Continuing the excerpts from the Ballina diaries of the 1960s...
Sunday, October 19th, 1996
Jerome is sleeping like a baby when I look in on him after breakfast this morning.
I am not surprised: mother must have disturbed him about 30 times during the night, edging the creaky bedroom door open repeatedly to check that his supposed insane desire for my sister Noeleen's body had not sent him on a lust-crazed dash to her room.
I have tried hard to imagine a lust-crazed Jerome but it is difficult.
Perhaps when he has passed Part Four of his accountancy exams he may relax enough to realise that he inhabits a sexual world.
Last night, at Jerome's suggestion, I agreed to accompany Noeleen and him to O'Hara's in Foxford for a few pints. The great thing about Jerome is that he has a car, a one-year-old two-tone Triumph Herald 13/60 of which he is inordinately proud. Apparently it has a "turning circle" of a mere 25 feet, or so Jerome tells me. I have no idea what this means.
I imagined Noeleen might not be keen on my presence, but she shrugged her shoulders and we chugged off.
It is probably not a good thing to have shrugged and chugged in the same sentence, unless of course one were writing a poem.
Jerome drank nothing but orange juice as he was driving. Apart from a five-year-old in O'Hara's pub who seemed to have mislaid his father, and was gulping orangeade from a pint mug, every other person (including Noeleen) was drinking Guinness, and the car park was packed. I asked Jerome if he did not think he would be safer if his own standard of driving was reduced to the same par as everyone else's, but he was horrified.
Every time I went to the toilet - and either I have a plumbing problem or O'Hara's Guinness has some special ingredient which speeds the manufacture of urine - Jerome became noticeably nervous.
I now believe that Jerome is actually more than happy to have a chaperone along to kill any chances of intimacy between himself and my sister.
When closing time came, Noeleen staggered slightly outside the pub and fell giggling into Jerome's arms as he was opening the car door.
"Watch out, you'll damage it."
That was his romantic response. The car then refused to start, which seemed to delight Jerome, as he then had to fiddle under the bonnet for about 20 minutes.
"Jerome", I observed to Noeleen as we gazed at her busy boyfriend, "is not exactly Jeromeo, is he?"
Noeleen took a drag on her cigarette (when she drinks, she forgets that she is not actually a smoker) and said feelingly: "He'd get up on that engine before he'd get up on me." How or why Noeleen has renewed her relationship is beyond me.
Monday, October 20th
News travels fast, but no faster than Walter Ging. I bumped into Walter on his way to work at the train station. "If P-paddy Galvin needs a n-name for his new h-holiday home in En-enniscrone", he said to me, "he c-could c-call it b-bus-in-urbe." I did not have Walter down as a Latin scholar until now.
Tuesday, October 21st
Finally got around to opening the letter from Andrea, my penfriend (courtesy of Ireland's Own) in Pisa (yes, Andrea, I know, "home of the leaning tower").
Andrea is well and hopes I am well, too. He sends greetings to all the family. He wishes my employment to be satisfactory (so do I). He hopes to study the English language in university next year and wishes to know if he will visit Ballina in the "glorious upcoming summertime" and learn to speak the good English here with a kind family.
This is fine by me, but I will have to warn Andrea that there is not much room in the house of this kind family. Also, he will need to revise his ideas about Irish summers.
Overall, I am not sure he has any idea of what he may be letting himself in for. If he picks up the cruder Ballina accent he may never lose it. And what will the ubiquitous local query "how is she cuttin'?" mean to an Italian? In translation, it may well come across as some foul slur on the female members of his family, inviting retribution down the ages from Andrea's family and, for all I know, his Mafia connections in Sicily, which, I understand, all Italians have.
The standard reply given to this greeting - "Oh, like a blade" - may well mean something quite different in Italian, possibly even provoking violence. Who knows?
On the plus side, Andrea invites me to visit Pisa "in a return". Pisa has to be more exciting than Ballina. It surely has more than a falling-down tower to interest the visitor.
I will have to ask mother. Generally speaking, she takes a starry-eyed view of Europeans, associating them with money, urbanity and style. And, of course, from her point of view, Italians have the Pope.
(to be continued)
bglacken@irish-times.ie