Myles Away From Dublin (17 page)

When invited to do something that looks easy and appears even pleasant enough in prospect, as well as financially rewarding, the best thing is to say that you’ll think about it rather than say YES straight out. That’s the sort of thinking I’m doing here this week.

A Very Important Person asked me would I write an article, one of a series by other persons as distinguished as myself, and all treating of the same theme? The theme was ‘The First Book I Ever Read’.

Yes, it looks easy. But is it? Ponder it for a minute and you will possibly agree that it is not easy at all. Taken seriously, it may be impossible. It may even be in the same category as would be the theme ‘The Last Book I Shall Ever Read’.

In the ordinary meaning of the word, history is a vast and complicated panorama of man’s existence on this planet through the countless ages, his doings, his glorious achievements and his collapses in torrents of blood.

History embraces even the development of the human mind, the attempts of reason to grapple with the mysterious and hidden nature of the universe, the immense minuteness of the Creation, and the task of locating and knowing God.

Indeed, the concept of history is more than any one human head can contain, and this will be plain enough to any man who tries to confine his study to the history of his own individual self. Just try it, and see how often you will be pulled up by faults of memory and record and by many inexplicable confusions.

For instance, nobody can remember being born. That is easy, you may say, I know my birthday and can get my State birth certificate from the Register-General for three shillings and sixpence. Well, perhaps. But things
were not always thus.

It is only within the last 25 years or so that persons otherwise qualified could automatically get the old age pension. Before that an applicant had great difficulty in establishing that he had reached the age of 70 because compulsory notification of birth, marriage and death did not exist at the time he was born; baptismal records where they survived sometimes helped, as did the testimony of other grand old neighbours.

Leaving milk aside, who could write an account of the first meal he ate? Theologists hold that a normal person attains the use of reason between the age of 7 and 8, and memory, as a rational process, can scarcely be said to be functioning before that age. True, most of us have glimpses of things which happened or things we did as babies, but they are fleeting inchoate visions, quite unreliable; some of them may be fancies, or even dreams.

But leaving childhood aside, it is notorious that some of us have very bad memories at the best of times, and I’m not hinting at that ten-bob note that was never returned. Most male adults of today take a drink. How many of them remember the time and occasion of their first pint? Curiously, I can do so. I think it is because there was a pub across the road from where I went to school and at lunch-break one day a fellow student gave me an invitation (which I took as a challenge) to hop across the road with him and have one. It was strong plain porter and cost sevenpence.

But countless other important and even momentous milestones are unmarked in memory’s record. When did you have your first smoke, for instance? What was the date of that disaster that was to condemn you to years of coughing, spitting and reckless waste of money? Bitterly let us confess we cannot tell.

When did you discard short pants for long trousers and how did this sharp step from boy to man feel at the time? Shaving, too – when did that begin? Most boys owned a bicycle, but when did the first one arrive? Or
how about learning to drive a car?

Before attempting that ‘First Book I Ever Read’ I should like to see the accounts given by some of the other persons invited. I feel a fair sprinkling of humbugs and hypocrites would be bound to emerge. Very likely some smug fellow would calmly say that the first book he ever read was the first Book of Homer’s
Iliad
(though I think the title of the theme excludes school books). Another high-minded character might claim that the first book he ever read was the Penny Catechism – which now costs, I am told, one and three. And some wily smart-alec might distort the theme and write about the first book he ever made, being even in earliest youth very interested in the ponies.

My own reluctant conclusion is that the thing is impossible, if one is to be honest and factual. It would be easier and at least possible to write about the first book one remembers having read, the first book which stuck in the mind. And I would say that for anybody in my own age group, the book would most certainly be one by Charles Dickens, though by no means to be ignored is the possibility that it was ‘Knocknagow’.

Every ever-so-often I present here a dissertation on the meaning and usage of words; this pleases some people and infuriates others, who think words are arid and dessicated playthings but the subject is really important since words are the only tools we have for conveying anything but the simplest and plainest meaning.

Consider first the trick of intonation we call accent. By any standard of measurement Ireland is a tiny country, yet the northern and southern accents are totally dissimilar, and so is the pronunciation. The slow drawl that is heard in Tyrone is in great contrast with the sharp, rifle-crack parlance of Cork. Why should this be, and what causes this considerable variation?
Personally
I do not know. It cannot be topography, for landscape north and south is largely the same; there is a small possibility that the reason may be racial, though passing time should long have effaced that. In Britain the situation is far worse for, though the language is the same, people in the far north do not understand a word the southerners are saying.

I have been brooding on the great number of words in English which have totally different meanings as between Europe and the USA. Take the motor car, which is still nearly always an automobile in the States. With us the hood is that deplorable canvas affair to be erected or taken down with unmanageable arms; there it means our bonnet. (But hood is also short for hoodlum, or gangster.) Where we have a gear lever, they have a shift. When they need a refreshing milk shake or a bag of sweets (candy) they go to, of all places, a drug store. With us hardware could mean anything from barbed wire to buckets but this is the word they have for tanks and artillery. We go up in a lift but they insist on using the elevator. London has an underground system while
New York has a subway and an entertainment which is a movie there becomes a picture or a film over here. An American vagrant is a bum but with us the word has quite another meaning. A most important difference attaches to the meaning of billion; here it means a million million, there a mere thousand million.

Mention of movies should remind us that the Americans have dozens of words or locutions which cannot properly be classed as slang but for which we have no native equivalent word at all. Just try translating the following:

Gatecrasher, flophouse, make a getaway, rough-house racketeer, lounge-lizard, OK, snap out of it, live wire, hard-boiled, down and out, go-getter, guy, pan out, pussyfoot, played out, quitter, size up, bawl out, canned music, cinch, double cross, bring home the bacon, monkey business, get down to brass tacks, sugar daddy, speakeasy, fourflusher, jinx, on the spot.

When it comes to slang proper, the sky’s the limit (which is itself a bit of slang). A rubberneck is a person who gawks stupidly at things, a rube is a country bumpkin, a man who commits suicide takes the Dutch route. A car which has much ostentatious
ornamentation
has pizzaz and when the presentation of a play is deliberately inflated and exaggerated, what has happened is a case of lollapalooza. And so on ad infinitum.

Conversely, the British have many words of their own which would puzzle even smart Americans. Samples which come to mind are biff, humdinger, conchy ( – note here that the military abbreviation CO can mean either conscientious objector or commanding officer), scrounge, cushy, fag, iron rations, copper, jabber, rung, pug, tippler, peepers, clink, cove.

A nigger in the woodpile is another bit of slang, but can you find him? In the first paragraph a fairly commonplace plain English word is very badly
misspelled
. No prize is offered, but can you find it? I would nearly bet you cannot, even if you look over my prose
again several times. The answer is upside down here below.

Strikes, threats of redundancy, fears of disemployment through automation and other labour troubles are accepted as normal features of our time. Our bus strike has caused national chaos and severe public hardship; it is only a fortnight ago that a settlement was reached in a strike of all New York newspapers which left the citizens without any paper for 114 days; and everybody agreed that radio news was no substitute.

But let nobody suppose that such goings-on are characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century. I present this week some notes on the history of that august organ
The
Times
of London.

It was started in 1785 by a John Walter but under the name of the
Daily
Universal
Register
;
he changed the title to
The
Times
on the 1st January, 1788, and was in the habit of calling his publication ‘a logographic newspaper’. That term would probably puzzle the printers of today but it proves that Walter was a very intelligent and far-seeing man.

Of course type was set by hand in those days but the logographic system, for which Walter held several patents, entailed casting all the more frequently
recurring
words in one piece, entire. It was in fact a system of partial stereotyping. It was said by the wits that his orders to the type-founders ran like this: ‘Send me a hundredweight, in separate pounds, of
heat,
cold,
wet,
dry,
murder,
fire,
dreadful
robbery,
atrocious
outrage,
fearful
calamity
and
alarming
explosion
.’

Being an Editor in those days was no honour and no joke. In a climate of political storm Walter was imprisoned several times for articles against important people and in 1790 had to stand in the pillory for a libel against the Duke of York. He died in 1812 and his son who succeeded him was the real founder of the paper’s
greatness and reputation. But he also offended the Government and they retaliated in a way unfortunately familiar to newspapers of today – they withdrew their standing order for the printing of lists of Customs duties and all their advertising. In those days there were no book reviews but great attention was paid to the drama.

And now along comes that most contentious thing we call progress.
The
Times
had been laboriously printed by hand-press, several pressmen struggling for hours to produce the 4,000 or so copies which was the total circulation. A compositor named Martyn had invented a machine superseding this method and which was powered by steam.

The pressmen threatened to wreck this machine if it was installed but it was smuggled into the office piecemeal, with Walter going about under various disguises lest the workmen set about wrecking him personally. His courage failed when the moment for action arrived but he returned to the charge in 1814, when he had the mechanical plant installed in the house next door to
The
Times
office.

One night he entered the old pressroom with a copy of this paper, the ink still wet, in his hand and told the pressmen to their astonishment, that the paper had just been printed by steam. He added that if they tried any rough stuff, he had already arranged to have all the protection he needed at hand, and that every man would continue to receive his pay until new employment was found for him. There was something eerily modern about that ‘no redundancy’ tactic.

That machine was too complicated, however, and another firm invented the cylindrical method of printing as known today, with a speed of 8,000 copies an hour. Then came Hoe’s process, with speeds of up to 22,000 copies.

The
Times
had been nicknamed ‘The Thunderer’ by Carlisle, and many Irishmen were associated with it, as they still are. An Irishman named Captain Stirling, who
had fought in the battle of Vinegar Hill (I am sorry I cannot say on which side) was paid over £2,000 a year for writing ferocious leading articles.

Tom Moore was offered £100 a month if he would contribute, and Southey turned down an offer of £2,000 a year if he would take over the editorial chair. John Delane, who retired through ill-health in 1877, was the paper’s most competent and distinguished editor since the start and gave it the final polish that won it worldwide respect and esteem.

Yet in those early days the paper lacked the dignity (which some people would call smugness) which informs it today. It had qualities we are inclined to associate with the gutter press. It was to the fore in exposing fraudulent promotion schemes and swindlers of every description, and carried on its own violent private feuds with public men. Its influence on Parliament and political changes was immense, and even Prime Ministers feared it.

It was the pioneer, too, in establishing the modern system of having correspondents stationed at capital cities and seats of war abroad and constantly beat its contemporaries in being first with the news. In 1870 its advertising revenue was of the order of £1,500 a day, and it was estimated that an issue consumed 70 tons of paper and 2 tons of ink. Nor was it the old-fashioned thing of 4 pages: its normal size was 24 pages, or 144 columns.

When it made mistakes it made them courageously. It warned the public of the misery and ruin which would attend what it called ‘the railway mania’ when trains were running at the unprecedented speed of 15 miles an hour and persisted in this attitude despite the fact that it resulted in the loss of £3,000 a week in railway advertising. And it was notable not only for paying the highest price for articles but by giving generous pensions to staff members who retired.

The attitude of
The
Times
to Ireland and her troubles is another week’s story. After disclosure of the Pigott
forgery, Parnell sued the paper for £100,000 for libel, but settled for £5,000.