News of the World E-Book

Andrew McNellie

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 181

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

To Aran, I tells how a young man from north Wales found the means to give shape a youthful dream of going to live on Inis   Mór, an adventure recorded in his acclaimed first memoir An Aran Keening.    This beautiful, high-spirited story blends moments of high farce, poetry and serious social observation, as the young McNeillie – a self-described 'quare fellow' – pursues his dream with a kind of fatalistic abandonment. Down but not quite out, he works his way towards Aran - first as a local news reporter on £5 a week in mining towns and villages in the Amman Valley in Wales. From there, he washes up in a condemned property at Waterloo on the Mersey shore in outer Liverpool and finally, aged twenty-one, finds himself in central London and the BBC's Radio Newsroom at Broadcasting House.    After amassing enough money to keep him afloat on Inis Mór   for a year, he sets out and, at the end of October 1968, he waved goodbye to a highly promising career, his colleagues, friends and even to his future wife: all to fulfil a dream he had when sixteen, first looking into J.M. Synge's The Aran Islands, as if it was Chapman's Homer and he John Keats.   

Leseprobe

NEWS OF THE WORLD

Also by the Author

An Aran Keening (2001)

Once (2009)

Striking a Match in a Storm: New & Collected Poems (2022)

NEWS OF THE WORLD

From Rhydamman to Inishmore

Andrew McNeillie

THE LILLIPUT PRESS DUBLIN

First published 2025 by

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

62–63 Sitric Road,

Arbour Hill,

Dublin 7,

Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Copyright © Andrew McNeillie, 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 84351 919 5

eBook ISBN 978 1 84351 936 2

Set in 11.5 pt on 16 pt Adobe Caslon Pro and Island Sans by Compuscript

Printed and bound in Ireland by Sprint Books

A Note on the Text

This piece of writing concerns itself with the eighteen months or so that I spent working in the news business, in Wales, Liverpool and London, as I clung to, and saved to afford, a dream to go to live on Inishmore.

The dream began when I was about sixteen and first read J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands. It became a reality six years later, in the first days of November 1968, when, aged twenty-two, with all my worldly goods, I arrived at Inishmore’s Kilronan Pier, out of the eye of a storm, on a trawler from Connemara.

The tale of my time on the island was told in An Aran Keening, published by Dublin’s Lilliput Press in 2001 and now reprinted as a Lilliput Classic. What follows is a belated prequel.

It is written for my wife Diana, and my family, to remind the one, and inform the others, what an odd piece of work I was as a young man. And, perhaps, what an odd piece of work I am still, a born ‘isolato’ (Herman Melville’s word for it), a quare fella.

For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever …

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

LOST CAUSES NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED

We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Suc- cess for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagina- tion. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus! Lord Salisbury. A sofa in a westend club. But the Greek! (from ‘Aeolus’, ‘The Newspaper Office’)

Ulysses

JAMES JOYCE

1

THE OCH

I

One night, in The George, on Great Portland Street in London, I met a Welshman. He was in the hotel business. He’d started out in a small way in Llanberis, at a B&B. It was very seasonal, no rest for the wicked in summer, dour and wet, with a little painting and decorating, out of season. The pay barely kept the wolf from the door. His situation wasn’t unusual. There have always been plenty of wolves in Wales hanging around people’s doors, giving them a hard time. Staying on meant going nowhere. So, ambitious to further himself, he’d left home one day, as winter set in, and, in a lucky step, moved up the ladder to higher things. He was now a doorman and general factotum at The Langham, on Portland Place, there, in ‘The Smoke’, as he called it, like someone long ago.

As best the noise in the bar would allow, he told me the story of his life, a short story, as you’d expect, from one who’d never strayed any distance from Llanberis, until now.

Llanberis, you might not know, is where the railway up Yr Wyddfa (the mountain also known as Snowdon) starts. A man appropriately called Moon, reaching for the stars, proposed its construction in 1869. Opposition by local landed interests thwarted the development until 1894, when, at last, the Snowdon Mountain Tramroad and Hotels Company Ltd was formed. The town had long figured on the traveller’s map as a base camp for mountaineers and sightseeing others, most famously William Wordsworth. Its slate industry, which had boomed in the nineteenth century, gradually declined in the twentieth, until tourism held sway. The doorman’s fate was decided before he was a twinkle in his father’s eye. He was earmarked for work in the bed and breakfast. His family story was a tale of hard lives in the quarries, fatal accidents, tragedy and, for him, a little fishing in the hills.

He was a sheet or two to the wind that night. When I told him where I was from, he became animated. Perhaps I didn’t sound Welsh enough, nor was I, though my native accent began to find its feet the more I heard him. I was only born and raised there. For any Welshman, that’s not Welsh enough, and ‘fair do’s’ as they say. He wanted to put me to the test. It was a shibboleth moment, a tribal thing.

Could I say ‘och’? He wondered. What an odd question, I thought. What an odd person. How had I allowed him to corner me in, of all places, The George, where I liked to drop in to raise a glass in honour of its erstwhile habitués, my hero Dylan Thomas and my revered fellow of Irish heritage (and complementary vowel-sounds), Louis MacNeice? That was in the days when, as Thomas put it, poets ran away to Broadcasting House as if it was the Sea. (My plan, insofar as I had one, was to reverse the trend.)

‘Och’ with a short ‘o’, he meant, that is, as I believe you should pronounce Van Gogh, not to my ear the idiotic ‘Van Go’ or ‘Van Goff ’ but ‘Van Gogh’ with a short ‘o’ and a hard ‘ch’. (The same principle is at work in Rachmaninov, not Rackmaninov – I’ll return to this later – or in Bach, which in Welsh means ‘little’, and also a lot in terms of affection.) And then there was ‘coch’ with a long ‘o’, meaning red. As I’d grown up within the purlieus of Miss Broderick’s Coed Coch Estate, in Denbighshire, born within sight of Coed Coch Road where we lived, I was in home territory and safe hands. My ‘ochs’ were in impeccable order. I could say ‘och’, and ‘Och,’ I said, and, ‘coch …’

He listened closely and smiled. Welsh accents are, or were once, very locally inflected. The Prince of Wales (now King of England) could never convince in a month of Sundays. On the contrary. ‘Cawl Windsor,’ a friend of mine liked to call His Highness’s efforts: ‘Windsor soup.’ Though ‘fair play to him, he tried hard to understand us’, and that was more than most of his kind. You have to be born to it. Once upon a time, at least, someone from Llanberis could identify another, from, say, the nearby village of Bethel, just by ear. I guess my short and long vowel sounds, my hard ‘ch’ told him enough. I had ‘the och’. He seemed to like the way I managed the modulation between ‘och’ and ‘coch’.

Drunk he might be, but he hadn’t lost his native wit. I had the green light. I was genuine, in this respect at least. I was no sais. I was no ‘Englishman’. Encouraged by this judgment, I threw in a few bits and pieces of Welsh for good measure. He caught them, smiling. But in reality, I was worse off than even the Welsh poet Robert Minhinnick, who once told me the Welsh he had was like wool caught in a strand of barbed wire with the sheep long gone over the mountain.

‘You’ve either got it,’ the doorman said, roundly, with some satisfaction, ‘or you haven’t.’

I could only agree. He paused and gazed a moment into the middle distance, distracted by some thought, maybe in two minds about something. Then he repeated it and said ‘och, och’ again several times, tapping the side of his throat gently, to indicate where the sound was formed. ‘There, you see,’ he said, ‘it’s there … och!’

If you find all this odd, so did I at the time. I found it peculiar and a bit unsettling, and I wondered where it might lead. What next? Come back to The Langham with me and see my etching of Llyn Peris? Not that it was completely alien territory. My Scottish grandad used to entertain me as a child by making a bagpipe drone in similar style, occasionally affecting the register by striking his throat with the side of his hand. Very peculiar. Och aye … He tried to teach me how to do it. But I’d have to wait for my voice to break before I could get anywhere with it, by which time I preferred not to.

Not that the man from Llanberis was physically imposing. He was the greater part of a foot shorter than I am. But there was something about him, something intense and obsessive, as if he mightn’t be quite right in the head, that made me wary. Until I got used to him. At first, I looked about me, ready to give him the slip, but he was insistent, and there was standing-room only in a great press before looming ‘Last orders!’ and then, ask not for whom, the bell, and ‘Time please!’ would begin to spill everyone, in dribs and drabs, out onto the street. A trip to the gents would have done it, but I might never have made it back to my drink.

Quite soon, I suppose as the beer lulled me and lowered my defences, we were brothers born. We shared an origin, ‘Yn y Gogledd’, in the North. It mattered. We were, as the Liverpudlians call us, ‘Gogs’, aliens among the barbaric English. And we had ‘the och’ at our disposal to prove it. We talked freely, as best the rising and falling tide of talk and the elbowing and shouldering crush in the bar would allow. What we hadn’t heard the other say, we nodded at, as if we had. It didn’t concern him that I had no Welsh beyond a few expressions. The ‘och’ was enough. It seemed he could think of nothing else, and he kept returning to it. The thought of those who didn’t ‘have it’ now suddenly struck him as highly amusing.

‘Think of saying “Abersock”,’ he said, nudging me with his elbow. He was getting friendly. Then, reflecting a moment, he suddenly laughed again, until he could almost not say it: ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogo GOCK!’ We both spluttered into our beer.

I think he missed the company of his fellow countrymen. Or perhaps he just missed company. Perhaps he missed Wales, and who can blame him? If so, I was an oasis in the cockney desert, a species of North Welsh oik just under the skin, someone who defaulted to the same register.

Not that I was at all homesick. Wales wasn’t the land of my fathers, but then, on the other hand, what is my Nation? I was born and grew up there. I’d spent a lot of my boyhood and youth fishing high in the hills of Snowdonia, east of the Ogwen Valley, mostly. We both knew the terrain, named the same lakes, the same mountains, and understood all too well what it meant to fish for trout in the far cold cwms and eternal downpour, and took pleasure, with a knowing look, in singing the praises of the coch-y-bonddu trout fly, another test for the artist formerly known as the Prince of Wales. I was now at my ease and happy in the company of this melancholy comedian, whose narrow face and pale blue eyes were familiar to me. I’d been to school with his kind.

‘Och,’ he exclaimed, in an entirely different usage, ‘och …’ He was supposed to have started the night shift five minutes ago and kept checking his watch, as if he hoped the onward march might have cut him some slack meanwhile. ‘Och,’ he said, ‘never mind’ and he downed one-for-the-road in a hurry.

No sooner done than, ‘’ave another?’ He looked at me like a spaniel, his head cocked in an enquiring way. ‘Shouldn’t, mind, but, ah go on … in for a penny. On me,’ he said. He downed this one at speed, in three or four gulps. Lord knows how many he’d had earlier. I struggled to follow him in search of the bottom of my glass.

Then he stood a moment, like a man hit on the head with a mallet. Now, ‘Must go,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘Llew,’ he said, ‘Llew Evans.’ I gave him my name in return. ‘A Mac!’ he said, smiling.

‘Och aye,’ I said.

We shook hands. He had a light, quicksilver grip, the kind I associate with quiet self-confidence, not the heavy-handed crush of the insecure testosterone male. Then, ‘Iesu Grist!’ he said, looking at his watch again.

‘If you’re ever passing, look for me, on the door at The Langham … that is,’ he said, ‘if I don’t get the sack.’

I knew The Langham. In those days it housed the BBC Club.

The barman was chivvying stragglers on their way, so I followed Llew out onto the street. Then ‘och, och’ we said to each other, like two Welsh ravens, croaking nevermore, in our vulgar, loud, North Walean way, and off he went at a trot. ‘Ta-ra!’ he said over his shoulder, and again, half sideways, half backwards, while still in earshot he called, ‘Och aye!’

‘Nos da!’ I shouted. I was a little drunk. He was very drunk but not so drunk to go a couple of steps backwards without falling over. I prefer to think we were both the better for wear. I watched him cross the road safely amid the thin rainswept traffic. Perhaps he was only a little older in years than I was. And whatever else, more straightforward and genuine than I was in my complication and upward mobility. He was more grown-up. I say upward but the mobility I was interested in was strictly sideways in a westerly direction. Exit whistling quietly ‘The Wild Rover’.

I’d just finished a 10-to-10 shift at Broadcasting House, contributing to Radio 4’s last major bulletin of the day. Now and then, at the end of a three-day shift, I’d squeeze in a last-orders-please before catching the last bus. Sometimes I went to The George, but I preferred going there on a wet Tuesday morning when I might have the place to myself, apart from the shades of the poets. I could do that on my days off. It’s an exquisite experience, the bar staff coming and going, exchanging a few quiet words, joking under their breath, polishing, setting up optics, the lights dimmed, someone backing in with a stack-truck rattling and clinking with crates of bottles, the clang and grind and scrape and thump of barrels and canisters going down into the cellar, a silent woman busily mopping the floor round you, prodding at your feet to make you lift them, the day beginning.

Nor do you know who’ll you meet at such times. A friend of mine in a pub in Fitzrovia once settled himself down in the same spirit, with a half and a chaser and a blank stare when, after a moment, he realized he wasn’t alone. In the far corner, there was Samuel Beckett, studying the Racing Post. You never know. I swear I once saw Louis MacNeice in the same way, reading the Odes of Horace, more lasting than bronze. But then I’d had a couple and no breakfast.

We had a good allowance of days off at the newsroom, three twelve-hour days on, three off, in a rotation. Then every third shift was a night shift. That gave me three nights for a tryst with the Shipping Forecast (sea areas Shannon, Rockall and Malin being the ones of most interest to me):

THERE ARE WARNINGS OF GALES IN VIKING NORTH-UTSIRE SHANNON ROCKALL HEBRIDES BAILEY FAEROES SOUTHEAST ICELAND …

SHANNON ROCKALL

NORTHWESTERLY BACKING SOUTHWESTERLY 6 TO GALE 8, BUT SOUTHWESTERLY 5 IN EAST AT FIRST. SHOWERS THEN RAIN. GOOD BECOMING MODERATE OR POOR

MALIN

SOUTHERLY 7 OR 6, INCREASING 7, PERHAPS GALE 8 LATER, VEERING WESTERLY FOR A TIME. SHOWERS THEN RAIN. GOOD BECOMING MODERATE.

You know the score. You’ve heard the music.

These occasions took place under the formidable eagle eye of the night shift editor-in-chief, the legendary John Beevers, a Cambridge man, occasional poet (under the pseudonym John Clayton), biographer of the Roman Catholic saints. A somewhat tormented soul, he got through six bottles of claret a night and scared the hell out of the hacks for his severity with their copy. But for some reason, he was as meek as a lamb with me. Perhaps it was my callow youth and the occasional poet thing.

On my free days I’d explore, here and there, browsing in bookshops, visiting galleries, gazing at and speculating about bourgeois women as they came and went talking about Michelangelo (for all I knew), filling my notebook, counting my pennies, reading The Aran Islands, so conveniently provided (together with four plays, including ‘Riders to the Sea’ and ‘The Playboy of the Western World’) in the pocket-sized Oxford World’s Classics edition; flâneuring, sitting in bars, daydreaming; that is, pursuing the extramural course in alienation studies, mooching and melancholy, for which I seem to have signed up at birth, or not many days after, as the terrible reality of human existence made itself known to me. Better never to have been born, the ancients said. So I read in W.B. Yeats. Isn’t that Socrates? I’ve never believed a word of it, however hard the going. Choose life, said the trainspotter, some time later. Choose life I did, but not as you know it.

Yeats’s ‘Some have known a likely lad / That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist / Turn to a drunken journalist’ had caught my attention too, as a word of warning, early in my acquaintance with him. I knew – and how I knew from a boy of ten years old – what it was ‘at dawn’ to drop my cast ‘at the side / Of dripping stone’. I read Sailing to an Island by Richard Murphy. I had a Garnier Flammarion edition of Les Fleurs du Mal et autres Poèmes by Baudelaire, more as a style accessory, I suspect. There were no English versions accompanying the poems. Beyond doubt, the author of ‘Le Voyage’, who so moved me with the idea of ‘Berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers’, would have viewed the idea of making landfall on Inishmore with horror. The book had a lurid image of a dark woman with black hair and two red rounds of either rouge or disease on her cheeks, it wasn’t clear which (I guess it was meant to be Jeanne Duval). It joined my Aran library. I read 77 Dream Songs by the American poet John Berryman. I knew he was my man, or that I was his. It’s a matter of horses and courses and temperament. I believe, now in retrospect, I’d have suffocated and drowned at Broadcasting House had I stayed on. I’d have had nothing to write about, for one thing, nothing to write up but the news. I would have lost connection with necessity. Or so it seemed to me then.

I believed in my abandonment is all I can tell you, and dreamt it would take me soon to live on Inishmore. And so it would come to pass, verily, in November. Believing in my abandonment (‘since it is what I have’) was a notion I got from the poet Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Funeral Music’, which I discovered one morning, opening my mail on the bus to work, in the Leeds literary magazine Stand. It was one of those life-determining moments of encounter. ‘Funeral Music’ is perhaps the best poem Hill ever wrote. Little did I know then that I was destined to publish work by him at Oxford University Press, and in an imprint of my own. And several others with my Clutag Press, including Seamus Heaney. The other line from Hill that has stayed in my head ever since was ‘Innocence is no earthly weapon.’ Innocence exists where no prior experience is. A lesson I hadn’t quite taken on board at that time. And I was far from at the height of my folly.

What an odd piece of work I was, what a quare fellow, to be so hell-bent, not to be content with the normal distractions of life. What was wrong with them? What a nightmare to my parents, at one level or other, I must have been, who yet took me in their stride better than I deserved, even if sometimes glacially. What an odd piece of work I am at seventy-eight, still telling the same old story, as if I once saw eternity in a grain of sand. What am I doing here? Writing up my ‘missing years’? Paying homage to my youthful self, without whom the story of my life would never have been what it has become. No matter what Ecclesiasticus had to say about the vanity (and vice) of youth. I vouch for it all as verifiable, as a newsman should. I hope and pray it lasts at least a little longer than today’s newspaper. I recall the Irish saying: ‘There’s many a thing more lasting than a person.’ Surely that ‘many’ includes the printed book that has done such a good job at outlasting all. Though if Nature could talk, it would say ‘words alone are certain bad’. But Nature’s for the birds, though in those days I thought, in its wilderness guise, it was for me.

‘Walking is one way of slowing thought to a useful speed but fishing is the master,’ I’d write (or the person who then went by my name wrote) from Inishmore to an aspiring poet friend in England. ‘The monotony of waves, of persistent effort … is productive, at the right level, the barely conscious level. … To say nothing new is self-indulgent. To say nothing is far better … I question my allowing certain attempts at poetry to leave my hands when I know that they’re not good. Still I’m sending these efforts your way.’