Romance in Ireland

Romance in Ireland

My first Autumn and Winter away from the Tropics, in Ireland, were a period of Romance. Not the romance (small “r”) of a young male free to associate for the first time in his life with comely, friendly lasses in co-ed classes after having been educated exclusively in strictly gender-segregated Catholic schools...I will write about that later, although, since my wife, my muckraking daughter and my granddaughters read my blog, it might be best for my self-preservation not to do so. Beware especially of granddaughters. They have a tendency to expose you in Show and Tell in nursery school, such as happened when my granddaughter, at her Christian nursery school, revealed that her favorite drink was milk but her granddad’s was beer.

The Romance of that fall and winter was the fantasy of living in a parallel world I had only read about and imagined till I went to Ireland.

It may not have been the wail of the Banshee that my Irish Catholic parish priest used to describe in his chilling ghost stories in Trinidad, but the first time I was startled by the screech of the wind in a chimney at my Dublin home, a sound I had never heard before, Banshees became pretty real to me.

The tightly closed sash windows rattling in a gale brought to life poems about desolate cottages on desolate lakes that we had memorized only because they were on the syllabus for English Literature in sunny Port of Spain. The only lake in Trinidad was the Pitch lake, and it didn’t even contain water but asphalt. Windows rarely rattled in Trinidad because they were almost always wide open to let the breeze in.

Groups of us students from the University would go beagling on a Sunday morning. Beagling is the poor man’s version of fox-hunting. No horses and horns, no tailored riding breeches, red coats or polished boots, no Manor houses to feast in afterwards, no foxes, just a hare if you are lucky. Oh there were hounds, but they were Beagle hounds, and the hunt was chasing after them on foot across muddy fields, over the many low stone walls crisscrossing them, and rarely if ever even seeing a hare. But it was exhilarating fun and part of a world I had only read about.

Was that a Dickensian thug creeping up behind me in the fog on some dark, narrow cobblestoned street, tugging at the woollen scarf wrapped tightly around my neck, a cold blade sliding down my back? My Irish landlady would call it The East Wind, chill enough to “cut the whiskers off a brass monkey”.

After six months of wet, bleak, soot-laden Irish weather it was easy to see things in terms of warriors slogging it out in the muck and rain trying to storm dreary castles. And so it was that I began to think that the word “fort” in “Earlsfort Terrace”, the address of University College, Dublin, was appropriate. The stark, colorless block-long stone facade, the single portal in the middle, guarded by a low stone wall at the curb with heavy iron chain links draped between its columns, a row of skeletal trees completely bare of leaves or life, all gave the impression of a fortress to this Trinidadian.

Imagine my surprise then when one morning as I trooped into my fortess with the other students, there were splashes of color: pink blossoms and tender green leaves covering what had been lifeless trees.




This was another whole new world to me. I suddenly understood why Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Chaucer and all those other English writers we had dutifully read in Tropical Trinidad had raved about Spring in their odes and narratives. We had to fake wonderment when we wrote our critiques of those works because in the Tropics Nature is always exhuberantly alive and colorful. There’s no season of death followed by a miraculous reawakening. Here I was experiencing a genuine rush of awe at Spring.

I began noticing how widespread this new life was in some odd ways.

Back of the main university building was the Iveagh Gardens, mostly a large grassy place with trees and a sunken field that we hurriedly crossed inattentively on the way to the Newman Center for lunch. On this first Spring Day there were students lounging about on the grass. Some of the men had even taken off their shirts, revealing a whiteness I had not seen before. An Irish classmate labelled it “City White”. Usually the complexion of colonial civil servants who were posted to Trinidad had turned to red at their first exposure to our sun. Here, where skin was never subject to a temerature of more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit in its life, even on a sunny Spring Day, it would remain blanched.

I noticed too that the purple, spidery blood vessels just below the skin that had marred many a lovely cheek and leg in the winter, began to disappear as the blood no longer had to struggle to the surface of the skin to maintain a liveable body temperature.

Just one block away from the university, in St. Stephen's Green, this Romance was confirmed as my new reality. There I came upon that “host of golden daffodils” I had struggled to imagine as I memorized that line from Wordsworth in class back in Trinidad among its hibiscus, anthuriums, roses, exoras, jasmine, frangipani. Here I was actually standing among hosts of real daffodils, and this would be my home for the next several years.