A Singular Country

by J. P. Donleavy

  But in spite of the vast rent you’re charging and that they’re willingly paying, there is a delicate point here. No matter who it is of these persons you have rented to, it does do something irking to you to have strangers sleeping between your coronet embroidered linen sheets and sitting upon your flower decorated porcelain crapper. And then bathing with your imported from Paris bath salts in your private sensuously delightful ancient copper bathtub the sensation of which you have so long cherished. But the Irish of whatever social persuasion have never lost their faith in the eternal affluence of the foreigner. And these visiting folk are not only just rich, rich, rich. They are bloody damn rich, rich, rich. And it is to this land long renowned for its poverty that these well heeled now stream in their thousands. They arrive in Ireland with their secretaries in tow, their limousines with chauffeur having been flown in ahead of time to meet them. And how could they ever be called gaudy or inelegant wanting as they so genuinely do to sample the indoor aristocratic ambience of the life lived by these European gentry in their great noble country houses as their ancestors have done going back the hundreds of years. And wanting to flex your self importance kitted out in gown and black tie, and then reflected in the mirror on your grand staircase landing, descend slowly step by step purring with conceit to attend upon dinner. Where god forbid that the previous Gretch and Steve should be lurking in wait to dance their brand of attendance upon you.

  You may have now so far gathered that Ireland is a tourist trap, albeit of some unique qualities. Especially if your physical and particularly your financial capabilities allow you to pursue the country house routine of fox hunting, shooting and fishing. For there still are a few unspoilt miles left of land, lake and river. Plus let me tell you that in Ireland the first unmistakably genuine thing you sample is the bloody damp chill. Which even in summer amid these three foot thick stone walls of the mansion you’re renting can freeze the tits off even your best upholstered ladies. And if her husband is not dead yet, and travelling with her, can make his balls clatter ice stricken together till they bust in small smithereens. And in addition, as he tries to brush his teeth with them chattering in his head of a morning, the amount of toothpaste he swallows ruins his appetite for breakfast. But cheer up. As each year goes by much more central heating and soft toilet tissue will have come.

  But surely, you’re suggesting, there is yet another way that your native home grown squire holds on to his stately home and estate. And by golly yes there is. And although it takes a bit of your more intimate elbow rubbing it’s got its recompense. Your previous pasha squire who has solicited in your stylishly glossy, better foreign and American periodicals now lets it be known he is ready for a paying guest or two. Who might enjoy taking up residence for a few days and will wine and dine right in the company of one who is to the manner and manor born, and be safely permitted to ramble freely around his estate. Of course all these visiting folk are courteously warned to come with their dinner jackets, ball gowns and sweaters packed. The main big feature being the nightly intimate dinner parties with the lord and lady of the house. Who, although they will not join you for tea after your bags are unpacked, will nevertheless see you get real hot from the oven scones and a bowl of clotted cream with your choice of morello cherry, strawberry or blueberry jam. And this time honoured and nearly sacred ritual in front of your blazing library fire will really knock you out. And alert you to the plenty of more pleasures to come.

  Now you may have suffered in your considerable accumulation of worldly riches, many a snub due to your generally disagreeable looks, or worse, sneers at your race, creed or colour. So if you are unhandsome in appearance or a member in good standing of a reviled and thoroughly disliked and resented minority, the one thing you are really going to find an absolute delight here and totally contrary to what the world has been led to believe about this isle, is the utter lack of ethnic and religious prejudice. Nor is there any reason in the least to feel inferior in the atmosphere created by your host’s voice. Which will in this unusually sophisticated gentleman be of a most highly polished elegance. Which at the outset might delude you into thinking that you are in for a stuffy stay. Far from it. Your squire will put on a show you won’t forget. Indeed verging on the vaudevillian, this aristocratic and eccentric member of the gentry will be found to be a startling revelation altogether and unlikely to be encountered ever again anywhere. So make the most of him. Listen to his every broad minded, unbigoted plain spoken word. Watch him enjoy with gusto his Sancerre and salmon mousse as he sits up at his presiding end of the table in his blue velvet smoking jacket and in a damn good mood since you are paying quite an astonishing whack for your bed, breakfast and nightly dinner. And note too that there is nothing mediocre about the wine, and the food you and he are presently devouring is plentiful and delicious. Although he doesn’t mind your suspect table manners in sipping from the finger bowl or your reaching for the wrong spoon or in your asking him how far back his lineage really goes. Or should you be that crass to ask if that enormous pedigree hanging in the front hall is actually all his. Nor does he mind in the least if you question the solid quality of the vastly tall heavy candelabra softly glowing the pleasant light all over the dining room. So sit back and enjoy the utter genuineness of everything and everyone around you. You may bet your last two dollars that his ancestry goes back so distantly far that you are nearly dealing with the zoological origin of the species. And that the family tree elaborated in its four colour variation out in the front hall is only part of what he could display of warrants, patents, birthrights and titles. And you can depend too that the every inch and ounce of the silverware in this stately home is sterlingly substantial as is the gold your twenty four carat quality. And suddenly right in the middle of all your indiscreet questioning your host will tweak the end tips of his black bow tie, fetch out his monocle tucked in his cummerbund and place it deeply in his eye. And only a moment of silence precedes his launching into his best version of his stage Irish accent in all its mellifluous peasant colouration. And this is, as he in an instant switches from his usual culturally pure Oxonian Queen’s English, a phonetic treat without parallel to behold. For amid his jolly ranting, little particles of food, usually associated with the lower orders, will realistically fly from his lips. Of course he will readily admit to perhaps an ancestral indiscretion allowing an occasional peasant interloper to infiltrate his lineage. And will often at this point, as his pièce de resistance, get up, and while pulling his forelock, dance around the dining room like a clod hopping, bog trotting potato digger. Although his elegant and beautiful wife may not show unbridled enthusiasm for these antics you yourself may well find that you are being splashed as you uncontrollably guffaw into your soup.

  Of course, as you might expect, there are your slightly more serious snags in staying as a paying guest in some of these country houses. Your hostess herself sometimes would really rather you weren’t around at all, and occasionally has difficulty in disguising it, especially as having already impressed you and made you feel as inferior to her as invariably you actually are, due, of course, to parental consequences beyond your control. Also, instead of haughtily lofty service in the manner of a genuine liveried footman bringing around the bowls of Brussels sprouts and steaming spuds, some of your stately hosts adopt what you might regard as a boarding house routine when you find yourself blatantly handed in plain style your plate already covered with its servings of food. Don’t mind this one little bit. Look at it in the honest homey plentiful manner in which it is meant. And fork up what you fancy of this usually generally tasty home grown and nutritious fare. Your host without coaxing will further regale you with his brogue and may even, when he’s feeling exceptionally chipper, sing an Irish ballad to prolong the collective happy atmosphere. But do prepare yourself not to take amiss his outspoken rudeness about the people, behaviour and places in the country you hale from. Remembering always that your man the host, widely travelled and sophisticated as he is, is your real ecc
entric in a land full of eccentrics, and this is just a friendly little exercise to encourage you and your kinsmen to keep yourselves up to scratch. Something he himself is not averse to doing in calling, say, a local hotel to order, and not mincing his words when he designates the place a prize shit hole to the proprietor’s face.

  But hold on. You may at this point as a paying guest, pat yourself on the back and take a little credit here. Your evening in this country house is waning and mellowness has settled upon your chaps as the port has for the third time passed around during the telling of generally uproarious bawdily indiscreet stories and the ladies who have withdrawn are now to be joined by the gentlemen. You are by your mere presence helping your host to defray the cost, and in effect contributing to save the remaining handful of these great houses, castles and grand mansions. Encouraging them to still stand and remain able to function with their sadly depleted staffs, which at least keeps the ivy vines from clinging and climbing the stone walls and creeping into their master’s bedroom windows, finally to entwine around his four poster bed. For while these gentry folk stay alive and kicking under their top hats and tiaras, and their smiles keep smiling from glossy social magazines, it is their voices alone which are raised to embarrass, to shame, if not stop, the gombeen marauder. They alone prevent the stripping of the big slates, roof lead, and keep the doric columns from falling. They alone prevent a night’s pale moonlight from finally shining through this stately mansion’s front open door through which the winds might blow and upon whose front hall floor might gather a soft blanket of leaves. They alone preserve from the mould of death just one more edifice of the many already crumbled back into the landscape, and which was once part of Ireland and whose existence can boast of its being wrought there by Irish hands.

  And

  Thank your lucky

  Eccentric stars

  Who save

  These stones

  From further tumbling

  Down.

  JUST AS THE KNOTS ARE WELL TIED HOLDING THE WEIGHT OF THIS STONE TO KEEP HAV FROM STRAYING IN THE WIND, SO IS AN IRISHMAN’S BODY STILL BUILT FOR WORK AND CAUTION FOR THE FUTURE STILL WRIT UPON HIS FACE.

  IV

  But let us get back to your ordinary sort of down to earth Irishman, who by god in his own way and through an occasional fault of his own, has helped keep intact this country’s widespread Irish reputation. For there is yet another type whom you might at first glance think is an arriviste interloper. But you would be grievously wrong. For your man, despite his present day appearance in his gent’s natty suiting, was here once before, being born and raised on this landscape and would, prior to the advent of television, have been doing his bit of forelock pulling. But now, let me tell you, he would deign to take up the role of squire and move in where your previous Anglo Irish tread as settler landlords. He would appear out of the utter blue from your distant continents of Australia, America or even the next parish of Britain itself. This successful nouveau riche gentleman would be stepping down out of your first class compartment of your boat or aeroplane and he and the wife be festooned with the latest in luggage in which is packed their jade pot to piss in. Your man, all smiles, also would, if it wasn’t so filthy with litter, even kiss the ground he arrives on. But instead bursting at the seams with his packs of punt notes, the well known playful native currency, he boards his limousine. Get ready for him. For the Big man would be coming at you like a steam locomotive loose on the tracks. His good intention being that now back home he’d show them a thing or two about being high and mighty as would make even your former gentry take notice. Rolling as he now does down the laneways in his conspicuously élitist monstrous long vehicle with your plethora of mink rugs, shooting sticks, pairs of binoculars strewn everywhere over the back seats. And if, stopping at the pub, they were stolen while he was in having a drink he’d only nod assent and say to those avidly witnessing and listening around him,

  “Ah now me boyos there’d be more of them same things as have gone missing to be got where they came from.”

  Now then. Plain sailing is never your general condition in Ireland. And there’d be too, a few of your other difficulties maybe not counted on by your Big man. The next of these being the width of the big car that won’t fit to go down the old boreen, up and down which he ran barefoot to collect the milk and drive cattle as a child. And where at the muddy end of it he would now deign to roll up in his limo at the front door to be visiting his relatives in style. Plus having already had most of the vehicle’s contents stolen from outside the pub, he’d be a little less anxious to have it left now up on the main road. Even if it was suitably surrounded by the neighbours hoping to have an envious peek in the windows at the finery. But never mind, he’s now bought the big house beyond with the great ballroom and with the wide big gates where there’d be no similar trouble of space for his limousine to squeeze between the vegetation. And with him now able to roar in the gateway over the apron of pebbles and up the mile long drive to this grand great mansion once occupied by your previous Anglo Irish gentry. And why wouldn’t he smile passing between the rolling parklands to take up residence in this edifice long dominating the landscape and which he’s bought cheap at the price.

  Now your mansion into which your Big man has moved consists of four storeys high over a basement and with eleven bays on its front elevation. And having unforgivingly sat these past three years empty and unattended it would, as the estate agent said, be in need of a few of your renovations and repairs. But sure, a lick of paint here, a joist mended there and a few of your chimneys rebuilt and slates replaced, and bob is your rud. This last expression often used by estate agents to denote that everything is to be finally gained by buying this house and that the extensive dilapidations shouldn’t trouble you since money is no object and you can with an army of builders put the place back in good nick in no more time than would take a few years. Optimism is the theme song here. And this returned, flush with quids Irishman wanting plenty of freedom and space for himself, the wife and kiddies plus the few horses he would be keeping, has also bought the extensive acreage surrounding this mansion. For real wealth to the Irishman is land. And this land is land the agent has represented as being in good heart and your man should be glad of every acre he could get. And with a few cattle grazing it would keep it that way. And as sure as bob is still your rud, all you have to do is open up a gate betimes to let them in and out. The rest you leave to them ripping off their mouthfuls of grass and putting on the pounds, shillings and pence while you have a late hot bath of a morning.

  Now although your Big man wasn’t born yesterday he’d listen calmly enough to your estate agent extolling the money making virtue of cattle. And not many weeks later he’d have your pedigree herd out on the parklands and already have got your teams of builders in to put the missing slates back on the roof, rebuild the chimneys, and screw in tight again the hinges of the limping shutters. Action everywhere as the roof gutters are cleaned and the downspouts are rid of blockages and the dry rot poison is pumped in the walls. Ah but the native workforce has different ideas of decorating, architecture, plumbing and electricity than they do in the distant places where your Big man made all his money, and with plenty of your best advice at his elbow which he always had the good sense to follow. But already he is out of breath rushing to the crisis sites where the eager to please workforce had torn the faded threadbare silk wall coverings from the main reception rooms, and had already pasted on your latest brocaded orange striped maroon ersatz wallpaper. Ah but with the hammers still banging and wrenches still clanging, the misunderstandings upstairs, bad as they are, are nothing like those as has been going on down in the damp dungeons of your cellars where the gang of them are now non plussed scratching their heads over the big rusty pipes left there from the last hopeless attempt made by the occupying gentry to heat this massive house. And now your plumbers availing of the convenience of the previous pipes, have lost track of their own guaranteed hot central heating arrangemen
ts they’d mapped out to rage the calorifics through the miles of pipes in this mansion. With the moment now reached when the system has to be switched on for its trial testing. With hands resting on the radiators just to find out where water would, by a miracle, bring a little warmth. The switch has been thrown. The oil booms into flames in the furnace. The circulating pump surges the water through the pipes. And by god folks, get ready with your boots, oilskins and umbrella. For coming pouring at you through your brand new wallpapers just pasted up in every blessed room of the house, are your streaming jets of rusty liquid staining and soaking every blessed thing in sight. Let me tell you your Big man didn’t half do an Irish jig on the ballroom centre of the parquet floor.

  Now normally you’d need an ambulance in a hurry for the apoplexy but fortunately we’re not dealing with an American here whose countrymen, in similar Irish circumstances, have been known to enter into hair tearingly permanent nervous breakdowns. But never mind such plumbing drawbacks for the moment. For by god your Big man has put in the nearby town’s local newspaper adverts for servants of your reliable teetotal non smoking domestic variety. And now even as this house stands unfinished and is damp and icily cold, a butler, a cook, three maids and a gardener plus three men for the farm are on their way to make themselves immediately available to dance attendance upon this returned Irishman and his family. Who has just provided each of his five kids with his or her own pony. Now if you think waterfalls coming out of your random walls through leaks in the central heating pipes and pouring down through floor boards were giving your man a touch of exasperation, you have no knowledge then of the local willing and ready Irish domestic servant. For these be now in this day and age of a calibre that would, if you were serious in your enjoyment of life, be best to avoid and forget. Yet the optimism attached in assuming the mantle of squire, is possessed of a certain momentum and becomes an irrepressible disease as the disasters accumulate. With your returned rich Irishman stubbornly laying down the household law as your domestic servants just as stubbornly flaunt it while ensconced as they are, solid as you please, in your big mansion where they await over their cups of tea their Friday’s wage packets. Of course your Big man is not having too much of that, and doesn’t he pull on the switch to the central heating to jolt them out of their kitchen complacency with a wall and ceiling burst of water jets from the faulty plumbing pipes.