The Vasectomy Doctor

by Dr. Andrew Rynne

  A great crowd has gathered outside of Kilmainham

  With their heads all uncovered they knelt on the ground.

  For inside that grim prison lay a brave Irish soldier

  His life for his country about to lay down.

  Songs like this of course always appeal to a broad base of Irish audiences because of their emotional patriotic content. In that sense then it never really mattered if they were sung well or badly because their content carried them along anyway. I am not saying that Maeve didn’t sing them well; it’s just that I have always thought rebel songs were a bit suspect.

  I never sang or played in the Fiddlers Club. I felt they were too good for me. In any case I was never asked. It seemed to me that the place was alive with Clare migrants.

  Peggy Jordan, once described in the newspapers as ‘Mrs ten per cent’ set herself up as a kind of folk impresario. If you got on her books she would get you gigs in exchange for ten per cent of your takings. That was all very well and grand of course except that in the tiny village that Dublin then was Peggy was a bit surplus to needs and most people looked after their own bookings and held on to their ten per cent. That said though she was a most exuberant, generous and gregarious woman who liked nothing better than to fill her house out in Kenilworth Square with all us singers and musicians. These were the days of the brown paper bag and a dozen bottles of Guinness and all night sessions of music and singing.

  It was at one such party in late 1963 that I first met Luke Kelly, then just returned from England. To hear Luke sing in those early days was simply unforgettable. Because I think he may have over-reached himself during later concert tours with The Dubliners, his voice, while always good, did deteriorate somewhat in his later life. It was the way in which he attacked a song that really made the hairs stand straight up on the back of your neck. You knew the big note was coming up and you knew that when it did, then by Jasus Kelly was going to go for it. Head held backwards, big head of wild red hair and red goatee beard; once you saw him and heard him you were never ever to forget him. He was an inspiration to us all. His was a voice to aspire to but never equal.

  At this time Peggy Jordan was trying to put a group together to entertain the American tourists out in the Abbey Tavern in Howth. Just before this they had a jazz quartet do the job and Ronnie Drew and friends followed this when all the folk singing and music got so popular overnight. A formidable lady, Minnie Scott-Lennon, then owned the Abbey Tavern. Minnie was a slim white-haired woman in her mid-sixties. You’d know by the look of her that she had been something of a socialite in her heyday. She had one golden rule and that was that there were to be no rebel songs in her emporium. Just one rebel song and you were out on your ear. I never asked Ronnie why he left the Abbey Tavern but I do know you had to watch your Ps and Qs where Minnie was concerned. She would be easy to fall out with and Ronnie Drew was never a man to be overly concerned with Ps or Qs for that matter. Anyway I am eternally grateful to him that he did walk otherwise we would never have been offered the job there.

  Peggy held the auditions in the Abbey Tavern on a Sunday afternoon and anyone who was interested was asked to go out and strut their stuff. When my turn came along I sang ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’, a song that very few were attempting at the time because of the demands it made on your respiratory system. This done Peggy threw her arms up in the air and said ‘You’re in!!’ in that expansive way of hers. This I have to tell you was seriously good news because, provided we didn’t rub Minnie up the wrong way, this should be good steady work that would last for God knows how long.

  The original team eventually picked to play the Abbey Tavern were:

  – Myself, a first year medical student, a singer with lots of volume but not great tone and a mediocre tin-whistle player.

  – Dolly McMahon, wife of Ciarán Mac Mathúna and a traditional singer who, when on form had a lovely voice and singing style but was often very nervous about using them.

  – Jesse Owens, a male model, guitar player, good singer and all-round smoothy doody.

  – Anne Byrne, a singer again with a lovely voice and good repertoire of songs.

  – Joe O’Leary, a fiddle player from Ardrahan in south Galway who would recite a long poem about the races at Punchestown that always brought the house down.

  – Bob Lynch, a guitar player and singer (mainly in a Calypso style). ‘He’s football crazy, he’s football mad’ was one of his offerings. Poor Bob died very young in life.

  This group changed a bit over time. Jesse and Anne dropped out early, probably to go on to grasses greener. Peggy Jordan had her inevitable fall out with Minnie Scott-Lennon before we even got started. This meant we would be all ten per cent better off. Joe O’Leary left to be replaced by John Sheehan, future fiddle-player with The Dubliners. Pay was by a strictly equal divide of the door takings on any given night. We often had a full house. The best night we ever had I got eight pounds. Eight pounds in 1963 was very decent money for a short night’s work. It was a week’s rent for a very upmarket apartment.

  Because of the Abbey Tavern I was able to pay for my own accommodation and some of my tuition fees at Surgeons and thus take some of the load off my poor long-suffering parents. I bought a second-hand Heinkel Scooter 175cc, a classic machine that you can still see being driven around Dublin today. To go with this I had a leather jacket made up for me in a leather factory in Rathmines and I wore knee-length leather boots to college where the only dress code was that you had to wear a tie at all times.

  Two years of human anatomy and physiology and it’s the summer of 1965. At this stage I sit and pass the ‘halves exam’ and another milestone in my medical education is reached. Gerry O’Sullivan, the dental student from Tralee, and myself pack our bags and head for the big smoke. We are off to London to make some serious money.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Wild Rover

  When the Kerryman was setting off for London he asked his father for some advice that might help him succeed in that difficult place. Having thought about it for a while the father advised his son to look as stupid as he could and call everybody sir. Gerry O’Sullivan, my travelling companion and mentor on this my first working trip to England had a slight variation on this approach to success. Gerry thought it of paramount importance that we not divulge to anyone, either through speech, dress or general demeanour, that we were students. It was his view, and he was very strong on the subject, that if the hiring boss thought for one second that we were medical or dental students then we would get no work. Therefore rule number one: I was to keep my mouth shut, stay quiet and look as stupid as I could and let Gerry do all the talking. Gerry was gifted with a good strong Kerry accent while mine, at least as far as Gerry was concerned, was a bit suspect.

  Rule number two, and this was more difficult, we were to look scruffy and have dirty boots and generally try to look like the serious navvies that we were not. The first building site we called to looking for work the man asked me a few questions which I felt obliged to answer, thus breaking rule number one. Then, to make matters worse, my dress code as an unskilled labourer left much to be desired. We got no work that day and it was all my fault.

  The next day wasn’t much better and things were looking very serious because we were on a limited budget and our money was running out in this hostile place. At this stage we decided to split up on the basis that a single navvy had a better chance of getting work than a brace of navvies, particularly if one of them had a slightly iffy accent and polished shoes. The next day we both found jobs. Mine was out at Heathrow airport where they had just started to build terminal three. I was given a ladder, a lump hammer and cold-chisel. My job was a simple one, one with which I would have thought a half intelligent chimpanzee would have no difficulty. Where poured concrete oozes out between shutterings it leaves a slight ridge on the finished wall surface. My job was to go along and remove these ridges from floor to ceiling, using lump hammer and cold-chisel.

  Down below two electr
icians were working. They had to do some calculations and the one shouts over to the other:

  ‘Hey Mick, what is a third in decimal points?’ And Mick says ‘Jasus, I don’t know.’ And I suppose they felt that there was not much point in asking the Paddy up the ladder with the lump hammer and cold-chisel. And, had Gerry been in the vicinity, he would have advised me in no uncertain terms to keep my mouth shut and go on with my work. But I couldn’t resist it: ‘Point three recurring,’ I shout down to them. ‘Thanks mate,’ they shout back and no more was made of it.

  At this stage, although I was working at last, I still had to wait until the end of the week before I’d get my first pay and this was only Tuesday. I had in total about three shillings to survive three days in London. By now I had absolutely no idea where Gerry had disappeared to. He was going to meet some woman or other when last I spoke to him and that was the last I saw of him for the next two months until we were going home. I was abandoned and maybe I deserved to be with my anti-navvy ways. I went out and bought a dozen eggs and a pint of milk and resolved that this would have to do me for the next three days. And so it did. The eggs were knocked back whole with a half glass of milk.

  Things gradually improved. I met up with Luke Kelly who was living in London’s Finsbury Park at the time with his then new wife Deirdre O’Connell. Luke pointed me in the direction of some possible singing gigs though in fact these did not materialise. I moved from my job at the airport to a better paying one out near Dagenham Docks. Here I worked with a gang repairing and shifting railway lines. This work was extremely hard and consisted of either shovelling ballast between sleepers or lifting old rails onto open carriages. Now of course they would use forklifts. We did it with our bare hands, one man to every three feet of rail, all together now LIFT! We all knew we had to put the effort in because any slacking would only mean more hardship for someone else. We were a team and we worked like a team and, although most of my workmates would have known full well that my credentials as a full-time navvy were a bit dubious, that never caused any problem.

  In London that long hot summer, near Shepherd’s Bush, I first knew what it was like to be really hungry. Later I enjoyed the delights of a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea before the bus came to take us to the work site every morning. After eight solid weeks of lifting rail and shovelling ballast I do not think that I was ever as fit again in my life. Fit and bronzed and with a few bob in the pocket I am now ready to tackle the second half of my medical education. Summers from here on in would be spent in hospital and I can kiss goodbye to the navvy boots, lump hammer and shovel.

  * * *

  Third year in medical school is a funny kind of year when you study odd subjects like jurisprudence and medical ethics. This is also the year when we did some psychiatry and pathology. The dental students have now all left us and have gone their separate ways down to the dental hospital in Lincoln Place to drill holes in phantom patients’ teeth. Psychiatry takes us out to hospitals and we get to see some real live patients for the first time, albeit incarcerated ones. Even in the mid-1960s psychiatry was still in the dark ages and conducted from grey institutions behind twelve-foot high walls. They no longer chained lunatics to the bedposts but they still kept them under lock and key.

  First of all the professor gives us a short address on the two major psychoses, which are manic depressive psychosis and schizophrenia. He outlines the major symptoms of each. All of us have mood swings, he explains. We have our good days and bad days, our happy moments and sad moments. That is all very normal and human. But where the manic depressive deviates from the normal is in the intensity of these swings. When patients with this condition are high or manic they think that they can buy out the shops and stay in the most expensive hotels. Nothing is impossible to them. They are expansive and effusive and frenzied and likely to make some desperately wrong decisions. They are also in denial and self-destructive. When down, they become withdrawn and, in the more extreme form, can become catatonic – a state of total withdrawal from all outside stimuli. At this stage suicide attempts are common and too often successful.

  At this point in the proceedings in this lecture hall in Grangegorman, the professor says that he would now like to introduce us to a classical case of manic depressive psychosis. With that he stands up and taking a big key from his pocket he walks over to a door at the side of the room, unlocks it and admits his poor unfortunate individual. We are then invited to ask this man whatever we like. This is like a scene from The Elephant Man. This is my first introduction to a person, or patient if you prefer, in which I am cast in the doctor’s role and the man is being afforded about as much dignity as one would normally give to a head of cabbage. Why is he under lock and key in the first place? Does he not have some human rights? These were the kind of questions that I would have liked to ask, but wise undergraduates do not make waves.

  * * *

  We have all left the Abbey Tavern at this stage. We have had enough of it and they have made the venue much larger and the fun has gone out of it a bit. That said, I worked there for the best part of two years for two, three and sometimes four nights a week and never once did I think of this as work. It was always enjoyable and always different. But all things come to an end and besides I was offered a handier number that did not require our having to travel all the way out to Howth every evening. O’Donoghues of Merrion Row, the Mecca itself, were looking for some resident musicians and singers and I am asked if I would be interested. I jumped at the chance.

  This place is a phenomenon and an icon and it all happened more or less by chance. It is not as if the owners, Paddy and Maureen O’Donoghue, set out to own an Irish traditional music and singing pub. Far from it. They in fact owned this pub for many years and doggedly persisted with the then Dublin convention of barring all singing in their pub. Singing, for some reason that I never quite understood, was associated, at least in the mind of the publican, with drunkenness and rowdiness and debauchery and no ‘respectable’ pub therefore ever allowed singing. Indeed neither Paddy nor Maureen had any particular interest in or knowledge of traditional music as they freely admitted themselves. So how did it come about then that they ended up owning the busiest and most famous traditional Irish music pub in the world?

  It did not happen by design but rather by stealth. The story goes that one evening towards the end of 1962 Johnny Moynihan was in there and was playing the tin-whistle with his coat over his head so as not to be seen. This serious breach of convention was tolerated for a while but Johnny was eventually asked to cease and desist. But at least the ice had been cracked, if not entirely broken. Now, as we have already seen, a lot of singers and musicians were already congregating in places like the Pipers Club, the Fiddlers Club, the Wren’s Nest out in the Strawberry Beds, Johnny Fox’s up in the Dublin Mountains and the Coffee Kitchen in Molesworth Street which happened to be only a block away from O’Donoghues. Some of these people were also getting engagements to play in concerts and so on and badly needed a central place to practise. Johnny Moynihan was such a person and he already had a toe into O’Donoghues. Gentle pressure was brought to bear on Paddy and Maureen and a legend was born. Years later Maureen would often say ‘God was good to them’. He was indeed but it took some persuading.

  Maureen O’Donoghue was a stout lady with a big heart. She administered to her minions from the tiny kitchen that opened into the space behind the bar. Here at lunchtime she presided over an enormous pot of homemade soup and she made up sandwiches to go with this – cheese and tomato, ham or chicken with lots of mustard. From this vantage point she could see everything that was going on, which was usually quite a lot. Maureen never missed a trick. She either loved you or hated you with very little scope in between. You could easily find yourself barred from the pub. For example, wearing your hair too long was a classic barring offence and a rather odd choice given that we all wore our hair longish in those days. It was of course a matter of degree.

  But that said I do know for a
fact that many is the time that she would discreetly look after people by way of not charging them for soup and sandwiches or indeed the odd pint of Guinness. These might be men who had fallen on hard times or perhaps who may have been the worse for the drink. Alcoholism and ballads are frequent bedfellows.

  Paddy O’Donoghue too was a decent kind of a man with old-fashioned good manners and graciousness. He was bald, wore thick black-rimmed glasses and smoked St Bernard’s plug tobacco in a twisted pipe. He kept an eye on everything and made sure nobody got out of hand. He worked behind the bar and always had a word for everyone.

  We played there three nights a week – Thursday, Friday and Saturday. In our group at the back of the shop there were the McKenna brothers, Ted and Gordon, who between them played guitar and mandolin. They both also sang, Ted being the better of the two. ‘The Blackleg Miner’ was one of their favourites:

  It is in the evening after dark

  That the blackleg miner goes to work

  With his corduroys and his dirty shirt

  There goes your blackleg miner.

  There was Pat Pender, also guitar and vocals, and Pat Stokes who played concertina. There was myself on whistle and singing the odd song and there was Hughie McCormack, the Leitrim fiddle player who spoke fluent Irish. Other musicians like flute player Des Kenny would also join us from time to time. There were no hard and fast rules. Our job was to keep the craic going but if there were enough volunteers from outside our group who wanted to play or sing then that was fine with us too. We just let things roll and the evening often grew organically. We were on free drink for the night plus £3. There was a kind of gentleman’s agreement that ‘free drink’ was a maximum of four pints. There was also a kind of unspoken rule that you did not put it about too much that you were being paid for your contribution. The logic behind this rule was that if people got the notion that certain artists were being paid to sing or play then everyone else would have a right to be aggrieved if they too were not given a free pint having sung ‘Fine Girl You Are’ off key.