Tales from the Road #9

Captain (after Maclise) etching from Tempest (Fifty Nights in a Dublin Hotel) SW

I have been a victim of a mugging twice in my life and that’s not counting  a night in Manhattan when a strange guy ran up to me wanting a hug, crying out  “Lay some love on me brother”  yeah, right!

One night on my way home from music school (I was about ten or eleven years old) I was ambling along Batchelor’s Walk on the banks of the Liffey, quite close to the main thoroughfare of O Connell street in Dublin when I was accosted by two men. They bustled me into a doorway. “give us your bleedin’ money or we’ll throw your banjo (it was my violin) into the Liffey” At that time I had a love hate relationship with my violin and I did consider their their modest proposal for about about five seconds. 

I imagined my fiddle floating away to the Irish sea on the evening tide. “Please mister, I’ve only got me busfare” I blurted out in response. “Give us your bleedin’ busfare, then” one of them whined.  I emptied my pocket and gave those two jackals all my money. They went off laughing like hyenas. I was a bit shaken and perplexed about how to get home. Luckily a friendly bus conductor with close cropped white hair and known by most North Dublin kids as Snowball, recognised me. I explained to him what had happened and he put me at my ease and sat me down at the top of the bus.

The second time was thirty years later. It was my day off in Amsterdam between shows on an extensive European tour. I was wandering through the busy tourist filled streets, musing, my head poking into the air with dreams of Tulip brokering, Dutch mystics, Flemish masters and Vincent van Gogh. I felt some thing nudge at my side like a little dog . I looked down and there was a wee swarthy man poking his finger through his jacket pocket in the fashion of a gun and speaking to me rapidly in Dutch.

I looked at him blankly as we kept walking along the crowded thoroughfare. He began ushering me to a doorway, still pointing with his “Gun”. Reading my blank stare he swiftly changed language from Dutch and started poking his bony pocket clad digit harder into my ribs, He machine gunned some French at me.  All I could manage was another blank coffee house stare!  Now, a quick salvo of high German all the while jabbing me annoyingly. He was getting frustrated and realised he was getting nowhere. The little greasy polyglot changed to English! “Give me all your money!” “If you speak to a cop I will keeel you”. I gave him all my money of course, all of seven euros. “What a well educated, poor little fellow” I thought to myself as I strolled homewards, trembling in shock.