David McFadden - An Innocent in Ireland: Curious Rambles and Singular Encounters

T he commuter train continued south over the Liffey and past Tara Street, Pearse Station, Lansdowne Road (location of the rugby stadium), Sandymount, Dalkey (near the Martello tower featured in the first chapter of Ulysses and now a James Joyce museum), and offered melancholy views out over the murderous innocence of the sea (Yeats) and the great sweet mother of the snotgreen sea, empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline (Joyce). It continued out over the formerly prosperous and still-handsome Anglo-Irish suburbs, spreading along the coastal plain and up to the feet of the lavender Dublin Mountains.

But I was tired after an overnight flight from Canada, and kept jetlagging off. Eventually I was awakened by a polite and serious eight-year-old in a grammar-school uniform. Strapped to his back was an oversize leather book-bag.

Excuse me, sir, he said, softly, but this is the last stop.

The child stood before me at solemn attention. When he was certain I was awake, he turned and scurried off.

In Toronto, where I usually hang out, this would never have happened. Id have been left to sleep it off, Id have had my bag stolen, or Id have been punched on the shoulder by a transit employee.

But this was Dublin, another world.

Cultural homogeneity was still not universal, though it had certainly progressed since J. B. Priestley wrote his novel The Good Companions, in which Messrs. Oakroyd and Oglethorpe come to the conclusion, after a lengthy debate, that people and places are as different as chalk is from cheese.

Coincidentally, The Good Companions was published in 1929, one year before H. V. Mortons In Search of Ireland, which I was intending to use as a guide of sorts on this trip.

We had In Search of Ireland in our house when I was a kid and I read it several times. Morton was a nice man, people responded well to him, and, if they hadnt, he wouldnt have noticed. He was a well-wisher, an optimist, a Pollyanna, a rank sentimentalist, a gladhander, a promoter of peace and goodwill, a schmoozer, and he always seemed to be on the lookout for a free meal. He was funnier than he realized. He was a certifiable Everyman.

I imagined him with a gap between his two front teeth, and wearing a tweed three-piece suit and a bowler hat splotched with bird droppings. If I were to run away to Ireland, Id be surrounded by happy Irish people holding hands and dancing and singing. Mortons Irish were eminently lovable, but a somewhat dark and devilish people who were not to be taken seriously and not to be given undue responsibility. They had a tendency to be bibulous, lazy, tribal, superstitious, irrational, a bit primitive, and fierce if unduly annoyed.