Jack Byrne

Oh, the water
Oh, the water
Oh, the water
Hope it don’t rain all day

Van Morrison ‘And it stoned me’

Pitch black country roads, the rain attacked the car, the wind pushed and pulled trees and branches, leaves flew through the swirling sky.

“It was no night to be driving.’ Danny, originally from Carrickfergus, told me about the night before. I was at the Town of Books fair in Graiguenamanagh, Kilkenny. Danny, an author himself, changed the words of another Morrison song to; “I wish I was never from Carrickfergus’.

It was one of the stormiest nights in recent memory, and we drove from Dublin down to the Kilkenny Carlow border. We made it tired and undamaged, which is more can be said for the country around us. We woke up the next morning to a power outage. ‘The whole area’ our host reported, ‘No power and no water’. Water because in this area it was pumped from bore holes, and without electricity the pumps wouldn’t work.

I had lots of conversations in which people told of family members who went across the water, mainly to the UK to look for work in decades past. Some returned, many didn’t, most were positive stories of families now spread between the two countries and return visits for new generations, some sad stories of relatives who went away never to be heard of again. One of a young man who died on a building site in London, who’s family were told many years later by someone who was there at the time, “It was no accident.” They never followed it up as decades had gone by.

What should have been a Summer festival was scorned by the season, and the rain came down again, more fitfully with outbreaks of sunshine. I sold some books despite missing the busiest day on the Sunday as we went to visit Kilkenny. All in all, a good time was had some pints were drunk, some books were sold, and contacts made.

The phrase ‘a small world’ came up often during the trip. I met a guy Tony who was in the Merchant navy and often shipped through Garston. He told how he was pretty regular in one of the three pubs in King St. he described the area as dock gates at one end of the street and the bridge at the other. He laughed in recognition of the the title of my first book ‘Under The Bridge’. We struggled to remember the names of the pubs on King St beyond the The Kings Vaults. Anyway he told the story of the landlady in one who had an Alsatian dog, and would loan the dog to regular sailors to walk them to the docks gates, to protect them from getting mugged as they staggered back to ship usually drunk.

After escorting sailors to the dock gates the Alsatian would run back to the pub. This story was being told to me about Garston in Wexford from a guy from Wicklow. The fact that it is ‘a small world’ is ironically only proven the further you travel.

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