“Hi,” I replied. “Where you headed?”
Back in the mid-1970s, people still hitched in Ireland. And those of us fortunate to be in cars frequently gave people lifts. For both parties it was something of a gamble. Of easy conversation, or not. Of possible personality clashes. Of committing to a distance or destination together that might prove to have been a mistake in as little as a minute or two into the drive. Of finding truth in the urban myths of either the hitcher or the driver turning out to be unsavoury or even dangerous. The sad realities of that, which still reverberate today in cases of missing people last seen trying for lifts, hadn’t yet arrived in Ireland …
Most of my time driving then, usually when alone, I did pick up people. Particularly on my way out from Dublin to my home in mid-Kildare. Sometimes I might detour a little, to get them to Newbridge, for instance, when my own drive would have been directly to Kilcullen through Naas. The extra miles and time were no big deal to me, and yet often could make a significant difference to my stranger passenger. Sometimes there was interesting conversation, other journeys were made in silent listening to the car radio. In a decade of motoring before Ireland gradually joined the league of dangerous places for hitching, I had no bad encounters with people I gave lifts to.
The mid-1970s were before our motorways. The traffic lights at Newlands Cross on the outskirts of the city was a favourite spot for people seeking a lift, with cars regularly moving slowly off on the green. That facilitated both hitcher and driver with time to seek or decide. A stop there for down-country buses was a last-recourse option for those who failed to get a ride.
One morning, I don’t remember why I had been in the city so early, the lights stopped me at Newlands around ten-thirty. Waiting for the green, I saw a couple standing at the bus stop, both with backpacks, a duffel bag at the man’s feet. To me, just passed from my twenties, they looked not quite elderly, maybe my parents’ age. The man’s thumb was tentatively out as the lights changed and the traffic moved off. I decided, pulled over and waited.
After those introductory ‘Hi’s, the woman had caught up and also bent down to look in. She smiled, a pleasant, motherly kind of woman. “We missed our coach,” she said. “We’ll go as far as you can take us, where we can maybe get a bus onwards, towards Limerick?” The accent was north American.
I nodded. “Sure. I can take you to Newbridge. It’ll get you on your road. There are several Limerick buses through there.”
“Thank you,” the man said, his accent similar to hers. “I’ll put the bags in the trunk, if that’s OK?”
“Sure. I’ll come and open it.”
A few minutes later, the bags stowed, the man was in the back seat and his wife, as she turned out to be, sitting up front. We were on our way down the N7, an easy drive as far as Naas, the road had been dual carriageway since 1968. We quickly got through the basics, the ‘thanks for picking us up’, exchanged names. Alice and Tom. They were Canadian. Their first time in Ireland. Somehow, it wasn’t really clear why, they had missed the connection in the city to their group heading out on a tour of the south and west of Ireland. Someone had told them, ‘take a city bus to Newlands Cross, you’ll get a lift from there’.
They were nice people. I don’t remember now what they did, but my recollection is that they were probably within horizon’s view of retirement. Like most north Americans I'd met, they were easy, open people. Happy to talk, not yet sure of the protocols when hitching a ride in Ireland. We got on well. They shared happy anticipation of their tour, if they managed to catch up with it. They had no family connections to Ireland.
By the time we reached Newbridge I had made a decision. It was my weekend off in the family pub business where I worked. I knew where their tour was staying that night, in Killarney. Catching up with it by the national bus service was not a likely possibility. “Stay there a moment,” I said as I pulled in behind the bus stop. “I just want to make a phone call.” The phone box — no mobile phones in those days — was conveniently nearby. My wife wasn’t surprised. She was by now used to my habit of bringing people further than needed. "Your strays," she called them. At least this time I wasn’t also bringing them home for lunch.
“We’ll keep going,” I said when I got back in the car. “I’m not working today, and I like to drive.” My car at the time was a red Rover 2200 TC, and I loved driving it. Loved cars. Which, a whole other story, was probably part of how I became much later in my life a motoring and travel journalist. But for this day, I was driver to a couple of visitors to Ireland whom in a very short space of time I had come to like. Also, working in what is now known as the hospitality business, I had always been conscious of fulfilling our Irish reputation of ‘cead mile failte’, a hundred thousand welcomes. Truth, though — a spin to Kerry was a great excuse for a day out in the car.
But we took the long way. We stopped in Kildare to look at the round tower and cathedral, in a place of spirituality going back to the time of St Brigid. We drove through the pretty town of Abbeyleix, the oldest planned estate town in Ireland. We stopped at the Rock of Cashel, where the King of Munster was reputed to have been converted to Christianity by St Patrick. We paused at several other places on the way that were probably on the route of many a tourist coach. Some of them I knew from my childhood, when driving with my Dad, a much-thumbed hardback Road Book of Ireland on my lap. Published in the mid-1950s by the Automobile Association, its almost 300 pages included thumbnail write ups of virtually every village and town in the country, compiled by Michael Morris, also known as Lord Killanin. In a number of these places I also recalled owners of bars, as my Dad, a prominent publican, had friends in the same business, it seemed in every town in Ireland.
All that made it a very slow trip to Killarney, and it was dark when I helped Alice and Tom with their luggage up the steps of their hotel. The rest of their tour group were probably in the middle of their evening meal. “Stay the night,” Alice urged me. “We’ll pay for it. It's the least we can do.” I declined. It was time for them to join their own group, and for the rest of their holiday to find out with a real tour guide the Ireland that they had come to experience. We hugged, and I drove home.
For many years after that, around the anniversary of their trip to Ireland, there was a postcard from Canada signed by Alice and Tom. Just to say they were thinking of the day they had spent with me. After some years, the card only had Alice’s name.
Eventually the card didn’t come at all. But, though details are lost in the mists of overcrowded memory and the passage of too many decades, that day remains one of my fondest. In showing that couple some of the places on our journey, I had relived many of my own early years on the road with my Dad. They often were slow and staggered trips too.
I had done Alice and Tom a favour, sure. But I had got at least as much in return.
