When I was a kid I couldn’t understand how Irish aristocrats with Irish names who lived in big houses in Ireland came to be sitting in the British House of Lords. Still don’t, to be honest. Nor did I have any real notion of an ancient Gaelic aristocracy. But I do remember my uncle telling me, when I was over in West Cork on holiday, that McCarthy was a royal name and we were descended from ancient high kings of Ireland. Nothing special about that, mind. Everybody else called McCarthy was royal too, which from what I knew about Ireland in those days—West Cork, basically—meant about 80 percent of the population. There were a few Crow-leys and O’Donovans about the place, but apparently they were just McCarthys who’d changed their names. And either all of us were kings, or none of us.
So it came as a surprise when some years later a BBC Radio producer told me that I had a clan chief to whom I owed my allegiance; but the head of the McCarthy family, he said, was not Irish. He was a Moroccan, who lived in Tangier, and was known as the McCarthy Moor. Fantastic, I thought. A Moor! Like Othello! We discussed it over a few pints, and decided that the original McCarthys must have been a nomadic tribe from North Africa who sometime in prehistory had, like the Celts, emigrated north to Ireland. Over Singapore noodles and a couple of bottles of wine we further deduced that the unaccustomed moistness of the Irish climate must have broken down their skin pigment, a kind of genetic rusting process that led inevitably over the centuries to red hair and freckles. And so it was that I began to tell anybody who’d listen that the ancient kings from whom I was descended were Moroccans, and that one day I would travel to Morocco and share a water pipe and a bowl of couscous with the Moor himself.
I gave the matter no further thought until I was in Galway a couple of years ago browsing in one of those shops that sell bogwood-in-poteen keyrings and Irish family coats-of-arms for tourists to sew on to their golf bags, when an article in a cheaply photocopied Celtic fanzine called Caledonian Fringe or Gael Force or Diasporic Paddy or some such caught my attention.
The North American MacCarthy Clan Gathering in August will be presided over by the MacCarthy Mór, Dr. Terence MacCarthy, Prince of Desmond.
Not Moor then.
Mór.
Probably a Gaelic word meaning “Moroccan”! Now I’d be able to prove to my uncle that I’d been right all along, and that everyone in West Cork was, if you looked at things from the right angle, African. The gist of the article was that hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans and Canadians called McCarthy, MacCarthy and McCartney would be gathering for a weekend of clan-related activities by a river somewhere in deepest Nova Scotia. It sounded too good to miss. There would be esoteric ceremonies, and indiscriminate bonding, and business cards embossed with shamrocks would be exchanged. We would dress up in strange togs, learn the magic words and discover where we came from. With luck there’d be re-creations of ancient Celtic rituals featuring half-naked bank managers covered in green paint, and I would be able to drink heavily with policemen from Boston and mental health professionals from Toronto who had never been near Ireland in their lives. We would sing the old songs together, to which none of us knew all the words. In Nova Scotia!
But how to contact them? There was a website address, but that was no good to me as I haven’t got a computer—not because I’m some sort of technophobe, but because I know them to be the spawn of Beelzebub—so I phoned a friend in Cork who logged, as I believe it’s called, on, and he came right back with the news.
Sorry, clan gathering cancelled.
Some sort of problem with the main man.
Seems he’s staying at home.
In Morocco.
A whole arcane world of medieval Gaelic princely shenanigans—quite probably involving the wearing of emerald-colored tights—of whose existence I had been completely and sadly unaware had revealed itself to me, only to snatch itself away at the last moment. I felt cheated. I decided to go to Morocco, meet the Moor, and lay claim to my roots.
It turned out to be impossible. Phone calls and letters to likely-sounding contacts went unanswered. Nobody in the mysterious world of Gaelic heraldry wanted to talk about it, while Irish people living in the real world told me it was a load of unbelievable old shite, and I’d be better off steering well clear of these mad feckers unless I wanted to end up minus large amounts of cash Riverdancing in plaid trousers in a Holiday Inn at two o’clock in the morning.
Then a friend who’d been making some enquiries for me got a call from someone claiming to represent some manner of ceremonial Celtic Guard, an order of armed Gaelic gentlemen who accompany and defend the Mór on all his overseas trips. And the word was that the man himself was indeed in Morocco, but would speak to no one.
No one. Understand?
Then two things happened.
First of all I managed to get hold of a book on Gaelic history with a foreword written by the MacCarthy Mór himself. There was also a photograph. He wasn’t a Moroccan fella at all. Rather pale and Irish-looking, in fact; and decked out in a dinner jacket covered in fancy badges and decorations.
The second was an article in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times saying that the Irish government had withdrawn “courtesy recognition” of the MacCarthy Mór, whom it described as “a Belfast historian of humble origins.” Suggesting that his genealogy had been declared suspect, the paper said that MacCarthy was indeed in Morocco, adding ominously: “He may yet face legal challenges from dozens of disgruntled Irish Americans to whom he sold and rented titles.”
The ceremonial Guard also got a mention: “A uniform of rust kilts, gray military shirts and black berets. One member carried an axe.”
What in God’s name could it all mean?
I was hooked, but my attempts to make contact with the Mór were, if anything, making reverse progress. The Tangier hotel in which he had been a long-term resident denied ever having heard of him. I did succeed in making contact with a count who had for years been one of MacCarthy’s supporters. “When you phone him, make sure you’ve got a donkey handy,” advised the intermediary who gave me the number, “so that he can talk the hind leg off it.” In a series of extended telephone conversations—during which I took on the role of donkey, none being available locally—the loquacious count denounced his former mentor as a charlatan, and urged me to avoid any contact with him. He saw no contradiction, however, in continuing to use his title, despite the fact that it had been bestowed on him by MacCarthy himself. On the other end of the phone I ee-awed in disbelief, but I don’t think he noticed. I had entered a peculiar realm in which, as I was to learn to my cost on more than one occasion, interested combatants armed with vast quantities of minute, unverifiable and unlikely-sounding historical detail talk and talk and talk at you until you have a very bad headache indeed.
After several weeks I was no closer to the elusive Mór, but I had managed to piece together the essential facts of the story. Since 1948 the Irish state has been conferring “courtesy recognition” on the proven heirs of the traditional Gaelic chiefships that were swept away under Anglo-Norman, later British, rule. In 1991, after a decade of petitioning, the chief herald of Ireland authorized Terence MacCarthy, a historian and the son of a Belfast ballroom dancing instructor, to use the title MacCarthy Mór, Prince of Desmond. In some eyes this made him potential heir to the high kingship of Ireland, even though the job no longer exists, on account of the inconvenient existence of a republic. Throughout the nineties MacCarthy adopted a high profile, publishing historical books, proselytizing for Gaelic culture, being photographed with dignitaries, and making public appearances at clan gatherings in North America. And then, as reported in the Sunday Times, the Irish government withdrew its recognition, and the chief herald issued a statement: “It appears that reliance was placed to an excessive degree on uncorroborated statements and uncertified copies, transcriptions, or summaries of documents, the originals of which were not produced or were said to have been destroyed by fire, flood or explosion.”
As a consequence of the alleged fires, floods and explosions, MacCarthy was duly stripped of his title—in effect, they said, because he wasn’t who he claimed to be. In reply the ex-Mór wrote that the chief herald, “a mere civil servant of a republic,” had no “right to alter the successional laws of Gaelic Ireland.” Each side accused the other of selling titles to gullible Americans—which, like many people, I’d always assumed to be a cornerstone of the Irish economy and therefore to be encouraged—and, in a welter of claim and counterclaim, MacCarthy announced he was abdicating, withdrawing from public life, and going to ground in Tangier, where he had been living on and off for twelve years with his associate, Andrew, the count of Clandermond.
“I shall not comment again on this affair. I shall not answer any correspondence, nor stoop to defend myself, or any member of my family, from any further defamatory attacks by self-interested trouble-makers, self-acclaimed experts, scandalmongers or title hunters.”
By now I had realized that it needed an experienced investigative journalist with a precise and analytical mind to crack this peculiar case and establish the facts once and for all. That ruled me out, then. In any case I felt no urge to prove anything. Most Irish people I’ve spoken to regard these titles, and the anachronistic world of Gaelic chivalry, genealogical purity and vicious back-biting that surrounds them, as a bit of a game. They may be of some importance to the tourist industry, they tell you, though not so important as genuine aristocracy like U2, Daniel O’Donnell and Fungi the Dolphin. Rather than caring who was right and who was wrong, I found myself intrigued by what it all said about contemporary Ireland. A Dublin academic offered me his take on the affair: “In England you have a class system, and everyone knows how it works. In America they have no class system, and everyone knows how it works. And in Ireland, we have a class system, and no one knows how it works.”
There was also a surreal and peculiarly Irish dimension to the whole business, placing it firmly in the grand tradition of Flann O’Brien, Sam Beckett and Spike Milligan. In 1923 the Public Records Office in Dublin was blown up by the IRA and all records destroyed, so that, when push comes to shove, hardly anybody in the country can prove they are who they say they are.
Yet I remained eager to meet the man at the center of the controversy. I didn’t want to cross-examine him, but I was intrigued to know what kind of guy might be claiming, rightly or wrongly, to be my chief. Who are my clan anyway? Senator Joe, the witch-hunter? Mary, the novelist? John, the ex-Beirut hostage? Perhaps. Someone cornered me in Cork airport this year, and said “Tell me, Mr. McCarthy—do you still see a lot of that Brian Keenan?”
I read learned tomes on clan history and discovered all manner of obscure information, most of which is far too boring to pass on; though I was pleased to discover that a McCarthy is reputed to have invented whiskey, and that in remotest Alaska there is a town called McCarthy, population seventeen. One day, I thought, I’ll go there. Maybe I’ll drink some whiskey when I arrive. And that was about it. I had reluctantly decided to leave the MacCarthy affair to more accomplished investigators when I got a phone call from a friend of a friend. Terence MacCarthy had passed his title—the one that the Irish government had withdrawn—to his younger brother Conor, who lives in Belfast.
And would I like to go over to meet him?
Though it’s not the most direct route, I decided to travel to Northern Ireland via Cork, where I had a visit to the unemployment office.
Another thing I found difficult to understand as a kid, I thought, as the plane crossed the Welsh coast and headed out over the Irish Sea, was that lots of people were still living in Ireland, even though so many had gone away. It was always the place we went to, but it was better known as a place that people went from. Growing up midway between Liverpool and Manchester there seemed to be more Irish about the place than there were in Cork itself. Everyone I knew seemed to have a parent, or a funny auld drunken granddad, or an auntie with a mustache who was always saying the rosary, someone at any rate to tie them into an awareness of an Irish past and a consequent shared cultural identity. Even though I had a flat Lancashire accent and was immersed in English pop music and politics and sports and literature, part of me was always aware of coming from, if no longer belonging to, another tribe. When England played Ireland at football or rugby it was impossible to know whom to support, because either way you’d feel like a traitor. Should you cheer for the land of your birth, your accent and your dad, against the poor downtrodden colonized persecuted underdogs, while your mammy fought back the tears on the other side of the room? Or did you go for the romance of oppression, the pride of a displaced nation in exile, and your cousin singing “Kevin Barry” at a family wedding, and turn your back on the country that had made you what you were, given you education and prosperity and friendships, Shakespeare, the Small Faces and The Who? These were impossible choices.
Cork has the second-largest natural harbor in the world, a land-enclosed deepwater haven entered from the Atlantic by a single mile-wide channel. The port of Cobh sits on the Great Island, facing the harbor entrance, row upon row of rather grand nineteenth-century houses terraced dramatically up the hillside. Many are newly painted in vivid colors, but otherwise the twentieth century didn’t make much impact on the look of the place, and the twenty-first hasn’t yet had time to.
At the center of the town towards the top of the hill looms the gray granite bulk of St. Colman’s Cathedral with its 300-foot spire and forty-nine bells, which makes you wonder why they didn’t go for the full half-century.
Its scale is massively at odds with the proportions of the rest of the town, as if a life-size building has been constructed next to one of those miniature model villages they build in places where there’s nothing else for tourists to do, so they go and have their photo taken standing next to houses that only come up to their knees. I once went to a park in China where they have miniature versions of everywhere else in China, to save you the bother of going. You can cross the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors off your list on the same afternoon. You can see the logic. It frees up all that traveling time for other things, which makes your life seem longer and more action-packed than it really is.
The cathedral is so huge that on a clear day they can probably see it from Ellis Island in New York, but the heavy-handed symbolism of its dominant position is showing signs of wearing thin; as I arrived the town was bristling with placards proclaiming no change to cobh cathedral. Perhaps they were planning to add a plastic conservatory or double garage, or paint it red, yellow and purple, like the houses along the main street. Discreet enquiries in a waterfront pub, however, revealed that the slogans of protest represented an unprecedented show of opposition to the church’s plans to relocate the Italian marble altar rails and create a more appropriately modern open-plan worship space. The word on the streets, or at least in the bar, or at least from the only other guy in there, was that although the protestors have public opinion on their side, they face a tough fight. The devout afternoon drinker told me of the awe in which he held the diocesan authorities.
“Ya don’t feck with those bastards,” he said, backlit for a moment by a vivid beam of sunshine through the pub’s stained-glass window—the Almighty’s searchlight perhaps, marking him out for the wrath of the bishop and the certainty of eternal damnation.
Back out in the crisp fresh air, and ever mindful of the fact that the humble potato is the only vegetable to contain all the nutrients needed for survival, provided you can force enough of them down, I bought a bag of chips to play yang to the drink’s yin. I found a seat in the sun near the renovated bandstand from which I could gaze out towards the prison on Spike Island and beyond it, through the break in the headlands, to the open waters of the Atlantic. For many people the view back through this harbor entrance would have been their last glimpse of home. For more than a century Cobh was the great port of Irish emigration. In the decades following the Great Famine of the 1840s 3.7 million people left Ireland, the vast majority of them from here.
My uncle sailed from Cobh to Boston. Nothing special about that. Every family in the country must have had someone leave from here. The town was famous for its American wakes, all-night vigils of celebration and mourning for those about to leave, and who in all probability would never be seen again. Perhaps I’m being fanciful, but I’ve always felt that the weight of numbers who passed through here, and the volume of tears of goodbye that were shed, have left an indelible mark on the soul of the place. And that’s before you even think of the Titanic. I was starting to get gloomy. Even the chips were beginning to depress me. I dumped them in an ornate British Empire rubbish bin, where they attracted the immediate attention of one of those fearless ostrich-size seagulls that have become alarmingly commonplace in recent years, and will one day inherit the earth.
The town was known as the Cove of Cork until 1849, when Queen Victoria, no doubt in a magnanimous gesture of famine solidarity, paid a visit. She painted some watercolors, and also made an entry in her diary: “the day was gray and excessively muggy, which is the nature of the Irish climate.” In the wake of this definitive meteorological assessment, the name of the town was changed to Queenstown in her honor. It reverted to Cove, this time with the Irish spelling of Cobh, after home rule in 1921.
I’d made the detour to Cobh to catch up on one of my favorite stories. I first heard it from an alcoholically-enhanced fiddle player at a late-night session in a West Cork bar. Even by the infinitely flexible standards of truthfulness that apply on such occasions, it was clearly a preposterous yarn.
“So this fella’s out of work and signing on, the roof leaks and he’s bringing up three kids on his own. Anyway, doesn’t he go and win a million on the Lotto? So how do you think he spends it?”
I don’t know, I thought. I can’t imagine. I don’t even believe the first part of the story.
“He only goes out and buys the feckin’ unemployment office, that’s all. Then triples its rent. What a man, eh? What a star!”
Ireland has few urban myths, due to a shortage of urbs, but plenty of tall stories. This, it turned out, wasn’t one of them. I visited Cobh a few years ago and was able to confirm that, on October 22, 1995, unemployed single parent Vince Keaney did indeed win a million and buy the local unemployment office. It’s a deeply satisfying story, with a powerful sense of poetic justice that gives it the quality of a contemporary myth or fable. But Mr. Keaney didn’t just buy the place for the craic or the revenge, though I’m sure those elements both played a part. A more pragmatic force was also at work. He was aware that in a previous life the unemployment office in question—situated on a decaying wharf in the center of town—had housed the White Star Shipping Line, and that it was through these offices, and from this wharf, on April 11, 1912, that the final 123 passengers embarked on the Titanic.
Vince had a plan, which he explained to me when I tracked him down shortly after his win. He was going to evict the unemployment bastards, buy off the handful of fishermen who still operated from the near-derelict sheds, and invest his fortune in a Titanic bar and restaurant. The man’s a loon, I thought, as he showed me the original designs for the ship’s tiles, railings and staircases, a charming and engaging loon who’s going to lose the lot for believing his own legend. In 1999 I wrote that “disaster is widely predicted once again.”
I heard no more of Vince and his plan to tip a boatload of money into the sea until a little while ago, when a letter arrived telling me I was no threat to Nostradamus, because the Titanic bar was up and running. Best of all, didn’t they have a survivor of the original disaster—an elderly lady who was a tiny baby when the ship struck the iceberg—coming to open the place? This sounded in such appalling taste that I felt I really had to go and see for myself. I also owed Mr. Keaney an apology for doubting his ability to pull off the kind of hare-brained scheme that most of us would dream up at two o’clock in the morning, write down on a scrap of paper, and then be unable to read the following day. Drunken notes to yourself explore the outer limits of the human psyche, and can only be understood when read in the same state of inebriation as when they were written. I can only presume that Vince woke up a couple of days after his win, found a stained beer mat on which he’d written “BUY UNEMPLOYMENT FECK FISHERMEN OFF BOOK LIFEBOAT BABY” and could actually understand what it meant.
Along the shore ahead of me next to the post office I could see a handsome, newly painted, yellow-and-white building where the scabby old unemployment office used to be. Titanic Queenstown, said the sign, over a flag of the White Star Shipping Line. Directly across the street was a shop called “English.” Perhaps it used to be called “Irish” but was renamed when Victoria visited.
Vince is one of those men who can wear cravats, brocade waistcoats and Panama hats and come out of it looking like a colorful roué rather than a twat. Like many Irishmen before him he served in the Royal Navy, then embarked on the successful career in unemployment that led eventually to his celebrated win and purchase. Despite the fact that his new toy must have absorbed the million and a fair bit more besides, he has such an unconcealed glee in the project that you’re almost convinced it might be a sound idea.
“This used to be the most miserable room in town. Well, take a look at it now.”
The signing-on hall has been transformed into an upmarket restaurant, modeled on the design of the Palm Court Café on A deck of the Titanic. The sea views are extensive, though not as extensive as the Titanic’s. The restaurant appeared to be open—people were sitting at tables eating at any rate—but there was an inaugural dinner scheduled for the next night in the presence of the Titanic survivor. What if she hated it? If she screamed, “This is a travesty and a desecration!” and threw herself through one of the handsome sash windows into the harbor, or onto the yuppies eating satay on the jetty?
“Ah, she’ll be fine,” said Vince, “we’ve had two openings already. She knows the drill. She’s a wonderful woman.”
As far as I could make out, about seventeen openings were planned. This made me feel marginally less special for receiving an invitation, especially as I’d phoned up and asked for one. As a general rule I find this usually works very well in Ireland, where social etiquette is less rigid than in England. If you really want to go to something, then you’re probably the sort of person they’re looking for anyway, so why not come along?
There’s a big bar downstairs, which was full of local types who looked as though they’d either finished work for the day, or never started. The room isn’t a replica of the ship’s first-class lounge, so much as an improvisation around its designs. There’s a wonderful back bar mirror with wooden surround.
“Indian rosewood, from the Mauretania,” said Vince. There are lots of other memorabilia, including the harbor logbook displayed in a glass case, and open at the Titanic’s fateful handwritten entry. The overall effect is either deeply impressive or wildly kitschy, depending on your point of view.
Vince gave me a guided tour of the Gents, followed by the Ladies, where our arrival did nothing to interrupt the vigorous application of mascara. Both facilities have been kitted out with period marblework and authentic-looking sinks with original taps, though my favorite detail was the bucketful of ice cubes that had been dumped in the urinals. Vince said they’d had some tourists in who’d been fascinated by the toilet fittings.
“Did these things really come from the Titanic? How did you get them up from the bottom of the ocean?”
After buying me a couple of drinks, Vince suggested we take a jaunt along the front. In the street just along from the restaurant there’s a wooden hut that operates as the taxi control center.
“It was built in 1886 as a beverage stall for departing emigrants. Once a year twenty-five or thirty men used to push it up the street, then back again, which meant they didn’t have to pay. Look, you can still see the wheels.”
And so you can.
Walking east along the harbor we came to a bench, known locally as the Bench, where conversation has been held and wisdom dispensed for many generations. The stretch of shore beyond it is known as the Holy Ground.
“Not like in the song ‘The Holy Ground?’”
“The very same.”
“I thought the song was about, you know, the whole of Ireland. The Holy Ground.”
“Ah, no, this is it here.”
It’s a traditional drinking song, sung when I was a kid in any social club you cared to go into, and made popular by the likes of the Clancy Brothers and, in Liverpool, the Spinners. Remember them? Remember their sweaters?
Adieu my fair young maiden A thousand times adieu
We must bid farewell to the Holy Ground And the girls that we love true.
We will sail the salt sea over And return again for sure
To seek the girls who wait for us In the Holy Ground once more.
(Fine girl you are!)
You’re the girl that I adore And still I live in hopes to see
The Holy Ground once more.
(Fine girl you are!)
Sacred ground, then, where virtuous young wives waved their menfolk off to sea and remained chaste until their return?
“Ah, no.”
The guy who had been in the pub dissing the bishop had sidled up and taken his place on the Bench, where, as tradition demanded, he was engaging in conversation and dispensing wisdom.
“They were a bunch of feckin’ hoors! ’Twas all brothels along here, a bit of a party for the randy auld sailors. Of course they don’t like you saying it, but feck ’em, for it’s the truth.”
“It’s a very close-knit community round here.” Vince smiled. “The original tenements were knocked down in De Valera’s time, and new houses built. The boxer Jack Doyle grew up and lived here. Remember him?”
No. So was it true—about the brothels?
“Well….” As a pillar of the local community Vince was potentially compromised.
“Course it’s true,” chimed in the Bishop Basher.
“Well, there are those who think that the song was written in an ironic voice,” volunteered Vince.
“Wasn’t it funny now, when the pope came over. He gets off the plane and kisses the runway and the band start playing ‘The Holy Ground,’ a song about a bunch of feckin’ hoors. Ah, Jaysus, we were pissing ourselves laughing down here.”
“It was an incongruous moment,” conceded Vince.
“On that headland over there”—the Basher was pointing to the west of the harbor mouth—“they found a grave dating from 300 b.c. Imagine that now.” He had clearly decided I needed a tour guide, and to be fair he did have an impassioned, unpredictable quality not normally found in official guides, but then usually they haven’t been drinking all day, more’s the pity. The thought of lairy, unkempt dipsos shouting and slurring and weeping their way round Westminster Abbey and Stratford-upon-Avon before hugging their visitors and asking for the bus fare home is most appealing.
“Seeorther?”
He was pointing to a distant industrial building across the water.
“Viagra factory! True! Export-quality Viagra, made in Ireland! And over there?”
He was pointing to Spike Island, so I said, “Spike Island?”
He ignored me and said, “Spike Island!” Then he said, “That’s where the Brits put their political prisoners. John Mitchel. You know about him?”
I said I didn’t.
“No, me neither. But they kept him out there. Can’t blame ’em like.”
I agreed that indeed you couldn’t. You couldn’t blame ’em at all. And so, having improved my knowledge of John Mitchel, though only marginally, the tour was concluded, and the Bishop Basher meandered home to sleep it off or have a few more, whichever seemed the better idea at the time.
We wandered up through the town and while Vince nipped home to sort out a room for me I decided to have a look round the cathedral, check out the altar rails and see what all the fuss was about. What I wasn’t expecting was to find the bishop himself, addressing a party of devout-looking coach passengers. As I backed out of the door as inconspicuously as I could, he fixed me with a withering look that made me sure he knew I’d been talking about him in the pub.
So one thing led to another, as tends to happen, and we ended up in a cozy bar full of people talking and drinking and smoking, while a singer with big sideburns played all the old songs on several instruments at once. Then the room went quiet and everyone stood as he played the national anthem, indicating that it was now an hour and a half past closing time. Then we all carried on drinking. A man from Manchester told me he once approached a barman in a small village in the west of Ireland at one o’clock in the morning and asked when they closed. “October,” came the reply.
The singer came over to join the table and we fell into conversation. He’d been on the road playing music all his adult life, in show bands and rock bands and traditional Irish bands, solos and duos, in pubs and clubs and big concrete dance-halls on the edges of tiny villages. It turned out that he grew up in one of those villages, where a favorite old aunt of mine was a teacher. Excited at this unlikely connection—even though by now I should know that in this part of the world there are no degrees of separation, rather than the usual six—I asked did he know her?
“Sure, I did. She taught me for five years.”
He took a drink.
“So, what was she like?”
“She was a vicious auld bitch.”
The Chinese takeaway that should have been closed was open, possibly because it knew that the closed pub was open too, so we headed back to Vince’s imposing Regency terrace with a leaking carrier bag full of noodles and duck. We washed them down with neat malt whiskey, an imaginative combination that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially if you feel your life’s stuck in a rut. Then we sat up talking for hours about things I can’t remember. Perhaps I should have written them down on a piece of paper. Perhaps I did. I know that at one point we went on a tour of the house, a gloriously unmodernized wonderland of ancient wood and plaster, bohemian clutter and horror movie landings, the sort of place you expect someone to say, “You’ll be sleeping in Igor’s room tonight.” So naturally I was thrilled when Vince refilled my glass and said, “You’ll be sleeping in Igor’s room tonight.” There really was a lodger called Igor, a young Croatian who was maître d’ at the Titanic and was away for the night.
Next thing I knew the sun was streaming through cracks in the shutters. I got up and opened the shutters to look at the harbor and was hit by blinding sunlight of such vicious and painful intensity that it seemed likely I had been turned into a pillar of salt. There was no sign of Vince anywhere, so I went downstairs, cleared up the duck, the noodles, the empty glasses and forty or fifty of Vince’s dog-ends, and drank six or seven pints of water.
I headed out for some early-morning fresh air to clear my head. It was half past one in the afternoon.
A big night was planned at the Titanic and Igor would be back in town, so I was booked into a guest house up the road, the only place I’ve ever stayed whose former owner once had a job as Napoleon’s doctor on St. Helena. My room had a perfect view of the harbor, the cathedral and the bishop’s bedroom. After checking my pockets for illegible notes that might give some clue to what we were talking about last night, I waved to the bishop, who didn’t wave back, then stepped out towards the waterfront.
The inaugural dinner was to be held in the Dean Room—named after the guest of honor, disaster survivor Mulvena Dean—but the warm-up was in the bar downstairs. Sleek and poised in black jacket, black polo neck and black bags under the eyes, Vince was working the room with energy and poise, giving an almost convincing impersonation of a man who’d had a quiet night in, a cup of Horlicks and nine hours’ sleep last night. “In a town of talkers, Vince is a doer,” said Eamon, a definite talker in a lost-at-sea beard and stained nautical sweater, who looked so completely at home on the bar stool next to me it seemed possible he was part of the memorabilia. Perhaps he’d been cloned from DNA on a fragment of Titanic timber and next year, when refurbishments are complete, he’ll end up on display in a glass case under the telly.
The Dean Room has huge wood-framed windows, salvaged from a local house when they were discarded in favor of that maintenance-free UPVC that turns gray and falls out after fifteen years. We were able to look out on the tugboats passing on the water outside, and beyond them the harbor mouth through which so many—convicts and famine victims, unmarried women and unemployed men, and maybe even Louie’s Jack himself—once passed on their way to uncertain and mostly unrecorded futures. I had a seat next to Mulvena, a trim and sparky woman who was an eight-month-old baby when the ship went down. I felt awkward and didn’t know what to talk about. Should I ask her if she enjoyed the movie? Would she be amused by the ice cubes in the urinals? She turned out to be good company, and well used to being trotted out for Titanic-related events.
“I think they think I am the Titanic in America. Some of them are obsessed. One man wrote asking for a lock of my hair.”
So what did she think of that?
“I thought he was a nutcase.”
Her father was a Hampshire publican who decided in 1912 to make a new life as a tobacconist in Kansas. A house and business were arranged, but her father went down with the ship. Her mother survived, and together they went back with nothing to her grandparents’ farm in Hampshire.
“When I was eight a vet came to see one of my grandmother’s cows. He saw my mother as well and married her.”
The food and wine were good, Igor floated effortlessly around the room, and a man at the far end of the table asked me was I aware my family were ancient kings in Munster, and did I know about this fella in Morocco, the one they say is the McCarthy king? I said that I did, but it was hard to hear what he said next, because people kept coming through to peer at Mulvena, which didn’t seem to bother her, and Vince told her she’d be better off in Ireland, where pensioners travel free on buses and trains and have their mortgages and fuel and phone paid. Yeah, but other than that, said the guy down the table, it’s everyone for themselves. “There was much more social acceptance of struggling and being poor twenty years ago than there is now. Communities looked after their own. That’s all but disappeared now thanks to the Celtic feckin’ Tiger.”
We were draining the bottles for a final toast when two big, heavily perspiring men who looked as if they’d made illicit fortunes from crooked dairy farming came through to pay their respects, as if we were in some downmarket Gangs of New York. The one in charge had a thick mustache, large glasses, stripy shirt, red face and a flamboyant toupee. Suddenly he closed his eyes, threw back his head and launched into an impassioned rendering of “The Fields of Athenry,” the tale of deportation and loss that has already achieved traditional classic status, despite having been written in the 1980s. It’s one of those stirring melodies that make people feel proud and sad and nostalgic and indignant and free, even if they’ve not the faintest idea what it’s about. Tonight’s version was delivered like a masterclass in pub singing technique, with peculiar vibratos and strange warbles in unexpected places.
By-ee the lonely prison wall-uh!
I-ee heard a young girl call-ee-ee-ing, uh
Michael! They are a-taking you ah-way-ee,
For you stole Trevelyn’s corn, ugh!
So the young might see the mor, mor, mor, or-or-or-ning, eh
Now a preeson ship lahs awaitin’—awaitin’, inabay, ee.
And we all joined in on the chorus, really, really quietly, like a murmur of conversation from a distant room.
Lo lie-ee, the fields of Athenry ….
“All together now!” he shouted, and we sang even quieter. Some of us were just humming. My God, it was embarrassing. The Dairy Gangster was turning redder as he built to what I can only describe as a climax. It seemed possible he might explode all over Mulvena. She’s a nice lady, though. I don’t expect she’d have complained.
Back at Napoleon’s doctor’s house a few of us sat up for a quick nightcap that lasted till almost daybreak. What happens to all the late-night conversation that goes on in Ireland? There’s far too much of it for anyone to remember. But I do recall someone telling me about the sinking of the Lusitania, when one of the bodies laid out on the quayside at Cobh got up and walked away; and about the cabaret turns on the nineteenth-century transatlantic liners, which he swore included performing polar bears; and the waterfront flophouses, where musicians were hired to wake the sleepers and make them dance while another shift slept in their beds. And I learned that the John Mitchel imprisoned on Spike Island was a famous political activist, who was transported from Cobh to Van Diemen’s Land, which we agreed sounded much scarier than Tasmania; and that Cromwell, in an early pilot scheme for ethnic cleansing, transported the Irish to work as slaves in the West Indies; and that the Titanic was only moored in Cobh for an hour and a half.
“Mind you,” said someone, “we tend to play that down a bit.”
Before I went to bed I wrote myself a note: VDL, NY?17/3?/or WINDIES?? MORROCCO????
With any luck it would still make sense in the morning. As I was falling asleep I remembered something.
There’s only one r in Morocco.
Next day on the way to Belfast I found a marvelous story in the newspaper.
A Dublin supermarket had been closed down the previous week because of infestation by mice. Vermin relations representatives, or whatever they call rat-catchers these days, were called in and the problem was quickly eradicated. But now the shop had been closed down again because the mice had been replaced, in a pleasing piece of synchronicity, by an elusive and incontinent stray cat. “The cat has been urinating on the food,” said a supermarket spokesman, “but we don’t know which food.” You can see their problem. I’ve always had my suspicions about prawn cocktail crisps, and supermarket coleslaw, but it’s very difficult to prove anything. Staff, continued the report, had engaged in a sit-in to try and capture the creature and conclusively identify the pee-soaked food. “The cat may be the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said the supermarket spin-doctor, in the first suggestion so far that infestation by dromedary was also a problem.
I haven’t spent much time in Northern Ireland apart from once seeing Daniel O’Donnell stripped to the waist and covered in shaving foam in a toilet in Coleraine. Other than that, the place is a bit of a mystery to me.
“It’s a mystery to most people here too,” said Mark the Pagan. I once made a television series, three in fact, in which I encountered pagans, wiccans, dowsers, Odinists, witches, shamans and druids. The Kaos Magicians were rather alarming, stomping round in moonlit woods brandishing human skulls and bones; and so was the woman who ran the bed and breakfast in Glastonbury and claimed to be growing a second spine, which she said proved she was from Atlantis. Other than that the British pagans seemed bright and sincere, and I liked them. I also enjoyed Iceland, where a majority of the population believes in elves, the elf stones in which they live and the existence of parallel dimensions in which the elf population operate, and into which we occasionally experience slippage. After the series I got letters from anti-pagans congratulating me for showing them up as the dangerous loons they really are; letters from pagans thanking me for giving them a fair crack of the whip; and a letter in six different colors of felt-tip from a bloke in Doncaster who said I was going to lose my immortal soul. I was invited to speak at pagan gatherings, and to open a new coven in Birmingham, just round the corner from the Bull Ring.
And now my occult credentials were having an unexpected payoff. Ireland is a small country, and people soon knew that I was asking questions about the MacCarthy Mór. It seems Conor MacCarthy, the brother and heir of my clan chief in exile, had heard of my interest and was determined to avoid me, until his friends in Belfast’s tiny pagan community—of which there is no mention in the Good Friday Agreement—gave me a glowing reference. Without my sun-worshipping, sweat-lodging, spirit-channeling shamanistic past I would never have got to meet him. Perhaps the Earth Spirit was guiding my progress.
I arrived in the afternoon and made my way as instructed to a pagan café in a shopping arcade. As he poured my coffee the guy behind the counter said, “The druid who used to wear the fox on his head says hi.” I was sorry to hear he’d stopped wearing the fox. It suited him, and was a big hit when we went for a pub lunch in Oxfordshire. I might not recognize him without it.
After half an hour Conor arrived, a scholarly-looking thirty-something with a nose and hairline that made him look alarmingly like my own younger brother. He was accompanied by his brother Tommy, an entirely different physical type, stockier, sandier, with less of the academic and more of the street lad about him. One of the first things he told me was that he was planning to move away from Belfast because so many friends had been killed in the course of the Troubles. After he bombarded me for an hour with the kind of incomprehensibly complex historical and genealogical detail that I now know is par for the course in the bitterly contested world of Gaelic heraldry, I felt another headache coming on, and suggested we adjourn to the pub. As well as being able to get a drink, there was the bonus of loud music, so if they started going into too much detail I could just keep saying “What?” without appearing rude.
Over a few pints, a Thai meal, a few more pints and dozens of cigarettes, Conor explained his family’s position, with Tommy on back-up vocals. In 1905, they claimed, at a clan gathering in Nantes in Brittany, the title of MacCarthy Mór was passed to their grandfather under the ancient Gaelic principle of tanistry, by which authority is passed on by consensus to the most able, rather than to the male first-born. He in turn passed the title to their father who, despite his humble circumstances as a dancing teacher and proprietor of the Cordoba nightclub in Belfast, exercised the office of clan chief until 1980, when he abdicated in favor of Terence. Aware of their family’s chiefly status, they grew up in a Catholic Gaelic monarchist household, apart from Tommy who was fostered and raised—“in keeping with an old Irish tradition,” they told me, somewhat mysteriously—by “one of the few Republican Presbyterian families in Belfast.” Are you with me so far? Good. Because since then all three brothers have converted to the Eastern Orthodox Tridentine Church of the Western Patriarchy, of which they are passionate devotees.
After several hours of this it all started to sound quite matter-of-fact, and I was able to give a half-decent impression of a man who has conversations like this all the time. I’d no idea how much of it I understood, but I couldn’t help liking their company. They were impassioned and funny and unpredictable, and, as pub talk goes, it was a lot more fun than football or the lottery or the fact that the same Ikea bed costs much more in the UK than it does in France or Spain.
They walked me to a minicab office and, ever the perfect hosts, insisted I take the first car. The driver said my bed and breakfast was in a mainly student area. As he dropped me off, the students were mainly off their faces and trying to find their way home from one of those nightclub promotions where the first fifteen drinks are free. Two English girls were shrieking and dodging the traffic and trying to walk the white line in the middle of the road, while their friend performed cartwheels and handsprings along it.
My room had three single divans with low-budget porno headboards, and enough melamine wardrobes and dressing tables to stock a mediumsize junk shop. As I lay in bed listening to a high-spirited young academic vomiting in someone’s garden, I realized that Terence MacCarthy had hardly been mentioned. There’d certainly been no suggestion that I might be able to make contact with him.
Ten days later I got a phone call from Conor asking if I’d like to come and meet them in Morocco. VDL, NY and WINDIES would have to wait.