In High Germany

by Dermot Bolger

  I went back up. Through the young German voices. I said nothing about the phone call to the lads. I could not tell them. They knew that I was living with a German girl. But nothing about our plans. But I knew at once that you would be a boy. Your high Irish cheekbones and raven black hair, standing out from all the German faces when I would bring you to school.

  Would you believe me, I wondered, when I tried to tell you about O’Brien. About the three of us kicking a ball around that dirty concrete schoolyard in Dublin.

  But as I sat on the steps of that hostel in the back of nowhere, I seemed to be on the edge of two worlds. Neither the Dublin I had come from, nor the Hamburg I had to go back to felt real any more. Even the news about you didn’t sink in. There was just this tension in the pit of my stomach that I knew would not stop until the final whistle blew in that game against the Dutch.

  We dressed in silence on the morning of the game. We wore the same clothes as at the other games. We looked at each other, not knowing where would we sleep that night. In Munich if we beat the Dutch and got into the first semi-final. In Hamburg, together for the other semi-final, if we drew with the Dutch. And if we lost? Nobody wanted to even think about that.

  “I never felt this sick before a game,” Mick said.

  We were always nervous before a game, but I knew this was different from ever before. This was no longer just about a football match. No longer just how long the Irish team could stay in Germany. It was about how much longer we three could stay together, pretending that our lives were the same. That we were still part of the Ireland of our youth.

  We got to the ground. Made it past the skinheads and the loose stones. Saw the vast Dutch crowd in the blaze of orange on three sides of the ground. We all packed into one corner behind Packy Bonner’s goal.

  There were faces we knew from the first two games. Faces from Dublin. Faces we had never seen before. All together in one wave of green. And when the game started we screamed and shouted and sang our hearts out for the lads.

  For Packy Bonner and Paul McGrath, running himself into the ground. For Frank Stapleton, suddenly old and making us old. Holding up the ball. Using up those few extra seconds. Paul McGrath rose at the far post and we rose with him, our arms out, flags flying, dreaming, praying. We watched the ball spin off the Dutch post. Jesus, how close could we get?

  Would this game never end? My mouth was dry. My legs trembling. My heart frightened me. An old lad beside me tried to sit on the ground, no longer able to bear it. All around us forty-five thousand Dutch roared their team forward. Drowning out our voices. How could we make ourselves heard? It was like throwing stones into the sea.

  “Sing your heart out,

  Sing your heart out,

  Sing your heart out for the lads.

  Ireland! Ireland! Ireland!”

  Could the lads hear us? Did they know we were with them? Half-time came and still we lived in hope. We sat on the steps, our faces white. Trying to suck in deep breaths. How could we ever get through another forty-five minutes in this heat?

  The lads were wrecked. You could see it in them in the second half. The Dutch passing it around, making them run for each ball. I closed my eyes and sat down, suddenly unable to watch any more.

  I opened them again as the shout went up. Forty-five thousand Dutch voices, filling up my head. Banging off my skull. The most lucky of goals, mis-hit. Leaving Packy with no chance. The flag went up for off-side. Then it was put down again. The Dutch goal was allowed. Shane’s hand touched my shoulder.

  “Its over,” he said, “over.”

  I stood up amongst the silent men and women, their faces white, and I raised my hands.

  “Ireland!” I screamed. “Ireland! Ireland!” I had six minutes of my old life to go. Six minutes more to cheat time. The crowd joined in with me. Every one of them. From Dublin and Cork. From London and all over Europe. And suddenly I knew this was the only country I still owned. Those eleven men in green shirts, half of whom were born abroad.

  Shane and Mick stood firm at my right and left shoulders. I knew they were thinking too of the long train journeys ahead. The tunnel was being pulled out for the end of the match. Men gathering down on the touch-line. We lifted our voices in that wall of noise, one last time to urge the lads on.

  “Ireland! Ireland! Ireland!”

  And then the final whistle blew. I lowered my head feeling suddenly old. The players sank down, knees pressed into the grass, as the Dutch jumped up and down. When I looked around after a few minutes, none of us were moving as the Dutch fans filed away, more relieved than happy.

  And when the Dutch were gone, we stayed on, to a man and a woman. Thirteen thousand of us, cheering, applauding. Chanting out the players’ names. Letting them know how proud we felt. I thought of my father’s battered travel bag. Of O’Brien drilling us behind the 1798 pike. The teachers who came after him hammering Peig into us. The masked men blowing limbs off shoppers in my name.

  You know, all my life it seemed to me that somebody somewhere was always trying to tell me what Ireland I belonged in. But I only belonged there with those fans. I raised my hands and clapped, having finally, in my last moments with Shane and Mick, found the only Ireland whose name I can sing. Given to me by eleven men dressed in green. And the only Ireland I can pass on to you, my son, as you carry my name in a foreign land.

  I thought of my uncles and my aunts scattered across England and the USA. Of every generation shipped off like beef by the hoof. And at that moment it seemed to me that they had found a voice at last. That all those English-born players were playing for all the Irish mothers and fathers written out of history. And I knew that they were playing for you too, my son. And for Shane and Mick’s children, who would grow up with foreign accents and Irish faces, confused by their fathers’ lives.

  All thirteen thousand of us stood in that ground, for fifteen or twenty minutes after the last player had gone. After Ray Houghton had come back out, sadly waving an Irish flag. After Jack Charlton had come back out also to stand and look up in wonder at us. Coffin ships. The decks of cattle boats. The queues at airports. We were not a chosen generation any longer. We had just been a hiccup. A small stutter in the system. Thirteen thousand of us stood as one on that German terrace, before scattering back towards Ireland and out like a river bursting its banks. Heading back to every corner of Europe.

  I did not need to look at Shane or Mick. We all knew that a part of our lives was over forever. We had always gone back home together before. Years spent in a limbo of youth. With poker games and parties in bedsits. With football in Fairview Park on Sunday mornings before the pubs opened. Walking out the long road to Rathmines on Saturday nights with six packs and dope and a sense that we belonged so deep inside us that we didn’t even know it was there until we lost it.

  “Italy, 1990 lads,” Shane said, “we’ll be there.”

  But we knew that we wouldn’t be there, even if Ireland got there. We knew that our new lives were too far apart, Jesus, we all felt so old suddenly.

  “We did it,” Shane said. “The first time ever. We were a part of it.”

  I can still see us, like in a photograph, on that platform. Twenty-eight years of age. One life behind us. Another ahead. Laughing together. Proud. Friends like I would never really have friends again. We shook hands and walked away from each other for the last time. You were a year-and-a-half old when Ireland played in the World Cup in Italy. I watched the games on TV. But I had more important things on my mind. Shane did not go either. He was getting married in Holland at the time. He wanted me to be his best man. But you got sick on the week of his wedding and I had to stay here instead.

  I don’t know if Mick ever came back from America. He never wrote. Letters and writing were not his thing. I suppose he saw the games in America, four years later, when we beat Italy in the World Cup and the bloody Dutch knocked us out again. But I may never know what happened to him. Your sister was born that year. There was no way I could go off t
o watch football in the USA.

  It is hard enough to find the money to go back to Ireland every two years. And, in truth, there are less and less people I want to see there. Dublin is full of jobs now, they say, with factories crying out for workers. But our roots are here now, in Germany. Your mother would never fit in. She has her mother and father here still and I have nobody like that in Dublin. Maybe I don’t think I could ever trust Ireland not to go bust again. Still, sometimes I think of talking your mother into packing up and trying to start afresh again in Dublin. But we could never afford a house there now. And, besides, I don’t have what lured my father home – I have no family waiting there.

  I’ve made a life for us in Germany, for better or worse. You can never go back. You can only go forward. All the same, with your golden feet and dribbling skill, you need not think that you will ever play for Germany. One day it will be an Irish shirt you will pull on. You will stand in Dublin to look at the crowd and say to yourself in German, “This is for my father.”

  Because it was the thought of you that made me turn my back on my native land, which had already turned its back on me. That night, after I left Shane and Mick, I walked down to a platform and boarded the train back to Hamburg alone. When the ticket inspector came in, he saw my Ireland scarf and nodded with a new respect.

  I remembered my father in carriages like that. Always coming home to his son in Ireland. But when I closed my eyes the Ireland I saw wasn’t the streets I had known as a child or the country fields that he had grown in. I saw thirteen-thousand sets of hands moving as one. United by pride.

  I knew your mother would still be waiting up. With you, my child, my future, like a tiny pearl growing inside her.

  “Come on train,” I said, “faster, faster, take me home to her and him.”

  The lights of lots of German towns spread out while the train raced on. And all the way back here to Hamburg it wasn’t the wheels that were singing. But the very web of train tracks, carrying all thirteen thousand of us away from there. Casting us like seed all over Europe. Those train lines were chanting …

  “Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé, Ireland, Ireland!

  Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé, Ireland, Ireland!”

  A POET’S NOTEBOOK

  This poem was written after I found an old set of records at home. Being used to CDs, my kids thought they were something from the dark ages.

  I put on a Tom Waits record that I had last heard over ten years ago. It was in the small flat of a friend of mine in Ranelagh, whom I used to call over to on a Saturday night.

  We would wander downtown to meet friends in different bars and maybe wind up playing poker for half the night in some flat. Perhaps some of us would crash out on the floor, or else I might walk out to Finglas in the dawn. Taxi fares were well beyond my reach.

  The poem is about remembering that freedom of my early twenties and those summer evenings of youth when time seems to stretch out forever before you.

  MARTHA

  I found the box of old albums

  Blew dust off a disused needle,

  Tom Waits began to sing “Martha”.

  Once again I was twenty-four,

  The pull of hash and tobacco,

  Cheap white wine at my elbow

  At the window of your bedsit

  In the dust-filled August light.

  A needle bobbing over warped vinyl

  One final time before we stroll

  Down to bars where friends gather.

  Decks to be shuffled, numbers rolled,

  Blankets bagged on some dawn-lit floor.

  Our lives are just waiting to occur.

  As we linger in the infinity it takes

  For the voice of Tom Waits to fade.

  Some years ago I was chairman of a company called Music Base. It was set up to give free advice to young musicians and make sure they were not ripped off by sharks in the music business. For some reason the powers-that-be were not too happy with this. Eventually for funding reasons we had to close down.

  A quiet, shy Irishman dying in a London hospital sometimes phoned the switchboard, just for someone to talk to. He was Rory Gallagher, the wonderful guitar-player who was such a huge figure in my childhood.

  When he died, we opened a book in the office where the public could sign or write something in memory of him. This poem, written on the day he died, is what I wrote. It’s set around the time when I was finishing school in the 1970s. At a certain point of every party back then, Rory Gallagher’s music would be played.

  I.M. RORY GALLAGHER

  There came a time on those summer nights

  When a free house had been found,

  And a cheap stereo rigged with strobe lights

  That froze each moment in your mind.

  You just knew when the crowd had waned

  And the wasters had long gone

  That soon the wised-up boys who remained

  Would put Rory Gallagher on.

  I was born at home in Finglas. I now live in Drumcondra. My house in Drumcondra is like a small version of the house in Finglas in terms of layout. So much so that sometimes when I look out the bathroom window in Drumcondra I half expect to see the long gardens of Finglas Park.

  This poem explores the idea that perhaps there is only ever one place we can call home. Even now, some mornings when I wake, I still half expect to find myself back there.

  The poem was written – like many of my poems – on the back of an envelope while walking my dog at night. Sometimes as you walk words just come to you. I had to tie the dog to the gate of a big house to have my hands free to write the poem. The owner came out and threatened to call the police. He thought I was a robber.

  Perhaps all poets at night get mistaken for robbers. But I wonder how many robbers get mistaken for poets.

  WHEREVER YOU WOKE

  There only ever was one street,

  One back garden, one bedroom:

  Wherever you woke you woke beneath

  The ceiling where you were born,

  For the briefest half-conscious second

  An eyelid’s flutter from home.

  I was almost forty before I knew that I’d had an uncle I never heard of. He died in great pain in Green Street in Wexford at the age of seventeen.

  Child deaths in those years and right up into the 1950s were common. Most Irish families have children who died and never got to leave a mark, or have children of their own to follow after them.

  I wanted to write a very stark poem in memory of those forgotten people.

  LINES FOR AN UNKNOWN UNCLE

  (i.m. Francis Bolger, died 3rd June, 1928, aged 17)

  No son or granddaughter to remember:

  No trace of your seventeen years left,

  Except in the mind of a younger brother.

  Sent out onto the street to wait,

  While you screamed in the height of fever

  For someone to finish you with an axe.

  My first job was working in a factory in Finglas. I wrote a book of poems, based on the lives of people I met there or around the streets at that time. It was called Finglas Lilies.

  At that time nobody wrote about the Dublin life I knew. I was very concerned to carefully put down names like Finglas and Ballymun in the poems and say that these places and these lives existed and deserved to be recorded.

  FINGLAS LILIES

  I:The party, June 1977

  A girl lies in the grass,

  Beyond the lights of houses,

  As dew soaks into her back.

  Flocks of leaves swarm

  Over them like water lilies

  Over a sunken garden.

  Dawn forms like silver stubble:

  An unshaven morning surfaces,

  Jaded and looking for trouble.

  Her hair feels like seaweed,

  Salty and drenched to touch.

  Like the cry of clubbed seals,

  Her scared cry pushes them apart,

  As he withdraws from he
r too late

  And dreams seep into the grass.

  II: London, Autumn 1977

  A tiny flat in West London,

  They live on frozen food,

  Make friends across the landing.

  At night she often cries.

  They make love softly

  For fear of harming the child.

  Developing like a negative

  In the pit of her stomach.

  They finally call her relatives.

  On the night crossing Dublin rose

  Like a curtain over a window

  With thousands of bullet holes.

  III: Finglas, 1979

  Steel wings at dawn sting like a wasp,

  In this factory where men curse

  And rust grows like hair on a corpse.

  She’s off to work as he finishes night shift.

  Today is their child’s first birthday,

  They’ll put his name on the housing list.

  Taking a chair he sits in the garden,

  Smoking Moroccan dope and tripping,

  The housing estate keeps disappearing.

  He feels himself at the bottom of a pond,

  Floating below rows of water lilies

  With new names like Finglas and Ballymun.

  As a writer with two small children, I use different rooms around the city as places where I can try to find the space and quiet in the daytime. Some years ago I found myself renting a room in Dorset Street over an archway which led down a lane.

  On the day I left the room I decided to walk down the lane and see where it led. I suddenly found myself back at the Temple Street Children’s Hospital, outside the same door that I used to enter with my mother. As a child I had very bad speech problems. Nobody could understand a word I said and I was regarded at school as a bit of a dunce.