Myles Away From Dublin Part 11

Enough is too much Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, Little frosty Eskimo, Little Turk or j.a.panese O don't you wish you were like me!

You have curious things to eat, I am fed on proper meat You must dwell beyond the foam, But I am safe and live at home.

That was a neat, satirical way to express the outlook of ... whom? The average Englishman? Or all of us? Unlikely as it may seem, the lines were written by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose personal infirmity ensured that he at least did not stay at home, damp and cold, but made him pack up and sail for sunny Samoa.

It is quite true that most of us shrink from the unaccustomed, whether it be in food, drink, weather, clothes or even music. With Dr Samuel Smiles (what an awful name!) our motto is TO STAY AT HOME IS BEST. But even at home there can be danger.

Look what happened to a lot of people recently. On their own dinner tables on Dec. 25 there was a wonderful succulent turkey and, with everything that went with it, it was immensely enjoyed. There was cold turkey the next day, of course, and that was quite acceptable. The evening after, one went to visit some friends, and they insisted on a bit of supper before parting. Well, yes, the cold turkey was all right. When one gets home, there is excitement in the house. A big turkey, a present from an old friend which had been held up in the post, had arrived. It meant, of course, hot roast turkey the next day, and the possibility of cold turkey for at least two days more. Visiting friends is now a serious risk, for there seems to be turkey everywhere.

Something frighteningly similar happened to myself several years ago when I arrived at a good, small hotel in Glengariff. Going to bed the first night, I jokingly said to the manageress that I would expect two grilled, freshly-caught trout for breakfast. That was exactly what I got, to the astonishment of myself and my companion. For lunch he got magnificent roast beef, but I got two more for the evening meal. Next morning what? Two grilled trout.

We had a car and I suggested to my companion that we should take a trip to Killarney, which we did, and had lunch of lobster. Back in Glengariff again. Next morning I got my two trout. We mitched again at lunchtime. I was determined not to climb down in that hotel but a stay that had been planned for eight days was cut down to four.

Consider that king of all freshwater fish, the salmon. Last season there was a glut of salmon and the bottom fell out of the market. This had several unexpected results, one of which was a succession of rows in fish-and-chips shops. The seasoned customer, when served with his order, stared at it, stirred it and then sent for the boss.

What was this he was getting, he asked. 'My dear sir,' the boss replied proudly, 'for once in my life I'm not serving ray. That's REAL FRESH SALMON!' His market research (if we may call it that) was poor. The customer said he had ordered fish and chips, fish and chips was what he wanted, and if this happened again, he would take his custom elsewhere. And he stiffly departed, having eaten nothing.

Quite recently I read a nostalgic article about fis.h.i.+ng on the Boyne, and how sadly it had declined since the good old days. An old doc.u.ment was quoted showing that in the contracts of service of the men employed on the fisheries (presumably at netting operations) they should not be expected to have salmon in the meals supplied oftener than twice a week.

It is not easy to explain why some foods particularly attractive, expensive, festive foods tend to pall in this fas.h.i.+on with only moderate over-supply. And it is just as hard to know why the more commonplace things can be placed on the table day after day for ever and ever bread, b.u.t.ter, cakes, biscuits, marmalade, potatoes, beef, lamb, rashers, eggs without anybody making the slightest comment or objection.

What about tea, particularly in rural Ireland? The pot is always on the hob in some homes, and even the postman is asked in for a cup when he calls. Appet.i.te for tea cannot apparently ever be saturated, and that applies to all ages and s.e.xes.

There is another drink and I have seen men capable of taking plenty of it every day, every night as well, sometimes, and go to immense trouble to get it when it is not handy or handed out: I mean whiskey. It never even occurs to them to change over to tea, though they probably know that tea can be immensely improved with a little whiskey in it.

There is quite a to-do at present about still another article that does not confer disgust with over indulgence in it. Yes, indeed. Have you got a match?

Looking back a little This is 1964. If you doubt me, reader, take a look at the extreme top of this page. I have been looking over some old newspapers and magazines and find it hard to believe that very nearly a quarter of a century has pa.s.sed since World War II was declared.

Many people reading this had not been born in 1939, and as many again had not been thought of in the sense that their parents had not yet met. It makes myself feel very oiled: very old, I mean. Those war years were an extraordinary time in Ireland and we were, of course, merely on the edge of the real thing.

We were living in a grim sort of fairyland, not really understanding the enormous issue then being decided, not realising the fabulous slaughter that was in progress at various fronts, and certainly unaware that 6 million Jews were being quietly exterminated in Germany. By 'we' I mean those of us who stayed at home: a great number of younger people departed to take a hand in the b.l.o.o.d.y game, and not all of them returned.

The homeland memory that survives is one of bleakness, uncertainty, rationing of essentials, black marketeering, the ascendency of the chancer, and the infiltration of Irish society by a great number of the young 'conchie' brigade from Britain. Only in retrospect does one realise how precarious that neutrality of ours was.

It is curious that in a situation of momentous climax for the world, it was trivialities which stand out in the mind here. Cigarettes were scarce: one had to have the leg of a tobacconist to get as many as five on demand, served loose. Simple essentials such as bread, b.u.t.ter, eggs, bacon and beef were rationed. Did I say bread?

This was a grey, crumbling substance apparently compounded of barnyard corn, concrete, sweepings from barbers' shops and c.o.ke. The national newspapers consisted of four pages of very condensed matter printed on grey 'paper' which had a faintly unpleasant smell.

Petrol was, of course, very strictly rationed on a coupon basis and none allowed to anybody who was not on 'essential service', which everybody tried to be. To get a gallon costing 3/6, you had first to buy a coupon costing up to 7/6 on the black market. To ask a pump attendant for a gallon without having a coupon was equivalent to asking him for a gallon of his blood.

Yet there was one cla.s.s who never weakened, and that was the civil servants. It is somehow refres.h.i.+ng to read the reply received by a British citizen who applied to the Board of Trade for permission to have two pockets in the trousers of a suit instead of the three officially authorised, and to have the third pocket transferred to the jacket. I give the reply below, as it appeared in The Investors' Chronicle and Market Review under the heading 'The Blight of Bureaucracy'.

'I am to refer to your letter dated March 1 in which you make application for a licence to permit of a suit being made having more pockets than those laid down in the above-mentioned Order.

'It is noted that you do not require more than two pockets in the trousers and that you would like, instead of the third pocket, to have an extra pocket in the jacket. I am to say that the Board are not prepared to consider the giving up of one pocket in one garment sufficient reason for the granting of an extra pocket in another garment since the restrictions are imposed on the separate garment and not on the suit as a whole.

'The Board realise, however, that in certain circ.u.mstances it may be necessary to vary the restrictions and if you will state why you are unable to make use of the third pocket in the trousers (it is not necessary that this pocket should be a hip pocket, the restrictions do not in any way refer to the position of the pockets but only to the total number in each garment) thus necessitating the extra jacket pocket, full consideration will be given to the issue of a licence. It would also be helpful if you would state the exact use to which the extra pockets in the jacket and waistcoat are to be put.

'With regard to your request for a small sub-division to the right-side pocket of the jacket, I am to say that this is not regarded as an extra pocket and that no licence will therefore be necessary in respect of this requirement.'

Brave words don't you think, when Britain had her BACK TO THE WALL.

Those forty days It was very sudden but the surprise is over now we all know that we are in the season of Lent. One of the desirable objectives which Vatican Council II studied was that of having a fixed Easter but it is a thing not yet achieved.

Two common words of which hardly anybody knows the real meaning are LENT and FASTING. Lent is a Saxon word which means just Spring, and fasting does not mean merely cutting out a meal during the day, or having much smaller meals: it means having absolutely nothing whatsoever to eat or drink.

Custom has, of course, modified the meaning of both words. It may seem disgraceful to say that Lenten fasting is not what it used to be but even middle-aged people know that such is only the truth. I remember my own grandmother taking her strong tea absolutely black and making horrible faces; and her heroism was even greater than that, for she refused to allow any sugar in it.

But such are human quirks that I personally would be horrified at the idea of tea WITH sugar in it, and I much prefer it with hardly any milk at all. Bread without b.u.t.ter on it was another old-time privation and as for meat, every day was a Friday. Many of those alive today and youngish will murmur, 'Ah, but the people of those times were far stronger and healthier.' Were they, though?

They certainly worked harder and what they earned for a hard week's work would hardly pa.s.s for pocket money today. Let us agree they were tougher, and had a more p.r.o.nounced development in the region of the spine.

Severity Lent itself as a fixed period of deliberate hards.h.i.+p was not always the settled thing we have today. In the early days of the Church the fast in preparation for Easter and some other important occasions was very short but very severe, sometimes being a total fast.

Originally the Easter fast was confined to Holy Week, and the forty-day fast (Quadragesima) was not formally laid down until the Council of Nicaea in 325 but for many centuries there was an absence of uniformity, and purely local customs of fasting, varying enormously in duration and severity, predominated throughout Christendom.

In the Middle Ages milk, eggs and meat were prohibited during Lent not only by the Church but by civil law. And diet was not the only matter on which the season of penitence turned; women wore mourning, right up to and including the court of Elizabeth I. Even in the confusion following the Reformation, observance of Lent did not wither away; the Anglican Church tried to preserve it, as did John Wesley.

It may be mentioned that fasting, as a method of self-denial, penance and purification, is by no means a Christian invention; it has been common in many cultures and religions, with great variety in the motives behind it. Fasting after a death, for instance, has been common, whether to placate the ghost of the departed or to make a sort of sacrificial occasion of the break.

Fasting has often been resorted to as an urgent form of prayer to secure something urgently needed such as a good harvest, shoals of fish, or even good weather, or on the negative side to avert a plague or some threatened natural disaster.

The rules of fast and abstinence, in Lent as well as out of it, could be straightforward and rigid in a primitive agricultural society. Nowadays in the complexity of modern life, where enormous numbers of people are huddled together in cities and communally employed in factories, workshops and offices, it is recognised that it is physically impossible or nearly so for the individual to order his personal affairs in matters of eating or attending religious observances on workdays.

Psychological and neurotic obstacles abound; large numbers who seek a dispensation from the fast get it, and we cannot guess how many grant a dispensation to themselves; it is usually enough that a person who has a wakeful conscience does not ignore it but devises exercises in self-denial which may in fact be much more onerous than those prescribed.

And here we are back, I am afraid, to smoking. Long before the lung cancer scare was heard of, it was quite usual for tens of thousands of heavy smokers to cut out cigarettes completely during Lent and without reading books on how to do it, consulting psychoa.n.a.lysts or taking pills guaranteed to make cigarettes taste poisonous.

And there are plenty of them still with us and they still cannot explain why they joyfully light up again on Easter Sat.u.r.day, even though they have completely broken the habit.

Perhaps somebody should compile a complete new form of abstinence, or several from which to choose. Suppose you determined during Lent never to look at a newspaper or listen to a radio news bulletin? to say not one word more than is necessary?

To wash the dishes after every meal in your own house (if you happen to be a husband)? To pick on something you loathe e.g., factory-made raspberry jam and have it at every meal? Read half a novel by d.i.c.kens every day? As often as possible sit through films you know you've seen before?

I am afraid original people trying out such systems would be disseminating Lent making others as well as themselves suffer, ending up perhaps by causing a breach of the peace.

O'Casey ploughs again There is something vaguely comic about the reappearance of The Plough and the Stars on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, advertised by the management as being 'by special permission' of Sean O'Casey.

When the theatre refused a new play of his, The Bishop's Bonfire, over six years ago, reportedly because it was anti-clerical, the playwright got into a huff or a tantrum or a pet, and excommunicated the theatre with truly ecclesiastical solemnity.

O'Casey likes to consider himself as an equal of Bernard Shaw but in a like situation Shaw would hardly have taken himself so seriously; very likely he would have contented himself with sending off a scurrilous postcard. It seems that O'Casey has now relented as a result of the Abbey Company being invited to play in London in connexion with the quartercentenary of the birth of Shakespeare.

The att.i.tude of many people, Dubliners included, to the Abbey Theatre has changed a lot in recent years. Most of the great players of the past are dead or departed, and new plays of real stature are apparently not forthcoming. Moreover, there has been a policy of gaelicisation which many feel is out of tune with the theatre's origin.

When a play in Irish is on, the programme refers to the stalls as 'steallai'. Probably this word has been mined out of Dinneen but why, I ask, don't they use the obvious word 'stol'? I might as well be talking to the wall, of course, though this phrase has always seemed pointless in view of the belief that walls have ears.

For years there has been on the programme and outside the house a phrase which annoys most people, if only for its decrepit syntax and obscurity 'Latecomers not admitted until end of First Act.'

It has several undesirable implications: first, that every play must have not only acts but have even a first act! (Nay, a First Act.) What would, say, Rouault or some other abstract artist think of such unenterprise? Is it also suggested that every play must also have a last act?

In my youth I wrote some plays myself and competent people who read them swore that there was neither beginning nor end to them. Some of them had no characters I did not say CHARACTER, mind and others were without 'climaxes', 'plots' and other dreary journeyman paraphernalia, but the scripts had clearly marked pauses for applause.

The second deplorable implication of the 'late-comer' slogan is that while those who are in at the beginning will not be disturbed during the first act, they will not necessarily be undisturbed during subsequent acts. (There are bars on the present premises, remember.) You can't barge in in the middle of the first act but you can arrive in the middle of the second or third act, start tuning the piano, decide you haven't enough light and stagger out with the thing on your back. What they really mean, you say, is 'Patrons not admitted between the acts.'

But not quite; because if that were the rule, n.o.body would ever get in. The ... interval, shall we call it, before the first act could not be fairly included as 'between the acts'.

But sheer admittance to the building is not necessarily a control of disturbing the audience. After a customer has patiently endured the first half of the first act, he may decide he has had as much as he can bear, get up, disturb everybody along the row, distract the players on the stage, and stumble out. Even if he likes the play, he may be overcome by a deadly craving for a cigarette, and create a similar fuss to get out. Without leaving his seat at all, he can create havoc by falling asleep to the accompaniment of thunderous snores, or be thoroughly objectionable by arriving with, not a box of chocolates, but a bag of walnuts and proceed to crack them against each other in a mighty fist.

And, anyway, wouldn't the odd late-comer be better for everybody than several early-comers who have whooping cough?

On the whole, the Abbey should think of a more precise and literate slogan, something catchy like this: The National Theatre Society Likes the promptness and sobriety, No patron will be admitted Unless promptly stalled (or pitted).

The real trouble is, of course, that too many of the patrons have learnt their manners from characters on the Abbey stage. I wonder has Sean O'Casy a clear conscience here? If Joxer Daly was ever in a drawing-room, he slept, cooked his dinner and drank his porter there and the house, alas, was a decayed tenement.

An oldtimer's thoughts Most people are, like myself, fond of old books. Probably we feel that our forefathers, having arrived earlier, must have been wiser and that we miserable moderns can improve ourselves by reading what they left behind them.

I have been looking through an old book with the commonplace t.i.tle of 'Information for Everybody', published in Boston, USA, in 1851. The author's name is given as Dr Chase just this, with no Christian name and no clue as to whether he might be an ancestor of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, this year a contender for the US Presidency.

Dr Chase says that his book is Consisting of a Large Number of Medical Recipes: Also, Practical Recipes for Merchants, Grocers, Shopkeepers, Physicians, Druggists, Tanners, Shoemakers, Harness-Makers, Painters, Jewellers, Blacksmiths, Tinners, Gunsmiths, Farriers, Cabinet-Makers, Dyers, Barbers, &c.

That's a modern weakness that '&c.' He shoves it in when he has absolutely failed to think of a single other word he can add to the list.

Most of his recipes are technical and boring but he invented a potion which he called 'Soot Coffee'. Hear his own words on how to make it: Soot Coffee has cured many cases of ague after 'everything else' had failed; it is made as follows: soot sc.r.a.ped from a chimney (that from stove pipes does not do), 1 tablespoon steeped in water 1 pint, and settled with 1 egg beaten up in a little water, as for other coffee, with sugar and cream, 3 times daily with meals, in place of other coffee ...

Thereafter the Doctor turns aside to castigate people, including 'Upstart Physicians' who stick up their noses at 'old grandmother prescriptions'. I agree with him there, for a lot of what nowadays is called folk medicine has a sound basis. I would gladly try this soot coffee myself if I had a chimney or can it be that I have already had a cup of it in a certain place in Carlow at the cost of a s.h.i.+lling? For ague you take it with cream. Taken black, it would probably be good for nerves or a sore head, but taken any way at all it would be bound to be very good for smoky chimneys.

But Dr Chase is not just an old scientist. He has a stern moral eye, and there's many a young fellow who could take a leaf out of the Doctor's book with advantage. Here is a note he has on the drink situation, in his day very bad: It will be seen that every quart of fruit wine not made for medicine helps to build up the cause (intemperance) which we all so much desire not to encourage. And for those who take any kind of spirit for the sake of the spirit, let me give you the following: 2. Spiritual Facts That whis-key is the key by which many gain entrance into our prisons and almshouses.

3. That brandy brands the noses of all who cannot govern their appet.i.tes.

4. That punch is the cause of many unfriendly punches.

5. That ale causes many ailings, while beer brings to the bier.

6. That wine causes many to take a winding way home.

7. That cham-pagne is the source of many real pains.

8. That gin-slings have 'slewed' more than slings of old.

A most impressive person, the Doctor, for here are met wit, good counsel, and a lofty literary style. It is perhaps significant that the admonition numbered ONE does not appear anywhere in the text. What good thing is thereby lost it is hard to say. Probably something like 'Porter is the man who carries the bags under your eyes.' Or better, perhaps: 'A pint of plain will make you very plain.' Or maybe just 'Stout makes you very stout, no doubt.'

My own dreadful weakness is that lager makes me swagger.

Our national feast-day Narrow green lines to guide traffic on the streets, emerald green beer in the pubs and beaming negroes wearing shamrock that is Saint Patrick's Day for you in New York. Apart from its religious significance, the day has for long been taken very quietly indeed in Ireland.

In Dublin there is usually a considerable collision at Croke Park and, in the morning, a great procession honouring Irish manufacturers. Some of these processions in the past have been in some respects surprising and shoddy.

I have seen our national electricity undertaking publicly flexing its muscle by displaying a considerable piece of machinery (a transformer or something) on the heavy duty lorry, though surely it was made in Stuttgart? Surely a nice stretch of native bog tastefully arranged on a float would be more appropriate nowadays?

How Irish are cigarettes made in Dublin but with alien tobacco handled by foreign machines? The more one ponders this problem the more one is driven to the conclusion that there are hardly any manufactured articles in the country which are Irish from top to bottom except stout and whiskey. For that reason it was surely ironical when the first native Government evinced an unsuspected puritanical trait and ordered the complete closing of all pubs on the National Festival, giving the day the same penitential mood as Good Friday.

Drink could be had in hotels, of course, and at the famous Dublin Dog Show, but the Plain Man was denied even a pint of plain. Happily, a more enlightened view now prevails, though it happens that abstinence is still promoted by the shocking price that is now demanded for the stuff. One wonders what Saint Patrick himself would have thought of it all.

Saint Patrick himself is an extraordinarily shadowy figure, several responsible scholars maintain that he never existed, and it is true that primitive Christianity abounds in mythical figures.

Reputedly he was born in Britain about 389, was kidnapped by marauders and brought to Ireland as a slave, escaped home and then went to France. After returning home he had a vision, went back to France to study at Auxerre and arrived in Ireland in 432. It was to commemorate that landing that we had a Eucharistic Congress here in 1932.

There is no authentic account of what Patrick did here after he arrived or whom he met, though tradition and legend are plentiful enough. But two things are reasonably certain: Christianity was in existence in Ireland before Patrick's time, and there is therefore no substance in the claim that it was he who first brought the new message here; secondly, Pope Celestine had already sent Palladius, who had laboured in Britain to stamp out the Pelagian heresy, to Ireland to do the same thing.

The only surviving doc.u.ment definitely ascribed to Patrick is the Confession, which appears in the Book of Armagh, said to date from about 800; it gives a general account of his career but is couched in Latin that is crude at best, and sometimes downright bad.

There are, of course, other and far later accounts of Patrick's life but it is hard to understand the absence of reliable contemporary information, having regard to how minutely we know the people of a far earlier day the Apostles, for example, or all the kings and prophets of the Old Testament.

Most people would be appalled by the theory that Saint Patrick never existed and that he is simply a pious myth, as was shown a few years ago and acknowledged by the Holy See in the case of Saint Philomena. But there is an even worse possibility. A learned historian and philologist named Professor D.A. Binchy has been maintaining for many years, both in writing and lecture hall, that in fact there were TWO Saint Patricks!

This is hardly the place to set forth his arguments and the sources on which he relies but it can be said that his theory has never been refuted. However unlikely, it is possible that another savant may yet come along and establish that there were three of them.

However tenuous the proof, most people but particularly the Americans will be glad to settle for one Saint Patrick and beg leave to inquire no further. Imagine ... just imagine ... where we would be if we were to have two Saint Patrick Days every year.

The Irishman would then cut a queer figure in the world: people would stare at him as if he had two heads!

Buy home products'

Well, we've had another St Patrick's Day, with all attendant shamrockry, champagne and shenanigans. The Saint has been once again toasted all over the world, and for at least a week in Ireland the motto has been BUY IRISH (but with no sly reference to whiskey hidden in the phrase). How real and how true is all this? Do we mean it? Do others mean it? Or is the cult of Saint Patrick an internationally-accepted sham, like Santa Claus?

At the outset, I honestly say I don't know. But I have genuine cause for wonder.

Last week I went into a tavern on purpose to have a snack. I won't say where, but it was not in Carlow town. It was a pleasant enough house. I sat at the fire and ordered bread and b.u.t.ter, some sardines and a bottle of ale. The bottle of ale was British, because the native article stocked was not in condition. The b.u.t.ter, rather like cheese, was Danish. The sardines came from Norway. The coal in the fire was American. The knife was made in Sheffield, and I a.s.sume the bread was made from imported grain. And do we manufacture salt here? I don't think so.

You might imagine that we could go no further than that? Wrong!

I stood up and turned my chair upside down. (I thought standing up was a desirable preliminary.) Hurrah! There was an inscription on the underside of the seat in the bold characters of the old tongue, namely, 'Deanta sa Phlain'.

The phrase means 'Made in Poland'.

Taking a sad farewell, I was nearly run over by an American car burning Iranian petrol.

Who made the paper, the ink, the machinery that enables you to read this? But perhaps I am asking too many questions this week.

But talking of pubs, I think we are inclined to take too much for granted. A public house looks simple but isn't. I have been looking through a publication issued by Messrs Guinness ent.i.tled Handbook for Customers and I find there is nothing simple or obvious about the bottle of stout or its management. The tapping of a cask (the Handbook carelessly calls this thing indiscriminately Cash and cask) is a difficult and esoteric process. To begin with you have to put the cask 'lying on a stillion, bung up'. There is later the question of the Keystone Plug, which must receive 'one hard blow'. Later comes along a 'Starter', possibly with a pistol in his hand. The book says: With a starter, drive the oak s.h.i.+ve which is in the taphole about half an inch into the cask. (If any difficulty is found in doing this, not more than a quarter of an inch of the s.h.i.+ve may be removed by a chisel before using the Starter.) Do you know what is meant by venting a cask? The instructions are a bit obscure, but venting is a process definitely carried out by licensed vintners.

Before bottling its contents a cask must be rolled to 'rouse' the beer. Also, 'strict cleanliness is necessary to good bottling' I would prefer 'for' instead of 'to' there, nor do I know the distinction between cleanliness and strict cleanliness. Yet perhaps there is a distinction. If one publican gives a hot bath to his cellar-rats once a week while another does it every day, I suppose their standards cannot be identical. The Handbook is unbending on one particular. 'Cullet and rubbish must be removed,' it says, with severity in its steely prose. What on earth is this Cullet? Could it be the name of some nasty old man? I have looked up the telephone book and find there is not a single Cullet in the country to ring up in search of information.

There is a whole section devoted in the Handbook to Crown Corks. Guinness is a London company, but they go a bit far, I feel, with this hint that they get their corks from Buckingham Palace.

A last thought; nearly a year must roll by before we have another St Patrick's Day. Can we stand the strain of waiting?