That night, after our dinner of Lancashire hot pot, as we fell into our scuzzy bed, the music started. It transpired that our outhouse was right next to a disco bar, which really only got into its stride at about one in the morning. Fantastic if you’re a party animal. Not so great if you’re on your holiers with a view to a rest. We lay awake all night, hysterical from sleep deprivation, feeling our intestines spasm in rhythm with the bass line.
The following morning, we had no choice but to go to the hotel on the hill for the newcomers’ meeting, to see if the bag had turned up, even though we wanted everyone to know that we would never normally go to a newcomers’ meeting. I’d hate people to think I had any truck with ‘Traditional Greek Evenings’ or bingo nights.
Himself had no summer clothes to change into, and as he sweated up the hill in his jeans and sweatshirt, cheeky cockney chappie Warren passed on his bike. ‘Warm enough for you, mate?’ he roared and laughed so much he swerved and nearly fell into the ditch.
Of the bag there was no news. It had gone truly AWOL. What should we do? He couldn’t go round in his jeans for the entire week.
‘You’ll ’afta buy stuff,’ Warren suggested. ‘Keep receipts, and claim it back on your insurance.’
Clammy dread flushed down my body as I thought of our lean bundle of travellers’ cheques. There was no room for going over budget on this holiday.
‘Do you… ?’ I could barely bring myself to ask. ‘Do you… you know, advance money for that kind of thing?’
‘You’re joking, intcha, luv?’ Warren convulsed. ‘What do you fink we are? Nat bleeding West?’
My credit card had no room on it – in other words, it was about two hundred quid over the official limit – but I’d cannily noticed that none of the stores in the town had electronic tills. Which meant I could buy clothes for Himself with my flexible friend, without my card being cut up in front of me. (Not the first time it would have happened, and doubtless not the last.) Of course, there’d be armed guards waiting to greet me and throw me in a debtors’ prison on my return to Gatwick, but what could I do? Round the shops we went and bought him shorts, T-shirts, sunglasses, togs and everything the well-dressed man requires for a sun holiday. But we needn’t have bothered. It began to rain.
Himself took it hard. ‘I’ve been to Greece about twenty times,’ he said tearfully. ‘And it’s never rained before.’
He gave me a funny look and I realized he was wondering if I was some sort of jinx. I began to worry that our relationship might not survive the holiday.
Apart from fleeting chip-butty forays, we spent four days trapped in the tellyless outhouse. The nights we passed sniping at each other, cotton wool in our ears as we went quietly mad from the music. The bag never turned up, and by the time we went home we’d cheered up at the thought of taking the insurance company to the cleaners and spending the proceeds on a weekend in Barcelona. ‘They’ll rue the day they ever stitched us up with the compulsory insurance,’ we laughed, tentatively friends again.
As we got off the plane I had a quick look around for the posse of policemen and Alsatians waiting to arrest me after my credit-card frenzy. No sign. But our gaze was inexorably drawn to a pile of bags thrown up against a wall. There, in the thick of things, shimmering with a kind of dynamic stillness, was something we recognized. No, surely not! It couldn’t be… But it was. Our bag. Our bloody bag. The trip to Barcelona wobbled, wavered and melted.
Reluctantly, we approached the Prodigal-son luggage and pulled it from the pile. The stamps and labels all over it indicated that it had spent the week living it up in Montego Bay.
‘Lucky bastard,’ I said, with grudging admiration. ‘Come on. Let’s go home.’
First published in Irish Tatler, July 1998.
Aerodrama
In the late sixties, when I was very young and living in Cork, there wasn’t afternoon television or Nintendos or McDonald’s. The shops shut resolutely at five o’clock on Saturday evening and remained that way until Monday morning. Which meant that of a Sunday we had to make our own entertainment. This usually involved a drive, but my father was a man of vision and our Sunday-afternoon, nuclear-family jaunt in the Morris Minor was no ordinary affair – my dad’s idea of a really top-notch Sunday afternoon was to drive out to Cork airport and look at the planes.
In those far-off forgotten days, Cork wasn’t the cosmopolitan metropolis that it is today, and had about three planes a week taking off from its airport. Nevertheless, I can still remember the breath-inhibiting excitement. The airport seemed a model of space-age modernity: all gleaming floors and high, echoey ceilings. I liked nothing better than standing at an enormous plate-glass window and looking out at a sleek, white, metal bird. I’d stare till I nearly went blind, trying to see through the little portholes, desperate for a gawk at the unbearably glamorous people within. Convinced that every man jack of them was carrying hard-shell vanity cases, wearing Grace Kelly suits and pillbox hats, fur coats slung casually over their shoulders, quaffing champagne and having arch and witty conversations with their travelling companions.
‘Will I ever go on a plane?’ I plaintively asked my father.
‘You will of course,’ he promised. ‘If you get your long division right.’
Like I said, a man of vision.
And, as it happens, he was bang on the money. I did get my long division right and, after a brief spell on the dole, then another brief spell waitressing, landed the job in London as an accounts clerk. Initially, any time I wanted to come home to Ireland, it was a boat-and-train job. Flying was so expensive, it was just out of the question. Then, in the late eighties, a couple of airlines started a price war and suddenly air travel became accessible to the likes of me.
But they say you should never meet your heroes. Because somewhere between the late sixties and the late eighties, flying lost its glamorous lustre and just became a stress-laden means of getting from A to B.
Nowadays my blood pressure rockets any time I’ve to fly somewhere and it starts at the check-in desk. Under normal circumstances it takes me thirty seconds to check in. I just hand over my ticket, rattle off, ‘Yes, I packed it myself, no, it hasn’t been left unattended, no, no one has asked me to carry anything for them in my baggage, apart from that nice man in the balaclava.’ ‘Window or aisle?’ they ask me. ‘I couldn’t care less,’ I reply. Then they hand over my boarding card and Bob is our respective uncles. But it’s not so simple for the people I always end up queuing behind. No matter how hard I try, I invariably pick the wrong check-in desk. I see a neat little queue made up of a mild-looking woman and a couple of men travelling alone and I position myself behind them, shunning the queues spilling over with squabbling extended-family units. But, lo and behold, just as the mild-looking woman gets to the check-in desk, she is joined by the eighteen people she’s travelling with, who’ve been hiding, just out of sight, until now. They’re usually flying as far as New Zealand or Borneo and, as well as their forty-nine pieces of luggage, they also want to check in a set of golf-clubs, a pram, and six thirty-foot canoes. It takes hours to set up all the connecting flights – Dublin to London to Singapore to Auckland to Dunedin – the check-in person usually has to go away and consult with a colleague in a back office. And nothing fills me with as much dread as the sight of her clipclipping her way down the departures hall. Eventually she comes back, and it takes hours more to label their luggage, then everyone gets their boarding card and I’m frantic with relief. But just as I shuffle forward, one of them turns back and casually asks, ‘Any chance of a vegan meal?’ That usually starts an avalanche of special requests – extra leg-room, a sodium-free dinner, a tour of the cockpit – and these things take time to sort out. Meanwhile, I seethe and fret behind them, convinced I’m going to miss the plane.
Not that I need worry. The flights I’m booked on are, without exception, delayed. But at least I now understand the double-speak on airport departure boards and can have a nice time idling around the duty-free (wha
t’s left of it). When ‘GO TO GATE 23’ flashes, it means ‘The plane you’ll eventually be getting on has just left Dublin and is on its way to London. Where it’ll turn around and come back to Dublin and then you can get on.’ ‘now boarding’ means ‘Your plane has just left London and is on its way back to Dublin.’ ‘last call’ means ‘Your plane has just landed in Dublin and we’ll be ready for boarding in about fifteen minutes.’ ‘FLIGHT CLOSED’ means ‘Now boarding.’ ‘FLIGHT DEPARTED’ means ‘Come on! Hurry! If you run, we’ll let you on.’
Eventually, the glorious time for boarding rolls around. I march joyously down the metal corridor, waving my boarding card, then come screeching to a halt as a businessman in the first row stands in the aisle and ponderously arranges his possessions. First he takes off his jacket, folds it neatly, smooths it flat, then places it in the overhead bin. I can feel the queue building up behind me, streeling all the way back up the metal corridor. Then he takes his briefcase, opens it, takes some papers out of it, places the papers on his seat, spends a moment staring thoughtfully at nothing in particular, then slowly moves to put the case in the overhead bin. By this time the queue is stretching way beyond the gate, down past Bewleys and out into the duty-free. With tortuous caution he carefully places the case on top of his jacket and looks as though he might sit down and let me and the rest of the plane past him. The relief is enormous, but, no! Wait! He’s forgotten he needs a pen from his jacket pocket! Out comes the briefcase and down comes the jacket. He fiddles around in the pockets until he eventually finds what he’s looking for, then the whole folding scenario begins afresh. At this stage, the queue has snaked out of the duty-free, past the electronic, bag-checking yokie, into the departures area and on out into the car-park. I’m told it was tough travelling on the coffin ships, but at times like this, I feel I’d rather take my chances!
First published in Irish Tatler, September 1999.
’Nam Flashbacks
I’d never been to Vietnam before, but as the plane circled over dense foliage, emerald-bright paddy fields, graceful palm trees, their blades silver in the sunlight, and patient-faced, sloe-eyed girls working in the fields, I had a powerful sense of recognition. All that was missing was a chopper hovering overhead in the hard, blue sky and half a dozen green berets, climbing down a rope and up to no good.
It’s impossible to avoid the war in Vietnam. No sooner had we landed in Ho Chi Minh than a commotion broke out in the seats behind us: a gang of fatigue-clad Australian lads doing their Apocalypse Now-revisited tour were getting very excited about the enormous anti-aircraft guns alongside the runway. There was much shouting about ‘Gooks’, ‘The horror’ and ‘Tour of dooty’. And great was their disappointment when they saw steps being wheeled towards the plane – they’d hoped that they’d be allowed to disembark by abseiling down a rope instead.
And so to passport control. I’ve never encountered bureaucracy like Vietnamese bureaucracy. Even before we’d left Ireland we’d had to fill in a million forms, then a million more on the plane, and our first glimpse of Ho Chi Minh’s immigration wasn’t exactly encouraging. What looked like a twelve-year-old boy dressed up in his dad’s army uniform was processing us. His hat was jammed low over his eyes – or maybe it was just miles too big for him. Either way, he cut a strangely intimidating figure.
The heat was indescribable as, with tortuous slowness, he worked his way through the queue. Suddenly he jerked his head up from his desk and directed a stream of high-pitched, screechy invective at us. We all made What-the-? faces at each other. Then the brat started semaphoring narrowness with his hands and suddenly we understood – the queue was getting too messy for his liking. Shuffling so that we were standing neatly behind each other – even the Aussie lads in their fatigues and buzz-cuts did as they were told – we muttered under our breaths, very under our breaths, about how a little bit of power was a dangerous thing.
Finally it was my turn and I staggered to the counter, buckling under the weight of my documentation. Sullenly, me laddo flicked through several of the forms, without paying them much heed. Then, without any warning, he screamed, ‘Whe’e you stay? Whe’e you stay?’ I felt like directing his attention to the hundred or so forms in front of him, and saying that if he bothered his arse looking at any of them he’d find the name and address of my hotel on just about every page. Then I took a look at the machine-gun which hung off his arm and meekly recited the whereabouts of my hotel. He glared at me from beneath the peak of his hat, then stamped something on a bit of paper – I was in!
And I have to say he was the first and last unpleasant person I met in Vietnam.
A short half-hour later and Himself was also in. We traipsed out to where the humidity hit us like a flying brick. And the people! I’d never seen so many. Ever. Bangkok, where we’d just come from, was as empty as Connemara by comparison.
We eventually found our guide, an earnest young man called Binh, who directed us to a white Hiace van. And then began the journey from hell. Nobody paid any attention to what side of the road they drove on, they just pleased themselves, and a sea of motorbikes flew at us, swerving out of the way only at the last second. It felt like a particularly dangerous game of Space Invaders and was almost enough to distract me from my first impressions of Ho Chi Minh – which were of low-rise, shabby, faded French grace married to overcrowded, Asian pragmatism; crumbling villas with wrought-iron balconies housing ten times as many people as they had in colonial times; street names a strange hybrid of Vietnamese and French; baroque municipal buildings that wouldn’t be out of place in Paris; occasional seventies, Soviet-style monuments, their greys and browns a brutal contrast to the ice-cream pastels of the French architecture. There were no skyscrapers, no silver towers reaching for the blue, nothing modern. Everything appeared old, down-at-heel, neglected. The pavements were like dotted lines, disappearing and lapsing into mud, then reappearing.
The ground floors of some of the French villas had been turned into shops, but without recourse to strip lighting or perky displays. They looked more like something you might come across in the Wild West, selling big sacks of loose produce – rice, maybe? Or grains? On the streets, stalls sold manky-looking fruit, misshapen and peculiar the way organic stuff is – though I suspected that the last thing it was in this casualty of chemical warfare was organic. Suddenly I felt a long, long way from Marks & Spencer.
And yet… our hotel was beautiful. The guidebook had warned that rats were not out of the question in Vietnamese hotel rooms, which had made me want to cancel the trip altogether. But this was a modern hotel lobby – all pale, curving wood and smart, uniformed receptionists – which wouldn’t have been out of place in London or New York. Maybe, for an authentic ’nam experience, I should have plumped for the rats and not this Western luxury, but feck it. You can only do what you can do.
We proceeded to reception – and then something happened which was to repeat itself again and again during my time in Vietnam. The girl checking us in looked up from her computer, clocked me for the first time and immediately choked with involuntary laughter. She got it together fairly quickly but for the rest of the procedure avoided looking at me, even while handing over my room key, and all the time her mouth twitched with barely contained laughter.
Fair enough. Whatever floats your boat, I thought, anxiously making for the lift and trying to ignore the silent convulsions of the liftman.
Our room was on the sixth floor, high enough to be able to spot the oily brown waters of the Saigon River in the distance. We flung our bags on the bed and straight away went out on to the humid streets, which teemed with people. Official estimates put the city’s population at four million. Unofficially it’s seven million. And even at first glance an astonishing number seemed to be amputees.
As we strolled around, every step that we took was followed by high-pitched, girlish hee-hee-hees (even from the men). They were so open about it and were clearly so amused that it was impossible to be offended.
&
nbsp; Though there are almost no cars in Saigon, there are plenty of cyclos and literally thousands of motorbikes – all weighed low with people. On one I counted five people – Mum, Dad and three gorgeous children. And wouldn’t you think that if there were only motorbikes and cyclos, it would be easy to cross the roads? But it was impossible – especially because no one paid the traffic lights any heed. Anxiously we stood as the lights changed from red to green back to red again and motorbikes continued to whip past us, covering us with dust. Enlightenment came in the form of a tiny woman, about four foot high and three stone, bearing several times her body weight in the two baskets swinging from her shoulder bar. Before our astonished eyes she stepped out into the dusty road in her shin-length pants, bare feet and coolie hat and didn’t look right or left. The motorbikes roared and swerved easily around her and, without breaking pace in any way, she continued her serene journey to the other side.
We nodded knowingly at each other. So that’s how you do it.
That night, we sat in the hotel’s roof-top bar and looked over the city, and it took a moment to figure out what was wrong with the skyline – no neon, no advertising. There were lights from houses, but otherwise a peculiar absence of colour that seemed almost unnatural.
An early start the following day, as we drove out to the countryside to see the Cu-chi tunnels. Beneath a pretty forest, these are a vast network (250 km) of underground tunnels and chambers from which the Vietcong conducted their guerrilla war against the Americans. They had everything the well-equipped guerrilla outfit might need: sleeping quarters, a restaurant, even – God help us – an operating theatre. A tiny, insanely cheerful man showed us around with gusto, leaping in and out of hidden entrances and dragging us below ground to point out the hideous traps that awaited the US soldiers.