In 1972, when I was seventeen, I found a job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, a sea side resort in County Waterford in the south-east of Ireland. I suppose some part of the hotel may have really been grand, compared, say with other hotels in the region. Or the hotel might have been grand in the past. But it did not seem grand to me in 1972. The bar was small and not very busy in the day. It was at night perhaps that the grandeur emerged, if grandeur is the word. At around eleven or so in the ballroom of the hotel it emerged in the guise of a grand appetite for alcohol. No one could have enough of the stuff, and they wanted even more in the two hours when all the other bars in Tramore were shut and the ballroom of the Grand Hotel had a special licence to go on serving on a grand scale.
Drinkers in those hours were five deep at the bar calling for more. They were frantic to have their orders heard over the loud music. Orders came like: 'Two vodkas and tonic, one vodka and white lemonade, two pints of Guinness and a double Jameson'. Pulling a pint of Guinness then, as now, took skill and it also took time. You pulled half of it and then left it to settle, but by the time you had found it again, you had forgotten the rest of the order and could not locate the customer among the crowd. And the strange part was when you went to clean up at the end of the night much of the last...
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature. Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).
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