At the Edge of Ireland (48 page)

Although there's rarely snow here on Beara, those dark days and “weary wets,” relieved by the occasional low-domed sun and a sear of golden light across the black-teethed ridges, tend to keep us inside and insular. Sometimes there are passing dolphins and whales—fins, sperm, pilot, humpbacks—some almost seventy feet long—that bring us out with binoculars. A lot of the time is spent reading books we've been promising ourselves to read for eons (Dostoyevsky seems most appropriate during this seasons); listening to good music; inviting friends to join us for “improv” dinners (we both enjoy the unexpected flavors that can emerge through a spontaneous blending of national cuisines and flavors), and generally allowing the mood and rhythm of each day to shape our activities.

And so the days move on, slowly lightening and warming until St. Patrick's Day races in again (although never quite so riotously self-conscious as the U.S. versions), and the whole splendid seasonal romp begins once more…on this wild and beautiful Beara.

“S
EEMS VERY QUIET TONIGHT
,” I
SAID
politely to the lady behind the bar at Twomey's. “Is the dancing canceled?”

“Is the what?” she replied with a pleasant smile as she waited patiently for someone's pint of Guinness to settle before completing the traditional three-stage pour.

“The set dancing. Your Friday-night special. It's advertised on your window…there's a poster…”

“Oh, yes. Very nice poster too, isn't it? Will you be joining us?”

“Yes. That's why I'm here. It says it starts at nine-thirty…and it's just about nine-thirty now.”

“Is it now? Well…would you believe. How the time flies by s'fast doesn't it?”

“So, is it still on?”

“What?”

“The dancing…”

“Oh yes, yes—indeed it is.”

“So, what time d'y think?”

“Oh, I imagine about an hour or so.” She was still smiling so pleasantly that I couldn't allow myself to express the growing exasperation I was feeling.

“Y'mean it'll start at ten-thirty?”

“Ten-thirty—yes, that'd be about right…maybe eleven.”

“So—a little late then. The start…”

“Oh, no—it's always around ten-thirty or eleven…when it gets full.”

“OK—fine. But…well, your sign seems very definite—nine-thirty on the dot!”

“Well now—and does it really? Would y'believe…”

“So the…the sign's wrong then.” (The hum of desperation in my head: I was beginning to wonder why I persevered with this line of questioning.)

“Well, to tell you the truth, I don't really know. I've never actually seen it…the sign.”

Stalemate and silence before she continued in her happy, carefree manner—“So, you've got nice time now. You can relax 'til ten-thirty at least…so, what can I get you…a nice pint o' Guinness?”

 

I
DIDN'T WAIT THAT
night, but I did come back the following week. At ten-thirty. And this time there were more people in the bar. A total of twelve. The same bar lady was there, but I decided to ask one of the patrons if there was ever going to be any dancing here.

“Oh, not just yet,” he told me with a fuzzy sort of grin and an even fuzzier pronunciation. “M'be another half hour or so, or an hour. Y'know. When it fills up a bit…”

Oh Lord!

 

S
O—THIRD TIME LUCKY
, I returned the following week. At eleven-thirty. And at least there was music this time. A young girl with a guitar and her male partner at one of those synthesizer boxes the size of a dog coffin that seemed capable of playing any instrument on the planet and a few interstellar oddities too. He went from the saxophone to bagpipes to pennywhistle to something like a didgeri-doo all in the course of a couple of Irish folk tunes. But unfortunately there was considerably far less here than first met my eyes and ears, and his fancy machine didn't seem to improve the actual presentation of these once-fine ballads. The girl just couldn't seem to hold a tune, and the guy seemed to be playing in a different key from her guitar. And worst of all, there was no applause from the patrons. The death knell of any pub show. All the “entertainers” were offered was what I later called (having seen it on many subsequent occasions when “the entertainment” failed to impress) the “wall of backs.”

Not a single person in that now increasingly crowded bar paid any attention whatsoever to the unfortunate duo. Silence towered up like a forest of giant redwoods. I was embarrassed for both of them, and despite the fact they'd have been far better off staying at home, I gave them my best hand-cracking clapping at the end of one of the worst renditions of “Fields of Athenry” I can ever remember hearing. And despite the fact that my clapping stimulated an unenthusiastic ripple of applause from other patrons, I felt a real phony. “Fields of Athenry,” along with “Danny Boy” and Tommy Makem's “Four Green Fields,” is one of the quintessential Irish ballads, recorded by just about every folksinger from our favorite—Danny Quinn—to the Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains, the Dubliners, DeDannan, Clannad, Christy Moore, and Planxty to Mary Bergin, Shane MacGowan, Ron Karenn, Paul Brady, Tommy and Sidbhan Peoples, Sinéad O'Connor, and even Enya, whose Irish-tinged mystery-Muzak is probably the most recognized sound in the world today.

Collin Irwin in his amusing travelogue
In Search of the Craic: One Man's Pub Crawl through Irish Music
describes the importance of this song throughout the island:

When the band went to “Fields of Athenry” that's when the bar crowd really erupted. There's something about the chorus that really just won't go away and it's hard not to be touched in some way by the forlorn dignity of the lyrics about a woman trying to be brave as she attempts to talk to her husband on the other side of a prison wall and then watching from the harbor as a ship takes him off with the other convicts to Botany Bay in Australia and she knows she'll never see him again. And his crime? Stealing a handful of corn so his kids could eat during the famine…Heart-wrenching stuff. And once you hit the big “Low lie the fields of Athenry where once we watched the small free birds fly” chorus, the eyes well up, the heart swells, we link arms and, by God!—we have an anthem…it gets sung spontaneously by crowds at Ireland's international football games…it's sung by every street busker you meet and covered by everyone…you can barely enter a pub in Ireland without hearing it in some shape or form…in fact music pubs are defined by whether or not you're likely to hear “Fields of Athenry” inside and you can usually tell the minute you cross the threshold…it seems to fulfill every musical sentiment the Irish hold dear. It encompasses the national tragedy of the famine, the heart-break of enforced emigration, the outrage of legal injustice, the preciousness of the family, and a deep enduring, harrowing, emotional love story to boot. Ultimately, the spirit of rebellion, defiance, independence, and hope plays chords that run soul-deep in the very bowels of the Irish psyche.

Fine, fist-clenching rhetoric then from Mr. Irwin, who, had he opened the door to Twomey's just a mere crack and heard the stuff coming from our poor little duo, would have doubtless scampered off the Beara Peninsula pursued by demons of discord, never to return.

Anyway—I digress. I'd come to see the dancing. Set dancing, so the flyer on the window said—and finally on this, my third visit, it came. But not at all in the form I'd expected—the Riverdance whirl of short flared skirts of young gazelle-legged girls moving in perfect unison and the complex counterrhythms of their hard clicking shoes and the straight motionless arms held tightly down their sides, rigid as flagpoles, and the flare of long hair in ringlets or ponytails and eyes gleaming bright and staring straight ahead, as if inspired by a mystical master of the dance just beyond our vision…

A
Seisuin
Group

No, alas—none of this at all. Because I'd got my terminology mixed up—it was
set
dancing here, as opposed to the world-celebrated
step
dancing.

Actually, it turned out to be a bunch of locals, a dozen or so stocky males and females, many well over retirement age, who launched themselves into a series of jigs and reels with all the energetic enthusiasm of teenagers. Apparently the “sets” are based on old “quadrille” dances brought over from Europe in the early 1800s. There had been furious outcries at such outrageous importations, particularly by the clergy of the time, but somehow they remained here, glossed with Irish tunes—most of them pretty fast and furious. One elderly man, who exhibited the complex footwork of Popeye dancing the seaman's hornpipe, seemed to grow more and more purple-faced by the minute. I thought the evening was about to come to an abrupt end with a fatal heart attack, but he whirled on, sweat flying off his brow like a flailing prizefighter, laughing, encouraging the others, correcting swirling colleagues if they misstepped in the complex rhythms and counterrhythms, and giving out the occasional “Wahoo!” when sufficiently inspired by the cohesion of that stomping, whirligigging group.

And it was good. Obviously though, it wasn't what I'd expected. At all. It certainly wasn't Riverdance, and there wasn't a single flying ponytail or nubile teenager anywhere in sight. But it was great honest fun and flare—a bunch of Bearans putting on an impromptu show for another bunch of Bearans all bellied around the bar—but this time with no “wall of backs.” Everyone turned to enjoy the show and applaud deafeningly at the end of each reel.

It was utterly exhausting to watch. But exhilarating too as I observed the little community—our little borrowed community now—at play, pleasing themselves and one another. Celebrating their traditions easily and naturally without striving for elusive perfection. Letting the
craic
just emerge and flow on through the night in the little pub on the waterfront at the edge of our tiny Beara town…

“O
H
L
ORD—WAY BACK THEN, SIX
, seven hundred years ago, y'wouldna believe the things they did, d'y'know, to poor Celtic bards who got the sequence of the kings and other royals wrong! Jus' one name missed out of a genealogy of hundreds could do it! It beggars the imagination—important bits of them cut off, tongues and other things pulled out, blindings with red-hot pokers, snapping off their—”

“Okay. Got the point. Nasty. Risky business, then—this bardic storytelling life?”

I was chatting with Tom O'Ryan during a well-earned interlude in an evening of his tall-tale-telling at a pub in Kenmare. Tom was the featured
seanachai
, although there were two other names on the bill that no one seemed to have heard of.

“Who's this Sean MacGowran, then?” I asked at the crowded bar.

“No idea” was the general consensus.

“And Jack O'Malley? Y'know him?”

“Not a jot.”

 

T
OM'S TALES HAD BEEN
honed down with half a lifetime of crafting his talent in pubs and halls across the southwest. “O'course—there were perks too, in those old days, y'know.” Tom continued his description of what he called “the best of bardic times.” “If you could wangle y'self into a royal household and get the sequence of regal names right—often going back a couple of centuries or more—then you were in pig heaven. Y'see, it wasn't just for royal ego satisfaction. It was also about legitimacy—constantly reinforcing the memorized oral liturgy, because there was no written Celtic language—and also about the long and revered heritage of the royals. A royal bard might also have to be able to describe more specific things like the precise boundaries of the kingdom and particularly colorful—or bloody or heroic—deeds of past and present royals. In great detail too. And there were plenty of those to go around in that Celtic era.”

“But the bards were more than just useful record keepers—they were poets and entertainers too, right?”

“Jus' a minute. Hold y'horses. Who's tellin' who this stuff…I'm comin' straight t'that point.”

“Sorry.” (I was still learning that one does not interrupt an Irishman, particularly a noted
seanachai
, as he's telling one of his tales.)

“Okay. Jus' don't mess up my train of thought. I'm not s'young as I was an' the old mem'ry's flaggin'! Next thing I know, they'll be loppin' bits off me, too! Anyway. Yes indeed—bards were poets and great entertainers, reciting—even singing sometimes—the great long songs like
The Cattle Raid of Cooley
or, t'give it it's correct title,
Taín Bó Cualnge
, or the tales of Finn MacCool from the
Duanaire Finn
…things of that nature. Fine powerful stuff. Some of them meant the bard had to act out dozens of different characters in gestures, voice tones, and body postures. And for a little light relief, they'd also become sort of stand-up comics and gossipmongers, spreading snippets of news and rumors and tabloid titillations to the assembled throngs. And that was particularly true of the wandering bards—the great
seanachai
—who carried hundreds of tales in their heads and made their living moving from village to village and—”