A DUBLIN SKETCHBOOK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 546, 9 December 1949, Page 7

A DUBLIN SKETCHBOOK

| Written for "The Listener" \

by

A.

A.

Euston at 840 p.m. and settling into a corner seat, I somehow expect that the first person to join me in the compartment will be an Irishman; a_ natural enough consequence, I suppose, of being eager to get to where I am going. There is something exciting about the first glimpse of an authentic native of a country one is approaching for the first time; one hopes to observe the native in the act of homing, to see the nostalgic heart beat faster, the eyes brighten, etc., etc. But I fall in badly. He is friendly enough to be non-English, but his contemptuous gesture when I ask him "Are you from Dublin?" (why it should have been Dublin I have no idea) and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder and says "No; Here" is a revelation. I conclude that he is a commercial traveller. His advice on the customs, passports, and a sleeper for the return journey sounds. infallible, the Irish. Mail -at No, my first glimpse of the authentic homing Irishman doesn’t come until, sleepy and warm at 2 o’clock in the morning, we pour from the train on to a wharf, and then the savour of the moment is all but obliterated by quite another sensation; the canopied wharf; the anxious looking people, none of whose carriages seem to have drawn up where they hoped; the ropes and cables to be tripped over; the seagulls riding on smooth oily wavelets in the patches of light from stern

portholes, waiting, even at that hour; the looming dark hull of the ship itself, the white part flooded with lights above. Yes, it could all be Lyttelton on a winter’s night, and the ship could be the Maori. But there is no old-fashioned electric sign on the hill, if indeed there is a hill at Holyhead. A. the name of the ship is Hibernia. Ac this moment, in a thickening press of people waiting to get into a kind of stockpen,.I come to a stop, finding myself beside a young woman with the black hair, grey eyes and reddened eyelids and dark lashes, the pale temples and ruddy cheekbones, all of which I have convinced myself are Irish, and I steal a look at her labels: "Miss K. Donnelly, Roscommon." That seems pretty authentic. I take a deep breath and get my passport ready. * * * RANGATIRAS, Wahines, Hinemoas, Hibernias, they seem to be all the same, allowing for the fact that on a short three-hour trip like this many people travel without a berth; they bag places in the smoking room and lounge and try to loll in chairs not made for lolling. There is tea and rolls in the dining saloon, brought by _ tighttrousered stewards I have met before on Cook Strait. For my part I take a berth, at a cost of half-a-crown, which entitles me to a bunk and a rug in a dormitory over the propeller shaft, and —

I lie there trembling and shuddering for three hours. It is all very familiar and queer. No less so when the engines stop at last and we do up our collars and comb our heads and go above with suitcases, and stand, all of us, like steaming sheep, on a rubber floor in an open space broken by round

pillars, waiting for a double door to be opened and a rope made fast. We try to edge our cases a futile few inches forward; some in the rear consider whether it would be worth going round the other way; and someone puts a case on an old lady’s toes. . :¢ A green train waits on the wharf at what used to be Kingstown and is now Dun Laoghaire; a foreign language in a curious lettering on boards above the doors; men crying morning papers in an incomprehensible foreign tongue; I afterwards learn that this is nothing but English corrupted, but at first it deceives me. I have fallen in again. The taxi driver, sent to meet me at 7 o'clock, is a garrulous bore, or would be if I came this way more often; but the first time, he is interesting. He gives me a lucid exposition of how we will take a short cut across the slope of the hills to the south of the city, with a

view of the whole of Dublin Bay. He says I will be very happy in Ireland provided I "keep off politics and religion."" Where have I heard those words before? Certainly not in England. Fingering my chin in the back seat I begin to think up a stumbling doormat speech about having meant to shave. We climb the hills. The only landmarks he can point to as the city spreads out below are a gasworks and something like a power station; and we pass Kathleen Ryan’s mother’s home; a film star, I gather. I am content to believe that under the mist lies the Dublin I knowMr. Leopold Bloom’s and , Stephes Dedalus’ Dublin, which I will roam in later. At the moment I’m more con cerned with my excuse for arriving une shaven. 5 At a fine house on the lower slopes of a gently rising hill overlooking the (continued on next page) RR EE LLC A CCR

| A DUBLIN SKETCHBOOK

(continued from previous page) city and the bay, I ring a bell. A mute ghost in a blue overall admits me and wordlessly takes me to my room. I de-duce-with what relief!-that my hosts are still in bed, and am shown to the bathroom, "And would y’ like a cop of tea poured out in yeir hahnd at 8 o'clock?" How queer, the delight of a new language that is yet immediately com-

prenensioie, and vivid and direct. * * BUT the "Irish language" is another matter altogethera serious matter. "Learn Irish and Speak It’’ say the not very persuasive propapaganda posters in official places. The street signs, in yel‘low on green, give the Irish first, and then (since the object of such signs is to be intelligible to the people who use them) in~ English

underneath. SRAID UAC UI CONAILL -O’Connell Street. Thank Heaven, this practice is followed everywhere, for the word Mna means Women; Men are Fir. I ask my hostess, when she drives me into Dublin, for pronunciations, and her answer is always surprisingly impatient; "Och I don’t know." I sense an obstinate refusal to know anything at all about the Irish language; some strong feeling somewhere. She is a Dubliner, but a Protestant. I ask more questions, and find that if I accepted her view entirely I would regard the Irish language as a piece of childish official foisting. "No one," she assures me, speaks it; later a taximan tells me it is required for civil service exams, but that civil Servants forget it afterwards; they have to be able to read the headings on forms, but they don’t speak it. It is easy enough to agree with the impatient attitude: Stampai, say the signs over post office counters; "Post" can be rendered as Poist, Phoist, and Phuist, no doubt with some reason which I don’t perceive. —

"Phone booths are telefon. One visualises so much zealous invention and cooking up of new words from an ancient script based on symbols that were out of use for centuries. The letter-boxes, with their indelible cast-iron V.R. fixed for ever, have all been painted greenwith what feeling! one imagines-and there seems to have been no truth in the story that the initials began to disappear after the revolution, erased by

patriotic leprechauns, Passing a house in an old Georgian \ square where a sign | reads "Bureau of | Military History" I see at once in my mind’s eye the fervent patriot rewrite man, ; busy at his exacting task. I make him out a comic figure. But that may be because ‘I have just been shown the space in front of Leinster House where till lately stood a statue of Queen Victoria. Workman ware niac.

ing flat stones there. Does anyone want to buy a statue of the Queen? Timaru? Whangarei? Ohakune? * * %* N the National Gallery of Ireland are painters-good painters-of whom I have never heard: Walter Osborne and Chinnery, an extraordinary genius who went to China at the age of 80, was there rejuvenated with romantic ardour, and painted’ some astonishing things. In the Portrait Gallery are the faces of those who doied for Oireland: earnest, gtave, smouldering with a fanaticism that would hotly deny the name. Poor Pearce, his staring eyes fixed upon that infinity that Parnell’s statue indicates with a sweep of one arm along Parnell Street: the infinity no man has a right to limit, where the march of a nation goes on. Yet how they must have hated the English, these people; and I, who ought to understand that, am asking "Was it worth it?" (To be concluded) =, i I i i ea a a i ll