reason going. Perhaps it had, already. Was I already one with the great Gaels of Ireland, the men that God made mad, as most of the other Gaels I had met on this, my first day in Ireland, appeared to be?
I told Wanda to stay where she was at the crossroads and guard herself, the soign and her boike, and let no one take any of them away, or otherwise interfere with them. Then I engaged the lowest gear at my disposal and pedalled away uphill in pursuit of the man with the torch who had so foully misused us. By the time I had climbed it and gone down the other side and caught up with him he was practically at Ballyline House. Perhaps he was on his way there to tell the assembled house party what a trick he had played on two foreigners. ‘Ah,’ he said courteously, ‘I should have told you about the soign. It should point left at the cross but then the wind catches and turns it back on itself. It often happens with it. It’s a strange thing.’
I went back up the hill, past the conifers, and down the other side to the crossroads where Wanda, like the Roman soldier faithful unto death at Pompeii, kept her vigil, and told her that it was left at the crossroads we had to turn, to which she replied that it all depended whether he meant left going towards Ballyline House or left going away from it.
We plumped for the latter, and tackled another steep hill, from the top of which, to our inexpressible relief, we could see the lights of the farm shining in a hollow below.
We were welcomed by Mrs Griffey’s small grandson, Gary, an enthusiastic cyclist who was so enamoured of Wanda’s pint-sized mountain bike that he wanted immediately to ride away into the boondocks on it, and by Mrs Griffey’s grown-up son, Tom, who had been lying on a sofa watching telly with his shoes off and who said it was a funny thing about the soign that the wind always twisted it. Present also was Mrs Griffey’s daughter-in-law, the girl to whom I had spoken on the telephone, who said she would cook the food Wanda had bought at the supermarket.
After all this, and a couple of very hot baths (hot baths, as we subsequently discovered, being something of a rarity in Irish B and Bs, especially in winter) we went to bed, whacked, although altogether we had only covered about thirty-five miles. By now it was a fine night and a moon in its last quarter shone down from a sky filled with stars in the last hours of my birthday, which I shared with Henry VI, born 1421, and Warren Hastings, born 1732. If the next ten days in Ireland produced cycling anywhere near as exciting as this evening’s we would probably be dead before Christmas.
The Burren, ‘of which it is said that it is a country where there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him, which last is so scarce that the inhabitants steal it from each other, and yet their cattle are very fat, for the grass growing in tufts of earth of two or three foot square that lie between the rocks which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.’
Memoirs of EDMUND LUDLOW, one of Cromwell’s generals The following morning we woke around seven-thirty to find brilliant sunshine pouring in through the bedroom windows. Anxious to make the most of the day, we got dressed and went downstairs to find no one about, except Gary, the grandson of the house, a fount of energy and of information about everything connected with the property and its occupants.
‘It’ll be a good bit yet before you get a sniff of your breakfast,’ he put it, picturesquely; and indeed it was ten o’clock before it finally appeared, or indeed there were any signs of life at all. It had certainly been a working farm when we had stayed on it last, but now showed signs, in spite of a tractor parked outside, of being an erstwhile one.
Inside, the house was still much as we remembered it, almost twenty years previously, enlarged but still homely and welcoming. The most recent acquisition appeared to be a set of large armchairs, upholstered in delicate green velvet, which would make a happy stamping ground for dogs whose owners had forgotten to bring their dog baskets and for children equipped with bubble gum and muddy rubber boots. Mrs Griffey now appeared, after her late night out with Pan Am, and gave us a warm welcome. Her husband, whom we remembered well, had been dead for some years.
How did we come to stay in this remote, pleasant spot in the first place? Back in 1964 the Irish Tourist Board began to compile a list of farmhouses and other houses in rural situations whose owners were prepared to take in visitors, and at the same time provide a certain modicum of comfort for them, which might or might not be forthcoming if anyone knocked on a door at random and unannounced.
To encourage the farmers’ wives and others on whom the brunt of the work would fall, and to give them confidence in their abilities and the opportunity to exchange ideas, courses were arranged in a large country house near Drogheda in County Louth, with the cooperation of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. The courses lasted a week, which was reckoned to be about as long as the average Irish farmer could survive with his family but without his wife. They were a great success: among other subjects they dealt with cookery, interior decoration and household management. The culmination was the answering of an impossibly difficult letter from an apprehensive potential guest. As a result of all this a tremendous esprit de corps was built up among the ladies who had been on what they proudly referred to as ‘The Course’.
As a result, the number of recommended farmhouses rose rapidly. The only trouble was that the guests failed to materialize. Understandably, after the expenditure of so much effort and money by all concerned, depression reigned. Alarmed at their lack of success the Irish Tourist Board asked me, in my then capacity as Travel Editor of the Observer, if I would like to visit some of these houses and see for myself what I thought of them. They produced a complete list, helped me to whittle it down to about thirty, and then left Wanda and myself to get on with it in our own way.
It was an extraordinarily interesting experience. Some were working farms with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century buildings, such as the one we were now staying in. Some were not farms at all but quite large country houses, standing in their own parklands, and with or without farms and rambling outbuildings. Some were neat and modern bungalows, rather early prototypes of those we had passed the previous day on the way from Sixmilebridge to Quin, some with plastic gnomes in their front gardens, which were fashionable then. Indistinguishable from ordinary B and Bs, we gave them a miss.
All had one thing in common: they were very clean. Many had washbasins in the bedrooms; others had vast bathrooms with washbasins like fonts, and baths commodious enough to hold a baby whale. In one of them the lavatory was on a dais in a long, narrow chamber so far from the door that, installed on it, I was in a perpetual state of uncertainty as to whether or not I had locked myself in. Students of early plumbing, I noted, would find a visit to such houses worthwhile for these features alone.
Some of the most modest-looking houses concealed within them beautiful fireplaces and remarkable furniture, some of it very fine, some very eccentric, such as bog oak bookcases and extraordinary what-nots. The interior decorations were unpredictable. Some of the ladies, after being visited by a representative of the Tourist Board, panicked and replaced their nice old floral wallpaper with contemporary stuff covered with designs of Dubonnet bottles and skyscrapers, and coated the slender glazing bars of their eighteenth-century windows with a thick coating of bilious yellow paint.
In the course of our journey we played croquet and tennis, got stung by bees, struck up friendships with various donkeys, one of which was called Noël, and innumerable tame rabbits, puppies and dogs. Often there was riding, which we were no good at, and fishing, at which we were not much better but which we enjoyed.
And there was the food, which was always abundant, too abundant. I was anxious to do my best by the ladies but it was not always possible to be kind and at the same time truthful. When it came to bacon, ham, eggs and sausages, soda bread and butter, home-made cakes, jam and cream, everything was fine. Let them loose on a steak, a piece of meat to roast, or even on a cut of freshly landed salmon, and they would turn it into something that resembled an old tobacco pouch, which is,