McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (15 page)

‘The weather is God’s way of keeping Ireland Irish,’ chips in the French woman.

‘What’s that you’re reading over there anyway, stuck away in the corner like you don’t want anyone talking to you?’ says the builder.

So we discuss Wibberley, and genetic memory, which he reckons is a sound enough idea.

‘So what are you doing here anyway? On holiday are ya? Or are you looking for a nice cheap old house to buy? Because if that’s yer game you should have been here ten years ago. Them days are gone now.’

I say I’m visiting my family and travelling around.

‘What? Looking for ya roots are ya? Like all them poor feckin’ Yanks in Killarney? Jeezus Christ, the trousers on some of them fellas.’

I’m cringing to be categorised in this way. I’ve got nothing in common with American heritage tourists, but for the moment I can’t think why; so I decide to stand there, saying nothing and chewing salmon, until someone else says something, which obviously won’t be long.

‘Where are you heading next then?’

‘West, I think, then north.’

‘Have ya ever been out to the Beara Peninsula?’

I never have; a piece of news which is greeted by sighs of pity and incredulity all round. I’ve heard about it all right, a wild strip of land poking out into the Atlantic at the western fringe of Cork. An Australian alcoholic I know once tried to spend the winter there, but his foot went septic and he had to go back to Darwin. These things happen.

‘It’s a beautiful place. You’ll find plenty of McCarthys out that way to make you feel at home.’

It’s a nice idea, but I’ve already decided to leave Cork tomorrow. There just isn’t time to go to Beara.

‘And there’s a McCarthy’s pub out there, real old style, never been changed.’

‘I really couldn’t change my plans now.’

‘Why the feck not?’

I’m just going to ask him whether he’s always said feck or was it invented by the guys who wrote the
Father Ted
TV shows, when the Belgian woman suddenly joins in.

‘I reckon there’s only two kinds of people, the Irish and the wannabe Irish.’

Clearly she’s now one of the former; but what if I’m one of the others?

‘Sure, we had some Germans in the other day, didn’t we, Yvette, and weren’t they desperate to be Irish? Couldn’t get enough of the place.’

‘Why do you think that is then?’

‘Well, I asked them that, and they said it’s because the Irish know how to have fun.’

‘That’s it? Fun?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No sort of mystical union with the land, Celtic twilight of our ancestors kind of thing?’

‘No, just fun. So I says, so you like fun, but do you know how to have fun? And this woman stares at me, all serious like and says, “Off course not. Ve are German.” ’

Huge peals of laughter all round. In its way, this is quite a telling symbol of the new united Europe: an Englishman, an Irishman, a French woman and a Belgian, all sitting round having a good laugh about the Germans.

I leave the pub and go for a moist walk past the post office, the butcher’s, and the other five pubs, down to the abbey at the water’s edge. You can still see the side door where lepers had to stand, and a well that’s supposed to cure warts. Because of the huge numbers of wine casks that were found there it’s believed by some historians to have functioned as both a haven of monastic contemplation, and a massive illegal off-licence. It was burned, along with the whole village, by the English army in 1642. Irish children were considered fair targets, on the grounds that one day they would grow into Irish adults. Some soldiers testified to having stripped Irish corpses and found pointed tails on their backs, proving they were devils.

Soft drizzle, a few pints and a good old wallow in the injustices of history is a powerful combination, as the Irish know better than most. As I head back up the hill to the Convent, my English half and my Irish half are distinctly ill at ease with each other. I have to give them a good talking to, and tell them there’s no point living in the past, but I’m not sure they’re convinced.

After a light supper of langoustines with whiskey mayonnaise, chervil and carrot soup, well-hung fillet of rare local beef marinated in Thai spices, and rhubarb crème brûlée, all washed down with a galumphing chocolatey Aussie red, I sleep the luxuriantly deep, guilt-free sleep that comes only to those who’ve had too much to eat and drink, and just don’t care.

I wake with sun streaming through the curtains, and realise almost immediately that it must be morning. I pull the curtains back and see that the tide is in, twinkling brilliantly. The landscape looks luminous, and a glorious day is beckoning; so I go back to bed for an hour, then get up again.

Out on the landing, at the top of a grand staircase with a huge Gothic ecclesiastical window, are the American couple who almost gagged when I arrived for breakfast yesterday.

‘We’ve been up for hours,’ says their body language. ‘We’ve already had a healthy breakfast of wholemeal toast and ’erb tea. We’ve explored the grounds and we’re dressed up like this because now we’re going on a massive walk that will help turn us into better people. You look like shit, by the way.’

Then they actually say, ‘Beautiful day.’

‘Sure is.’

They go on down while I go back into my room because I’ve forgotten my map. I also grab my copy of the tourist board’s indispensable
Guide to 100 Best B&Bs Run by Mad Nosey Religious Fanatics
. Downstairs, the front door opens, and the Americans blow back in, pursued by the climate.

‘Problem?’

‘Yeah, gotta change. It’s started to rain. Now I remember why we usually go to Hawaii.’

Yes indeed.

Over breakfast, I hatch a plan. I will definitely leave Cork today. I’ve no idea why. The still dominant, but increasingly rattled, English half of me just needs a plan, and this is it.

As I ease the blue Tank round the turning circle and head down the drive, I look back at the Convent in the rear-view mirror. I’m abandoning this house, this view and the best cooks in the country to take my chances once again among the Mrs Goggins of this world. With luck I’ll be somewhere up the Kerry coast by nightfall.

Eight miles on there’s a fork in the road. Right for Killarney, Kerry and the north; left for Bantry Bay and the Beara Peninsula.

I turn left. No point in being too rigidly Anglo-Saxon about these things.

The rain has cleared and it’s a bright blustery day. The gorse is still in bloom, and occasionally there’s a burst of its distinctive coconutty-vanilla aroma. The road west goes through Skibbereen again. On the western edge of town it runs alongside a river for a little way. A bank of black clouds, backlit by sunlight, has given the choppy water an unearthly charcoal and silver sheen; the wind compounds the surreal effect by making the river appear to flow backwards. I pull over to the side of the road and get out to admire the view.

Immediately across the road is a ruined abbey and cemetery. As I haven’t visited one since late yesterday afternoon, I decide to take a look. On the whole, it’s fair to say that, if you’re travelling round the west of Ireland, an interest in ruined abbeys, however slight, will stand you in better stead than a passion for rollerblading, say, or a penchant for showbiz gossip.

The sign says that this is Abbeystrowny—the monastery of the stream—a Cistercian community ruined since the thirteenth century. The graves are more recent. Flanked on three sides by the churchyard is a plot of lush, neatly mown grass, about fifty yards by twenty-five, its surface gently undulating like the windblown waves on the river over the road. Some sort of garden of remembrance, perhaps?

There’s a white painted wrought-iron monument, all ornate flowers and petals, incorporating a harp and a Celtic cross. It was erected in 1887 to the memory of the victims of the famine. A plaque says, ‘Made by Eugene McCarthy, blacksmith, of Ilen Street, Skibbereen.’ The significance of the patch of thick grassed lawn begins to dawn on me. It’s a famine pit—an unmarked grave of victims of the potato famine. I find an inscription on stones nearby.

There isn’t a soul to be seen; no cars passing. The black clouds pass from the face of the sun, and a granite boulder sprouting a huge gorse bush on a hill looking down on the churchyard is suddenly illuminated. The rock, and probably the bush as well, have been watching this spot since long before these terrible things happened. I look down at the patch of grass beneath my feet. The undulations in the ground suddenly look like long human shapes, as if the ground is too full, and they’re rising to the surface. How many must be buried here? Dozens; hundreds maybe. The famine was never mentioned when I was a kid. I think older generations were still in some way ashamed back then. ‘Humiliation’—that was the word on the stone. The inscription continues: ‘Ireland’s worst single disaster 1845 to 1850. One million dead. One million emigrated. Skibbereen, epicentre of this horror, suffered more than most. Here in the famine burial pits, were placed the coffinless remains of nine thousand victims…’

Nine thousand.

I cross the road back to the car in subdued mood and take a look in Wibberley. According to him, parliament in London voted £100,000 to famine relief, in the same year it gave £200,000 to the beautification of Battersea Park. ‘Anyone who knows Battersea Park,’ he observes, ‘will quickly admit that such a sum was totally inadequate for the purpose.’

Cheered by the bleak humour of my guide, I leave Skibbereen behind and drive west towards Beara.

Glengarriff sits on Bantry Bay on the armpit of the Beara Peninsula. Sheltered on three sides from the winds by lofty wooded hills, it’s reputed to have the best climate in Ireland, and both the mainland and the islands offshore in Bantry Bay luxuriate in rich subtropical vegetation. When Thackeray first came to Ireland and visited the town in 1842 he wrote of ‘the astonishing beauty of the country’, even though it was pissing down and they’d lost his luggage. ‘What sends picturesque tourists to the Rhine and Saxon Switzerland?’ he wondered. Sweet white wine, over-hyped sausages and an obsession with cleanliness, William Makepeace, that’s what.