Michael Harding: Hash cakes and other stories you wouldn’t tell to a guard

I was in a Cavan hotel last week for lunch. They always give me lots of gravy and beef. I was sitting at the window on my own, so that it was impossible to avoid listening to the pair at the next table.

They were both small men, as common in Cavan as big houses, and they were clearly passionate about fishing, which is not surprising, since the lovely waterways of the county are full of fish, and even the Kinnypottle river, which flows through the town, shelters small perch beneath the green slimy reeds.

“Did you do any fishing this weekend?” the bespectacled one asked.

“Killykeen on Saturday morning,” the lean one replied as he chewed roast beef like a hungry whippet.

Then he stopped chewing, for dramatic reasons, and stared at the bespectacled one.

“There was nine Dutch fellows along the shoreline under the wooden bridge, with the sun shining on them and one woman on the other bank, in the shadows, all on her own. Nine,” he stressed, holding up four fingers of his left hand. “Nine.”

“Did you catch anything?” the man with the glasses asked.

“I did,” the whippet replied. “Just the one. But he was hardly as big as me mickey.”

The man with the glasses didn’t reply to that. I suppose it’s a difficult statement to address. He might have said, “Jesus that must have been the tiniest fish in the world.” Or maybe he could have said, “Actually, I’ve never seen your thing, so how would I know what size the fish was?”

They ate in silence for a while, and it struck me that fishing is a very male kind of activity. I had a girlfriend once who grew up with three brothers in Cavan, all of whom fished under the same wooden bridge near Killykeen, with worms dangling on hooks that hung from rods that were cut from ash or alder trees.

In those days it wasn’t a question of catching the fish, placing it in a net for a few hours and then releasing it again into the wild. The children of long ago would have thought that quite mad. Their purpose was to kill. To beat the brains of the little creature against some nearby rock and take it home and throw it in the sink, in the hope that their mother might cook it.

Their mother usually threw it to the cat and told them not to be dirtying the sink with smelly fish. One night they hid a fish under the bed. Their sister, who was five, could smell it during the night. She got up and bit the head off with her bare teeth, and then threw the head and body into the boys’ chamber pot. She told me this on the wooden bridge in Killykeen in 1971, because courting back then was a form of sharing intimate and shameful things about your past.

Sharing intimate stuff

The two boys in the Cavan hotel were gorging on apple tart when they began sharing intimate stuff that – as they say in Kilnaleck – you wouldn’t tell to a guard.

“Were you ever in Amsterdam?” the bespectacled one asked, out of the blue.

“No,” said the whippet.

“I went with the wife,” the bespectacled one said. “I thought we might do some drugs. So we went into the shop and they had hash buns for sale. Hash buns, if you don’t mind. And they were marked at different strengths. Light. Medium. Strong. So we took a couple of the light ones and went back to the hotel and made mugs of tea, and we sat there eating them and wondering when we’d feel high. But nothing happened. Not a thing.

“So the following day we went back and the wife said she’d have the medium one, and I said, ‘Feck that, give us four of the strong ones’, cos they were only €6.”

“And back we went to the hotel and did the same thing, with the bath running, and it full of fancy-smelling salts, and us drinking tea and horsing the buns, and what do you think happened?”

“What?” inquired the whippet.

“Nothing. Not a fecking thing. The wife said she thought they must be buying them in Supervalu and selling them as hash buns to gobshites like us who come over from Ireland.”

The whippet pointed out that he didn’t think they had Supervalu in Amsterdam, but I was already finished my coffee and ginger biscuits, so I left before they had resolved that issue.