Paradise in the Picture Houses

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Bond: Not such an eejit after all

The first film I remember seeing in the cinema was called The Wilderness Family. I loved it. It was the 1970s and the idea of nature and wilderness was iconic at the time, what with the oil crisis and all that.

John Denver was singing about Rocky Mountain Highs on the radio and the big hit show on TV was a thing called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. James Adams was unjustly accused of murder by John Q Law and went off to live deep inside the forest with no-one for company except a great big bear called Ben and a man called (appropriately enough) Mad Jack who used to name his donkeys numerically. He had got as far as Number Seven by the time of the show.

There were no bears in the county Mayo at the that time – although I grant that there may have been a few Mad Jacks – and it all seemed so exotic, even on an old black-and-white Pye television set. As such, the chance to see that same wilderness on the big screen of the Savoy Cinema on Tone Street, just down from the current location of the Western People offices, was impossible to resist.

While Grizzly Adams had his troubles during the cowboy era of US history, the Wilderness Family was contemporary to 1970s concerns. But it was close enough, and 100 years is small change in the lives of mountains. If I sat down to watch the Wilderness Family now, it might not seem so magical, but it’d be a mistake to try. Wonder is always at its height during childhood, as it should be.

The Savoy is long gone, leaving not a wrack behind, but in the 1970s it was not the only cinema in Ballina. There was also the Astoria, an old-style cinema and even more wondrous than the Savoy.

Two reasons for this – firstly, there were huge iron gates on the front of the premises, trellised gates that opened and closed like an accordion instead of swinging on hinges. Those gates made a certain impression on duffle-coated eight-year-olds whose imaginations would immediately conclude that those gates were all that stood between the county Mayo and all sorts of Scooby-Doo villains. Many times I piously reflected that it was the grace of God that they were locked away inside there and not roaming the countryside and causing RTÉ to extend Garda Patrol in the light of the special emergency.

Secondly, the Astoria had a balcony. Watching Christopher Reeve’s Superman from the balcony made it feel that you were up there in the air with him, flying around Metropolis (although why he wasted his time with that girl, Lois Lane, was an utter mystery).

The Astoria is long gone now. The Savoy stuck it out for a longer time, with two new movies every week. There were only two channels on that Pye TV set and the Savoy represented a doorway to a different, wholly exotic life that seemed a million miles away from the mean streets of an Irish market town. Every day coming home from Scoil Padraig I’d stop to stare at the posters before dropping into Keohane’s to stop and stare at the no-less-exotic comics.

It’s funny what sticks in your mind. I can vividly remember staring at the poster for Smokey and Bandit, a 1970s comedy starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field and Jackie Gleeson. Everything Reynolds touched turned to cinema gold then.

I remember the poster for the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, where Bond is framed by the extremely long and toned legs of a lady. I wasn’t as bothered with Scooby-Doo at that stage, and thought that Bond, English though he may be, might not be such a fool after all.

The cinema comes into its own for teenagers, as it fulfils two vital teenage social necessities. The first is the intense need to get out the house and meet your friends when you have very little money to spend. And the second is that burning need to spend quality time with that special someone that is counterbalanced by the horrible dread that, the more time he or she spends with you, the more likely he or she is to realise what a drip you are and not at all worthy to lace his or her sandals.

Not only do you not have to talk during a movie, it is positively rude to do so. You only have to sit there. The only slight problem is what movie to go and see in the first place.

For the middle-aged people reading this who grew up in the 1980s, there were only two movies. If you were a boy, it was Top Gun, and if you were a girl, it was Dirty Dancing.

Top Gun is a movie about US air force pilots, and which of them is the best at flying a fighter plane. I have no idea to this day what Dirty Dancing is about but I’ve been told that its principle message is that one should never put a baby in a corner. Sensible advice, but hard to see how it took them two hours to get it across.

The new cinema opened and closed on Convent Hill during my own time away from Ballina. I heard it was an excellent place, but not enough people went to see films there for it to survive. And then I read in last week’s paper that the cinema is to return, and gave a little whoop for joy.

Even in this age of Netflix and torrents and You Tube and blue-ray DVDs there’s still something magical about the dark of the cinema, and the light above your heard shining onto the screen and maybe, on the really good days, someone nice next to you. You’re not talking, but at least you’re there, the two of you, together. Sometimes that can feel like paradise too.

Jugular Train - Ballina Locomotive Discovers the World Beyond Manulla

An Spailpín Fánach has written before of the boundless courage and impossible spirit of daring that is the birthright of the Ballinaman. The events of the train journey from Ballina to Dublin last Saturday simply added further lustre to that fundamental truth.

As far as Irish Rail are concerned, Ballina is like Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon – it exists somewhere off in the mists, and can damned well stay there, as far as our masters are concerned. The train to Mayo runs from Dublin to Castlebar and Westport – fine towns both – while Ballina is served by a spur connection that runs from Ballina town to a block of concrete in a field in the townland on Manulla, about three miles north-west of the great town of Balla. The commuters descend from the Ballina train onto this block of concrete, and then board the Westport train all the way to Dublin. And vice versa on the way back.

Because it’s a spur line, the rolling stock on this route isn’t of the first water. It usually consists of a clapped out old locomotive and two carriages – if it were a car, it would be a Ford Cortina Mark IV, and two fluffy dice would hang from the mirror.

Last Saturday, that dauntless old locomotive and her two carriages chugged out of Ballina on her way east to the city. As the train approached Manulla, the commuters heard dread news on the PA. The train from Westport had been suspended due to “operational difficulties.” Hearts sank in the carriages, as the normally procedure in these not-at-all-uncommon circumstances is to put everyone in the train on a bus at Claremorris and send them off that way.

Imagine, then, the thrill that ran though the people when the driver continued his announcement: because the Westport train was suspended, that clapped out old Ballina train wasn’t going to stop at Manulla this time and slink back home again. She was going all the way to Dublin.

The train drove through Manulla without even slowing down as women wept and strong men clenched their teeth. The light brigade at Balaclava can have felt no more electric a thrill as they began their charge for the Russian guns. At Claremorris, the driver announced that there would be no “dining car” on this trip, none of that fancy-smancy “food” or “beverages.” The commuters were given five minutes at Claremorris to stock up on minerals and Mars bars, something they attended to with alacrity, and then off again on their gallant trip east.

Leaving the heather county at Ballyhaunis and cutting a swathe through Roscommon, the steadfast heart of Ireland, the scale of the undertaking became clear. The Westport train is normally blessed with eight to ten carriages. The Ballina train had but two, and carriages of a vintage that if one were to find Charters and Caldicott inside one of them discussing the cricket a person couldn’t be a bit surprised. But the two carriages were only meant to carry the Ballina contingent; now they had to carry the commuting population from all towns between the western Atlantic shores and the city of Dublin along that particular rail line.

Things quickly became crowded on the train. On leaving Mayo, the people were, quite frankly, crushed in a heap together. In Roscommon, a situation similar to the infamous black hole of Calcutta had arisen on the train. And after she crossed the broad majestic Shannon, the commuters waiting on the platforms recoiled in horror, staring at the windows of the train which now seemed to offer a glimpse into a nightmare vision from Hieronymous Bosch or Picasso’s Guernica, human forms crushed almost beyond recognition, heads the far side of shoulders, legs where arms should be, and even some people with the eyes moved to the one side of their heads from the squeeze of humanity.

And that’s what that Ballina commuter train looked like when she finally rolled into Heuston on Saturday – like a Mark IV Cortina driving up O’Connell Street, great clouds of smoke and steam coming from under the bonnet, and every single member of the Croke Park Residents’ Association jammed into the back. And there’s a lot of them.

An Spailpín Fánach doesn’t know what happened that train after her epic journey east. I do know that the passengers untangled and disembarked, and then went about their business in the city, including the one who drank the sweet porter with your correspondent in Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street on Saturday night and told the grand tale. It’s possible that the old locomotive chugged her last, and then just fell down in a heap in Heuston, and could be there yet. But chances are she just took a fill of green diesel and headed back home again, to rest peacefully by the banks of the Moy until she hears the bugle once more.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Ballina, Mayo, commuting, Irish Rail

So. Farewell Then, Gaughan's Bar and Public House

One of the most evocative images of exile in An Spailpín Fánach’s fragile psyche, for whatever reason, is of Frank Ryan taking his last look at the Irish shoreline from the conning tower of German U-boat, on his way from Franco’s Spain to Hitler’s Germany, exile, and death.

An Spailpín resonated a little with how the incorrigible old Republican must have felt last night when a text message confirmed, once and for all, that Gaughan’s Bar, O’Rahilly St, Ballina, Co Mayo, is no more. The premises still stands, and the lunch trade of international renown continues, but from this moment on Gaughan’s is that most deconsecrated of churches, a pub with no beer. The license has been sold and from now on you can get nothing stronger across the counter than coffee, tea and porter cake. And a tremendous sadness settles on An Spailpín as he contemplates that thought.

When people talk about their locals, they try and pin down this ineffable thing that we refer to, with doubtful spelling, as “craic.” This is not the case to those that raised a glass in Gaughan’s, and left it down empty. One of the many delights of a Saturday night in Gaughan’s was watching the slow implosion of a visiting hen night in Ballina who made the mistake of visiting Gaughan’s instead of finding a hostelry that might have suited them better. They would arrive glammed to the nines, cackling happily around the big table just to the left of the door, their bottles of Smirnoff Ice clutched in scarlet talons. After half an hour, all hopes and dreams of the future would have left them. The chief bridesmaid would dream of nursing the poor in Mozambique or along the coast of Malabar, the bride-to-be’s sister would swear to dedicate her life to fighting injustice and inequality where-e’er she found them, while the inchoate blushing bride herself would think of taking the veil, and signing up with the Poor Clares first thing in the morning.

An Spailpín well remembers the night some broken hens left Gaughan’s in silence, trailing their wings out the door. One of their party had just come down from the ladies, and scurried out to rejoin her sisters. A knight of the back bar high stools put it best: “she took one look at us boys, she turned on her heel and she left.”

And fair weather after her – I hope she found better luck nursing beneath that Indian star. Her disappointment was only ever equalled by that of Gunther, Fritz and Johann who had bought Dubliners records by the dozen and had now come to Ireland to participate in this thing they call the “craic.” Porter ordered, smiles all around, one of that visiting tribe would push the chair back from the table, and launch into the Wild Rover or the Black Velvet Band. But before he could tell how he had spent all his money on whiskey and beer, or of a sad misfortune that caused him to stray from the land, the curate on duty would have materialised at his shoulder, and told him, gently but firmly, that if he wanted to sing he had better sing on the street, and not be disturbing the customers. Nonplussed is too weak a word to describe the typical reaction.

The singing ban was lifted for the Ballina Fleadhanna of 1997 and ’98, and An Spailpín is happy to remember that, as he drank what I now sadly realise was my last ever pint of stout in Gaughan’s, Mick Leonard was belting out that sad old ballad about the Boston Burglar, who went midnight rambling, breaking laws of God and man, and paid for it dearly. Why was Mick not shown the door now the Fleadhanna are eight years past? I guess we all get mellow towards the end.

Dreadful curmudgeon that he is, An Spailpín is not a fan of Christmas, but I will miss Christmas Eve in Gaughan’s dreadfully. The town is busy, and people go in and out, meeting, greeting, drinking and departing. There’s an excited hubbub at all times, and we exchange presents – almost invariably booze, as I recall, as if we hadn’t enough of the stuff as it was. Those Christmas Eves were all smoky as well, not just from that warm stove just inside the door, under the pipe racks, but from the fact that ever sinner in the joint was puffing gaspers. The smoking ban has been good for the people and the country, but for a bar that was famous as pipe-smokers’ corner, and that had pipes for sale worth hundreds of pounds, it was perhaps a premonition that the centre couldn’t hold.

And now it’s all gone, never to return. Is it allowable, I wonder, to think of those who have been and are also gone, or is it a sign of disrespect to their memory? It’s facile and juvenile to compare the closing of a bar with a death, but at the same time, it is the closing of another door, and presager of our own mortality, in its way. A way of life has ended, and while I mourn it, it seems unfair not to remember those with whom I shared happy times there, and on whom time was called early, in a manner that seemed neither fair nor just. And as such, in memory of those many nights together, I raise a final glass to Brendan and Bernie, one whom I knew a little, and one whom I knew a little better, and say that another little piece of the past has passed on with you. We that are left move on while those that are gone stroll the Elysian Fields, and while we’ll always have other bars there will never be another Eden, Camelot or Gaughan’s. We can only hope for that happy day when we’re all together again ar slí na fírinne, as that lovely expression goes, sharing a glass together. And even now An Spailpín can but smile as he foresees, just as the archangel takes a deep breath and raises the Last Trump to his lips, a man comes out from behind the bar and says “lookit, you can’t play that thing in here, disturbing my customers.” And so, until that happy, blissful day, farewell then, Gaughan’s; hail and farewell.

Technorati Tags: Ireland, Ballina, bars, Gaughan's