The Summer of '83

In the hottest summer since the Fall of Man Bernard Loughlin went on an Odyssey through Ireland.

The summer of '83 is likely to become a byword for heat among those of us who suffered through it and survived, somewhat along the lines of the Big Wind of '56 or Easter 1916. These last few months will be known as the Swelter of '83 and in years to come, when the sun peeps through the clouds for an hour or two in the middle of July, people will tell their grandchildren how we blistered and boiled in a subtropical heat storm, or at least those of us will who had not the sense to stay in most of the time and only go out into the foul stuff swathed in mosquito net and covered by gobs of protective shark's grease, to run from the shade of trees to the dark side of the street, anything to avoid a lethal overdose of radiation.  Altogether too much was made of the bit of heat. Back in May, before the unnatural weather descended upon us, I had occasion to go round the country for what is known as business reasons, that common excuse for persons of my age and socio-economic condition to burn up hydrocarbons in the acquisition of big guts and sore bums, and from Sligo to Cork it bucketed gloriously. It was wet unto saturation everywhere, so that everybody complained in an orgy of climatic lamentation. I seemed to be the only genuinely happy person in the land.  Myself I find sheets of rain as becoming to the Irish landscape as veils are to an aging belly dancer. Heavy precipitation covers a multitude of blemishes. Roadside dumps look better through it, bogs come into their own, bungalows begin to look indigenous, spavindy cattle just out after the winter's confinement ruminate romantically in it and the towns, oh Lord, the towns look positively resigned to their sodden ugliness as they steam under a thick unhealthy blanket of mist, like old carthorses chewing over their gruel after a hard life's drudgery. Take Knock as a case in point. In the course of my journey in May I stopped there on my way through that part of Mayo that looks to be reverting to a primeval state that it has not quite made up its mind about yet, something between tundra and moonscape, and in the middle of this life-size model of what the world was like when the dinosaurs were about is this place Knock.  Never in my life have I been anywhere that so much suited being rained upon as Knock. The sky water ran in streams down display windows behind which medals were sold by the bucketload and lights flashed under Sacred Heart altars, revolving racks of rosary beads and scapular medals stood in the doorways out of the wet, and the whole place looked as if it had brought the curse of a wrathful Jahweh down upon itself. I looked up alleyways for signs of an ark a-building but saw only more booths stuffed full of golden calves, left there no doubt by lineal descendants of the people Jesus drove out of the Temple with a flail.  Contrast Knock with the ambience of Dingle, near which I spent a couple of weeks en famille in June. Here was a refreshing town that seemed to be creeping with freethinkers, Gaelic speakers, dopesmokers, potters, booksellers, fishermen, restaurateurs, dirty old men, hippies and wholefoodeating followers of Maharajee, or whatever they call the little fat fellow with the white Rolls Royce, and not a plastic rosary bead or bleeding heart in 3D colour to be seen.  Dingle is a town for the discriminating, where it is evident that poor working class people who like plain food and plain porter have something wrong with them, and consequently the place is full of first generation petits bourgeois drinking Pernod with ice and water before going in to the dining room to be smirked over for having to ask the waiter to translate the menu. It is a milieu in which if you have any origins at all, they will out.  All along the peninsula was the sound of chopper traffic and each and every helicopter was attributed to Charlie Haughey. Even on holidays it seemed, he was dreaming up schemes and on the Whit Monday in the summer of '83, the leader of the opposition dropped out of the sky in a clatter of whirlybird wings and bought drinks all round in Kruger Kavanagh's dismal den in Dunquin so that five hundred cute Kerrymen could go around the next day saying "When I was having a drink with Charlie last night.... " It is strange too how one person, rich, powerful, brash, with a big red helicopter hired for the weekend, can turn a quiet, lovely, out of the way place like the Dingle Peninsula into a parody of west Belfast in a bad spell of rioting, with a vroom, crash, chop chop chop here, and a boom, thud, zoom zoom zoom there across the clear blue skies through the livelong day.  Down below the roads were agog with plump trainee teachers talking English heatedly to one another so as to be better fitted to carry out their statutory duty of teaching Irish to schoolchildren, so there was neither comfort nor joy left in the place.  As we drove north through the midlands, away from all this, Mullingar shining as a guiding star in the imagination, people with farms to look after who cannot leave the beasts for fear of them getting mastitis or redwater were busy, as they eternally are. The Skelligs and the clochan settlements of Fahan are all very well but serious work is what keeps us all from being underfed ricketic dwarfs sleeping in muddy corners of beehive huts, listless and hallucinated from a diet of boiled crustaceans and fungus.  The cut fields of the cattle ranches had already taken on that half apologetic scorched look they hardly lost the whole summer. Jagged rectangles of cardboard hanging from trees saying 'Sylege (sic.) Making' warned of enormous trailers swaying and clanking along country roads in the charge of 10-year-old boys with more idea of the world than most intellectuals manage by the time they are 80.  At home, in the yard at Annaghmakerrig where life ever goes on regardless, doublechopped grass and other shredded vegetation was steadily rising in the silage pit like bread in the oven. Two tractors worked steadily back and forward to flatten it as more brimming loads arrived to be added to it. The inept were allowed to keep themselves busy, only for the sake of being in at the crack, by lifting ineffectual forkfuls to toss under the advancing and retiring wheels. Buckets of molasses were spread in extravagant sweeps that lent a treacly sweetness to the already odorous air. With the ceaseless noise and smell of the tractors' diesel engines it was not quite the romance of Constable's 'Haywain' but when the machines stopped we could sit and sup tea with satisfaction, commenting on the abundance of the crop the year.  By this time the weather had sickened and turned nasty. Dog days were upon us. Cold lake water turned to tepid oil. Good and wicked alike were punished indiscriminately.  The worst of such doldrums is the terrible urge they bring on to walk about and drink and stay up all night, just like they do all the summer long in Harlem and Watts. It is on account of heat exciting the molecules of which we are made, like the molecules in a boiling kettle rushing around bumping into one another in their frantic search for the spout. July was a cauldron, with no spout.  Bertie Anderson's of Drum must do service as Pigalle and Bangkok and Byzantium. In a border village of Presbyterian order and quietness we sit on the step of the one-time village store about 10 o'clock of a Saturday evening and wait for Mr Anderson to come and open up for the only night of the week that he does. Men lurk at corners, look out from windows, and only when Bertie ambles across the road with a half-dozen eggs and a loaf from the shop where he has been closeted in gossip for two hours do they all move up and pass decorously through the door, doffing their caps as if entering a meeting house, as they might indeed if going to the branch office of the Free Presbyterian Church which is just up the road.  The long bare bar is spacious and airless. Two cases of bottles of Guinness and one of Smith wicks stand ready as the whole provender of the house. Whisky can be had, usually, but vodka is impossible, ice does not exist and there is only one small bottle of orange squash. Townies demur, baulk, complain, but the men of the country order what they always have and pour the heads of raging molecules into glasses embossed with a shield that says "John Anderson, Wine and Spirit Merchant, Drum", relics of the time when this was an emporium sans pareil in these parts.  This is real travel now. To be a stranger in one's own country is better than to be a stranger anywhere else. The intellectuals duck and yaw from topic to topic, their behinds raw from the hard benches and their economic prissiness upset by never getting the same change from the same money for the same drink twice. It could be Macedonia or Galicia, the differences being only in the caps on the villagers and the old corked Guinness bottles on the shelves behind the bar, and every other detail, once you begin to think about it, but the sense of being in a foreign country continues to rise up with the residual dusty heat of the day from the bare floorboards and passes out into the night through the broken cast iron lattice windows that I have to acknowledge in my heart of hearts as an architectural trait of this part of Cavan and Monaghan, for we have them too in our own house and they are in every church in the area. Even summer with all its flashy orange man 's regalia of flowers and smells and trick lighting cannot disguise the facticity of Drum, the most down-to-earth place I know, where even going out to relieve oneself, on a pile of stones in the street that seems to have been left there for that express purpose, is a reminder of banal mortality.  Afterwards there is nowhere to go but home. There is another place in the hills above Cootehill where the cross-grained crank who owns it could be rapped up but he is as likely to call the guards and have you taken away as to serve you bottles of warm stout gone off, so you would only go if you were desperate, and I am only bad, not yet quite that desperate.  Some time later a wedding makes an excuse to go north, where fragmentation is a way of life. At the border crossing point the shirtsleeved soldiers are listening to RTE Radio 2 as they bop about their imperialist suppression of the nationalist community. Even in blazing sunshine Aughnacloy is surly and uncomprehending of what is happening to it, like a soldier left behind in the trenches who has not been told that the old war is over and a new one has begun.  Even though we are not sure where in Omagh the church is, we are reluctant to ask for directions for fear of causing offence by reminding the guide that the other sort exists, in case they are not that sort themselves. People are known to be very touchy about that class of thing. I, a Belfast-man, am in a foreign land again.  This feeling of being an alien is compounded by the service in the lovely church with the dissimilar spires on the hill dominating the town. With all the sunshine we have had, and the effect it has had on even the most pallid, it is impossible to sort out among the male guests of a certain age which are the ones recently returned from three thousand mile cycles across North America, but the priest has no such difficulty and delivers an ingratiatingly simpleminded homily to an audience half of which has not been in a church since the liturgy went demotic. A lot of sniggering goes on as communion is handed out without question to notorious scapegraces who feel they should go, even if unshriven, for the sake of the day that is in it. This is not the religion I remember at all, for which our forefathers fought and died, but something brought in to alienate us even further in our own land.  We went to county Donegal for the reception, through Sion Mills, where Presbyterian industry is in tatters, and Strabane, where nobody has worked since before the Flood, and on to Stranorlar, which is the same place as Ballybofey, only spelt differently. How is it that no matter how benign and good-natured the company, no matter how much the Walls of Tory and the Waves of Limerick are whooped through, in spite of all the bonhomie and rigs and jeels and songs to tear your heart out, an Irish wedding feast invariably ends with a few diehards and a scattering of comatose drunks huddled in one corner of the function room surrounded by a stilled avalanche of bottles and half empty glasses and ashtrays brimming over?  Fortunately, even such bestial decadence did not cause the sun to stagger and swoon in the sky. Sodom and Stranorlar suffered no retribution and the next day the revellers were able to move off into the hills to Biddy's of Barnesmore Gap, done over since my last visit from being a marvellous old inn where two old ladies served bottles of stout to be drunk while sitting round a turf fire on sugaun chairs to being an efficient dispenser of anything you care to name to anyone who might be attracted to the hostelry by two giant thatched signs at the new carpark proclaiming this to be Biddy's 0' Barnes, begorrah. As the serious musicians and singers, who had been somewhat shackled by the formality of the previous day's proceedings, got into a flood of tunes and songs, people in 10-gallon hats or lederhosen or trim Parisian slacks wandered in and out round the back, signs of the new times that were in it, so that for me the session became a farewell not only, who had gone the night before anyway to Britanny with a tent, but also to the spirits who looked down from the walls, Biddy and Eileen and Pat, whose like would never be there again.  By now the August heat had become insufferable. Mad dogs were rampant everywhere. Cattle starved in the fields. It was a calamitous month. I stayed in most of the time and read gloomy books about the woefulness of the human condition. Nothing the books said, no matter how despairing, could match the insensate conditions outside.  The summer of '83 was the season of the mob. Every scrap of earth giving onto a bit of water was thronged by humanity at its most brutish. Nowhere was sacrosanct. There was a place I go deep in the woods where I thought no other person ever went but this year whole families gathered there with their spam sandwiches and cold tea and transistor radios tuned to nowhere, loud. Now that the climate has come back to its senses we can resume living. The country is slipping back into the primordial ooze of winter. From this out it will be possible to walk in the parks without being embarrassed by writhing of flesh. Dawn will start at dawn and dusk at dusk. Swallows and warblers and other immigrants will soon all be back where they belong.  If I live long enough to have grandchildren, and this summer has debilitated me to the extent that I think I might not, I will tell them to move somewhere dependable, cold and miserable all year round, like Iceland or Bratislava or Omsk. The joviality that was here since June was quite sickening. As far as I can see nobody has done a tap for months, beyond the foreigners who discovered oil and look set now to own us forever.  May the Lord preserve us from a summer the likes of it ever again.