Myles Away From Dublin (21 page)

If a man repeats himself, you are inclined to say he is repetitious. That is, if you are a mild-mannered and easy-going person. But you are more likely to say something worse than that.

But the law of charity should prevail, for there may be a good excuse for saying the same thing a second time. For example, if nothing happened after you said to a barman, ‘Give me a glass of whiskey,’ you would be justified in repeating yourself. I have nothing so trivial in question here today. I feel my theme touches on the supernatural, for the occurrence seems to be outside the ordinary sequence of human affairs, far beyond
anything
that may be expected, extraordinary to the point of being frightening apart from being physically very painful.

Readers will remember my recent articles wherein I told of a sudden illness, my journey to hospital, and my slow recovery there. It’s not a polite subject for literature – one’s ills, tribulations and crises. Most people don’t want to hear anything about them, having enough troubles of their own to get foostered about and being anxious to do nothing but mind their own business.

That’s fair enough, but there might be a wider public interest involved in what I have to say – the question of hoodoo, a mysterious personal curse, black magic or the secret incantations of witch-doctors. Just because we in Ireland don’t live in the jungle is not to say we are free from occult and evil forces. I do not want to dismay or alarm anybody, but strange forces may be at work among us, and to be warned is to be fore-armed. Let me tell of what happened last Saturday.

I was in good form, bright and cheerful, and made a slight trip to buy papers and also some of those
pernicious things called cigarettes. To a large extent, all was right with the world. My humble purchases completed, I took a bus home, and indeed arrived at the bus-stop which was my destination. It was then Force Sinister took over.

I can’t describe in immediate detail what happened. In a way, it was pleasant. A nice rosy glow seemed to come over me. I wasn’t in the least bit worried or upset. I felt things were being looked after – were in good hands. Indeed, I felt sort of happy.

But gradually, the image and the feeling changed. I found I was more uncertain of myself. I was in bed, but obviously not my own bed. Two men were doing something to my right leg and, unless I was mistaken, that new sensation I felt was extreme pain.

Well, time passed and, gradually, the story was pieced together. In getting off the bus, I had stepped on a stone or something of the kind, broken my leg at the ankle, fallen, and fainted away. I will probably never know what happened directly after that. Probably some passer-by raised the alarm and rang up for an ambulance.

The ambulance men brought me unconscious to a hospital not far away, where I was X-rayed. It was when two doctors were putting a temporary bandage (not plaster) on my leg that the light of sweet reason returned. I broke the same leg, almost at the same place, fifteen years ago, and I knew what I was in for: an initial period of extreme pain followed by a time – the length of which nobody could foretell – of complete immobilisation in a plaster cast. There is an immense difference in the time different people take for broken bones to ‘knit’; on the previous occasion I had been 9 months out of action.

It is a woeful and dismal prospect, and I feel that
ill-luck
is not quite strong enough a term to denote this repetition of a major reverse in health. I feel I have done nothing to deserve it.

Initially, at least, it means life in hospital. No matter
how considerate and kind the nurses, this is no joke. The awful bang-bang starts at six in the morning, perhaps only an hour after the patient has managed to lapse into an uneasy sleep. Hours of turmoil follow, with fuss about washing and shaving and even saying prayers. For those in extreme pain it can be very trying. In fact it can be brutal.

There is one last thing which must be said, not about any particular hospital, but about them all: the food is terrible. Not personal experience alone justifies this dictum; many, many other people have been forced to the same conclusion.

The general feeling is that while hospital staffs big and small have given minute study to medicine, surgery and nursing generally, they have given hardly any attention to the extremely technical science of mass catering. No restaurant which dispensed ‘hospital food’ would last a week.

There is another source of intense suffering in hospital, even in a very small ward. I mean the other fiendish patient who has brought a radio in with him and insists on having this thing blazing loudly all day no matter what the condition of his fellow patients. The extraordinary thing is that hospital authorities do nothing to stop or restrain this horrible practice. In the modern hospital, of course, each bed is connected to a central radio installation, and each patient provided with headphones if he requires them.

I cannot forget what one man told me he saw happening to a fellow-patient; this unfortunate man was anointed to the lilt of ‘The Blue Danube’ and later died to strains of ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’.

I hope most of my own convalescence – if we call it that – will be spent at home. Radio there is completely under control, unlike myself in the use of my legs.

Just imagine this situation: it is raining in torrents and on the road there is a man with a car. The car is stopped but the man has the hood up. WOULD YOU PITY HIM?

Not so simple, that question. The answer depends on the country – nay, the hemisphere – in which the scene is laid. If the man with the car is in the United States, then he is in a mess, for there the word hood means what we call bonnet, and obviously his engine is banjaxed. In passing, let me record my own sense of nostalgia at mention of a car’s hood.

It seems to evoke the ghost of the Model T and that fearsome thing presented by other makers in the early days – the One-Man Hood. The name suggested clearly that you could put the thing up yourself quite unaided, even on a lonely country road in a rainstorm. What it did not say was that you were expected to have the personal qualities of Henry Ford himself, the great funambulist Blondin, Jack Dempsey and Houdini.

I say it seriously when I express conviction that many an owner-driver (another obsolete term) met a lonely and terrible death in the thrall of a One-Man Hood. Compared with it, single-combat with an octopus was kid’s stuff. Suppose, for argument’s sake, you did get the thing up. How then could you be expected to drive the car home with two broken arms and a strained spine?

That was one of the menaces our fathers faced. Could there be any connection between the word hood and hoodlum?

This subject of divergency as between the English and the American languages was touched on last week by colleague Jack Juvenal. It is an interesting theme, and one that has been studied quite a bit by inquirers at the scientific level. Let us therefore have a glance.

At the time of the first verified white migration to America, it was a departure to the other side of the world.

The English language which emigrants from this part of the world brought with them became petrified, and many words and phrases still commonly in use in the States, by us regarded as American – even Hollywood – slang, were genuine English in use in Shakespeare’s day. Such was, for instance, the phrase ‘I guess’, and genuinely ancient are such words as flap-jack, jeans, cesspool, greenhorn, bay-window, stock (meaning cattle) and fall (in the sense of autumn).

But the subject is complicated because the
immigration
of English speakers from Britain was followed by other immigrations from France, Germany and Holland, and all those people brought their linguistic furniture with them. But everybody freshly arriving in the New World was confronted with plants and animals that he had never heard of and was forced to adopt rough versions of Indian words: whence we have opossum, raccoon, woodchuck, moccasin and even tapioca.

But perhaps the most important factor in this situation of lingual flux was the fact that the English language is uniquely analytic (as distinct from being inflected like many European tongues – indeed, it has little more than the pathetic remnant of who, whom and whose) and it is infinitely versatile and twistable. Any foreigner can master what is called pidgin English in a few weeks, and to a large extent every man is entitled to make his own English.

In addition to that, the modern America is infinitely resourceful and even witty in inventing new words. We, pompously running to Greek, talk of the cinema but the Yank, far more adequately, talks of the movies. We have no equivalent of such words as dawnburster, rubberneck, bootlegger, triggerman, convertible and sedan (cars), fall-guy, lame-duck, hoopla, showbiz, tammany, or even shaymus (meaning an Irishman).
Even in serious, objective writing, Americans make very little distinction between slang and respectable
improvisation
in language. ‘A.B.,’ you may read in a State document, ‘seemed a good guy but he was yellow.’ At least nobody is in any doubt about the meaning of that. And there really isn’t much difference between a trolley and a tram, or a lift and an elevator.

I feel printers and also careless writers have a lot to do with the formation of language. In Dublin there is a well-known amateur boxer who, though I believe of Irish birth, has a German name. I cannot say for certain what that name is, or what to call him in conversation. In countless newspaper articles he has been called (within the same article) Tiedt and Teidt.

I know enough German to be sure that IE has the sound of EE in the English ‘seed’ and that EI has the sound of the English word EYE. Therefore our boxer is either Mr TITE or Mr TEET.

But where does it end? For weeks in this very newspaper Richard Lea has been calling certain cows FRIESIANS. In fact they are FREISIANS, and on this occasion we can forget the pronunciation.

As I write these lines the morning paper records that on the previous day in the Dáil a Government deputy had complained that Mr Dillon had called Government backbenchers ‘gutties’. In return he said that deputies in the opposite side of the House were nothing only a lot of ‘plucked roosters’.

If any of the rest of us had a choice, I think most would elect to be a gutty, however much the term lacks precision. He may be badly dressed, loud and sometimes profane of language, but you no longer find him standing miserably at street corners. Indeed, the cornerboy is now largely obsolete as a social type.

The gutty is usually found indoors, sheltering behind a pint, and even looking sourly at television. A plucked rooster does not seem to have anything better to look forward to than the oven.

The question is, however – should dialogue of that kind take place in the Dáil at all? It is a deliberative assembly, concerned with the quiet and orderly
presentation
of views on important public issues, arrived at by members after objective cogitation, assisted perhaps by research in the library. The Standing Orders which guide the Chair make no allowances for interruptions, bellowed shouting, sneers, challenges or showers of personal abuse.

Needless to say, fisticuffs or gunplay (not unknown in similar other assemblies abroad) is absolutely out of order. Sometimes but not too often a Dáil deputy is ‘named’ for disorderly conduct, which means that there and then he has to leave the Chamber.

For all we know he may say to himself, ‘Aw to hell with it, I’ll go down to the bar and have a drink and maybe I can contact a few of the lads and get a game of poker going in a committee room.’

Noble rhetoric of the kind used by Burke and Grattan has fallen into completed disuse, very likely because Dáil deputies are quite incapable of it, and the only man who attempts old-style oratory, with variations of pitch and a wealth of florid gesture, is James Dillon, who can be a fascinating and impressive speaker and get punches home without appearing to be dealing in dirt at all.

But debates on the 212 per cent turnover tax were occasions of terrible scolding and scalding, with abuse and insults hurled readily across the floor with the greatest of freedom and violence. What are we to think of this? Must we conclude that many of the deputies are genuine gutties in upbringing, and that they are in their natural element in rows blistering with recrimination and threats?

The daily papers give such scenes great prominence and ‘play’ because readers demand a verbatim account of anything resembling a ‘heave’ or ‘barney’ at Leinster House. Usually however the report is accompanied by an austere editorial paternally reproving the main performers and denouncing such goings-on as ‘
disedifying
’, sometimes even ‘disgraceful’. They deplore affronts to the dignity of parliament and moan of lapses in ordinary manners. Is that a parade of hypocrisy?

It is certainly not a realistic attitude in the world of today, when proceedings in any parliament minutely affect the lives of everybody. Deputies who betray bad temper at least give evidence that they understand what is under discussion and have strong feelings on the subject.

Their manner of speaking their minds may sometimes be unfortunate but surely lively debate is better than droning monologues and the featureless drool one has come to associate with the House of Lords at Westminster?

And is it reasonable to expect polish, reticence and delicate debating punctilio from a House that is largely composed of farmers, not a few of whom have handled the gun as well as the plough? Hardly. That is Ireland.

What one should rightly deplore in those ‘exchanges’ is the almost total lack of wit. If you call me a gouger, I’ll call you a bowsie – but where does that get either of us? Too much of that sort of wordplay and both of us will come to be regarded by those present as bores who carry on our shoulders completely empty heads, people quite unfitted to be deputies. The fact is, of course, that prospective deputies are picked out at election times for their personal popularity in their home districts, for a known attitude of helpfulness, or indeed a man could command wide admiration for his skill with a fishing rod, or putting a horse at a fence.

The last quality considered is his potential as a parliamentarian, and in fact his ability to expertly judge public issues need not be called in question at all; under the party system he is just a vote, and undertakes to do as he is told.

A curiosity about Leinster House is the public gallery. It is cut off from the Chamber below by a screen of fine-mesh steel netting, no doubt giving some visitors the impression that they are beholding and hearing a den of wild animals. But such impression may be mutual, the deputies feeling that they are reasonably protected from those dangerous, unpredictable beasts, the People of Ireland.

It is painful to hear the Dáil now and again denounced as a ‘talking-shop’. That is exactly what the word PARLIAMENT means.