Mark Jarman - Irelands Eye: Travels

Copyright 2002 by Mark Anthony Jarman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic p IRA cy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the authors rights.

This edition published in 2012 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.houseofanansi.com

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Jarman, Mark Anthony, 1955
Irelands eye : travels / Mark Anthony Jarman.
ISBN 978-1-77089-148-7

1. Ireland Description and travel.
2. Jarman, Mark Anthony, 1955 Journeys Ireland. I. Title.
DA978.2.J37 2002 914.1504824 C2002-904011-6

Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Part One

WANKERS AND WIDOWS
AND CHANCERS AND SAINTS

Travel is the ruin of all happiness! Theres no
looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
FANNY BURNEY
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression.
ALFRED ADLER

Chapter One

RECRUITS STRAPPED INSIDE
THE AMAZING MACHINE

MOVING ON A 767 IN 1997. From the get-go on the painted jet we drink hooch madly, foppishly, British Airways headphones on the so-called rock channel with some cockney DJ nattering and spinning hit singles from 1966, from my ancient grade-school history. Eight miles high and 800 miles per hour with the Yardbirds and Kinks; Ike and Tina giving me shivers with River Deep, Mountain High; and Pet Clarks voice booming past her white lipstick.

Some of us are bored, blas about travel. Some of us should be pistol-whipped. My drowned Irish grandfather likely never laid eyes on a plane, was never flung through air at 800 miles per hour with Shapes of Things to Come crashing the hairs of his inner ear.

Shoehorned into blue seats zooming over Rocky Mountain House, Hudson Bay (I look down for Henrys lost rowboat), Baffin Island, Greenland, I cannot escape the TV screens placed overhead every few rows. I dont want to watch, but you cant not see Madonnas large mouth pretending to be Evitas large mouth or the special-effects volcano punctuating the mindless in-flight disaster movie.

Were zooming over the real volcanoes of trendy Iceland and Sigur Rs; were on the polar route up over the giant ice pack, but inside this finely engineered aluminum tube its hot and stuffy, elbow to elbow, thigh to thigh. We wipe our sweaty faces with British Airways Refreshing Tissue.

Its hot and stuffy, but crowhop out on that big wing one inch past this pane of Plexi and youd freeze to death. Youd freeze-dry and blow off like a shrivelled maple leaf, but thats okay, thats part of the buzz, the commodity.

The British pilots, Reginald and Nigel, have such beautiful, decent accents. Thawnks so much to our cabin crew.

Long night flights are difficult, of course.

Yusss.

The British Airways cabin crews are dedicated, are days from a strike that could strand me the far side of the ocean (not that Id mind being stranded).

Our dedicated British stewardess, trying to cut back our impending jet lag and inebriation, ferries us round after round of water, orange juice, tomato juice, and then she hands out free bananas to go with the rivers of booze.

This pretty stew with the Sloane Ranger accent represents Europe. Whatever Europe offers, we take. We are manic tourists with wallets and Tilley hats; we are hick-yokel appetite personified, party-hearty hayseed consumers with shy eyes and back teeth floating. Were happy, special, and England swings like a pendulum does. Were buying an experience.

Soon well be dancing on Carnaby Street with Twiggy and the corpse of Sid Vicious, marching for a larf with Ulsters kick-the-pope brigades and the Red Hand Defenders! Yes! Ill be knocking back black garrulous pints with James Joyce and Martin Amis and Maggie Thatcher and forgetting why I came, forgetting my murky family legends and Irish errands, because Britain is a seductive stewardess and Europe is a giant theme park: castles and granite gargoyles and miniskirts and ivory beer pulls and flying buttresses a construct just for me!

But then... then arrives that half-drunk epiphany.

My eyes clear and I see that Im a fool, fallen from suave jet-set infallibility into a Freudian pop art installation, product.

My eyes clear and I see myself riding an assembly line that fills Western Europe. Row upon row of inebriated tourists clutching erect bananas and waiting to be serviced.

Chapter Two

RIDING ON THE NORTHERN LINE

MY FATHER, LEIGHTON, WAS BORN IN OXFORD. My mother, Kay, fell into the world in Dublin. I feel the magnet pull of rival kingdoms. This trip Im visiting the two kingdoms. My mother and father met during the war in the Royal Navy. Some of the Oxford side of the family did not approve of my fathers secret wartime marriage to an unknown Irish woman while on a thirty-six-hour leave in London. My grandfather forbade my father to marry my mother. All his life my grandfather loved a Catholic girl but hed been forbidden to marry her. He wanted his son to feel the same despair.

Kay and Leighton had met just weeks before. My mother was an officer (as a nursing sister) and my father a non-com, so they were not allowed to mix. Theyd slip off on separate trains to rendezvous secretly at Cheddar Gorge. They managed to be in London during the Blitz and in Plymouth when it was flattened by the Luftwaffe.

The navy shipped my father from Oxford to Ceylon in monsoon season. A big hospital in Trincomalee, for the invasion of Japan. If the Suez Canal was blocked by sunken freighters and tankers, then his convoy would have sailed the bottom of Africa, bouncing past the stormy Cape of Good Hope. Im sure it was Gibralter and the Suez, says my aunt: He went to Ceylon early in the war; he had to come back when his twin brother died. My mother disagrees: No, he went late in the war, after wed married; sailed to Trincomalee, Foul Point. The past is the wrong end of the microscope. My father told me of his hospital ship being dive-bombed by Stukas, but usually he didnt talk of the war. He said the monsoon rains were so hard that his shirt ballooned with water just running door to door. My English father is dead now, so I cant ask him of his wartime voyages, his fabled seasickness, the names of his ships in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. My father is not talking to me.

My Irish mother, very much alive, is also not talking to me, even though I am going to prowl her old wrecked neighbourhoods.