Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (Paperback)

Introduction


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...