Myles Away From Dublin (6 page)

For years I was in the habit of jumping up in great annoyance and switching off the radio when
Question
Time
was announced from Dublin. I found the stupidity and obtuseness of most of the competitors very bad for my nerves.

Compere: Number 4, which is the longer, a yard or a league? (Big pause.)

No. Four: A yard. (Gong!)

All the same, all sorts of quiz programmes are still very popular, not only with many radio stations but also as part of stage shows. The Q and A procedure seems to be a deep-seated human neurosis. Practically nothing else goes on in the courts and, of course, we have Question Time in the Dáil itself. Most of us learnt Christian Doctrine through the catechistical method. In regard to that, let me issue a warning. More than once I have heard a heated argument in progress when one of the contestants bellows in a towering rage: ‘You see nothing wrong with it? You think it’s all right, what? Well if you’d read your penny Catechism, you’d find something different there about it.’ I am told that the penny Catechism nowadays costs one shilling and threepence.

Today I am tempted to conduct a small quiz of my own.

The ideal quiz would contain commonplace questions to which the answer is obvious yet wrong. Here is one:

Q. – Before the buses were introduced in Dublin, did the trams go up Grafton Street?

A. – Not at all.

But indeed and they did. They left College Green, went up Grafton Street and turned left into Nassau Street.

Q. – In what county is the city of Waterford?

A. – County Waterford, or course.

No. The Ferrybank part of the city is in Kilkenny. And here is a question which very few people could answer correctly and to which practically everybody would give a No:

Q. – Was there or is there anybody who had a Dublin street or road named after him in his own lifetime?

There was and, happily, is. In Donnybrook there is a thoroughfare of good, red-brick dwellinghouses named Brendan Road. When the brave Batt O’Connor was not busy with operations against the British, he was pursuing his own business as builder and in fact built this whole road. Presumably he named it just as his son Brendan was born, so that it can truthfully be said that Mr Brendan O’Connor, one of the most distinguished architects at present in practice in Dublin, had a public thoroughfare named after him in his native city when he was an infant!

And that is a quare one.

There are a great number of questions on which the interrogator can very safely lay small bets and which depend on the principle that nobody looks at the most familiar objects which are in use and on view every day. How many chicks has the hen on the Irish penny, for instance? But here is one upon which I have made many frugal shillings myself and not once have I got a publican to answer it. If it is asked in a pub, there must be a preliminary warning that the respondent must keep his back to the shelves:

Q. – Two firms named respectively Jameson and Power make whiskey. About the centre of the label in
each case, two words appear in very large type. The second word is
Irish.
What is the word before it?

Naturally, there will be a great variety in the answers and the wildest guesses will come from publicans, who have been looking at the bottles in question all their lives. Among the usual words are Irish, Pure, Liqueur, Superfine, Potstill, Best, Guaranteed and Barley. They are all wrong, of course. The word is
Dublin.

On the usual packet of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes, are there any ships shown? If so, how many? Is there any land visible on the seascape? Is there a lighthouse? Is there a name on the cap of the bearded sailor and, if so, what name? I won’t offend the reader by answering questions so easy.

Here is something of a different kind again, but to be done only in a house where there is a telephone.

You casually announce that you have memorised the entire telephone directory. You will be told, no doubt politely, that you are a liar.

Very well, you say to some individual, get pencil and paper and write down absolutely any four numbers that come into your head. Don’t let me see them. Here, I’ll sit over here as far as possible away from you. Have you written the four figures? Good. Now multiply that
four-figure
number by 9. Have you got a result? Excellent. Now add the figures of the result. Now you have another number as a result of that addition? Right, now get the telephone directory.

You pause here, light a cigarette and tell him to get the page in the directory which bears his last number. If, say, it’s page 31, count down the telephone numbers till you reach number 31. You then tell him the telephone number and the name and address of the subscriber.

Explanation: no matter what four numbers he starts
with, if he does what he is instructed to do above, the answer will be 9, 18, 27, or 36. You have, of course, memorised the appropriate entries on those pages. It is easy to see from afar from turn-over of pages which page he is at but it is dangerous to do the job more than twice because the same final number can keep turning up, no matter what the original four were. Try it!

What sort of revolution do we like nowadays in this country? Do we like any, or are we tired of that game? Is it a played-out fancy? Worse – is it
uneconomic
?

It may be the heat but various foreign newspapers in front of me have a strange unanimity. Lurid headlines of vast size tell us what we do not wish to hear and what a lot of us do not really understand. CASTRO GRABS ALL, one headline screams. I need hardly stress the fact that there is comment in the use of the word GRABS. It tells readers that Castro is a barbarian and an outlaw. Is he? The matter following is so confused that it gives me no answer. There are mentions of ill-defined ‘oil empires’. There is no news as to who owns or controls them, apart from anonymous company titles.

In ill-considered small type the reader is told that for the future petrol is going to be either far dearer or far cheaper. Oil fuel for industry or domestic heating and cooking will be unobtainable.

Another paper, quite unrelated, roars VENEZUELA CHALLENGES THE US. A smaller line reads ‘Arrest of Four Marines’. The body of the report contains the disclosure that the men concerned were drunk and disorderly and had assaulted a taxi-driver.

Still another paper trumpets the fact that serious trouble, very likely of a military or aerial character, may be expected as between the US and Canada. The pie presented here is a bit mixed. The US insists on dominating the North American land-mass and objects to protests made by Canadian politicians that they are
‘British’. These men have been told by persons of rather indeterminate rank and authority that all that stuff is obsolete and that the continent must be defended integrally. Certain Canadians, no matter how aware of the strategic situation, have replied by singing ‘God Save the Queen’.

Keeping pace with this almost comic ill-humour is the grunting and growling as between Khrushchev and what he calls the West. Mentions of the use of nuclear weapons have become as commonplace in this sort of discussion as the bottom of the garden where the praties grow.

The Poles are re-arming, aided by substantial aid from the US. Several other enslaved countries in Eastern Europe are going to rise simultaneously against their Red masters. Germany is getting ready to resume the role (and always with the consent and assistance of the British) of a mighty military power in Europe. Thousands of young Germans are being trained in Britain by the RAF. That soldier’s best friend, his rifle, is obsolete. A new machine, far lighter and smaller, is replacing it. It discharges a nuclear missile which can kill in one go a platoon of soldiers or knock out the most modern tank. It can knock down a four-storey house. An organised convergence of them could demolish a medium-sized city and kill everybody in it.

The Black and Tans, who were earnest enough in their endeavours, seem very small stuff compared with this. Indeed, the end of the world, as set forth in the Bible, could justly be said to have been considerably underwritten. Is it all true, or even half true?

Personally, I like to think that most of it is morbid fantasy. It is also modern fantasy and is made possible by comparatively recent advances in the sciences of communication. The primitive newspapers were most
unattractive in appearance, hard to read, and usually a few weeks old in reporting events which had occurred in (say) China several months before. Nobody paid any serious attention to newspapers in the centuries I have in mind. Other organs accessible even to illiterates such as sound radio, TV and the cinema, were yet to come, and still a long way off. An approach to humanity in the mass was not possible. Crude admonitions – such as publicly hanging a man for stealing a sheep – were accepted as the best that could be done. Perhaps indeed it was, for democracy had not been heard of and most men had no fundamental rights.

All arguments about the last war apart, I believe Hitler was a lunatic. I believe his astonishing grip on the German and other people was due mainly to the radio. His shrieking was compulsive, and many a time I listened to him myself. His contagion was infective.

But how many of the other lies and fancies I have briefly mentioned above are due to newspapers? I feel the true answer is: Not a few. Reckless newspapers in search of circulation and notoriety can incense bodies of readers to the point of causing a war which would not otherwise, from economic reasons, happen at all.

I think that the record of the Press of this country is clean enough, though it may be mainly because we are a small country and our capacity for originating mischief is small. Still, I think the point I have been trying to make is worth making.

An old story invented in America concerned a young lady who had to enter hospital for an operation. When she emerged she told all her friends about it and even some strangers. Naturally they were all sympathetic. But she went on talking about this operation all her life, ever embroidering the recital. Eventually she changed even the nature of the ailment for which the operation had been performed. Apparently she could talk of nothing else and in her old age she had the distinction of being the world champion at the art of emptying a room; people slunk away the moment she appeared.

Well, I have had influenza. Why should I not talk about it this once?

The doctor I called when I noticed my soaring temperature first checked that it was nothing really serious such as pneumonia, and said I had influenza.

‘I thought,’ I said, ‘that the main symptoms of that disorder, fever apart, were a sore throat and muscular aches.’

‘Ah, no,’ he said, ‘that thing takes many forms and there is a lot of it knocking around just now.’

That didn’t sound very satisfactory. Happily I have a few medical books and decided to investigate this question myself.

I have discovered many surprising things. Doctors and scientists have done much research on it during the last 80 years and have discovered very little that is helpful. The name, based on an Italian phrase, was invented by a man named Huxham in 1743 but there is some evidence that the disease is probably as old as man
himself. An illness described by Theocrites in 412 BC has been identified by modern commentators as influenza. It is not generally a dangerous affliction and usually does not last long but there is real danger in complications, by no means rare, such as bronchitis and pneumonia.

Influenza is an acute infectious respiratory disease caused by a filtrable virus. It can enter only via the throat. If this virus in solution were injected into any other part of the body, the heroic volunteer would not get the disease. Scientists DID discover that this virus took two forms, which they dubbed A and B. Apparently both forms are equally bad for you.

What did my own doctor do for me? Nothing at all except tell me to stay in bed. That brings us to another astonishing fact. There is no specific treatment for the virus. Those modern ‘wonder-drugs’ such as the sulfonamides, pencillin and streptomycin have no effect whatever on this bug.

How does one become infected? Doctors are not sure even about that, though they guess that if one is physically near an infected person, particularly one who is sneezing, the air will be filled with the virus. They also mention the danger of dirty, ill-ventilated rooms or halls (this is probably oblique advice to keep out of the pubs!). Attempts have been made to sterilise the atmosphere in public places but that seems to have been ineffective also. No wonder this malady has been called ‘the last of the unconquered scourges’.

The incidence and location of outbreaks is also unpredictable. A severe outbreak is usually fairly localised and is called an epidemic. A pandemic could cover the whole world. Many still alive will remember the pandemic of 1918, which spread over the whole northern hemisphere, killing far more people than lost their lives in the world war then ending. The carnage of war and endemic malnutrition may have had a say in that tragedy – or was it ’flu at all?

But the picture is not entirely black. Prophylactic inoculation has been evolved, though again there is no sure knowledge of the duration of the protection the serum affords. I must say I never heard of anybody who sought such injection, though it is only commonsense in a time of epidemic. Can it be that many people do not fear influenza since it is not very painful and really entails a rest in bed for a week?

I almost forgot to mention another real peril of this disease. There is every possibility that a pregnant woman who gets it will have a miscarriage, so that infected people who make no effort to isolate themselves are really public enemies.

Let me conclude with another odd fact. Pigs are also subject to influenza. The books say that the pig virus is not transmissible to humans. I wonder how true that is?

It would surely be a nice how-do-you-do if, after your plate of rashers and sausages in the morning, your temperature shot up to F. 104 and the muscular aches set in.

It would be nice to think that there is really no such thing as influenza and that it is merely a word widely used by doctors when they cannot make out exactly what is wrong with the sick person. But that is a foolish optimism. For the future I’ll stick to eggs. Mr Porker can stay away.