Learning to Love Ireland

by Althea Farren

  Yet South African President Thabo Mbeki refused to acknowledge that Mugabe and his regime were guilty of human rights abuses or that Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis required an urgent resolution. He merely conceded that the problem was ‘something we have to live with’ and continued with his ineffectual ‘softly, softly’ approach.

  The Zimbabwean crisis was having an adverse effect on South Africans at every level.

  I decided to postpone submitting my book to agents and publishers in Ireland and the UK until I’d finished my course of talks.

  ‘If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.’

  These were the words of Lyndon B Johnson, thirty-sixth President of the United States, as early as September 1964, when he signed the Wilderness Act.

  He also said:

  ‘Despite all of our wealth and knowledge, we cannot create a redwood forest, a wild river, or a gleaming seashore...’

  President Johnson is probably remembered more for his role in escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War, for his ‘War on Poverty’ and for his domineering personality, than for his eloquent defence of the environment.

  What did Brave New World, Never Let Me Go and Oryx and Crake reveal about cloning? What did Morrie Schwartz tell us about how to live and die? Or Christopher Reeve and Stephen Hawking teach us about courage? Had Daisy and Gatsby distorted and diminished the American Dream through being grossly careless and irresponsible?

  Novels, poetry, plays and short stories often had more impact than factual accounts and predictions in the media, didn’t they? Ralph, Jack and Piggy; Napoleon and Boxer; Winston and Julia; Daisy, Tom and Gatsby were as real to us as raging fires in California or an earthquake in Japan. Weren’t they?

  I didn’t sleep much the night before my first lecture.

  I arrived at the bus stop two or three minutes early. The bus was already there. But, as I was about to get on board, the door closed in my face with a rush of air. I hammered on it frantically. Much to my relief it opened, but an angry, red face glared down at me.

  ‘Who d’ye think y’are, banging on my bus like that?’

  If I’d been less nervous, I’d have been reminded of the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

  But I was pathetically, cringingly grateful to be on my way to Enniscorthy.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I grovelled.

  Ugh.

  The Enniscorthy reading group was interested, enthusiastic and patient. I had trouble pronouncing such names such as ‘Niamh’, ‘Áine’ and ‘Aoife’. I discovered that Enniscorthy accents were different from Gorey accents, even though the towns were close to one another. They were curious to hear about a tyrannical dictator’s effect on a country and its people. How could Robert Mugabe have been allowed to get away with so much for so long?

  During the second lecture, we discussed Ray Bradbury’s story, ‘A Sound of Thunder’.

  A group of time-travellers returns to the present after a visit to the Mesozoic Age. Not everything has gone according to plan, however. One of the hunters strayed from the path and trod on a butterfly. As they emerge from the time machine, they find that the present is, somehow, slightly out of kilter:

  ‘The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not sit behind quite the same desk... Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear...’

  They learn, to their horror, that the result of the recent presidential election is different. Deutscher, ‘an iron man’, ‘a man with guts’ has won.

  The death of an ancient butterfly has changed the course of history.

  Perhaps some minute blip in the eco-system 65 million years ago influenced the result of the US presidential election in 2000. Many Americans still believe that Al Gore was the legitimate winner of that extraordinarily close contest, not George W Bush. If the US Supreme Court had not ruled in favour of Bush, would there have been a 9/11? Would there have been a war in Iraq? Might we be closer to a settlement in the Middle East?

  Ruthven Todd in his poem ‘It Was Easier’ shows how we prefer to ‘avoid all thought’ of unpleasant reality. The ‘shaped grey rocks’ are more easily imagined as ‘pleasant water colour for an academic wall’ than as ‘cover for the stoat-eyed snipers’.

  It is always easier to do nothing.

  We considered Lord of the Flies. What might have happened if a group of girls rather than boys had found themselves on an uninhabited island? Did women have the same ‘darkness of heart’ as men? Did they have the same latent tendency to give way to their primitive instincts when society’s balances and checks were removed?

  The general consensus was ‘yes’.

  In The Road the child is appalled by the discovery of a cellar in which living people are being stored for food. Later, he and his father come upon a smouldering fire and see ‘a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit...’

  Was cannibalism ever defensible? We reflected on the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972. Piers Paul Read’s Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors has been described as ‘a classic in the literature of survival’. One of the survivors, Nando Parrado, had also written an account – Miracle in the Andes – chronicling the dilemma he and his friends had faced.

  I’d found a fascinating book by the historian, Hywel Williams, entitled Days That Changed the World. Williams selects 50 defining events starting with the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC when the Athenian navy destroyed the Persian fleet. Event 49 is Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and Event 50 is 9/11.

  His book provided a valuable springboard for debate.

  We discussed the theme of betrayal in several of the texts, with particular reference to Orwell’s 1984.

  Incarcerated in a cell in the Ministry of Love, Winston is brutally tortured by O’Brien. Often, the pain is so bad that he loses consciousness. On one of these occasions, he recovers to find himself sitting up, with O’Brien’s arm supporting him.

  ‘For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it...’

  In February 1974, Patty Hearst (a wealthy young heiress whose family owned the Hearst media empire) had been kidnapped by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of armed radicals. She was blindfolded, imprisoned in a closet for two months, raped and subjected to death threats. On 3 April she announced that she had joined the SLA, assuming the name ‘Tania’. On 15 April she participated in a bank robbery. When she and her companions were captured eighteen months later, she declared herself to be an ‘urban guerrilla’.

  Patty Hearst was regarded by many as a victim of Stockholm Syndrome – a psychological response sometimes seen in an abducted hostage, where the hostage shows loyalty to a powerful abuser. In 1973 a bank robbery had taken place in Stockholm, Sweden, during which the bank robbers had held bank employees hostage for six days. The victims had become emotionally attached to their victimisers and had even defended them after they were freed from their ordeal.

  If the definition of ‘betrayal’ is ‘the act of violating a trust’, was Winston false to his lover, Julia? Was Patty demonstrating treachery and duplicity, or was she doing what was necessary in order to survive?

  Just in time for my final lecture, Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, obligingly released The Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic book reader. It was a wonderful topic for discussion, this eco-friendly device that would, as one commentator remarked, ‘change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish’.

  The Kindle would be able to hold 200 books at a time and hundreds more on a memory card, eliminating the need to carry around heavy load
s of books. The font size could be changed, converting every book into a large-type edition for people with poor sight. The device was perpetually connected to the Internet, enabling a reader to venture onto the Web, search using Google and follow links from blogs and other Web pages. One of the most persuasive advantages of the new technology was the fact that it would eliminate the need to chop down trees.

  What about people who took ‘a fetish-like pleasure in physical books’? What about that trance-like state that readers enter into when reading for pleasure? What about ‘the rabbit hole of absorption’ that books drew you into? Could an electronic device or ‘service’ (as Bezos termed The Kindle) replace the magic of the book?

  I concluded the course of lectures with an arresting quotation from Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip and author of business commentaries, social satires and experimental philosophy books:

  ‘The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we’re screwed unless we do something about it. If you haven’t noticed, the children who are our future are good-looking, but they aren’t all that bright. As dense as they might be, they will eventually notice that adults have spent all the money, spread disease, and turned the planet into a smoky, filthy ball of death. We’re raising a generation of dumb, pissed-off kids who know where the handguns are kept. This is not a good recipe for a happy future.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Strands of shredded paper had escaped, and were swooping and soaring around the complex. Two large wooden crates took up the entire driveway in front of Number 3. Larry’s head and upper body appeared and disappeared as he lifted out armfuls of items cocooned in corrugated board or bubble wrap. He alternated these with scrunched up bundles of dusty clothing. I carted each pile into the house and then came back for the next load.

  After months at sea, our belongings had finally arrived. A forklift operator had dumped the crates outside our house and left us to it. Larry had opened the crates with a crowbar and then climbed inside to get to the objects he couldn’t reach.

  I wished we’d decided on sending only a single crate, since so much of our stuff was redundant. We’d made all sorts of uninformed decisions and miscalculations. I knew now that most of the clothing would never be worn. It was unsuitable and unfashionable. Because they were too bulky, I had given away jerseys or ‘jumpers’, as I was learning to call them now: in Ireland ‘jerseys’ are sports gear. I should have disposed of the lighter garments instead, since it seemed that there wasn’t going to be a summer in 2007.

  In fact, we should have ditched all the clothes, which would have left room for Larry’s boxing trophies. Cleaning them would have been hard work though, and finding a place to display them would have been even more challenging. We’d donated all except the three most important ones to Christian Brothers College in Bulawayo.

  Nothing ever went to waste in Zimbabwe. We’d given away mountains of stuff to our workers who could no longer afford to buy clothes for themselves and their families. In Ireland, that didn’t appear to be a problem. Charity shops were inundated with bags of unwanted clothes and other ‘junk’. Disposing of ‘rubbish’ wasn’t easy, if the charity shops declined it. It would then have to be recycled, and we had no idea where, when or how this happened.

  The last item was impossible to lift out of the trunk – it was my mother’s camphor chest. Larry had to rip open the entire side of the crate to get it out. Although it was covered in dust and one foot was rickety, the exquisite carvings of oriental figures were undamaged.

  When I opened the lid, the strong fragrance of camphor brought my African childhood back to me and, with it, the smell of the freshly laundered sheets and pillowcases that our mother had always stored in this exquisite container. Here it was now in my Irish home, linking my past to our future.

  But first we had to tackle the problem of a house swamped with cardboard packages, two large crates full of shredded paper and a heap of grimy clothes.

  We’d looked forward to the arrival of the crates for months, and yet we felt a perverse reluctance to get on with the next phase of unpacking. We decided to do things gradually, starting with those items that mattered most and which were easily identifiable – our pictures and ornaments.

  As familiar flowers, trees and animals took up their positions on our walls, the bare little house began to come alive at last.

  We put the printer’s tray up in the hallway. Wooden printer’s trays with brass corners had been very fashionable at one time in Zimbabwe. They were an excellent way of displaying tiny ornaments and mementos. I had a lovely collection that included brass swans, pottery vases from South Africa, a thimble from Holland, an owl with blue eyes from Cyprus, a Swarovski crystal hedgehog from Austria (my most beautiful and expensive piece) and a delicately painted Russian nested doll or matryoshka. And, of course, a Zimbabwe bird, our national emblem. The famous soapstone carvings of this bird appeared on walls and monoliths of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, which was built, it is believed, some time between the 12th and 15th centuries by ancestors of the Shona people. The ruins gave their name to modern Zimbabwe.

  I’d decided not to keep my fondue sets, although I’d loved that style of entertaining. Men were less keen on fondue dinners – they found them frustrating and preferred large, underdone steaks. Immersing individually cooked morsels of meat in a variety of sauces, tasty though they might be, wasn’t their idea of a satisfying meal. And the barbed fondue forks were as lethal as fish hooks. Everybody had heard story about the hungry guest who’d got the barbs stuck through his lip. He’d been carted off to hospital. Most Zimbabwean men regarded fondues as hard work. I’d thought that men in Ireland wouldn’t be any different, even though there might be fewer steaks.

  I wished now I had kept them, along with my beautiful crystal glasses, my set of Chinese bowls and my special casserole dishes. But there wasn’t space in our tiny kitchen, and we weren’t likely to be doing much entertaining anyway.

  It seemed to us that one of the favourite pastimes in Ireland was criticising the government. The Health Service Executive (HSE) took constant flak. Every day, journalists reported malfunctions within the health system, TV presenters discussed its shortcomings and radio broadcasters gleefully regaled their listeners with stories of patients left on trolleys and a litany of other failures.

  We wished we could send the whole lot on a visit to Zimbabwe. Then they would experience the reality of understaffed hospitals and clinics without drugs. There would be no trolleys to incense them. Sick people would be lying without blankets on the floor in the corridors or on the dusty ground outside. Many would be dying from AIDS, little more than living corpses.

  My experience of the Health Service in Ireland was far more pleasant. I’d recently discovered that everyone is on first name terms here. In doctors’ waiting rooms or dentists’ surgeries, I would be addressed as ‘Althea’. I had no objection to the lack of formality – it was just different from what I’d been used to – and, in a way, rather nice.

  Every two or three weeks I went to St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin for skin cancer treatment, my legacy from all those glorious sunny days spent basking like a lizard in the sun. When I was a teenager, we used Brylcreem (‘a little dab’ll do ya...’). Not for our hair, though. We’d discovered that you caught a great tan with a bit more than a dab. It beat cooking oil, anyway. You tended to blister if you used cooking oil.

  I’d arrived in Ireland with two sores that wouldn’t heal. One on my neck and one on my shin. There were other bits and pieces elsewhere, but these were the bad ones. Dr Kirby and his team performed a series of examinations, biopsies and excisions. I was given anti-biotic ointment and dressings each time I had to have a procedure. Qualified nursing staff took out my stitches. This was my first experience of the state’s healthcare system and it was very reassuring.

  I’d applied to have my degree and teaching diploma recognised by the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland (NQAI). John, my contact there
, said that I needed certified photocopies of the list of subjects studied and results attained, and an official translation of the degree parchment which was in Latin. He also warned me that I needed to supply the requested documentation within three months, as ‘applications will not be held on file after this time-frame has expired...’

  Oh great, I thought. I had attended the University of Natal, which is no longer the University of Natal, in the late 1960s during the era of ‘apartheid-ruled South Africa’. Years later, I had studied for my teaching diploma through the University of South Africa, the world’s first correspondence university. And surely it would be reasonable to assume that ‘Gradum Artium Baccalaurei’ meant ‘Bachelor of Arts’?

  I told John that I was likely to need longer than three months, but that my sister, Glyn, in South Africa was already in touch with the relevant institutions. In fact both universities were extremely efficient. They complied with all John’s requests and Glyn posted everything off to me.

  We both breathed a sigh of relief.

  I waited, and waited, and waited. The South African postal service had a record of the registered package leaving the country, but there was no evidence of its arriving in Ireland. Numerous parcels and registered letters had apparently vanished without trace in the UK’s postal strike.

  We had to start all over again.

  Larry had just reached the magic age of 66, which meant he was eligible for a free travel pass. If we were together, I got to travel free, too – one of the amazing benefits Ireland offers its senior citizens.

  Using his free travel pass for the first time, we travelled by bus to Arklow to apply for the same ‘entitlement’ for Northern Ireland. When (not if) this was granted, we’d be able to go up to Derry and Donegal more often to visit Larry’s family.