1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge

by Tony Hawks; Prefers to remain anonymous

  Rory returned from his last phonecall just as I was completing my first meal of the day.

  ‘Good breakfast?’ he enquired, making no apology for his lack of involvement in its creation.

  ‘Lovely. Thanks.’

  §

  Twenty minutes later I was in a taxi taking me to the bus station, Rory having charged me half price for the room.

  ‘Ah, if you’re staying in guest houses for a month you’ll need to save money,’ he had said. A nice gesture—or was he trying to tempt me back there to work full time?

  The taxi driver had helped me in with the fridge but had failed to see anything in it worthy of conversation. He had his own agenda and he wanted to chat about traffic congestion in the city, unnecessary roundabouts and the mindless introduction of one-way systems. Taxi drivers are the same throughout the world—great levellers. Never mind that Nelson Mandela, President Clinton or Michelle Pfeiffer has jumped into the cab, they’ll get no specialist treatment, none whatsoever. The driver will bore them just as shitless as you and me.

  At the bus station I was to discover that pulling a fridge on a trolley wasn’t easy amongst large numbers of people who were in a hurry. Cornering was harder than I had imagined and going down stairs was a particularly hazardous business. I knew that in the course of the next few weeks I wouldn’t want to find myself in a hurry too often. Selfconsciously I made my way to the ticket office taking care not to injure small children with my cumbersome load. I was aware now of the heavy rain outside and was approximately at the mid-point of a mood swing from jolly to despairing.

  I bought a ticket to Navan where I was to start hitching. I would be happy if I could make it as far as Cavan by nightfall and then take on the potentially difficult journey to Donegal the following morning. As far as I could make out from the map, the roads leading to Donegal dipped in and out of Northern Ireland, and I was anxious not to find myself hitching in that part of the world. Apart from the fact that I’d been told that drivers very rarely stop for hitchers there, I was conscious of the interest a small white container might hold for the security forces. Of all the romantic and heroic ways to leave this world, being part of a controlled explosion with a large kitchen appliance rated very poorly. Folk songs and poems were unlikely to be written, and not just because fridge’ is a very difficult word to find a rhyme for.

  The bus driver, a balding middle-aged avuncular figure, helped me load the fridge into the vast luggage compartment at the rear of the bus. There were no other bags in there and I was concerned that it would slide from side to side every time we went round a comer.

  ‘Isn’t it going to slide from side to side every time we go round a corner?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘Ah no, ifll be just fine,’ he assured me authoritatively.

  There were no views to be enjoyed on the fifty-minute busride because the heavy rain meant that the windows had steamed up. I don’t understand the physics behind why that happens but I do know that it does little to improve your state of mind. My personal mood swingome-ter had now left ‘jolly’ way behind and was nudging ‘despair’ with a fleeting stop at ‘mild wretchedness’.

  We ploughed on through the rain towards Navan, five of us dotted around the bus, either reading or, like me, indulging in painful self examination. There were no conversations to distract me from my immediate fate, the only sounds were the hum of the engine and that of the fridge sliding from side to side every time we went round a corner.

  Finally we arrived in what I took to be Navan. We went up a hill and on my right I could just make out a sign saying ‘NOBBER MOTORS’. Excellent—this cheered me up—a secondhand car dealer’s called Nobber Motors. Where the salesmen really screw you.

  I could fathom two other things from peering through the smudge I’d created in the window’s condensation; it was now raining harder than ever, and the town centre of Navan was no place to start hitching because everyone here was either shopping or going to the bank. Thinking there may be a suitable stretch of open road north of the town, I decided to consult the driver.

  ‘Excuse me, but is there a bus stop north of Navan?’

  ‘Where are you headed?’

  ‘Er…Cavan.’

  ‘Well, this bus goes to Cavan.’

  ‘Yes…er…yes…but the thing is…I want to get out at a spot which might be suitable—’

  ‘You’re going to Cavan you say?’

  ‘Yes, but-Well, this bus is going to Cavan.’

  ‘I know that, but—’

  ‘Where are you trying to get to?’

  ‘Er…Cavan.’

  ‘Well, this bus is going to Cavan.’

  I sat back down again, in absolutely no doubt as to where this bus was going. It was going to Cavan. From my point of view the exchange with the driver had been an abject failure. All I had succeeded in doing was confirming beyond any doubt whatsoever something that I already knew, and I now had a problem with regard to getting off the bus, the driver seemingly now having taken it upon himself to make sure that he delivered me to Cavan. Any attempt by me to try and get him to stop and let me out on the open road would result in his insistence that it wasn’t Cavan, and that his bus was going to Cavan.

  Now I could have insisted he stop and let me off; it was after all my inviolable right as a passenger, and what was more, I had already travelled further than the validity of my ticket permitted. But I was suffering from the English disease of not wanting to make a scene. like most English people I fall into the category of those who will suffer a third-rate meal at a restaurant with sloppy service, and then, when faced with the waiter’s question ‘Is everything okay, sir?’ will simply say ‘Yes, fine thanks’. Better that way than making a scene. The last thing you want to do is make a scene.

  Somehow I had to find a way of not going to Cavan on this bus. Without making a scene. I decided to try and sneak off at the next stop, hoping that there would be a reasonable amount of cover created by passengers getting on and off. It was a long shot but it might just work. Fifteen minutes later we stopped on the outskirts of a small town and a few of the people who had joined us in Navan got up and started to make their way off the bus. It was now or never. I quickly jumped to my feet and slipped between an old man, and a woman carrying a baby. It was touch and go whether the driver would see me out of the corner of his eye but I skilfully used my rucksack to obscure my face. I was good. I was very good, and I found myself descending the steps of the bus with freedom in sight. Such was my feeling of elation when I hit the ground and started to move off that I was untroubled by the driving rain which greeted me. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. The fridge! I’d forgotten the fridge!

  I turned round to see the bus doors closing. I scrambled back to the bus and just managed to slam my fist again in the closed door before the bus pulled away. The driver looked down and recognised me. He opened the doors and said, ‘This isn’t Cavan yet.’

  We were back to square one.

  ‘I know. It’s just that—’

  ‘Jump back on, this bus is going to—’

  ‘Cavan, yes I know, it’s just that I thought I might spend some time here first.’

  ‘In Kells?’

  He looked a little surprised, a desire to spend some time in Kells not being a preference often expressed. Looking around me, all I could see was a pub, a shop and the reason for the driver’s surprise. Then I became conscious of the rain. Hard driving rain. I remembered my comfortable lifestyle at home and it occurred to me that I needed to be somewhere where there was a pub, a shop and a head doctor’s.

  I responded to the driver’s bewilderment, ‘Yes, I like the look of Kells. Very much.’ I might have been overdoing it. ‘I need you to open up the back for me to get my stuff out.’

  The driver obliged, but with a lack of enthusiasm bordering on disapproval. He didn’t buy this whole ‘wanting to spend some time in Kells’ yarn and as far as he was concerned I’d let him down badly by not staying on his bus as far as Cavan.
He helped me out with the fridge, treating it as if it was a perfectly ordinary piece of baggage, and said ‘Goodbye now’ with a hollowness which reflected his deep disappointment in me.

  Oh well, sometimes you’ve got to tread on a few toes in this world.

  4

  Rain, Mud And A Jack Russell

  This was it. My reason for being here, the apogee of a dream held dear for so long and the inception of an unlikely and unpredictable voyage of discovery. I had arrived at the point of no return. I had my rucksack, I had my fridge and I had my desire. Nothing was going to stop me now.

  Except the rain.

  Look, I know it sounds feeble, but it really was raining too hard. To my mind there seemed little point in starting off the whole thing absolutely wet through and miserable. Okay—all right—and I needed to acquire some courage of the Dutch variety.

  When I wheeled the fridge into the pub, the head of the little old man at the bar span round immediately.

  ‘Is that a fridge?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, growing quite skilled at this response.

  There was a silence as the old man surveyed my baggage pensively.

  ‘Sweet mother of Jesus, I’ve never seen a man come in here with a rucksack and a feckin’ fridge before,’ he said. And the’n smiled, ‘Have you got a bomb in it?’

  I explained about my bet and he shook his head in amazement, but then conceded, ‘It’s a very neat little fridge—everyone should have one.’

  I agreed and then raised the question of whether there was any possibility that someone might appear behind the bar to serve me a drink.

  ‘Ring the bell and he’ll be with you in a moment. He’s busy doing stocktaking—counting bottles or something.’

  I rang the bell and in the ten minutes it took before it provided any kind of result I learned most of what there was to know about the old man’s life. His name was Willy, he lived in Kells, had spent the years between 1952 and 1962 in London, had fought for the British in the second world war in North Africa, was now spending his army pension money on one of his favourite hobbies—whiskey, and his blood group was ‘Rh Negative’. I didn’t even know what my own blood group was, but already I knew Willy’s. He’d just come back from Navan where he’d been giving blood and he was rather proud of the fact that there weren’t very many ‘Rh Negatives’ in Ireland. Lucky him, he had the privilege of being born special; some of us had to lug fridges around to achieve that status.

  The landlord eventually emerged from the bowels of his own pub, unflustered and unapologetic, and I ordered a drink.

  ‘He’s got his own ice,’ said Willy to the landlord, who didn’t get the joke because he hadn’t yet seen the fridge at the foot of his bar. Still Willy laughed, and I smiled supportively.

  ‘Do you do food?’ I asked the confused landlord. He shook his head and mumbled, ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Next year.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Next year. We start doing food next year.’

  I really was getting quite hungry and I figured that next year wasn’t going to be soon enough so I nipped over the road to the shop to buy a sandwich.

  When I returned the pub was considerably busier and there was much excitement and raised voices. The atmosphere was transformed, the only constant being that for the landlord, the counting of bottles was still taking priority over the selling of them. Two middle-aged couples had come in and Willy was undergoing a rigorous cross examination. As politely as I could, I struggled between them to rescue my pint and sat down to listen in until I had enough information to ascertain exactly what was going on. The newcomers were two sisters, originally from Kells but now living in Canada, and their Canadian husbands. The sisters had left Kells in 1959 and hadn’t been back since. Each disclosure of a Kells character that Willy and the two sisters knew was welcomed with a cacophonous enthusiasm which was visibly starting to piss off the husbands. They were already more concerned than their wives at the lack of any tangible barman. An almighty clamour greeted the discovery that the sisters’ mother used to do Willy’s mother’s hair many many years ago. Other discoveries of a similar magnitude followed until the atmosphere was suddenly punctured by a raised and irascible Canadian voice, ‘How does anyone get a drink around here?’

  Willy gently explained the protocol, the bell was rung and the reminiscing continued, but at a slightly more acceptable volume. It also entered a new domain.

  ‘Do you remember a little woman, auburn hair—a wonderful dancer…Rosie…lived beside the church?’

  ‘Yes, of course we do.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh dear. Mind, she must have been a fair old age.’

  ‘That she was.’

  ‘What about her sisters?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘And the brother?’

  ‘Dead.’

  The next twenty minutes saw the establishment of who was alive and who was dead from the 1959 population of Kells. The only high point was the appearance of the landlord which soothed the nerves of the Canadian contingent and saw my pint glass replenished.

  Then the ladies were furnished with two important new facts. That Willy was an ‘Rh negative’ and that I was travelling with a fridge. The sisters thought the latter was hilarious and it even caused some amusement in the long suffering Canadian camp.

  ‘You’re carting a ruddy fridge with you—for what?’

  I told them about the bet.

  ‘Who the hell is going to give you a ride?’

  I told them it would fit in a four-door saloon car.

  ‘Well, I hope you’ve got good walking shoes and a good ruddy mac.’

  More laughter. All of this wasn’t instilling me with confidence. The banter was all good natured but it was undermining my already fragile state of mind.

  I looked at the fridge and saw a toy machinegun.

  §

  I hadn’t hitched anywhere for about fifteen years. I was hoping the thumb hadn’t lost the old magic. I’d hitched alone in America, my obliviousness to the danger somehow making me immune to it On one triumphant day, I’d made it from Niagara Falls to New York City in a quicker time than it took the Greyhound bus. I had met a lot of nice people and experienced much kindness. One guy, seeing that I was hungry, insisted on buying me a huge lunch and when I thanked him for his kindness, he simply said, ‘Pass it on.’ I liked this selfless concept—repay me by rewarding someone else entirely with a generous-dollop of goodwill.

  The only slightly dodgy experience was in France when I was picked up by an elderly man whose second question to me was what did I think of nude bathing? Having originally said I was headed for Lyons, I immediately revised my destination and insisted he let me off in Chalon-sur-Saone. As I got out of the car he said something in French which I didn’t understand but I assume meant something equivalent to, ‘But this bus is going to Cavan.’

  I hauled my load slowly to a suitable spot by the roadside, noticing with some concern that cars were coming by at alarmingly irregular intervals. In a physical and emotional state close to numbness, I arranged myself by the roadside and tried to force myself to feel optimistic. Although the rain had eased off, it was still spitting and the clouds on the horizon suggested that it wouldn’t be long before the waterproofs would have to come out. I surveyed the surroundings with which I hoped I wouldn’t become too familiar and saw that I had chosen a bleak unwelcoming stretch of road on which to begin my journey. It wasn’t ugly and it certainly wasn’t attractive; it was just a dull stretch of Irish road. Electricity pylons, a couple of fields and the back view of a sign pointing the other way which, with any luck, read ‘NO SCOFFING AT THE HFTCHER’. I put the fridge a little way in front of me and leant the rucksack against it trying to create an impression of normality—that a fridge and a rucksack should be seen together, and I stuck my thumb out.

  A Ford Fiesta sped past. Then a Vauxhall Cavalier. A Renault next, and then a red car whose make I
couldn’t fathom. That was four cars and none of them had shown any sign of stopping. What was going wrong? Had they not seen that my thumb was out? Were they not intrigued by the sight of this fridge? A Citroen, a large truck, a Ford Escort and a BMW later I sat on the fridge for a moment and gathered my thoughts. Eight vehicles had been past and I had been there ten minutes. I realised that this was less than one car a minute. I checked the second hand of my watch, and waited a minute. Oh dear. Nothing. Things were going from bad to worse. Even less than one car a minute. I tried to escape from this statistical mire by giving myself a pep talk in which I resolved to think positively for a quarter of an hour or so. I got up off the fridge and attempted to stand in such a way as to present myself as a strong, positive man with an air of vulnerability about him, thinking that this might give me the best ‘across the board’ appeal to oncoming drivers.

  This gave me cramp. So I sat back down on the fridge and wondered how I could have been so naive as to have expected a steady flow of traffic on a main road. Maybe I should have got a piece of card with my destination written on it. Maybe I should have got a card and written ‘ANYWHERE’ on it. Maybe I should have recognised the difference between a funny idea and the practicality of attempting to act it out. Cars passed with an infrequency which left me having fantasies about traffic congestion. The numbness which I had felt when I began had long since disappeared and instead I now found my emotions lurching from one extreme to the other. Each time I could see a car or truck on the horizon I would become filled with expectation, ‘This is it! This is the one!’ As it drew nearer I would allow my hopes to rise to such an extent that when it sped by I felt bitterly rejected. Twenty minutes and seventeen bitter rejections later, I was beginning to feel a little low. Three or four weeks of this kind of torment would leave me in need of expensive counselling. My thoughts turned to the bet. I could handle losing a hundred pounds, and the knock to the pride would be considerably less than a daily dose of what I was having to suffer now. Contemplating giving up after less than an hour was not the start I had envisaged. No doubt about it, I was on the ropes. Actually I was on the canvas with the count having reached about six.