The Road to McCarthy Read online

  AROUND THE WORLD

  The Road To McCarthy

  IN SEARCH OF IRELAND

  Pete McCarthy

  TO THE WEST CORK McCARTHYS,

  wherever they may be

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Part One: Ireland and Morocco

  Chapter One - Attack of the Killer Macaques

  Chapter Two - Pity the Poor Emigrant

  Chapter Three - McCarthy’s Casbah

  Part Two: New York City

  Chapter Four - Unrepentant Fenian Bastards

  Chapter Five - Fairy Tale of New York

  Part Three: Australia and the West Indies

  Chapter Six - Young Ireland in Damn Demon’s Land

  Chapter Seven - Emerald Isle of the Caribbean

  Part Four: Montana and Alaska

  Chapter Eight - From Beara to Butte

  Chapter Nine - Where the Road Ends and the Wilderness Begins

  Part Five: Return to Cork

  Chapter Ten - To Travel in Hope

  Acknowledgments

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Praise for The Road to Mccarthy

  Also By Pete Mccarthy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The author sets out on his journey

  INTRODUCTION

  I grew up not far from Liverpool in the north of England, the son of an Irish mother and an English father. Though English by birth and accent, I was in the sway of the Irish culture that had crossed the sea to our part of England in wave after wave of emigration. Religion was part of the identity. The priests and nuns who populated my childhood all spoke with the same Irish accent as my uncles and aunts. I was aware on an intellectual level that the Catholic Church was meant to be Roman, and therefore in some way inherently Italian, but as far as I could make out in practice it had been comprehensively hijacked by the Irish.

  Every summer we visited the small West Cork farm where my mother grew up. For a boy from an industrial town, it was an unimaginable thrill to make hay with a pitchfork and ride to market by horse and cart. I experienced an Ireland that has all but disappeared, and came to love it. It’s a feeling that has never left me.

  Though I still live in England, where family and circumstance and work have kept me, the ties pulling me back across the Irish Sea have never loosened. Those childhood visits have meant that today, when I visit, I feel in many ways more at ease, more at home, than I do in the country of my birth. In recent years I found myself wondering whether there was such a thing as genetic memory. Was it possible truly to belong in a country where I had never lived but my ancestors had? Or am I just a nostalgic fool, wallowing in the sentimentality of childhood memory, seduced by the romance of Irish music, literature and history, and wanting my own part in it?

  I decided to make a journey around Ireland to put these feelings to the test. An account of the trip was published under the title McCarthy’s Bar. (Motto: Never pass a bar that has your name on it.) And that was to be the end of it. It was not my intention to write further on Celtic themes. I planned instead to turn my attentions to Arizona, where I once managed a junk shop, and where my career as a salesman peaked the day I sold a bow and arrows to a Navajo family. But as I traveled in the wake of McCarthy’s Bar giving readings in the U.S.A., Canada, Ireland and Australia, stories of the Irish diaspora brought themselves to my attention. I began to consider the possibilities of a global journey in pursuit of Irish themes, some of them connected with my own clan, others drawn from the wider historical experience. My mind was made up over brunch one Sunday morning in Toronto.

  I was speaking to a banqueting hall of well-fed book fans about my childhood, and in particular about the two packages that arrived from Ireland every year without fail. The first was a small box containing the St. Patrick’s Day shamrock. The second, arriving a few days before Christmas, was turkey in a hessian sack. No plastic wrap, no wrapping paper, no card, no note—just a sack, covered with stamps and an address, with a naked, dead turkey inside. I don’t think it happens anymore. It’s probably illegal now to send nude poultry in the mail (though I believe there is a shop in Amsterdam that will send you photographs). I remember thinking at the time how strange it seemed to be living in affluent England and receiving food parcels from relatives who had no running water in the home.

  As I was telling the story, there was a noise in the audience. A man got to his feet, pushed his way through the crowd, and took the microphone from me whether I liked it or not. Luckily I did. He was about eighty years old, Canadian by birth, and said he had just been reminded of a long-forgotten incident from his childhood that he wanted to share with us. “We had the turkey in sack, too! I remember the first time it arrived.”

  He had grown up, he said, in the mid-west, the son of Irish immigrants. It was a poor household, so the first time a turkey arrived from the old country, there was no prospect of such a luxury being saved for Christmas Day. In any case, there was no way of knowing how long it had been traveling. The giant bird went straight from sack to oven in double-quick time.

  An hour and a half later there was a tremendous explosion, and the door blew off the oven. His mother had failed to spot the bottle of poteen with which the turkey had been stuffed.

  The realization that the two of us had grown up on separate continents, of different generations, yet had such specific life experiences in common, was the spur I needed to set me on the road to McCarthy. The journey unfolded over a period of a little over a year. Though my take on life has always been a humorous one, I was engaged in a search for identity that had a serious purpose at its core.

  There’s no denying the huge and burgeoning modern need to know where we come from. In recent decades, cheap air travel and mass college education have made us more socially and geographically mobile than ever before. As small, closely-knit communities have broken up, and a global network of communications has replaced the local, oral traditions of previous generations, so the need to belong to some known collective past has rocketed. Not an invented need, a plastic heritage, as some cynics have suggested, but a genuine yearning, that’s always been there, but now is no longer satisfied. And for many people, God’s gone missing too. He may be back one day, but until then people will seek the reassurance of a wider human context, a bigger picture in which their own walk-on role gives life meaning and significance. Everybody wants to be in a good story. It’s a natural impulse to shape the random events we live through into coherent narrative; otherwise our lives would feel like experimental theater or abstract painting, which would be a complete nightmare. We need a good plot, and if God isn’t available to provide it, then an epic human story stretching back in time fits the bill nicely. And so history and archaeology are all over our televisions, and genealogical websites implode under the volume of hits. Americans come to European archives, and Europeans go to Australian prison records, and people tramp round the west of Ireland going into every pub that bears their name and wondering at their place in it all. In a world that lives increasingly in the moment, it’s important to remember where we’ve come from, or we may wake up one morning unable to remember who we are.

  And so I set out on a journey, beginning and ending in Ireland, that would take me to Australia and the Americas. First, though, I had to try and find my own clan chief, who had gone to ground and was holed up in that well-known Celtic hot-spot.

  Morocco.

  PART ONE

  IRELAND AND MOROCCO

  CHAPTER ONE

  Attack of the Killer Macaques

  It had seemed a romantic idea to arrive in the port of Tangier, and the continent of Africa, by sea; but the painfully early hour of my flight to Gibraltar, where
I will catch the ferry to Morocco, has already turned romance sour. An alarm clock ringing at four in the morning in the middle of an English winter is a cruel and unnatural thing. The fear of getting up so early pollutes my sleep, filling it with nervous, guilty, premature awakenings, as well as nightmares of having overslept and missed the taxi, the flight and the rest of my life.

  It’s frosty and still dark as we board the plane at a shopping mall with an overcrowded airport attached somewhere in Sussex. The young man in the seat next to me is Estonian, like his friend across the aisle. When breakfast is served he orders two quarter-bottles of red wine from a surprised stewardess and knocks them back at high speed with his sausage, bacon, mushrooms and powdered egg. Then he eats the muesli and yogurt. It’s so early my brain isn’t working properly, and I’m struggling to decipher the meaning of such extreme behavior.

  The Estonians are accompanied by a hearty English business type in a Winnie-the-Pooh-on-a-balloon tie who is keen to show that he’s in charge. He keeps telling the Estonians very boring things in a loud, slow voice with all definite and indefinite articles removed, like a whisky trader talking to injuns about heap powerful thundersticks. When the stewardess comes to collect the breakfast debris my Estonian orders a gin and tonic to wash the wine down, while his friend opts for another cup of tea and some port. I have been to Estonia twice, and can report that it is an enigmatic country, with a glorious tradition of choral singing.

  We’re crossing southern Spain when the pilot comes on the intercom to tell us that the weather isn’t very nice in Gibraltar. Very windy, apparently. More than fifty miles an hour.

  “Under the circumstances it would be hazardous to attempt a landing. We’ll get back to you in a few minutes to let you know what’s happening.”

  “WINDY!” shouts Winnie the Pooh at the Estonians. “NOT LANDING! DANGEROUS! GO! SOMEWHERE! ELSE!”

  He’s using his right hand to mime what he thinks is a change of direction, but the Estonians think is a plane crash. They have taken on the haunted look of men who are about to plummet from 36,000 feet and don’t know whether to use their last seconds to proposition the hostess or order more gin and port.

  Before they can decide we enter a cloud and the plane starts pitching and bumping in the most terrifying manner. It feels as if the controls have been seized by two teenage boys who are pulling and pressing everything in sight to see who can make a wing fall off first. Clouds look such gentle, fluffy things, so what the hell’s inside them that can cause aircraft so much grief? Monsters? A giant anvil? Gods who are displeased with us? Not for the first time I find myself wondering whether you pass out as soon as the fuselage cracks and you hit the cold air, or whether you remain conscious and have a brilliant but eye-watering view all the way to the ground, or sharks.

  We ricochet down through the clouds and suddenly we’re clear of them, descending rapidly but seemingly still in control. The PA system bingbongs and the pilot is back on the airwaves.

  “We’ve decided we’ll try and give it a go anyway.”

  His voice is alarmingly casual. I suppose he’s hoping to reassure us, but his words couldn’t be more worrying if they’d been spoken with a slur and preceded by the phrase “Ah, sod it.” Though we’ve spent the last two hours flying over land, we’re now very close to something that looks like the sea. I can see white tops on the waves. I can see individual drops of water, but no sign of land anywhere, as we go into an abrupt gung-ho bank to the right that suggests our man may be a frustrated fighter pilot who failed the psychological profiling. All around me passengers are exchanging panicstricken glances with complete strangers with whom they’ve so far been scrupulously avoiding any kind of eye contact.

  And now there it is in front of us, the Rock itself, massive, gray, broody, windswept; but, above all, very solid-looking. The PA pings back on.

  “I’m afraid this may be a little bumpy.” And that’s it. He’s gone quiet. Perhaps one of the stewards has managed to force a towel into his mouth before he could add, “but I really couldn’t give a toss.” We’re hurtling flat and low across the water, straight towards the Rock. Why are we so low? To get below the radar? Are we going to bomb it? They’re on our side, aren’t they? We’re so low over the spray that I can feel it on my face; or is that just the Estonians crying? And now there’s the airstrip straight ahead of us, immediately beneath the enormous bulk of the Rock. At close range it really does look dauntingly dense. If we do hit it, it seems unlikely we’ll have the option of surviving for ten days by eating each other.

  A brutal gust of wind strikes the plane, tipping the wing on my side up towards the Rock, then down towards the seabed. We’re dropping ever lower, rolling from side to side in newer and scarier ways, when without warning the G force sucks back our stomachs and flattens out our internal organs like offal on a dinner plate as we surge into a steep, last-minute climb. I can see people in Gibraltar going to work in their cars and thinking, “What in God’s name was that?” But they’re receding rapidly into the distance as we climb back to a safe, or possibly unsafe, height. Confident now that he’s given the Red Baron the slip, our man is back on the PA, but sounding strangely low-key and matter-of-fact.

  “Well, as you can see ….”

  Pause.

  “We were unable to land at Gibraltar. We’ll keep you posted.”

  He sounds curiously post-orgasmic, and we have to suppress dreadful images of what’s been going on in the cockpit.

  Ten minutes later, we’re dropping down over calm sea and miles and miles of pristine deserted sandy beach to land in Tangier, which is where I want to be tomorrow, but not today. As I’m wondering whether to accept the fact that I’m already in Morocco and save myself the bother of going back to Europe by plane just so that I can come back to Morocco by boat, the pilot comes back on the speaker and says that we are just refueling. We can’t get off until we arrive at our new destination, which may, or may not, be Málaga. Terrific. I’m going to spend the rest of the day retracing my steps so that I can pay extra money to come back here a slower way first thing tomorrow. Good plan.

  “And can I ask you please not to use cell phones while we’re refueling?” he adds.

  The Winnie-the-Pooh businessman immediately gets out his cell phone and phones Kirsty at head office to tell her she can’t call him with any messages for the foreseeable because we’re on the runway at Tan-bloody-gier and aren’t allowed to use phones for safety reasons. The call continues for about seven minutes while he explains to Kirsty exactly why it is that he isn’t currently able to use the phone and would she be a poppet and call Jonathan direct and tell him it looks like he’s going to have to cancel the 2:30 with Telecom and the fucking Spaniards? Thanks, love. As he snaps the phone shut, he throws a defiant look in my direction for listening to his conversation. He’s glowing with the it’s-a-free-country-so-why-shouldn’t-I stroppiness you get when you try and reason with someone whose dog has just fouled the pavement outside a kindergarten.

  There is an unspoken agreement that requires us all to collaborate in the pretense that we are unable to hear the conversations and monologues that other people are having into their cell phones. In one of the more unpredictable shifts in British social behavior of the last decade, a hitherto reticent nation has taken to shouting intimate details of its social, emotional and sexual life into the faces of complete strangers, who are required to pretend that they aren’t there and haven’t heard. Under no circumstances must you acknowledge your existence by joining in and saying, “She sounds a right bitch,” or “What a coincidence, I’m on a train too.”

  I recently found myself crammed into one end of the London Victoria-Brighton service with a shy-looking Sikh couple, their three young daughters and Grandma. At East Croydon a bare-midriffed multiplypierced teenager came striding along the platform arguing with her phone. She climbed in through the nearest door, which she left open for a customer liaison operative to slam violently shut behind her, and sat down opposi
te Grandma.

  “Bollocks!” she shouted as the girls gazed on, mesmerized by her fashion sense. “Bollocks! I never? I bloody never!” Grandma caught Mum’s eye for a second but no one said anything. “Twat!” she continued. “Twat! Lying twat!” before bursting into tears, gurgling and snottering into the phone. “You don’t know why? You don’t know why? I’ll tell you why then shall I? Shall I? Right. Because I fakkin lav you, you cant, that’s why. Now fakk off and leave me alone.” Then she sat there and pretended that we hadn’t heard, and so did we. She got off at Redhill, in case you’re ever in the area.

  When we finally land at Málaga we’re herded onto three waiting coaches and given mineral water and egg sandwiches from a big cardboard box. The Estonians have managed to get a six-pack of San Miguel from somewhere, while Winnie is tapping away at his laptop, because a top executive can never rest. The driver waits until almost, but not quite, everyone has got on, then takes us on an extended coach tour of the Costa del Sol. This isn’t something I’d have booked for, but it turns out to be quite diverting. I thought they’d finished the Costa del Sol years ago and started on somewhere else by now, but apparently not. The scale of unfinished construction is astonishing. Motionless cranes and half-built apartment blocks litter the coast to Marbella, yet there’s not a builder to be seen. Like the migration of lemmings and the homing instinct of salmon, the disappearance of builders from unfinished jobs remains one of the unfathomable mysteries of our time.

  Traffic is heavy, and we’re held up at roadworks outside an Irish pub called Rory’s Taverna Irlandesa, so one way and another it’s five o’clock in the evening when we get to Gibraltar, rather than ten in the morning as planned. So much for my day exploring the Rock. I’m going to have as much time to get an intimate feel for the place as a coachload of camcordered Korean pensioners who are having a cream tea in Anne Hathaway’s cottage and are due at Beatrix Potter’s house for dinner.