Myles Away From Dublin (24 page)

I am sure the reader has noticed the slow but inexorable change by common usage of the name of this unkingly territory from Eire to Republic of Ireland. I am not very clear why the handier Irish Republic is so studiously avoided but it is clear that ‘Eire’ is pretty universally disliked.

I heard through my grapevine that there was a devil of a row between a Government department and the designers of the Irish stand at the New York World Fair about what the country’s name was; only after a bitter battle did the designers succeed in establishing the fact that where we live is IRELAND.

The Eire label is set forth in the Constitution. Is it the best name? I doubt it, mind you. We had others in the old days, of course, when the old crowd were around. Banba, for instance, now hyphenated Ban-ba in honour of their Excellencies, the Censorship Board.

Then we had Scotia. This title has been lifted by British Railways for one of their mailboats, so we can hardly use it again. In any case there is now a Nova Scotia and, if anything, we would have to be Antica Scotia. (Not, hasty reader, Antiqua; for that word refers to time, the other to space. Antica Scotia means the foremost Scotia.)

Another name we had was Fodhla, which sounds like a baby food. I’m no longer interested in baby foods though I’m told that some people named Power do very well out of them. ‘Hibernia’ is notable only for the fact that the well-known quotation means that the visiting team became more wintry than the Irish themselves, not more Irish.

‘Saorstát Éireann’ was still another pseudonym
adopted
by this most honourable Irish nation. ‘Saor’, of course, means ‘mason’ and I have always held that the
SE title attributed undue influence to the Masons in our national affairs. The only other title that occurs to me at the moment is the one used among ourselves, in privacy of family or public house circle: I mean ‘this b— country’.

What about rethinking the thing, and having the name properly changed? It would mean a referendum, of course, but unless we have more frequent appeals to the people, I fear the traditional science of personation will be a thing of the past, like ‘patterns’, homespuns, rinnkeh faudas, potheen and efficient public transport.

‘Eire’ is over-full of vowels (75 per cent in fact) which means that the word is open to crazy mispronunciations on the part of foreigners. Could we not call this country … Cork? (Go on, laugh. What is wrong with my suggestion, anyway?)

Cork is a simple word that is known the world over for cuteness, alcoholism and literary posturing. The crowd down there have got a bad name for the whole lot of us and I hold that our national ignominy should be geographically located and acknowledged. A town such as Cork, which holds that the rest of Ireland is provincial, deserves to be freed from a name that means ‘swamp’ – if only to utilise, for national purposes, the paranoia, the secret studying, the shrewd marriage, the innumerable small forethoughts that have made our higher executive officers the finest in the world.

Call the country Cork and the other place Eire. Think of the distinction for your children unborn – they will be Corkmen one and all! And therefore they will write ‘novels’! Even we who are now alive could become naturalised Corkmen!

I had a vision, or nightmare, the other night. Dreamt I went up to the Patents Office in Dublin Castle to try to patent being Irish. I had drawn up a very detailed specification. You see, I want this unique affectation protected by world right. I am afraid of my life that other people will find out that being Irish pays and start invading our monopoly.

I am not sure that certain sections of the population in America have not already infringed our immemorial rights in this regard. I did not get very far with the stupid officials I saw.

They held that copyright did not subsist in being Irish and more or less suggested that it was open to any man to be Irish if he chose, and to behave in an Irish way. I pointed to the Cork colony, who were regarded by the rest of Ireland merely as Corkmen. No use.

The officials made the dastardly suggestion that even Corkmen could be regarded as Irishmen … of a kind. It was only on my way out that I realised the reason for this extraordinary attitude. Funny how the Coal Quay breaks out through the whitest official shirt.

As I write, we have the ironic spectacle of young fellows on the march in Dublin demanding the safeguarding of schoolboys’ rights and their ancient entitlement to undergo examinations. Perhaps by the time this is printed somebody will have climbed down. But perhaps what one might call the pathology of literacy and literature is worth looking at.

What prompts a sane inoffensive man to write? Assuming that to ‘write’ is mechanically to multiply communication (though that is sometimes a strong assumption), what vast yeasty eructation of egotism drives a man to address simultaneously a mass of people he has never met, people who may resent being pestered with his ‘thoughts’? They don’t have to read what he writes, you say? But they do. That is, indeed, the more vicious neurosis that calls for inquiry. The blind urge to read, the craving for print – that is an infirmity so deeply seated in the mind today as to be almost ineradicable. People blame compulsory education and Lord Northcliffe. The writer can be systematically discouraged, his ‘work’ can be derided and, if all else fails, in a military society the creative intellectuals can be liquidated. But what can you do with the passive print addict? Very little.

Consider the average day of the average man who is averagedly educated. The moment he opens his eyes he reads that extremely distasteful and tragic story that is to be found morning after morning on the face of his watch. Late again. He is barely downstairs when he has thrown open (with what is surely the pathetic abandon
of a person who knows he is lost) that white tablet of lies, his newspaper. He assimilates his literary narcotic in silence, giving only 5 per cent of his attention to the business of eating. His wife has ruined her sight from trying for years to read the same paper upside-down from the other side of the table, and he must therefore leave it behind him when he rushes out to his work. Our subject is nervous on his way, his movements are undecided; he is temporarily parted from his drug. Notice how advertisements he has been looking at for twenty years are frenziedly scrutinised, the books and papers of neighbours on the bus carefully scanned, even the bus ticket meticulously perused. Clocks are read and resented.

At last the office is reached. Hurrah! Thousands of documents – books, papers, letters, calendars, memos, diaries, threats to sue, bailiffs’ writs! Writing, typescript, PRINT! Heaven at last – an orgy of myopic indulgence! Consider the countless millions who sit in offices all day throughout the world endlessly writing to each other, endlessly reading each other’s writings! Inkwells falling and falling in level as words are extracted from them by the hundred thousand! Tape-machines, dictaphones, typewriters and printing presses wearing out their metal hearts to feed this monstrous lust for unspoken words!

And now consider that rare and delightful soul (admittedly he lives mostly in the Balkans) – the illiterate. Think of his quiet personal world, so untroubled by catastrophes, threats of war, cures for heart disease, the fact that it is high water at Galway at 2.47 p.m., or even the death at an advanced age of a distinguished prelate who had reflected the light of heaven on his flock for 53 years. Recall the paragraph of a brother-scribe of mine who saw a poor countryman ‘reading’ the morning paper upside-down and
remarking
that there was another big one sunk as he gazed at the picture of an inverted liner. Think of the illiterate’s acute observation of the real world as distinct from the
pale, print-interpreted thing that means life for most of us.

If you know such a person, leave him to his happiness. Do not pity him or patronise him, for he is suffering from nothing more terrible than innocence. Of all the things you read yourself, you know the great majority are unpleasant, sad or worrying. And if you can read, reflect that your accomplishment is
irreversible
. You cannot discard it as you would an old jacket that is a bit tattered and no longer fits properly. Those marching schoolboys will have many a chance later on to reflect soundly on those exams that they once got so excited about. ABC is the beginning of pain and boredom.

I am sure many people were amused at the suggestion made in the Dáil last week by Mr ‘Pa’ O’Donnell (FG) that a book on etiquette should be compiled for use in our schools and for circulation to adults through the libraries.

It would be troublesome and tedious to decide which one of all the legislative assemblies in the world merits a gold-plated cup for being in its proceedings the most unmannerly, scurrilous and reeking with insults and contumely but it is a sure thing that Dáil Éireann would be very high up on the list.

I speak as one who had to frequent Leinster House for many years, and my memories are grim. Language apart, it is a fundamental of politeness in a man joining a company or exhibiting himself in public that he should be presentable in his person and recently washed.

It is only their familiarity with them on the part of the ushers and Guards that prevents the arrest of many shabby, unshaven, often tieless characters who may be seen in the corridors and bar, and even occasionally getting up to speak in the chamber.

But as usual I can come to the rescue. I have a book called
Etiquette
for
Men
by G.R.M. Devereux and published in the last century. Today I will give readers some of the pithy maxims at the end of the book; some of them may seem a wee bit dated but no true
Nationalist
reader can fail to benefit.

Don’t wear a low hat or a straw with a frock, or tail coat.

Don’t clean or pare your nails anywhere but in your own room.

Don’t caress your moustache incessantly, however
delicate or robust its growth; nothing is more annoying or unpleasant to those who have to witness it, or makes the owner of the appendage look more silly.

Don’t take down a whole glass of wine at one gulp.

Don’t mash your food all up together on your plate.

Don’t turn your meat over continually on your plate, as though examining it. Avoid all appearance of wrestling with your food.

Don’t produce your own cigar or cigarettes at a dinner party, and smoke them in preference to those of your host.

Don’t make noises with your mouth when eating or drinking.

Don’t keep your mouth open while eating or listening or at any time.

Don’t refrain from offering your seat for fear of your offer being accepted.

Don’t use a toothpick in public; it is a disgusting habit.

Don’t break your bread and drop pieces in the soup.

Don’t turn an egg out into a glass or cup to eat it; an egg should be eaten with the utmost daintiness.

Don’t say ‘good-afternoon’ or ‘good day’ when taking leave of your host, a friend, or anyone who is your equal. ‘Good-bye’ is the correct term.

Don’t turn your trousers up at the bottom, unless there is real mud about.

Don’t stir the fire with your foot, or put coal on with your fingers.

I am leaving two of the most striking admonitions to the end, but meantime, dear reader, have you noticed anything peculiar about the foregoing prohibitions? They have one quality, explicit in some and implicit in them all. Look over them again, if you like.

Got it?
They
are
addressed
exclusively
to
men!
I suppose it would be risky to assume that all ladies were so well brought up in those days that they were in no need of advice. Victoria, if I am correctly informed, was a very
grumpy old lady, and indeed she used to sit, very brazenly, outside Leinster House. But here are the last two massive don’ts:

Don’t speak of an umbrella as an umber-ella, nor of a brougham as a broo-ham; never sound the H.

Don’t sound the L in golf; speak of it as goff, not gauff.

You could set the last one to music, recording it in tonic soffa!

It is not because my hands are full but this week I would like to talk, if I may, about my feet. I am wondering if what I have to say will awake an echo in some reader’s mind?

When the world was trying to recover from the Great War I was a young fellow in Dublin, a bold strap of a chisler, on the brink of being sent to school, and I would say that my people – what I wouldn’t have dared to have said then – were lower middle class. That connotes, of course, ultra respectability, carefulness amounting to perhaps contempt for the real poor. Yes, a lot of us were like that!

Such families were subject to all kinds of fads. Many fathers believed that sugar, for instance, was very bad for a growing youngster; he was not allowed to have it at any meal, and would get a hiding if caught eating sweets. Other fathers thought that tea was poison for a youngster and totally prohibited it. Butter, white baker’s bread, pork, ice cream, chocolate and goodness knows what other everyday item was also on somebody’s forbidden list. It all looks very silly now in retrospect, particularly when the tiny citizens feel deprived without a supply of purple hearts or marijuana cigarettes.

But I remember one fad that simultaneously struck my own parents as well as those of practically all my hoity-toity companions. And I hesitate to call this a ‘fad’ because, to this day, I believe the idea was very sound, and is still very sound. Perhaps the thing started innocently and quietly enough in a newspaper article but I know it spread through our people like wildfire. The theory was that boots or shoes (and shoes were a rarity in those days) should never be worn by young growing children because they distorted and deformed
the little feet then in process of being shaped, and could leave a youngster permanently gammy footed for life.

So we were all ordered to go about barefoot, like dogs or cats or the birds of the air. At this remove it may sound barbarous, particularly in the case of youngsters whose neatness in dress was a matter of family pride. But I do remember that after the first few days we thought nothing of it and even the grown-ups in the street soon stopped taking notice of respectable barefoot boys, there were so many of us.

Without attempting a pun I may say that Mother Nature took this sort of thing in her stride. After quite a short time something approximating to a natural sole, thick and nerveless, began forming on the nether surface of the feet, and soon the roughest or sharpest ground did not cause the slightest pain or
inconvenience
; even an odd bit of broken glass could be negotiated without injury. In fact we got TOUGH.

I can’t remember now, alas, when the pressure of convention forced me to resume wearing boots, or how footwear can be justified at all in view of how happily and healthily one can carry on without it. I suppose somebody will mutter something about fashion. If you look at a pair of boots or shoes coldly in the face, you will find they are awkward, cheap-looking and vulgar – certainly far from elegant. More than likely you will find they are dirty, neglected, unshined for days, possibly broken and leaking. No matter how smart and new your suit is, your whole appearance is utterly betrayed by a bad pair of shoes. And as I have said above, they are utterly unnecessary.

Some unthinking people may be horrified at the idea of adults going about their everyday business in bare feet, but that is merely the force of irrational
convention
, possibly allied to the secret knowledge that a lot of poor feet are not much to look at with their bunions, corns, twisted toes and broken nails. All that sort of wreckage comes from wearing shoes, for it is more than likely that the shoe that fits properly has not yet been
made. Many of the fleetest runners who have run away with world records have done so in their bare feet, and all swimmers have found that it is better to leave their shoes on the shore.

Next time you have a chance, have a good look at the bare foot of a healthy, young, well-developed man: you will see that it is a thing of beauty, style, complexity and elegance, a tool of movement and power, something certainly not to be hidden away in shame. For if the human feet are ugly and shameful, why are we not also self-conscious about our hands, and blush to think of holding it out naked, to be grasped possibly by a total stranger? Our faces, too – is there not something to be said for carefully hiding some of them, as some eastern women do under their system of purdah?

It is too much to hope, I suppose, for the liberation of human feet and the passage of a statute declaring the wearing of footwear illegal. But it would be a great day for Ireland, and maybe an example to the world, if such a measure were passed by Dáil Éireann, with every man-jack of a TD sitting there with his bare spawgs outstretched, for all to see and admire.