The rugs on the floor, all made locally in County Cork, were of plaited cotton which produced a patchwork effect, and there were oil lamps on the walls with metal reflectors behind the glass shades, but wired for electricity. A wooden staircase led to a room above with two beds in it, the equivalent of a mediaeval solar. Leading off the living room was a very well-fitted kitchen, and there were two more bedrooms on the ground floor: altogether, counting a sofa bed and a secret bed that emerged from a cupboard, there were eight, a lot of beds for the two of us. The rooms, primarily intended for the visiting Americans, could be made fantastically hot: they had under-floor heating, convectors, a portable fan heater upstairs, infra-red heating in the bathroom, plus the open fire. Gary was bowled over by all this. He was even more pleased with it than we were. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘in all my born days’ had he seen anything like it.
‘When I get married,’ he confided, ‘I’m going to bring my wife here for our honeymoon.’
‘How old did you say you are?’
‘Eight.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘is there any girl you really like?’
‘There’s one in First Grade. I like her.’
‘How old is she?’
‘About six.’
‘But would you marry her?’
‘I would not.’
‘Why wouldn’t you?’
‘Because she’s an O’Hanrahan. You can’t marry an O’Hanrahan in the parts we come from.’
Later, after he had eaten three apples, a banana and a large plate of salted nuts and drunk three large bottles of Coke, left as a welcoming present by the proprietors (together with a bottle of gin for us), Wanda asked him if he spoke Gaelic.
‘No way!’ he said firmly.
‘But I thought they taught you Gaelic in school.’
‘No, they only teach us Irish,’ he said.
After this we went to a pub where he ate all the nuts on sale there and drank three large orange juices.
Ballyvaughan is a small village and one-time fishing port. Until well into the twentieth century it imported Galway turf for fuel in sailing vessels called hookers – something which makes Americans when they read about them or see a rare survivor go off into peals of laughter – exporting in return grain, bacon and vegetables. Until the First World War and for some time after it there was a regular steamship service to and from Galway in the summer months.
There was not much of Ballyvaughan but what there was we liked: two streets of cottages and shops, one of them running along the shore with a pub restaurant at the western end, open most of the year, which served fish. In the other street there was the post office, Claire’s Place, a restaurant now closed for the winter, a couple of miniature supermarkets and two of the four pubs. Of the pubs, O’Lochlan’s was of the sort that in Ireland was already a rarity: dark in the daytime behind the engraved glass panel in its front door; at night still dark but glittering with light reflected off a hundred bottles and off the glasses and the brass handles of the black wooden drawers stacked one above the other like those in an old-fashioned apothecary’s shop. Behind the bar was a turf-burning stove which kept whoever was serving warm.
The equivalent of Piccadilly Circus in Ballyvaughan was where the roads from Galway and Ennis met; the equivalent of Eros was a monument-cum-fountain equipped with faucets in the shape of lions’ heads erected in 1874 by Colonel the Hon. Charles Wynn, son of the Baron Newborough, who at that time was Lieutenant of Clare. Behind the village the steep, terrace limestone slopes of a mountain called Cappanawalla, which means ‘the stony tillage lands’, rose 1200 feet above it.
Our cottage stood in a meadow in which cows grazed and overlooked one of the two jetties in the harbour which, apart from one fishing boat, was empty. Beyond it was the expanse of Galway Bay and beyond that again, the best part of forty miles away and barely visible, the Twelve Bens of Connemara, at the feet of which, completely invisible, was the Lough of Ballynahinch. This still held the record for having more rainy days in a year than anywhere else in the United Kingdom and Ireland – 309 in 1923 – and was somewhere that I felt we should do our best to avoid.
The next morning was cold, cloudless and brilliant with an east wind, and with what looked like a vaporous wig of mist on the mountains above. While we were eating rashers and eggs we received a visit from an elderly man wearing a long black overcoat and cap to match who offered to sell me a walking stick he had made – one of the last things I really needed, travelling on a bicycle. ‘I’ll bring you a pail of mussels this evening, if you like,’ he said, negotiations having fallen flat on the blackthorn. The whole coast was one vast mussel bed where it wasn’t knee-deep in oysters, but as the tide was going to be in for most of the morning and it was also very cold, it seemed sensible to let him gather them for us.
Our destination that day was Lisdoonvarna: ‘“Ireland’s Premier Spa,”’ I read to Wanda in excerpts from Murray’s Guide (1912) over breakfast. ‘“Known since the middle of the 18th century … situated at a height of about 600 feet above the sea … its climate excellent … the rainfall never rests long upon the limestone surface. The air, heated by contact with the bare sun-scorched rock of the surrounding district, is tempered by the moisture-laden breezes from the Atlantic three or four miles distant, and is singularly bracing and refreshing owing to the elevation.”’ It also spoke of spring water conveyed to the Spa House in glass-lined pipes, thus ensuring its absolute purity. More modern authorities spoke of a rock which discharged both sulphurous and chalybeate (iron) waters, rich in iodine and with radioactive properties, within a few inches of one another, the former to the accompaniment of disgusting smells.
The town was equally famous as a centre of match-making. Farmers in search of a wife were in the habit of coming to stay in the hotels in Lisdoonvarna in September after the harvest; there they found unmarried girls intent on finding themselves a husband. The arrangements were conducted by professional match-makers, in much the same way as sales of cattle and horses are still concluded by professional go-betweens at Irish fairs. This marriage market is still said to thrive, although to a lesser extent than previously. Professional match-makers, masseurs and masseuses, sauna baths, sun lounges, springs, bath and pump houses, cafés, dances and pitch-and-putt competitions, all taking place on a bed of warm limestone – it all sounded a bit like Firbank’s Valmouth. With the addition of a black masseuse it could have been.
‘Did you know,’ I said to Wanda, ‘that according to the Illustrated Ireland Guide “its sulphur water contains more than three times as much hydrogen sulphide gas as the spring at Harrogate”?’ To which she uttered an exclamation, the equivalent to ‘Cor!’ in Slovene, which I knew from a lifetime of experience meant that she wasn’t in the slightest bit interested.
We set off in the sunshine in the general direction of Lisdoonvarna, this being the nearest thing attainable in this part of the world to going from A to B by the shortest route. All was well at first. The road ran through meadowy country interspersed with hazel thickets, ‘fairly level but with a strong upward tendency’ as the Cyclists’ Touring Club Irish Road Book of 1899 rather charmingly put it, en route passing close to the Ailwee Cave, closed for two million years until its discovery in 1976, and now closed again because it was winter.
At this point the ‘strong upward tendency’ began in earnest – a succession of steep hairpin bends up Corkscrew Hill. At the same moment the sun vanished and we found ourselves in what seemed another world, enveloped in dense,