A Boston wake

I was up in Boston this week enjoying, on a blissful warm day, a wake, a celebration of the dear departed. So that nobody will mistake my meaning, I go quickly to the Oxford English Dictionary to be sure I've got the right word.

In the religious denomination I was brought up in, a funeral was a mournful event and neither before nor after were small boys supposed or permitted to smile, let alone to laugh outright or wolf pork pies and I think it's possible that some of my old Methodist fellows – I was going to say cronies, but Methodism and croneyism don't sound right as a pair – some of them may be mildly shocked at my enjoyment of a wake. All right, so, the dictionary.

It says here: 'From old English, watching by a corpse before burial, lamentations and merrymaking in connection with it'. That's right! That's the definition which I believe all good and faithful Irishmen of whatever sect would take for granted. And, remember, I was in Boston – Boston is not exclusively an Irish city, no American city is exclusively homogeneous, but Boston became a powerful political centre after millions of indigent Irish had gone aboard the old Cunarders at Cobh and landed at their transatlantic destination, which was Boston.

And, pretty soon after the turn of this century, Massachusetts which, for 150 years or more, had automatically sent to Washington people named Adams and Cabot and Lodge and Saltonstall, the people of Massachusetts, led by the pols of Boston, began to make a choice of the men they wanted to represent them between the old Boston Brahmins and up-and-coming, lace-curtain Irish and by the 1950s, such types were battering the lodges in elections for the United States' Senate. And in 1960, one of them who'd done that had the audacity to run and be elected as President of the United States, the grandson of a saloon keeper and street politician. The grandson's name, need I remind you, was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The poignancy of last Wednesday's wake was added to by the presence of a big shambling Irishman with the face of an amiable codfish. This possibly bizarre image occurs to me because the cod, the catching and marketing of it, was the economic salvation of the Massachusetts' colonists, as tobacco had been for the Virginians. And after the War of Independence, the royal coat of arms was taken down from the hallway of the state house in Boston, the capital of Massachusetts' government, and replaced with the carved likeness of a cod, where it hangs or is embedded there, to this day, as a sacred emblem.

Well, the big shambling Irishman, who'd been in politics over 50 years and in Washington for over 30, had come back to Boston for keeps. In the last few years, he was the arch Democrat, the unrepentant Roosevelt New Dealer, the most important, the most politically influential opponent of the Reagan administration and all its works. He was Mr Tip O'Neill, the retiring speaker of the House – a post, which I hasten to remind you once more, is not a ceremonial headship or a referee, but always occupied by the party that holds the majority in the House of Representatives and is its leader and spokesman.

Tip O'Neill was given a huge, sentimental send-off on the last day of the 99th Congress and no farewell speech could have been more apt, more characteristic anyway, than Mr O'Neill's last words, part of them spoken to reporters, the other part spoken in a farewell telephone call to President Reagan himself.

To the reporters, Mr O'Neill said, quietly, thoughtfully, 'He is the most uninformed president I have ever dealt with on any subject whatsoever.' Then, he telephoned the president and said, 'Thank you, Mr President, for making me such an important man in Washington. God bless you, you're a beautiful man!' There spoke a true American politician – in two sentences, revealing a quality of character, I suppose, which is possessed by most good politicians in this country, at any rate.

It's the ability to fight your opponent with vigour and passion, maybe even with blistering sarcasm, on the floor of the House or the Senate, but to leave all grudges there and, after hours, resume relations which are not only civil, but often even warm and affectionate. I can't think of two senators who made such scornful fun of each other on the Senate floor as John Kennedy, when he was Senator Kennedy, and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, another crusty veteran we're going to miss. He's just retired too.

Kennedy and Goldwater represented the opposing poles of political convictions as they were held by Democrats and Republicans and, in many countries, the parties and voters would have assumed, correctly, that the two men probably didn't speak to each other in private. But Kennedy and Goldwater, after murderous onslaughts on each other on the Senate floor, always retired, on Thursday evenings, I think it was, to their weekly poker game far into the genial night.

Well, the Boston wake was not for the ageing, but happily sturdy, old Tip O'Neill, it was for Boston's beloved baseball team – the Red Sox, which has been trying, at long intervals since 1918, and failing to win the World Series, the national baseball championship. Until last weekend, the brilliant memory that would never dim was of the incomparable series of 1975 when the Red Sox went down in the last inning of the seventh game – the series has to be won by the team that takes four games of seven and sometimes, obviously, there's no need to play all seven games. Bostonians could chant like a sacrament the years on which they've reached the final and lost, but last Saturday night, or just after midnight, the holy grail appeared shining over the stadium of the New York Mets and was there for the Red Sox' taking, as 50,000 glum Mets' fans bowed before the inevitable, several thousand of them already trooping out like early mourners.

Baseball has nine innings but if the game's not over then, they go to extra innings and it was the tenth inning, the bottom of the tenth. The Mets were two runs behind. They had two men out and the third, the last man had two strikes against him. One more successful pitch from the Red Sox pitcher and it would be all over.

So the man pitched and was hit. Another Met came up and hit, and another hit through the legs of a Red Sox fielder, a rare, dreadful error indeed in baseball, where the fielding is routinely brilliant. Then, a wild pitch, only the second that this Red Sox pitcher had ever delivered in his life and the catcher went clumping off for it while the Mets ran in three men, three more runs and won.

Now the series was tied, three wins each. On Monday night, not to stretch out Boston's agony, the Mets in the beginning two games down won the deciding game and were the champs. Once more the Red Sox had seen the grail and seen it vanish like a mirage.

The Red Sox stars were seen weeping in their dugout, weeping copiously into towels and fists and one of them, this year's champion hitter in all baseball, froze his face like the mask of a Greek tragic hero and let it melt, bit by bit, with the tears coursing slowly on to his chin, his neck, his shirt.

Well, that melancholy ceremony fulfilled the first part of the dictionary's definition, the watching of a corpse before burial and the lamentation. Most of us assumed that the Red Sox would drag their broken bodies and spirits back to Boston and look around to find themselves dishonourable graves. We had not reckoned with the spirit of the Irish.

Of course, the New York Mets, by command of Mayor Koch, were promised and given on Tuesday a ticker-tape parade that out-tickered Charles Lindbergh or the conquering General Eisenhower. In the interests of accuracy, I should say there wasn't a snowdrop of ticker tape, that's all gone. The blizzard was provided by shredded computer printouts.

But on Wednesday In Copley Square, Boston performed the second ceremony of the wake. The merrymaking in connection with the burial, and, as one old Irishman said to me, 'New York's parade was just vulgar. Ours was heartfelt'. What was there to make merry about? Well, as another Irishman put it, what do you say in a darlin' sports town after the other team won? Naturally, that it's a darlin' sports town!

'Let us bask,' said an undaunted politician, 'in penultimate glory! We nearly made it!' An enormous pair of Red Sox was hung above the entrance to city hall and the mayor of Boston, Mr Raymond Flynn, naturally, bellowed, 'Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Boston is the sports capital of the world.' Tidal waves of cheers, thousands of fists held high. Right on!

When it was all over, Mayor Flynn performed the final act of lamentation and merrymaking. He'd made a bet with Mayor Koch of New York. If the Red Sox lost, he would ship down to New York a pot of Boston baked beans and a terrine of New England clam chowder, which is cream, mashed clams and tiny potatoes. Bostonians despise the so-called Manhattan clam chowder, which is clams dropped in a vegetable soup. Mr Flynn sent along a message with the beans and the New England clam chowder. I suggested to Mayor Koch, he said, that the two dishes be eaten separately.

Well, I have obeyed the stern American injunction that nobody talks politics until the World Series is over. Until a year or two ago, this meant that people began to hot up their political prejudices any time after the first week in October, but now that there's a whole series of play-offs between the eastern and western divisions of the two baseball leagues, the main event can run, as it did, into the last week in October, which left only a week for the people to figure out who to vote for in next Tuesday's election.

The big questions there being, will Reagan hold his majority in the Senate? If he does, he has two years in which to rattle every sabre in his political armoury.

If he loses it, he will be a very lame duck through November 1988.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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