The Vasectomy Doctor Read online

  When I’m dead and laid out on the counter,

  A voice you will hear from below.

  Saying send down a hog’s head of whiskey

  And we’ll drink to old Rosen de Beau.

  Yes, a major folk-music revolution may be about to explode but it is important to acknowledge also that many factors, not least of course the musicians themselves, ensured that in fact interest in Irish folk music and singing never died out nor for that matter showed any signs of dying out. The first All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil was held in Mullingar in 1951 organised by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann with an attendance of some 1,500 devotees. Ten years later the attendance at the same venue was close to 100,000. Prior to the Fleadhs there were Feis Cheoils – timid little affairs held out in a field with little girls hopping up and down on the back of a lorry. But at least they were doing it.

  Then there was Gael Linn and all the trojan work that they did during the 1950s collecting and recording Irish music and songs for posterity. On this point too one has to mention Ciarán Mac Mathúna and his long series of radio programmes called A Job of Journeywork. From the early 1950s right through to the mid-1970s Ciarán travelled the length and breadth of Ireland collecting and broadcasting musicians and singers of all levels of talent. He even made trips to the UK and the USA to chase down and record our musically talented lost diaspora.

  Dominic Behan also was exceptional in singing and composing Irish folk songs before anyone else and he had a four-track record out at this time with ‘Liverpool Lou’ and ‘The Patriot Game’ among others on it. And of course the great Joe Heaney from Carna in Connemara recorded in London in 1960. Joe was way before his time with a record of his unaccompanied singing of four songs: ‘John Mitchell’, ‘The Rocks of Bawn’, ‘Morrissey and the Russian Sailor’ and ‘The Bold Tenant Farmer’.

  Seán Ó Riada’s music score for the film Mise Éire in 1959 was also undoubtedly a massive watershed in the revival of interest in traditional Irish music. This music, used to accompany a film commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916, featured two powerful and classic Irish airs – ‘Roisín Dubh’ and ‘Sliabh na mBan’. These were played on a French horn with Radio Éireann’s Symphony Orchestra in full support. The effect was stark and moving, simple yet powerfully effective, making the film utterly unforgettable and bringing it and its music international acclaim.

  A few years later Seán Ó Riada was to revolutionise the way group Irish traditional dance music was to be played. With his founding of the group Ceoltóirí Chualann, old style céilí music was given a brand new lease of life. Rather than all the musicians playing together and in unison, as they had to do to get volume for dancing in the days before amplification, Ó Riada broke them up into their integral parts. In this way maybe two fiddles would play the first turn of a reel only to be suddenly joined by all, including percussion, for the second and third turns of that reel. Some people of course didn’t like this innovation but then some people hate all changes and want things to stay the same for all time. I loved it I have to say and faithfully followed Ceoltóirí Chualann through a series of five recorded concerts that they held in Francis Xavier Hall off Dorset Street for a radio series later to be broadcast under the title of Fleadh Cheoil an Radio. This programme also featured sean-nós singers but few sweeter than the Waterford man, Niclas Tobin.

  At this time too the Belfast family, The McPeakes, had played in Dublin and had an LP out. I drew much inspiration from this talented family with their unique sound of concert harp, uilleann pipes, banjo, and guitar and close vocal harmony. Francis McPeake senior, then in his eightieth year, was the only man that I ever knew who sang and played the pipes at the same time. They wrote many classics but few gained more international appeal than ‘Will You Go Lassie Go’ which they sang in close harmony and with great passion.

  Over in America the likes of The Weavers, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were all well-established artists in the American folk idiom with several records to their names. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were to be the new kids on the block. England too was years ahead of us with the likes of Ewan McColl and Peg Seegers and their London Singing Club and younger singers like Martin Carthy, Maddy Prior and June Tabor. All of this was terrific stuff but not quite what I was really looking for which was older traditional songs, street ballads, sea shanties, sporting songs of English or Irish origin and above all sean-nós or traditional Irish unaccompanied singing in an individual and ornate fashion. All of this was to come cascading down on us within a year or so. This was the lull before the storm.

  But if the so-called ‘folk revival’ in Ireland seemed slow this was due to the fact that interest in, and the playing and singing of, traditional Irish music had never actually waned. It is just that after the so-called revival it all became so much more immediately accessible. But that’s all.

  But if we were temporally short of records then of course there was always sheet music and songbooks. Of the latter there was one bible called Colm O’Lochlainn’s Irish Street Ballads. And while this book had been first published way back in 1939, twenty-five years later it was still as vibrant and alive as ever. In addition to the words and music of so many worthwhile folk songs it also had wonderfully amusing wood-cuttings worked through it. Perhaps the best early song to come out of O’Lochlainn’s was ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ and first sung by Johnny Moynihan down in the Coffee Kitchen in Molesworth Street:

  ’Twas in the merry month of June when first from home I started

  Left the girls in Tuam they sad and broken hearted

  Saluted my father dear, kissed my darling mother

  Drank a pint of beer my grief and tears to smother.

  And it’s off to reap the corn, leave where I was born

  Cut a stout blackthorn to banish ghost and goblin

  With a brand new pair of brogues I rattled over the bog

  And frightened all the dogs on the rocky road to Dublin.

  It was great stuff and sung to slip-jig timing. You’d need to be in the whole of your health to face into ‘The Rocky Road’ but we were and we did and that was the song that was to get me into the Abbey Tavern out in Howth a few months later. I sang and played there for the best part of two years.

  * * *

  Now it’s the autumn of 1963 and John F. Kennedy has come to Ireland and gone home again making us all feel better and proud of ourselves. Nelson’s Pillar is still standing but its days are numbered. Thanks to some brilliant grinds that I received from a man somewhere around Kenilworth Square, I understand enough about chemistry to eventually pass all my pre-registration exams. Test tube washing days are over and I was never to fail another exam in this place. Once I got over the Beecher’s Brook that was pre-med I never looked back. I am now a real medical student at long last. I am wearing a white coat and I even have a scalpel and I’m dissecting real corpses or cadavers, as we liked to call them.

  We proudly walk up and down the length of Grafton Street with Gray’s Anatomy under our oxters. In the dissecting-room five bodies, three male and two female, are lifted out of their holding tanks of formaldehyde by Christy every morning and laid out on dissecting trolleys. The class is divided up into groups of ten students per body. We are to be in here for a few hours every day for the next two years. Nobody ever explained to us why we are required to cut up dead bodies or if we found such an activity distasteful and repulsive. I believed then as I believe today that medical school anatomy departments are designed to give employment to professors of anatomy who are often failed surgeons themselves. If they serve any other purpose then precisely what that purpose is escapes me.

  Of course all doctors need to know some human anatomy. We need to know the names of and the course taken by all the major blood vessels, nerves, muscles and tendons and we need to know their relationship to one another. We need to know about the musculo-skeletal system and how it works. And finally we need to know about the major abdominal and thoracic organs and their relationship with each other. But
all of this can be learned from three-dimensional models, MRI scans and illustrations. There is in fact no need to dissect human bodies to learn this stuff. The practice is a hangover from the dark ages of the body snatchers like Burke and Hare. Anatomy was taught to medical students when they had nothing else to teach them. But we foraged on.

  The large dissecting-room smells of formaldehyde, decayed human flesh and cigarette smoke. One of my classmates, Anne Dawson, douses herself in perfume every morning before facing into this disgusting place. The women tend to stick together picking away at one body and are largely ignored by the fellows. The women do not smoke or use foul language, the men, by and large, do both. There is absolutely no romance in this place. Any coy notions that any of us may have harboured about the sacrosanct nature of the intimate details to do with genitalia, male or female, can forget about that now for all time. In this room all secrets are exposed and uncovered. This is a place utterly devoid of any semblance of modesty. It must by its very nature be so.

  You dissect a body in a planned and organised fashion, section by section. We started in an area in the front inner aspect of the thigh called the femoral triangle. This is bounded on its outer or lateral aspect by the sartorius muscle so called because it is the muscle used by a tailor to bring his ankle onto his opposite knee while cutting cloth. At the apex of the femoral triangle you dissect down to find where the femoral artery, the femoral vein, the great saphenous vein and the femoral nerve all merge together at one point. The importance of this is that it is the exact spot on the front of his thigh where a boner will stab himself with his boning knife should it slip in its downwards course. Such an injury is potentially lethal and needs urgent surgical intervention.

  Our modus operandi is that one person actually does the dissecting using scalpel and forceps while another reads from Gray’s Anatomy a description of what is being uncovered. Occasionally our demonstrator Mr Rooney will come along and, using a long curved surgical scissors called a Mayo Scissors, point out this and that. Mr Rooney is a fine teacher but a sad, slight and unhappy figure. I do not think that he enjoys his work. Before he took up anatomy demonstrating he was Kildare county surgeon and rumour has it that he lost his nerve for surgery. Demonstrating anatomy is a long, long way from actually performing life-saving surgery. It is hardly any wonder then that the poor man looks grim and grey.

  Grim and grey too is the book from which we read. Gray’s Anatomy is not exactly a belly full of laughs. There is a photograph of the great author himself on the flyleaf and he looks like an undertaker’s assistant. He describes the scrotum thus:

  The scrotum is a cutaneous pouch containing the testes and the lower parts of the spermatic cords and placed below the pubic symphysis. The left portion hangs lower than the right in correspondence with the greater length of the left spermatic cord. The skin is very thin, of brownish colour and generally thrown into folds or rugae. It is beset with thinly scattered crisp hairs, the roots of which are visible through the skin.

  I do not know whose scrotum Gray is endeavouring to describe here. But as someone who has now had a fairly intimate relationship with some 25,000 of them, I can say he is not describing the typical one. So much for authoritative textbooks.

  * * *

  Things on the outside world are going very well indeed. The folk revival is now in full swing and there is no end of places to go to. O’Donoghue’s pub on Merrion Row is not yet a venue for music and the student architects frequenting it at this time are barred from singing. No singing was allowed in any pub in Dublin in the very early 1960s with the exception of the so-called ‘singing lounges’ where the Perry Comos and Johnny Cashes chanced their arms in front of a microphone after ten pints of porter. I remember going to such a place in Camden Street once in desperation but they had nothing whatsoever to do with traditional music or singing.

  There were perhaps only a few exceptions to this universal ban on live music and singing in Dublin pubs of the day. The Brazen Head Inn on Bridge Street, Ireland’s oldest pub and Robert Emmett’s watering hole, did allow us to sing and play there. Tony Murray, just released from the Curragh prison camp for his IRA activities, sang ‘Henry Joy McCracken’ – a song that reminds us, if we need reminding, of the fact that not all Ulster Presbyterians were unionists and that some in fact fought and died for the cause of the United Irishmen and a new republic in 1798:

  An Ulsterman I am proud to be from the Antrim Glens I come

  And although I laboured by the sea I followed flag and drum.

  I have heard the martial tramp of men

  I have seen them fight and die

  Ah lads I well remember when

  I followed Henry Joy.

  Mick Dwan from Ennis sang ‘The Cliffs of Duneen’ and later tried to teach me how to play ‘The Kilfenora Jig’ on a tin-whistle.

  You may travel far far from your own native home

  Far away ore the mountains far away ore the foam

  But of all the fine places that I’ve ever seen

  There are none to compare with the Cliffs of Duneen.

  There is in fact no such place as Duneen but that hardly matters. The words of the song would place the singer somewhere around Tarbert in north county Kerry where my uncle, Fr Tom Curtayne, is buried beside the church. ‘The Cliffs of Duneen’ has always held a high place in my repertoire of songs. I love every word and note of it and I later passed it on to Christy Moore who altered the air slightly.

  Since by and large we were not allowed to play or sing in pubs, we tended to congregate in places where drink was not sold but where we could give expression to our talents such as they were. The Coffee Kitchen in Molesworth Street, down in a basement, was one such venue. It was here that I met Ronnie Drew for the first time and was immediately smitten by his quite extraordinary talent and great store of unusual songs like ‘The Twangman’ and ‘The Kerry Recruit’:

  About four years ago I was digging the land

  With me brogues on me feet and me spade in my hand

  And says I to myself it’s a pity to see

  Such a fine strapping lad digging turf round Tralee.

  Every time I sing that song I think of Ronnie Drew, always immaculately dressed in a dark blue suit and string tie and drainpipe trousers. Such neat attire was a long way from the more usual dress code for folk singers of the day, but Ronnie didn’t care. He was always his own man.

  In this basement on Dublin’s Molesworth Street after the pubs had closed on a typical night you might find Dolly McMahon, Johnny McEvoy, Johnny Moynihan, Andy Irvine, Peggy Jordan scouting for talent, Maeve Mulvany, Trevor Crozier the Trinity student with a stiff leg, Joey Walsh the bodhrán player, Frank Harte the great exponent of the Dublin Street Ballad, Dick Cameron the tall American singer, Al O’Donnell the best singer and banjo player in Dublin until Luke Kelly came along a few years later, Anne Byrne and Jesse Owens, Tom Munnelly later to become state folklorist, Liam Weldon, Ciarán Burke later to join The Dubliners, Amanda Douglas and a whole assortment of musicians and hangers on. Nobody was being paid. Everybody there was giving of their time and talents for no reason other than their love for music and song.

  Then there was the Pipers Club in Thomas Street where Rí na Píobairí, Leo Rowsome, was in charge. Leo was a fine musician, an uilleann pipe maker and teacher of that most difficult of instruments. No drinking was allowed in the Pipers Club so it too was a kind of after-hours place. In the three small downstairs rooms great respect was paid to the musicians. Singing was never a big feature in this rather serious folk venue.

  The Fiddlers Club across the Liffey on Church Street was another serious Mecca for good music and song. This is where I met Barney McKenna, the banjo player, for the first time. At that time Barney was the only person in Dublin who played Irish music on a tenor banjo and this made him absolutely unique and extraordinarily popular. Barney, apart from his considerable musical talent, was also an extremely amusing man. You would never know what he was going to come out wit
h next. For example during those early days of the so-called folk revival spoon players were in over supply. I remember being at a session with Barney once and he was playing a solo of his called ‘The Mason’s Apron’. In the background there were at least four spoon players going clackity-clack, some of them out of time. A spoon player or bodhrán player who keeps time is one thing but to have a few of them out of time is hard to bear.

  When Barney was finished his piece he turned to me and said: ‘Would somebody give those fuckers a bowl of soup?’ – equating bad spoon players to prisoners rattling their tin plates on the cell bars looking for food. Another description of a person who tries to play the bodhrán was given to me many years later by Gerry O’Mahony, the box player from Allenwood. He said that a person who was not particularly good on this instrument sounded like a billy goat trying to get out of a wooden barrel. But I think as you might by now have guessed, among Irish traditional musicians the percussion section is often held in some disdain – sometimes unfairly.

  Sonny Brogan, the icon of box players, also played at the Fiddlers as did Ted Furey, his son the piper Finbar Furey, John Kelly and Joe Ryan – fiddle players. Maeve Mulvany with her guitar looked after the singing department. Maeve was a very attractive young woman with jet-black hair and she played reasonably good guitar. She liked rebel songs like ‘James Connolly’: