Ireland and England in the Summers of 1984 and 1985
By Michael O’Flaherty
Part I
Early one morning in July of 1984, my mother and I got up when it was still dark outside and drove to O’Hare airport. There we caught a flight to Kennedy and, after a layover, another flight thence to Heathrow. By the time we reached our hotel in the heart of London, it was already night once more. After checking in, we took a walk around Piccadilly Circus. The neon and traffic and crowds were of the same forms as the scenes I’d witnessed many times in downtown Chicago or even visiting my grandma in New York, yet there was something different about the way they manifested themselves here, something that indicated clearly to me my arrival in a very different world. As a sports-obsessed twelve-year-old boy, the most obvious such difference to me was the total absence of a central visual aspect of any American downtown – that is, paraphernalia of U. S. professional sports. American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey all might as well never have been invented. Instead, the landscape was sprinkled with the banners and insignia of soccer or, as it was exclusively known her, football; and, to a lesser extent, cricket. Luckily for me, I had already been interested in British football for some time, reading about it first in The Sporting News and then moving on to the British and European football magazines sold at the big newsstand in my neighborhood.
We went into one of the souvenir shops and I got an Aston Villa banner (they were one of the Birmingham football teams) and a Manchester United scarf, and a mid-sized soccer ball. Then we went to Wimpy’s to eat. This was another parallel-universe thing – a hamburger chain (of all ultra-American entities) that had no existence in the U.S.A. itself. The burger tasted different as well; it had a roast-beef like aftertaste and was garnished with boiled, minced onion. I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not, but I was intrigued. While we ate, I stared out the second-floor window of the restaurant at the cars circumambulating the traffic-looping “roundabout” (more exotica to me) in the light rain.
When we went back to the hotel, I had my first encounter with the non-American electrical outlets. You couldn’t take anything for granted in this odd and wondrous world, but fortunately my mother had an adapter. Once we got settled in, I turned on the TV. There were only a few channels, and half of them seemed to have some sort of serious-cultural or educational slant. Another one was a talk show hosted by some goofy dude making small talk, using British terms I’d never heard to British celebrity guests I’d never heard of. I actually enjoyed watching it for a while; it was a window into the inner life of the new world whose outer layer I’d glided over out there in Piccadilly Circus. There was something about the people on the show that gave me the same feeling as my recent wanderings. It was a feeling of something slower, more deliberate than America, not as extreme and compressed and with a self-awareness that rounded where we went straight ahead, as if they’d been in the same place long enough to find a steady groove. I liked it, but it was still really new and alien to me, so after a while I got tired of not understanding what the people on the talk show were saying. I changed to the last channel, which had football (British, as will hereafter be assumed unless otherwise noted). As I watched the game, there was that same sense of space, of leisureliness. It was like I was looking at a garden; even like I was in one, the pale green and purple neon light from outside giving a floral, greenhouse feel to our cool hotel room as I sipped the tonic water my mom had gotten out of the mini-fridge.
But before I had time to get accustomed to this faraway place, we were going even further away. The next morning, we went back to Heathrow and boarded a plane for Dublin. The flight was short, and when our friend David met us at the airport the sun was still shining bright overhead. The inside of David’s car smelled like a farm. His car back in Chicago, where he taught at the same university as my mom, had a similar smell. But it was much stronger here because David owned a fully functional farm just south of the border with Northern Ireland. I was a city kid, but I knew what a farm smell was from forays into rural Illinois Indiana and Wisconsin; it was a distinctive mixture of diesel soil, grass and manure, strong yet sweet. David obviously used the car to facilitate farm work, and we had to move a bunch of stuff around to accommodate me into the back seat, but soon we were on our way.
The airport was on the outskirts of the city so we were out in open country right away. “Open” in Europe is a relative term, however. I’d driven out of Chicago and through northern Indiana and southern Michigan several times over the last few years, to go to a school-chum’s summer house or on a class trip. The towns were separated by distances of woodland or fields, vast, monotonous spaces that exerted a hypnotic effect on my child’s mind; a sudden encounter with a clump of farmhouses or a solitary roadside McDonalds hit me like a jolt out of the blue. The scene unfolding before me in the Irish countryside was quite different. One small village blended into another, the distance between dotted with pubs and houses near the road. (It was only when we drove through the center of the country that I’d encounter a Midwestern-style sparseness of settlement.) There was something human and comfortable about it that weighed against my sense of being in a strange place. It felt like being in a house that someone had lived in for a long time, scattered with a cherished collection of accumulated bric-a-brac. The surface of the built environment felt like the interior of David’s car: dusty and healthy, the spirit of earth and grass channeled through stone and wood. The people walking down the weaving, narrow streets of the villages through which we passed were dressed in clothes of the same colors as the landscape: slate-grey, tan-brown, olive-green. The most garish hue to be found on the storefronts was fire-engine red, slightly browned-out. But it didn’t feel uniform, the product of some zoning-board’s can-do, top-down management as it would have been in the States. Given the (to my American eyes) limited palette, it expressed itself across the range of people and places in my field of vision in a spontaneous and varied fashion. These were just the shades in which they saw the world. It was a sensibility for which the twentieth century seemed not to have taken place. There were no franchised businesses, with their bright, instantly recognized logos, very little visible presence even of any kind of advertising. The housing stock looked Victorian – boxy brick blocks humanized with filigrees of wood – or even older, grey green mottled stone surfaces echoing back to the Tudors (or the Druids!).
Of course, it would take me a long time to sort all of this out. At that moment, half-dreaming with jetlag, I took it in as an undifferentiated alien world. The last village en route, Belturbet, and the road from there to David’s farm, would be intimately familiar to me in weeks to come; but now they just blended in with the other little villages, the other undulating roads on the way there. David’s house seemed to appear out of nowhere by the side of the road, tucked into a nook of the surrounding woods. As his terriers ran out and barked alongside the packed car, David, my mother, and I got out and dragged our suitcases down the front walk. David showed me to a room just to the right of the front door, with a bed into which I promptly climbed and fell asleep.
The next day David showed me around the house and the farm. The house was a two-storey structure, with rooms on either side of the front door and the same amount of space in the rear half of the building. My room was to the right of the front door heading inside; if you kept straight ahead, a hallway led to the kitchen. To the left was a sitting room, in which I didn’t spend much time; nor did I often go upstairs, where David’s and my mother’s room was. I also seem to remember a dusty room on the second floor, filled with miscellaneous things – old-fashioned metalware, quilts, rocking chairs. The main place in the house where David, my mother and I spent time together was the kitchen. It was a large room with a sturdy, rectangular wooden table in the middle and a wide window flush against the tangled greenery of the surrounding woods. The refrigerator was a bulky ‘50s or ‘60s artifact, its enamel surface as white as the charred heavy iron pans were black. These pans were used to cook the finest bacon and eggs I’ve ever had before or since. The eggs were from David’s farm across the road; they fried up thick and firm and tasted like real meat, rich and fresh and almost a little gamey. The bacon was more like ham than the American variety, with less fat, but unlike the Canadian version it came in long strips and crisped around the edges when cooked. It had the salty tang of good American bacon, but the texture was almost like steak, and the flavor was bolder and, like the eggs, had a pleasantly gamey aftertaste.
I must have eaten something else as well, but other than the bacon and eggs the only thing I remember is a log-shaped pastry (I believe it was called a gateau) which consisted of a spiral of alternating layers of yellow sponge cake and raspberry jam, served sliced in cross-sections like a loaf of bread. It was sweet yet piquant, soft but resilient, and I had to force myself not to keep slicing off piece after piece. Another sliced food, going back to the meat category, was black pudding. It was a sort of blood sausage, fried in a pan in thin slices. The flavor was salty and tangy, but what really gave it its appeal was the texture, somewhere between the burnt bits on a steak and a dry, crumbly brownie.
David also ate sharp cheddar and crackers, served with salt ladled from an open jar with a little spoon. They were one of his staples, along with Tanqueray gin and tonic water. My drinks of choice were Lucozade, a carbonated English energy drink that tasted like a cross between orange Crush and the aforementioned tonic water, and Ribena, a sweet blackcurrant-flavored syrup served mixed with water. I should also mention that the milk, gleaned from David’s cows across the road, shared the same sterling quality of robust and savory freshness as the eggs.
After breakfast David went to work on the farm. Once you crossed the road, a short, wide pathway opened onto the farmyard. Facing away from the house, the dairy building was ahead, across the yard and slightly to the right; directly to the far right of the yard was a big hangar piled under with haystacks; and just to the right next to you and across the yard to the dairy, were the poultry coops. These formed a row of clapboard enclosures fronted with wire mesh and floored with straw over the dirt. In addition to the chickens, David then had geese. On one occasion the gander chased me around the yard and bit me on the buttock. I had my revenge when we cooked and ate him later in the summer. In truth, I wasn’t vindictive toward my erstwhile assailant and current meal; really more awed that, as I apparently then told my mother, this was the first time I’d ever eaten somebody I personally knew.
The hay-storage building really did look like a hangar, as broad and tall as David’s house but open in front, with hay bales piled up four- and five-high. I could use the top edges of the bales as footholds and clamber up them like temple steps. I liked to climb to the top of the highest stacks so close to the roof you couldn’t sit upright. I would lie down there on the hay and read one of my soccer magazines. When it rained (which it did in Ireland even in the summer sometimes) I enjoyed the sound of the raindrops on the thin metal roof and the sweet, wet scent of the humidified hay.
The center of life on the farm was the dairy, though the center of the farmyard was often occupied by David’s big tractor. This was a big, imposing rectangular building made (unlike any of the other structures on the farm) out of reinforced concrete. You entered through an opening on the side, large enough to drive a van through. The interior was a vast open hall with concrete stalls on either side of a center aisle. The space was daylit through broad windows (opaque either by design or by the accumulation of airborne mud and manure particles). David would herd the cows into the stalls every morning to be milked. I soon learned how to do this. The first lesson was not to stand directly behind the cows; they seemed dull-witted, but were more than capable of administering a swift kick to a would-be milker when placed in a position to do so. (I learned this lesson from experience.) Next, their udders had to be loosened for milking by rolling the teats gently but firmly between the thumb and forefinger. I was at first taken aback by the warm, rubbery tactile quality of the teats, and their tendency to pop out of my grip, but soon I found myself caught up in the peculiar drama of building toward the moment when the first jet of milk would spurt out at a skewed angle. That meant it was time to attach the milking machine. Once you connected a cluster of open-ended thick metal tubes to the cow’s teats, the milk would be sucked through the attached thin rubber tubes into a complicated-looking machine about the size of a motor-cycle, until at last it collected in a large metal jug. By far the most challenging stage in this process was the first; it took some practice for me to get the tubes connected to the teats on the initial attempt. Even then, there were often fraught moments when I’d think I’d got it stuck on only to watch first one tube, then another, slip off until the entire unit dropped into the nearest pile of cow poop (a substance of which there was an abundant supply).
But once everything was up and running, it was a transfixing experience to sit back and watch the process: the cow indifferently chewing her cud while the machine emitted a rhythmic humming, pumping sound, and the milk slowly pooled up in the jug. Once the jug was filled, David would load it onto the cart and roll it out into the yard (where it was no doubt later taken to a refrigerated storage unit of some sort). At some point all the cows were sufficiently milked and then David would drive them out of the dairy building, through the yard and down the road to the field where they passed the rest of their time. They moved very deliberately, and sometimes David would mutter at today I will drive that away them and prod them with a short, thick piece of a broken branch (which they seemed barely to notice), but move they did, with a casual singleness of collective purpose, drifting loosely back and forth within the herd but ever forward. It was awesome and mysterious to see, and after David had secured them behind the big iron gate to the field, I would often find myself taking a last look before we headed back to the farm, wondering, as I saw them absentmindedly milling around the hillside, what it was to be a cow.
Another source of fascination for me in regard to the cows was the sheer quantity of manure they emitted, and the methods used for its disposal. The hind ends of the cows pointed away from the walls of the dairy so that their udders would face the milkers. This also positioned the cow anus conveniently flush with the wide middle aisle. As the cow-shit collected there, a sort of broad, motorized plow would be deployed from time to time to roll it out through the wide side entrance in a great, undulating sludge-wave. It would then be pushed until it reached the manure collection point at the edge of a nearby meadow, a vast mound referred to as the slurry.
Sprinkled with sawdust (for reasons I now forget if indeed I ever knew), this pile looked quite like an ordinary dirt hill, an optical illusion which in one instance caused me to fall afoul of it in the most literal sense imaginable. I had a daily practice back then of running laps and that aforementioned nearby meadow made an ideal makeshift track for me: It was almost perfectly round, and big, about the size of a minor league baseball field. And the moist long grass gave me just enough padding over the hard ground, though occasionally I’d run into a particularly thick patch and find myself veering upwards and sideways as I struggled to gain traction. The grass was destined to be mown for hay sooner or later, and it had that same pleasantly sweet-wet scent. There were already a few bales stacked in the middle of the meadow, and when I was running closest to the farm I could look over and see them standing out in their isolation against the tree-line that formed the meadow’s outer edge, and the woods and hills beyond. Particularly when the sky was colored an electric lilac with the potential coming of a storm, I could lose myself in the faraway, magical quality of the scene. Perhaps I was distracted in such a fashion on that specific afternoon as I ran vaultingly toward what I took to be a hill. An instant later, there came a long slurping sound as my leg sank into the manure pile up to the knee. Extracting myself, I hobbled back toward David’s house, only the stench of the manure distracting me from my self-recriminations. My long tube-sock had to be written off entirely – I can still see it curled up against the burgundy-colored carpeting of my room, the white fabric now piebald with filth – but after a careful washing my running shoe did go on to a long and productive life.
That room didn’t see much of me in daylight hours – there was too much of active interest around the farm – but when I was alone at night it came into a life of its own, the scene of private vigils that would often last until quite a late hour. I wondered if anyone could see my illuminated front window, if there was any other light on for miles. Sometimes I left the window slightly open, and the curtain would stir in the breeze as amphibious sounds and scents drifted in. If I looked out over the front hedge I might see moonlight reflected on the road. The room itself was lit by a bedside lamp on the night table. Further away from my bed, the cream-colored walls of the room became dim. There were a few old-fashioned prints of woodland hunting scenes framed above the mantle and a chair or two; otherwise the room was empty except for my suitcase and my clothes scattered haphazardly around. But I spent my time in bed when I was in the room anyway. I would read British football magazines until I started to get tired, and then I would listen to the radio on a little tan plastic transistor set I placed close to my ear, with the volume down. There was no commercial radio – another thing that seemed indescribably alien to me, having come from America – just Irish state radio and the BBC.
I’m not sure where the BBC’s signal was coming from – Wales? Lancashire? Ulster? But hearing it far down the road in this moonlit agrarian hinterland brought home the sense in which Ireland was a postcolonial country. Like India, where I’d been only a few months earlier, it had its own hard-won balance of distance and nearness to the UK, but where in India the geographical distance underlined by independence made the nearness that remained seem that much more striking, in Ireland the reverse was the case. Listening to the BBC in that farmhouse late at night, there was something almost mystical in thinking about how far away London seemed, as if the waters between the islands were a yawning void between planets.
The song that really captured that feeling for me was “Here Comes The Rain Again,” by the Eurythmics, which got played a lot on the late-night BBC shows that summer. The Eurythmics were Scottish, and the song’s video, which I’d seen back in America, played up their Celtic-exotic aspect (the Far North, and in Wales and Ireland’s case Far West, as England’s first Far East?). But as a piece of pure audio in this dim, sparse room, the way the song used the lush patter of ultra-futuristic synthesizers as a medium for soundscapes of living green earth and wind-blown torrents perfectly captured that exhilaration of being at the very edge of the modern world where it dissolved into something older and wilder. And when Annie Lennox sang “Walk with me,” my mind could follow her voice across the green-black world of night just outside the light in my window.
In the day, however, the wildness receded and the countryside around the farm felt bright, inviting, and open-handed. There was a small field up the road where I would play soccer/football with the ball I’d bought at Piccadilly Circus. The big rust-browned steel gate that enclosed the field made an ideal “goal” and bounced the ball satisfyingly back toward me through the air on the ricochet. I would imagine I was Gary Lineker, Luther Blissett or one of the other titanic British strikers of the day and found my way through the tangle of grass and clover until I was positioned to boot the ball with all my might toward the gate. That was pure joy of life – the mild warmth of the sun in the soft blue sky, the half-herb/half-flower scent of the greenery, and the bird and insect songs punctuated by the low, hollow ring of the ball striking the gate. I could while away hours at this, constructing entire matches, but if I did get bored I left my ball by the gate and wandered further down the road to the nearby small town, Belturbet.
The scenery on the way was calmingly uniform – tall hedges on either side of the two lone lanes, punctuated occasionally by a steel-gated field. About halfway there the landscape opened up, the hedges lower now and woods visible far cross the fields. Eventually you reached a crossroads, near which were parked a couple of trucks and an installation of some sort of processing machinery with big green-and-white tubes. Down the left fork in the road the town could already be seen in the distance. The road graded steadily upward the closer you came until you reached a stone bridge with retaining walls on either side, over a little river; once across, the town began.
On reaching Belturbet, the road from David’s farm became the town’s one big street, the High Street in British/Irish parlance; on the other edge of town it turned back into a country road again. The town was built on a hill, and the road kept grading upward as it wound toward the hilltop. On either side were the classic two-story family homes of small Irish towns, brick or wood-frame, colored in a palette of clay-red, cream-white and greenish-grey. Approaching the hilltop, small businesses began to appear – fish-and-chip shops, tool and repair places, fishmongers, tobacconists and groceries. There was a sense of concentrated and active social life; it could almost have been a street in a much larger town, except for a certain sense of tranquility that suffused it. But then you would pass an intersection, where one of the side streets sloped downhill, and see in an instant that the street ended a few blocks away, and beyond that fields, marsh and woodland extended to the horizon. It felt as if the endless countryside had spontaneously sprouted this town in its midst, like a solitary grove of trees.
But that thought passed just as quickly as it came, once the intersection was crossed and my procession up the high street resumed. A couple of blocks away from the hilltop was a small grocery store; they carried small rectangular boxes of candy cigarettes, each of which contained one rectangular card with a color action photo of a football player on the front and information about the player on the back. This was one of the most intriguingly exotic products I encountered in those days. First off, the candy cigarettes had quite a distinctive taste, like cotton candy with a hint of citrus. Then there was the card itself. The fact that there was only one was novelty enough; American baseball and football cards came in packs of ten, or something close to that. And the photo on the front of the card was bare – no team logo, not even the player’s name. This was actually what the earliest American baseball cards had been, a single card in a pack of cigarettes, except that those had been the real cigarettes that contained tobacco, and so fears of the corruption of America’s youth had led to their supersession by the standard pack-of-cards-plus-bubblegum-stick format by the 1920s. Yet here was something that hearkened unmistakably back to them. The qualities of this little product – an unassuming archaism, an elegant simplicity – crystallized everything that was compelling me about this place, drawing me into this marvelous mirror-world across the ocean.
At the hilltop, the road broadened into the town’s central square, dominated by a dark, looming church, which I believe was Anglican. Across from the church was the newsagent’s, always my ultimate destination in town. The newsagent’s occupied the corner at which the high road turned hard right and descended a winding hill road out of town in the other direction from David’s farm. Arguably, it was the most prominent point in the square; the church dominated by virtue of its mass and mystery, but in terms of location-as-such it was tucked into a corner. I was certainly in awe of the church. We went there one Sunday with David, finding it mostly empty, as most of the townsfolk were Catholic. But the sparse occupancy of the pews actually enhanced the somber grandeur of the church’s vast, lofty interior. It had a certain quality, dust-blackened but stirred faintly by the country air, shadowed and inward-looking but intercut with narrow rectangles of summer sky through the high windows, that seemed impossibly old, patient and alive. Like David’s farm, like Belturbet itself, it seemed to have grown out of the very ground, and it felt as if it must always have been there.
The newsagent’s, by contrast, was very much connected with the contemporary world, though an incarnation of it far different from the one I had known. The newspapers outspread on a table toward the front of the store were all British or Irish; The New York Times was not even yet a U. S. national paper, much less an internationally available one, and if the Herald Tribune was still being published at that point, the Belturbet newsagent’s didn’t carry it. The only one of the newspapers that ever caught my eye on my way in was the Irish Times, because that was David’s paper, and it conjured up a happy mental picture of David crumpling it in one hand trying to read it while ladling salt onto some piece of fried breakfast meat with the other. He particularly liked the coverage of the country’s farm commerce, which I enjoyed as well for the accompanying photographs of men in peaked caps intently scrutinizing arrays of cows, pigs, sheep and so on in hedge-lined rustic markets, as well as the latest-model tractors in all their forceful utilitarian glory. My favorite part was the sports pages. I took a particular interest in the football coverage, but I was also intrigued by cricket and rugby, precisely because everything about them – team names, statistics, even what players were doing in the photographs – was so impenetrable to my comprehension. Still, I wasn’t intrigued enough to give myself a crash course on those sports. After all, I had a limited budget, and the newsagent’s had a tremendous number of football magazines on display.
These were, however, only a fraction of the vast walls of colorful slick paper spread throughout the store. In our post-print era, it may stagger credence to conceive that a mere hamlet in the middle of a small agricultural nation should have had an audience for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of magazines, but I saw it myself. They also had an excellent selection of candy. I didn’t have much of a sweet tooth then, but I couldn’t resist Rowntree’s Fruit Gums and Pastilles. They were fruit-flavored, with a more tart, less syrupy aftertaste than American candy, and exotic flavors like blackcurrant. The pastilles were covered with sugar crystals that were coarse and crunchy like salt, and the pastilles themselves were soft and chewy. The gums, on the other hand, were highly resistant and had to be ground into oblivion by the molars. They also had a knobbly surface on one side that was a tongue’s delight.
Near the candy were packs of football stickers. Stickers, not cards – rectangular and about 3 by 5 inches, and featuring two stickers of teammates, each of which could be peeled off separately. The stickers were even more low-tech than the candy-cigarette cards. As with the cards, the photo-portraits of the players on the stickers were unadorned by print of any kind. The pictures themselves were sometimes fascinatingly erratic – the face and uniform dazzling and flat in a burst of electric light, or muted and garden-shadowy against a late-afternoon field. The pictures seemed to place English football in the particular British-Irish world I found myself in, a world where life moved in a more measured gait than America, closer to the ground and the old world that never went away, just shifting within its flow like a quiet stream.
Once we’d gotten settled in, we ventured out to explore our immediate corner of that world, one encompassing the area of eastern Ireland from Dublin to the counties just north across the Ulster border. The nearest point of interest was Cavan town, the eponymous seat of the county in which Belturbet and David’s farm were situated. My impression of it was one of movement – winding, undulating roads like the ones in Belturbet, but many more of them, woven into one another like a maze, with lots of shops and vehicles moving to and fro. This may also have been where we visited the Cavan Crystal Company, a warehouse full of bright, beautifully detailed glassware surrounded by an equally bright, beautiful, and verygreen garden. (It truly is an emerald isle.)
To the south of Cavan was county Meath. The main towns there seemed smaller than Cavan town, and for Cavan’s county-seat bustle Meath substituted a stark aspect of Celtic mystery. One of the towns, after all, was Kells, associated with the renowned medieval illuminated manuscript to which it lent its name. The main thing I remember about Kells-the-town is a massive sandstone Celtic cross right by the middle of the road, in front of a row of sandstone-colored townhouses. That was the quality of Ireland that captivated me, the way the ancient and sublime manifested itself so unassumingly in the midst of everyday life. The townhouses looked the same as those in the nearby town of Navan, where I remember them arcing up a long road under a grey sky of rolling clouds, the windows blank and nobody around. Then there was the town of Butlersbridge; signs announced it for miles, but when you got there it was just a few rows of houses and a sort of barracks-building by a stream, and then you were out on the country road once more.
Further south, the northern outskirts of Dublin began. This was a number of years before the city’s economic takeoff, so it still felt pleasantly sleepy and provincial. I saw a couple of teenagers, one with a shock of blond hair and an AC/DC t-shirt, wandering down the street under a line of tall trees, small family homes behind them. In the city, we stopped to get sandwiches at a grocery near the Liffey. I could see the river under a terraced bridge on the other side of the wide road from us, and beyond that a group of tall, elegant stone buildings that looked like Edwardian hotels.
Then we went to the track to watch horse races. It smelled like beer and pitch, and as the crowd roared, the golden light on the green turf slowly softened into late afternoon. The last of the sunlight darkened into dusk in the parks full of strollers and picnickers we passed on the way to the theatre. It was a Restoration comedy, I think, Goldsmith or Sheridan, and now that I look back on it there was a funny sort of 18th-century feeling about Dublin that day, as I often felt in Ireland then, a brightness and lightness and country-fair bustle.
That was south; north of Belturbet was Ulster. David had a friend who lived in Fermanagh, an Ulster county just north of the border, so we set out one morning to drive there. The road north was densely forested on either side, and there was a light rain. Suddenly we came to a little clearing and there was a sentry booth manned by young men in camouflage uniforms, holding submachine guns – British soldiers. They looked very young, and very nervous, so it came as a great relief to me when they handed back David’s documents and we drove off. The forest immediately closed in again around us, but it soon gave way to rolling fields dotted with grazing cattle and shrubbery. The sky cleared as well, and it was a splendid sunny afternoon by the time we reached David’s friend’s house. They showed us around their farm and stable, and then we all gathered in a book-lined room with a dark floral carpet, and we sang folk songs together until the sun went down. David and his friends drank gin and tonics, the friends’ sons smoked the marijuana they grew on the farm, and I drank Lucozade.
As exciting as our day-trips were, I was happy to spend most of the time around David’s farm, or walking into Belturbet and back. Eventually, however, the time came for me to return home to America. We packed the night before, and in the morning David drove us out through Belturbet one last time. I’ve described the route of the high street up from the direction of David’s farm to the hilltop town square; its route down and south toward Dublin was quite different. Where the road upward was relatively straight, long and gradual, the road down spiraled rapidly and steeply down past statelier homes than those on the way in, until at last it passed by a shop with a pretty surrounding garden and crossed a bridge over a little brook. It felt a bit like leaving Looking-glass Land. I really wished I would be able to return.
As a coda to that first encounter with Ireland, there’s a peculiar memory from that time which I can’t quite sort out. I seem to remember wandering through the woods near David’s house with my mother until we came upon a clearing. It wasn’t very large, about the width and breadth of David’s house itself, and hemmed in on all sides by dense, high shrubbery. In the middle of the clearing was a large, dark rectangular object, overgrown with vines and brush. What was it? Some sort of generator? An architectural ruin, ancient or more contemporary? Debris fallen from the sky? I no longer know, if indeed I ever did. But as I recall the scene, standing under the glare of the pale blue sky and the shadows of the surrounding woods, it seems to epitomize for me the mystery and remoteness, and the visionary fire within everyday life, that I found in Ireland.
Part 2
Over the next year, I drew closer to Britain and Ireland even from an ocean and half a continent away. Through the fall, winter and spring of 1984 and 1985, I immersed myself deeper and deeper into rock music, from the 1950s founders to the punk, post-punk and new wave sounds of the day. A lot of this was British; not much was Irish, but a few crucial works were – Van Morrison’s recordings with Them and his second solo LP (Astral Weeks), and the first two U2 albums. So my imagination was already primed by the sound-worlds coming through my headphones when I heard the good news that we would be going across the ocean again that summer – and not just to Ireland this time, but first to England and Wales.
On the day of our departure, we woke up at daybreak. My clock radio awakened me appropriately, with the latest single by the English postpunk band The Fall, from Manchester. The song, “Couldn’t Get Ahead,” was one of their classic twitchy, gargoyle-grey shuffles, about moving compulsively while not being sure where you’re going, a good fanfare for my journey into mystery. The next thing I remember is eating excellent rubbery pizza and a chili dog in the space-age-spectral Kennedy International terminal while reading a copy of Spin magazine with Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics on the cover and an article on some of the new Midwestern avant-garde hardcore punk bands – fascinating stuff, but I was heading away from that place, my familiar home.
Some hours later we were in London. We must have spent some time there; I remember being in a row of colorfully jumbled shops under a glass arcade, through which I could see the overcast sky, and then at a train station, the tracks stretching out parallel to a public garden. After that we were in Oxford, to spend a week or two.
This was actually the city where I was born – to American parents over there to work and study, I should add. I had left when I was three and not been back. My memories of the time were intense, but few and fragmentary. Yet there clearly remained some deeper connection to what was after all my primal experience in earth, because I instantly felt relaxed and natural on returning to Oxford in a way I haven’t quite felt since. The light, the sounds, the colors all reverted me to some sort of affective default setting from before I’d learned enough to fear the world at all. Yet this sense of subconscious familiarity had superimposed on it the same sense of conscious estrangement I’d had in Ireland – this was another modern, English-speaking place that was yet not America. This play of connection and alienation was an almost exact reversal of my city life in Chicago, where even familiar features of the world could always be suspected of hiding some sort of chaos or menace.
Still, it wasn’t just the activation of my memories of comfort that made this new-found Oxford so comfortable; the place itself seemed to move at the ideal tempo for life itself, purposeful but unhurried. We took a room in the back of a three-story house on a side street, on the third floor. It had that light, middle-class Edwardian feeling the English then gravitated toward as their default feel-good mode, kind of like the American impulse toward the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. These were remembered as periods when people weren’t worried, and these interiors did give the occupant a certain mood of calm and goodwill. The carpets and wallpaper were geometrically patterned just to the point of a stimulating sense of quiet activity, without being distracting. The furniture and tea sets were mellow tan and cream colors, not intimidatingly white or modishly black as in a contemporary hotel. The back windows opened out onto a small garden. I liked to look out onto the little rows of flowers and shrubs, or just sit on a chair and read my new book, A. J. P. Taylor’s illustrated history of World War II, while the English afternoon sunlight (so much softer than in America; something to do with it raining more?) passed through the window and its thin, cream-colored curtains stirred by the breeze, casting a slanting rectangle of pale golden light onto the carpet with its diagonal rows of small crests, spaced far apart.
It might seem an odd contrast with such an idyllic setting, but I had never been so conscious of World War II as a living presence as I was that summer in England. Of course, World War II was still very much such a presence in a great many parts of the planet in the mid-1980s because the Cold War, which froze in place the dislocations and relocations of the hot war against the Axis, was still highly, even perilously active. Those familiar lines on the maps my parents’ and my generations alike had grown up with were stitches where wounds had been hastily stitched together. In the US, which had been spared fighting at home, one could forget this without sufficient attention. In Britain (much less continental Europe or East Asia) it was more like Ahab looking at the stump of his peg-leg. A tremendous number of Britons had been killed in their homes by German aerial bombardment, and then there had been the unspeakable terror of the very real possibilities of a successful German invasion. So it was perhaps no surprise that the bookstores in Oxford gave more prominence to volumes on World War II than in the US, where the memory of Vietnam remained so dominant only ten years after the fall of Saigon. On the other hand, Britain was already fifteen years into its own “Vietnam,” in Ulster, and not in some tropical place halfway around the world, either, but as nearby as Cleveland was to Chicago. And yet the ongoing war in Northern Ireland seemed to command less of a public presence than forty-years-gone World War II. The material residue of the Second World War – uniforms, weapons, machinery, graphics – seemed to be sprinkled unassumingly across the visible surface of popular British life, a culture as much second nature as their gardens.
Of course, there was more than one legacy of the war years in Britain; a less visible one was the small but enduring British Communist movement, one of whose members was an old family friend in Oxford, Charlie Chackas. A painter who lived in a small side-street bungalow/studio, Charlie subscribed to the Communist Party newspaper, the Morning Star, whose crimson masthead invariably peeked out from amidst a mass of jumbled papers on one of his work desks. Amid my afternoon rounds of the local record stores (of which more below), I would wander over to Charlie’s house. It always felt cozy and welcoming behind its overgrown front garden, with the sun warming the paint-scented interior through Charlie’s skylight. He would get me a glass of water (with that nice crisp, mineral taste British and Irish water had) and we would sit and talk. I was in my first flush of youthful excitement about political and artistic avant-gardism, and he was touched by my enthusiasm, since these were the things he had discovered so long ago and lived by ever since. He was kind and treated me as an equal, not just a naïve kid, even as he corrected what he saw as my misconceptions about the USSR and indulged my perhaps extravagant claims for the merits of punk rock. Sometimes I would watch him paint. So unlike the stereotypical dour Communist, he loved color, in all its excessive possibilities, and in the silence of his concentration his tiny, wood-panelled studio opened out into a tropical paradise around me.
Back outside, I would head to one of the local record stores. The one I remember best was HMV, which would eventually get to the States a decade or so later, before all the chains went out of business a decade or so after that. It was set up like an American record store – rows of cassettes along the walls, racks of LPs through the center aisles, and no CDs yet – except that in Britain the LP sleeves and cassette cases were empty; you gave them to the shop assistant (UK-ese for clerk) behind the counter and they would find where the LP or tape was filed and insert it into the packaging for you. This might have taken more getting used to were it not for the fact that I was still in a sort of ecstatic shock from the cornucopia of audio gold arrayed before me. Reconstructing my subjective sense of why this should be requires digging down through a few layers of since-accumulated historical experience: past the 21st century’s universal availability of any piece of music anyone happens to remember and have access to as an instantly streamable clump of data; further past the turn-of-the-millennium emergence of online retailers selling (still) physical CD’s and LPs from anywhere to anywhere with a modem; further still, past the 1990s and early 2000s heyday of the megastores with their economy-of-scale capacity to reach deep into every niche taste . . . and don’t stop until you hit the 1980s. Most American record stores only carried releases on US major labels. If you were lucky, there might be a tiny Import Bin which contained not only actual foreign-made products but also American music on small independent labels. Even a lot of older US-major-label-released stuff had gone out of print and would only come back with the CD boom of the ‘90s. The best reissue labels were (and still are) British or European, and thus something like the classic late-‘60s debut by the Texas psychedelic band the Thirteenth Floor Elevators was only available as yet another scarce “import.” Last but not least, a lot of great British music (particularly the punk and post-punk stuff in which I was most interested) had never been released in the US in the first place.
So you had to go to the source to find it – and now here I was! Records I’d only read about, right there in my hand! The raw, rattling, splatter-frantic 1977 debut album by pioneer punks the Damned was here, not even available on cassette, but I actually bought the LP and carried it padded inside my suitcase all the way through the Midlands, Wales, Ireland, and back to the States. (The cover got slightly creased around the edges, but it still plays great to this day.) That was the only LP I bought in Britain or Ireland, however. The rest were cassettes – portable, basically unbreakable, and I could play them in my Walkman.
Again, since we have lived for decades now with the assumption that music accompanies us everywhere on personal speakers, it requires an act of imagination to conjure how marvelous it seemed to me that I could replicate the experience of listening to music in my living room when I was in fact thousands of miles from home, and on the move. But the Walkman was still so new that even a couple of years earlier nobody I knew had had one (and this then-futuristic device is now so obsolete that I feel I ought to explain that the Walkman was a Japanese-manufactured, compact, battery-powered cassette player, only twice the size of the tape itself, to which one connected a headphone unit with earpieces each the approximate size and shape of a miniature donut). So it was thrilling to read about a band in the NME (the UK’s leading weekly newspaper), go to HMV to get the cassette, then wander through this now-unfamiliar foreign city of my birth and infancy, listening to it on my way back to our bed-and-breakfast.
There was one such tape I liked in particular, by a group called The Men They Couldn’t Hang, who played in a mode that was hot in the current rock underground-folk music, played with with punk drive and velocity. But most of those groups were American, and The Men . . . were British, so British I had to go across the ocean and read about them in the NME before I even knew they existed. They had a song called “Walking And Talking,” a jaunty, defiantly slap-happy fast shuffle about ignoring life’s petty irritations in favor of wandering around singing to yourself and generally wasting time. It was a theme for me as I made the rounds of Oxford (and my later destinations in Britain and Ireland) with my Walkman on, letting the unfolding scene surprise me with no particular place to go except to be out in that soft but brilliant northern summer. The Men . . . had a darker side, though; they did a long version of the mournful World War I song, “The Green Hills of France,” that expressed a passionate, living connection to history that was very different from the mood of their American counterparts, which was more like a quest for already-receding roots. It was very much in the vein of Charlie’s Communist fidelity, an intimate bond with an unbroken procession of struggle, defeat and endurance that stretched as far back into the past as the land itself. This was the other side of that long British memory that clung to World War II as an apotheosis of national togetherness – a sense of British history as intimacy, true, but also enmity, from Roman versus Celt to Norman versus Saxon to English versus Irish, and throughout all this the few who owned the land and its riches versus the many who did not.
The summer of 1985 was a time when it was hard for a visitor to Britain to avoid an acute awareness of this, because the country was in the midst of the great miners’ strike against the Thatcher government. Beyond the primary and spectacular element of class conflict at work, there was an aspect of equally long-running regional and even ethnic fracture and inequity involved as well – the mines were concentrated in the union’s Celtic fringes as well as the far north, whereas the south, with its burgeoning financial sector, remained the citadel of power in the land as it had been for the Romans and Normans alike in their time. There was nothing like this in America; my hometown, Chicago (now the third largest city in the US), had not even existed 200 years earlier, and my other hometown, Los Angeles (the second largest), had been a minute Spanish-colonial hamlet.
That was part of the excitement of reading the NME, which wove coverage of the strike – very favorable to the miners – into their presentation of the current music scene. There was a sense of life crammed so close together, without the vast gaps in space or time that defined the US, that the compression generated a boiling frenzy of energy, and a sense of some impending explosion that would put all that history into play once more. That urgency, that sense of history at stake and in motion right now, informed the NME’s more strictly aesthetic/musical concerns as well. The NME had redefined itself as the vanguard intelligentsia of British rock journalism/criticism during the explosion of punk in 1977; eight years later, punk was still the seismograph by which the paper measured successor musical movements’ capacity to unleash the shock of the new. And the sounds they favored in ’85 – the punk-folk off-kilter anachronisms of the roots-rockers, the polarized fusion of classic ‘60s pop and futuristic white-noise guitar by Hüsker Dü and the Jesus and Mary Chain, the folk-lullabies-turned-minimalist-guitar-drones of the Smiths – all had the same feeling of an uneasy but exciting tightrope between the weight of the past, the urgency of now and the mystery of the future. I think this sense of awakening to living in the midst of larger political, social and cultural forces, all moving so fast and to apparent purpose and carrying us along with them, was what the twentieth century was all about, even toward the end of its last real decade. It was something that Charlie realized I felt too, something that bonded us. I suppose the NME was my personal equivalent of his Morning Star. Certainly it was “my paper,” at least while I was in Britain and Ireland, because you could find it at any newsstand there, even in Belturbet.
Good introverted adolescent that I was, though, a lot of this excitement was of course principally going on inside my head. Life in Oxford was actually pretty quiet, almost like a dream of summer. I wandered by the riverside, watching the little boats glide along while groups of students and ducks lounged around on the lawns. We went and had an evening dinner with another old family friend at an Indian restaurant on the second floor of a building right in the middle of town; the soft sunlight faded to pale blue as we ate a delicious mild curry with cucumber in a room that seemed as old and comfortable and familiar as a favorite chair.
One afternoon we drove to Blenheim palace, just outside of town. The palace was lovely inside, full of porcelain and crystal and long halls, and plenty of windows to let in the slanting summer sun. From outside, the grounds seemed to spread out all around us, with the low expanse of the palace as a shifting focal point. As I wandered the grassy hillside, I felt pleasantly immersed in a sense of infinite space and the leisure to let myself get lost in it. Like the rest of Oxfordshire, it felt like a place I’d never actually left since I’d been born and would never have to leave now.
But soon enough, it was time to leave Oxford. Before I do, however, there is one more set of memory fragments from my stay there that remain after I’ve sifted the rest for clear meaning. Perhaps those are the purest experiences, the ones that are too singular to fit in anywhere in particular. I remember walking down along a street near the center of town. It was a bright summer day, a bit brighter than usual, the joy of walking in Oxford juiced with a bit of extra energy. I was listening to the Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette, their third album and the breakthrough where their jet-fuelled rock-and-roll blare filled out, simultaneously acquiring a heavy edge and brilliant melodies. The sound was about being out in the world; it alerted you to all the movement and color playing out unpredictably around you. I watched a car pull out of a garage, the scent of exhaust mixing with the summer pollen; my eyes caught a moment of a pretty girl crossing the street, her skirt fluttering in the breeze. I went into a chips shop I liked, ordered the standard fish and chips with salt and vinegar wrapped in newsprint. There was an acrid charge to the way the hint of ink interacted with the vinegar, oil-saturated batter and fish that galvanized my palate with delight; it’s just not the same in America without the newspaper.
While I ate, I walked up a hill road, the small shops giving way to houses with front gardens full of merrily colored flowers. At the top of a hill was a four- or five-story apartment building; it must have been the home of a family friend I’d been to before and therefore knew how to find, because my mother was already there (either that or I’m yoking two distinct memories together, an inevitable hazard of these sorts of recollections). The apartment was on one of the upper floors. It was close-packed with books and furnishings and little artifacts, yet everything in it seemed perfectly at home, with plenty of room; it was tidy but still felt casual and natural. All in all, it epitomized the qualities that made me comfortable being in Britain again, made me feel I really had in some way come home to where, after all, I was born and spent the first three years of my life. Looking out the window, I could see over the trees and down the hill, with the low, gently coalescing skyline of Oxford visible in the middle distance, neo-gothic and modern seeming perfect company for one another.
After I left, it would be some time and many miles before I spent more than a transitory hour or two in sight of a city skyline, even a semi-pastoral one like Oxford’s. Actually, we did stop next at Coventry on our way north. I recall going to a stationery store that had the fussy cheerfulness of a little Edwardian library, simple but elegant displays of pens, paper, notebooks and so on in wood-framed glass cabinets. It was just around the corner from the city’s great cathedral, our destination. The interior was vast and shadowy, but somehow comfortably enveloping, especially with the light filtering through the brilliantly colored stained-glass windows. There was something intimate, even personal about the cathedral’s presence; the remaining scars from its devastation by German bombing during the war made it seem like a great, wounded yet enduring creature. Outside, people were spread out around the church grounds, basking in the summer sun. It was yet another marvelous instance of the way the weight of history and the lightness of life’s everyday pleasures coexisted so naturally here.
As we drove away into the Midlands countryside, however, all of that seemed to simplify itself into a great garden that had always been here, just as it was. This was the most English of English landscapes, groves of trees as modest and symmetrical as hedges, hedges full of soft-colored flowers, yellow, pink and white, all positioned in a grid of gently rolling grasslands. At some point we stopped at a pub for sandwiches, a slice of mild cheddar on white bread. It seems so simple, but I’ve never had one that tasted quite like that except at one of the many pubs we stopped at in Britain and Ireland, where they all tasted like that, bland at first but with a tang that snuck up on you.
Eventually we arrived at the home of our family friends the Scotts, in a Midlands town called Malvern. The house was asprawl with books and plants and Mrs. Scott’s paintings and art supplies, open to the light and fresh air of the place. They had a lovely garden outside the kitchen, on top of a hill ringed with bushes. I spent some time there with the Scotts’ daughter Thalia, who was about my age, comparing notes on school, friends and music. Thalia’s favorite was Paul Young, a cool but passionate British soul singer with a matter-of-fact but commanding presence. I was already drifting away from pop music (though I would drift back), but I couldn’t deny Paul Young – he was very modern, very real.
Thalia also told me about a summer festival in town that sounded like a lot of fun, and we went, the next day or maybe the day after that. There were hundreds of people, and food stands, crafts, games, you name it, all spread across those Midlands hills under the high, soft summer sun. It was definitely a different feel from the midwestern state-fair-type summer events I’d grown up with, where the fun came from the sense of the colorful carnival scene flashing in out of nowhere onto a big flat vacant lot of grass, then disappearing into thin air once more when it was all over. Here, there was again that sense of continuity with the past, as if this was the same summer fair that had come up with the rise of the medieval market towns, but now with new costumes to be worn and new wares to be found. Some people actually were decked out in archaic garb in a light and playful renaissance mode à la Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it almost felt like I might catch a glimpse of a castle over the next hillside. On the other hand, my big find of the day was a blue T-shirt with a black-and-white picture of Debbie Harry under the Blondie logo. And it was the early Blondie, with Debbie’s hair all ratty in the grainy photo, and the logo in lurid red. Yes, the British still remembered punk rock! That there was something so quintessentially urban and American here that made me feel even more at home. The world was a big place, and yet I could always find myself there, wherever I was. As the sun went down, I played the Jesus And Mary Chain’s “Something’s Wrong,” the huge, thunder-rolling chords of melody making me feel like a giant as I walked across the hills toward my latest home away from home.
Soon we were on our way north again. The scenery became gradually more austere, the soft garden-landscape of the Midlands fading into winding switchbacks up and down hills denuded of houses or even trees. Then the hills rose into mountains with great arrays of pines or firs massed all the way up their slopes, places no human hand seemed ever to have reached. We were now on the threshhold of Wales. Eventually the mountains levelled into the grand but warmly enveloping Welsh valleys, as green as one could have imagined. As we went further north, the land gradually flattened still further into rolling fields, dotted with farmsteads and then small villages. One of the villages was our destination; we turned off the road on arriving there and found our way to my great-uncle’s house. Norman was, to be precise, the father of my Aunt Liza, the wife of my mother’s brother, my Uncle Tony. But Norman, a kind and gregarious man, always treated me like blood kin. He palpably enjoyed being the patriarch of his comfortably commodious house as it hosted multiple generations and branches of our family that week: Norman and his wife Anne, Tony and Liza and their two daughters, Kate who was then about three and Emma who was just one year old, and finally my mother and me. I remember the house being full of open space and sunlight even with all those people bustling about inside it; and there were all sorts of exciting nooks and crannies tucked away, my particular favorite being the pantry, where they had these little pre-made cubes of Jell-O that you could chew like gum. The garden outside was a classic tidy and colorful British garden but more sprawling and ebullient. There was a certain extra sense of roominess and freedom about Wales, as if hidden behind its mountains it could relax and be what the rest of Britain might be like if it didn’t think anyone was watching.
It was definitely one of the places where I’ve enjoyed being active outdoors the most. Norman took me and Tony golfing outdoors one afternoon. I’d never been golfing, unless mini-golf in Tarzana counted (Norman and Tony weren’t sure it did). The links was a beautiful parkland with ponds and willows amid steeply sloping hills. I got the hang of it surprisingly quickly and only lost a couple of balls. Norman’s presence on the links was inspiring; purposeful yet at ease, he was someone you could take your cue from in enjoying life as it was meant to be enjoyed. We also played cricket a lot out in the yard. I’d played enough baseball back in America that I was able to “translate” some of that into this new (to me) sport. The biggest novelty was the bat, broad and flat like a paddle instead of the familiar thin barrel of the Louisville Slugger. But soon the very novelty of it, not just the still-instinctively unexpected width but also the fact that you swung it underhanded, became what made it such fun. It was what had thrilled me all along about Ireland and now Britain, this other world across the sea, how like and unlike America it could be all at the same time. It rekindled my young sense of hope and wonder, that life could be life yet still something more.
It so happened that an event took place the week I was at Norman’s that reminded me of how vast the world really was. The Live Aid benefit concert for famine victims was or course designed to elicit precisely that reaction; the event’s de facto anthem was entitled “We Are The World.” Watching the bands play on TV while sitting on the couch in Norman and Anne’s living room chewing those (delicious) Jell-o cubes really did bring that message home, though. Here I was, thousands of miles from home but with my family, in this place that felt perfectly hidden from the world yet watching the same thing millions of other people were watching at the exact same time, while it was happening! That this very public event revolved around rock music, which I had experienced as my great private passion, was just another paradox – one that felt even more acute (and emotionally stirring) when the Russian act Aquarium performed. My friend Bill was probably right later when he said I overrated them, but I couldn’t help it. These people didn’t want to incinerate Kansas City with ICBMs, they just wanted to rock out, like me. As far as I was concerned, that was the start of glasnost.
The next thing I remember is being in Belturbet again. Which is not to say that I teleported there directly from Norman and Anne’s couch, merely that I can’t recall how the passage was effected. David’s farm was just as I had left it, which is exactly what I’d wanted. I instantly went back to my old routine, as if I’d never left, and in a way it felt like I hadn’t. There was a calm, unassuming vitality to it that seemed to me to embody the norm from which the other forms of living I’d experienced were mere embroidery or deviation. The one difference was that instead of getting football magazines when I walked to the newsagents in Belturbet, I got the NME. The heavy coverage of American underground music struck my fancy in particular, since David’s farmhouse felt yet more remote from the US than any of the places I’d been so far on this trip. I remember reading an article about the New York avant-garde noise-rock group Sonic Youth while eating fried eggs and black pudding in David’s kitchen, the band looking like weird druids wearing yellow raincoats in a grey landscape much like the one outside the kitchen window, with the rain coming down on the woods behind David’s house. In another piece I read in my room late at night, the NME’s critic tried and failed to figure out Black Flag, the most furiously, hermetically American and underground of American underground punk bands. Britain and Ireland seemed exotic to me, yet we seemed just as exotic to them! Thinking about it was like looking through one end of a telescope, then the other.
Of course, late at night was always when David’s farm seemed most exotic to me. When I wasn’t listening to the murmuring from the woods, my default nocturnal soundtrack was the Cult’s recent album Dreamtime, which I’d picked up on tape in Oxford. This group would later become widely known as a straightforward if effective American-style hard-rock unit, but in 1985 they were still under the radar (Dreamtime hadn’t even been released in the US) and still within the goth/psychedelic framework they’d formed around as the Southern Death Cult, if now hinting at heavy metal. The music was brilliantly dark and swirling with obsessive, driving rhythms, and as I lay in bed, moonlight streaming through the curtains, it conjured visions of ancient spirits and creatures passing across the land outside my window like fast-drifting clouds now that they were free to move unseen, singing strange songs, their shifting expressions inscrutable in the shadowy landscape.
It was a good rehearsal for going west into the heart of Ireland, where my mother and I were headed next. We left David’s farm early in the morning, drove through Belturbet, and took the road south and west toward Longford, the neighboring county. Longford is close to the geographical center of the island, which forms a sort of basin, and sure enough, as we went the hills levelled into land that graded upward and downward in very long, gradual waves. There were fewer trees here too, only the occasional grove decorating the vast expanse of meadow and bog. The little towns seemed to appear out of nowhere up ahead on the road. There was something about them that felt faintly out of place, especially when they were dwarfed by some ancient structure that blended more naturally into the austere landscape. I recall in particular a semi-ruined abbey, blackened stone halls and gates with a tall tower whose silhouette seemed to press against the empty blue sky. Yet there was something so comfortingly human and everyday about the small grocery store across the road from the abbey, with its colorful flyers in the window announcing deals on meat, its Rowntrees fruit pastilles and slightly out-of-date magazines. It was a reminder that this was a place where people had always lived, whether the monks in the abbey or the villagers shopping for crisps or black pudding. The center of the country was a place where that clear, direct quality of Irish life felt most manifest to me, a flat, simple but beautiful place with nothing in its way.
That was Longford and the neighboring county Roscommon, whose flat landscape began to give way to mountains as we passed through to the west. Atop one rising pass, in a field full of tiny orange flowers among the grass, we spotted a dark bulk of rock and pulled over to take a look. It was a dolmen – a long, thin, rectangular slab of rock placed slanting onto supporting stones. The dolmens had been used for religious rituals by the pagan Celts, or perhaps even by the people who had been there before them. Standing by the dolmen, I navigated the contradictory sensations of a presence that was so ancient that (unlike the abbey, which was after all a ruin of Christendom) its meaning was completely alien to my world, and yet whose physical being seemed to communicate something to me in its massiveness and simplicity; a something about this form, drawn in lines so raw yet so sure, spoke to a part of my brain more basic than language itself. As we were about to enter Ireland’s mystical far west, this dolmen made a suitable gate.
It turned out, however, that we weren’t headed straight west quite yet. My mother, who I don’t believe had yet been in that part of the country, and certainly not without David, missed a turn and went further south. The next thing we knew, we were in the town of Limerick. We didn’t meet the Man From Nantucket or any of his literary kin, but the town was quite lovely – spacious and with a garden-like feel from its rows of cottages and elegant public buildings and churches amid lawns and shrubbery. The hilly streets seemed to go endlessly up and down and around in circles, but finally we made it out and headed north again into County Clare.
We knew we had indeed reached the Far West without having to read a sign, because we saw the Burren. It was like nothing I’d ever seen – a huge ridge of smooth, charcoal-dark rock rising from the land like the back of some dormant, mythical black dragon. The next thing I remember is the Atlantic Ocean, dashing against the cliffs far below the coastal road. The sheer scale and power of these two natural phenomena – one deriving from its vast dark stillness, the other from its frantic eternal motion – were a bit overwhelming, so I was ready to relax when we reached the bed-and-breakfast where we were staying. It had been a long drive, and we went to bed early.
The next morning, we had a delicious breakfast of fried eggs, sausages and steamed tomato slices, while the nice old lady who owned the place asked us all about ourselves. Afterwards I went for a walk around the environs of the house. It was on a part of the Burren that formed a sort of plateau, so for acres around it was flat and bare of any foliage except the tough grass that could grow on the rock. In the middle distance behind the house the Burren rose again, a black margin edging deep into the pale blue morning sky. I was well away from the house when I saw a dark shape moving rapidly towards me. It was the nice old lady’s dog, a mid-sized scruffy black mutt. When he reached me, he rolled over on his back, paws whirling haphazardly around in the air, expecting that I would rub his tummy as I had the night before, so I did. He would do this whenever he saw me for the two days I was there, the very embodiment of canine high spirits and good fellowship. I christened him Muchly Feet for the way his paws seemed to multiply themselves during his frenzies of enthusiasm. He was my special friend in a way that a dog can become even the course of a brief acquaintance, and I’ve often thought of him since.
We spent most of our time there exploring the Burren or the coast. At one point I recall climbing up to a great moss-covered rock that formed a sort of small cave in the space between itself and the mountain against which it rested. If you climbed to the top, you could see the ocean far down below. There was something sublimely hidden about the scene, just as there was something sublimely expansive about the one we witnessed late that afternoon. We were on a high cliff overlooking the Atlantic, the terrain around us flat and covered with long grass except for spots where the soil had crumbled, exposing the black rock beneath. The sun was sinking into the ocean, tinting the sky a melancholy shadowy lilac. Suddenly the disc flared orange, turning the sky an incandescent scarlet and making the long grass look like it was about to catch fire. A few minutes later it had burned itself out, the sky fading again into a curtain of purple velvet settling onto the scene. But in that bright interval, I had really felt what it was to be at the far western edge of the British Isles, indeed of Europe, with nothing between us and the sun but this great ocean. There was an eerie purity about that encounter that went, I thought, a good way to explaining the peculiar mystical power of Ireland, and particularly of its far west.
It was a feeling that stuck with me when we finally said goodbye to the bed-and-breakfast (and, sadly, Muchly Feet) and made our way the few miles up the bay to Galway. This was in many ways Ireland’s second city, not as commanding as Dublin but possessed of a distinctive elegance. The buildings had a modern sense of mass, but their soft colors and subtle flourishes of decoration recalled the 18thcentury, yet a different one from Dublin’s, more courtly. Our hotel was like a Georgian dollhouse, all glass panels, polished wood, cream- and pastel-colored plush furniture. But there were moments when that same salmon-orange light we’d seen on the cliff would flood the cityscape and you would have the odd sensation of being in a British city (architecturally speaking) without the usual gently enclosed garden-like feel, one that was open to the great elemental forces of the world. It actually reminded me of the central harbor area of Bombay (where I’d been the year before), another imperial heirloom perched on the rim of the open ocean.
One particular encounter with that light stands out in my mind. We were wandering around the dense, narrow-laned center of the city when I saw in passing the window of a little record store. The entrance was through a marble-floored arcade, open to the street, with shop doors on either side when you went in. I found my way to the cassettes, which were stored in the compartments of a row of revolving towers. As I was turning them to look through the stock, a burst of afternoon sunlight poured through the store windows from the west. It refracted against the cassette cases, the silvery window frames and the shiny marble arcade floor visible through the side windows, shifted and blurred the faces of the customers and the posters on the walls as it passed across the room. And then it was gone, the fluorescent lights of the shop dominant once more. There was almost a feeling that you could lose yourself in that light, let yourself dissolve.
In a certain sense, that is what I’ve always gotten out of travelling far from home, which is why I love it, but only seem to do it infrequently, and exactly when I need it. And now I had gotten what I needed, let go of as much of myself as I needed to, gone as far as I could, to the very edge of Europe. The only thing further was the ocean, and then America. It was time to go home. After a drive back to Belturbet and a farewell to David’s farm, we drove to Dublin, then flew to Heathrow and thence to the U. S. Sadly, I haven’t been back to Britain or Ireland since. But I took a lot of them home with me, including a foot-high replica Kells cross, made out of some black stuff that felt like dried peat. A few years later, on an acid trip, I felt myself drawn to the place on my shelf where it rested. I picked it up; the palms of my hands seemed to burn gently and the room filled with light.