Slainte, John Byrne

John Byrne, the most erudite tour bus driver I’ve ever met (one of the most erudite people I’ve ever met, in fact), is telling us about being in his mother’s kitchen as a child, watching her make the Christmas pudding. At first, I barely notice that he’s talking. We’re at a big table full of tired, hungry people at a restaurant called Beatrice Kennedy, in Belfast; we’ve spent most of the day driving (courtesy of John) up from Dublin, and people are making toasts, ordering food, and playing with the Christmas toys that we all received when we came in. A good quantity of wine has already been put in its place. We’re loud, and John (who’s come in a bit late after finding a place to park the bus) speaks quietly, deliberately, with no great desire to call attention to himself.

But eventually I tune in. The tale is nostalgic and meandering—a child’s Christmas in Ireland. I’m still missing bits and pieces of what he’s saying, but a picture is forming in my mind: John as a little boy in tweed britches (his imaginary apparel no doubt a product of the influence of Irish Spring commercials I watched in my own youth); a big, bright kitchen with a window opening onto a green field (same influence); his mother in a dress and apron, setting the pudding out to cool, gently chiding her son for his impatience. John recites the ingredients of the pudding; they sound as warm, sweet, and full of Christmas as sugarplums. I tease him a little with a line of Tiny Tim’s from “A Christmas Carol”—“Come hear the pudding singing in the copper, Peter!”—but I actually find the tale enchanting. John is a grown man, sturdy and serious, with a face that no one would mistake as being anything but Irish. Yet he describes the making of the pudding with such care, and in such detail, and with such affection for both his mother and the tradition, that I find myself thinking that I hope my own son will speak of me and our Christmases together with such undiluted fondness when he’s grown.

It’s only my second day in Ireland, and John has been weaving himself in and out of my consciousness since he corralled our punchy, sleep- and shower-deprived group into a bus at Dublin Airport, just before dawn, and drove us to our hotel. Inside the airport, I’d walked right by him, even though he was standing in full sight, holding a sign identifying himself as our driver. He’d said nothing, and instead waited for me to wake up, turn around, and find him. “Walked right by me, did you?” he’d said, with a little smile that indicated that he’d watched this scene play out many times in the past while waiting for the various groups of dazed Americans that he’d been hired to shepherd around Ireland.

It was still dark as we drove into the city, and almost no one was in the streets except for a few lone souls heading out to work, or back home. Even at that hour, John was talking, pointing out streets and buildings, but I was too tired to listen. I’d do that later. The only time I really paid attention was when John mentioned the G.P.O.—the post office building where, in 1916, Padraig Pearse, James Connoly, and various other ill-fated comrades staged the sadly miscalculated Easter Rising in 1916. I’d been reading about that, so as to have a clue.
******

The morning after we arrive in Dublin, we are rested, caffeine-enhanced, and relatively clean and presentable. We’re on our way up to Belfast. I’m eager to get there; I’ve been fascinated (but ill informed, as it turns out) by Northern Ireland since I was a child. As we drive, a voice from the front of the bus is talking about everything from Constance Gore-Booth Markiewicz’s role in the Easter Rising, to a statue of James Connoly that we pass, to the head of Saint Oliver Plunkett, which is preserved and on display (for those with strong stomachs) in a church in the town of Drogheda. Sitting toward the back of a bus, I’m assuming that the non-stop, astonishingly detailed monologue is being given by a tour guide who must have boarded the bus when I wasn’t looking. It’s hard, at times, to separate the speaker’s words from his accent, but I envy the effortlessness with which his narrative moves through centuries of Irish history—the recounting of battle strategies and the ways in which the British have oppressed their Irish subjects, the relating of anecdotes that give life to historical facts, the thoughtful answers to our questions. It’s something that I would never be able to do.

It isn’t until we’ve crossed the invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and stop to pick up a tour guide that I realize that there has not been one on the bus since we left Dublin.

“Was that John?” I ask one of my fellow travelers.

It was.

Like the sound of his voice in the predawn hours in Dublin, and through the laughter, clinking glasses, and competing voices at dinner at Beatrice Kennedy, John’s presence verges on the subliminal; he arrives almost unnoticed in any given scene, and then disappears again. None of us knows a thing about him, other than that he has intelligent answers for any question we can come up with about Ireland, that he can tell a funny story, that he seems to have a passion for acquiring and imparting knowledge, that he doesn’t get us killed or lost on the highways or the narrow country roads, and that his mother used to make a fine Christmas pudding.

After dinner that first night in Belfast, our group decides to do research on the various pubs and clubs around the city. In order to make certain that our research is thorough, and our information accurate, we find it necessary to drink a great deal of beer and port, and to stay out until the early morning hours. Our final stop is at a brand-new club, about which I can say very little now other than that it was very loud, and very yellow, and that I met a very nice Irish couple who clued me in to what the “O.C.” in the American TV show of the same name stands for, and who told us that they could tell we were liberals just by the fact that we had passports, and used them.

At some point I become, once again, aware of John’s presence. It’s clear that he would feel much more at home (as I would) in a pub, but he looks content enough sitting at one of the tables, watching the crowd, nursing a drink.

Our research complete, we walk back toward our hotel, among many other researchers, in a fine mist of rain. Halfway there, I stop.

“Where’s John?” I ask. No one had thought to tell him that we were leaving the club.

Feeling very guilty (and very much as if I’d participated in a pub-crawl the night before, rather than doing important research), I apologize profusely to John as we board the bus the next morning. He seems unfazed.

“Did you think that I’d be crying, ‘boo hoo hoo—they’ve left me?’” he asks.

No, I suppose not.

Later that day, John shows up at St. George’s Market (kind of an indoor farmers’ market), where I’m Christmas shopping with another woman from our group; it’s a good thing, because our ability to come to any sensible conclusion about how much money the piles of pounds and pence in our hands actually amount to is minimal, and he tells us (not much, but more than we’d thought). He shows us the cockles and mussels at the seafood stand, and even goes so far as to sing a few bars of “Molly Malone.” I tell him that it upsets me to look at the live shellfish, waving their claws in vain.

“You’re not one of those tree-huggers, are you?” he asks, smiling. I confess that I am. Serves me right for quoting Tiny Tim at dinner.

On the way back to Dublin, John talks about the history of Belfast’s Troubles. I make my way up from my accustomed seat at the back of the bus (I’ve been hanging out with the bad kids) to the one just behind him; the Troubles, for some reason, is a subject that I can’t seem to hear enough about. We’ve had other tour guides on this trip, and they’ve explained things quite thoroughly and well, but John is telling us about Bobby Sands and the 1981 hunger strikes of the “H-block Martyrs.” He describes what happened with the same slow precision that he used to tell us about the preparation of the pudding. Twenty-three years after the hunger strikes, I finally understand why they happened. It’s as satisfying as clicking the last piece of a tricky puzzle into place.

******

As John helps us load our bags onto the bus on our final morning in Ireland, I return the copy of the archaeological magazine that he’d handed to me a couple of nights earlier, with instructions to read a particular article (he’s been handing out books and scholarly magazines to all of us at various points during the trip; if we don’t get around to reading them he has no problem describing their contents and explaining their relevance). He points out the pockmarks on the otherwise pristine building we’re standing in front of; they were made by British bullets during the Easter Rising, while Constance Gore-Booth Markewicz and her comrades held their ground inside (during the course of the trip, I’ve noticed that John, and many of the other Irish people that I meet, gossip about the country’s historical figures and writers as if they are contemporaries). The pockmarks are not something that I would not have noticed on my own, and it’s a shock to see such tangible evidence of what I’d only read about, casually pointed out, in the bright early-morning light and only a few feet away.

At the airport, John tells us that he’ll come inside to say goodbye to everyone as soon as he finds a place to park the bus. Once we get inside, however, it’s obvious that he will never be able to find us among the aisles of ticket desks. He’s gone again. I imagine that he’ll get rid of the bus, go home, fix himself something to eat, and sit down to catch up on his reading.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008