Playing Hurling with Michael Oakeshott

 
My father was a Philosopher of History, and I once taught a visiting don from Oxford how to play hurling. He arrived earlier than expected and my parents were out. Michael Oakeshott must have been in his forties, but looked old before his time. In a long gray raincoat and heavy tweeds, he could have been an amateur fisherman expecting the worst of the Irish weather. While in Cork, even when it was warm and sunny, he kept his raincoat on. Cadaverous with a lank, fly-like figure, he was an unlikely athlete. Hurling is a swift and brutal game of awkward elbows and light steps. But he took to it like a dancer, executing his every move with precision and panache. His mastery of the stick after a brief demonstration suggested to me a childhood memory of cricket or hockey. In no time he was hitting the leather ball, the slither, into the raspberries and retrieving it himself.

When we were exhausted, he sent me down to the village for ice creams, and I ran all the way like a rabbit or Ronnie Delaney, bringing them back before they melted. Two water ices, and we sat in the hollow of an ancient oak called the Goblin Tree eating them and not talking (it was before cones and wafers dripped). Our parents came in through the gate and saw us crouching there, licking our chops.

Oakeshott was not embarrassed. Raincoat open and the sleeves tucked up, he waved to our father with the hurley and didn’t get up. ‘Gone native,’ our mother said, laughing. Then our father reminded him of another of his sporting exploits. Oakeshott had written a popular book in the thirties called How to Pick the Derby Winner. Their talk of various betting systems was above my head. But our father’s interest surprised me. I’d forgotten his family had horses and that one even finished the Grand National.     

On several occasions during his stay, Oakeshott asked me to play. His buttoned-up inner self was released in a stick dance of joy, a game of Irish cricket, escaping no doubt the tedium of reading a thesis on the Mercy Nuns and the Crimean War, and refusing to accept that Mother Mary Akenhead was a worthy rival to Florence Nightingale (I now know that Michael Oakeshott was a celebrated ‘conservative thinker’, who nevertheless refused a knighthood from Mrs. Thatcher).

The front garden had a spacious lawn, so we moved the game there, sidling our way through the undergrowth of the hedge at the side of the new wing of the house. I would have much preferred to be showing off my tennis skills. Hurling, though I loved the bend and whip of the ash, could be regarded as an insular peasant sport. His enthusiasm, though, made me forget my parochial snobbery. I was awed by this stooped crow of a man with a funny accent – as though a milk bottle had damaged his upper lip when he was a baby – buck-leaping boyishly around the lawn, avoiding the flowerbeds with deft pivots.

When I told this memory to my brother Edmund, the historian, he was not best pleased and said that it was he who gave Oakeshott lessons in hurling. I don’t know what to think. The memory is graphic, and the details convincing (the ices, particularly. And Ronnie Delaney, the surprise Olympic champion, 1956, makes me thirteen). Maybe Edmund was there too? Recently I read an article about the exclusion of siblings as a novelist’s trick, so that the narrator has the field to him/herself. The examples are numerous. Perhaps I have fallen for it. It is also possible he played hurley with Oakeshott too when I wasn’t there.

During the long summer holidays a cricket wicket was carved out of some wasteland. Edmund, me and the boys picked up the rules from listening to poet of sport John Arlott on the BBC. We played for hours with a stone ball and a planed baseball bat. Edmund was called the hindrance, being nearly impossible to bowl out. He covered the stumps with a dead bat, playing no strokes. Any runs he made were off the edge. Thirteen not out was his highest score. Nought not out meant he was on form. I was a hit and miss player, but enjoyed fielding. Catching high balls was my specialty, a skill that served me well in rugby. But Edmund apparently showed to advantage in hurley. I don’t think I ever saw him play. Reputably with a dry slitter on a hard pitch, he defied his reputation for killing the ball, and had an easy swing. Oakeshott would have been impressed.    

Foreign Games in the Quarry

The Ban (and the Beans or Fast Women)

At college Interfaculty rugby matches were played in the Quarry, a boulder-bound crater in the Quadrangle. A river ran under it and, as Cork is the capital city of drizzles, the crater was often fogged up. It proved to be a melting pot, which defied sports politics. Most Engineers were Gaelic footballers who broke their nationalist code in taking part. Rugby was a foreign game as were most sports including cycling abroad (Sean Kelly’s ban for riding in South Africa had nothing to do with apartheid. He went on his own bat rather than under the aegis of an association, which represented all thirty-two counties. Eire plus Northern Ireland. As rugby does. He was an innocent country boy).

Point-to-Point horse racing, back road bowls or lofting them over viaducts were countenanced being party to peasant traditions. Horse racing and horse- jumping were native sports as the Irish Horse were a national industry (which allowed in equestrian polo, for those who could afford it, mainly lingering Anglo-Irish gentry). Surprisingly golf, tennis and squash (Christy Ring’s sport in his afterlife). were exempt from the ban.  I never quite knew why they were accepted as Gaelic-friendly (originating in Scotland, France and Pakistan, respectively). Perhaps it was because they were stick games like hurley and ‘cat and dog’ (a shillelagh making blocks of wood jump).

But why not hockey then? My mother said it had something to do with games left behind by the British army. Soccer was the most obvious example. ‘A garrison sport like whoring’, said Oliver St John Gogarty. He was a trick cyclist in his prime, but he ended up writing poems about the Hay Hotel in Dublin, which Church and State would call a game foreign to Catholic Ireland, though it was local women that were ‘on it’. 

Football note: Soccer and prostitution came together in the 2006 World Cup. Both are legal in Germany. And so, outside the grounds in the carparks there were toilets, hot dog stands and portacabins for prostitution. Registered prostitutes are not expected to satisfy the demands of an anticipated half a million fans. So, there is a drive to import them for the occasion. Brazil with its universal reputation for football and footsie is the main supplier.

Fleet feet in the Quarry

Without touchlines, the ball in the Quarry bounced back from the sheer rock face into play, limiting stoppages to when the ref blew the whistle, which was rare, not least because most matches were played under fog, rucks and mauls steaming. The pace was twice as fast as a normal game and sometimes the ref blew because he was winded. Gaelic football is gridiron (without the armor) crossed with rugby (though the ball is round) and much of the action takes place in the air. 

Brawn and flight are Gaelic Football’s salient attributes and only the Medicals, stronghold of rugby, particularly chronic students who stayed on for the sport, could compete with the Engineers, even on the ground. The Arts faculty joined up with Commerce and Agricultural Science to produce a hybrid of intellectualism, business nous and down to earthiness. But in a team sport they hadn’t a chance. The airy faeries, moneymen and the racy of soil had nothing in common. 

The final came down to the Quacks and the Queers (‘We are, we are, we are the Engineers / We are, we are, we are a bunch of queers’ was their chant. In those days there were no women). I was a Quack and have written a poem about playing through injury called ‘Pain and Gain’*. The Queers included some All-Ireland finalists for Kerry and Cork and the Medicals always had an International or two. But making up the numbers with poets and non-hearties added to the gaiety. Both sides had their designated jokers. I suppose I was one, though I did not always see the joke.

 Lectures were skipped, if they were not cancelled (most of the professors had the sense) so nearly a thousand students cheered on the mayhem occasionally visible through the fog. It was a prehistoric form of entertainment. Men and projectile bouncing off the walls of a cave. Afterwards all the Quacks went to North Infirmary and the Queers went to the South Infirmary to have their wounds dressed. Once everyone was bandaged up the two teams met again in the Star on the Western Road where firkins of Beamish were downed amid raucous choruses of ‘we’ll hang Harry Atkins’ (then President) ‘by the bollocks in the Quad…when the red revolution comes’. The GAA wouldn’t dare ban any of their code stars who took part. Anyway, nobody could with certainty say they saw them playing in the mud and smog. It was a rare event above politics in mid-century Ireland. Now I believe the quarry has been built over to make way for more students (in my day there were a few thousand students. Now it’s almost 25,000).  

*Pain and Gain (published in the Quarryman, 1964)

In my youth I didn’t feel the pain
injured in the heat of a game
and finished the match in a prelaps -
arian innocence only to collapse
into the arms of a dwindling crowd
and the trophy too was mine. Youth is proud
to take the laurels for granted
and the body. What’s countermanded
is only temporary. But that try
I nearly got while breaking a bone
was a touchdown on the moon (now known
to be half mirage, half deadpan surface
without illusions, hardly worth a base
to land on’). The romantic poets
were love-struck by the moon though remote,
and, since, love has never been the same.
So much for concussion of the brain.

 Making My Mark:

Strong legs proved useful in rugby. However, when I failed to grow higher than 5’8.5 in my boots after sixteen, I had to play scrum-half, a position for which closeness to the ground is essential. Noel Murphy, the international, occasionally took the school team for a training session. Besides when it was iced over, the pitch was a field of mud. Noel had a ‘soft Christian College accent’ and a kind heart, except when he was playing. He always had a good word for all of us. With me, he famously said, ‘James you are a very good dribbler,’ a remark which I never lived down (I had learned to talk a lot as a scrum-half). Dribbling was footing the ball between the legs of big boys. My career ended at college when I was scragged so often that I now have no neck.  During my last interfaculty match in the Quarry, I played to the end with broken ribs and collar bone. The recovery was long and painful. I took up study seriously and ballasted it with rowing, a low-achieving sport in UCC, closer to music (toned, rhythmic and harmonious). But I still play rugby in my head. Indeed, I recently wrote a fantasy poem about it:

I may not have kept on my feet in life’s rolling maul,
but I was always calm under the high-dropping ball.

I like to think I made my mark.