On the pouring of pints

Isn't it funny how memory connections are made?

An online writer friend of mine was asking, in jest, if the 'flames blowing out of the CD slot' on his new Mac Mini were normal? It's his first Mac, as he's always been a Windows man.

Being a longtime Machead myself, I replied 'yes, you've just switched on the barbecue function; and there's an undocumented icemaker in there somewhere too, while the draught beer outlet has to be linked up to a firkin'.

All a little bit of nonsense, of course. But that last word brought memories tiptoeing back.

When I was growing up in the pub business, the firkin was a smaller version of the aluminium keg now used to hold draught beers, mostly Guinness then.

And instead of a single connector on the top, it had two on the side, one to take the gas supply and the other leading to the dispenser, then a stainless steel 'cooler' that sat on the counter and in a series of trays inside caused the high Guinness to settle a little before it went through a tap into the glass. It worked pretty well unless we got really busy, and then everything coming out was white and we had to dismantle the unit and clear off accumulated foam.

It was high-tech for its time, though in these days of carefully metered and chilled beer dispensing it seems quite archaic. And while we called it a 'cooler', there was at that time no question of actually cooling Guinness.

However, I have two strong memories of even less sophisticated methods of dispensing the 'black stuff'. The first, as a very small child, when escaping in behind the bar of my aunts' pub. I still have a clear vision of the copper sink with a copper jug in it, and a brace of old beer 'pump' handles fixed to the timber of the bar.

There was no gas in those days. The Guinness came in wooden kegs which stacked in a cellar and the beer was literally pumped up out of them. In the course of which the copper sink would end up with quite a load of it swilling around after the pint glasses were topped off.

Every so often the copper jug would be sluiced through the sink, picking up the filling of a couple or three pints which would be used to half fill the glasses before the pumped and foamy fresh-from-the-barrel Guinness was used to top them off.

Nobody thought any the worse of it, though there's no doubt but that anyone doing that today would lose every customer they had in very short order.

Later, in my teens, I used to work summers down in the Royal Hotel on Valentia Island.

Most of the time I worked in the Residents' Bar. There was no draught Guinness there, anybody wanting the black stuff had to drink it from bottles.

But there was draught in the Locals' Bar. And though we were in those days well ahead in gas-pumped Guinness right around the country, the logistics and probably the cost of getting an adequate supply of gas across the sound to Knightstown meant this system wasn't realistic.

So we used a variation on the system I remembered from my childhood. There were no beer pumps made any more, so gravity had to be used.

It went like this. Two firkins would be set up on the bar counter, the side openings facing in to the barman. There were even natty plastic covers available to take the bad look off the little barrels.

A brass beer tap would be pushed into the bottom bung hole on each. Initially, there was enough pressure from inside the firkin to push out a fairly creamy product, which at first took a fair bit of time to settle. There was a stainless steel jug under each tap to catch the overflow, and these would be used from time to time to add more 'flat'.

When one of the firkins was only pouring flat itself, the initial pressure gone, the other would be brought into use, and then through the evening the pints would be filled by alternately pouring flat and foamy from the respective firkins. If we kept it going right, the 'flat' one would empty just about the time the second one became flat itself. Then it was a case of heaving a new firkin up in place of the empty and the sequence started all over again.

Everybody thought tthey were great pints. Still, if we tried that one on today ...?

... at least these days, there's a bridge to the island and proper roads, so delivery of the modern beer is no problem.



I've just remembered one last item in this vein. After leaving school, having always wanted to be a pilot, I got to go to England for an interview and tests with a view to joining the RAF.

A vision imbalance from a childhood eye operation knocked me out at the end of the four-day process, and it was homeward bound for yours truly.

But not immediately. The RAF had paid for my train ticket from Ireland to London, and the return was good for three months. So I decided to get a job in London for the duration, see a bit more of the world.

I eventually got in as a junior barman in Mooney's of High Holborn, one of a chain of Irish-owned bars in the capital at the time.

It was an easy enough number, with most of the business being the provision of a watering hole and lunch space for the office workers of the area. At night it was pretty dead, with just a few regulars.

I can't remember his name, and it's probably just as well, but the manager was a Londoner who didn't have any of the grace of the Irish publicans I knew back home. He was a condescending bollocks, actually, who had no business running what purported to be an Irish pub.

And he had a particular instruction. There were maybe six different beers on tap in the bar, two of which were Guinness, all with their own drip trays.

Every afternoon and night time, after each closing, we had to empty all the trays into an enamel bucket. The Guinness gave the whole mix a blackish colour, and the boss's order was that this should be used up, by the jugfull, in filling pints of Guinness during the lunch trade the next day, before any 'straight' pint could be poured. It was easy enough to do, because in the quiet before the rush of lunch hour it was common to get a stack of pints nearly ready so they could be topped off and served quickly to the guys nipping in for their fast lunch. You could set your clock by them, so it was dead easy to have the pints ready not a lot of minutes before they arrived.

Of course, in the case of a pint for the guv'nor and a couple of his cronies, this wasn't to be done.

None of us liked it, but jobs were scarce enough and it was part of the job and he was the boss. In the end, after a month, I told him I wouldn't do it any more, that it was a lousy and shameful practice.

We verbally fought about my stance for a month or so. It didn't matter to me, I was going home anyway. And I did eventually.

It's funny, he didn't even threaten to fire me. I guess he knew I didn't care, that I was only in for the short haul, and I could have easily done him damage by coming back in as a customer and letting every one of the lunchtime regular Guinness drinkers know what they were getting.

So he wasn't a total eejit.

And I was, at that time, still not ready to be a serious stirrer of s**te.

As I said, it's funny how memories connect ...

©2005 Brian Byrne.

A tease of summer?

And then, just to show what a crazy and unpredictable climate we have here, less than a week after we were freezing in north-eastern Arctic winds, two days beyond St Patrick's Day and with the earliest Easter on record just around the corner, it is such a glorious afternoon that I am able to get out and work in the garden.

Note - NOT 'work THE garden'.

Don't laugh: this could be all the summer we'll get. It has happened before ...

When we really had snow

Going through some old photographs recently, I came across a couple I took about 15/16 years ago when we had a REAL snowstorm. Sure makes the little fiddly flakes we've had in recent years look inconsequential.

©2005 Brian Byrne.

Trees and us

This last week was, in Ireland, National Tree Week. For A Kilcullen Diary, I went along to record the planting of a holly tree in the national school, sponsored by the Heritage Group. The job was done by local Parks Service ranger Roy Thompson.

Prior to the planting, he gave a talk on trees to the pupils, and came away very pleased with how 'clued in' they were about the subject.



Their questions were many and varied. To watch and listen, it was an uplifting experience. Not just because the kids were interested, or because they were very aware, but also because there are people like Roy Thompson, and teachers like those in Scoil Bhride, who are committed to satisfying young appetites for knowledge.

But one question, which on the surface might seem just funny, triggered a new thought.

'Have you ever fallen out of a tree?' one kid asked.

'Sure,' Roy answered. 'Have you?'

The answer was apparently in the negative. I recall Roy asking a general question of his own then.

'Have any of you fallen out of a tree?'

And it seemed that no one had. Or that any of them had even climbed trees much, if at all.

That has prompted me to think about when I was their age. Which in itself must be a sign of older age ...

But, when I was a kid, we had relationships with trees.

We climbed them. We shook them to get the apples down. We used them as navigation points in the several woods we played in around Kilcullen.

We had a Big Tree here, where Conroy Park is now. It was a landmark in the town, and also for those leaving and arriving in town on their way to and from Dublin.

I'll come back to that one. But we had an old orchard in the back of our house, one which had probably been planted long before our family acquired the property.

The trees were rough and gnarled, maybe about eight of them, and they produced little apples of varying qualities and sourness.

But they were all climbable. And as kids growing up we each had our favourite climb. At certain times of the year in playing in those trees, we had our individual 'homes' in those trees. Depending on the games we played, we even defended 'our' trees against each other. And again, at certain seasons, each tree provided ammunition to help in that defence.

Well, the apples really weren't edible ...

In the 'outer world', all Kilcullen boys played regularly in the various woods around the town.

Blacker's Wood in Castlemartin — now home to Sir Anthony O'Reilly — was one of the more important ones.



Several generations earlier it had been an almost formal garden for the aristocracy living in Castlemartin, its 'Laurel Walk' famous enough to be engraved on official maps of the area.

For those same people too, the woodland edge at the River Liffey had a boathouse for pleasure boating and fishing on the waterway.

But by my time the Blacker family who owned the estate had fallen on hard times and the wood was no longer the carefully-tended area where the gentry had walked in relative comfort and probably without fear of their boots getting muddy.



Which was great for us. We had gangs, of course. We played cowboys and indians. We built camps, stacking fronds of laurel against suitable trees. We had trails through the wood, which we used and defended, depending on what was the game of the day.

There were trees that were landmarks, there were trees that were cover, and there were trees that we climbed to watch for our rivals from.



And there were fallen trees that were very important. Both to get into the wood from the adjacent field, forming bridges across Pinkeen stream, as well as doing the same duty in the wood itself across the various runs of water that divided the then-neglected and relatively wild woodland.

All of us, at different times, fell out of or off of many of those same trees that were part of the fabric of our wilderness playground.

None of us, in my memory, were ever seriously hurt in any of those incidents. Scratches and blood-stained handkerchiefs were sometimes taken home, but generally meant little in the overall sense of satisfaction in a day well played.

In summer holidays we could be missing for most of the day, and our parents never worried. They didn't need to.

We had our trees ...

... and wherever we might be missing at, they were always comfortable in the fact that we were probably out in the wilds around Kilcullen. Out of their hair. And enjoying ourselves.

There were other trees. Like those that hung out over the bottom of what is now today known as the Valley park, but was then a scrubby-bush wilderness owned by the Molloy family.

On the upper stretches, we also had trails, steep and difficult in places where we had to hang on tight to those same bushes to avoid slipping down to the lower levels, especially after rain.

Those bowed trees out over the water were where we watched the flow of the daily 'flood' from the dam at Poulaphuca rise, sometimes sitting in summer with shoeless feet dangling to gauge the level of the rising water as feet and then knees were covered.

We also set fishing lines from some of those boughs, to catch eels overnight. Then, and now probably, illegal. But nobody bothered about it much, and we mostly always threw the eels back. In this country, what else would you do ...?

There were also trees in New Abbey wood that were their own landmarks if you wanted to walk the route to Carnalway.

But maybe more important in my memory are those chestnuts that still mark the last part of the walk to the old New Abbey graveyard.

At important times of the year, they provided us with 'conkers' for the annual ritual of competing to have a real hero chestnut.

(You don't know 'conkers'? Whoops ... take a chestnut, make a hole through it with a skewer, or nail if that was too much for the kitchen tool situation, and then put a piece of string through and knot it underneath. The contest is alternate bashing of each other's suspended chestnut until one breaks apart. Every one you break adds a value number to the victorious one.)

I don't believe I've felt the need to explain this. And, in the pub where I'm writing this, I've just talked to a former and much younger Dub-turned-Kilcullenite who did play conkers in his home area while growing up, but he doesn't know if it's common any more.

Still, he reminded me of the ways of becoming a champion. Heating the conker would do it. Smoking it in a chimney was much more sophisticated. Didn't always work, though — an 'overcooked' conker would eventually be too brittle to last repeated assault.

But it was all part of our relationship with the tree.

Back to the 'Big Tree'. When it was cut down by Kildare County Council in the early 70s, I wrote a piece in The Bridge which castigated the act. It was one of the first pieces that was later to bring me to a full-time career in journalism.

As it happened, the contractor who did the job and subsequently sawed it into bits had substantial costs in replacing the teeth of his machine.

It turned out that the Big Tree had been used for several centuries as a notice board for Kilcullen, and there were so many nails inside it that it caused serious damage to his equipment.

I got a few of the 'rounds' of the tree, which supplied me with winter firing for a couple of years. My chopping with a big axe wasn't too badly affected by the nails ...

So, for National Tree Week, these are some of my memories. But I have to wonder, is there a computer game around these days that, virtually even, will allow a child to fall out of a tree?

Because, however way, we all should have the experience.

©2005 Brian Byrne.