Myles Away From Dublin

by Flann O'Brien

  That was a neat, satirical way to express the outlook of … whom? The average Englishman? Or all of us? Unlikely as it may seem, the lines were written by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose personal infirmity ensured that he at least did not stay at home, damp and cold, but made him pack up and sail for sunny Samoa.

  It is quite true that most of us shrink from the unaccustomed, whether it be in food, drink, weather, clothes or even music. With Dr Samuel Smiles (what an awful name!) our motto is TO STAY AT HOME IS BEST. But even at home there can be danger.

  Look what happened to a lot of people recently. On their own dinner tables on Dec. 25 there was a wonderful succulent turkey and, with everything that went with it, it was immensely enjoyed. There was cold turkey the next day, of course, and that was quite acceptable. The evening after, one went to visit some friends, and they insisted on a bit of supper before parting. Well, yes, the cold turkey was all right. When one gets home, there is excitement in the house. A big turkey, a present from an old friend which had been held up in the post, had arrived. It meant, of course, hot roast turkey the next day, and the possibility of cold turkey for at least two days more. Visiting friends is now a serious risk, for there seems to be turkey everywhere.

  Something frighteningly similar happened to myself several years ago when I arrived at a good, small hotel in Glengariff. Going to bed the first night, I jokingly said to the manageress that I would expect two grilled, freshly-caught trout for breakfast. That was exactly what I got, to the astonishment of myself and my companion. For lunch he got magnificent roast beef, but I got two more for the evening meal. Next morning – what? Two grilled trout.

  We had a car and I suggested to my companion that we should take a trip to Killarney, which we did, and had lunch of lobster. Back in Glengariff again. Next morning I got my two trout. We mitched again at lunchtime. I was determined not to climb down in that hotel but a stay that had been planned for eight days was cut down to four.

  Consider that king of all freshwater fish, the salmon. Last season there was a glut of salmon and the bottom fell out of the market. This had several unexpected results, one of which was a succession of rows in fish-and-chips shops. The seasoned customer, when served with his order, stared at it, stirred it and then sent for the boss.

  What was this he was getting, he asked. ‘My dear sir,’ the boss replied proudly, ‘for once in my life I’m not serving ray. That’s REAL FRESH SALMON!’ His market research (if we may call it that) was poor. The customer said he had ordered fish and chips, fish and chips was what he wanted, and if this happened again, he would take his custom elsewhere. And he stiffly departed, having eaten nothing.

  Quite recently I read a nostalgic article about fishing on the Boyne, and how sadly it had declined since the good old days. An old document was quoted showing that in the contracts of service of the men employed on the fisheries (presumably at netting operations) they should not be expected to have salmon in the meals supplied oftener than twice a week.

  It is not easy to explain why some foods – particularly attractive, expensive, festive foods – tend to pall in this fashion with only moderate over-supply. And it is just as hard to know why the more commonplace things can be placed on the table day after day for ever and ever – bread, butter, cakes, biscuits, marmalade, potatoes, beef, lamb, rashers, eggs – without anybody making the slightest comment or objection.

  What about tea, particularly in rural Ireland? The pot is always on the hob in some homes, and even the postman is asked in for a cup when he calls. Appetite for tea cannot apparently ever be saturated, and that applies to all ages and sexes.

  There is another drink and I have seen men capable of taking plenty of it every day, every night as well, sometimes, and go to immense trouble to get it when it is not handy – or handed out: I mean whiskey. It never even occurs to them to change over to tea, though they probably know that tea can be immensely improved with a little whiskey in it.

  There is quite a to-do at present about still another article that does not confer disgust with over indulgence in it. Yes, indeed. Have you got a match?

  Looking back a little

  This is 1964. If you doubt me, reader, take a look at the extreme top of this page. I have been looking over some old newspapers and magazines and find it hard to believe that very nearly a quarter of a century has passed since World War II was declared.

  Many people reading this had not been born in 1939, and as many again had not been thought of in the sense that their parents had not yet met. It makes myself feel very oiled: very old, I mean. Those war years were an extraordinary time in Ireland and we were, of course, merely on the edge of the real thing.

  We were living in a grim sort of fairyland, not really understanding the enormous issue then being decided, not realising the fabulous slaughter that was in progress at various fronts, and certainly unaware that 6 million Jews were being quietly exterminated in Germany. By ‘we’ I mean those of us who stayed at home: a great number of younger people departed to take a hand in the bloody game, and not all of them returned.

  The homeland memory that survives is one of bleakness, uncertainty, rationing of essentials, black marketeering, the ascendency of the chancer, and the infiltration of Irish society by a great number of the young ‘conchie’ brigade from Britain. Only in retrospect does one realise how precarious that neutrality of ours was.

  It is curious that in a situation of momentous climax for the world, it was trivialities which stand out in the mind here. Cigarettes were scarce: one had to have the leg of a tobacconist to get as many as five on demand, served loose. Simple essentials such as bread, butter, eggs, bacon and beef were rationed. Did I say bread?

  This was a grey, crumbling substance apparently compounded of barnyard corn, concrete, sweepings from barbers’ shops and coke. The national newspapers consisted of four pages of very condensed matter printed on grey ‘paper’ which had a faintly unpleasant smell.

  Petrol was, of course, very strictly rationed on a coupon basis and none allowed to anybody who was not on ‘essential service’, which everybody tried to be. To get a gallon costing 3/6, you had first to buy a coupon costing up to 7/6 on the black market. To ask a pump attendant for a gallon without having a coupon was equivalent to asking him for a gallon of his blood.

  Yet there was one class who never weakened, and that was the civil servants. It is somehow refreshing to read the reply received by a British citizen who applied to the Board of Trade for permission to have two pockets in the trousers of a suit instead of the three officially authorised, and to have the third pocket transferred to the jacket. I give the reply below, as it appeared in The Investors’ Chronicle and Market Review under the heading ‘The Blight of Bureaucracy’.

  ‘I am to refer to your letter dated March 1 in which you make application for a licence to permit of a suit being made having more pockets than those laid down in the above-mentioned Order.

  ‘It is noted that you do not require more than two pockets in the trousers and that you would like, instead of the third pocket, to have an extra pocket in the jacket. I am to say that the Board are not prepared to consider the giving up of one pocket in one garment sufficient reason for the granting of an extra pocket in another garment since the restrictions are imposed on the separate garment and not on the suit as a whole.

  ‘The Board realise, however, that in certain circumstances it may be necessary to vary the restrictions and if you will state why you are unable to make use of the third pocket in the trousers (it is not necessary that this pocket should be a hip pocket, the restrictions do not in any way refer to the position of the pockets but only to the total number in each garment) thus necessitating the extra jacket pocket, full consideration will be given to the issue of a licence. It would also be helpful if you would state the exact use to which the extra pockets in the jacket and waistcoat are to be put.

  ‘With regard to your request for a small sub-division to the right-side pocket of the jacket, I am
to say that this is not regarded as an extra pocket and that no licence will therefore be necessary in respect of this requirement.’

  Brave words don’t you think, when Britain had her BACK TO THE WALL.

  Those forty days

  It was very sudden but the surprise is over now – we all know that we are in the season of Lent. One of the desirable objectives which Vatican Council II studied was that of having a fixed Easter but it is a thing not yet achieved.

  Two common words of which hardly anybody knows the real meaning are LENT and FASTING. Lent is a Saxon word which means just Spring, and fasting does not mean merely cutting out a meal during the day, or having much smaller meals: it means having absolutely nothing whatsoever to eat or drink.

  Custom has, of course, modified the meaning of both words. It may seem disgraceful to say that Lenten fasting is not what it used to be but even middle-aged people know that such is only the truth. I remember my own grandmother taking her strong tea absolutely black and making horrible faces; and her heroism was even greater than that, for she refused to allow any sugar in it.

  But such are human quirks that I personally would be horrified at the idea of tea WITH sugar in it, and I much prefer it with hardly any milk at all. Bread without butter on it was another old-time privation and as for meat, every day was a Friday. Many of those alive today and youngish will murmur, ‘Ah, but the people of those times were far stronger and healthier.’ Were they, though?

  They certainly worked harder and what they earned for a hard week’s work would hardly pass for pocket money today. Let us agree they were tougher, and had a more pronounced development in the region of the spine.

  Severity

  Lent itself as a fixed period of deliberate hardship was not always the settled thing we have today. In the early days of the Church the fast in preparation for Easter and some other important occasions was very short but very severe, sometimes being a total fast.

  Originally the Easter fast was confined to Holy Week, and the forty-day fast (Quadragesima) was not formally laid down until the Council of Nicaea in 325 but for many centuries there was an absence of uniformity, and purely local customs of fasting, varying enormously in duration and severity, predominated throughout Christendom.

  In the Middle Ages milk, eggs and meat were prohibited during Lent not only by the Church but by civil law. And diet was not the only matter on which the season of penitence turned; women wore mourning, right up to and including the court of Elizabeth I. Even in the confusion following the Reformation, observance of Lent did not wither away; the Anglican Church tried to preserve it, as did John Wesley.

  It may be mentioned that fasting, as a method of self-denial, penance and purification, is by no means a Christian invention; it has been common in many cultures and religions, with great variety in the motives behind it. Fasting after a death, for instance, has been common, whether to placate the ghost of the departed or to make a sort of sacrificial occasion of the break.

  Fasting has often been resorted to as an urgent form of prayer to secure something urgently needed such as a good harvest, shoals of fish, or even good weather, or – on the negative side – to avert a plague or some threatened natural disaster.

  The rules of fast and abstinence, in Lent as well as out of it, could be straightforward and rigid in a primitive agricultural society. Nowadays in the complexity of modern life, where enormous numbers of people are huddled together in cities and communally employed in factories, workshops and offices, it is recognised that it is physically impossible or nearly so for the individual to order his personal affairs in matters of eating or attending religious observances on workdays.

  Psychological and neurotic obstacles abound; large numbers who seek a dispensation from the fast get it, and we cannot guess how many grant a dispensation to themselves; it is usually enough that a person who has a wakeful conscience does not ignore it but devises exercises in self-denial which may in fact be much more onerous than those prescribed.

  And here we are back, I am afraid, to smoking. Long before the lung cancer scare was heard of, it was quite usual for tens of thousands of heavy smokers to cut out cigarettes completely during Lent – and without reading books on how to do it, consulting psychoanalysts or taking pills guaranteed to make cigarettes taste poisonous.

  And there are plenty of them still with us and they still cannot explain why they joyfully light up again on Easter Saturday, even though they have completely broken the habit.

  Perhaps somebody should compile a complete new form of abstinence, or several from which to choose. Suppose you determined during Lent never to look at a newspaper or listen to a radio news bulletin? to say not one word more than is necessary?

  To wash the dishes after every meal in your own house (if you happen to be a husband)? To pick on something you loathe – e.g., factory-made raspberry jam – and have it at every meal? Read half a novel by Dickens every day? As often as possible sit through films you know you’ve seen before?

  I am afraid original people trying out such systems would be disseminating Lent – making others as well as themselves suffer, ending up perhaps by causing a breach of the peace.

  O’Casey ploughs again

  There is something vaguely comic about the reappearance of The Plough and the Stars on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, advertised by the management as being ‘by special permission’ of Sean O’Casey.

  When the theatre refused a new play of his, The Bishop’s Bonfire, over six years ago, reportedly because it was anti-clerical, the playwright got into a huff or a tantrum or a pet, and excommunicated the theatre with truly ecclesiastical solemnity.

  O’Casey likes to consider himself as an equal of Bernard Shaw but in a like situation Shaw would hardly have taken himself so seriously; very likely he would have contented himself with sending off a scurrilous postcard. It seems that O’Casey has now relented as a result of the Abbey Company being invited to play in London in connexion with the quartercentenary of the birth of Shakespeare.

  The attitude of many people, Dubliners included, to the Abbey Theatre has changed a lot in recent years. Most of the great players of the past are dead or departed, and new plays of real stature are apparently not forthcoming. Moreover, there has been a policy of gaelicisation which many feel is out of tune with the theatre’s origin.

  When a play in Irish is on, the programme refers to the stalls as ‘steallai’. Probably this word has been mined out of Dinneen but why, I ask, don’t they use the obvious word ‘stol’? I might as well be talking to the wall, of course, though this phrase has always seemed pointless in view of the belief that walls have ears.

  For years there has been on the programme and outside the house a phrase which annoys most people, if only for its decrepit syntax and obscurity – ‘Latecomers not admitted until end of First Act.’

  It has several undesirable implications: first, that every play must have not only acts but have even a first act! (Nay, a First Act.) What would, say, Rouault or some other abstract artist think of such unenterprise? Is it also suggested that every play must also have a last act?

  In my youth I wrote some plays myself and competent people who read them swore that there was neither beginning nor end to them. Some of them had no characters – I did not say CHARACTER, mind – and others were without ‘climaxes’, ‘plots’ and other dreary journeyman paraphernalia, but the scripts had clearly marked pauses for applause.

  The second deplorable implication of the ‘late-comer’ slogan is that while those who are in at the beginning will not be disturbed during the first act, they will not necessarily be undisturbed during subsequent acts. (There are bars on the present premises, remember.)

  You can’t barge in in the middle of the first act but you can arrive in the middle of the second or third act, start tuning the piano, decide you haven’t enough light and stagger out with the thing on your back. What they really mean, you say, is ‘Patrons not admitted between the acts.’

&nb
sp; But not quite; because if that were the rule, nobody would ever get in. The … interval, shall we call it, before the first act could not be fairly included as ‘between the acts’.

  But sheer admittance to the building is not necessarily a control of disturbing the audience. After a customer has patiently endured the first half of the first act, he may decide he has had as much as he can bear, get up, disturb everybody along the row, distract the players on the stage, and stumble out. Even if he likes the play, he may be overcome by a deadly craving for a cigarette, and create a similar fuss to get out. Without leaving his seat at all, he can create havoc by falling asleep to the accompaniment of thunderous snores, or be thoroughly objectionable by arriving with, not a box of chocolates, but a bag of walnuts and proceed to crack them against each other in a mighty fist.

  And, anyway, wouldn’t the odd late-comer be better for everybody than several early-comers who have whooping cough?

  On the whole, the Abbey should think of a more precise and literate slogan, something catchy – like this:

  The National Theatre Society

  Likes the promptness and sobriety,

  No patron will be admitted

  Unless promptly stalled (or pitted).

  The real trouble is, of course, that too many of the patrons have learnt their manners from characters on the Abbey stage. I wonder has Sean O’Casy a clear conscience here? If Joxer Daly was ever in a drawing-room, he slept, cooked his dinner and drank his porter there and the house, alas, was a decayed tenement.

  An oldtimer’s thoughts

  Most people are, like myself, fond of old books. Probably we feel that our forefathers, having arrived earlier, must have been wiser and that we miserable moderns can improve ourselves by reading what they left behind them.