The Vasectomy Doctor (11 page)

Another hazard about going to a Fleadh was the weather. We never brought sleeping bags or tents or anything like that with us. We didn't own such luxuries in the first place and in any case we didn't see any need for them. ‘Accommodation' at a Fleadh was the first hay barn you could find outside the town. You had to scout for these in the daylight and before you got too drunk. In theory the whole thing sounds lovely, romantic even – sleeping snuggled up in the sweet new-mown hay and the farmer's wife bringing you out a
cup of tea in the morning and the cuckoo calling in the background.
The reality of course was something totally different.

In a hay barn just outside Clones it is pissing rain outside and it is 8.30 in the morning. Most of us are nursing moderate to severe hangovers and are having a bit of a lie-in. Christy Moore, Frank and Donal Lunny, Peter Sheehy, Mick Bulfin and a whole lot more of us are holed up in this shed. The next thing, and all of a sudden, don't we hear this madman of a farmer and he ranting and raving down on the floor under us. Then he grabs up a hayfork and starts lunging at the haystack to see if he can dislodge a few bodies. ‘Get to fuck out of my hay barn,' he roars. I never saw a group of fellows leave a hay barn so quickly in all my life, rain or no rain.

I remember another wet Fleadh Cheoil, this time in Thurles. The trouble here was that we had fallen into a serious session of mu
sic and singing early in the day and never got to scout for a hay barn.
When the music and the drinking and the craic were all over we came out to find it dark and raining. This time it was every man for himself. Having wandered around for a while I eventually found a greyhound track with starting traps. I gladly climbed into one of these and, snug and out of the rain and the wind, I slept the sleep of the just. Hotels, guesthouses and even B&Bs were considered at the time to be a waste of good drinking money.

It was while playing and singing in O'Donoghue's of Merrion Row that I first met my wife to be, Ann Hughes. She and two of her girlfriends just wandered in there one evening and sat at the table around which we were playing. These three young women worked together in the blood bank and lived in a flat just up the road in Upper Leeson Street. They, each of them, seemed to have a love for and a grasp of the kind of music we were doing but no one more so than Ann. After the session I accompanied the three of them back to their flat where I was introduced to the as yet unfamiliar world of air hostesses and blood bank attendants. I had been spending too much time with musicians, bohemians and medical students. But here there was a whiff of glamour and a new world to be explored.

* * *

Running parallel to all the Dublin stuff we had, if you like, our country seat in the form of Pat Dowling's public house in Prosperous, county Kildare and the old kitchen in the basement of Downings House a mile away. The secret to the success of these twin institutions was their closeness to Dublin and the almost irresistible attraction that traditional musicians and singers had and still have for things rural. The roots of most folk music are sustained in the soil of the countryside and therefore frequent excursions out of the city become an imperative for anyone serious about playing, singing or just listening to this kind of music.

But why Prosperous you might reasonably ask. It could have been some place handier to the city like Lucan or Clonee or some place like that which in those days would still have qualified as ‘the countryside'. The answer to this is, as so often is the case, people and circumstances. The people in question were my brother Davoc, his friend Ciarán Burke who was later to join The Dubliners, myself and Pat Dowling, the man himself who had at the time just bought the pub from the Cribbins.

Those were the people. The circumstances were that in early 1963 Davoc was doing up a cottage that he had beside the big house and, being a bit strapped for cash, he somehow prevailed on Ciarán Burke to lend a hand. Ciarán, with his then girlfriend, Jeanie Bonham, more or less encamped on site working on the cottage by day and drinking in Dowlings by night. To the people of Prosperous Ciarán and Jeanie would have cut quite an extraordinary dash. Had two aliens from Mars been thrown in their midst they could hardly have been any more different. They were in fact classic beatniks but the problem was that beatniks had not been invented yet so nobody knew what to call them or how to classify them. He was handsome
and tall with a Parnell-like beard, tweed jacket and general unkempt
appearance, she was small and squat in a floral dress, beads and bangles and smelling of smouldering sandalwood.

But it hardly mattered what they looked like. It was what they were able to do that mattered. Ciarán played a Clark's tin-whistle and kind of sang in a husky and slightly off-key voice. Jeanie was the better singer. They sang a duet thus:

Soldier, Soldier, Soldier, would you marry me now?

With a hey and a ho and the sound of a drum.

Arrah no fair maid I couldn't marry you.

Because I have no shoes to put on.

So she ran to the shop as fast as she could run

With a hey and a ho and the sound of a drum

And she brought him a pair of the very very best

Saying here my small man put them on
.

And so on in that vein until your man has built up quite a good wardrobe for himself and never marries her in the end because as he says in the very last line of the song: ‘I have my own wife at home.' Innocent stuff for sure but then these were innocent days. Ciarán would then encourage some local character like Larry Dowd or the Pike Keegan to sing a song and all of a sudden there was a proper session going, something very unusual for the days that were in it. Pat Dowling stayed quietly in the background but did everything in his power to encourage these sessions, firstly because he loved the craic but also because he could see the potential that singing and music sessions like these had as crowd pullers into his new pub.

Word quickly spread that there was some right good sport going on in Pat Dowling's pub. Soon local musicians, who up until then we didn't even know existed, started to drift in. People like Ned Farrell on the bodhrán and piper Mick Crehan from Naas who later was to play at the graveside when Willie Clancy died. There was box player Gerry O'Mahony and his wife, Peggy Carroll, who was a good singer. There was banjo player, Joe Ward; the Moran brothers, Denny and Ducks from Robertstown, both box players; Frank Burke from Sligo, fiddle player and singer; Mickey Maguire, flute player from Coill Dubh always with his wife, Mary, who could lilt a fine tune. Then there were the Newbridge brigade, Donal and Frank Lunny, often with their parents, Frank senior and Mary Lunny. Christy Moore and his mother, Nancy, and maybe his brothers, Barry and Andy, and later his sisters, Anne, Terry and Eilish, all good singers. Nan McCormack would try to organise us. There were various members of the soon to be defunct Liffey Folk Four. Within a few weeks a legend was born that was to last for the better part of the next ten years. These were the Wednesday night sessions in Dowlings of Prosperous.

Pat Dowling was a generous man. Singers and musicians would all be looked after with a free pint or two and towards the end of the evening a massive plate of sandwiches would somehow materialise, having been made up by Maureen in the back kitchen. Maureen was Mick Crehan's landlady and we were always trying to get her fixed up with Pat Dowling because neither of them was married and it seemed to us a good idea and a perfect match. The sandwiches were made with white batch loaf, roast beef and YR sauce, just the lad for hungry musicians. The musicians that I have mentioned here were, if you like, the core people. In addition to these we always had our Dublin contingent join in the sessions. I am not going to start naming all the famous and not so famous singers and musicians who would join us from time to time. Just take my word for it. There were very few singers or musicians indeed frequenting the pubs and clubs around Dublin during the 1960s who did not call into at least some of the Wednesday night sessions in Dowlings of Prosperous.

The second leg of this most extraordinary academy of Irish folk
music was the old kitchen in the basement of the big house – Down
ings. When conditions were right or when the spirit moved us, or if there were some special people in for the session, perhaps no more than two or three times a year, all the musicians and singers and characters down in Dowlings would be issued with verbal invitations and asked to come on up to the house and we would keep the craic going. They had to bring their own drink and no food would be served. These parties were all about venue and music and if that was not enough for you then you knew where to go.

The basement had a hard-stone flagged floor, which lent the room fantastic natural acoustics and resonance. The uilleann piping of say Liam Óg Flynn or the mandolin playing of Francy Grehan were all greatly enhanced by this feature. Heat of a winter's night was provided for by way of an enormous open fire onto which old furniture was usually thrown – benches or old chests of drawers or anything that came to hand. Davoc was in the antique business at this stage so burning old furniture was not quite as bizarre as may first appear. And in any case it was always good for a laugh. There was a pair of hob-nailed boots kept on a shelf. If anyone was in the mood for it they could put these on and batter to the music. At times the whole place took on a surreal quality, an out of this world aura to it all.

And if you should go away across the ocean,

Then take me back you to be your servant,

In fare and in market you will me well looked after.

And you will sleep with a Greek king's daughter.

You took what's behind me and what's before me

You took east and west when you wouldn't mind me

The sun, moon and stars from my sky you have taken

And God as well or I am much mistaken.

CHAPTER 6

All during these medical school years I would live at home in Downings House during the holidays and in flats or digs during term. In all I lived in no fewer than fourteen different addresses around Dublin as a medical student. I often shared places with my
good friends Óg and his brother Peter Sheehy in Charleston Avenue
near Ranelagh and later out in a flat in Fairview. Also I once shared a place in Rathmines with Tony McMahon, the great box player. Tony flew through pre-med in Surgeons and then seemed to lose interest in medicine having got over the biggest hurdle in the entire course. He once found me playing the tin-whistle during an idle moment and said that it was a horrible tune made worse by my playing of it. If you were looking for compliments then Tony would not be your first port of call. He was hugely intolerant of any player not up to his own very high standards. But once you got to know Tony you soon found out that his bark was worse than his bite.

A strange thing about going through the six-year course of medi
cine is that the longer you go on the easier it becomes. For example human anatomy is a horrible subject that requires you to submit reams upon reams of largely useless information into your brain and to regurgitate it at exam time. The next year or two are not much better. But when you come to the two final clinical years during
which you study medicine, surgery, paediatrics, obstetrics and gynae
cology, ophthalmology, some psychiatry, radiology and dermatology, all of these subjects are rational, practical, interesting, and easy to remember and to understand.

Practical medicine is taught at the bedside and we all flock around the poor patient up on Richmond One. The women are allowed up front because in the main they are not as tall as the fellows. Some of the fellows, but one in particular, seems to always get himself up right beside the patient. This guy pisses the rest of us off a bit. Professor Alan Thompson is giving the tutorial. The patient, an elderly man, is suffering from chronic bronchitis and emphysema or, as we would say nowadays, chronic obstructive airways disease or COAD for short. In hospital, as a kind of a code, they were often just referred to as ‘blue puffers'. At that time hospital wards in Dublin were full of blue puffers whose conditions were exacerbated by the higher levels of air pollution that we had in those days. Blue puffers were considered good teaching material because they had a lot of signs and symptoms – a lot of things to ‘demonstrate' as we used to say.

Even though we had two more years to go we were often, a bit sarcastically I suspect, addressed as doctor.

‘Tell me, doctor,' says Professor Thompson, looking straight at me, ‘What do you think is the matter with this poor man?' This is the first real live ‘patient' that I have ever seen in my life and the professor wants an opinion from me! But to be fair about it Professor Thompson, who always wore a dickey bow and was the first radio doctor to ever broadcast on Radio Éireann, was a gentleman and a kind teacher. He saw my discomfort and offered me a way forward.

‘Does the man look well or does he look ill?' he wanted to know.

And there was my very first lesson in clinical medicine and one that
all doctors instinctively use throughout their professional lives. Simple
commonsense, intelligent and straightforward observation can still tell you more about a person than even the most sophisticated blood test or scans. Does the person look well or ill? Always look your patient straight in the face and ask yourself that question.

‘He looks very ill, sir,' I proffered. The professor concurred.

Someone suffering end stage ‘cor pulmonale', as this condition is also sometimes referred to, looks dreadfully unwell. Their functioning lungs, which should look like a large bunch of tiny grapes, are now more like a bunch of tennis balls. Thus the surface area of the lungs used to oxygenate the blood and carry away carbon dioxide is massively reduced. The patient's lips are constantly blue, or cyanosed as we say in the trade, due to a chronic lack of oxygen and excess CO
2
. In an effort to get as much air into their lungs as possible the patient holds his chest wall in the full inspiration or expanded position and this is referred to as ‘barrel chested'. While breathing out the patient purses his lips in an effort to push back the escaping air so as to leech out of it the maximum possible amount of oxygen. When you look at their fingernails, blue puffers will often exhibit ‘clubbing' a sure sign of long-term oxygen starvation. This man is slowly dying in front of us.