Originally published in the New York Times: Dec 20, 1981. pg. A.9
By HUGH LEONARD
Soon after I had ended a 10-year exile and returned to my native Dalkey, I wrote a television play called ''The Virgins'' - an account of the exploits of three male celibates of this parish. In our town a secret is a crime against nature, and a few days before the transmission date one of the three lifted his face from the surface of a pint of Guinness and said to the barman, ''I hear tell that Leonard has put the lads and me into a play on the goggle-box.''
The barman, who already knew but has the cunning of a papal nuncio, merely looked astonished and said, ''Do you tell me?'' ''True as God, next Sunday they're showing it.'' The man submerged his nose in the pint like a fish that has been too long out of water. When next heard his voice was wistful. ''A pity we'll miss it. Sunday's our night for a jar in Finnegan's.''
He never did see the play. Being a real Dalkeyman - as distinct from a first-generation parvenu or runner-in - he will effortlessly set the world to rights, but is hanged if he will be at its beck and call. Discommoding yourself, he will tell you, is the kind of senseless jack-acting that gave Dinnie McCarthy the bad ticker, and, in any case, watching yourself on television might be classified in the town as a form of affectation.
There is an elderly woman who, whenever she sees me in the town, regards me with such venom that I cross the street. Last week, as I was collecting the newspapers, there was a growling noise at my elbow. She was muttering: ''Look at him, standing there with the cigar stuck in his gob. I know the kick up the behind his mother would give him.'' I am, by the way, 55.
The point of both anecdotes is that Dalkey seems to exist out of ordinary time: a kind of Irish Brigadoon without the mists, the feyness or the tendency to disappear. By rights, it should be off in the fastnesses of Kerry or in a fold of the Slieve Blooms; instead, it is on the southeast corner of Dublin Bay, nine miles from Grafton Street.
A visitor, arriving first in Dublin, will ricochet from the Book of Kells to the mummies in St. Michan's Vault, then go tearing off pell-mell to the lakes of Killarney, pausing to plant a kiss on the Blarney Stone before rampaging through Connemara and ending up at the Bunratty medieval banquet. If his aim is to see all of Ireland, he can do so at a fraction of the energy and expense. A microcosm exists.
You board a No. 8 bus at Eden Quay and go juddering out to Ballsbridge, past the red-bricked embassies and the front gardens where the flowers observe a discreet protocol and the trees blush for a week in May. Farther on the sea is in view, with the hill of Howth across the bay, and if the one-ring circus is in residence at Booterstown a lone camel may be seen, grazing on a patch of slobland. Just up the road is Blackrock Park where there was a production of ''Much Ado About Nothing'' some years ago. It rained, allowing the local wags to apotheosize the occasion as ''Bad Day at Blackrock.''
Another four miles, and Dalkey Hill looms almost apologetically, with its castle - actually an old semaphore station that had delusions of grandeur - perched on the summit like holly on a pudding. The roads are decorously Edwardian. They amble sedately down to the sea, where James Joyce's martello tower overlooks the bathing place known as the Forty-foot, which until recently had a sign saying: ''Forty-foot men only.'' A final mile, and the town is yours.
Dalkey's main, and only, street looks as if it had started out with the best of intentions, like a drunk walking past a policeman. For a hundred yards it is irreproachable, marching as straight as a die between two 15th-century castles; then, perhaps distracted by Searson's pub to its right or The Queen's to its left, it lurches crookedly, tries to correct itself and staggers again. Finally, it pulls up short, dazed by the choice of The Club, The Arches or Dan Finnegan's. There are six pubs in all, which for an Irish small town is eremitical self-denial.
My own local, The Club, has an air of mild bohemianism, except at weekends when it resembles a combination of Carnival time in Rio and Easter Sunday in St. Peter's Square. Even in quieter moments, its conversationalists can be unpredictable. Only yesterday a lady sculptor told me, quite gratuitously, that she had tricked her doctor into giving her a spinal X-ray and discovered that one of her vertebrae was missing. ''Now,'' she said, ''if only I can somehow cod him into doing a brain scan, I'll be on the pig's back.'' At this point, another lady made a flanking attack, told me not to mind that bloody bore and proceeded to hold forth on the merits of acupuncture. Her husband, a jazz trombonist, kept wondering aloud - to thin air and to deaf ears - if Turk Murphy was still playing in Earthquake McGoon's in San Francisco.
Even to my eyes, which are afflicted with the belief that the past is yesterday, the town has changed. The aging corner boys, including my Uncle Sonny, no longer loaf at what was once Gilbey's Corner, their job-shy, begrudging eyes never missing the flick of a dog's tail the crooked length of Castle Street. They have gone to slouch against a celestial wall and spy on God.
There is an air of chic about the place, even if the only outward sign of change is that Findlater's, the family grocery, was taken over by Superquinn. The latter painted the clock on the front of the building a dingy orange and then had the temerity to be aggrieved when, quite properly, it self-destructed in disgust.
In what we call old God's time, dining out was unheard of. Now there are five restaurants tucked away behind the unchanged facades of what were hucksters' shops. These have given the town a notoriety, for if you were brought up on spuds and back bacon, your conscience never quite takes in its stride the decadence of rack of spring lamb and Chateau Lynch-Bages by candlelight.
The sense of disquiet is at its most acute during the phenomena described - no one knows why - as safari dinners. These occur on Sunday evenings and consist of perhaps 40 diners having appetizers in one restaurant, traipsing on foot to another for soup, to a third for a fish course, and so on. The procession, with everyone dressed to the nines, follows a piper winsomely attired in green jacket and saffron kilt. The chances are that between courses the gourmets will encounter a stream of worshipers leaving the church after evening devotions. You are surprised by an urge within yourself to look away from the churchgoers; otherwise you might catch the faintly mocking glance that reminds you of how you once lived in the alley lane with the behind out of your trousers. The leap from a two-room cottage with a privy in the back yard to a trim all-mod-con bungalow on Avondale Road was a mighty one, but the past still has you in its pocket.
From Castle Street, narrow roads wander like tendrils around the hill or to the sea. The town - or the village, as the Protestants call it - was, in my father's day, a stronghold of ''the quality,'' the Anglo-Irish, whose ivied houses molder behind high walls or around the far bend of unkempt avenues. They moved out from Dublin when the railway came, more than a century ago, to enjoy a feudal existence 30 minutes away from their factories and counting houses. Storekeepers, gardeners, maids and cooks, roadmakers and masons followed them and were followed in their turn. Therefore, a town. The ''quality'' died out, moved away or became integrated, lost among the mansions of the new affluence, but you may still trace their spoor along Victoria Road and Trafalgar Terrace and past houses with names that sang of empire: Khyber Pass, Kalafat and Jamrud. The native Irish, disinherited for so long, were quick to flourish their credentials: The house where my father worked for 54 years as gardener ceased to be ''Enderley'' and was re-christened ''Sancta Maria.''
Colimore Road winds down to the harbor and a view of Dalkey Island so theatrical as, at first sight, to resemble a backdrop. On second thought, you decide that it is an enormous floating set, built for a John Ford movie that was never made. A martello tower, one of a hundred along this coast, crowns the summit: a squat granite pepper pot still awaiting Bonaparte's men-o'-war. Beneath it is a ''holy'' well - ''fresh water in the middle of the sea'' my father would brag, as if he himself had dug it that morning -which was once supposed to cure diseases of the throat. Now, judging from the color of the water, it is more likely to cause them.
A few yards away are the ruins of a church supposedly built by the town's patron saint, St. Begnet. Like St. Patrick himself, St. Begnet may never have existed: There is even uncertainty as to whether he or she was male or female. No one bothers to argue about this: In Dalkey, when it is a question of sainthood, sex is hardly likely to have much relevance. The island, 400 yards offshore, is inhabited, year round, by wild goats and scuba divers. As I write, in a house opposite and on a gray November day, the former stare down inscrutably at the bobbing heads of the latter. Instead of the summer yachts and powerboats, a trawler heads for home.
The name Dalkey is Old Norse for ''island of thorns'' - a reminder of the spiked barricades that warded off Viking invaders. For centuries, merchantmen found safe anchorage between the island and the tiny harbor, and seven castles, of which three still exist, were built to guard their cargoes from pirates. When the River Liffey was dredged, it became possible for ships to sail into Dublin, and Dalkey's hour of stardom was past. Unperturbed, the town went back to sleep.
A few hundred yards from the harbor, a mild schizophrenia sets in. The granite walls of the town are behind you; now there are palm trees and Mediterranean villas. Even the roads have such names as Sorrento, Merano, Vico, in deference to a view that resembles a reversed negative of the Bay of Naples. Across Killiney Bay the Wicklow Mountains go tumbling out toward the sea: first, Carrick Gollogan, with its tower a disused smelting chimney; then the Greater Sugarloaf, doubling for Vesuvius, and its lesser sibling; finally, Bray Head, its cliffs sheer to the water. In Ireland, all our cygnets are swans. These are mere foothills; other, wilder mountains jostle from behind like less favored guests in a wedding photograph. In between, there is the Vale of Shanganagh, hemmed by the long crescent moon of Killiney Strand. Closer to hand is the Vico Road, a corniche with pink and slate-blue houses clinging to the hillside, and as the day ends the salt air carries the fragrance of nightscented stock.
Down to the left is what once gloried in the title of ''gentlemen's bathing place.'' Here, by way of proving the inviolability of the Victorian male, swimsuits were optional, and the tradition still persists. In my own youth, a brace of hussies - on a dare, perhaps - would peep down at us from the railway bank above the broken swimming pool and flee, shrieking at the horrendous sight of unclad males. Today, their daughters are likely to appear at the same vantage point, but carrying either placards reading ''Segregated bathing unfair to women'' or cameras equipped with 200-millimeter lenses.
Farther along the Vico, as it is called, there is a narrow and allbut-endless flight of stone steps known, because of their steepness, as the Cat's Ladder. The long toil upward is reminiscent of the Sisyphean climb of Laurel and Hardy toting a piano in ''The Music Box'' but at the summit you are facing Torca Cottage, where Bernard Shaw spent his youthful summers. A plaque on the wall quotes him to the effect that whereas Ireland's men are temporal, her hills are eternal.
The proof is all about. The climb continues along a grassy lane to the summit of Dalkey Hill and what is probably the most all-embracing view in Ireland. To the south are the fastnesses of Wicklow, where trout streams, mountain lakes, forests, miles of desolate bogland and the monastic ruins of Glendalough are an hour's car ride away. To the west - a dark pimple on the two-rock mountain -is the burnt-out husk of the Hellfire Club, while to the north the two-mile-long piers of Dun Laoghaire harbor are the arms of a gambler cradling his winnings. Dublin, a blur under its smoke, is beyond.
Beneath one's feet is an amphitheater of sheer cliffs, where a quarter of the hill was gouged to provide the granite for the piers two miles away. The stone was conveyed by an ''atmospheric railway.'' A pumping station moved the wagons by air pressure, and the route may be followed today along ''the metals,'' a lane-way that begins on the quarry floor and ends on the decorous tree-lined seafront of Dun Laoghaire.
There are other walks, trails that lead through rabbit woods and flowering gorse. The short, stubbly hill grass is so springy that it might be upholstered. You lie on it and see only the sky and a climbing 747 striking out for Shannon and New York. Then there is the stillness that comes at sunset, and it is time to return at a halftrot - the road itself is downhill - along Dalkey Avenue to the town. In short, it is a village for walkers and idlers. The traveler who merely likes to ''do'' a place will be out of it in half a day and on his way to Killarney or Connemara, his visual appetite glutted and nothing else. To know the town, he must loiter along a moss-crowned road, stand on tiptoe to peer into an abandoned garden, sit for an hour by the harbor wall or in Sorrento Park or eavesdrop in Castle Street.
A real traveler does not go to a place: He bides his hour until it visits him. Dalkey is an anomaly, neither suburb nor country town. It is uniquely itself, but typical of Ireland in one respect. Much disillusionment has been wreaked by travel brochures that rhapsodize over the friendliness of the Irish, when all the visitor is likely to receive is common civility. We keep our distance. A wariness of seeming quaint, of putting on a free show for the tourist who has been weaned on the colleens and boisterous rustics out of ''The Quiet Man'' has made us taciturn. The conversation in pubs, say the advertisements put out by the Tourist Board, is sparkling with epigrams. This is a fiction: What you get is one monologuist waiting for another monologuist to pause for breath. There are few aphorisms; mainly, there are anecdotes which become more maundering as the evening draws on. And the conversations are private.
If the visitor wishes to listen in, however, there is a way. An observation on the weather or the charms of the town will net him no more than a hearty ''Oh begod, you're right'' and a view of several backs as ranks are closed against the interloper. What you must do is ask a question that invites an opinion: advice, for example, on a place to eat locally. At once, someone will off-handedly suggest the Baroque, say, just around the corner. This, as far as the others are concerned, is fighting talk. Not at all, Michael Duffy will snort, explaining that Americans are renowned trenchermen. ''Leopold's is the place. Think of the amount of lamb they serve you. The plateful I got last week as near as dammit said 'baa' to me.''
Demarcation lines are now drawn. A bald accountant swears by Chez la Hiff. Mr. Duffy snorts that you cannot get a drink there, not even on the sly. (Except for hotels, few Irish eating places are licensed to sell hard liquor.) ''Look at the man,'' he says, waving at you. ''He's banjaxed from seeing the sights. What good is a glass of bloody sherry to him?'' A timid soul suggests yet a fourth restaurant and is shouted down. The food may be first-rate, but the owner is regarded as pushy and having a smell of himself - a cardinal sin. The debate rages, and if you never get a word in edgewise, you at least have the satisfaction of being the cause of it. That's Dalkey. On Safari Dalkey Style Attending a safari dinner - at which diners walk from one restaurant to another for the next course - may be a good way for the visitor who lingers in Dalkey to meet and mix with local people. The safari dinners benefit various charities, and they are held on Sunday evenings from time to time, not on a regular schedule. To find out the date of one of these events you should write to the Grand Food Circle, Leopold's, Dalkey, County Dublin, Ireland. Leopold's is one of five restaurants that each serve a course during the safaris. The price of dinner runs from about $28 to $47 a person, including wine. The menu is bound to be a surprise, since the restaurant owners draw out of a hat to determine which place provides which course. Not much walking is involved in going from one restaurant to another because each one is not more than 25 yards or so from its neighbor. The dinners usually begin at 7 P.M. and continue to about 11, but many of the diners like to stay on and have a party in the last restaurant on the tour, prolonging the affair into the small hours. The source of general information on Dalkey is the Eastern Region Tourism Office, 1 Clarinda Park North, Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, Ireland (telephone, 01-808571).