Myles Away From Dublin (25 page)

All readers of this newspaper (well, some of them) will be delighted to see me back here and at action stations, a bigger divil than I was before.

The cause of my absence was illness, which befell me through no fault of my own.

A person who insists on telling you at great length and with enormity of repetition all about his operation is regarded the world over as a bore, but I insist on doing that because, one, my account may be of great value and warning to the reader and, two, I had TWO operations.

Think what that means. It means two sessions of
preoperative
scrutiny, two trips to the table, two prolonged sessions of convalescence punctuated with presents of unripe grapes, detestable marzipan sweets, cigarettes (for me, a non-smoker!), tattered paperback books I had already read – these were all unwelcome presents from friends – plus, for 12 hours a day, the roars from two radios in my small ward, each going full blast on different stations.

I don’t suppose I need add anything about being pulled out of my drugged sleep at 6 in the morning and being invited by the sweet nurse to try and wash in a basin of tepid water.

I don’t think Purgatory could be worse than a term in certain hospitals, though wild horses would not drag from me the name of this particular hospital nor the names of the distinguished doctors and surgeons. But I may say it did not happen in the Counties Carlow, Kildare, Laois or Wicklow, where the people seem to be very self-conscious about hospitals.

For some weeks I hadn’t been feeling too well in myself and one night got a frightful pain in the pit of my stomach, a bit to the right-hand side. I called in the nearest local doctor, and after humming and hawing, taking my temperature and tapping me here and there, he said I was a very bad case of appendicitis, and would have to go to hospital immediately and have the appendix out.

Well, what could I say or do? Nothing but comply.

In I went and, after a day or so, the job was done. There was hardly any pain until I found myself back in bed again and woefully awake. Pain is hardly the word for that feeling in my side, and it was just awful when I happened to cough or sneeze.

The other pain (I mean the two-radio one) was almost unendurable. But in the evening time they gave me the needle – morphine, I suppose.

A Naggin

I was there ‘recovering’ for over a week, but, in truth, I was fading away. As the days passed I was being given more and more build-up food but continuing to look more and more like a scarecrow. Moreover, I would get terrible pains after a meal. A friend smuggled in a naggin of whiskey, but this was the price of me, for I nearly passed out.

Eventually, against the doctor’s advice, I decided to get up and crawl home. If I was going to die, surely home was the proper place for that?

Last Throw

Eventually friends advised me to see a specialist, a practitioner so-called because he specialises in high fees. This man examined me and sent me into another
hospital to be X-rayed. He told me afterwards that the lower part of my main gut was in a terrible state because ‘some ass had cut out a perfectly healthy appendix.’ Well, what could be done, I asked. He walked up and down beside the bed, pondering this.

‘You see,’ he said at last, ‘you should have that appendix.

‘Grafting on an appendix is almost unknown as a feat of surgery. It is almost certain that your body would reject somebody else’s appendix. Still, if somebody very like you turned up genuinely requiring to have his appendix removed, we might risk the transplant.’

‘Somebody very like me?’ I queried. ‘Well, I am youngish, dark, with lovely wavy hair, clean-cut features, strong, athletic figure, perfect teeth.’

He went away at this, frowning a bit, but rushed in two days later saying that the very man had arrived, and that the operation – or rather the two operations – would be performed that evening. And so it was done. The newly severed appendix of my unknown benefactor was sewn on to the butt of my gut … and the transplant worked! I began to eat every bit of food I got as well as apples, plums, sticks of raw rhubarb, chickory and celery I sent out for, and was never with less than half a dozen bottles of stout under the bed. I told the two radio maniacs that if they did not close down their stations for 7 hours a day, I would get up and thrash the life out of them

So there you are – I’m all right again. It’s easy to sleep, Ernie O’Malley used to say, on another man’s wound. It’s even easier on another man’s appendix.

Well, well, well – things get tougher. Here we are in the second half of March, most of us perished with the cold or soaked to the skin (or both, maybe) and we already have the privilege of finding ourselves in Summer Time. But can we ignore watches, newspapers, schedules of TV shows and go quietly into hibernation? No, indeed! We also have a General Election on our hands. In a way, that laborious procedure could be regarded as one for the election of a General. But if now-unarmed political Generals are nowadays not so numerous as they used to be, here is a question: apart from outgoing deputies who have, or think they have, cast-iron safe seats, is there any large body of citizens in the country who actually welcome and enjoy a General Election? (I know that the question sounds like asking anybody in the hall at the large overflow meeting who is fond of whiskey, purple hearts or goof balls to raise one hand … but the question is serious. And the answer is YES.) Those citizens are schoolchildren of both sexes, mostly those attending national schools. It may be very cynical but on the appointed day those lyceums of lower learning are turned into polling stations; the homes of innocence temporarily become part of the grim apparatus of politics and the scheming of sundry chancers.

One could write a lot about the oddities and anomalies of the Irish election. Bribery is illegal, for instance – but only in the sense of giving a voter money or an expensive ‘present’. But if a candidate swears that, if elected, he will get a job with the civil service or the local authority for the voter’s son, that is just harmless
electioneering blather and not seriously regarded by the law. The voter’s choice on the ballot paper is strictly secret, with a special little caboose within which to mark the paper, but voters are whisked to the polling station free in cars plastered with party banners. True, such voters could cheat in the sense of voting for the other party, but in fact how many do … and how many feel conscience-bound to repay the transportation kindness with a vote? Nobody knows the answer to that. And if the ballot is secret by law, why do so many people afflict and bore all others around them saying and emphasising for whom they are going to vote, a procedure which in some situations could lead to blows?

Consider this other thing known as canvassing. A total stranger knocks at your door and straightway begins to explain to you the nature of your public duty, and for whom you must vote. The implication is that you are a feeble-minded, pitiable person, and that you know nothing of politics. I confess that this has never happened to myself but maybe the possibility of it is one of the reasons why I keep a good dog. Election literature, as it is called, is no problem. Put it aside to help light the fire.

Does standing strong liquor to strangers in a pub constitute bribery? I can’t say, but the practice is quite common with candidates, their agents, relations and chief supporters.

In some ballot arrangements (e.g. the universities and professional bodies) there is postal voting. Every person on the register receives by post a ballot paper, brief memo of instruction and a reply-paid envelope for the return of the paper, duly marked. Could a General Election be managed this way? It is very doubtful, I’m afraid. In a multi-vote household, old or blank-minded persons could be intimidated, or one rogue in the family
could secretly snaffle all the papers and mark them to his own way of thinking. And even to this day there must be some illiterate voters.

I have not personally taken kindly to television but heretofore decent citizens who have forked out the £5 licence fee have had to endure the interruption of programmes by silly, shoddy advertising matter. For several coming weeks they will also have to face shabby all-too-familiar politicians letting out of them spiels about agriculture, tourism, the cost of living, the warble-fly menace, the Irish language, the Border, Ireland’s destiny as a world force, the right price for malting barley, the suffering poor – stuff that
everybody
has heard and read hundreds of times before.

I suggest that the main parties should be classified as illegal organisations.

The reader must try to be forbearing and tolerant if I am seen to move with the times, and present this week a deluge of electioneering. True I am not standing (as the commercial traveller said during a fleeting visit to a pub in Tullow) but is that any reason why I should not give out a lot of nonsense at the top of my voice? Have I not got the same constitutional right to talk rubbish publicly as (say) MacEntee? The fact is that anybody can play at this game, and indeed the game might be improved if everybody did.

Extravagance then might be kept within reasonable limits, and wild talk might perhaps be a little bit less wild. If a candidate swears that on election he will offer me £1,500 per acre for my 25 acre farm (– I haven’t got any farm) I can’t see why I must not myself offer everybody £3,000 an acre, even without being a candidate at all.

At times like this a few of us take a side-long, suspicious look at this thing we call democracy. Is it all a farce, a parlour game played for the benefit of those on the make? How many affirmations of eternal service, loyalty, sleepless days and nights of cruel work, would be forthcoming if a seat in the Dáil did not carry with it a fat salary? I believe that the POSITIONS VACANT column in newspapers would have to be used to fill any position in parliament, and that the utmost inducement a candidate would offer the elector would be a promise to do his best to keep the sheriff off for 14 days. The truth is that life overtakes people – even political people. In the bar in Leinster House it is possible to order a drink
and
pay
for
it
yourself
!
(Honest! I’ve tried it.)

Let us assume then, that I am not going up and that you are not going up but that we insist on exercising the Walter Mitty in us all to make silly promises to which nobody can hold us. What sort of a gaudy future would you paint? How glorious would the Ireland of tomorrow be? What costly baubles would you offer the lady next door? I am not sure that I would trust you, even in the matter of meaningless boasts. Probably you would undertake to have delivered to her a set of pots and pans made of solid gold, without stopping to consider that gold has a low melting point and would be useless for cooking a breakfast with.

Why not be BIG and offer a dwelling house made entirely of 18-carat gold (which contains a fair amount of strengthening copper), a stratoflight between
Shannon
and New York for two years non-stop, a
knockdown
to Danny Kaye and a ticket for two to the races at Leopardstown on New Year’s Day, 1986? Now
that
basketful should pull in a few votes, for there is nothing illegal about daydreaming.

Yet somehow I feel that human cravings have little to do with gold, parades of opulence or fairy godmothers. The things that people REALLY want vary from day to day. Yesterday I asked a friend (while I had this article in mind) what above all else he would like at that moment, both of us being seated in a bus.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘If you have a magic wand, prepare to wave it now. The shoe on my right foot has been cutting the life out of me since I left home this morning. I sent it to be repaired and this is what I’ve got. I’m sure my sock is full of blood. I’m in a desperate condition. Have you any whiskey in your pocket?’

You see? Gold was far from his mind. He wanted (foolishly) to get away from pain. That seems to show that the aspirations of humanity are modest and that they have little use for the sun, moon and stars. To reduce humanity’s yearnings to an ultimate low, I think
it is adequate to say that humanity wants to be left alone, particularly by politicians. Since nobody takes their vapouring seriously, why have them?

What I have written has been at the dictate of plain reason. But since when did plain reason get anybody elected to a job with a salary? If and when I run for office, I promise every elector who votes for me

a farm of not less that 500 acres, equally suited for tillage or pasture;

a sum of £25 a week for life, without deduction of income tax;

a Rolls-Royce car, and a Mini for the missus;

malt and fags ad lib;

top jobs in the civil service for all the children;

directorship of the Bank of Ireland;

no more wet, dirty, weather;

free copies of all banned books.

That should bring the votes in all right. But – heavens! – I nearly forgot something. I also offer the elector the editorial chair of this newspaper.

A Minister of State made a pronouncement on this subject after a public dinner recently. (‘After a public dinner’ is good, for he took good care to have the dinner before he squawked.) He said: ‘This business of rates is under consideration by the Government. I don’t know what to make of it.’

Those who have any dealings with public
departments
will know what is meant by the phrase ‘under consideration’. It means that absolutely nothing whatsoever is being done about something that is acerbating the public temper to the point of open revolt. The hidden, petted, shrouded Minister does not have to worry. He pays no income tax on his salary as a TD. He knows nothing of petrol tax, for he is whisked from here to there in a Mercedes car owned by the State at absolutely no charge. Now and again in public address he lectures the citizen on the necessity for being austere, girding his loins, the necessity for stopping smoking (where an enormous chunk of State revenue resides) and what Patrick Pearse died for. The admonitions one gets from this class of politician-on-the-make make one sick. Therefore why not get sick? Me – I just don’t know how to do it on the printed page!

Probably no reader of these notes is immune from the horrifying demand that arrives on the doorstep twice a year. PAY UP – Or Else. It has no relation to your income, your birth or origin, your commercial worth, the colour of your face … nothing. Pay up to the County Council, or the Urban Council, or you’ll be sold up. Your bed will be put to auction. The chair in which