Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  “How extraordinary,” the tall, auburn-haired woman said.

  “There’s a family named Wilkinson that has houses in every place where you’ve stuck a pin. I had a dear friend named Bun Wilkinson who took me to every one of those spots.”

  “What? I am a Wilkinson!” she exclaimed. “Bun was my uncle!”

  My, my. “This is amazing. We’re about to head over to Carlow to see Paddy, Bun’s son. He won’t believe this.”

  “Well, he better! Paddy and Anne will be here in two hours! Wilkinsons are coming from all over the country for a family reunion. Put your bags down. You’re staying.”

  Ireland the inscrutable, the nursery of serendipity, was at it again. So we stayed up until three o’clock in the morning – the traditional hour for the first guests to depart Irish parties – while Paddy fiddled, everyone sang, and tales were traded with characters who threw out words like DJs screeching vinyls in nightclubs. Eventually, we awoke with gasps for water and an enriched appreciation of how exquisitely such uproar had been perfected through centuries of Irish party empiricism. A little bedside reader told of glory eighteenth-century party days in grand homes like Mount Panther, Mount Venus, Mount Misery, Ballyseedy, Ballyruin, Ballydrain, and Bastardstown.

  Jonah Barrington, the owner of a “pile” in the midlands, held one particularly rousing bash, featuring a hogshead of claret, mixed with a repast of slaughtered cow and chickens, bacon and bread. At 10 o’clock the next morning, the guests were discovered still crashed with insensibility around the dining-room table, with the evening’s comatose piper sprawled on the floor with a tablecloth drawn to his chin. In the stables lay four more guests who had careered toward their horses before collapsing into the straw. Two of the parched guests in the dining room had passed out against a newly plastered wall. The heat from the fire had set the goo like marble against their hair, leaving the gone-native Anglo-Irish stuck to the wall. But the resourceful Jonah Barrington took his clicker out of his pocket and clicked it, whistling in the local wig maker to extricate the unfortunates, ultimately by ripping their muddied hair off with an oyster knife.

  Our much more virtuous selves washed, dressed, and joined Paddy and Anne that afternoon for a leisurely cruise down the Grand Canal.

  Nearly a decade later, we sallied around the west of Ireland and were startled by the pace of change: bicycles all but vanished, cars roaring down once tranquil lanes, garish new concrete bungalows replacing whitewashed thatched cottages everywhere.

  Tick and tock went the clock to a sun-drenched August family holiday in a Georgian cottage outside Castletownshend in West Cork in 1998. Before us lay spectacular ocean vistas, with ruined castles and round towers on offshore islands and distant head-lands. In the local pub, farmers filed in at the end of the long summer evenings to chat and sing; it seemed impossible to think that dozens of mass-produced dreary holiday bungalows were soon due to double the size of this picturesque village, with its cobbled main street sluicing toward a sublimely sheltered harbor.

  Scrambling through gorse-ridden pastures, we discovered an ancient stone ring fort at the crest of a hill with views of endless bays, cliffs, and mountains – one of more than 40,000 megalithic formations casually scattered about the Irish landscape, invariably with no fanfare or visible sign indicating their existence. Runic whorls had been inscribed in a standing stone, and a murky underground passageway burrowed into an infinitely mysterious past.

  “What’s this, Dad?” asked Harris, forever fascinated by secret worlds.

  “Who knows? Maybe an escape route from the Vikings who would lop off the heads of anyone they caught, or a chamber for killing wicked people. Go take a look.”

  Jamie, not understanding the beauty of bloodcurdling visions, protested that dispatching an eight-year-old into an underground chamber indicated a deplorable lack of judgment.

  Not by Harris’s lights, because he quickly squirmed out of sight. “Cool! There’s some kind of strange ancient paintings on the walls,” his muffled voice quickly called back to us. So transpired another impromptu initiation rite into our family’s ancestral past.

  On the next rise stood a haunting formation of prehistoric standing stones – ten-foot-high, free-standing monoliths once known as the Five Fingers, although one has toppled over and another was dragged off long ago to become a folly in the gardens behind the mock castle of the ruling Townshend family, so imperious were the Anglo-Irish landlords of an earlier era. One could also gaze down into the estate where Edith Somerville-Ross, with her cousin Violet Martin, wrote The Irish R.M., The Real Charlotte, and other celebrated novels describing the privileged ways of their class and an Ireland now gone. Some homicidal fools from the local IRA knocked on that door one evening in 1937, and pumped her nephew full of lead, fifteen years after the Crown’s presence had been driven out of Ireland. Senseless.

  What did it matter now? The bitter religious divides and hierarchies of foreign domination have long since withered in the south of Ireland, where Vikings, Normans, and transplanted Brits – and innumerable modern wanderers like ourselves – have all been swallowed up and transformed by the island’s wily potency, and the seductive spirit that keeps hypnotizing anyone who long strays upon its soil. So I hiked the fields with the boys and took our young Laura to fling out our fishing lines in the next cove, and click, click, click. Even when we landed nothing, we hooked visions. Little did we realize that we were reeling in Ireland, and that two years later the catch would be complete.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 6

  Cork City is infested with odd characters and many speak in parables. On fine afternoons one of the street artists tapes an eight-square-foot canvas on a sidewalk to labor on a masterwork that will never be completed. His boombox swells out maudlin refrains from the movie Titanic as he begins each afternoon in art hell. Droves of tourists gawk at the near-photographic likenesses of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet reaching toward each other across a starry night while their doomed vessel sinks into the blackness beneath their ethereal forms. Leo and Kate are permanent fixtures, never to be changed by a single brush stroke. But the street artist takes pains to blacken yesterday’s details from the margins before renewing his caricature for a few appreciative dropped coins. His creativity is limited to doodling a fresh iceberg or crowded lifeboat in one of the tableau’s corners.

  Watching this charade after leaving the Hi-B on a late August afternoon, I thought about how difficult it is for visitors to Ireland to resist feeding upon similarly complacent constructs. A mental canvas is unrolled upon arrival, already dolled up with visions of a timeless green land that the tourist wants to be far different from home. First-hand viewing may produce a few fresh details in the margins of the visitor’s preconceptions, but the stereotypes are painted back in at every chance.

  Of course, nobody surpasses the Irish at making merry with this tendency. A few years back, there existed a kind of Cork drinking club called the Clancys, which had a loose affiliation with a similar collection of eccentrics in London. Hearing that the Brits were coming over for a tour of the southwest, the Clancys decided to show them the Real Ireland. So they recruited three local midgets, each smaller than Small Denis, and outfitted them with elfin jackets, tricornered hats, leggings, and pointy shoes. The wee fellows were then secreted to a Ring of Kerry field that the visitors’ tour bus, with several stewarding Clancys on board, was sure to pass at dusk.

  “Stop here,” one of the Clancys shouted as the coach approached the spot. “There’s a famous fairy circle just below and at this hour we might just see them.”

  “Sure, mate. We’ll go see the little people,” scoffed the Brits.

  But the visitors halted nonetheless – and shortly dropped their jaws at what waited in the hollow. There, sitting on a stool, was a leprechaun nailing shoes, another beside him whistling on a miniature flute, and a third stirring a little magic pot. Lost in reverie, they didn’t cast a glance at the white-faced English
men – until the embedded Clancys roared with laughter.

  A wicked joke, but scratch the Irish hard enough and you may still hear a thing or two about fairies. A country-born but city-smart friend named Lourdes, a teacher with a fashionable spiked hairdo that would fit in perfectly in London or New York, told an anecdote a few months after our arrival.

  “When I was about ten or eleven, I met a neighbor in the lane one day, an old lady named Mrs. Crowley. She looked so distraught that I asked what was the matter. ‘Have ye any news?’ I asked, because that is what everyone said when meeting back then. She said, ‘Someone has disturbed the fairy circle and the livestock are gone out of their senses.’

  “This might sound crazy to you now, but the truth was that a farmer had in fact that very morning plowed close to the village’s ancient fairy circle, and the horses had taken a terrible fright, broken through fences, and scattered for miles in a way that no one had ever seen before. You may be skeptical, but something strange happened to set them off like that, and I am telling you that even today, no Irishman with any sense would ever build a thing on an ancient fairy circle.”

  “No question about it,” nodded her partner, Hans. “There are realities still that nobody quite understands. When my mother was young, she heard a strange wailing outside at midnight and went into the fields to investigate. The sound was most horrible and got louder and louder as she approached a nearby row of trees. And what did she find there but a banshee keening and plaiting her white hair, then suddenly vanishing before her eyes. Two days later, my grandmother died. You can call that coincidence if you wish, because she was already ill admittedly, but it’s enough to scare you, truth be told.”

  The tricky path between truth and stereotype must be tiptoed gingerly when a family of five has to forge a changed life in a new land. Favorite clichés get shattered in the midst of the simplest transactions.

  A world-favorite stereotype is that the Irish are a supremely open people. Right. And Eskimos are just waiting to rub visitors’ noses too. Well, the Irish can be extraordinarily friendly, and will certainly talk your ear off when in the mood. They can also be suspicious and clannish and vacillate between every extreme of the emotional spectrum with an elusiveness that can leave a visitor dangling in confusion. In Cork, a simple inquiry about someone’s work status, even if you have been asked a dozen questions about your own, can engender long scrutinizing glances, as if the interlocutor might be wearing a secret tape-recording device. “Keep yes and no unsplit. And give your say this meaning: give it the shade,” advised the Romanian poet Paul Celan. In the southwestern counties of Ireland, collectively comprising the province of Munster, ambiguity has been perfected to a level that would do the Sphinx proud. In fact, the native Irish language doesn’t have a solid word for “no.” Road signs, when they exist, never say “stop.” That would be too straightforward. It’s “yield,” even when anything short of a dead halt will lead to a screeching smashup. “I will, yeah,” Corkonians say when they mean “never.”

  During a later journey to the beautiful island of Valentia off the Kerry coast, the director of Ireland’s westernmost marine emergency radio command center – an institution predicated upon the need for instant direct communication – waved out over the nearby mountains as if seeing inscrutable gnomes. A native of not-so-distant West Cork, Gene O’Sullivan said, “I’ve been here for thirty years and do not begin to understand these people. Sit down to have a pint with them and they’ll ask the most personal and embarrassing things without blinking. But ask them anything about themselves and they reveal nothing. Ask them if they think the black clouds overhead will bring rain, and Kerry people won’t answer. They’ll just say, ‘Sure, there could be a change in the air.’”

  In Ireland, the Kerryman is considered the “cutest” – meaning most shrewdly cunning rather than handsome – of individuals. He’s often called “a cute Kerry hoor” (a phrase applied exclusively to men) on account of his infinite capacity for duplicity, but the Kerryman is actually a cultural archetype. Pithy anecdotes about Kerry cuteness provide insights into the mysteriousness of the entire race, and, we soon found out, apply with considerable aptness to the clannish and clever ways of Corkonians.

  Things in this part of the world are simply not as they seem, until at least one comes to understand the meaning of cuteness, and the omnipresence of gates. People in Ireland’s southwest work invisible ones constantly. Look at almost every house, be it ever so humble, and the first thing you will notice is a closed gate.

  Our house in Cork came with a solid iron gate with a latch that clanked like a prison cell’s. At first, we seldom bothered with the thing. We still imagined Ireland as being a safe and freely mixing place, and had no interest in perpetuating some archaic class divide, just because our side yard, called a “garden,” was more generously proportioned and hedge-sheltered than the small squares of lawn that serve as most children’s play areas in Ireland’s cities. So the kids piled in, sometimes a dozen of them creating a three-ring circus out there, with two or three in the apple tree, another dangling from a rope swing, a bunch playing soccer on the lawn, and a couple more playing hide-and-seek in the hedges.

  After years of chauffeuring twenty-mile round trips for two-hour play dates, Jamie especially relished the easy comings and goings of neighborhood pals for the children, even though the growing hordes seemed to be proliferating unnaturally and were laying waste to our kitchen stores. “Do you think someone’s put up signs urging every kid in Cork to play here during the school holidays? They eat crisps as if the second Famine is returning, and I think they’re going to crawl into our beds if we don’t look out,” she fretted one late summer afternoon.

  “At least none of them mean any harm,” I rejoined, not realizing you should never ever tempt fate in Ireland in this way.

  Sharing too readily on this island, it soon became apparent, can be taken as a provocative act, exciting suspicions of boasting and preening. Unbeknownst to us, certain neighbors began to talk about our gate behavior. To them, it was as fate-tempting as disturbing a fairy circle.

  Meanwhile, a couple of less-than-friendly teenage boys from a bit further afield began examining the fantastical sight of our always-open gate. The boss had a squat body and dark eyes that seemed fraught with the confusion of adolescence. Often they’d hulk near the beginning of our walkway while a seemingly more innocent younger girl with them would venture forward a few steps to the edge of our lawn and wistfully eye the to-and-fro. Our landlords, who had lived in this house until we arrived, had manipulated the garden gate like prison wardens, and never allowed more than two kids in at a time. Suspicious and mean, that seemed to us. We still imagined that every kid within earshot would welcome our democratic new ways, which was as naive as thinking that all Irish people are delighted when an acquaintance gets a new job or car. Hah! To understand Ireland, one must learn to hear whispers.

  One day, Laura came home in a hysterical state after the younger sister of the Chief Scowler spat upon her for no apparent reason. We had no idea what motivated this – Laura’s foreign accent? Our strange gate behavior? Our newness? The size of our garden? Furious, I marched forward and gave the young culprit a good dressing-down. But this was far too direct, and not at all the way things are handled in Ireland.

  Undoubtedly the young lass had gotten the idea she wasn’t fully welcome in our garden, whether this was or was not true. So she got even. Little did I know that it was not our place as newcomers to remonstrate. Her heavy-set older brother made that clear by driving his bicycle straight at my much smaller boys whenever they ventured onto the common pavement of Bellevue Park. Appeals to his better nature fell flat, so then I warned him that I would not tolerate further bullying. That evening we returned from a pleasant stroll and discovered that our kids’ garden play furniture had been smashed to bits.

  Suddenly, our new lives seemed less carefree.

  Another neighbor came by for a hello, and a “No, I couldn’t poss
ibly, well okay, just a sip of wine.” We did the how-do-you-do, then moved to the Big Issue. “My mother thinks you’re crazy not to close the gate. She’s been talking about it every day, but she’s like that.”

  He’d given us a direct warning, then disguised it, as Irish people always do to cloud their meanings. In Cork, the lexicon of the unsaid runs deep, and conflicts are discussed in parables.

  In the nearby John Henchy’s & Sons public house, I met a raconteur with shoulders as broad as Bun’s and a surname in common as well – a distant cousin named Seamus Wilkinson. He told riveting stories about his native Galtee Mountains in Tipperary, about his father’s exploits in the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence, about various foreign adventures, about, it seemed, everything near and dear. Wonderfully gregarious, Seamus soon brought us a gift the next morning of fish he’d just caught. Yet it took ten months before Seamus revealed that he spent many weekends looking after the dying and infirm in the local hospice and chaperoned a yearly contingent seeking miraculous redemption in Lourdes.

  “Why do people in this country hold onto their secrets so fervently; why the half-closed gate?” I asked my new friend.

  “If you tell people too much, they’ll start talking about you,” Seamus said.

  Out. In. A newcomer to Ireland had better learn those nuances. They speak of gatekeeping, of ancient suspicion and deep guardedness in this land where the legions of informers to the occupying British and the Normans and Danes before them were the most reviled of toads. The burgeoning economy has created countless entrepreneurs like Seamus, who is a very successful builder. But nearly every one still watches their back and works their invisible conversational gates deftly, like dealers in a sleight-of-hand game of shells. Too much openness will merely get you dismissed as naive.