A visit to the dancehall of my youth reminds me of a time when we were all too busy jiving, quick-stepping and smoking to contemplate our mortality
I WAS IN THE Ballroom of Romance last week, where the toilets haven’t changed much in 30 years, so I combed my hair in the tiny mirror, before stepping out on to the best dance floor in Ireland, sprung from beneath by tractor tyres, and where years ago I often jived with the Tommy-Andy girls, one of whom always carried a knitting needle to curb the enthusiasm of frisky young farmers.
Last week the same old floor vibrated with jazz dancers commemorating Jimmy Gralton, a Leitrim man who was deported from Ireland in 1933 as an alien, for his Communist politics and his attempts to propagate socialism and dancing in Leitrim by means of a small corrugated hall in Effrinagh, which he ran, and which was once riddled with bullets and finally burned to the ground one Christmas Eve; an act of God that must have greatly pleased the parish priest.
The quick-step and jive were all the rage when I first arrived at the Ballroom of Romance around 1974. Frisky boys would sometimes arrive on their tractors, on warm summer nights, fresh from mowing fields close by, their wheels leaving a trail of grass on the dry roads.
One boy would drive while two others clung on, in standing positions on the rear box, and the threesome often smoked while in this tableau, and looked as magnificent as something from a Wagner opera as they arrived in the car park.
Not that the clergy disapproved of smoking. The priests smoked pipes, old men smoked non-tipped cigarettes and everyone else smoked Albany. Even children smoked. I have a friend who remembers a woman neighbour entertaining nine-year-old boys with glasses of orange and single Woodbines, allowing the little creatures to puff away at her back door like real men.
No wonder the clergy took a dim view of human nature. If the species was left to its own devices it would probably self-destruct, and so the need for God or at least a parish priest with a sharp tongue was essential. To contemplate the universe without an overlord was an appalling vista that may have kept the parish priests of Leitrim awake at night for decades, bitterly regretting their own wasted youth in the constrained psychological cages of Catholic seminaries.
The universe without an overlord is a subtle theme in Werner Herzog’s movies, but he seems quite calm about it all. I saw his latest work, Into the Abyss, in the IFI last week; afterwards, on a link from London, he appeared live for a question-and-answer session.
No, he doesn’t believe that the universe is reaching consciousness through our eyes, or that the cosmos cares much about us.
“I believe the human species may die out eventually,” he said. “And if that happened soon, I would not be concerned.”
Of course he’s right but it’s not a subject much discussed in Leitrim. Auschwitz and its philosophical implications don’t bother old men who live lonely lives up the hills, and who long for the lorries that fracking might bring to brighten up their un-tarred lanes, and who lean on the counter in the post office each week as they wait for the clerk to dole out their little pensions.
“How’s your mother?” I heard one old man ask the clerk last week, probably because he danced with her long ago. Twenty minutes later I saw him in the supermarket, leaning against the meat counter for support, his face as white as marble and short of breath, and fingering a €10 note as if measuring up what he could afford.
I suppose old men can survive on small portions. Even the famous flute player Peter Horan, who was as thin as a rake, survived on little more than bread and tea for years. And it’s hard to imagine old males actually cooking anything in those galvanised-roofed cottages where it’s always dark and there is still flypaper hanging from the brown tongue-and-groove ceilings.
But they do eat. And then wither, eventually, on pillows, like inmates of a death camp. And old priests die. And film-makers die. And I suppose the abyss that opens before us on the pillow is what makes us cling to the idea of an afterlife, and eternities of conscious bliss.
Meanwhile all that jazz endures, though the dancers have moved to more sophisticated venues with names like Club Kiss, where young people shake it like randy monkeys, believing they are special, and that, despite the odds, they will live forever.