Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 10: Irish history with musical accompaniment and a Guinness chaser.
I exited the Sligo train station on a pleasant, sunny day and strolled into a settlement of perhaps 10,000 inhabitants. It has since more than doubled in population, and looking at the handy satellite view on Google Map, I see little that looks familiar. Glassy plasticized malls and name-brand department stores now are stacked near the station, whereas my memories are of an orderly and clean but languid small city, perhaps a tad down at the heel.
Four decades is a long time. My hometown doesn’t look much like itself these days, either; mostly for the better, but there are exceptions.
As always, job one was locating a place to sleep, which originally meant the youth hostel someone had recommended to me back in Dublin. But before I found it, my attention was caught by hand-lettered words on a jagged piece of cardboard, posted in the window of a typical row house on Wolfe Tone Street opposite the station: “Bed and Breakfast.”
Well, informality had worked out fine in Dublin, hadn’t it?
Just because the tourist bureau didn’t officially certify a room wasn’t any reason not to make an inquiry. I knocked on the door, mustered my best John Wayne accent (an inadvertently winning tactic in Dublin), and was introduced to the delightful O’Donnells, Mary and Gerry, school teachers in their fifties on summer break, who were trying to earn a few punts by renting their spare bed to bedraggled wanderers exactly like me.
The price was right (five Irish pounds per day, or less than $10), and before I went back out to find a bank and grocery store, Mary reminded me that in addition to breakfast, afternoon tea was included as an option, with nibbles and biscuits. My hosts had grown children approximately my age, and honestly, I felt like a house guest more than a paying customer. For the next five days, we got along famously.
There was time enough to develop a routine. Evenings in Sligo were for pub visits, listening to music and nursing pints. The predictable Irish summer rain mostly held off, and so daylight hours were lovely for long walks into the surrounding countryside.
One afternoon was devoted to roaming the streets and taking pictures with a roll of black and white film I’d stashed in the lead-lined pouch for the express purpose of attempting photographic artistry.
Another entire day involved a long walk to the east, following the Garvoge River inland past rows of old mill buildings to Lough Gill, with Benbulbin, a plateau-like rock formation, hovering over the skyline to the north. It occurred to me to hike to the top, but a different plan, at a different hill, already was taking shape for Saturday.
Speaking of pubs, historically the Irish tavern keeper was considered a general factotum (read: a local jack of all trades).
“The publican was the man who christened them, married them, and buried them, the local people,” said John O’Dwyer, a Dublin publican, in Dublin Pub Life and Lore.
Evidence of this was provided during a brief and honestly forgotten respite at Martin Furey’s bar and lounge in Sligo, where I had my jars, although could find no need for a taxi, coach or the services of an undertaker. As the photo attests, these added capabilities struck me as humorous by comparison with my previous experiences in Indiana.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that in Ireland, there’s a whole story behind why the fellow pouring your beer also drives the hearse, a tale both complicated and perfectly sensible. Jessica Gingrich at Atlas Obscura explains why Ireland’s pub owners have long moonlighted as undertakers: “It helps to have cold storage and room to hold a wake.”
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the dual role flourished in rural Ireland, where publicans often ran multiple businesses from the same premises to compensate for low foot traffic. “Back then the local publican…just did everything, including the undertaking,” says (Tom) Coburn. Country pubs doubled as groceries, butchers, hardware stores, carpenters, and of course, undertakers.
“You could buy anything in a pub, from a needle to an anchor,” recalled Tommy O’Neill, a carriage driver from Dublin…For example, Michael McCarthy was listed in a 1889 business directory as a baker, grocer, spirits dealer, draper, and post car and hearse driver.
There’s another chapter of local Sligo history behind the Furey pub. By the time I drank pints there and took the photo in 1985, Martin Furey had already owned the pub for 16 years (he died in 2018). Very early Furey noticed there were no options for taxi service in Sligo after midnight; it was a potential business opportunity, and so he obtained a hackney license in 1970, bought a couple of cars and a two-way radio, and got busy.
Evidently what separated a taxi from a hackney was the latter being neither available for hailing from the street corner nor welcome at the taxi rank. No matter, because the point is that Furey added a VW bus to his fleet in 1973 and kick-started a coach service.
As I was sipping that Guinness at Furey’s bar, the transportation side project was far along toward becoming his family’s primary focus, and it’s now one of the best known motor coach/bus companies in Ireland. The pub remains open, although it isn’t clear whether the founding family continues to have a stake in it.
At one of the pubs, maybe Furey’s, I’d overheard a conversation about the big rock concert on Saturday, July 13. At first I thought they meant a live show in Sligo itself, but then I made the connection with the magazine I’d spotted in Paris.
It was Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s epochal day-long, worldwide gig to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. I was about to learn the importance of being Irish; Geldof was born and raised near Dublin, and as the guiding force behind the punk-era Boomtown Rats, he doubled as curmudgeonly social critic, a quality Irish conservatives found disconcerting ― that is, until the hometown boy made good on an international stage.
I was learning never to discount the power of national pride. Geldof subsequently was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, but Live Aid was the charitable project of an Irishman, and Ireland as a whole was prepared to be quite enamored of this fact, whether any of them much cared for the Boomtown Rats.
Come Saturday morning, I asked Gerry which bus went to Strandhill, a settlement by the ocean at the foot of Knocknarea (nock-na-ray), a 1,000-foot tall limestone hill overlooking the Bay of Sligo. My plan was a morning hike to the Knocknarea’s summit, where a Neolithic burial cairn lies, and then a return to Sligo to watch Live Aid.
As it turned out, Gerry was preparing to drive to the nearby golf course, so he gave me a lift, depositing me at the trail head near Strandhill. It was a hazy day, muggy and fly-infested, but the path was clear and well-traveled. The view from Knocknarea was worth the uphill effort, with majestic vistas of green fields, rocky hedgerows, shimmering sea and the ever-present Benbulbin.
I caught a bus back to Sligo just after lunch, showered, and found a seat at a nearby pub, the name of which is forgotten. Live Aid was showing on a projection TV. The Irish national television channel had preempted all other programming, and between acts, there were cuts to the live feed from the studio, where an older presenter and Phil Lynott, Thin Lizzy’s singer and bassist, provided commentary.
It struck me that when a set ended, and the two began talking, voices in the pub would be lowered, the drinkers pausing to listen. After all, Lynott was a national hero, although his studio role pointed to incongruities with Live Aid, as explained to me by an adjacent barfly.
Live Aid was the most ambitious international satellite television production of its time, but favorite son Geldof’s creation also was subject to criticism: Wasn’t it the very same group of pious pop stars, pumping up their own album sales by means of a charitable “cover” show, with little of the money raised ever actually making it to the intended beneficiaries in Ethiopia?
More pointedly for Live Aid’s connection with Africa, why were the acts almost entirely white? Stevie Wonder was said to have refused a slot at the American venue in Philadelphia because he had no intention of being the token black act.
Hence Lynott’s exclusion. He was the rare black Irishman, present for duty in the television studio precisely because his band had not been invited to play the gig at Wembley. Seeing as they were mates, asked my pub explainer, how could Bob do that to Phil? Doubts aside, as Live Aid unfolded my fellow pub goers seemed united in their praise for the idea; remember, it was an Irishman who’d organized it.
Tragically, illness and addiction felled Lynott barely six months later. In retrospect, his poor health might have been the cause of his absence. Thin Lizzy’s reputation has only grown during the decades since, but did Phil and Sir Bob ever make up?
Later in the afternoon, I walked back to my room to get more money. I heard familiar sounds coming from the kitchen, where Mary sat watching U2 commence its star-making Live Aid set.
“It’s U2,” I said. “I love this band. Are you a U2 fan, too?”
“I’ve no idea,” she replied. “But they’re our lads, aren’t they?”
We watched together as Bono plunged into the crowd, costing his band the allocated time necessary to play “Pride (In the Name of Love),” their biggest hit up to that point. She asked, “Is he supposed to do that?” I told her I didn’t know, but it was some mighty effective stagecraft. Afterward the band members thought Bono’s stunt was ill-conceived; subsequently they were overruled by the verdict of history.
Just as I re-entered the pub, Queen started. Like much of the remainder of the planetary viewing audience, I was spellbound as Freddie Mercury worked the crowd. Previously I’d been only a casual follower of Queen, and never witnessed the band live on stage. Today Queen’s 20-minute set at Live Aid is routinely rated among the most memorable live performances in rock history, although I can attest to the power it exerted over the barroom on Sligo. They paid attention.
It’s a personal memory I’ll always cherish. Live Aid became hazy after that. Back in my room, I listened to some of the Philadelphia portion on a small radio alarm clock and fell asleep. It would be many years, well into the Internet era, before I ever saw videos of what I’d missed.
The “craic” in Sligo had been excellent. For the uninitiated, the Gaelic word “craic” (crack) means the quality of conviviality, discourse and entertainment on hand – often, though by no means exclusively, as applicable to pub culture.
But like sands in an hourglass, the days of my life in Europe were running out. I’d covered a ridiculous amount of ground up to this point ― Luxembourg through Italy and Greece to Istanbul, then back through Italy, Austria, Germany and France to Ireland. It’s what you do when you’re young, and you think it might be your only chance.
It’s what you do when the Eurailpass keeps paying for trains, and occasionally boats. For the remaining three weeks I’d be pushing myself ever greater distances in order to touch a few scattered Scandinavian high points prior to the single most anticipated weekend of the trip: August 1 – 4 in Leningrad, USSR, which included my 25th birthday.
First things first. There’d be a train ride back to Rosslare, a ferry boat to France, and a pilgrimage to the D-Day beaches in Normandy, where I could pay my respects.
As noted throughout this narrative, World War II was a constant presence during my childhood, and it remained quite the active memory for people of my father’s age, whether they were living in Georgetown, Indiana or Gessopalena, Italy.
My dad, a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific Theater, was only 60 years old in 1985 (he died in 2001). Newsman Tom Brokaw had yet to coin the phrase “Greatest Generation,” but during the 1980s, the ubiquity of Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” certainly set the stage for later celebrations of American patriotism with regard to remembrances of the war, and the generation that fought it.
Even then, I knew these were overly simplifications, and yet personally WWII exercised a strong hold. My dad didn’t like talking about “his” war as a gunner on a Navy ship, and probably sublimated these experiences into a stated fascination with the Nazis, Soviets and “their” war. He never travelled to Europe, and later regretted it. His son took seriously his responsibility to provide reports to the home front.
The return path was familiar, from Sligo to Dublin by rail, a change of trains to Rosslare, and from the sleepy port overnight by boat to France. Looking back, I’m continually fascinated by how very little I remember. There was a full Sunday in Sligo to recover from Saturday’s Live Aid concert-watching in the pubs. What did I do? What did I eat and drink? Those memories are lost.
Much of Monday was taken up in transit. What was I thinking? It’s a blur, or more accurately, a blank, although Guinness may have been involved. The return ferry debarked at Cherbourg instead of Le Havre, and I stepped onto French soil on Tuesday, July 16, 1985. From Cherbourg, it’s an hour by rail to the town of Bayeux, which is mildly famous for a tapestry depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066, and boasts a beautiful cathedral called Notre-Dame de Bayeux.
Bayeux lies a few miles south of the English Channel coast, and the beaches chosen by the Allies for the D-Day landing. The beaches face northward, toward England.
For the invasion, from west to east, they were given the names Utah and Omaha (American troops) and Gold, Juno and Sword (British, Canadian, Commonwealth and Free French). The nearby towns of Sainte-Mère-Église and Caen were heavily damaged during the fighting, but Bayeux itself was largely spared.
During the short train ride, I talked with a sharply outfitted American backpacker from Los Angeles, who said he was 50-something years old and had only recently quit his job in the film industry (or perhaps it had quit him), so he cleaned out his savings account and booked a flight to Europe.
We both got off the train at Bayeux. He was planning on staying at a hotel most backpackers couldn’t afford, and I was looking for a much cheaper hostel called the Family Home. Except that the woman at the Family Home said there was no available space ― unless maybe there was, so could I wait a minute?
At least she spoke English. After earnest consultations with co-workers and negotiations with another solo tourist who’d entered the building at the same time as me, it became clear that a room formerly dubbed as a dorm for four persons was being outfitted with extra mattresses, and henceforth would house six. We were the lucky (and final) two.
Unfortunately, no one told the original quartet of occupants, who came back from their grocery foraging expedition just after the newcomers claimed new mattresses. The most vocally annoyed was Fred, a garrulous Floridian.
However, a Canadian named Bruce quietly calmed Fred, and an adult conversation ensued. The following morning, we hopped a bus together to Omaha Beach, the six of us, and in spite of our rocky first meeting, we coalesced on French soil and quickly came together.
Of course, what helped more than anything else to achieve harmony among these strangers was the hostel manager’s grudging acknowledgment that the more mattresses were stuffed into the attic, the fewer francs each occupant would pay. We were unknown to each other, and yet bound by a shared interest in saving money.
It made good fiscal sense. Introductions were made, and we set about getting to know one another. From the start, Fred and Bruce stood out. Fred was tall and mustachioed with a gift of gab, and Bruce was blonde, sparsely bearded, quiet and more analytical. This is not to say Bruce wasn’t capable of being opinionated, as I learned later when I offhandedly remarked that Keith Moon of The Who was rock’s greatest drummer.
Bruce quickly became red-faced, proceeding not only to make a convincing and fully detailed case that Rush’s Neil Peart was far better as a drummer, but adding that Peart wrote challenging lyrics, and besides that, Canadians in general were key contributors to the history of rock and roll all across the board in spite of what perpetually clueless Yanks AND Brits insisted on thinking.
Canadians were not supposed to be combative chauvinists, were they?
I didn’t think so, either, but here was an example of one who also knew what he was talking about. Bruce was passionate, bright and articulate, and I learned a lot from him during the coming days.
As for Fred, he was divorced, a tad embittered yet also hilarious. He was absolutely delighted to report the intimate play-by-play details of an amorous conquest experienced while in Greece, where he and Bruce had struck up an acquaintance by means of their shared interest in Hellenic culture ― which is to say, Greek nude beaches, during which Fred had gotten lucky (and athletic) with a fellow American tourist.
She didn’t stick around, but Fred and Bruce had been traveling together ever since. They seemed temperamentally well paired, although Bruce’s eyes often rolled when Fred got rolling. The Floridian’s bombast was essentially harmless, and in truth, he was highly entertaining.
As for the other three loft roommates, their names unfortunately are lost to history. For mysterious and arcane reasons, I’d decided that precious film must not be wasted on ephemeral matters like documenting images of people, as opposed to buildings, so no photos of them exist.
Photos do exist of the cathedral in Bayeux.
The morning after my arrival in Bayeux, all six of us boarded a local bus for the coast. Fred had concluded that hitchhiking in the vicinity of the D-Day historical sites was the very best way to see them, explaining that Americans would be adored in such a locale (not altogether untrue, by the way) such that we’d have our pick of passing cars.
Obviously, hitching a ride would be unlikely for so large a group. It wasn’t clear if Fred intended to explore the vicinity alone, and I kept my eyes open for bus route signs just in case. After misty beginnings, a lovely summer’s day emerged. I was keen on the idea of walking the coastline for as much of it as possible, while being opportunistic about buses. The area proved to be well signposted; we had maps, and it all worked out using public transportation.
Knowing that that the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944 comprised the biggest amphibious invasion in military history proved to be inadequate preparation for viewing the ocean from the high ground, then trading places at water’s edge to look back inland, and being overwhelmed by what it must have felt like waist-deep in salt water, having nowhere to go except forward.
Most of the invading force came from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. However, troops also were present from Australia and New Zealand, as well as in small numbers from occupied European countries: Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, Netherlands, Norway and Poland.
The Allies had undertaken an immense disinformation campaign designed to confuse the Germans as to the landing site. It worked to a significant degree, but perhaps the single biggest hindrance to an effective coastal defense stemmed from the larger strategic picture, because German wartime strength was waning.
Guns and ammo were less of an issue. Contrary to popular belief, Germany was able to keep up its war production in material terms in spite of relentless bombing, which Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe was unable to impede. War production went underground, literally and figuratively, but Allied control of the skies proved vital as the Normandy invasion unfolded.
More importantly, Germany’s two-sided war was in the process of bleeding manpower to the breaking point. By 1944, the Germans were in retreat across the entirety of the Eastern Front, where the Red Army’s seemingly limitless numbers and escalating tactical abilities gained traction in proportion with the increasing exhaustion of the Germans.
Indeed, then as now, Americans need to understand that the outcome of the Great Patriotic War (as WWII was called in the Soviet Union) hinged on horrifically costly combat in the East. Tens of millions died there. US forces bore the brunt in the Pacific, while in Europe, the Soviets absorbed Adolf Hitler’s punishment, then turned it back on him with compounded interest.
Consequently, Germany was weakened, and France’s coastal defenses were only partially completed and inadequately manned. Hitler’s constant military meddling added a further level of dysfunction; the perfectly capable general Erwin Rommel was on the job, and yet the dictator insisted on moving chess pieces from Berlin.
In spite of these many advantages, Operation Overlord was far from a sure thing. The Allies aimed to shift 150,000 soldiers across an unpredictable ocean, albeit over a relatively short distance from England. Even a slight shift in the weather might have wreaked havoc.
Not only were fighting men in route on small transports. Big naval ships had to be positioned for shelling, and parachutists had to be dropped behind enemy lines. There were supplies to be landed, too, primarily by means of an improvisational device called the Mulberry, which was a floating harbor to be assembled where natural contours were lacking.
As almost always is the case in war, it came down to the heroism and tenacity of the foot soldiers. On the Allied side, casualties during the first day alone exceeded 10,000, one of whom was my old friend Barrie’s father, who received a Purple Heart. More than 4,000 of his comrades died.
June 6 ended with five contested, bumpy bridgeheads for the Allies, and yet these lines held and were expanded during the remainder of June. By the end of the month, close to 900,000 troops had poured into this continental foothold.
You know the rest of the story.
Our own beach-combing sextet held together for a little while. Looking at the satellite images today, I have little clear idea of where the bus took us. My best guess is Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, located near the Omaha Beach monument and the American cemetery.
I recall a stretch of shoreline displaying wreckage, perhaps of landing craft, although it doesn’t seem possible that we could have started as far to the east as Arromanches, where remnants of Mulberry Harbor can be viewed, and still had time to walk to Pointe du Hoc, a heavily fortified headland between Omaha and Utah beaches.
U.S. Army Rangers famously attacked Pointe du Hoc by climbing the cliffs with ladders, ropes and hooks. The site remains pockmarked with shell craters and the ruins of German defense installations.
Throughout the day, buses occasionally trundled past, and one of us would hop on and wave goodbye. By afternoon, it came down to Bruce, Fred and me, and we began looking for ways to get back to Bayeux.
After hiking inland a short way past neatly groomed fields, gnarly hedgerows and stone walls, we found a small country café at a crossing of two lanes, shaded by a copse near a cluster of farmhouses. A few languid cows observed our arrival from across the narrow road.
The posted bus schedule seemed to indicate a final afternoon pickup for Bayeux. Inconveniently, we would have almost two hours to wait, which in reality would have been more than sufficient time to walk all the way home, except there was popularly priced Kanterbräu golden lager on tap.
Let’s be clear: The beer was underwhelming. Bruce immediately began comparing it unfavorably to Labatt’s, and on a subsequent trip, Barrie dubbed it “Cancerbrau.” Perhaps because we were tired and hungry from having skipped lunch, the beer went straight to our heads, and after the third round, Fred belatedly decided to test his theory and uncork his thumb.
His mangled efforts were futile and hilarious, and even the otherwise humorless café owner laughed when the American decided to explain his hitchhiking tactics to the bored bovines.
As we waited, a group of bicyclists stopped for a drink. Surely by then I’d seen hundreds of Europeans riding bikes without thinking much about it, and it would be another 12 years before the cycling bug finally bit. Still, I can remember drinking my beers at the bar following our day at the D-Day beaches, and thinking how much fun biking appeared to be.
In retrospect, renting a bicycle in Bayeux would have been the best and most practical course, but if I knew then what I know now, the entire trip would have been far different from the one I’ve described.
The bus eventually arrived, and we returned somewhat giddily to Bayeux just in time for the family-style evening meal at the Family Home. It was a communal affair at a huge table, accompanied with cheap wine, and utterly delicious.
Tales were spun and schemes were hatched. We decided to travel by rail as a group, and no hitchhiking. Little did I know that a fashionably roomy bathtub awaited.
Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 12: Omaha Beach to the Manneken-Pis and Little Mermaid.
