Notebook
President Carter's translator's infelicities in Poland were a marvellous delight to read. Less so, as a piece of pure farce, was the President's own gaffe in New Delhi, where directional microphones picked up his instruction to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to arrange a 'cold and very blunt' letter to the Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai over India's refusal to sign the multinational nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Mr Desai is old, his voice and his manner are almost unbelievably soft and gentle, but in his way he is hard and firm as ice. When I met him in Delhi last spring, he reminded me of another ascetic, a man whose voice and manner were equally soft and gentle, but whose mind and will were as strong as any man I have encountered. I refer to my old teacher, the great historian of English monasticism, the late Dom David Knowles, whom I first encountered as my supervisor in Peterhouse in 1946. Professor Knowles was the first Roman Catholic monk to be a Fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college since the Reformation. He was by way of being an authority on Authority in the Church: his toughness was evident in the sense that, despite his great knowledge of and respect for that Authority, for much of his life he was in a state of disobedience with the superior of his order. This has taken me a long way from President Carter and Prime Minister Desai; but if Morarji Desai is as like David Knowles as I believe, then the Indian will be neither much troubled nor much flustered by Carter's gaffe. Men with the kind of certainty of mind of Desal or Knowles distance themselves from the fusses with which they are often surrounded.
I spent the last days of the old, and the first days of the new, year in and around Dublin, and found it changed, for the worse. It seemed shabbier than I recalled it, and also more Irish, as if the pale had finally been removed. Although I have been to Ireland several times during the present troubles in the north, I realised that I had not been to Dublin itself for any length of time since before the Ulster strife began. It was this realisation which explained why my obvious Englishness seemed to be greeted more cautiously, with more reservations, than I had expected and remembered. In Grafton Street, for no reason whatsoever, a drunk kept shouting at the passing crowds of Saturday shoppers, 'The dirty British, the dirty British.' In one bar, which I subsequently learnt is an IRA place these days although it used not to be, I was refused admission well before closing time with the excuse, 'We're closed now.' At another,
nearby, I was refused a drink on the grounds that they had stopped serving, although it was all too plain that others were still being served readily enough.
Dubliners were not always distrustful of, or
even surly towards visiting Englishmen; and of course the examples I've quoted above
were in no way typical of the warm hospitality I generally encountered. That hospitality can, however, sometimes be overinsistent. In the Royal Marine Hotel at Dunleary — itself a faded relic of the days when everyone travelled to and fro by sea — an Irishman and his wife sat in the middle of a room, he asking the handful of others in the room, Will you dance? It's going to be a fine fine year.' His wife kept saying 'Now I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll go back and have rashers and eggs. Will that do? Will that be fine?'
'That will be fine. But first we will have another drink. Cheer up,' he said across the room to me, 'don't look so miserable.' People often say this to me. I have a habit of disappearing into remote thoughts and when this occurs I have noted, from comments made over the years, that I wear a gloomy countenance. 'I'm fine,' I said, 'it's just that I've got a miserable-looking face.'
'Well, have a drink. Well, what will you be having?' We were late for dinner, I explained. He kept pressing. I kept declining, and irritation began surfacing. Suddenly he said to me 'Don't start putting on the English, now'. 'But I am bloody English,' I bellowed back, echoing that celebrated retort of John Braine, when a remark he had made about the negroes in America was riposted with 'You wouldn't say that if you were black,' roared 'But I'm not bloody black, you fool!'
Flying to and from Dublin, no drinks at all were being served, 'because of an industrial dispute': instead we had to make do with plastic sandwiches and orange juice in plastic beakers. I tried, without success, to discover, and then to imagine, what kind of industrial dispute it could b6 which permitted orange juice and sandwichcs and chocolate bars to be served, but prohibited a beer or scotch and water. Whatever its cause, this mean-minded ban enabled an Irish steward on my flight into Dublin to announce, 'British Airways take this opportunity of wishing you a happy new year and express the hope that the pubs in Dublin are open.'
In the Royal Hibernian hotel — strange how the royal suffixes have persisted throughout half a century of the Free State and the Republic — I saw two pale figures, both aged around eighteeen, I'd say, a boy and a girl. She had huge mournful eyes and wore a wide-brimmed hat; her clothes were almost entirely black, and his were dark, too. He removed his hat, but kept his scarf and overcoat on, although the room was warm. They sat opposite each other, across a table, totally still. They were only moved from
their immobility by a waiter, to whom they addressed their orders simultaneously. They looked exactly and entirely like two central parts in a well-made film of a wellmade book by L P Hartley. I said this to my companion, who nodded agreement. Then I added, 'I wouldn't mind betting they share some Guinness blood', but she dissented, arguing that the young Guinnesses tended to be 'more hippy and jeany'. At another table I overheard a man speaking to someone hidden behind a column, 'I suffer from a much bigger emotional trauma than you do.' My emotional trauma is bigger than yours: what will the Irish come to next?
One thing they have already come to is disposable, ready-pasted toothbrushes. In the gents at both the Shelbourne and the Royal Hibernian, on the wall where you would expect to find contraceptive slot machines, they have similar machines, offering these unique objects for 10p. I bought one, and have just this minute opened it up. Sure enough, inside a squat blue tube is a minitoothbrush already pasted. The toothpaste is very strongly minted, and this is doubtless its justification. They are prophylactics in their way — they protect the breath ejaculating the smell of booze.
This being a New Year's column perhaps I. may be forgiven for its alcoholic flavour, not that in fact my own New Year was all that heavy on the hard stuff, although there we re plenty around whose it was. Let me change the mood with quite a happy little tale. On a stretch of Merrion road in Ballsbridl e, south of Dublin along Dublin bay, there is an enormous pile of neatly stacked and crated empty bottles, a hundred yards long or more. Dubliners have taken to driving out their empty bottles — the sort that require no refundable deposit — and dumping them by the roadside along an unused piece of land beside a closed-down railway station. This station is used as a shelter by winos. Someone organised them into collecting these bottles, which they then sell to the glass-manufacturers for re-processing. This ai once reduces the waste of glass, the litter, and danger of broken bottles, and gives the down-and-outs something to dc as well as a little money. They take pride in keeping the extraordinary dump as neat as possible, and had put up a sign thanking their 'customers'. The idea was dreamed up by a Scotsman who, as soon as he had the system working, left them to it. I've no idea whether the Scotsman is a Christian or, if so, whether he is Protestant or Catholic; but whatever he is, his work strikes me as good, in the most Christian sense of that word.
Not that all is Christian. Pulling a Christmas cracker, made in Cork, two little men fell out. Examined, the two little men, all 41 green, represented two armed men, one of whom was shooting the other in the back. And a happy new year to you's all.
George Ge IC
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