A Place In My Mind
Regency Colonial
By FRANK O'CONNOR The city was an sesthetic blank, and the only column of the Cork Examiner that had literary flavour was the 'Births, Marriages and Deaths.' At Neuve Chapelle my darling fell,
I hope his soul in Heaven do dwell—
haunts my memory like Susie's gone but not forgotten; She was a good friend to be sure; As1go round from town to town It reminds me more and more.
But Cork had something Dublin doesn't have. It had hills, and minute-by-minute changes of View; endless eye-catchers in the towers and campaniles that appeared at the end of narrow Winding lanes. A flat city is static; a hilly one is forever in motion: angles change, levels change, roof-lines change. I am a Corkman perhaps only in criticism—I hate to be bored! •
'Cork' means 'marsh,' but it is not The Marsh Proper that gives the city its interest. This is Merely the original half-island site where Norse and Normans built to command an inlet of the sea. The original Irish town, built to command a river crossing, was on the hill near the present Protestant cathedral, but there is scarcely a trace of it left. That melancholy offspring of French Gothic, the cathedral, is the only begetter of all the ugly Catholic churches that have since Plagued the city, with their utterly irrelevant airs. Even the remains of the tenth-century round tower which once stood in the grounds were demolished, and it is only here and there, if you look closely, that you can find bits and scraps of a native tradition—the Romanesque voussoirs and fifteenth-century corbels, a moulded gateway or the headless effigy of a child.
What charm Cork has is almost entirely
Regency Colonial, and it will not have it long because it is rapidly approaching the point that bublin has now reached, when a hundred and fifty years of neglect have made a beautiful city Untenable and it all collapses together. Welling- ton, Clarence and Adelaide will hardly last much longer in those fine roads and terraces that cling to the hillsides. One friend who had stubbornly stayed on in his own old eyrie left recently when he stepped out of his bath into the room below.
But it still is a city of character. Even into the Ruabon brick period some local architect delighted in corbelled turrets of French Renais- sance style, and, curiously, their irrelevance is not offensive. In the streets the lilting speech, Innocent of spirants, makes you pause and wonder what language is being spoken. We of Alan Brien is on holiday. the working class said, 'Dis, dat, dese, dose,' and were mocked by the middle classes, who said with self-conscious arrogance, 'Dhis, dhat, dhese, dhose, under the impression that this was how the words were pronounced in England. Ask a Corkman to pronounce 'breathed' and watch him slowly suffocate!
We had a peculiar vocabulary which is fading from my memory, but which I fancy may have contained interesting Old English forms. Diminu- tives tended to end in 'a.' Patrick Street' was Tana,"Shandon Street' Shandona; and to go 'for a scove down Pana in your bareas' (bare feet) was `me daza' (splendid). 'Scove' for 'a walk' may have been only slang, but 'gulve' for 'swim,' bebble' for 'run' and 'fun!' for 'kick' look like old words. Among the nouns, we had 'dake' for 'look' and 'tack' for 'stone,' and ad- jectives such as `dooshy,"small' and 'dawny,' 'dainty.' We never robbed an orchard: we 'sloughed' it. When I first met James Joyce. he asked at once, `Do you still call a penny a lob?' We never pronounced it that way; we said lop.' Some time I must really study an English dialect dictionary and discover what part of the West Country produced the language my characters speak.
But that msthetic blank was a nightmare to a growing boy. The ghastly irrelevance of the Protestant cathedral seemed to have spread over everything. We were a colonial town; we still had British troops in the barracks and English players in the Opera House, but having first lost contact with the.indigenous.culture, we had begun to lose contact with the imported one. I shall never forget the first time I went to see the Abbey Theatre and heard Synge's Playboy. I wept with sheer delight that at last I had come into contact with a living tradition of literature.
I wanted that sort of theatre for Cork, but it wasn't easy. When O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock was first produced there, Mary Boyle had to have influenza instead of an illegitimate baby. The great authority on the theatre was a priest called Christy O'Flynn, who specialised in Shakespeare, but in his Othello Desdemona could be called nothing more than 'wench.' When I started a little theatrical group. O'Flynn prophesied in the Cork Examiner that 'Mike the Moke' (meaning me) 'would go down to posterity at the head of the Pagan Dublin Muses: I remember it principally as a dreadfully lonely town, a suitable setting for an Irish Three Sisters. Years after we had left it, Sean O'Faolain and I, having heard of its 'wonderful hospitality' from some visiting actor, went over the number of middle-class homes at which we could call.
I was received in one, though I know that the women of the family disapproved. His score was not much better. So the little group I called 'The Lost Legion' were unduly dependent on one an- other. Reading C. P. Snow. I find myself wondering if his Leicester was like that and if Lewis Eliot was as dependent as O'Faolain or myself, and if the question of who was speaking to whom assumed the same disastrous proportions. I doubt it. Ours was a fine Colonial city; we spoke an English beside which George Passant's was an invented language, but, having lost our own cul- ture, we had been cut adrift by England and were merely our eccentric selves, provincials twice over.
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