A life less ordinary
ONLY a fool believes a good story is all about the ending, so there is nothing like a back-to-front story to really pull the rug from under your feet. So it is with the life story of Damien Enright, the nature writer, Irish Examiner columnist, writer/presenter of RTÉ’s Enright’s Way and author of the acclaimed A Place Near Heaven, A Year In West Cork.
His is a tale of sex, drugs, fraud, forgery and international drug-smuggling in 1960s Ibiza, as depicted in Damien’s new book, Dope in the Age of Innocence.
Then, Ibiza was an impoverished backwater, because it took the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, so the dictator Franco shunned the island. This suited an ersatz community of bohemian dropouts encamped there, a motley collection of artists and writers leavened with seekers, beatniks, shysters, drinkers, druggies and assorted oddballs.
They smoked marijuana with abandon and were early experimenters with LSD. You could have called them hippies, but the word had yet to be coined. At the epicentre was Damien Enright, bank manager’s son, ex-Blackrock College boy, medical school dropout, fledgling writer and the only Irishman on the island.
It is 1964: after three years on Ibiza, Enright is living on Formentera, in a faltering relationship with Hanna, and their young daughter, Aoife. Back on Ibiza, his ex-wife, Nancy, lives with their two sons, Col and Killian. After their first LSD trip, Enright and Hanna, spurred by acid-idealism, abandoned the Ibiza crowd for the more spartan Formentera. Though the cost of living is minimal, it is hard to turn a buck and there are the boys to support back on Ibiza. Gathering snails for restaurants nets a few pesetas, but, once the season is over, things are grim.
So Enright is heading to London with two American drifters, Carlo and Rick, to pull a few traveller’s cheques scams. Enright runs it, providing back stories for their ‘characters’, and they soon have $900 profit. It’s not enough for Enright: a talented forger, he heads to Holland and Belgium with doctored passports, eventually returning, Cuban-heeled boots stuffed with enough money to finance a year back in Spain.
During his London stay, still pining for ex-wife, Nancy, and unconvinced of his feelings for Hanna, he fits in a casual affair. It chimes with the mores of the times: no attachments, no old hang-ups. Then, one day back in Formentera, someone suggests a road trip to Turkey to score a few kilos of hashish, not for profit, but to benefit their little community.
Enright and Carlo make the trip, a hair-raising, rollicking travelogue through Europe and Asia, but it has the air of a ‘boy’s own’ adventure, until they arrive back at the final hurdle, the Spanish border.
They are busted, and, in a time before universal dope-smoking, it is the biggest drugs haul in Spanish history. Carlo is imprisoned and Enright goes on the run, hiding out on Ibiza, a wanted man, the police searching for him high and low. Here, the tale takes a dark turn, when ‘friends’ sheltering him, Rick and another American, Marvin, have different agendas, stalling on escape plans. That the ‘friends’ are now seriously into opium — even heroin, when they can get it — doesn’t help.
Hanna wants nothing to more to do with Enright and it emerges she is now sleeping with the creepily messianic Marvin. Enright, hiding in isolation, slowly but surely begins to lose all reason, before the gripping finale.
Enright made it out, eventually, and bought Carlo out of jail within the year. He even had another two children with Hanna, in London, but they finally split in 1967. He met Corkwoman, Marie, in 1971 and they have been together ever since, in West Cork since 1990. They have two boys.
Even today, Enright bursts with boyish enthusiasm; you can easily picture the younger man itching to break loose. As a child, he lived a peripatetic life, the bank manager’s family transferred around the country to a series of small provincial towns.
“That’s what gave me and my brother the impetus to go and travel, to seek out adventure. I was ready to go as soon as I could. I went to the College of Surgeons, spent a year in Dublin wasting my parents’ money and then I took off for Britain, where I met my first wife, Nancy. I was probably rather romantic, I probably had a bit of a three-musketeers view of the world,” he says.
That spirit of adventure seems to have extended equally to drugs? “We weren’t out to wreck our heads,” he says, “we were young and idealistic and we really believed psychedelic drugs would enable us to move beyond our conditioned minds to a new freedom, and closer contact with God, whoever that God might be.
“I stopped a long time ago. If I’m at a party and a joint is passing around, well, I mightn’t say no, but I think you’re head gets beyond the point where you can handle dope that well. I still drink a glass of wine every night of the week. Tonight, I’m going out to play Texas Hold-em poker and I’ll have a few beers. But I haven’t taken acid for 40 years, it’s a mind-bender, a psychic washing machine, but that was a pursuit of something better, to make us better people, it wasn’t trying to be ‘hard men’,” he says.
How did the international drug smuggler evolve into a genteel naturalist? “I was always interested in nature, we lived in the country. My old man used to shoot rabbits, I didn’t like seeing the rabbits blown away very much, but it was one of the things we did. I contrived to miss them, until he was very old, when I contrived to hit them — because he loved a rabbit. He showed me things — like goldfinch eggs and how to make a bird trap from sally rods. And, for years in London, we headed out to the country every single weekend. My eldest boys were living in the Brecon Beacons, my kids with Hanna in the Cotswolds.
“I wrote a story about my father coming to see me in west Cork and sent it in to the Examiner. [The late writer] Sean Dunne rang me and said, ‘whenever I get unsolicited material, I usually have to re-write it, but I don’t want to change a word of this. Would you be interested in a bit of regular writing’? I said ‘I would.’ ‘What would you like to write about?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ I said, I’m looking out at a big flock of birds, what about that’? He said ‘alright.’ I sent in three more pieces. After that, they offered me a column.”
Is he worried about reaction to the book? “I asked an editor, some time ago, if he thought it would alienate my readers, that Damien Enright who writes the ‘inspiring nature column’ turns out to have been a druggie? He said, ‘look, they have priests to worry about putting their hands in little boys’ trousers, politicians to worry about putting their hands in the till and bankers ripping off all and sundry. I would not worry. If anyone is concerned, they are out of date, out of style, out of fashion’.
“I can say to anyone, ‘I have a marriage lasting 40 years that is sweetness and light, we never have a row or a bad word, I have seven children, nine grandchildren, none of them alcoholics or junkies, what’s your problem.’ I’ve always talked to them about this story, from the time they hit 17 or 18. They have all been very successful, academically and in their careers. They all got very straight. None of them were doing anything I did.”
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