At the Edge of Ireland Page 8

  And once in a while, a halfhearted attempt at a joke will rise like a semi-inflated balloon. “So—what’s the definition of an Irish queer, then?”

  An expectant silence.

  “A man who prefers girls to drink.”

  Grins and groans and more orders for stout.

  And while nothing much was going on, the ladies who run this place, Adrienne MacCarthy and her sister Nicola, would make regular appearances to see if anyone had any sudden impetuous requirements in terms of groceries or Guinness or their glorious crab sandwiches with brown bread and lashings of Irish butter or the need for a little across-the-counter banter. They were always around. I never saw a man behind the counter and never asked why. It seemed just fine the way it was.

  Of course there are occasions when a man’s bicep-backed authority would be needed to separate a couple of tanked and cantankerous post-teenager town terrors. And it inevitably came from one of the regulars who, with a polite “by your leave” nod to one of the ladies, would launch into the fray initially with a “Now, c’mon, lads, c’mon…” If that failed to calm the pit bull tensions, there would be a stronger indication that the door would be the evening’s denouement. Usually things ended in a kind of amicable blur of back slappings and proclamations of undivided brotherhood. In fact I don’t think I’ve actually seen a real Irish fistfight here because, first, it’s too small to get a good swing at anything other than your own glass, and second, because the mood is usually so pleasantly benign even when the place is packed. It invariably has the aura of a family gathering or even an Irish wake which, unlike wakes in other countries, are often renowned for their jolly games, pranks, and spirit of upbeat bonhomie. And a third reason too, which is maybe a little more subtle, is what I can only describe as the confessional spirit that seems to float around the tiny space, which is barely big enough for a dozen people comfortably but often hosts three times that number.

  Whatever the size and spirit of the craic and no matter how intensely earsplitting the din, you’ll invariably see and overhear the most personal and intimate of verbal intercourses. Perfect strangers, I should add, not entirely succumbed to the juice of the barley (“He has the drink taken, but not to unseemly excess,” in local police lingo), have told me about aspects of their lives that they possibly wouldn’t even think of sharing with their spouses. Maybe for them it’s a toss-up between a mumbled recitation of sins in the confessionals of the towering gray cathedrallike edifice up the street, or in the more relaxed raconteurship here with someone you’ve never met before and may never meet or remember again.

  However, in the case of Adrienne, I guarantee you’ll certainly remember your first meeting. There’s an aura about her that lures you to the bar. She looks straight at you—gentle eyes from a pretty but proud face framed by long blond tresses. She exudes kindness, sensitivity, a quiet wisdom, and a sense of fun—frisky and bubbly—beneath her placid demeanor. You feel you could trust her with all your worldly woes and worries and that she’d find time to listen while pulling half a dozen pints, making change, taking orders for sandwiches, and smiling at someone’s corny joke down the bar.

  Following the publication of McCarthy’s Bar, with a photograph of Adrienne’s colorful little pub on the cover along with a behatted Peter and a nun in her black robe supping a pint of Guinness on a bench outside the front door, the place has become a bit of a shrine with travel book lovers.

  “Every day I find I’m talking about him to strangers,” Adrienne told me. “I tell them the way he’d pop in after the publication of the book and peep his head around the door and sigh with relief when he saw that nothing had really changed. I think he dreaded that the popularity of his book would spoil things around here. But, except for a few extra visitors and blow-in residents, it’s still a place for the locals really. Occasionally we’ll get letters from people who loved his book—really sweet messages. Even poems and things. I think it’s a great honor for Pete—and for us—all this affection and interest.

  “But it happened so…accidentally, I suppose you’d say. Pete was at a bit of a loose end. He was working a lot with the BBC but was getting restless. So his agent suggested—with a name like McCarthy and despite a very English upbringing—he should do a book on Ireland. She said—‘Just go and you’ll know what to write.’ And after he’d spent a few days here in Castletownbere, he suddenly knew what he wanted to do, and the book just sort of wrote itself. And he was so grateful—to us—to the whole place. And then—surprise, surprise!—he called us a year or so later and said ‘I’ve written a bit of a book about Irish bars…’ and I thought ‘Oh yeah…’

  “‘What do you think about the title McCarthy’s Bar?”

  “And I said ‘Sounds great…”

  “‘Do you mind if I put your pub on the cover…’

  “And I said ‘No, that’s fine. Think it’ll sell a dozen or two…?’ and then it turned out to be a best seller. It was on the charts for over a year. But you kind of just take that on board. There’s no panic about it. It’s just nice that people can come and chat…I mean, we were here long before Pete made us famous and that’s what he liked. He even signed one of his books for me—‘To Adrienne, definitely the best bar in the world!’

  “It’s so nice to have that. We both really clicked the way you do with some people…It all began when he first came here. It was my birthday, and he looked a bit low, so I said ‘Why don’t you come along?’ and we had a great time and he just kind of became part of the family. He was quite well known on the BBC doing travelogues, but we didn’t know any of that…and he was a stand-up comedian too…and you could see his wit and timing came through. But then he left after a couple of days and we didn’t hear anything until he came back months later with his family. He did that a few times. And then, on his last visit, he said ‘You’ve made me so much a part of your family, and if anything ever happens to you or your mum, please contact me and I’ll be right here for you.’ But a couple of months later…it was me going to his funeral.”

  Adrienne paused. Her eyes were moist but tears refused to leave the sanctuary of her eyes and she smiled: “Y’see—it still hurts. Even after all this time…”

  “Sometimes the death of a close friend makes people go off and fulfill a few of their dreams, their life fantasies, before it gets too late. But you stayed on here,” I said.

  “Well—you’re right. And I sort of mixed them up a bit. Y’see, this place is not a family obligation—I love it here. I just enjoy people so much, and despite all the routines, you never know what each day will bring. And I have my adventures too—hill walking in the high Atlas Mountains, in the Himalayas. I finally went to our Skellig islands too—the hard way—climbing all those seven hundred steps to the top of Skellig Michael, where the monks lived in those tiny beehive huts. Most fantastic place I’ve ever been to. I just wanted to lie down on the ground and cry…It’s wonderful to realize what we’ve got right here in front of our noses. I love it all so much. Even if I go to Cork for the day, when we get back to Glengarriff and the whole of Bantry Bay just opens up…my heart just goes aaaaaghh! What a place! I need so little. I enjoy life. I’m not interested in a lot of money. I just want to be surrounded by good, interesting people and maybe help bring them together a little. Beara attracts who it needs. There’s just so much…right here!”

  “That’s what I’m beginning to find out about Beara—layer upon layer—right here…”

  Adrienne laughed softly and said, “Yeah, right…layers…”

  Then she looked directly at me. (A disconcerting habit of hers. It was almost like having someone step inside your head and root around for a truly responsive self.) “Have you got a few minutes? I’ll show you some layers right now, if y’like!”

  I had no idea what she was referring to, but one does not reject such an invitation from a lady of charm and charisma.

  Adrienne led the way up creaking stairs to the family house above the pub. Then she opened the door on the se
cond floor, held it open for me, and I entered a totally time-warped room. I was back in the 1920s—maybe the end of World War I. Even possibly somewhere around the end of the late Victorian era, if the crush of furniture and trinkets was any indication. Certainly the profusion of gracefully aged armchairs and settees, beautifully carved wooden side tables crammed with photos and family memorabilia, and dark somber oil paintings on the walls above a cheerful peat fire set in an elegant fireplace made it all feel like a refined drawing room in an affluent Dublin town house.

  “My grandfather started a store here around 1860 and then later, despite objections from other family members, he got one of the first official licenses to sell Guinness in this part of Ireland. Before that, you mainly got your porter and your uisce beatha—your ‘water of life’ whiskey—from illegal stills and in shibeen shacks. So we did pretty all right and then my grandfather made a nice living out of supplying the British navy, who had a base across the channel there on Bere Island until 1939. He had his own bakery here behind the pub, and up in the garden he had the official powder house for the troops. So we had a nice life, which is fortunate, because he had ten children and he furnished the house all fancylike and well…it kind of stayed that way!”

  For an hour or so we chatted in this Aladdin’s cave of a room. Then Adrienne’s mother came in, her hair done up in a kind of 1940s style (time-warp time again), with an ornate tray brimming with dainty sandwiches, scones, homemade sloe and apple jam, and tea in hand-painted porcelain cups. She was a delightful person, full of tales of family antics and obviously very proud of her homemade jams. “I’ll give you a pot to take with you. It’s the gin that really makes it special!”

  “Gin in what—the jam?!”

  “Of course. Gives it a little kick, don’cha think?”

  “Yes, I certainly do and”—I paused—“by the way, there’s something over there in the corner kicking too…”

  Adrienne laughed. “Oh, that’s just one of the pugs having a bit of a scratch…There’s two more around somewhere.”

  The dog seemed to realize it was now the focus of attention and ceased its flailing and turned its head toward me. I gasped, I think. Certainly I was shocked by the dog’s resemblance to an utterly time-worn, exhausted, and ferociously angry Winston Churchill. And then I remembered: “Isn’t that the dog on the cover of Pete’s book?! The one next to the boozing nun?”

  Adrienne laughed. “That’s the one. Isn’t he a darling!”

  Not my choice of adjective, but I chewed on a sandwich and made some kind of acknowledging grunt and we moved on to other matters.

  As we chatted, I noticed one corner of the room seemed a little like a shrine to a good-looking man and adorned with swords and medals and newspaper clippings.

  “Oh, that’s my dad—Aidan,” said Adrienne with a grin of pride and affection. “He was a doctor and decided to join the Brits in World War II. Many round here didn’t, but he thought he should, and later—thirty-five years later—he finally wrote a short memoir about all the amazing and terrible things he’d seen. I showed it to Pete. He was utterly gob-smacked—so was I when I first read it. He’d never talked much about his experiences. He was a very gentle, modest man. So Pete helped get it republished and it’s been on the best-seller list now for quite a while. Look—just read one of the reviews. There were plenty, but I think this fellow—Philip Nolan—got it just about right.”

  Adrienne handed me a yellowing review clip and I read: “The shelves of the world’s libraries are not exactly littered with memoirs of World War II written by Irishmen. After all, the vast majority sat it out on the sidelines watching with a lazy eye as the markers were shuffled across the map like chips on a roulette baize. And what a tale it is. This is a stranglehold of a book…”

  The reviewer, aware of the gravity and horror of many of Aidan’s stories, seems relieved by its lighter moments. For example:

  Aidan’s wanderings around Europe in search of his elusive “senior medical officers’ group” in 1939 and the heady days of the “phony war” in France where he was called upon to examine the local prostitutes for infections. He described how ordinary servicemen had to be out of the brothels by 10:30 p.m. to leave the field clear for the officers, thus reinforcing the fact that, even when satisfying nature’s most basic urges, the ranks were not allowed to mingle! Then his efficiency as a health inspector was so respected that on one occasion he had over 200 completely naked females lined up for him at an RAF base in England. Following his initial surprise and embarrassment, he instructed that bras and panties be donned immediately. For the next few days, the incident took a good deal of living down and was the subject of endless ribaldry in the officers’ mess.

  But at the heart of the memoir is a traumatic record of his five years of military service, starting with the utter chaos and slaughter of Dunkirk; his attempts to rescue men from a burning plane, for which he received the George Medal; a sudden transfer to Singapore, which fell to the Japanese just prior to his arrival so he was directed to Java, which was also being rapidly conquered by the Japanese. Four long and cruel years of internment followed by a plethora of River Kwai–type horrors, and in a sudden evacuation of prisoners by crazed camp commanders, the ship was torpedoed and survivors were picked up and then carried to Nagasaki just in time for the disastrous atomic bombing of the city on August 9, 1945 (two days after he and all the other prisoners had dug their own graves in preparation for their mass execution!).

  His description of the immediate aftermath of this war-ending event is as follows:

  We were wildly dashing for the air raid shelters. There was a blue flash, accompanied by a very bright magnesium-type flare. Then came a frighteningly loud but rather flat explosion which was followed by a blast of incredibly hot air. Some of this could be felt even by us in the shelter…Then an Australian POW stuck his head out of the shelter opening, looked around, and ducked back in again, his face expressing incredulity. This brought the rest of us scrambling to our feet in a panicked rush to the exits. The sight that greeted us halted us in our tracks…The whole camp had disappeared…We could see right up the length of the valley where previously the factories and buildings had formed a dense screen…But most frightening of all was the lack of sunlight…We all genuinely thought that this was indeed the end of the world.

  Eventually, having somehow escaped the horror of radiation sickness, Aidan sailed back home to Dublin following Japan’s surrender—on the Queen Mary! But even then—safe at last—a final dagger twist of fate awaited him when he was told by his family on his arrival that his younger brother had just been killed by the last V-2 rocket of the war to fall on London.

  And yet Aidan’s spirit—a living example of sensitivity and generosity overcoming gross brutality—is captured in the last paragraph of his memoir. Adrienne insisted on reading it aloud as we sat by the fire in that intriguing museumlike living room: “The greatest gift I have had is the appreciation of life around me. To be able to love my wife and children, to breathe the air, to see a tree in the golden stillness of a Cork evening, to take a glass of Irish whiskey, to see my children grow up, to fish in my favorite river—and to see the dawn come up upon each new day.”

  We sat together quietly for quite a long time by the glowing peat fire.

  A WEEK OR TWO later, after many return visits to what had now become our favorite watering hole in Castletownbere (a judgment of course requiring regular resampling of delights at the town’s other fine hostelries), I realized I was becoming a connoisseur of conversational tidbits here. Conversations are constantly buzzing around the bar, and amid pauses in my own yammer and blather, I found myself capturing a few pungent aphorisms and gems of societal perception—so many in fact that I wondered about compiling a modest booklet with a title something like: Overheard at MacCarthy’s, A Provocative Potpourri of Prepossessing Platitudes and Attitudes. For example, how about some of these actual tape-recorded fragments to get the thing started off…

&nb
sp; “Y’see, the problem is my whole feckin’ life seems to go on by itself just a little too far out of reach for me to feel a part of it…”

  “Ah—tha’s not a problem, lad. Jus’ get y’self longer arms.”

  “She keeps on what she calls ‘openin’ up m’mind,’ but problem is, there’s nothing in there…absolutely nothin’!”

  “Y’see, movie stars are the external images of society’s idealized dreams, fantasies and hopes…”

  “Oh Lord, Mr. Redford—say it ain’t so.”

  “I suppose you’ve just got to trust things will all work out—when I paint, for example, I’ve got to be convinced that something worthwhile will eventually evolve out of my mush of a brain…so all I can do is go to the edge and jump!

  “Have a good stiff drink first—in case you hit something hard.”

  “It’s a really great film—it reveals the mask of mediocrity that hides an enormous all-encompassing emptiness—the terrible randomness that has spawned us, the ultimate ecstasy of exhausted surrender when the fear of death is finally conquered by death itself.”

  “Oh yeah, right—sounds like a real laugh-a-minute Oscar winner!”

  “Our problem is—no one seems to want to vote anymore—and those that do are just glassy-eyed media sheep asleep in a national trance…”