Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?. Tim Bradford
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bluuhhh marquees
bluuuh bluuuh bluuuuh.
Me: Car keys? Uh huhh! Hmmmmm!
I stopped at a garage somewhere in Wales and bought us both a sandwich (he didn’t have any money, he said). When we set off again I asked him when he’d last seen his mother in Ireland.
‘Oh a long while,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got cousins in Dublin who I saw a couple of years ago.’ I suggested to him that, since Wales seemed pretty quiet jobwise (although, admittedly, it was the middle of the night) and the Celtic Tiger6 was still so rampant, he should go with me on the ferry and get off in Dublin. It wouldn’t cost him anything. He pursed his lips and thought about it. OK, he could go and see his mother. And his cousins would put him up for a while, until he got a job. But he still wasn’t happy. Think about it, I said. We agreed he’d go as far as Holyhead and then make his mind up.
How many are like him, I thought? Most of the Irish people of my age in London all came over ten years or so ago for the money because there wasn’t anything for them at home7 (though now, of course, things are different). So many people around the world claim Irishness (seventy million apparently). They or their ancestors have all had to leave and the sentimental myths are built up. There’s often a dream of returning. But to what? Sometimes all that’s there is a memory of Irishness, a semi-fictional home, a country they carry in their hearts to salve the rootless detachment. I thought of the folk songs which must have been written by people missing home, like the ‘Fields of Athenry’, or ‘Spancel Hill’. I thought about asking the hitcher to press the Singing Leprechaun’s belly for me. His soulful rendition of ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ would have been the perfect soundtrack to my mind’s sleepy wanderings.
Being brought up in England in the early seventies meant that Ireland was a constant but not always apparent factor in my life. It began naturally with those crap jokes which always involved an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman – the Irishman naturally always being the fall guy. The Englishman was never anything but maddeningly sensible – you didn’t care what he said or did – the Scotsman sort of sat on the fence, unsure whether to be daft or boring, and the Irishman, the kind of fellow you’d probably get on with if you met him in a pub, would happily humiliate himself, shoot himself, jump out of an aeroplane without a parachute, or refuse to get off with Raquel Welch, in the interests of the narrative. For a while I had a theory that the Irishman in the Irish jokes was actually taking the piss out of the Englishman’s caution (the subvert-from-within philosophy). But I suppose that wasn’t what got the laughs on Saturday evening TV shows like The Comedians where blubber-necked walruses in dinner suits with big lollipop microphones and accents like gravy would entertain a nation (or rather pander to our prejudices), a nation moreover still stuck somewhere in the late 1950s (apart from those few lucky fuckers who actually had a shag and an acid tab in 1967).8
And then, of course, there were the bombs that I’d hear about on the news and not quite understand, bombs that were to do with Ireland. Why England was at war with Ireland (and ‘Ulster’) I could never work out (I knew it was war because the British army were always there in the TV pictures – I read all the war comics so knew the score). In many people’s consciousness bombs and Ireland thus became synonymous. Years later, at the end of the eighties, a paranoid mad distant relation tried to stop me going on a weekend jaunt to Dublin with my mates saying, pleadingly, ‘Them Paddies’ll bomb yer if yer don’t watch out!’
At Holyhead, in the cold flinty early morning light, we were one of the first cars in the queue. We both stared out at a shard of fading orange in the clouds. Go and see your family, I said, seemingly on some kind of repatriation mission. We got out of the car and went to check the ferry times. It would cost him a tenner to come back over. He waddled over to the phone to call his sister, who lived down in the southwest, to see if she would wire him twenty pounds to a bank somewhere in Dublin. It all sounded a bit elaborate to me. But the sister wasn’t there, only the husband, and he didn’t want to do anything until the sister came back. I didn’t understand. Someone in your family asks you for twenty quid – is it that big a decision? (Mad Relation: ‘Yeah but Tim, what if the IRA got their hands on the money, they’d be using it to buy missiles from Libya and that.’) I walked around Duty Free while he sat in the car trying to think what he should do. I got back in and handed over twenty quid, obviously expecting never to see it again. He must have read my mind.
‘You think you’ll never see this money again don’t you, but I promise you as soon as I get in touch with my sister I’ll get her to wire me some money and I’ll send you it straight back – Yeah, I’ll send you it in a couple of weeks, if you give me your address.’ I scribbled it on the back of an envelope and gave it to him.
On the ferry we went down to the front. It was like a big shopping centre with huge cathedral-like windows and an American-style cocktail bar with a Budweiser neon sign. Whatever happened to boats that actually looked like boats, I thought. In the gift shop were some of the Singing Leprechaun’s captive brothers and sisters. I pressed the belly of one of them and a sweet tune rang out. It seemed somehow familiar – where had I heard it before? Then it came to me – it was the famous old ballad, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’. The Hitcher wandered off and I tried to get some kip, thinking of garages, Irishwomen and Terry (I hoped he was regretful but guessed not – not his style, he’d be tucked up in bed sound asleep with a bellyful of good beer and a head full of crosswords).
About an hour later the Hitcher came back, I bought him a coffee and we discussed his plans. He hoped he’d never go back to England now. He was feeling positive. We stopped in Dún Laoghaire and he phoned his cousins in Tallaght to tell them he was coming. I then drove to Dundrum in south Dublin and stopped outside the big 60s-style shopping centre where busy consumers were going about their business. What are you going to do now? he asked. I’m going to have breakfast with my friends. He asked me about them. Oh they’re just a family of crazy and beautiful single women who live near the foot of the mountains and talk a lot, I laughed, sadistically. He looked at me pleadingly but I said he’d better go. Get a bus or something, I said. No, I’ll save my money he said, it can’t be more than five miles or so. I pointed him in the direction of Tallaght and waved goodbye. I knew I’d never see him again. Normally in these circumstances you feel some sort of sorrow after the bond that’s been forged. OK, there was a bit of that but I was also rather glad to see the back of the miserable bugger. Not much like Kerouac in On the Road, is it? I’d like to know how he got on, though. I hope he did stay in Ireland, maybe working in a pub in Mayo or even earning a bit of dosh on the back of the Dublin boom. Chances are, though, that he was lured back to England by the promise of a chilly bedsit and semi-regular employment, and the possibility of forgetting his dreams and just surviving on his own.
1 o2/a (m) = a x f/m – m = me, f = fuckup quotient, a = amount of things to be fucked up, o = other people.
2 Does this make me sound like some romantic delta blues guitarist or Gram Parsons figure who rejected his family’s wishes for him to become respectable?
3 And there goes the lucrative Brummie market.