Myles Away From Dublin (4 page)

I am sure everybody knows the original link between holiday and holy day. A good few centuries before now, important Church holidays were preceded by a period of light-heartedness on the part of the faithful. It is true that the hearts got lighter than they had any right to, and the situation looks the more odd when one reflects that those customs arose a long time before anybody dreamt of conceding the working classes anything in the way of real ‘time off’.

Not so much in Britain – and certainly not in poor Ireland – the excesses of the people on the continent in medieval times just when an important religious event was in the offing were considerable indeed, and not infrequently seriously worried the local Prince or Landgrave. Perhaps the root of the worry was not so much that they were drinking or dancing too much, or behaving riotously, but simply that they were not doing any work. What about the sowing of the harvest, the vines, or the mere mending of shoes? But the Church itself did not condemn such procedures out of hand, and over the centuries some system of accommodation was found.

This age of ours should not be regarded, as too readily it is, as the one which invented appeasement. In what I have said above I indicate where most of us got what we call our holidays, and how this most suspicious thing started at all. Holidays in the ordinary sense are a turbulence, a disturbance, an abomination and a terrifying nuisance.

I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror. What about being
packed off as toddlers to stay with the aunt for six weeks? That stern lady who made custard every day and who otherwise thought the staff of life was porridge? You remember those tyrannical obsessions about
washing
necks, going to bed early, and being respectful? These procedures can have a disastrous consequence; now myself approaching middle age, I think I can truthfully say that I have not properly washed my neck since 1931.

But the most critical disaster was surely the discovery about a century ago of the sea by the land-bound British. They found the sea was very good for you, not in its ancient sense as an occasion of empire and world conquest but as something to get into on mild strands and let it cover you up to the oxters and maybe higher. The ‘resorts’ then came to the fore, the ‘bathing machines’, the sand, the buckets, the unbelievable seaside lodgings and ultimately the pier with its band, phoney negroes, ice cream, and that most marvellous of all atrocities – Sundays when absolutely nothing was permitted.

Naturally Ireland was slow in following this
cross-channel
opulence of expansion to the letter, yet not a few good men and true still alive here are innocent of a youth which did not have some of that terrifying quality. Skerries, for instance. I have carried around in my juvenile socks more of the sand of that place than would rebuild the Four Courts, again and again I have fallen on the weedy slime of its rocks to the extent of splitting my sconce, and once spent two months every summer in a house which, though two-storeyed, slated and fine, had no running water or sewerage. (To be just, I think arrangements are a bit better now.)

Do people still go in for this lunacy? Well, I suppose they do. But why? That’s a big question.

Yet all is not bleakness. I think the main boon for a person going away for a while is to make it crystal-clear to himself and all others that he is not going on his holidays. The person who uses that horrible phrase is bunched. A business-trip, perhaps? To Istanbul?

I do think the seaside holiday is largely discredited. But take care that something worse does not take its place, for something far worse nearly happened to my good self just before Easter. Two chaps I know were good enough to ask me whether I would care to join them on three or four days away from it all? The idea sounded good but I was suspicious. A quick trip by air to Tunis? Nice enough, but surely expensive; even a bit dangerous, perhaps, with all those gun-happy characters in Morocco. I gave a tentative three cheers but modestly asked where they were going. Oh, Galway – Kerry, maybe. Fine – but how?

I did not back down on the spot. This, I said, was a new thing and terribly interesting. I would see them, I explained, the following night for a further talk. And so I did, bringing a loose but commodious waterproof bag reasonably filled for the novel trip the day after. I was asked what was in it? Just a few essentials, I explained – a few clean shirts, pyjamas, change of pants and jackets, soap, shaving gear, a few towels, a raincoat, some elementary medical stores, and a bottle of whiskey.

I can only report that the row was appalling. Did I think I was going on safari to darkest Africa? Who did I think I was? What did I mean by shaving? Surely I knew what it was for a few fellows to knock about together for a few days in the land of their birth? Towels?

I didn’t know much about a few fellows knocking about a few days – and don’t. I didn’t go. But I brought that whiskey safely home.

My business, varied and mysterious as some may judge it, frequently brings me to Dublin city and entails bus trips about the suburbs. I have encountered one startling thing so often in the early afternoon and in different localities that I think I might mention it here.

The bus is nearly empty and I am on the top deck, peaceably trying to read a paper. It pulls up at a stop and presently all bedlam breaks out. Shouts and shrieks fill the air and the vehicle shudders as it is assailed apparently by a horde of redskins. There is a clattering on the stairs and suddenly the whole upper saloon is filled with an inundation of bawling schoolboys aged, I should say, between 8 and 12.

Nearly all of them carry a sort of toffee apple on a stick which is brandished indiscriminately between sucks, on one occasion smearing the clothes of my innocent self. The noise is deafening and fights start here and there. They kneel and stand on the seats. The last time this happened to me, the company had an important notice about time-table changes pasted to the curved bulkhead above the windows but one corner of the notice was loose and detached. One lad stood on the seat, got a hold of this corner and methodically began to tear the notice down.

The reader must not think I am censuring the natural exuberance of youth and, in case it should matter, the boys were nearly all
well dressed and did not look as if they attended the conventional national school. They were brats. Do they behave like this in the schoolroom? If they do, teaching some juniors must be a greater martyrdom than is commonly supposed, though it would be quite unfair to expect teachers single-handed to try to eradicate this mode of conduct. That is primarily the duty of the parents. And the prognosis could be grim
enough. I am afraid that some at least of those characters are embryo teddy-boys.

I am sure some readers may have heard of a little book entitled
The
Accomplished
Gentleman
or
Principles
of
Politeness
and
of
Knowing
the
World
by Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield. My own copy is published by James Duffy of Dublin and dated 1844.

I will grant that parts of this treatise are funny and the mere date alone countermands many of the principles he lays down, for even manners have some dependence on contemporary fashion and custom. All the same much of what he teaches could with great benefit be absorbed by those schoolboys, for he is addressing ‘every young gentleman’.

He praises modesty and reprobates all insolence, boasting, shouting and extravagant behaviour, and strongly condemns lying, which he discerns as
originating
in vanity and cowardice. He considers the essence of good breeding is absence of rudeness and ruffianly self-assertion. At table the awkward fellow is easy to discern. ‘He sets himself upon the edge of the chair, at so great a distance from the table, that he frequently drops his meat between his plate and his mouth; he holds his knife, fork and spoon
differently
from other people; eats with his knife, to the manifest danger of his mouth; picks his teeth with his fork, rakes his mouth with his finger, and puts his spoon, which has been in his mouth a dozen times, into the dish again. If he is to carve, he cannot hit the joint, but in labouring to cut through the bone, splashes the sauce over everybody’s clothes. He generally daubs himself all over, his elbow is in the next person’s plate, and he is up to his knuckles in soup and grease.’

In that much I think Lord Chesterfield was mostly
concerned with etiquette, and it was not in etiquette that I found those schoolboys so deficient.

One of the subjects on which his lordship’s advice is obsolete is that of dress. Let me quote again:

‘There are few young fellows but what display some character or other in this shape. Some would be thought fearless and brave: these wear a black cravat, a short coat and waistcoat, an uncommon long sword hanging to the knees, a large hat fiercely cocked, and are flash all over. Others affect to be country squires; these will go about in buckskin breeches, brown frocks, and a great oaken cudgel in their hands, slouched hats, with their hair undressed, and tucked up under them, to an enormous size …’

I complained of wanton noise in the bus. He holds that loud and frequent laughter is sure evidence of a weak mind and quite inexcusable if the pretext for it is that when another man is about to sit down, you pull the chair away so that he falls on the floor. Loose language, mispronounced language and even bad
language
‘must be avoided, if you would not be supposed to have kept company with footmen and housemaids’.

His lordship undoubtedly has some stern attitudes. He advises against playing cards or drinking. Excess in drink is the mark of the blackguard, though moderate drinking when unavoidable (e.g. a toast at a wedding) is permitted. But suppose playing cards is a social duty. A person in such a spot ‘will not be seen at cribbage,
all-fours
, or putt’. Seemliness at games is also important and those schoolboys might note that a wellbred person ‘will not be seen at skittles, football, leap-frog, cricket …’ If music be your interest, be careful here again. ‘Piping or fiddling at a concert is degrading to a man of fashion. If you love music, hear it; pay fiddlers to play for you, but never fiddle yourself. It makes a gentleman appear frivolous and contemptible.’

There are many other matters I may mention another day but perhaps special school buses and not
Chesterfield
are the real remedy for my own problem.

Some stir has been caused by the turning down of a motion at a recent meeting of the Dublin Corporation. The motion was that a former resolution be rescinded and that for the future the title of all new roads on Corporation estates should be put up bilingually, not in Irish only as heretofore. Many people had complained that they did not know Irish and had the greatest difficulty in finding given addresses.

Passers-by whom they stopped could not help much and other people complained that although they had no trouble in making their way home, they could not say where they lived – postally. One man wrote sarcastically to the papers saying that he fully appreciated the Corporation’s attitude, that those who objected were shoneens, but that the Corporation should now carry on its deliberations in Irish only and that the minutes and records should be kept only in that language.

The curiosity is that Corporation name-plates bristle with stupid mistakes in the Irish, and the plates are expensive enamel or cast-iron affairs incapable of amendment. I once had a list of them, now long mislaid, but I clearly remember one. In the old days a saintly man was saying his matins on the banks of the Dodder and was attacked by a gang of louts, who fired his holy book into the river. Promptly a badger appeared with the book in his mouth and restored it to the saint and soon at this spot a church was built. It was called Domhnach Broc, church of the badger, or Donnybrook. Several Corporation plates in the area give the Irish name for Donnybrook as Domhnach Broch.
There is no such word as Broch.

A similar mess is made all over Dublin and the whole country in the matter of putting up the Irish names of sub-post offices. It is a rarity to see a wholly correct inscription.

All the trouble, agitation and work to revive the use of the Irish language is about 100 years old. In 1860 there were over a million native speakers in the country, many communities as far east as Tipperary and Roscommon, and at Omagh and Antrim. I do not suppose that there are 200,000 left who speak Irish ‘from the cradle’.

It is impossible to assess the extent or value of teaching Irish in all the schools since the foundation of the State but it is a fair guess that the language learnt, even well learnt, is not true Irish. Scarcely ever anywhere is an acquired tongue the true thing and that holds even where a transposed person is in an environment where nothing but the other tongue is spoken. In fact, as languages go, Irish is a very difficult language, totally alien to the European mould.

I happen to have a formidable library of literature relating to the revival, including many bound volumes of the
Claidheamh
Soluis
and the earlier Gaelic Journal, issued by the Gaelic Union. In 1886, when the President of the latter body was The Right Hon. the O’Connor Don and the Patron The Most Rev. Dr Croke, Archbishop of Cashel, I am ever delighted to note the particulars of a Trinity man who was on the Council. Here is the name as it appears on the official list:

‘Rev. Samuel Haughton, MD, FRS, FGS, SFTCD,
DCL (Oxon), PRIA, MA, LLD, F K & QCPI, FGRSI.’

It is nice to know that so learned a man did not despise the Irish tongue.

I think the first formal body dedicated to reviving Irish was the Ossianic Society – one omits, of course, the Royal Irish Academy, founded in 1782. Next came the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, then the Gaelic Union and in 1897 the Gaelic League. After that, cumanns and clubs were ten a penny.

Has there been any genuine progress? I cannot truly say but don’t believe the man who tells you he doesn’t know a word of Irish. It isn’t true.

The same man may take a dander down the
boreen
, raising his
cawb
to the
soggarth
shebeen
to have several
glawsheens
of
usquebaugh
in his
cruiskeen
lawn.
When he has become a bit unsteady on his
croobs
,
he will try to give a
pogue
to the
benatee
,
whether she is
colleen
dhas
,
a
shan
van
vocht
,
a
banshee
,
or a
streel
,
calling her his
mavourneen.
He will become talkative and begin discussing the market for
bonavs
with sundry other
omadhauns
,
shanachies
,
ownshucks
,
cawbogues
,
loodera
mauns
,
spalpeens
and even
leprechauns
,
his
doodeen
stuck in his
gob.
After ordering a pound of
drisheen
and a pound of
croobeens
to bring to
céili
he is going to, he will call for a
duckandurus
and
fooster
about, proposing a drunken
sláinte
to all and trying to
grig
the son of the house by calling him a
sleeveen.
Tottering home leaning on his
slane
like a bemused
pooka
,
he will stop to talk to a
gossoon
about
pinkeens.
A
gar
da
will bring him the rest of the way. He will be met by his wife and it won’t be 100,000
fawlthah
she will put before him.

Sure we’re all practically native speakers.