An unforgettable sojourn in Ireland
Living in Ireland, Grant Smithies felt the power of a freshly minted adult, and the world seemed promising and brand new.
Iwas living in Ireland in the mid-80s and, if I had to pinpoint a place and a time where my adult character began to take solid shape, it was probably there and then.
I arrived into that glorious stone-and-brick city of Dublin in the middle of an unusually hot dry summer and was smitten.
Dublin was beautiful, full of churches old enough to feel pagan and a predominantly Catholic population doing joyously Godless things.
The reticence of the people I’d grown up among in Whanganui was nowhere to be found. Words flowed out of people in great torrents – and drink flowed in.
Modern drunks staggered ancient streets and I tagged along, far from home, a magnet for mischief. I felt the power of a freshly minted adult, and the world seemed malleable, kindly, promising, brand new.
For the first-time ever, I was considered something of a catch. Was it the exotic accent, with its pancake vowels and rising inflection? Probably not.
I was also young and loose and slender in a way that gives me a jolt of pain when I think back on it now, old and round and uptight.
I got strong and brown working in the sun as a labourer for a landscape gardener, then retired to Slattery’s on Rathmines Rd to ensure my rightful share of Guinness wasn’t hoovered up by some thirsty stranger.
I had many girlfriends that summer and behaved without honour. Relationships routinely overlapped, like a Venn diagram where the middle bit might be marked ‘‘dodgy’’.
Good and bad things about my own character became more evident as the months passed. I had clothes hanging in assorted wardrobes around the town, a tiny box room in a former coal shed in Donnybrook, a mattress stowed behind a couch in Rathgar.
A wronged woman turned up at that last place early one morning and called me many unholy names at a volume that woke the downstairs neighbours.
A pint was poured over my head by another aggrieved party in a bar that stood between the Grand Canal and the Deaf Association meeting rooms, sparking frantic but silent gesticulation in half the nearby drinkers.
My free-and-easy, loose-asa-goose, hash and stout-addled summer was turning me into a bit of a dick.
So, I made an effort to calm down – and grow up. I drank less, put more energy into key friendships.
In a few months, I was returning to New Zealand, so I travelled further afield: up to Donegal, down to Cork, across to Galway.
I helped rebuild a dry-stone wall in County Clare and had my mind blown by primeval west coast landscapes where myth and antiquity clung like soft mist.
But, back in Dublin, a month before leaving, things got weird again. I paired up with a new girlfriend who was a stranger to the truth. Claire, I think, but this too might have been an invention.
A wronged woman turned up at that last place early one morning and called me many unholy names at a volume that woke the downstairs neighbours.