Jaywalking with the Irish (18 page)

As Charles Smith related in 1774, East Cork’s strangeness has been obvious for a long time:

Smith, like most of the other exotic blood in East Cork then, came from England. Throughout the region, the planters built their stately houses with finely arched doorways, imposing stone facades, and meandering drives through manicured pastures leading to the gated entrances in their omnipresent walls. Some treated the natives under their employ with steadfast benevolence, but others, including a local branch of the Wilkinson clan, exacted brutal tithes while blithely spending most of their days in still
grander residences in England. During the War of Independence, IRA Flying Columns enjoyed some pay-back time by burning many such big houses to ruination, sending their owners fleeing back to Mother England in an exodus that quickly reduced the Protestant class from 10 to 3 percent of Ireland’s citizenry. This has recently been recounted with exquisite poignancy in William Trevor’s
The Story of Lucy Gault.

Many who hung on watched their estates list into rainy oblivion, with the roofs leaking, the timbers rotting, the brocaded paper peeling away from weeping walls, while the bulbs in the crystal chandeliers went dim one by one. The inexorable decline produced some of the most potted eccentrics in the world. In a Cork village called Castlefreke, one unraveling scion spent his twilight years quaffing port and pumping bullets into dining room portraits of his ancestors. Up in Westmeath, the late Adolphus Cooke became so obsessed with hot-air balloons that he had miniature versions of them attached to his dining room chairs, perhaps hoping his guests could join him for nonstop flights to St. Brendan’s Isles of the Happy. Alas, this peculiar romantic became terrified of the idea that vindictive foxes were eyeballing him from the hedges. More unnerving, he believed he would be reincarnated as one of those fretful creatures – after all, his father had come back as a dog – and forsook his dreams of blithely ballooning to the ends of this earth in order to devote his remaining energies to fighting off the sly bastards who were watching his every move.

Despite such marvelously eccentric histories, the great Irish country houses eventually could be bought for a song, provided one possessed a fortune for subsequent restoration. Over the last few decades, rock idols, celebrities, financiers, and the Irish nouveau riche have been doing that with a vengeance. One tranquil East Cork inlet features a turreted mock castle that was inhabited in the 1990s by a family of German teenage pop stars called, for some reason, the Kellys. The great lawns and walled gardens used to be patrolled by Prussian security guards yelping into their walkie-talkies, but now an erstwhile Wall Street fat cat named Glucksman (meaning “lucky man!”) has moved in with his Irish-American wife. The new earl has spread his philanthropy freely enough to
become wined and dined by the powers that be in Dublin, and pocketed an overnight honorary doctoral degree from Trinity College there.

So, in observance of the honored tradition of what is called “the touch,” this couple became my first target to back the new
Cork Magazine
. Alas, the appeal fell on deaf ears. “I don’t know you, Mr. Monagan, and I am not interested in hearing your presentation,” growled the keeper of the castle after one phone call. Maybe he had more Cork blood than I realized.

As it happened, we were soon treated to a far more gracious taste of East Cork “big house” living, at a place that embodies the potential of the old manors to become reintegrated into Ireland’s evolving modern fabric. This transpired at Ballymaloe Country House, which has become world famous for its exquisite restaurant and gourmet cooking school looking out over peacock-infested island gardens and flowing green fields.

The lady in charge is named Darina Allen, and she is a champion of the Irish culinary renaissance now being supplied by a new artisan class of local growers, herdsmen, cheese-makers, bakers, and butchers. Meanwhile, her mandolin-playing brother-in-law, Rory, is seeking to expand the place’s spirit with regular sessions of Irish traditional music. Better yet, he likes to fill the dining room with a sprinkling of guests whose sole function is to contribute laughter and talk – not a bad job assignment, I reasoned after an invitation popped up. So we sidled inside, not quite sure what entertainment we could contribute. Perhaps Jamie would have to trot out her “looking for a noodle” song.

Elizabeth Rush, an American friend with a house nearby, was the intermediary, but she proved to be Elizabeth Slow in appearing herself. No bother. All one has to do to get comfortable at any Irish table is start talking – about anything – and the interweaving circles fall into place, the conversation spreading as easily as mist. Here was a charming accordion, or “box,” player who proved to be a close friend of a friend; here a pretty Australian flautist fresh from a decade in Vienna. So the talk flowed and the wine was poured. It felt like balloons were lifting every conversation and elevating our own identities into the free-floating ether that
sometimes surrounds a person who has changed countries. Far from home, the relentless ordinariness of life can, on certain magic nights, be transposed into moments of endless charm, provided the right balloon power is arrayed at every neighboring chair, so that you yourself no longer feel as humdrum as you once were. So in a brief shining moment of forbearance and grace, one is allowed to recount the campaigns that got you to where you are tonight, like a dottering retired British colonel reliving his glory days with Lord Gordon in Khartoum.

Now, for some chamber music in the drawing room.

But naturally.

Let me just adjust my balloon.

Of course, this wasn’t our first indulgence in the Big House fantasy. Once, Jamie and I stayed in a vast home in Sligo called Temple House, with its own lake, thirteenth-century Knights Templar castle, working farm, endless walled gardens, and rooms filled with priceless heirlooms. Ancestors of the owner, Sandy Perceval, who had been grievously afflicted with chronic fatigue syndrome by the toxic baths that are used to rid sheep of worms, had been looking after this pile since 1665.

After dinner at Temple House our host offered me a cigar, which I dumbly declined. “There are hundreds of these in the basement. In fact, the maids used to dry them in the sun so they could start fires with them when I was a boy. But they’ve managed to retain a decent taste,” Sandy offered from the wheelchair he resorts to of an evening. A year later, the
Wall Street Journal
reported the discovery of a million dollars worth of the oldest Cuban cigars in the world in a perfect humidor of a Sligo basement in a place called . . . Temple House. An infusion of desperately needed funds could now be put into bolstering the farm and renovating some of the house’s crumbling derelict rooms. Fair play to that, for the grand country estates are an intrinsic part of the island’s history, and the reality of gawking foreign tourists having to keep them alive is sad, when the most industrious farm operations can rarely do so.

Still, modern Ireland produces some bizarre juxtapositions of its own. Some of our other East Cork trips brought us to a spot just past Ballymaloe where Seamus Wilkinson was transforming a
huge stone barn for himself and his wife, Mary, whose family had once suffered grievously in the troubles in the North. Seamus, in contrast, had it made – and why not? Every detail of the work in progress was being executed with attention to the aesthetics of the land, just as Bun Wilkinson had done on a much smaller scale at the end of the Dingle Peninsula a quarter of a century earlier. We saw grand rooms in various states of completion, and climbed half-finished stairs to look out at the orchards, duck ponds, and vegetable gardens presently being laid out in Seamus’s visions. Green fields rolled off to the distant lighthouse blinking just beyond the fishing village of Ballycottton.

Yet one couldn’t help look at this spread and wonder – what if the Celtic Tiger comes to a halt? What will become of the thousands of Irish families racing after a prosperity they themselves – let alone their parents – could not imagine even twenty years ago?

Seamus, who must ask himself that question often, quietly interposed, “We will walk there now beside the cliffs, and ye will see how lovely it is out here. But I want ye to know that I have not yet brought anyone else to see this place. I think that tells ye something of my feelings for ye,” he said, leaving me humbled, but also scratching my head, once again.

I kept pressing on with the magazine, at one point borrowing a photograph of Brian O’Donnell beaming in strange transport from the Hi-B’s bar as he stood before a crew of the usual eccentrics. A graphic designer transformed this into a mock-up of the magazine’s cover and added a priceless headline: “The Maddest Man in the Whole Damn Town.”

A week later, I returned to show this off, along with a more conventional alternative.

“How are you, love?” asked Esther.

“Not too bad. And yourself?”

“Fabulous,” Esther said, despite looking somber. “But Brian’s not been well. He says he was mugged.”

“By his fecking shadow, more than likely,” cackled John Burke.

“Ah stop. Maybe that was in his own head, but he’s lost enough color to paint a house,” Esther protested.

Soon, Brian was consigned to hospital. The official complaint was of a nosebleed that would not stop. “Well, they don’t seem to ever end, like. He’s had one after another for days. He calls me in the middle of the night. ‘Ah Esther,’ he says, ‘you better come here now as I am not feeling myself.’ He was needy, like. So I got him signed in. I’m telling the truth now – the man looks weak.”

Having written a bit about medicine, I was instantly concerned. Despite his mad whims and “talent to abuse,” Brian had been nothing but kind in my direction, and always interested in my family’s well-being. I saw a larger soul than some of his regular customers took in, and Brian was grateful for my respect. His love of music and drawing, and impatience for dimness of all kinds, spoke of frustrated dreams for some higher calling, and his wife, occasionally glimpsed in the bar now, was a figure of startling elegance. I wanted Brian to be well, to carry on with his peculiar magic theater of a disappearing Ireland. But there was change in the air, for him and for me, and, if a person looked at all behind the scenes, for the entire country. Some kind of curtain was obviously drawing closed, perhaps on my own fantasies.

Return to beginning of chapter

One cannot know Ireland without understanding its relationship to the sea, for the ocean’s moody fickleness pervades the country’s soul – from the ever-changing weather to the wistfulness of the Irish people’s apprehension of the present, which is never to be taken for granted. More concretely, the surrounding Atlantic has through the ages dispensed endless bounties, mellow currents, and countless freak deaths. In the last few months alone, twenty-eight commercial fishermen had been swept off into eternity; children collecting cockles, anglers casting amiably into the surf, they too had drowned; and several despairing teenagers had walked to the edge of Ireland’s picture-postcard cliffs, stared into the dark water below, and jumped.

In March I landed a magazine assignment to look into the remarkable confraternity of volunteers who man Ireland’s search-and-rescue lifeboats, and whose grim duty it is to pluck the imperiled, and often bloated corpses, from the unforgiving ocean. Arrangements were made to participate in a training exercise with the crew of the oldest lifeboat service in Ireland, in an out-of-the-way West Cork village called Courtmacsherry. As luck would have it, the appointed day proved gale-tossed, cold, and menacing. There was no choice but to proceed.

Trees shuddered and bent in the howling winds as I followed the winding country road from Bandon to a kind of time-warp settlement called Timoleague, which is crammed like a tourniquet at the end of a huge lagoon, spreading west toward the Old Head of Kinsale. Listing over the place and the ever-shifting waters of that mournful bay lies a crumbling eight-hundred-year-old Cistercian abbey, with every inch of its grounds stuffed with skeletons. A large portion of the gravestones that are not rain-battered
beyond recognition bear the names of Hurley, O’Neill, and Deasy. My mother’s Deasy ancestors,
my
ancestors, could well be lying beneath my feet, I thought, as I picked my way through the creepy ruins, wondering just how many of the dead had perished at the ocean’s whims.

A pretty stone causeway turned from Timoleague to the western shore of the estuary, which was now roiled with a wicked chop. After a few miles, I reached my destination – a village with a single street filing under the lee of a pasture-strewn hill. Across the darkening bay, I could see the odd distant house looking about as significant as a sheep grazing in the dreamy blue-green distance. Sidewalk eyes met mine every hundred feet, taking measure.

Courtmacsherry has hosted a volunteer sea-rescue service since 1824, a time when every family’s survival was linked more to the beneficence of the ocean than the hopelessness of the region’s thin soil. Untimely death was the epitaph of many a villager here. Even just a few decades ago, shopkeepers, fishermen, and farmers would come running from nearby hovels whenever a ship foundered, and braved wicked gales with a ten-oared rowboat – because the great monster at their door, the pitiless ocean, could seize their kin or the next clan’s any time it chose. All that has mostly changed, what with progress. Now, sleek as a Ferrari, a powerful modern rescue vessel bobbed just offshore, its orange superstructure and deep blue hull gleaming as it sunk and rose in the chop – this was one of the classic boats of the RNLI, or Royal National Lifeboat Institute, an all-volunteer coast guard that rings the coasts of Ireland and Great Britain.

The vessel spoke. One look and you could tell that its presence out here at the edge of creation loomed as large as the Space Shuttle at Cape Canaveral.

I parked beside the Travera Lodge, a nineteenth-century guesthouse on the main street.

“You’re going out in this?” asked my host, himself a Dublin landlubber newly moved to the village, yet instantly accepted in this radically transformed new Ireland. “I’d have a double brandy first, if I were you.”

I instead sought a soothing pint at a waterside pub called
the Pier Inn. A few souls sat silently soaking up the gloom like shrouds pondering through the timeless shadows that are, in the end, Ireland as it was and shall be. After some long pauses, one of these revealed himself to be Alan Locke, a portly candy salesman by day but passionate lifeboat volunteer whenever trouble erupted.

“Have you eaten?” he asked solicitously, once I explained that I was joining the evening’s training exercise.

“Not much.”

“Going out on a night like this, it’s better to have a full stomach,” Alan advised.

About two minutes later, I was welcomed into his comfortable, suburban-styled house, the ample windows of which offered sweeping views of the ever-more-frothing and angry-looking bay. His wife, Liz, laid forth heaping plates of roasted potatoes, garden carrots, and gravy-sweetened pork.

Alan, now three years from the RNLI’s mandatory retirement age of fifty-five, gazed wistfully upon the lifeboat, its orange superstructure casting luminous reflections upon the darkening water. “I look out there and think about my service ending and it makes my heart sag,” he said quietly. “I’ve loved every minute of it.”

Alan, who has a son volunteering on the lifeboat too, explained how, whenever an emergency call sounds on his beeper (which the Irish call “bleeper”), he runs three hundred feet down the hill from where we were sitting and jumps the neighbor’s hedge to save precious seconds. He talked of harrowing recent rescues, including a dismasted French yacht that was mortally foundering in hellacious seas after being slammed by a Norwegian freighter in the predawn darkness of St. Stephen’s Day, the day after the Christmas just passed.

Tonight it was not necessary to jump any hedges. Instead we walked the short distance to the stone-clad lifeboat station, the hissing wind tearing at our cheeks. I felt excitement and embarrassment as the door opened to the locker room inside and I was introduced to Dan Dwyer, the wiry, balding forty-seven-year-old first coxswain, or skipper of the crew – embarrassment because it felt like I was merely hitching a ride into Ireland’s soul.

“So you want to write something about the lifeboat service, is
it?” Dwyer, a primary school teacher by trade, sized me up with a witheringly intense gaze.

I gave a speech, a testimony of my interest and respect, while feeling very small, and very foreign.

“If there’s a movie to come of this, I want the lead role,” said the station’s mechanic, Mícheál (pronounced Me-hall) Hurley, breaking the ice.

“And you’ll sink that project too,” rejoined a ruddy-faced fellow named Martin, one of the village’s last three commercial fishermen, whose wife is also a lifeboat volunteer.

Oilskins and a life jacket were proffered, and I soon clambered with seven volunteers onto the
Frederick Storey Cockburn
, a five-year-old, £1.4 million vessel whose twin 865-horsepower engines rumbled to life with stomach-rattling potency.

And we took off. Dan Dwyer barked out commands with the same fervor I had once glimpsed among the friends of my deceased fighter pilot brother, as the vessel charged at a speed of twenty-five knots – a pace that one-third of the rescue vessels belonging to the mighty United States Coast Guard still cannot equal – through the inner harbor to the riled ocean beyond. On the flying bridge, sixteen feet above the swells that had been whipped across three thousand miles of open water, it felt like a crazed bronco ride. The innards churned and the legs buckled with every surge, but Dwyer exuded invincible confidence. It was an Irish spring evening after all, with stinging sleet flying laterally into our faces and winds now surging to forty knots and licking foam off the breakers. And it was strangely thrilling.

A wan light arced from the lighthouse at the distant craw of the Old Head of Kinsale, where this search-and-rescue team had recently helped retrieve the remains of a mangled suicide jumper. To our right lay the ghostly, sinuous shapes called the Seven Heads, where Algerian pirates, British traders, a German submarine, and countless yachts have all been swallowed – a small fraction of the nine thousand or so wrecks that have smashed into Ireland’s shores.

Dwyer spoke of more recent history. Two years earlier, essentially the same crew as on board now braced thirty-five-foot swells
and eighty-mile-an-hour winds in one of the more daring rescues in the annals of the lifeboat service. A young Courtmacsherry farmer named Colin Bateman, who would have been married the following week had his fiancée not suddenly died in a car crash, pulled himself together and was among the first to respond.

The volunteers soon confronted what would have been termed a hurricane elsewhere, although the Irish have too much experience with the sea to give its whims names. Plowing through the maelstrom, they neared a dismembered yacht staffed by a nearly senseless, wounded crew. The bereaved Colin clambered into a raft to deliver a lifeline so that the imperiled sailors could be winched away from imminent death.

Tonight, the nearby outcroppings offered a protective shore and we began the training exercise under their lee. A couple of volunteers were dropped overboard in an inflatable dinghy and promptly abandoned.

As the engines throttled, Dwyer gazed out toward the scene of one of the most epochal disasters in maritime history, the U-boat rending of the
Lusitania
only a half-dozen miles farther out in the now howling Atlantic Ocean. “People up and down these hills heard the explosion and came running and riding bicycles and horses to the lifeboat that was then kept just a mite back from where we are now. Fifteen men took turns pulling on the oars for three hours because the day was so calm that their sail was useless. They found nothing but a mass of floating dead bodies, because even in May the coldness of these waters will kill a person in about ninety minutes. If they had the boat we are in now, people would have been saved in minutes.”

“Human flesh gets very squid-like in no time around here,” assured Alan.

Somewhere behind us, two volunteers were bobbing like lost seal pups in the swells. Dwyer explained his various means for locating them – sonar and computerized global positioning systems, searchlights, and flares, if necessary. “What happens if none of that works?” I asked.

“They have a pair of oars and if they’re very good at rowing,
they’ll get to shore. If not, they won’t,” he said with deadpan Cork wit.

Of course they were found, and swiftly. A variety of other exercises followed – steering this formidable vessel with nothing but a heave-ho on guy ropes around the rudder, working the fire hoses, tricks of navigation, and the like. Finally, I was put at the controls, and the feeling was like commanding the raw power of an F-16, as my brother once did every day, flying over these same waters from NATO bases in England.

It was heartening to share a pint with these stalwart souls afterward. “These boats are tough as steel,” Seán O’Farrell, the second coxswain, said as we settled into an eccentric pub called the Anchor Bar, whose owners were so blasé about technological progress that they not only have no cash registers but throw months worth of change into a pirate’s larder of a wooden drawer. “The hulls are a three-inch-thick sandwich of fiberglass and Kevlar, and even sledgehammers can’t dent them. A lot of people say that 1700 horsepower is overkill for a boat of this size, but we are asked to go out where danger is real.”

The mechanic, Mícheál Hurley, picked up the thread. A born storyteller, the man was a portrait of wide-shouldered mirth and had oversized white teeth that clamped down as he coltishly bit, sometimes with a little snort, into his point. “You’d be a fool to believe all the jargon the technical fellows would be giving that the boat’s self-righting and all singing and dancing,” he replied when asked about the risks involved in the service. “That’s all very fine, but if you’re off on a lee shore and have one or two engines stall, and these things can happen, all the power in the world is no good. Machines are just machines and you can get sucked in by the euphoria of their being invincible. A boat is a boat, and all boats have engines and they can break down. If you hit a submerged container or a log, or a freak wave, and the boat caterwauls, the end can come at any time.”

Seán O’Farrell returned to the village’s history. He lives above Courtmacsherry’s only remaining shop, run by his wife and naturally called O’Farrell’s. But he explained that a few decades past, when cars were scarce, there were eighteen shops in the village,
which then had a population three times its current size, most of whom rarely even ventured to nearby Timoleague. Now there is just O’Farrell’s. The railway that was a lifeline for imported coal and outgoing salted mackerel is forty years gone, as are a dozen other spurs that once stitched together the fabric of Cork County’s life. The village’s formerly substantial fleet of trawlers has shrunk to but three or, on a good day, four. Only thirteen of Courtmacsherry’s two hundred residents were actually born there, as the blood relations of the past have been replaced with holidaymakers and newcomers with no ties to the sea, along with the to-and-fro of transient Dutch, Germans, and Brits seeking Irish redemption. Rather than tending near fields, Courtmacsherry’s residents often drive an hour to their work, and unlike their desperately emigrating forebears, think nothing of jetting off for the weekend to Dublin or even Paris, which is little more than an hour’s flight from Cork City’s airport. But somehow, the lifeboat remains an icon burned into the village’s soul.

Mícheál Hurley, proffering another dark sculpture of a pint, spoke of the vessel’s power. “When I was a boy they’d launch a walloper of a rocket – it was called a maroon – whenever the lifeboat was heading out. It would shake the house and we’d stop our playing and run up to the pier, and the old lifeboat men would shout, ‘Keep back, you!’ as if it was the secret service. You’d see them hauling out to that boat gleaming offshore. You could not get that vision out of your eyes.”

I stepped aside, marveling once again at the conversational magic land that is Ireland, and looked around amiably – well, in fact, dumbly. Suddenly, it became clear that everyone in this pub and in this village had been constantly watching me. One of the three Fleming brothers, who acted as pub managers, gave a nudge. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?” asked Padraig Fleming.