A NATIVE’S RETURN TO THE “OLD BOROUGH” - Apr 1921

The old quays drowse in the sunshine. The full tide slaps lazily against the hulks of the few sailing ships nodding at anchor. High up in the grey landward walls tufts of wall flowers strike a vivid note of colour. Mingling with the clean, strong breath blowing in from the sea, and the tarry smell of shipboard, is the scent of resin from the stacks of freshly-cut trees awaiting shipment. Overhead, against the splendid blue and white of the spring sky, seagulls wheel and scream in an airy morrice. A few old men in small groups smoke and talk placidly.

Go up from the waterside through the quaint medieval lanes that lead to the streets of the town. In the sunshine the life of the community pulses calmly, evenly, without haste. Business is conducted with the placid philosophy that savours of sunnier lands. The soft accents of the townsfolk, whether they are using Gaelic or the Beurla, is characteristic of their temperaments.

Simple, kindly, easily contented, they stroll genially their generation, caring little for tomorrow, but pleasantly conscious of today. So it was thirty years ago. So I found it when revisiting the glimpses of the moon not so long ago. Nothing seemed to have changed much. One or two shop windows didn’t seem to have been dressed since my far off schooldays. I had a strange uncanny feeling that I could go right in and buy the identical sweets that I had coveted when a youngster - not their successors, mark you, but the self same saccharine lumps. I refrained.

Bill had grown up in the meantime, but otherwise he was not changed - merely an enlarged but unimproved version of mine ancient enemy. Our mutual regard for each other didn’t seem to have improved either.

“Who’s carrying on old Blanks business ? “ I asked, as the name over the shop aroused memories.

“Why, Blank is, of course,” I was told with an air of surprise.

“Great Scott, “ I protested : “he must be about a hundred. He was an old man when I was going to school here.”

They pointed him out to me - a well set-up man , apparently not more than sixty. It was in the fitness of things that his shop didn’t seem to have changed either : it contained exactly the same things as thirty years ago - and the same dustiness.

“When I grow really old and tired of the giddy outside world, “ I announced, “I am going to come back here to my native town and renew my youth like the eagles. Seems to me it is a great place to begin growing young in when you’re about eighty or so.”

Of course, there had been a few changes while my back was turned. The natives call them “improvements,” but they had various ways of pronouncing the word. Usually they contrived to give it an inflection of terrific sarcasm. I will not specify the improvements. It was quite easy to overlook them. Personally I was keenly glad to find that, on the whole, it was the Old Borough of my hard-fought schooldays. I decided to go down through one of those grey, ivy-hung medieval lanes, and see if I could conjure up any of those fine pirate dreams of my boyhood. “It should be easy, “ I argued with the doppel-ganger, as I sauntered along with myself, “there is no change in the quays. There are the old sailing ships, with the old figure-heads leaning out at the bowspirit, and the same old names in the same old yellow paint, and, to all appearances, the same old crews.” It was even so. And there was the entire atmosphere of the quays unchanged to help the illusion. They are the kind of quays where you resent a steamer as an anachronism. They are a scene originally set a background for sailors in tarry pigtails and red nightcaps, wearing cutlasses, jackboots, and aprons akin to those affected by present-day conventional victuallers. And aristocratic swashbucklers in flowing wigs, plumed hats, velvet and lace putting to sea as jauntily peacock as if there were never such things as half-gales or mountain waves coming inboard.

I found a soft spot in a stack of freshly-cut trees with the ivy still fresh and green about them, and sat down to recapture an hour or so from the faerie seas of the past. Somewhere down the fresh sea-wind came a droning sound. In the languor of the sunshine a great bee buzzed. The sound persisted - it grew louder - a harsh, cutting, metallic note came into it. The boy of thirty years ago, with his glowing, colourful dreams of pirates vanished, and the middle-aged man sat up with ears alert.

“An aeroplane,” said the man in whose youth there were neither aeroplanes, nor motor cars and very few telephones, or similar blessings. It came from the direction of Waterford, flying low over the distant tree-tops. Across the bay it flew, swooping low as it neared the town. Once, twice it circled over the roofs. A dark object dropped from it as it reached its lowest point. Immediately it began to climb again. In two minutes it was out of sight, flying towards the south west.

I climbed down from the odorous tree trunks and sought information from the placid old men still smoking and talking with smooth, lazy content further along the quay.

“Oh, yes,” they told me, “that was the aeroplane delivering the letters to the military barracks. It does come this way very nearly every day.”

“And where,” I enquired “are these new military barracks ?”

“Oh, begob, tisn’t new they are at all, but the ould ones beyond there.”

“But,” I protested “that was practically a ruin thirty years ago.”

“Haith, an’ it’s not much better now. But since the sojers came to the town they’ve fixed up the ould place and the police an’ the sojers live there together.”

Full of a strange curiosity I went along the well-known quayside ways until I came abreast of the old barracks. Its crumbling walls, heavy-hung with ivy and laurel, indicated that about the time Elizabeth’s captains were winning the seas it might have been regarded as a sort of C3 fortalice. But the old men were right. Once more after all these years the old building had a garrison.

From the summit of the high loop-holed wall khaki-capped faces looked down upon me with mild interest. At the flagstaff the colours of an English regiment ruffled in the salt breeze. And as I passed, the strident voice of trumpet sent a blazen call to the four winds. Yes, something had changed and changed very materially in all those thirty years. An the visible signs of a spiritual transformation lay within the old barracks walls. So there were unsuspected depth, eh? The soldiers of Britain testified to it. Their colours proclaimed it. The bugles of Britain told it the four winds of Eirinn. And now the Old Borough has had further distinction.

It has Curfew at seven in the evening.

(J.A.P The Freeman)

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