There once was a pub . . .

Once the smoking ban in pubs was approved in Ireland, many people believed it would sound the death knell of the old, smokey traditional pubs. And they were right. At the time, 2004, I had an idea to visit as many bars as I could before they died and to make them the subject of book. I was younger then, I had no kids, a lot of free time and probably a bit of an alcohol problem. Luckily, no publisher was interested in a book about obsolescent pubs, because I can only imagine what that would have meant for my liver. Anyway, I did manage to pop in to a few of my favourite pubs before they vanished or were radically altered.

Cheers . . . 

Redcross

Cullen’s Pub

Redcross 

Co. Wicklow

The woman in the grocery store in Redcross village says that Cullen’s Pub doesn’t open until around eight o’clock. Or sometimes nine o’clock. Or it could even be ten. I’d really have to come back and see. John Cullen has been running it on his own since his brother died and he also has the farm to look after. So there are evenings when he mightn’t open at all.

Like she said, I’d really have to come back and see.

I came back, three times, and only on the third visit spotted the silver-haired figure of a man through windows thick with cobwebs and dust. He sat behind the bar, head down, arms limp, looking a bit like a puppet with its strings cut.

The door of the pub opens with a prolonged squeak and you step onto a floor that is just a large surface of cold concrete. The air is like that inside a tomb - musty, moist and cool. Paint crumbles from the walls, names of young couples are scratched into the plaster and the woodwork around the bar has been scuffed and kicked from hard boots that swung from barstools.

To the right, a lounge area is just about illuminated by the hue of the summer evening dusk. A few parish hall chairs, a fireplace filled with dry logs and a piano provide the only other distractions in an otherwise dull room. Ahead, a short corridor leads to a larger room with the same furniture and a bulky stove, caged in, as if it had grown unmanageable in its advanced years. The door to the right is an exit to a yard that houses toilets as well as several barking dogs, the door firmly shut with a bolt as thick as a 60-ring gauge Cuban cigar. 

Behind the bar, plastic crates and wooden boxes filled with beer bottles are stacked in crooked piles, some with their destinations stamped in a bold black print. Daly's of Cork. A long way from home, they are, and likely to be the few remaining of their kind. There was, in the 1950s, a John Daly group in Carrigrohane, Co Cork. A large wine and spirit wholesalers, who later moved into a Coca-Cola franchise. That wooden crate – if it does belong to them – is the only trace I could find apart from odd scraps of references.

            An apron, a curled price list and a few ashtrays for change are the only other items that betray the building as a bar that was once busy, once a changing station for horses and carriages, the yard out the back alive with the sound of horses’ hooves. Now the only sound is the sniffing of the dogs under the door, hoping to get a bite of this stranger’s ankles.

            We were only about fifteen years old when we first rolled into the village of Redcross in the Wicklow Mountains. Actually, we didn't exactly roll in, we were on bicycles. And the Wicklow Mountains are only hills. But it was the first time away from home for the four of us and that's how it all felt at the time. Our plan was to get to Wexford that evening, but despite taking turns with the tent that weighed a ton, we barely got down through Wicklow County, the weight of the tent on the wheels of the bicycles causing numerous punctures and slipped chains. We were tired, hungry and as deflated as the tyres beneath us by the time we reached the camping ground, only to be told it was full. For some reason, we decided to go further up into the hills rather than stay put, got ourselves lost, and eventually knocked on the door of a house for directions.

            “To where?” we were asked by the woman.

            “Somewhere to pitch a tent.”

She gave us her garden that night for the tent and beans on toast the next morning for the trip back down the hill. In return, we made the journey back up again with a box of tepid chocolates by way of gratitude. Our luck changed as a reward and there was space that day for the tent in the campsite.

That evening we went looking for something to do. The choice was limited. Redcross had little to offer. There was the local hall, a chipper in the campsite and a pub called Cullen's. So we tried Cullen's.

Aged fifteen, we hadn't been in that many pubs, but we knew what draught beer was and there was no sign of it in here. Nor was there any sign of a till. A fridge. Crisps. Anything to say that this was a pub. Beer was in bottles only, straight from the crate. Spirits in a glass, no ice. Tots were done on a jotter. The home for coins was the ashtray, notes went into the pockets of the two brothers who shone the bar with a cloth after every purchase. Eventually we got the nod.

“Carlsberg please,” said the oldest of the fifteen-year-olds among us.

            “What ages are ye?”

            “Eighteen.”

            “Can you prove it?”

            “I got a watch for my birthday,” says the oldest.

            It was back to the chipper.

Two years later, six of us arrive back with the same tent. We stuffed ourselves in the chipper and had another crack at the Cullen's. This time we got served, warm beer straight from the crate. Saturday night and the bar, all three rooms, were hopping. People sat on upturned beer crates and old school chairs. The piano lid was raised and the keys were pounded. An accordion joined in. Then a guitar. Then a fiddle. Rings whizzed over our heads at the board on the wall behind us. People were singing -  ballads and folk songs. They thumped the floorboards and whacked the sides of the crates – wooden and plastic. We joined in and guzzled the beer and the two brothers, by ten o’clock, were in a lather of sweat. The ashtrays were full and the crates were getting empty, providing more seats for the bodies that fell in the door.

By midnight, all six of us had been sick as brutes. The warm beer left behind us in the cold grey toilet at the back of the yard, the barking of the dogs at our heels, the ringing of the ballads in our ears. But it had been a great night. And we never returned again, just to make sure that it stayed good. 

This evening, the piano is silent. Old Cullen gives me a beer, a Budweiser, and refuses to take any money for it. It was quiet last night, and the night before that, he says, looking up. But the night before that it was busy. The campsite had turned the chipper into a bar and restaurant, so that takes a lot of the crowd.

I tell him I had come here about twenty years before or so and he nods as if to say “do you really expect me to remember you?”.  I ask him if the musicians still come here on a Saturday night like they used to. “They’re all dead,” he tells me. There’s not much you can say after that, so I have a look round.

The building, from front room to back, has the appearance of a fading photograph. You almost expect the corners to come curling in on top of you. Everything is on its way out, washed in vanishing mid tones of chalky grey – the tabletops, walls and floors. It has the pallor of death, and even though I’d only been here a couple of times, I had a feeling I was going to miss it.

The door opens and a couple of guys enter. German by the sounds of it. They order a few bottles of beer to take away and look in wonder as old Cullen picks up a jotter and spends what seems an eternity doing a tot and working out the change from a twenty Euro note. They grab the beers and leave laughing.

I returned once after that on a Friday night with a few friends for a quick drink and the place was again empty. Old Cullen occupied the same spot and had the same jotter to calculate the round of drinks. Up the road, the campsite was brimming and the restaurant was full. People sat outside their mobile homes and tents and played stereos and lit barbecues, sipping cans of beer under heated lamps. Maybe I felt that bit more of an attachment to Cullen's because it was the first pub that I had got sick in, but I wondered, what was it that kept these people away?  

I didn't wonder for very long because it's no great mystery. It's not people in general that keep places alive but generations in particular. Institutions like traditional pubs can stand or fall on the generations that choose or choose not to accept them. This generation doesn’t need the traditional pub. They don't want it or the time it belonged to. And just like old Cullen, his brother, and the musicians, time is always called.

Some time later, I phoned the shop next door to ask about the state of the pub. It was gone, I was told. Soon to be demolished. And the owner. Gone too. Into a home. Maybe I shouldn’t have been taking these guys’ photos.