Continuing the diaries from Ballina of the late 1960s...
Saturday, October 18th, 1966
It is a perfectly pleasant Saturday morning - well, mid-day, and I am strangely at ease, lying in bed nursing a mild hangover.
I have not yet seen Jerome, and because I was a little the worse for wear last night, do not know if he was in bed before me or after me. But while Jerome has presumably slept in the bed on the other side of my room, and is there no longer, the bed is once again perfectly made up, and Jerome's clothes are laid out on top of it in the same unnervingly neat manner as they were when he first arrived.
When mother knocks at the door to remind me that the day is "almost over" (something of an exaggeration since it is only about 12.45 p.m.), I call her in and invite her to observe the perfect horizontal layout of Jerome's weekend wardrobe, on his immaculate bed.
This is a little wicked of me. Just as I expect, mother jumps to the conclusion that Jerome has been sleeping in someone else's bed, namely Noeleen's.
Mother turns pale and leaves the room.
Saturday evening:
PJ clammed up the other night when I asked him about his Galway adventures with the plump sloe-eyed temptress from Connemara. There is some mystery there. No doubt all will be revealed in good time.
Instead, PJ changed the subject by telling me that his father has bought an old CI╔ bus and stuck it on their ancestral site in Enniscrone as a summer home. I offer my congratulations, but PJ is not so sure.
He reckons that he will be roped in to help with making the thing habitable and that his weekends will never be his own again.
As for a summer home, he says the whole point is to do it up, rent it out and make a few bob on it.
For a National School teacher, PJ's father has done fairly well. They moved recently from Ardnaree to the more select area of Riverside Walk, which caused a lot of snobbish outrage among certain people in this town.
Of course PJ's mother teaches too and they obviously have a few bob to spare if they can purchase a bus, even if as PJ says it's only a shell of a thing which they got at a knockdown price.
I wouldn't be all that gone myself on the notion of summer holidays in Enniscrone. Firstly, Enniscrone doesn't really have a summer. In fact the whole of Ireland hardly has a summer.
But Mother adores Enniscrone and had us all practically living there as kids every alleged summer, where the wind from the beach would, in the immortal words of Maureen (my ex), "whip the knickers off you".
That may be vulgar, but it is accurate enough. Certainly, as a child I can recall my own arse being frozen there on more than one occasion as I waited after a swim for my sister to finish using the towel.
My brother Johnnie claims he is permanently numb "in that area" because of having to wait so long to dry himself every day of the week when we stayed there.
(I don't even want to think about the trauma that may have afflicted poor Frankie - fourth in line for the towel - never mind the state of his arse.)
Nonetheless, Enniscrone has a certain wild charm. It also boasts the dubious attraction of the Marine Ballroom. This almost surreal institution plays second string to Pontoon, and attracts crowds of enormous rednecked young farmers from all over Sligo and Mayo, looking for "likely gerruls" as one of them confided to me one night while "stoking up" with about 15 pints of Guinness in Conway's pub.
To think of the flower of Irish maidenhood being plucked by these ape-like if relatively harmless creatures!
Speaking of Conway╣s, Enniscrone also has the very great attraction of public houses which do not know what the term "closing time" means. (Not that the Ballina pubs are entirely au fait with it either, thank God).
At any rate, a pad in which to crash out in Enniscrone would be very welcome after a night's carousing there. It might wipe out the particularly noxious memory of the night PJ and I innocently took a lift home from Enniscrone to Ballina in the back of a cattle truck driven by a supposedly kindly country yokel. The farmer-versus-townie conflict is an old one of course, but I see no need for such vindictive actions as that, under the guise of helpfulness.
PJ and I stank of manure for a full week afterwards.
(To be continued.)
bglacken@irish-times.ie