Celebrating the colours of The Kingdom
I might also write about Kerry football and outline for you a particularly well-taken point, from boot to crossbar, but I would much prefer to write about the living lingo of the greater, hard-necked, Atlantical warbler known as the Kerryman, who quests individually and in flocks for all forms of diversion and is to be found, high and low, winter and summer, wherever there is the remotest prospect of drink, sex, confusion or commotion!
Plain, everyday language is of no use to your genuine Kerryman. I remember to have been involved only last year in the purchase of a trailer of turf for my winter fires. A countryman friend, in order to bring down the price, spoke disparagingly of the trailer’s size. Said he, dismissively, “A young blackbird would bring more in its beak”.
On another occasion, the same gentleman was breakfasting with some friends on the morning of an All-Ireland final. The fare consisted of the usual rashers, egg and sausage, but, alas, the rashers were of the fatty variety and were possessed of no meat whatsoever. He put the rashers on his side plate and proceeded with the demolition of sausages and egg.
“Why,” asked the companion at the opposite end of the table, “are you not eating your rashers?” “Because,” said our friend, “they are too fat”.
“Is there any taste of lean meat at all in them?” asked the other.
“No,” said our friend, “not as much as you’d draw with a single stroke of a red biro!”
For all his wanton but worthwhile diffuseness, our friend would regard himself as a rather inferior sort of Kerryman. “A bit of a country boy,” as he says himself. He reminds me of the Kerryman who thought he had an inferiority complex: “I am only the same as everybody else,” said he.
There is no such entity as a conventional Kerryman. If you try to analyse him, he changes his pace in order to generate confusion. He will not be pinned down and you have as much chance of getting a straight answer out of him as you would a goose egg out of an Arctic tern.
He loves words, however, and that’s the only way you’ll get him going. Snare him with well-chosen words and craftily calefactive phrases and he will respond with sempiternal sentences, sonorous and even supernatural.
On the other hand, he also has the capacity for long, perplexing silences. It is when he seems to be speechless, however, that he is at his most dangerous. He is weighing up the opposition, waiting for an opening so that he can demoralise you.
He never talks in ordinary terms, and why should he when he can aspire otherwise? Once, on our way back from a football game in Dublin, a party of us stopped at a pub in west Limerick, but we were refused admission on the grounds that there was more morning than night in the hour that was in it.
“Be not forgetful,” said the oldest of our party, remembering Saint Paul, “to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares!”
“Let them in, don’t we be damned,” said the woman of the house, who happened to be a Kerrywoman.
An old man once told me that Kerrymen were uniquely articulate because the elements were their mentors.
“They can patter like rain,” said he, “roar like thunder, foam like the sea, sting like the frost, sigh like the wind, and on top of all that you’ll never catch them boasting.”
* The Colours of Kerry is from The Best of John B Keane: Collected Humorous Writings. It is published here courtesy of Mercier Press.
Jul 21, 1928: John B Keane was born in Listowel to William B Keane, a school teacher, and Hannah Purhill. John B was one of a family of ten, including actor Eamon. Attended Listowel national school & St Michael’s College, Listowel. Worked as assistant to chemists William Keane-Stack and WH Jones.
1951: Emigrated to England to work in a factory.
1955: Returned to Listowel, bought a public house and married Mary O’Connor. They had four children: Billy, Conor, John and Joanna.
1959: John B’s first play, Sive, was produced by Listowel Drama Group. The production won the All Ireland Drama Festival in Athlone and toured throughout the country.
John B followed Sive with a yearly succession of plays that included Sharon’s Grave, The Highest House on the Mountain, The Man From Clare and The Year of the Hiker.
1965: First production of The Field at the Olympia in Dublin, with Ray McAnally as the Bull and Eamon Keane as the Bird. The work was inspired by the murder of north Kerry farmer Moss Moore in 1959.
1969: First production of Big Maggie.
1986: Publishes the novel The Bodhran Makers.
1990: Jim Sheridan adapts The Field for the big screen, with Richard Harris as the Bull, Brenda Fricker as his wife Maggie, and John Hurt as the Bird.
1991: First production of Moll.
1992: Publishes Durango: A Novel, later adapted for television with Brenda Fricker.
May 30, 2002: John B dies, aged 73, after a long battle with cancer at home in Listowel.
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