At the Edge of Ireland (12 page)

“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 second 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…

• “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…”
  “Baaa…humbug!”
  
• “You've heard that old sayin' ‘Your mistress knows you're a feckin' lyin' creep but your wife can only wonder…endlessly!'”
  
• “Life's far too damned short and far too much fun to waste time accumulating trinkets and toys…especially toys for boys who should know better!”
  
• “Y'see, I never really noticed him until he was gone and then I forgot all about him until he came back—and punched me out!”
  
• “I was jus' getting' worried that there was something a bit wrong wi' me by feelin' this happy and then I got some bad news like I always do, and then I felt lousy, and then I knew everything was okay again…so I felt a bit better…”
  
• “Don't know what the hell's happening to the real Irish music—now it's all these overproduced musical blunderbusses with boilerplate plots if any at all, and full of little tweener pop-tarts and snarky little snits all wrapped up in sparkly garishness and lip-synching gnarly nouveau-bog country tunes…”
  “Oh…I rather liked the show…”
  
• “Poor lad—all he wanted was to be labeled an ‘Artist' with a capital
  A
  so then he'd have all the excuses he needed to behave very badly, drink himself daft every night in Dublin, whore it up whenever he wanted, and die young, penniless and prematurely senile.”
  “You call him a ‘poor lad'—I'd call him pretty damned smart!”