The Road to McCarthy (50 page)

The weather’s closing in
from all sides as I drive north from Clonmel towards Ballingarry. There’s a lot of water on the road and on a bend near a bridge I’m almost wiped out by a huge Guinness truck, which would have been a terrible irony, but I suppose a kind of immortality. It would probably be lovely scenery around here if you could see it, but as well as driving through three different kinds of rain simultaneously—soft, hard and wet—an opaque mist has descended, and now the inside of the windshield has fogged up as well. Perhaps I’m crossing some kind of time barrier, and as I round the next bend a squadron of nineteenth-century troops will loom up out of the mist to trap me in the stories I’ve been pursuing.

At the precise moment I pass the sign that says ballingarry I’m hit by an overwhelming fragrance of turf smoke. For me burning peat is one of the most evocative of childhood smells, like potatoes roasting at Sunday lunch-time, or the all-enveloping malt and hops of Greenall’s Brewery as we used to get off the school bus in St. Helens. The prefect for my first year, the big
grownup lad in long trousers keeping an eye out for all us littlies in shorts, was Pete Postlethwaite, who grew up even more and then became a famous actor. Whenever I see him in a film it comes with the sensurround aroma of that brewery in St. Helens. It’s the same with turf. One of the most memorable things about childhood visits to Ireland was that my uncles could cut lumps out of the ground with a spade, then burn them on the fire. I experimented with bits dug from the lawn in Lancashire, but they barely smouldered. I know these days it’s mostly processed briquettes they’re burning rather than the real sod, but, like a gust of hops on the air, or a glimpse of Pete Postlethwaite on celluloid, the scent of turf still takes me back to another place and time.

I didn’t know whether to expect any memorial or acknowledgment of the Young Irelanders in the village, but in fact there is one, albeit so understated you’d have no sense of its significance unless you already knew: “1848,” say two gray marker stones on two gray walls, barely visible through the increasingly monochrome weather in what may be the center of the village, though it’s very hard to tell. It’s completely deserted, so there’s nobody to ask for directions. I drive on a couple of hundred yards, as far as a ribbon of new houses whose fences are painted in Tipperary sporting colors, and then Ballingarry is no more, so I turn back.

I’ve brought Thomas Keneally’s account of the fateful cabbage patch encounter with me, hoping to use it to pinpoint where the widow’s cottage used to be. “A small two-storeyed two-chimneyed house surrounded by a stone wall, on land named Boulagh Common,” writes Keneally. I drive down the only nearby lanes that might be contenders, because they are the only nearby lanes, but one dwindles to nothing in a farmyard, and the other takes a wrong direction and makes no sense in relation to the events of the fateful day. Back in the center of the village, at the epicenter of the crepuscular damp, the post office and shop is resolutely closed, and it’s possible it’s been that way for generations.

I leave the car and walk towards the church, which is barely visible through the radar-defeating weather. As I begin to acclimatize I’m aware of a ghostly chipping sound cutting through the gloom like sonar. Across the hazy jumble of Celtic crosses and headstones I can see a blue plastic sheet
draped like a bivouac over a grave, possibly concealing some kind of body-snatcher or amateur pathologist going about his grisly business. From the sound of it he’s also talking to himself. They’re usually the worst ones. I decide to approach him, because I have already realized there is nothing else to do in Ballingarry today. Hesitantly I creep up, trying both to surprise and not surprise him, as I can’t work out which would be more dangerous. I can hear him muttering from beneath his morbid shelter as I approach.

So it’s not a necrophiliac making pillow talk. It’s the one o’clock news on a transistor radio. What peculiar synchronicity. Could the end of my Young Ireland pilgrimage be about to coincide with IRA disarmament? There are rumors of “significant announcements” every nine months or so, then nothing happens, I’ll grant you that, but maybe this time? I suppose you never know.

“Would ye like to come in out of the wet?”

He’s peering up at me from under his bender, a Milo O’Shea type with creased laughter lines, snug in a tweed cap and distressed maroon V-neck. He’s sitting on a grave, chipping an extra inscription onto a headstone with a hammer and chisel. I try and get a look at the name, just in case it’s mine.

I stoop under the plastic sheet and hunker down on the grave with him. With the politeness of someone who wants to welcome a stranger into his home but can’t give up the company he gets from the airwaves, he turns the radio down, but not off. “How are ye?” he enquires. I tell him I’m fine. This really is most peculiar.

I know it’s an off-chance, I say, but I’m interested in a historical story—he’s starting to look embarrassed, like a kid who’s been picked out because the teacher knows he hasn’t done his homework—a famous battle that was
fought near here; well, smaller than a proper battle really. I’m burbling a bit now, because he can hear my accent and we both know the battles were always against the same opponents, and to make matters worse they’re wittering on about decommissioning again in the background, but anyway I don’t suppose he’s heard of, or knows where I can find the site of, the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch?

“D’y’know I’m embarrassed to say it, but I don’t know as much about the history of my country as I ought to. I’d say ye might have the advantage on me there.”

He gives a warm smile and I tell him I think the battle was fought barely a mile or two from this very spot, so I wonder if perhaps there’s a chance the priest might know?

“Ah, well, maybe he would, but ye know I really couldn’t say. I’m not from round here myself. I’m from Callan.”

Callan is just a few miles away. It’s where the police who took part in the battle marched from.

“D’y’know what I’d do if I were you now?”

I think I do. I was already thinking that way myself.

“Go for a pint, and while y’re in the pub, ask them in there.”

It is an honest workingman’s panacea, and I’d be a fool to decline it. I emerge from the muggy, plastic-enshrouded necropolis into the real world, where the rain has eased off and the church is now as large as life. There are three pubs in the village; unfortunately all of them are closed, even Meagher’s, so depriving me of a unique opportunity to have a pint in a pub named after a famous patriot and governor of Montana, in the very village where it all began to go wrong, or right, for him. As I walk back to the car a hand turns the closed sign in the post office window to open.

“Sure I do,” says the postmistress with an ah-come-on-you-patronizing-sod laugh when I ask her if she knows about the battle. “Is it the house you’re looking for? Straight up past the church and the school, turn right at the second crossroads, you’ll find it up the hill there.”

What—the house itself? It’s still standing?

“I’d say so. The Ministry of Works is doing it up. I think they’re hoping it might turn into a tourist attraction.”

I find it where she said it would be, off the lane up a newly laid driveway with creosoted fences and an empty car park. department of arts, heritage, gaeltacht and the islands, says a sign. safety goggles must be worn. hard hats must be worn at all times. no admittance—authorised personnel only. I park up and head on in. It looks just as it appears in the illustrations of the battle—four windows, two chimneys, some outbuildings, a water pump and a fenced-in garden—except there are no cabbages in the garden, and no rifles pointing out the windows, and it looks altogether newer and more pristine than I’d expected. the war house, claims a rather grandiose inscription. scene of the 1848 rising. acquired by the state 1998. Then underneath that, taoiseach bertie ahern td. Ain’t it always the way: the politician gets his bit of immortality, but poor old Widow McCormack gets nudged out of the picture altogether.

There are none of the sounds you usually associate with a major construction project—work going on, that kind of thing—and I’m just starting to wonder whether perhaps Bertie’s got his name on the wall because he’s doing it up himself at weekends, when I notice three noses and six eyes watching me from over the top of a wall. They pop down out of sight, as if they’re about to reload their muskets, so I walk through the gateway into the courtyard while I still have the advantage of surprise. Three builders are lying in wait looking a bit uneasy and shifty, as if I’m about to ask them why they never turned up to finish that kitchen conversion I paid them cash up-front for last July. There are two young lads and an older chap who looks like the foreman. All are distinguished by a complete lack of safety goggles and hard hats.

“Yes?” says the foreman.

I say that I’m very interested in the story of Smith O’Brien and Meagher and Mitchel and the others, and I’ve come a long way to be here, and I know it’s not open to the public yet, but is there any chance I could take a quick look inside?

“The thing is, it isn’t open to the public.”

“I know. I understand that. It’s just that, like I say, I’ve come a long way and this story really means a lot to me.”

“It’s not open to the public, see, so you can’t really come in.”

“I know. I know that. It’s just that, having come such a long way, it seems a pity ….”

“I know. But it’s not open to the public, so I can’t be letting you in. Do you see my problem?”

“Of course I do. It’s just that I’ve followed the story from Clonmel to Tasmania. Just a quick look would be all I’m after. I understand it isn’t open to the public.”

“Ye’d better come in so.”

He shows me in while the two lads start hitting a piece of wood with a hammer to feign work in case I’m really some kind of undercover jobsworth from the Department of Arts. He’s a most gracious guide, pointing out original floorboards, beams, cupboards and hearths where they remain, though mostly the house has been fixed up, like large parts of the rest of the country, with new materials. Still, I hadn’t even expected it to be standing, so I’m just thrilled that it’s here at all. I check with him that the small enclosed front garden now laid to lawn was the celebrated cabbage patch, and that O’Brien and the rebels were just twenty or so feet away, out there on the other side of that low garden wall.

“That’s right.” He’s pleased I know the story. “They were out there, and the, er …. in here, looking out, was where, you know ….”—we make eye contact at this point—“…. where the British were.” There. He’s said it. Wasn’t so bad after all, was it? In fact I’m pretty sure that most, if not all, the forces in the cottage were Irish police and soldiers loyal to the Crown, but we don’t want to go into that now, especially not with all this talk of decommissioning on the wireless.

I thank him for showing me round and he tells me to take a few minutes on my own to get a feel of the house if I want. Despite the just-painted look I feel privileged to be here midway between dereliction and Heritage, the first visitor to a brand-new Attraction. I hope they get it right, and it brings people fresh to the story of O’Brien the globetrotting Protestant Fenian, Meagher, Mitchel and their friends. We always need good new stories, and the old ones are often the best.

On the way back to Clonmel the mist evaporates in a ninety-second meteorological
epiphany to reveal bright sun pouring down from a cumulus-studded blue sky onto a patchwork landscape of rolling green fields studded with toytown cows. The thicker the mist, the more impressive the special effects that usually follow. You’d have little hope of convincing a new arrival how bleak the weather was looking just twenty minutes ago. The thin film of pure Irish mineral water greasing the tarmac would be the only forensic evidence you could submit in support of your claim, and that’s already evaporating beneath my tires in an incongruous, possibly miraculous, rainbow heat haze. The day still has many hours to run, and I’m not about to rule out the possibility of visions just yet. If the statues are ever going to start moving again, this would be as good an afternoon as any for them to give it a go.

Halfway back I pass through Fethard, a famous horse-racing village packed to the gills, according to its reputation, with those bright-eyed Irish jockeys and urbane matter-of-fact trainers you see forever being interviewed on British TV in the winners’ enclosure. If you look closely you can usually see clutches of gleeful Irishmen in the dubious haberdashery of the betting fraternity, brandishing wads of cash on the other side of the railings. Fethard is completely deserted, as if all the people who weren’t in Ballingarry an hour ago aren’t here either. On my left as I head down the main street I pass a large pub called McCarthy’s. I hit the brakes, reverse, park and go in.

There’s a bar on the right, a pot-bellied stove on the left, and four lads are chatting at a table just inside the door. A gray-haired man in his sixties who looks as if this isn’t the first time he’s had a few drinks in the afternoon is sitting at the bar drinking stout, with what appears to be a dead dog on the floor beside him. A solitary barmaid has the look of someone who might do a bit of glass polishing or shelf stocking in a little while, but doesn’t feel under any pressure to start just yet. The meteorological special effects were an omen, or possibly an opening sequence. You can’t plan these moments. You just have to know them when fate sends them your way, and accept them for what they are.

I sit one stool away from the dead dog owner, order a drink and wait for something to happen. He’s sitting sideways reading the paper with his back
to me. He doesn’t seem to have noticed I’m here, but then he breaks the ice with a classic ploy favored by solo drinkers all over the world: He starts talking to himself out loud.