A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  After my trip to John Kavanagh and the north side, I retraced the familiar route, convinced now that I was more likely to find traditional pubs in those neighborhoods where pistachio oil hadn’t yet arrived. Ringsend qualifies handsomely in that respect. It has no “destination” restaurants, only a small café, a chip shop, and Good View Chinese, a takeaway place. There are no video stores, either, and no supermarkets, just one master butcher and a mom-and-pop grocery with giant turnips and huge bundles of kale out front in season. The presence of Paddy Power and Ladbrokes, two bookie joints filled with ardent punters, was another encouraging sign, and so, too, was Cecil’s Barbershop, a trig red and white building where senior citizens availed themselves of budget haircuts three days a week.

  Here was the home territory of the notoriously thirsty dockers, and though the new high-rise apartments and office blocks have altered the face of the quays on the Liffey, Ringsend retains a trace of the seaman’s salty swagger. The village grew up around St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, where two streets converge to form a hub. The city center may be only a mile away, but Ringsend feels enclosed, apart, an entity onto itself. It has no shortage of pubs. Clustered on one street are the Raytown Bar, Hobblers End, and the Oarsman, while on the other the Yacht and Sally’s Return stand almost side by side, their windows bedecked with model ships and ropes hitched into the panoply of knots featured in sailor’s manuals.

  Indeed, Ringsend had served as Dublin’s port in the early 1700s, when packet boats from England tied up offshore. Passengers boarded a smaller craft to reach the city, or used a Ringsend Car, horse-drawn and able to negotiate the Dodder’s mudflats at low tide, although the journey was scarcely salutary. “It is one of the most horrible stinks of filth I ever beheld,” wrote a reluctant visitor. “Every house swarmed with ragged, squalid tenancy, and dung and garbage lay in heaps.” Crime was rampant, especially around villainous Beggars Bush, a hill overlooking Dublin Bay, where thieves and other scoundrels watched and waited for travelers. With five main roads to pillage, the highwaymen pursued their quarry so skillfully that the locals carried arms at night. The Brennans, a family of bandits, once holed up at the King’s Head for several days and left with about twelve thousand pounds sterling in stolen property.

  Pubs like the King’s Head played an active and perhaps overriding role in the social life of the village, where a third of the residences were licensed as alehouses. Few were as fancy as the Conniving House, located just a few yards from the water. An anonymous Brit bunked there for a while, and filed a dispatch full of praise. “Here we used to have the finest fish at all times,” he enthused, “and in season, green peas and all the most excellent vegetables. The ale here was always extraordinary, and everything the best. Many a delightful evening I passed in this pretty thatched house with the famous Larry Grogan, who played the bagpipes extremely well; Jack Lattin, matchless on the fiddle and the most agreeable of companions.” Acclaimed, too, were the oysters at the Sign of the Good Woman, and the cockles, shrimp, and wine at the Sign of the Highlander.

  Though Ringsend lost its currency as a port eventually, it still harbored a fishing fleet and became known as Raytown, because the ships caught so many rays. They caught whiting and mackerel, as well, and also herring to be sold for export, but the fishing declined by the 1850s as did the entire neighborhood, its houses dilapidated and its streets rougher than ever. (In Dublin slang, a “Ringsend uppercut” means a kick in the balls.) Here on Newbridge Avenue you found the home of the fictional Paddy Dignam, who died in a drunken stupor and was buried at Glasnevin under the auspices of Mr. Joyce, while Oliver St. John Gogarty, apparently never uninspired, contributed a few celebratory lines about the village:

  I will live in Ringsend

  With a red-headed whore

  And the fan-light gone in

  Where it lights the hall-door;

  And listen each night

  For her querulous shout

  As at last she streels in

  And the pubs empty out.

  It was in Ringsend, too, that Joyce went walking with Nora Barnacle on June 16, 1904.

  With the advent of the dockers, Ringsend flourished again. Beyond the village, Georgian tenements stretched from the Dodder to Westland Row downtown, where schoolboys finagled tips by toting the bags of overburdened travelers from the train station to a taxi or a hotel. In summer the boys swam in the Grand Canal at Baggot Street Bridge and cavorted among the barrels and cranes strung along the waterfront, sometimes pulling the bung from a keg and spilling beer the way kids in Manhattan tap into fire hydrants, but their mothers played a trickier game by far when they tried to outwit the rent collector. We’ll call him Mr. Wolfe and extend him some sympathy, because he was terribly overmatched as the St. Andrew’s Heritage Project once recorded in a typical colloquy.

  “C’mon, little ladies,” Mr. Wolfe might start. “Pay your rent.”

  “What, I gave it to him, I’m after giving it to you,” a mother replies, acting wounded.

  “You did not.”

  She turns to another woman. “Did I not give him the rent?”

  “I saw you, sure as God in heaven,” the neighbor testifies. “I saw you give him the rent.”

  “You didn’t give me any,” Wolfe insists.

  “I did give it to you. Now don’t stand there and tell me I didn’t.”

  “Oh, hold now, maybe you did. I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

  “Well, you better mark it down, because I’m after paying you.”

  Cowed, Wolfe marks it down, but the mothers aren’t done with him yet. Instead, they gang up and accost him in chorus. “I paid you, too,” they all swear. “I paid you when she was paying you,” and so on until Wolfe admits both utter confusion and absolute defeat, exiting stage left. No doubt Wolfe also heard another standard excuse when he knocked on doors, part of Irish folklore by now, where a child answers and says, “Me mammy inside told me to tell you she was out.”

  To Willie Murphy, who grew up in a tenement on Holles Street with nine siblings and a docker father, the ruckus would be familiar. As a boy, he earned sixpence a week from a neighbor woman whose husband, a bricklayer, was an awful drunk. When the bricklayer ran through his money, his wife hired Willie to pawn his only suit so she could feed the family, and Willie would pick up the suit again in time for Sunday Mass. (The bricklayer finally fell under a truck and died.) Though his own dad, Willie Sr., drank and gambled, he was still the proverbial good provider and gave Mrs. Murphy fifteen shillings every day, whether or not he had any work. She objected once that Lily down the block got twenty-five shillings, and Willie Sr. agreed to pay that much, but only on the days when he did find work. Mrs. Murphy, no gambler herself, backed off and settled for a steady sum.

  Willie Murphy told me those stories at his little house off the village hub, as neat and tidy as a ship’s cabin. I’d been asking around for someone with roots in Ringsend, preferably a docker who knew the pub scene well, and Willie fit the bill. He was watching an episode of The Virginian when I stopped by, Westerns being a staple on Irish TV. He’s still a powerful-looking man at the age of sixty-nine, broad through the chest and thick in the forearms, with a standard tattoo on the right one. There was a healthy glow about him, an ease of being. He dressed neatly, too, in jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a pair of sandals. His white hair was cut short, and his blue eyes sparkled with wit and intelligence. Though Willie had suffered through the “bad, bad, bad old days,” he had an aura of contentment.

  Murphys are everywhere in Ringsend, Willie said, patting his dog Charlie. His own family hailed from Wexford, four brothers who labored as sailors and shipwrights and built smacks, or ketch-rigged fishing boats. Willie Sr. followed the usual docker’s routine and shaped up before a stevedore every morning for a “read,” where the day’s jobs were allotted. The men were dispatched to various quays, and those who struck out and failed to be tapped often went right to a pub—one out of every five houses or so, by Will
ie’s count. Even if they were broke, they managed to cadge a drink. They’d hook up with a mate who was “in the goo,” solvent rather than “on the slate,” in debt to the publican. The cash for pints was never a problem, really. Willie Sr., when short in the pocket, used to borrow a fiver from Billy Lynch, who ran his local, and kept two pounds for himself before he surrendered the balance to his wife.

  Dockers were brilliant at funding their habit, according to Willie. They might be employed, but they still signed up for the dole and collected every Tuesday. On Wednesday, they hit the tax office on the chance of a rebate, while on Thursday they received their checks from the Central Pay Office, an obvious cause for celebration. The drinking was every bit as epic as I’d read. The average docker who shoveled coal ate a sandwich and downed two or three pints at the beero hour, and two or three pints before lunch at one, the big meal of the day, and then two or three more during the afternoon break. The serious boozing began after quitting time, when the pubs filled again after the men ate a light supper. The standard measure was six to eight pints, Willie guessed.

  “You sweat it out of you in a couple of hours,” he swore. “It goes right through you.”

  “No hangover? No ill effects?”

  “Not for me.”

  The great danger for dockers, it seems, was that they’d spend all their cash on the craic, so they separated the money for household expenses from their drinking stash, tying it up in a handkerchief and tucking it into a shirt pocket. As the evening progressed, the craic affected their judgment, and some fellows dipped into the bundle for another round. At home, the embarrassed offenders avoided their wives and left the expense money, considerably reduced, on a table or a mantlepiece rather than hand it over and risk a confrontation. The wives hated the tactic and sometimes tossed the pittance out a window, shouting, “That’s not my money!” meaning it was less than they expected. The dockers reacted with aplomb. “Must be mine, then,” they’d say, grabbing the change and reserving it for a pint.

  “The women didn’t have a look in. It was a fuckin’ terrible system in those days.” Willie broke into a sly, ironic grin. “The halcyon days of manhood.”

  Willie joined the system when he left school at twelve and later took a job shoveling coal off the ships. It was filthy, miserable, punishing, sapping work for a young person. Willie’s hands were torn up and covered with lumps, callused and bloodied, and the harangues of his bosses were unrelenting. He had no recourse, either. A job of any kind was difficult to land, so you put up with all sorts of abuse. A sixteen-man crew might be ordered to unload 130 tons of coal before the beero hour, driven at an inhuman pace while a crane hovered over them to add to the pressure. If a ship was about to set sail, the crew might be assigned to clear the hold before a specific deadline, and they could be at it until after midnight.

  “You’d be a fuckin’ wreck,” Willie sighed. “It was white slave labor.”

  After four years of shoveling coal, he’d had enough. He shipped out at nineteen, off to see the world as a steward on an ocean liner. He expected an easy ride, but he was mistaken. Though the job didn’t tax him physically, he was on duty from the early morning until nine at night. His supervisors were steely-eyed former officers of the Royal Navy, who monitored his every move and slashed his paycheck for any lapses. He worked the emigrant run to Australia first and has fond memories of the ten-day layovers in Melbourne and Sydney, where the pubs closed at the ungodly hour of six in the evening. To beat the clock, the local dockers drank so much so fast that they passed out on the sidewalk, “worse even than Dublin.” Willie’s crew couldn’t afford the pubs, anyway, so they bought cheap flagons of Penfolds wine.

  “Terrible stuff,” Willie said merrily, amused by his youthful panache. “I got to drink all over the world.”

  He made it to South Africa, too, and sailed through the Suez Canal, but he liked New York best of all the ports he visited, because it was so cosmopolitan. He held a staff post on the Queen Mary then, a choice assignment, but he thought often of going home. At sea, he underwent a curious transformation. As he put it, “When you travel, you realize your limits.” He couldn’t abide a future without any promise, so he applied himself on his return to Ireland. While he worked as a salesman, he took classes in business and social studies at night and earned a college equivalency degree. He could feel his horizons expanding, fascinated with the reading for his courses, those fat books on history and biography, the insights packed into them.

  He married, as well, and started a family, five children in all. To support them, he worked as a trade union official for twenty-seven years, a post his father had also held for a while. (When the dockers organized a union in 1933, Willie Sr. was a driving force.) Initially, Willie had more than a thousand dockers as members and did a good bit of his canvassing in pubs, but the rolls had dwindled to barely a hundred members by the 1990s due to the mechanization of the port, and a way of life was ending. Still, Willie carried on as he’d always done, hitting his favorite spots and sinking fifteen pints of Guinness every day until the extravagance caught up with him. The doctors checked his liver first—perfectly fine—and next his kidneys—in excellent shape—and took an x-ray of his lungs to see if the coal dust had caused any cancerous lesions, but he passed that test with flying colors, too. His heart turned out to be the culprit, its muscles damaged to the point of near-failure. Willie has been dry since 1998.

  “I’ll bet you don’t even miss it anymore,” I said.

  “Oh, I do!” he cried, sitting bolt upright. “Jaysus, I do!” At last I’d met a truly heroic pintman, his grip on the glass surrendered only reluctantly.

  Willie missed the camaraderie as much as the beer, but whenever he inched into a pub, he listened to his friends and heard absolute rubbish—total nonsense, really, and they went on about it at such length. “Jaysus, that was me,” he’d say to himself, relieved to be out of action, although he did succumb once to the illusion that he could drink on the grand scale again. His doctor advised him he could handle two or three pints without any harm, and his hopes soared, yet the doctor meant per week. “That would be of no use to me,” Willie admitted. “No use at all.”

  He still felt kindly toward his drinking days, though he understood the toll they had taken. An old pal had just washed up drowned in Dun Laoghaire harbor, in fact—another docker who was always in the pub, and the very fellow who had once kicked off a melee at a place called Connor’s, when he unlatched the gate of a panel truck parked outside and liberated a flock of geese and turkeys destined for someone’s Christmas larder. It was only mid-morning, but the holidays had induced a spirit of revelry. The pints were flowing as if from a fountain, and the men were singing away when into their midst rushed the flapping, gobbling, hysterical birds, knocking over glasses with their wings and throwing a fright into everyone. Willie captured a goose and took it home, where it escaped the usual fate and ended up as a backyard pet rather than on a platter. His wife and children doted on the goose, who even had a pool to splash around in, but it reared up and hissed whenever Willie approached. “Had an awful effect on my sex life,” he joked.

  That wasn’t the case when a docker uncovered a box of amphetamines beneath a tarp on a South African ship, a consignment of drugs being returned to the UK. Somehow the box didn’t make it. Instead its contents were parcelled out to Willie and his friends, who’d never taken speed before and were ignorant of its effect—but they quickly learned to like it. Dosing each other became a sport among them, just as hippies used to load the punch with LSD. At the pub you had to take your pint to the gents with you, or somebody would pop in a pill. Nobody could sleep because they were wired all the time, but the women were the beneficiaries for once, treated to nonstop rolls in the hay and puzzled as to why the sex should be so good.

  Willie had an agreeable way of unfolding his tales, with a glint in his eye, as if looking back at a foolish—too foolish—and yet courageous younger self, a lad who took his chances, had some
fun, and wound up in the clover, but maybe that’s how we all regard and even treasure any youthful folly that doesn’t end in disaster. The roundhouse right that mercifully misses its target, the silly E-mail sent when tipsy, the one-night stand that results in pure pleasure rather than herpes or worse, they’re almost airborne in retrospect, lighter and less threatening versions of themselves, and we shake our heads and decide that it wasn’t so bad to have strayed from the straight-and-narrow, after all.

  Willie offered to lend me some books about Ringsend as I was leaving, and pulled them from a bedroom closet. A pamphlet from the Watchtower Society of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and a flier about the Sacred Heart were stuffed in there, too, and he discarded them with a fair bit of disgust. He’d also stored lots of boating magazines in the closet. “Boats are my second love,” he told me. He owns an eighty-foot trawler he once believed he’d convert into a twelve-berth passenger ship for cruises around Ireland and Scotland, but he felt too old for it now. His energy flagged at times, he said, and he got tired. Yet there wasn’t a hint of self-pity in his voice. Whatever the outcome, I thought, he’d have few regrets.

  The era of the dockers and their gargantuan appetites had guttered out long ago, and one shouldn’t be romantic about their pubs, a collection of dives, more or less, modeled on the Flann O’Brien archetype complete with bluebottle flies and yellow sandwich cheese, often dark, dirty, and offensive to the sense of smell. The toilets were an abomination, with floors so wet and slippery with urine that a drunken misstep might lead to a fractured skull, and the smoke was thick enough to induce a coughing fit on entry. If women were admitted at all, they sat in the purdah of snugs, and were ignored or heckled. Sailors often accosted them, although Biddy McGrath gave as good as she got, as a song of the period recounts:

  Now I’ll tell you a story that is bound to shock

  It’s all about a murder on the Ringsend dock