worse, a fellow-traveller of that suspect class, a West Brit rather than a putative citizen of America.
For a start, I was born in the Pale: Dublin and its environs. My first language was English, albeit in a dialect light years away from the BBC accent, whose Home Service provided most of my childhood listening pleasure; Radio Éireann broadcast only a few hours per day.
My early reading was what we called the comicuts, The Rover, The Hotspur, The Eagle, all published in England. My favourite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.A. Henty, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris and so forth. Even the Irish language detective story writer Reics Carlo, who was obligatory reading in school, turned out to be English.
But as I grew up I betrayed them all for the likes of Irwin Shaw, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Hemingway, and now I know I’m a virtual Yank. I assure you that this is less a form of ingratiation with the American Chamber of Commerce than one of realisation and resignation. No problemo.
There are more ingredients in this cultural Irish stew.
Among our official heroes, Pádraic Pearse’s father was from Birmingham; James Connolly came from Edinburgh and James Larkin was a Liverpudlian. No wonder I am ambivalent about nationalism, Irish, English and American and still cling to that long-lost cause: socialism.
The last night of the Proms in the Albert Hall disturbs me, with its sea of Union Jacks and Hooray Henrys rendering Land of Hope and Glory – because I am moved by Elgar’s music (although he did not write the lyrics, which are as Kiplingesque and vainglorious as Deutschland Ueber Alles).
When filming American schoolchildren with their hands on heart, reciting the daily oath of allegiance to their flag, I am also uneasy. Indoctrination of the unruly young starts early on that continent but, by contrast, nationalism has in recent years become a vulgar word in Ireland.
How do the British and the Yanks get away with their jingoism? And where, apart from everywhere and nowhere, do we Irish really fit in? To those who, like myself, find all of this disconcerting I say, cop on, get a life, get the message, get over it, get with it, and other such novel and useful imperial edicts. No worries.
Staying for a moment with the phenomenon of British and American nationalism, I wonder if the answer may not be that they were both empires whereas Ireland’s only imperial conquest was spiritual – mainly among the black babies of Africa – and that appears to have been erased by our national amnesia. As very soon must happen to me as, dragging my feet like a reluctant schoolboy, I approach four score and ten, intending that looming watershed to be more an act of defiance than any petty celebration.
On my ninetieth birthday I shall beware of those who say: “You’re looking great, haven’t changed a bit.”
My exact contemporary, the late Ben Barenholtz, a survivor of Naziism and a New Yorker, who produced Coen brothers’ films and gave me a present of a book of all of Cole Porter’s lyrics, told me that he has an ex-friend, a liar who has said exactly the same thing to him every year for the past twenty years.
The astonishing thing about this compliment is that we ancients believe it. We skip and dance down the road until we are forced to pause, whereupon we resemble the silent nun in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem who was breathless with adoration. We oldies, by contrast, have merely run out of breath, full stop, or period, as I should really learn to say.
The truth of the above platitude, ‘yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’ is simply this: we are decommissioned. Joseph MacAnthony has described our aged generation as tourists in the departure lounge. We exist, persist, only in our anecdotage.
Who would have thought that little Riobárd, the boy in the drawing, would survive so long? Certainly not himself, whose life expectancy as a film and TV maker was long ago estimated by an insurance Actuary to be no more than forty five years.
What matter that this little Jackeen has spent more than half his life in the least colonised part of Ireland – the Gaeltacht of Conamara which, paradoxically, he has long known to be spiritually and economically closer to Boston than to Dublin.
Who gives a tinker’s curse that the Jackeen in question, having read so many comments, references, articles, essays, even PhD theses about his minor oeuvres, now dares to give his version of the story? But age confers a protective veneer of immunity, anonymity, even a kind of invisibility on the elderly so one is free to say what one likes.
As Kurt Vonnegut – who in one of his modest communications to me referred to himself as an old fart who smokes Pall Mall – put it: “Old men are obscene and accurate.” We can experience a kind of lightheaded bliss when we notice our fuel gauge moving towards empty and we can offload petty concerns.
The present words are thus an act of memory, which is equally an act of imagination and may be approached academically as sub-Proustian because although my life sentence has been long these sentences are, with a few exceptions, not.
I also possess unlimited memorabilia – photos, letters, diaries, the usual bric-a-brac of a life – which may save me from downright lying. Besides, there are those modest films which constitute aides-memoire and, not least, may be treated as having been personal buoyancy aids, otherwise described as vain aspirations.
I occasionally wonder, as I float towards the brink of the cataract, if I do not exist in some other, gentler person’s nightmare?
My 84-year-old grandmother, widowed, came to live with our family, and took over my bedroom. I was forced to give up the room, to share instead with a sibling.
The old woman was hale and hearty, retained her wits, preserved her down to earth assessment of life, had referred to her late, much loved husband – my favourite male relation – as ‘the old fool.’ One day she said to me: ‘Ye’re just waiting for me to die, aren’t ye? Well yiz’ll be waiting a long time.’ I was taken aback at her frankness. She died a year later.
When my old friend Dinno was on his deathbed handled matter-of-factly by his ex-nurse wife Oonagh – I asked him what he was thinking of. He said: ‘Gone-ness. I’m wondering what gone-ness will be like,’ and did not need to elaborate. We had understood each other well.
My father roared indignantly on his deathbed in the old Mater hospital. His wife and other children had gone home, reassured that he had survived the first heart attack and would survive until morning. I stayed and was the only witness to his last belligerent protest.
My mother spent her last days carefully organising her own funeral and the disposal of her one asset (a house). She waited only for my return from Canada until, in my presence she removed the oxygen mask from her mouth and stopped gasping for breath.
I am of an age to be intrigued by these quite normal dramas. Love dies. Beauty dies. Everybody and every thing dies. As Woody Allen said: ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’
What he might have meant was: better to lose your mind before your body gives up.
Dementia and altzheimers are tragedy for the nearest and dearest but a blessing for the sufferers because they don’t suffer at all; they are unaware of the impending disaster. What a way to go!
One of my brothers died in that condition. I envied him. One of my sisters died, still worrying about it. Poor thing. Another sister, the eldest in the family, is fortunately still alive. She’s lucky too; has no idea whats going on around her, I think.
The phenomenon is an everyday one and still we wonder at it: In what sense are we alive one day and gone the next, vanished without trace? No body. No soul. All disappeared, remembered briefly, forgotten forever. How extraordinary. Even when we breed frantically, seeking immortality, knowing our seed will also die, we still do it, procreating, making stains on life, producing work, writing, building solid bridges and skyscrapers, empires. All made of dust. Even dinosaurs lived a million years and now are merely known as skeletons.
People invented the idea of heavenly immortality: wishful thinking. They even invented god. We are at heart optimists.
There is no sting in death without consciousness; and nobody knows yet of what precisely that consists of. Fortunately death can be simulated under the surgeons knife until we wake and are reminded by pain of what we have mindlessly endured. Think of that.
Some people choose euthanasia but that’s a sin, we’re warned. It’s a cop out. We should be allowed to enjoy this once in a life experience. It is unique to each of us, just like our birth, to be celebrated as a never-to-be-repeated exercise. We are born astride a grave with, not a silver spoon, but a shovel in our hands.
I once speculated that nobody dies. We are bundles of transformed energy – the frantic impulses of copulation when we are conceived. Food becomes our energy fuel. What happens this energy at the point of death? Energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed like breath into gas, into condensation, into water into ice into steam etc etc. So what happens to us – bundles of energy? My speculation involves the millions and billions of galaxies and further billions of stars in each galaxy. Each of us, I suggest, becomes a twinkling star in the endless infinity of the universe. There is room for everybody out there.
There’s a happy thought. Perish our tiny worries. We are immortal. We just leave our egos behind. And good riddance.
A number of chapters from Bob Quinn’s latest memoir A Monk Manqué, mixing moments of hilarity with profound statements on the state of the world, are available on Cassandra Voices.
Holy Gawd, we’re back to Charles Darwin and his interpreters.
In the mid-19th century Darwin was recognised as a superb recorder of natural history and the inventor of evolutionary theory. He pointed to adaptation as a species’ key to survival. If an animal couldn’t adapt to new circumstances it faced extinction – like the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, or the elderly to-day.
Unfortunately Darwin’s innocent findings on adaptation were used to rationalise the superiority of young, thrusting people (early entrepreneurs), and the inferiority of lazy people (the old, the sick, the unemployed and immigrants). Opportunists were bright enough to see gaps in the market and could exploit such arbitrary classification.
However, Darwin wasn’t an entirely objective scientist: he thought Tasmanian natives were inferior humans, that is to say, not useful, who could, justifiably, be annihilated. It was, after all, the culmination of the Age of Enlightenment and the Tasmanians were untutored in the philosophies of Smith, Hume, Descartes, Spinoza et alia; nor had the natives the ability to defend themselves.
The fact that neither they nor the vast majority of European working class and peasants had familiarised themselves with Enlightenment ideas was insignificant. Their ignorance was noticed by the Imperial mindset and the Tasmanians were duly culled, wiped out. Closer to home that mindset facilitated the Irish famine. The poor, the old, the weak, the lame were a drag on the fast moving herd bosses.
In these tortured times the same insight is best represented by President Trump’s sociopathology. He illustrates the simple logic of big business: if you can’t adapt to our commercial imperatives (Big Pharma, for instance), you go out of business, i.e you die.
Thus, if you cannot get on your bike, have not realised there is no such thing as society, not become an entrepreneur, not risen early in the morning, you are disposable.
The crude American and U.K. analogies of a ‘war’ against the present disease have also proved subliminally useful. Idealistic youth was once considered ‘collateral damage’ in our just wars, million-fold sacrifices to preserve freedom and the status quo, including ours.
Now apply the concept of a war to the present pandemic. In every conflict, certain leaders weigh the collateral damage against potential victory. How many body bags as against how much ground gained? In this case, political ground. It is a suitable coincidence that anyone over 65 is ‘non-productive’ and less to be cherished. Are they not a proper sacrifice in the ‘war’ against Coronavirus?
I am biased, an 84-year-old artist, outrageously healthy and still productive but, by actuarial estimates, superfluous. So, with clichéd thoughts and prayers, dispose of me. Do not resuscitate. All is well and all manner of things will be well. Darwinism rules.
Years ago, arriving late one evening in Ostende by train – always my favourite means of travel – from Paris, I went to the first hotel I spotted: The OLD SHAKESPEARE HOTEL. I booked a room and, feeling expansive after a film shoot in Sud Tirol, asked the blonde receptionist for directions to the best restaurant in town. In her arms, she fondled a Pekingese which had the all-seeing eyes of an intelligent chimp. The woman said, with complete assurance: ‘This is the best restaurant.’
When I dumped my bag I went down to the restaurant where the only diners were a man with a cravat and two glamorous women. While I waited for a menu I heard the word ‘chateaux’ and assumed they were haute bourgeois patronising the best restaurant in town. Reassured that the receptionist was not lying, I listened out for other snatches of conversation.
“Florida! Of all places.”
“Its actually quiet in Winter.”
“Do you really like McDonalds?”
“Well, it has Disneyland and Cape Canaveral.”
I switched off and shortly afterwards they left. I was now the solitary diner.
The middle-aged waiter in white handed me the menu. I thanked him and he responded with the simple phrase: “As you please, sir.”
I studied the menu and said, “I’ll just have the best fish dishes you have.”
He repeated, “As you please sir,” and took the menu away, replacing it with the wine list. As my filming expedition had been more than usually successful I chose a rather expensive Pouilly Fuisse.
“As you please, sir”
Over the next hour that was the only phrase he repeated, after my every “Thank you.”
Perhaps that was the only English he had? Once I tried to engage him.
“What do you do when trippers from London ask for fish & chips?”
“We do everything, sir”
And that was his only deviation from the role of perfect waiter. In a small aquarium in front of me there was one lobster and one crab, the latter missing one of its muscular claws. It was pressing itself despairingly against the glass while the lobster hovered. I knew it was going to die, eaten by animals like itself before they were eaten in turn. But I was to be this crab’s final executioner. My uncommunicative waiter delicately fished him out.
There followed at discreet intervals and in stately procession a series of small miracles of the most delicious food I have ever eaten, titbits of shrimp, mussels, smoked eel, halibut, salmon (smoked and fresh on the same plate), oysters (with a special fork), squid. All were prepared lovingly and served in its own unique dish or platter, garnished with a sprig of this or that herb, or slices of lemon impaled.
Having no other than perfunctory human communication available, in my notebook I actually wrote down details of each course, even noting that dishes were all wheeled in on a silver tray. Including, of course, the single clawed crab.
I felt no pity for it, so sated was I in the luxury of perfectly prepared food.
“This is the finest food I have ever enjoyed,” I said to the morose waiter.
“As you please, sir,” he repeated. I must have heard him utter this thirty times, before and after every dish.
The only other people I glimpsed were a young Asian couple in aprons who emerged briefly from the kitchen to look at me and smile shyly. Then they disappeared again. The Pekingese also appeared once, without its owner, to study me inquisitively. Satisfied, he trotted back to report satisfaction, presumably to the handsome blonde at Reception.
The dessert was astonishing in its construction and taste. I have no idea of what it consisted but felt guilty at destroying such a work of art with a fork.
The only detail that let down the side was the that the toothpicks were plastic rather than wooden, but I overlooked this as I sipped on my Hennessy cognac, feeling not in the least bit guilty about the starving masses or the bill to come next morning. It was the best money I ever spent.
Many years later I went to Ostende, but could not find the Old Shakespeare. I wondered whether it existed any longer; maybe I dreamed up the meal? But I could still relive the splendour of it like some old love or a sensuous dream.
This evening, in a vacant and pensive mood, I scribbled down these words about the experience, and wondered idly if the miracle of the Internet could help me, so I Googled the place. Yes, an advertisement suggested it still existed as a centre of gourmet eating. There was even a phone number.
A woman answered my call in Belgianese and said that, at least as far as I could gather, that the hotel/restaurant was no more. I assumed Coronavirus was responsible. “No”, my multilingual son – who was eavesdropping on the conversation informed me; “the building is now apartments.”
Never boast to your children that you had seventeen occupations before your twenty-fifth birthday. I did so with my fifth child and it was a bad call. It relaxed him into not worrying about the aimlessness – in my view – of his life. I became the kettle calling the pot black.
‘Oh good’, he said cheerfully. ‘That gives me a few years before I start worrying.’ He was twenty-one, had dropped out of college after first year. Why?’ I asked sorrowfully. ‘It was irrelevant’. And he laughed.
He had thoroughly enjoyed the life of a student unencumbered by distractions like studying. His parents were worried. But like Napoleon’s favoured soldiers, he had a marshall’s baton in his rucksack: he was lucky. Somebody spotted his real talent – he was ‘cool’, a nerveless boy racer – and he trained to be an aircraft traffic controller. At first we all worried about using air transport, but it soon became obvious he was a rounded plug in a round hole. I had spotted it first. When I asked him what the hell he was going to do with his life he calmly answered:
‘You must remember, father’ (my children always addressed me like this when they were being ironic), ‘I am lazy.’ I didn’t worry about him any more. Any young man who can be thus frank with an outraged patriarch has confidence in himself. Or perhaps he realised I’m just a softy. I suspect that boy may be among the minority of my extended tribe who will not be upset by something or other in this old man’s gossip.
Years ago I delicately reminded him he was in the demographic of the four hundred males who top themselves in Ireland every year, but he reassured me: ‘Don’t worry, I’m enjoying myself too much.’ He gave me hope.
It is time to confuse this narrative with facts. There follows a list of my pre-twenthy-five-year-old occupations, and what I learned from them.
Age 13: Slop gatherer for my Granda’s pigs – a lesson in humility. Age 14: Caddie in Milltown golf club – an introduction to the Irish native bourgeosie Age 16: Milk bottle counter in Hughes Bros., Rathfarnham – I lost count after an hour. Age 18: Shipping clerk in Palgrave Murphy on Eden Quay – meeting drunken sailors and horse protestants with names like Jameson and Pakenham and Pim. Age 19: Clerical officer in Dublin County Council – how to surmount job dissatisfaction and survive boredom. Age 21: Worker in Lyons factory, Hammersmith – how to sort rapidly moving strawberries on a conveyor belt. Also that year: lifesaver on the Serpentine, London – how to attract bathing beauties. Also (it was a very busy year:, agricultural ‘praktikant’ on a farm outside Munich – learning the German work ethic. Age 22: Booking clerk and travel guide with Michael Walsh Travel, Dublin – how to entertain fifty-four girl guides on a trip to Rome. Age 23: Bottle washer with Coca Cola – I lasted a day. Also that year: Labourer in Gouldings Fertiliser, Ringsend – I lasted a morning. Also: Farm labourer in the Gaeltacht of Cúil Aodha, Co. Cork – how not to learn Irish. Age 24: Commercial traveller with Rowntree Mackintosh – how to eat a four pound box of chocolate samples meant for customers, in one day. Age 25 – Bus conductor in Leeds – the bells, the bells! Also that year: Pub piano player in the same city – as near to concert pianist as I’ll ever get. Also: English teacher in Pforzheim, Germany. I learned that Germans take their studies seriously. Every age: aspiring writer, singer, actor – I realised early that a very amateur talent is as inadequate for a career on the stage as that of Mrs. Worthington’s daughter:
…she’s a bit of an ugly duckling you must honestly confess,
and the width of her seat must surely defeat her chances of success.
Once I reached twenty-five I became a television technician, then a producer/director, then an independent film maker. All of those occupations passed the time while I was working out what I would do when I grew up. That is still a work in progress.
I console myself by thinking that such a C.V. would look interesting on the back of one of my unpublishable novels; probably even superior to the novel’s content?
Just listing the jobs makes me yawn and reach for a nicotine chewing gum. I gave up smoking years ago. The pipe tobacco had become too expensive when Social Welfare took fifteen Euros off my old age pension. I’m easing off, slowing down, reminding me of a gyroscope, a toy that amused us as children. It was a kind of posh spinning top, with a fixed protective frame and a groove in its single foot which rested on a tightrope of string held taut by us children.
The energy of its internal spinning enabled the gyroscope to defy our altering the angle of the tightrope. It seemed to have a survival instinct, like a living thing. We could make it slide up and down as we wished, admiring its balance, its defiance of gravity and our expectations. Inevitably the initial impetus of its spin weakened, it wobbled and collapsed.
We young dei ex machina would catch it and start the whole game again. More sophisticated versions of the gyroscope are nowadays used by rich and paranoid civilisations to keep tankers and telescopes, space ships and satellites, guns and drones on their straight and deadly paths. To me the gyroscope is still a toy but a serviceable metaphor for life: keep spinning until you drop.
I first heard the story of Gene Shepherd after receiving a 46th rejection slip for my novel.
Shepherd was a New York radio presenter who broadcast regularly for twenty-two years. What interested me about him was that he created a best-selling book which did not exist.
Because he thought disc jockeys were just an extension of the music industry, Shepherd played no music on his show – except the occasional tune by himself on a kazoo or a nose harp; otherwise he talked non-stop from midnight to 4.30 every morning. He had 50,000 loyal listeners for whom he first invented the term ‘night persons’: insomniacs, airline pilots, night watchmen, burglars, lovers and those who lived their lives while their fellow New Yorkers slept.
One night he told his listeners that they had a great advantage over daytime people: they thought for themselves. He argued that daytime people’s lives and tastes were dictated by rigid work schedules and especially by arbitrary consumer guides called lists: the ten best-dressed women; the twenty richest men; the thirty best songs; the fifty best novels.
‘How many of you’, he asked, ‘ever voted for the Academy Awards? Who actually decides these things? Who makes up these lists?’ His concern had begun in a bookshop when the assistant haughtily told him that the book he had requested, a minor classic, did not exist because it was not on her publisher list.
The Conspiracy
One Summer night in 1956 Shepherd invited his listeners to conspire with him in inventing a book which actually did not exist. After several nights of listeners phone calls he opted for the suitably tempting title, I, Libertine, by an imaginary author, F. R. Ewing, and an imaginary publisher, Excelsior Press, which, for prestige, they would describe as an imprint of the ‘Cambridge University Press’.
Over the next few nights he distilled his listeners’ ideas for background material to the book and its author. The writer would be called Frederick Ronald Ewing, British, of course. His CV would include a spell as a Lieutenant Commander in the North Atlantic fleet, a BBC radio broadcaster, a regular contributor to the London Observer and he would now be a settled civil servant in Rhodesia.
He also must have a charming wife named Marjorie, a horsewoman from the north country. The imaginary book, I, Libertine, would be described as the first volume of a trilogy on the subject of 18th century Erotica.
Besieging Bookshops
Shepherd now urged his listeners to descend on their local bookshop over the following days and ask for the non-existent book. The results were hilarious.
The New York bookshops were besieged by Shepherd’s conspirators who reported their experiences on air. Shepherd had predicted that the first caller to a shop would be dismissed, that the second would be told the book was on order; but that a third inquiry would result in telephone calls to distributors who would then besiege Publishers Weekly. It all happened exactly as he had predicted.
One listener reported on a snooty bookshop assistant, the kind, he said, who gave the impression that he might himself be Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer. The assistant had the habit of dropping remarks like ‘Proust never really matured’ or ‘Joyce, a bit overrated don’t you think?’ When the customer asked, however, for the non-existent Fred Ewing’s I, Libertine, the same assistant brightened up: ‘Ah, Ewing’, he said, ‘it’s about time the public discovered him’.
Going Global
Airline pilots listening on shortwave got the joke and brought word of the imaginary book to Paris, London, Rome, even to Honolulu bookshops. Soon everybody was talking about I, Libertine.
Gene Shepherd and his listeners kept the intrigue going for eight weeks. One student reported that his end-of-term thesis on Frederik R. Ewing’s equally non-existent pre-war BBC Radio 3 broadcasts on the History of Literature had been awarded a B plus.
The student’s examiner had written in red ink ‘Superb research!’ The student mournfully told Shepherd on air: ‘Maybe my whole education’s been phoney. Now I think maybe even Chaucer didn’t exist.’
Another listener rang to say she mentioned the book at her bridge club. Three ladies claimed to have read it, two of them disliking it very much.
A fundamentalist church in Boston actually banned the book.
A New York gossip columnist, Errol Wilson, wrote: ‘Had lunch to-day with Freddie Ewing and his wife just before they set sail for India. Freddie said he was surprised at the popularity of his book’
Finally, the inevitable: the New York Times Literary supplement carried a review of the non-existent book. As a result I, Libertine appeared on the nationwide best-seller list and Gene Shepherd’s project was complete.
But he was now getting nervous. What if the President of the U.S.A. referred to the non-existent book – this was, after all, the paranoid fifties. Might Shepherd be hauled before The House Un-American Activities Committee, for making an ass of the Commander-in-Chief?
House Un-American Activities Committee.
Busted
When a journalist rang in to tell Shepherd that he too was a ‘night person’, that he knew the whole story and suggested that it might be time to reveal the deception Shepherd jumped at the chance.
The Wall Street Journal carried the entire bizarre story on its front page. It was reproduced word for word across the world – even in Pravda, the official Soviet news agency.
Shepherd was inundated with phone inquiries from newspapers in six countries. But in America the story was spun very carefully. ‘Radio DJ deceives the public’ was the usual headline. This, as Shepherd protested, was untrue. His entire listenership had simply demonstrated how hype and PR could manipulate the public. But his was an unpalatable message in the self-proclaimed home of individualism.
The story ended not too badly. Before the expose, a paperback publisher named Ballantine had asked the Wall Street journalist for help in tracking down Ewing with a view to buying the paperback rights to the non-existent book.
Shepherd joined them one day for lunch and the journalist introduced the broadcaster as the real Frederick Ronald Ewing. Ballantine was astonished but retained his focus. He said: ‘Of course, you will now have to write the book’ And in six weeks the broadcaster and the journalist did so. The real book became a bestseller and they gave the proceeds to charity.
Moneybutton
However Gene Shepherd had long been resented by the advertisers on his radio show – he tended to make fun of the commercials with the introduction ‘Here comes the moneybutton’ – and they gradually sidelined him into doing hour-long broadcasts.
No longer was total freedom of the airwaves available to him. He ended his career presenting his show on college campus radio while he churned out books, for one of which he invented the slogan: ‘In God we Trust – the rest pay cash’. Gene Shepherd died in 2002.
I now await my own novel’s 47th rejection slip, but thanks to Gene Shepherd I care a little less whether it comes or not.
Trudie Fursey, a 7th century Irish saint, was born on Lough Corrib in Co. Galway. He had a church named after him and like many others expanded his missionary operations to Britain and the Continent, dying in 652 in a village called Mezzerolles which was renamed Forsheim and eventually became Pforzheim.
Looking across the Lough towards Inishlannaun/Inis Fhlannain from the churchyard of Our Lady of the Valley Church. Image: Trish Steel.
We Irish were always wanderers. Ending up as a teacher in Fursey’s adoptive town brought my tally of successive occupations to seventeen.
The advertisement in The Guardian resulted in an interview in Manchester University, where a laconic man showed no interest in my previous teaching experience. This was fortunate because I had none.
It seemed sufficient that I could distinguish between standard English and say, Urdu. It was a bonus to actually speak one of the King’s dialects – even without a Home Counties accent. The fact that my contemporary, Ronnie Drew, was also teaching Dublinese in Spain gave me confidence, at least enough to satisfy my interrogator.
I travelled back to Dublin to collect a couple of books and inform my parents. They had meantime taken note, on my behalf, of a quite different job opportunity.
I had time to fit in an interview with some men who were recruiting for a brand new Irish television service. I greatly enjoyed the interview, cared little for the result and assured them that with people of their good humour in charge, the service was sure to be a success. Promptly dismissing the matter from my mind I headed for the promised land, Germany.
Berlitz teaching techniques
Happily en route on the long train and boat journey and still daydreaming, I fell asleep, and did not awaken until the train stopped in Stuttgart, many miles beyond my destination. I had to wait on a cold platform until sheepishly boarding the next train back to Pforzheim. The unsmiling head teacher, the Frau Oberst who met me, was not impressed.
Pforzheim: View from Horse Bridge (Rossbruecke) along the Enz river.
I was given a month of learning Berlitz teaching techniques. My companion on the introductory course was also Irish. Her name was Colleen and she had just graduated as Miss Elegance, Trinity College in that same year, 1961.
Ours was a short and innocent interlude (a repressed Irish background ensured that). The reason Colleen and I were accepted for training was the sudden erection of The Wall. It had caused many expatriate English teachers to scurry back to Blighty.
A Third World War seemed possible. Being Irish, and innocent of world politics, Colleen and I had no bone to pick with the East Germans nor with the real villains, the Russians.
Our xenophobia was confined to the traditional Anglo-Saxon foe and sprang from a more ancient quarrel than that of the Cold War. Although she and I were doused in competing versions of Christianity, we shared the vague bond of Irish neutrality, such as it was.
We wandered contentedly by the river Enz, footloose because we were unshackled from the tight reins of culture and family, free to discuss anything we liked. Alas, once we had completed our short training course in Karlsruhe and were considered to be qualified Berlitz teachers, our fraternising was judged to be pedagogically unsound and she was retained in Karlsruhe while I was stuck in Pforzheim. Once we were separated I never saw Colleen again, one of the themes of my life.
Herr Dinkelbaum
That weekend I spent my entire week’s food allowance in the Goldene Adler pub and was consequently reduced to a diet of a single apple over three days. Hunger encouraged the hallucination that my life was over and food superfluous.
What was needed was an anaesthetic. The Goldene Adler supplied this in litres. Countless other hostelries have since been equally generous to me. I also came across Heinrich Boll’s ‘Irish Journal’ and its penetrating picture of 1950s Ireland made me homesick.
The interval of gloom was relieved by the arrival of a new student in my classroom. Her name was Trudie and she helped me forget. To relieve the earnestness of the classes I bought a yellow hand puppet which I called Herr Dinkelbaum and introduced him as a proxy teacher. I like to think Wittgenstein gave me the idea: think for yourself and trust your instincts. They’ll often get you into trouble but you’ll have a lot more fun.
Herr Dinkelbaum lightened the Teutonic gloom. One evening a student brought in a case of Coca Cola and a bottle of Vodka and the lesson became even more raucous.
But my Berlitz training course had omitted the vital detail that there would be a concealed microphone in each classroom. Despite my defence that to educate you must first entertain – which is an impeccable formula for television – my supervisor, the same Frau Oberst was unconvinced.
The subsequent rap on the knuckles – a deduction from my paltry pay – was, I felt, unduly harsh and I protested. Making a vague reference to Gestapo surveillance practices was also not a good idea. Only the scarcity of English teachers saved my bacon.
lovers’ corner
Trudy had a Botticelli shape, thoroughbred ankles, had lost her father in the war and clearly needed a father figure. Six years her senior, I seemed to fit the bill.
We spent many happy hours in the Goldene Adler pub/restaurant where in lovers’ corner there was a sign in German saying, ‘Here it is permitted to tell lies’.
After a couple of delightful months, however, a letter from Ireland reminded me of that long forgotten interview in Dublin. The new TV service was offering me a job, to start immediately.
In no hurry, I wrote back saying my contract would not allow me to leave yet. I lingered for a month in Pforzheim to enjoy Trudie, consider my options and save up the train fare. Would I stay in Pforzheim with Trudie and become a penniless would-be writer or would I please my parents by taking this job?
For once I decided they deserved a break, bade Trudie a tearful farewell and returned home. A month later I got an even more tearful letter claiming that she was pregnant and I must return, otherwise she would set her GI brother-in-law on me.
I ignored the letter and dived into the exciting world of television. But the past was always on my mind. Exactly thirty years after that parting I diverted from a filming expedition in Germany and paid a flying visit to Pforzheim.
With some basic research in the basement of the town hall I was given Trudie’s present married status, address and telephone number – a tribute to German thoroughness as well as their weakness for my elaborately romantic cover story.
Is that Robert?
I rang the number and in my half-remembered German said: ‘Is that Trudie Bopp?” She replied in German: ‘That was once my name.’ ‘Do you remember Herr Dinkelbaum?’ I asked. After a long silence, Trudie replied: ‘Is that Robert?’
Over coffee in the Goldene Adler which still existed (although the Berlitz school did not), I noticed she was still beautiful and spoke no English – a reflection on my teaching talents. She was clearly taking no chances with this blast from the past: she had arranged for her daughter to pick her up in one hour. They were going shopping for the girl’s imminent wedding.
Trudie remembered everything, even her threatening letter of three decades ago, to wit: if I did not return and face my responsibilities I would die. I asked her how old the daughter was now. Just twenty eight, she said. A quick exercise in mental arithmetic whetted my interest. Was it possible that I might have a half-German offspring?
There was not time to press the matter as the daughter duly arrived to whisk her mother away. I could hardly interrogate the girl or study her features for a resemblance. I felt a little disappointed, and not convinced either way.
The following morning, just before departing my hotel, curiosity overcame me. I rang the number again and asked Trudie to tell me the truth about her old letter. Now, decades later, she laughed and dismissed her white lie and the empty threat: ‘You must know what a young girl in love will say to keep her man.’
The realisation that she remembered our romance as clearly as myself was consolation. The Arab mantra ‘Man is the animal with the short memory’ is quite mistaken. I now remember ancient, significant things with more clarity than my breakfast this morning.
Now, where did I leave my coffee?
Feature Image is of the so-called Venus of Willendorf an an 11.1-centimetre-tall (4.4 in) figurine estimated to have been made c. 30,000 BCE.
I made the following notes in an old factory that was built in 1906 at a cost of six hundred pounds. It was a draughty one story building which has stood for over a century on the eastern shore of Loch an Mhuilinn in Carraroe, Conamara. Jack B. Yeats and John Millington Synge referred to it in their Manchester Guardian reports about the West of Ireland. It stimulates my memory. Five of my six children grew up during the twenty years I previously occupied it and in my mellowing years I returned to inhabit the place.
The exterior is unchanged except for the slate roof replacing a rusty corrugated covering which was no protection from the elements. When it rained heavily we had to deploy five pots and pans to catch the leaks. Since then it has been modernised but the mice still run up the wainscoting. I trapped and murdered one every couple of days and felt sorry for the creatures. The heating system was idiosyncratic, suffering from convoluted wiring, a faulty water pump, thermostat and oil burner. I wore layers of clothes and walked a lot on Trá an Dóilín (the Coral Strand) to keep warm.
The original purpose of the factory was to teach local maidens lacework and knitting, provide them with a small income and thus keep them at home as potential breeders. I possess a photo of thirty-five girls in white pinafores and four teachers in dark skirts posing outside the building. Most of the girls saved up the pittance they earned and used it as their fare to America. The factory survived as various forms of cottage industry, until 1975 when I took it over and turned part of it into a cinema. My eldest son has since made a fine documentary film about that enterprise, which ended in 1994.
Once, when my then wife advertised for extras for a small film, a burly farmer from the Gaeltacht of RathCairn in county Meath arrived with a present of a sack of barley on his shoulder. His antecedents from Conamara had been encouraged to colonise land in county Meath in the nineteen-thirties. It was one of the exotic ideas conjured up by De Valera when he looked into his own heart. The Meathman dumped his sack on the floor of the kitchen, surveyed the place and announced: ‘I used ride young wans in here.’
In 1994 we swapped the factory for a cottage four miles west. This had six acres of bog on which I planted a thousand trees to compensate for driving a carbon monoxide vehicle. By then I had changed partners, for better or worse, and would soon have a final total of six children.
I found that this factory hadn’t been occupied for a couple of years and I rented the place again for the precise purpose of writing these words. I’m of an age when reminiscence is a compulsion, self-pity is tempting; the gyroscope is wobbling and there’s nobody around to catch it.
The person indirectly responsible for the building was Rachel Lady Dudley, wife of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Her real surname was Gurney. ‘Shut your gurney face’ is now, I understand, an urban insult in Britain.
Unlike her husband, Rachel was concerned for the poverty of the peasants. Those English aristocrats had a summer residence in Rosmuc, just across the road from Pádraic Pearse’s cottage. I am sure that the doomed Irish teacher and the enforcer of the King’s writ never met socially. However, James Joyce’s Ulysses records the occasion of Lord Dudley’s cavalcade across Dublin in June 1904 – a detail which may be the lord’s only memorable action in the history of human affairs. He was going to a charity bazaar on behalf of Mercers Hospital in which, by the way, my father later had his final heart attack. Mercers is now a hotel in which I long ago had a one-night stand and wept, perhaps finally mourning my father.
As was the custom in the early twentieth century, especially in the social circles of his friend the Prince of Wales, Lord Dudley was having an affair – or as it was delicately described at the time, ‘concupiscent capers’ – with a music hall star named Gertie Millar.
Gertie was the wife of Lionel Monckton, successful composer of the Quaker Girl hit, my old love Thaura M’s party piece, an affair I have already recounted in these pages.
In between bearing seven children for the Lord Lieutenant the neglected Rachel needed something to occupy herself. She immersed herself in the work of the Congested Districts Board who erected this building. She took up photography and recorded the misery of Irish peasant life. She also initiated a bursary scheme to provide nurses for the impoverished poor. In 1970 when I came to Conamara they were still called Dudley Nurses and there is many a child in Conamara named Dudley.
The Lord Lieutenant – whose real name was William Humble Ward – also served briefly and unnotably as Governor General of Australia. Andrew Deakin, a contemporary Aussie politician wrote of the Governor’s short career in the Antipodes: ‘His ambition was high but his interests were short-lived … He did nothing really important, nothing thoroughly, nothing consistently … He remained … a very ineffective and a not very popular figurehead.’ A perfect cartoon of the English monied classes.
However, the energetic Rachel founded the jubilee nurses Down Under to service the poor people of the Outback. It was the forerunner of the Flying Doctor service which still functions.
Rachel and the Earl were divorced in 1912.
I laboriously copied the above photographs by Lady Dudly in my darkroom. Several elderly neighbours have told me that their aunts and mothers and grandmothers worked in the knitting enterprise. When I wanted to exhibit this and copies of several other of her pictures, I wrote a polite note to her son, the next Viscount Dudley, asking his permission to do so. It would have been nice for my neighbours to see pictures of their long departed mothers, fathers, aunts and other antecedents.
This Viscount – whose second wife was Maureen Swanson, film actress – replied, threatening me with legal proceedings if I infringed the family’s copyright. I desisted, realising that what the absentee colonist seizes, he still holds onto, very tightly.
It has just occurred to me that if Rachel took the photographs as a functionary of the CGB perhaps the photos should now be in the public domain. The Viscount who refused me permission died recently, in fact within two days of my own birthday. It is on my list to write to the present incumbent of the Dudley title.
Lady Dudley will be remembered for her good works and also her tragedy. One fine day in June 1920, she walked into Screebe lake in Rosmuc. Local tradition maintains that she drowned herself. She was fifty-one.
Four years later the original Lord Lieutenant was free to marry Gertie the musical hall artist and he sailed on until dying of cancer in 1932. Some day I will summon the daring to have that photographic exhibition in that old factory which still echoes with the voices of my children.
Originally I was warned that because the building bordered the main road it was a dangerous place to bring up toddlers. In fact it taught them road sense. The only member of the family who came to grief outside was our beautiful and headstrong border collie, Laddie.
Nowadays the constant swish of traffic outside – teachers commuting from Galway and workers commuting to Galway – suggests that the warning would be more apposite today. As in every other rural culture, few people now walk the roads to shop, school, pub or church in Conamara.
They mostly stay in at night, no longer drink poitín in quaint thatched cottages, but tipple – if they drink at all – in fine, modern, mortgaged mansions and watch Netflix. The heart of rural Ireland, the pub, is dead. But that old factory is again for sale and, for me, still vaguely alive. Each of us inhabits a small personal world where time and space converge.
