Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

My Twelfth

I go to London about once a year, usually on business. It is always a new experience - at my age I’ll never really get to know the place, nor the people - but it is exhilarating and I love the cosmopolitan crowds thronging the streets, the variety of people, the hustle and the bustle. I love being alone on top of a mountain but I exult in being surrounded in a city.

I often wonder at how this small maritime country of England ruled so much of the world. Of course, the political and economic system, and the novel introduction of ‘underwriting’ the expenses involved in the search for trade and overseas markets (which was first thought up in Lloyd’s Thames-side coffee house in 1688), certainly facilitated England’s commercial and colonial expansion and supremacy. But there had to be also something in the character of their leaders - confidence, egotism, adventurism, self-righteousness, ruthlessness - which played a major contribution to the establishment of the British Empire.

Regardless of the explanation, the outcome was that throughout the world tiny garrisons could subjugate vast submissive populations who were robbed of their wealth and resources. It was at a cost of extreme humiliation, unhappiness, suffering and death. Peoples also enslaved themselves by believing their conquerors to be superior. Much of the progress of freedom struggles, besides including physically confronting the enemy, can be measured in terms of how people shake off that debilitating psyche through which they have convinced themselves that they are second-class.

When you consider the centrality and contribution of England to much of the world’s history, its own colourful and dramatic domestic history; the fact that English is the universal language; when you think of the big names that stand out in literature and politics (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Cromwell, Victoria, Dickens, Hardy, Churchill); when you look at its capital’s impressive and awesome architecture (symbols of might, stability, ingenuity); it is understandable that outsiders would feel small, crushed, and intimidated by Brittania.

So, here I was in London, over the Twelfth, jumping on and off tube trains like an old hand and giving directions to those who were lost, including a group of Japanese tourists looking for St Paul’s Cathedral.

Whilst in London I did some research in the Imperial War Musuem into the First World War for a book I have almost finished and which will be published in October. I met with a theatre producer and director who are interested in staging a play I adapted from my novel, ‘The Wrong Man’. And, on Thursday night, I went to the ‘The Guardian’ newspapers’ summer party which included among the guests a sprinkling of cabinet ministers, MPs and media celebrities. I met with a few people and took issue with their stance on the peace process but mainly I kept out of the way, drank apple juice, observed and left early!

All of my best times in London have been spent on the same old street. If you are a book lover and haven’t seen the film ‘84 Charing Cross Road’, get it out on video. It tells the story of a lifelong correspondence between a struggling New York writer, Helene Hanff (played by Anne Bancroft) and a London book dealer, Frank Doel (played by Anthony Hopkins), based at No. 84, before, during and after World War II. When Hanff, who sends food parcels to the staff during the war, eventually gets the opportunity to visit the London bookshop, Doel has died and so they never meet.

Charing Cross Road is a bibliophile’s dream. As well as new bookshops there are dozens of fusty second-hand stores where down spiral stairs and in the ill-lit basement you can discover long-lost treasures. I always bring home with me more books than I will ever have time to read, or books that I enjoyed, but they are there in reserve as little presents to friends whom I hope will read and love them.

This time, among others, I got ‘Crowds and Power’ by Elias Canetti who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Reading it on the plane back to Belfast I came across this claim, which, if wrong, I have no doubt, some gaelgeoir will correct. Canetti writes: ‘Some people imagine their dead, or certain of them, as fighting hosts. The Celts of the Scottish Highlands have a special word for the host of the dead: sluagh, meaning ‘spirit-multitude’… The word gairm means shout or cry, and sluagh-ghairm was the battle-cry of the dead. This word later became ‘slogan’. The expression we use for the battle-cries of our modern crowds derives from the Highland hosts of the dead.’

Finally, another book I bought was ‘Galway At The Races’ by the essayist Robert Lynd (whose grave in the City Cemetery Tom Hartley found and brought myself and Michael Longley). Lynd wrote the introduction to James Connolly’s ‘Labour in Irish History’. From his house in London James Joyce and Nora Barnacle were married. One of Lynd’s favourite stories was of a stranger to Belfast who, seeing a crowd gathered after a street accident, asked one of them what had happened. ‘Afallafallaffalarri,’ he was told. The stranger repeated his question and was given the same answer, which he thought was in Gaelic until someone explained that, ‘A fella fell off a lorry.’

Not ‘a chap’ but ‘afalla’!

< Prev ... Next >

[ back ]