In High Germany Read online

  DERMOT BOLGER

  IN HIGH GERMANY

  Born in Dublin in 1959, Dermot Bolger is a novelist, poet and playwright. His novels include The Journey Home, Father’s Music and Valparaiso Voyage. His plays include The Lament for Arthur Cleary and April Bright. He also devised the bestselling collaborative novels Finbar’s Hotel and Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel.

  IN HIGH GERMANY

  First published by GemmaMedia in 2009.

  GemmaMedia

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  Boston MA 02109 USA

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  Copyright © 1999, 2009 Dermot Bolger.

  This edition of In High Germany is published by arrangement with

  New Island Books Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This text of In High Germany is a specially abridged and revised version of the author’s stage play of the same name, first performed by the Gate Theatre, Dublin. This text is not for public performance. The performance text is available in Dermot Bolger: Plays 1 (published by Methuen in the UK and New Island in Ireland, 2000). No performance may be staged unless a licence is obtained in advance from the author’s agents, Curtis Brown, 4th floor, Haymarket House, 28/29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4SP.

  All poems at the end of the book (except ‘Approaching Forty’) are taken from Taking My Letters Back: New and Selected Poems by Dermot Bolger (New Island, 1998) andare now reproduced here by permission of the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover design by Artmark

  12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN: 978-1-934848-01-2

  Library of Congress Preassigned Control Number (PCN) applied for

  OPEN DOOR SERIES

  Patricia Scanlan

  Series Editor

  CONTENTS

  IN HIGH GERMANY

  A POET’S NOTEBOOK

  IN HIGH GERMANY

  You are eleven now, Son. All you think of every day is football, football and more football. Upsetting the old man in the flat below us by kicking ball on the grass, in the car-park spaces. Anywhere you can find room in this apartment block.

  How very un-German of you not to obey the house rule about making noise. The afternoon hours when one is not allowed to use the Hoover or play the radio too loud. Their neat German laws. It was never like that at home in Dublin, with kids shouting night and day. But Dublin will never be your home and it is no longer mine.

  I am Irish in Germany. You are half-Irish in Germany and half-German in Ireland. Maybe it is even harder for you than for me, in no man’s land. Your German accent and your Irish looks. When you grow up, perhaps you will play football for some big German team. But if you ever become a star, I will make sure that the football shirt you wear will be the green one of Ireland.

  That was the shirt I was wearing twelve years ago, when I first heard, in a phone call, that you were going to be born. Sometimes now you ask me about that. About the last time I saw Ireland play. Not in Dublin, but here in Germany, when I followed them around in Euro 1988. I saw them play England and Russia and Holland.

  That was the last week of my youth or at least of my old life. The last time I stood among lots of Irish voices. The last day I woke without thinking of myself in a new way – as a father.

  Some nights still, when I am getting a train in the main station, I remember that night back in 1988. Holland had just beaten Ireland. I came back here to Hamburg without phoning your mother to tell her I was coming.

  It was late at night. The station was empty when the train got in from the town where the Dutch game had been played.

  I remember the cold light on the platform. I sat down on a bench. I threw my bag and sleeping bag on the ground. I lit cigarette after cigarette, kicking an old can with my feet. I was still wearing my Irish shirt and scarf. But it took me two hours of sitting there before I was able to leave my old life behind. Before I went home to face your mother (or my girlfriend, as she was then), knowing that you were growing inside her.

  I still wake up at night, reliving that day. Wishing we could have hung on for a draw against Holland and made it into the semi-finals of Euro ’88. I remember how the road into the football ground was paved with loose stones. There were almost as many loose stones as there were Dutch skinheads to throw them at us if Holland lost.

  I thought about the stones a lot during the match, when I could think of anything at all. Sweating with the heat. Sweating with the fear. My throat raw from shouting. My hands raised, calling:

  “Ireland! Ireland! Ireland!”

  How would we ever get out of that ground alive? Away from the Dutch skinheads if Ireland held on for a draw? But really I didn’t care how we got away. I would have faced every rock if we could have hung on for a draw. If I could have come back to Hamburg that night, not alone after losing, but bringing my old friends here for the semi-final to be played in this city.

  If I could only have arrived at the train station that night with Shane and Mick and still felt that I was part of my old life with my old friends.

  The only way to reach the ground for the Dutch game was to take these tiny trains. More like trams really. With only room for maybe forty people, packed up tight.

  Around fifty of us packed into one, on the street where we had been drinking the local beer. We took off for the game. The first stop was fine. No one got on and no one got off. The second stop was the problem. There were sixty of them. Dutch skinheads. The real McCoy. These boys were mean bastards. Bald heads painted orange. Boots as thick as the walls of Limerick jail. Sticks in their fists. Eyes like hard sweets from Bray that would break your teeth.

  They didn’t all get in. Just as many as would fit between us and the roof. One of them had his face pressed against mine. He had been drinking. I looked at him in fear, then did what every Irish man does when in doubt abroad. I raised my fist in the air and slagged the Brits.

  “If you hate the Queen of England clap your hands,

  If you hate the Queen of England clap your hands,

  If you hate the Queen of England,

  Hate the Queen of England,

  If you hate the Queen of England clap your hands.”

  The Dutch skinheads smiled, banged their sticks on the roof and sang along. Would we ever get to the football ground? The train stopped and started. Nobody getting on or off. Every Irishman trying to think of new songs to keep the skinheads happy.

  “The Queen Mother is a man, do-da, do-da,

  The Queen Mother is a man, do-da, do-da, day.”

  “Yes, do-da-do-da day!” said the Dutch skinhead beside me. He took out a cigarette and asked me for a light.

  I took out a cigarette lighter from my pocket and began to raise it. Then I remembered. I had two cigarette lighters. A plain white one and another I had found in a bar after the England game a few days before, with a big Union Jack on the side. I closed my eyes, held the lighter up and flicked it.

  No thump in the face came. I opened my eyes. The lighter was snow white. And they say there is no God, eh?

  You often ask me why I love to hang around train stations. What I find so interesting in them. You see, growing up in Germany, Son, you would not know how different it is from Dublin and from Ireland when I was your age.

  Trains have no magic for you. You cross Hamburg in them easily. Without thinking. You know the web of stations. Where to change trains to get anywhere. Back then in Ireland it was so different.

  I have always had a dream about making a film set in a railway station. It would s
tar a secret agent from some small country.

  The film opens with him going to an empty flat in Russia to rob secret papers. He gets hit over the head. The picture goes into darkness. Followed by a blur of railway tracks until, all of a sudden, he wakes up.

  OK, he knows he is in a railway station waiting room. But where? That is the question. There is just silence. Nobody is about. The glow of dawn at the tiny window above the wooden seat. Could he be in France? The USA? New Zealand? Finland? Cuba? Are there armed police outside? A dead blonde on the platform? Naked except for a fur coat and a tattoo on her bottom.

  He jumps up onto the seat. Throws the window open. Puts his head out and sees them … sheep! Nothing but sheep. Sheep, sheep and more sheep! The camera moves back to show the sign over his head for LIMERICK JUNCTION!

  Limerick Junction. That was how I always saw train stations. Old buildings hidden at the back end of small towns. One train in the morning. One train at night. Miss it and you were stranded.

  And, don’t ask me how, even if you were only going from Dublin to Drogheda you still always found yourself sitting on your backside for two hours in Limerick Junction.

  We saw every station on Sunday mornings when I was growing up. On our way to Cork, Limerick, Dundalk, Athlone, Sligo. Once, after Waterford beat Bohemians, the team bus broke down. The whole team had to come back on the train with us.

  “What are you doing here?” one of the fans shouted at the manager in the queue.

  “I’m getting a train ticket for the team.”

  “You’ll be doing well,” the fan told him. “They’re not worth the price of one!”

  Every station was the same. Sleepy porters in big hats shuffling out with a flag to wave the train on. Scratching their backsides at the same time. And always the rusty metal bridge. The name of the town laid out in white stones in a flower bed. The platform like a ghost town until ten minutes before the train was due. We would hang around the platform to watch the young Civil Servants and the Library Assistants, who had come home for the weekend. They were being sent back to bedsit-land in Dublin by Mammy and Daddy, with clean underwear in their bags.

  Not that we always had it so easy, mind you. Limerick was a hole. Athlone the same. Every local thug and skinhead wanting to prove they were as tough as the skinheads in Dublin by trying to kick our heads in.

  “Welcome to the Irish countryside,” Shane would say, as we ran down back lanes for our lives. “They are just letting us know how glad they are to see us!”

  It’s funny, Son, the way train stations always interest me. Maybe it is because of all the old photos. My mother had lots of them in an old biscuit tin at home. Meeting Daddy off the train at Westland Row. Seeing Daddy back onto the train at Westland Row.

  How many times were passers-by asked to snap them standing on that platform? Awkward together in public like any Irish husband and wife. Not hugging or anything. Always with a little space left between them. That little space shrunk and grew in Westland Row. The train wheels bringing them back to England, chanting over and over …

  “You will never go back, you will never go back!”

  Black ’57. That was the year when the building game collapsed in Ireland. All the jobs suddenly gone. I was one year of age. A tiny bundle of love. Daddy was a shadow coming and going, from London and York and Leeds. The postman bringing a registered letter with crisp English banknotes every Friday. Daddy was a black travel bag carried in and out of Westland Row every few months. Bottles of Guinness for him and a Babysham for my mother on the night before he went back across the water. And always he would sing the same song:

  “And still I live in hope to see, The Holy Ground once more.”

  It would have been so much easier for him, I know, to have just picked up his one-year-old bundle of love and left through Westland Row for a new life in England. All his brothers and sisters already had. But Da refused to. He had guts, my da. I’d say that for him. Guts and dreams.

  Dreams that I would grow up under an Irish flag, knowing that I belonged somewhere. A free person in a free land. Not that he would have said it that way, or any way, for that matter. He didn’t speak much, my da. Just worked till he dropped dead a few weeks after the US factory gave him the brush-off in 1983.

  My mother and father’s stories were like the best old films. They always began and ended in railway stations. So does the story of that last week I spent with my friends following the Irish team in Germany in 1988. Mick and Shane and me. But not Limerick Junction.

  Real stations this time, or at least big train stations. Hamburg and Essen. Hamburg in hope, the day before the England match. Essen in farewell after the Dutch one. Not places that we ever dreamt we would wind up in when we first met, Mick and Shane and me. All of us five years of age with short pants. Off to school for the first time. Pissing ourselves with fright. I think Mick spoke for the first time when we were seven. It was also the first time Shane paused for breath. Shane was small and hard, with the same waddle as a duck as he lunged in after the ball. He got more kicks off other kids than he ever got at the ball.

  Captain Shane we called him, or, as he said himself, “Captain Shane Birds-Eye and his cod pieces.”

  It took me ten years to get the joke. Mick said that he figured it out when he was six, but he just never got around to laughing. He never got around to saying anything. Our teacher, O’Brien, could ask him a question, hop up on the desk with canes, whips and daggers. Mick would just look back at him with the same stupid stare.

  O’Brien never hit him. He would turn away in defeat and make some remark about planting Mick with the other vegetables in the fields. But as soon as O’Brien’s back was turned, without even looking down, Mick would mutter the right answer to me. Mick knew everything except his letters. He just couldn’t seem to write things down.

  How could I even start to tell you about that school yard in Dublin, Son? It was like something from a hundred years ago. A big row of cement slabs. Weeds growing between them. Seagulls flying overhead as we were marched into lines at the end of break.

  O’Brien, our teacher, would stand on the top step. Bark out orders in Irish. Telling us to lift our hands to touch the shoulder of the boy in front and then to drop them again.

  “Suas, seas, suas, seas.”

  O’Brien always watched over us, with a strap in his hand like it was part of him. Maybe he slept at night with it still in his fist.

  A long wooden bench ran all the way down the shed where we sat to eat. Talking. Joking. Laughing. Eating lunch quickly. Waiting to get out there on the concrete, among the litter of bread and papers. Sandals. Boots. Shoes. Runners. Kicking out, rushing after that one dirty plastic football.

  Forty forwards with no backs or goalkeepers. Coats piled up as goalposts. And there we would be, Shane and Mick and me, in the thick of it. Kicking, shoving, together, united. Till we were caught by the blast of O’Brien’s whistle.

  “Suas, seas, suas, seas …”

  Touch the shoulder of the boy in front of you in the line. Look at his short hair. Watch out for O’Brien pacing behind. With your legs still tingling. Your breath still panting from that game. Your feet itching for the last, perfect kick, to score in your head the cup-winning goal for Bohs.

  Instead, O’Brien took us down the field and stood us in front of a ball.

  “This is a ball! A what, boy?” he shouted at me.

  “A ball, sir,” I replied.

  “In Irish!” he shouted.

  “Liathróid, a Mháistir.”

  “And what do you do with it, boy?”

  “Kick it, sir.”

  “And what else, boy?”

  “Head it, sir?”

  He roared at us then. “You pick it up, boy! Pick it up! Pick it up! Pick it up!”

  I reached for it and he screamed:

  “Not off the ground! Use your foot. Use your foot off the ground, boy! Do you not know the first rule of Gaelic? Now run with it. Not more than four steps at a time.
Solo it! Solo it! Solo it!”

  We ran over the grass, trying to bounce the ball and solo it. Forced to play a game that felt foreign to us, until O’Brien finally screamed at me in fury:

  “What arse end of the bog are you from at all, boy?”

  “The street, sir, the city street.”

  He had a small problem with Mick and Shane and me. O’Brien could not accept that we lived with other hopes and dreams to his. The notes in his teacher-training book did not include the likes of us – or city streets or soccer.

  “A Brit sport. An English game played only by Englishmen,” he would scream, if any of us dared to speak of an English football team. Or were seen heading a football on the street outside the school. Soccer was like something evil and un-Irish. It had to be stamped out of our lives. O’Brien, with his strap, felt that he was the man to do it.

  Not that it mattered much. He was on the way out, O’Brien. This is 1966 I am talking about. Things were looking up for Ireland by then. Sean Lemass was playing poker at night over Cafollas’ chip-shop in O’Connell Street. Westland Row had been renamed Pearse Street Station. And we clapped hands till Daddy came home from England for the last time.

  The new US factory with the gold sign over the gate was where Daddy was heading. His new blue uniform. The odd feel of him coming home for his tea every evening. His travel bag hung from a nail in the shed where he took out his spade. He joined with all the other country voices calling to each other across the hedges in the long back gardens.

  “Call them spuds, eh? It’s the Kerr’s Pinks you want.”

  All the men on my street were up from Galway, Mayo and Kerry. They lived for the country Gaelic scores and The Walton’s music radio programme.