Round Ireland in Low Gear (22 page)

We now directed our bikes towards Dingle, crossing a miniature pass between two mountains with the snow streaming across it in the wind; and from there to Anscaul, from where another road led over the mountains to Tralee Bay, on the north side of the Peninsula, by way of the 1354-foot Connor Pass. It was under eight inches of snow, so we had to give up, and got a lift to Tralee in an empty removals van.

In Tralee it wasn’t snowing, only pouring with rain, and we chartered a taxi to McKenna’s Fort, a lonely ringfort in which Sir
Roger Casement was captured on Good Friday 1916. He and two companions landed from a German submarine on the vast expanse of Banna Strand, which stretches away for miles north of Tralee Bay. While doing so their rubber boat overturned and they were soaked. After walking inland for some distance they came to the fort where Casement remained, exhausted, while the other two went on to Tralee in order to make contact with Austin Stack, Commandant of the Kerry Brigade of the Volunteers. Casement was arrested in McKenna’s Fort that afternoon, with sand on his trousers and a used railway ticket from Berlin to Wilhelmshaven in his pocket, as was Stack when he later went to the police barracks in which Casement was being held, to try to speak to him. Casement did however manage to send a message out of the barracks, which was taken to Dublin by a Volunteer, telling the rebels that arms but not men were being sent to help their cause. By this time the
Aud
, in which the arms had been shipped over, was lying on the bottom of Queenstown Harbour together with 20,000 rifles, ten machine guns and a great quantity of ammunition. Two months later Casement was convicted of high treason and in August 1916 he was hanged at Pentonville, going to the scaffold with great courage. Stack was also sentenced to death but his sentence was commuted to twenty years’ penal servitude; he survived a hunger strike and forcible feeding, and was released in July 1917.

The fort was almost invisible, completely covered with brambles, as it had been when Casement hid in it. On the way back to Tralee I discovered from the driver that there was also a memorial nearby, which he hadn’t bothered to show us as he ‘didn’t think you would be interested in that old stuff, being English’.

Later in bed we read
The Kerryman
, dated Friday, 24 January 1986, which had the banner heading:

The next morning we took the bus back to Killarney, and another to Kenmare to pick up the van. We caught the night boat from Rosslare to Fishguard in a Force 10 wind, which smashed all the glasses in the bar when the ship cleared the breakwater. By one o’clock the following afternoon we were back at home in Dorset. It was Friday, 31 January, the last day of what had been an altogether memorable month. As someone said to me while high in the rigging of our four-masted barque, taking in sail early in the morning of New Year’s Day 1939: if things continued as they had done in January, the year to come looked like being ‘a focking no-good year’.

It was March before the terrible winter of 1986 released its grip on us sufficiently to allow us even to contemplate biking in Ireland once more, and June before we actually got around to doing it, by which time the weather, at least in southern England, had gone into what looked like a terminal decline.

Meanwhile, studying the newly published Michelin map of Ireland which, in spite of its modest scale, was as big as a spinnaker and as intractable to handle in any sort of breeze, I had what seemed to me a brilliant idea about how to overcome one of the principal factors that made cycling so unpopular with Wanda, namely, hills. (The other was headwinds: she had not forgotten how a freak blast had literally plucked her from her saddle down in County Cork in January.) My idea was to ride westwards from Dublin, not on the N4, which if it was anything like the dreadful N18 was best left to the Irish, but along the banks of the Grand Canal, which begins where the River Liffey meets the Irish Sea in Dublin Bay and eventually comes to an end at Shannon Harbour. I figured this would entail the minimum amount of hill climbing, eighteenth-century canal builders and their financial sponsors being very sensitive to any unnecessary variations in the level of their creations. Another advantage, in
theory anyway, was that we would only rarely encounter motor vehicles. And in the unlikely event of the Irish wind choosing to blow from points east instead of west, then that would be in the nature of a bonus.

Which was why, off the boat from Holyhead at Dun Laoghaire (pronounced Dunleary) we found ourselves the following morning astride our bikes, armed with nothing more lethal than a couple of bicycle pumps, in a run-down, spooky, some might say positively dangerous area of Dublin dockland. To be precise, we were down by what were the Grand Canal Docks, otherwise the Outer and Inner Ringsend Basins, until they ceased to be used commercially in 1960. Now the only vessels in this expanse were a couple of small trawlers with no one on board, moored just inside the lock gates. Immediately downstream, the River Dodder enters the Liffey more or less at the point where the Liffey enters the Irish Sea, which is also where Oliver Cromwell landed in 1646 with twelve thousand men and an artillery siege train to begin the subjugation of Ireland.

These Docks are bounded by ruined warehouses, some of them overgrown with ivy and intersected with streets, some of them cobbled, and some, that morning at any rate (just in case the Corporation writes to me inviting me to eat my breakfast off them, in the way corporations do after cleaning up), littered with every kind of imaginable rubbish, including mattresses bursting at the seams and looking as horrible as only mattresses can, enough broken glass to warrant opening a bottle recycling factory on site, and bundles of what had been newspapers but were now gooey masses of papier mâché.

And across the water from where we were standing, beyond Charlotte Quay and what used to be the Dublin Tramway Power House, was the Inner Dock Basin by the Ringsend Bridge, which links Pearse Street with Ringsend Road, which in turn leads into
Irishtown Road and Sandymount: streets traversed eighty-two years previously (give or take a few days) by Leopold Bloom, seated uncomfortably on a piece of lemon-scented soap (obtained from Sweney’s the chemist in Lincoln Place), in a funeral carriage that formed part of the modest cortège which accompanied the remains of Paddy Dignam to Prospect Cemetery on Finglas Road, out beyond Mountjoy Prison and the Royal Canal.
³⁹
There, on 16 June 1904, he was deemed to have been laid to rest in company with, among others, Parnell, O’Connell, Collins and the veteran Fenian, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who died in New York in 1915. Casement’s remains were not taken there until 1966, fifty years after his execution in Pentonville Gaol; remains which, some ghouls suggested, were inextricably mixed with those of Crippen the poisoner, which like Casement’s had been buried in quicklime in the same patch of unconsecrated ground.

In all this extensive and melancholy landscape on this cool, grey summer’s morning the only living things in sight apart from ourselves were a solitary, snooty-looking seagull afloat in the Outer Basin and an over-sized ginger cat which was digging into some ordures in Green Street, off Britain Quay. In spite of this solitude we still had the uneasy feeling that if we stayed around in these parts we might get taken apart, a feeling that comes over one – well, it certainly comes over me – in any derelict, semi-populated urban area, potentially full, as Dublin certainly is, of heroin addicts and muggers. But by the time I had begun to think about saying, ‘Let’s get outta here!’ like the guys in those 1930s B pictures, Wanda was already getting out, head down and pedalling away like mad, up Hanover Quay, along Grand
Canal Quay at the foot of Misery Hill, past sundry decrepit gas works and along the Inner Basin,
⁴⁰
before she dived under Maquay Bridge where the Grand Canal, Circular Line, begins at Lock No. 1.

Beyond this first lock, lined with noble trees, its grassy banks positively arcadian and in places overlooked by elegant terrace houses, the Canal curved away through unexplored tracts of South Dublin, following the same route as the Circular Road, built around the same time as the Canal in the mid 1790s. Now most of the through traffic follows a more modern route to the north, leaving the inhabitants of the Canal banks and the old road in relative peace. In the first quarter of a mile or so a series of four locks lifted the Canal, and us with it, a dizzy 29.8 feet above sea level without either of us noticing it. If it went on like this we would be laughing all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Not a boat to be seen in this section. Hardly surprising. ‘It is a good idea to seek the help of the lock keepers passing through the city section and even ask the Inland Waterways Association to provide a shore party,’ writes Ruth Delany in her
Guide to the Grand Canal
(1986). Hazards include having one’s boat stripped of its contents if left unattended, and being pelted with stones by schoolchildren. The offices of Bord Failte, the Irish Tourist Board, are at the fourth lock, behind expanses of glass that one would have thought would present a much more tempting target for stone-throwing children than a cabin cruiser and its crew, but there is no accounting for juvenile tastes. At this fount of knowledge I stocked up on such free literature as
A Visitor’s Guide to
Pubs in Dublin
, though I had not much hope of seeing, let alone entering one on this particular trip.

One of the nicest pubs I remembered from time past in Dublin was Doheny and Nesbitt’s establishment in Lower Baggot Street, only a short distance from where we were now standing. Full of mahogany, cut and uncut glass, and mysterious partitions of a sort that always made me feel, hiding behind them, that I had come to denounce someone to the Dublin equivalent of the Council of Ten, it had a snug out front and a room at the back for ladies, or was it the other way round? In another half hour it would be open and I would be elsewhere, somewhere up the Circular Line or beyond.

By now the sun was coming out and it was going to be a lovely day. Just beyond this lock, beautifully inscribed on what resembled a headstone, and miraculously unvandalized, was a poem written by Patrick Kavanagh (1905–67), son of a farmer and shoemaker in County Monaghan and himself a farmer – a poem that in the circumstances made appropriate reading, even if it was June not July:

Just by this stone was the seat for the passer-by, one who in this instance looked more like a permanent fixture: an emaciated Gael – he would probably have described himself, modestly, as being ‘on the tin soide’ – fortyish, with two mid-front upper incisors missing and wispy hair. He was dressed in a thick, dark, hand-made greatcoat several sizes too large for him, with puke on the lapels and equally over-size boots without laces, as if to emphasize, as the bound feet of Chinese ladies once did, the sedentary position of those who wear such footwear in life’s race.

He was not the sort of citizen the Americans call a bum, or the British a down-and-out, but what the Dublin writer Tom Corkery used to say was ‘a mouth’ to his friends, ‘a character’ to tourists and ‘a non-productive unit’ to economists: non-productive, but unlike a real bum or down-and-out, certainly supported by some unfortunate woman, perhaps two unfortunate women and/or other next-of-kin.

‘Have a place on Paddy’s Seat,’ said this non-productive unit graciously, moving sideways a perceptible bit to give me more
lebensraum
if I wanted it.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I won’t actually. I’m bicycling and my wife’s way on ahead; but before I go, tell me, what do you think of Kavanagh?’

‘I tink of him as a toughtful man to give me a seat here by the water, which I can use for the rest of me natural life, God willing, and as a great poet, too. Have you read “The Great Hunger”, that’s his best in every way, the one that begins “Clay is the word and clay is the flesh”? It’s a long poem but I have most of it by heart if you would like to hear it.’

‘I’m afraid it will have to be some other time,’ I said. ‘I’ve got
to get on.’ By now I was feeling like the Water Rat when he meets the Seagoing Rat who almost persuades him to go to sea.

‘He died of the drink, they say; but he was a good age for a drinking man, sixty-two, or tree. Dere was only one man he couldn’t abide, that was Brendan Behan. He was a
comic
, Paddy Kavanagh.’

To the right and left now, 99.9 per cent of it out of sight, was Dublin, inhabited as the spirit and events moved them by Gaels, Norsemen, Normans, Huguenots, Flemings and others: city of Sheridan, Shaw (who hated it), O’Casey, Joyce (who apparently hated it) and so on. Or rather, around us now was what is left of it following the 1916 Rising, the Civil War and the ministrations of vandals, demolishers and improvers in the guise of town planners.

Dublin must be one of the few capital cities in the world which has turned its splendid Parliament House, originally designed by Edward Lovett Pearce, into a bank – the Bank of Ireland – in 1802. Well, they had to turn it into something, not having a parliament any more. The Irish destroy so many of the things they love – or ought to love until they can produce something better to take their place. Instead of simply removing Nelson from his pillar in O’Connell Street, putting him through a crusher and having him recycled into some more homely folk hero such as Collins, Casement, or even O’Connell himself, in 1966 they chose to blow the whole thing, pillar and all, to smithereens. Thus, in one mad stroke, was destroyed the last embellishment, apart from the façade of the General Post Office, of what had been one of the more beautiful eighteenth-century streets in Europe.

It is a city in which the inhabitants were, as I remembered, completely indifferent to the march of time (which meant an almost total inability to keep appointments, at least on the right
day), to the weather, to what is commonly regarded as edible food, and to their surroundings, but capable of talking the hind legs off the biggest herd of donkeys ever conceived; their folk heroes racehorses (but not the riders), greyhounds and whippets, footballers, hurlers and prisoners, preferably political; impatient of and despising authority; hating what those who were not ‘offeecials’ referred to as ‘offeecials’ while longing secretly to be ‘offeecials’ themselves. A city in which, at this very moment, many of them would be drinking their first pint of the day from a glass without a handle in one of what were, when I was last there, its seven hundred or more pubs; pubs which, ideally for the older drinker, would have an ambiance compounded of brown-painted lincrusta and glittering glass; pubs in which the drinkers used to drink in companies or schools, each one waiting his turn to buy his round of what was called ‘the gargle’, which ensured that everyone had six drinks instead of three. For this was a city in which few men drank at home unless they were already drunk, or otherwise incapacitated, on the grounds that it didn’t taste the same as in a bar: ‘Now, Mr O’Leary sir, I tink you’ve had enough for a bit, sir.’ I remembered singing pubs; pubs that looked more like libraries, but with bottles not books on the shelves; theatre pubs; pubs with poetry; one pub reputed to be used only by market women and no men; another a favourite stopping-off place for mourners on their way back from Glasnevin Cemetery. Here, in The Brian Boru House, the wake still flourished and you could drink ‘a ball o’malt’, Irish whiskey from a wooden cask. Hickey’s, on City Quay, had one of the best pints anywhere.