Myles Away From Dublin (12 page)

For the fact is, you’d be poorly off without them. They are usually numbered as five – sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. These faculties are operated by certain organs, under the control of the central nervous system. But man, and many other vertebrates, has not only far more senses than five but even those named are subject to an infinity of nuance and degree. Furthermore, the senses can be easily fooled.

Sight is perhaps the most important of the senses inasmuch as, apart from its own primary function, its collaboration is demanded by other senses, particularly that of taste. You can for instance, by using a perfectly harmless and tasteless dye, turn milk black. But you will have the greatest difficulty in trying to get anybody to drink it, unless you proffer the glass in pitch darkness. Nicotine is ranked as a mild narcotic and should suffice for itself. But every smoker knows that smoking a cigarette in the dark is utterly futile and unsatisfying: he cannot see the smoke.

Or consider sweets of a certain kind. They are all made from a gelatinous compound but the cunning manufacturer by using harmless dyes colours them and pretends to impart a fruit flavour; red means
strawberry
, dark brown is plum, very pale yellow is lemon, green is grape, and so on. The fastidious sweet-eater will pick among a bagful to find the favourite flavour. Yet they all taste absolutely alike. The eye deludes the palate that there is a difference.

A sense not even hinted at in five is that of equilibrium. It is established by a labyrinth in each ear and the
verifications of the sight. But even without sight, a man will always know when he is upside down, and so will many animals.

A dog or a cat held upside down will try to screw the head round to the level it would occupy if the creature were standing up. Another unscheduled sense is that of falling. You get this before you open your parachute or even when taking a high dive. Hunger and thirst are senses and can be very keen and nasty ones.

It may be said that a branch of the sense of sight is recognition. When you see something that is familiar (your lost dog, maybe) you do more than see it. And here is a curious thing about recognition-by-sight. It is a vertical faculty.

I saw a film recently which featured Burt Lancaster. This man has a strong, massive face, not unlike the side of a quarry, but you would know it anywhere. In the film he was brutally beaten up by a gang of roughs and the next scene showed him in hospital, lying on an operating table. The camera showed him in a horizontal attitude. His face (which was unmarked) was quite unrecognisable. He might as well have been Saint Peter or Santa Claus. Yet I am not quite right when I say that recognition of a face is a vertical function. Nobody would recognise the most familiar face if presented vertically but upside down.

How the sense of taste can be fooled if sight is withdrawn may be shown by two tests which are easily carried out, preferably in a pub. You select as the guinea-pig a man who both smokes and drinks and knows all about both occupations. First, you securely blindfold him. Then say:

‘I have two cigarettes here, one lit, the other not lit. I will place a cigarette between your lips seven times successively and you are welcome to take a good pull.
After each cigarette you must say whether it was lit or not.’

It is safe to have a good bet that he will be wrong.

The other test is even more startling. Your man is still blindfolded. You buy him a bottle of Guinness and a bottle of ale. You hold a glass to his lips five times and let him have a good drink. Again, he is almost certain to fail to distinguish the one drink from the other every time.

This suggests that brewers are not to be trusted too far in the claims they make in their advertisements. I don’t know. With talk of drink we are back again to that valuable thing, the sense of equilibrium.

It would be unthinkable for anybody to write as much as a line for today’s paper without acknowledging that it is Christmas. The fact cannot be ignored. Even
non-Christians
cannot ignore it unless they are impervious to shoves, batterings, shrill voices, and high prices for things that look very ordinary, if not useless. It is not the feast of Christmas that is in question at all but the disorder and near-panic which precedes it.

Why is the day in front of a feast-day denoted by this word ‘eve’? That old servant, my dictionary, is no help here. It says bluntly that eve is short for even or evening, but adds (without giving authority) that the word is also used to denote the day preceding a Church festival.

The Church itself uses the word vigil which from the Latin means ‘watch’, or keeping awake in honour of the day to come. That makes sense; ‘eve’ doesn’t.

It is a plain and sorry fact that as the years go on, more and more people are heard saying ‘I wish it was all over,’ ‘I’m nearly bet,’ ‘Why didn’t I think of buying these things two months ago?’

The chaos that is commonly known as Christmas shopping is hard to understand, since the exact date of Christmas is known a year in advance, and the prudent man or woman could obviously begin the Christmas tasks at the beginning of, say, September, take things easy, and spend such money as is available wisely, free of the distraction of crowds and hustling sales people.

If blame for the present situation is to be allotted, I fear it must be placed on the shoulders of the business
community, retail and wholesale. I have a suspicion about their procedures and motives. They feel that the occasion of Christmas tends to make the majority of customers careless, sentimental and hysterical, inducing them to buy many things which the unexcited, cold, critical eye would disdain.

But suppose a wise man realises all this in time and, on the 1st of September, enters a shop and says:

‘I would like to see your Christmas cards, please.’

What will happen? The lady behind the counter will look at him as if he had two heads, give a ghastly smile and beckon to the boss who is somewhere in the background. By some other gesture she will convey to him that a quare fellow has entered the premises, and to look out.

Holly is an evergreen and sprigs of it may be gathered at any time on a country walk. But no. It must be bought at the last moment from an urchin at the door, who thinks he is selling gold leaf. Absolutely everything connected with Christmas except greeting cards and perishable foodstuffs can be got all the year round if there be found a persevering pioneer who will sternly keep after what he wants. Apparently such an heroic character doesn’t exist.

An occasion which was not festive required my own presence in Dublin just a week ago. (I had to see an income tax inspector or else later face exile in Siberia.) I had to traverse almost the whole length of O’Connell Street and the experience was not very different from taking part in a needle-match on the field of
international
rugby. It was unnerving. Tens of thousands of young children were trailing after dishevelled mothers and hanging on to an infinity of balloons, multitudes of men reeled about with many of them the worse for drink while decent respectable men trying to hurry about their
occasions got shocking falls from prams immured in the midst of the seething mobs.

It was almost impossible to make any progress, in any direction. It was common to see stout fellows from the country deciding that the way to get through lay in the use of the solid shoulder charge. Yes, CIE had made its contribution; several special trains to Dublin at
excursion
rates were run to convenience ‘Christmas shoppers’.

Apart from bedlam and pandemonium, Dublin had absolutely nothing to offer in the way of goods that could not just as well be had, and possibly at a cheaper price, in any country town.

Well, bruised as I am, I wish all my readers a happy Christmas, but hope they will be more sensible about the one that follows.

It takes an emergency of somewhat colossal import to prevent the holding of an international rugby match as scheduled. The last interruptions I can remember were apparently caused by the enactment of World War II. The reader should not too glibly assume that this was the most awful and disastrous war in history: let it not be overlooked that history is not yet finished.

Some cynics of recent date suggest that the Irish team is not very anxious to play, that their forward branch of the game has been very bad because they have been under the disability of having small packs. I disagree with that and believe that the boys in the green jerseys are all right provided that they have not also green faces.

And the fact is that the postponement of the Wales-Ireland encounter was due, not to small packs, but to small pocks. The usual spelling is ‘smallpox’, but a pock everywhere on the face is just as genuine as a puck in Croke Park.

I am an authority on smallpox and would fain recount my recent experiences. The phrase ‘would fain may seem archaic, but so am I.

A distant cousin insisted that I attend her wedding in Swansea on the 2nd of this month. (That means a present, I muttered to myself morosely.) In Dublin, I casually mentioned to a medical friend, though no client of his, that I would have to go.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how would you like a temperature of 104, a racing pulse, vomiting and pains all over the back and legs for a start? Then a rash that develops into
a mass of pustules? Then a swelling of the head that makes your face unrecognisable and threatens death from asphyxia by blocking the air passages? And even with recovery, the certainty of being disfigured for life?’

I said I wouldn’t fancy this regimen.

‘Then you’re a lunatic to go across without being vaccinated. Slip down to the hospital tomorrow about 11 and I’ll do the little job. If I’m tied up I’ll get another man to do the needful.’

‘Do the needle, you mean?’

Unthinkingly, I did this. Within a week I was very ill, and in bed. In hospital.

Smallpox is a very painful, dangerous and largely unexplained disease, caused by a filter-passing virus, and is highly infectious. There is no settled treatment or cure for it. Emphasis of medical endeavour has been on prevention, and the very word vaccination (from L.
vacca
,
a cow) was first invented in connection with the fight to control smallpox.

Following a theory of therapy now very widely distributed in use, one Dr Edward Jenner in 1798 published a paper which said, in effect, that the best way of making a man immune to smallpox was to give him smallpox.

The idea is that if he is given a minor dose of the disease, he is almost certain not to get the massive, disastrous dose. It seems to work pretty well in practice, but there are not a few quaint individuals to whom vaccination proves not only dangerous but occasionally fatal. I think I am one.

There is a disorder called vaccinia, which is really smallpox of the cow, sometimes misleadingly called cowpox. Jenner found that if a cow was infected by smallpox, the end-product of the passage of the virus through the cow’s body would still be a smallpox virus
but one of much diminished power and malignancy.

This, if injected in a solution of glycerine into the human arm, would cause a mild attack with the familiar pocks in a small area at the point of injection but would lack the power of causing a generalised eruption.

In 1889 a Royal Commission on vaccination was set up and in its final report of 1896, it gave approval with some reservations to the principle of vaccination against smallpox. In Britain as well as in many other countries, legislation was passed making vaccination compulsory. This led to political and social upheavals, and the inevitable appearance of ‘conscientious objectors’ led to some relaxation of compulsion. Responsible people have alleged and established many cases of eczema and impetigo following vaccination, and hundreds of cases of the far worse horror known as post-vaccinal
encephalitis.

True, the difference in reaction of adults to
vaccination
is truly enormous, but it is indisputable that almost anything is better than a dose of real smallpox.

Therefore, good reader, if the next time you look over a hedge and see a cow, raise your hat.

It seems, looking back, that my contributions to this newspaper have consisted mostly of my accounts of illnesses, bad luck, money owed and not paid, and every other kind of misfortune. If it’s the truth, why should I be shy of telling it. The recital alone gives some relief, and might also be a sort of a warning to other people who have it in for me.

I feel the latest piece of victimisation takes some beating. For once, I will be brief about it, if only the torture was very lengthy.

One morning I got a telephone call from a television company in London. I do not disclose which company. Would I be good enough to sit for a television interview? The date suggested was a Saturday and the man speaking said that absolute quiet was essential, the place he wanted to do it in (a pub) would have to be closed.

I said certainly, though I made no comment about the pub. I knew that Irish pubs everywhere ‘make’ the week on Friday and Saturday, when the wage-earner drinks the wages. I did, however, as a sort of a joke ask certain proprietors if they would be good enough to close on this Saturday for a few hours, and that the television firm would pay handsome compensation. The result was the nearest thing I have seen to heart failure.

Yes, two bright boys came to my own house at 10.30 a.m., accompanied by three locals, very likely borrowed from Telefis. These were a camera man, a man to look after terrifying and roasting arc-lamps, and a third to attend to sound recording. All were polite enough in a
bleak way, refused my hospitable offer of a drink, and went to work immediately.

I was put sitting on an upright, dining-room type of chair and No. 2 of the visitors sat near me but apparently not in the picture. The Sahara lights went on and my interlocutor (the general subject was books) began to ask me the most stupid questions imaginable.

‘You shave every morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘What part of your face do you choose for starting shaving?’

‘I have no idea.’

When the whole shot was over, No. 1 said:

‘That was very … very … very good, but you raised your voice slightly when you began talking about knitting. Shall we try it again?’

And so we did, and so we did. There was no lunch because the Mammie, if I may so call her, assumed that this 10-minute orgy would last an hour or so at most. There was the added crux of making lunch for seven persons in all. I don’t think we have that many chairs.

There were a few minor breaks between ‘takes’, and one major one. Glancing through a window, No. 1 said ‘That’s a nice little garden you have’, went out and lay down on the grass.

‘Get up, you fool,’ I roared, ‘that grass is wet. I don’t want pneumonia on my hands as well as this television job.’

‘OK,’ he said, rising, ‘let’s try it again.’

The major break came about half an hour afterwards. The camera man had to motor into Dublin to get more film.

This outfit arrived, as I’ve said, at 10.30 a.m., and that’s early enough for the start of any ordeal. They left at 7.30 p.m.

If any reader would like to know what this means in personal terms, let him sit on an upright chair between those hours, with no food beyond a cup of coffee, and nothing else of any kind except non-stop annoyance.

The item has not yet appeared on the TV screens, but I can certify that the recording was HELL. With knobs on.