Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [81]
The place where we were put to stay was a charming little hotel in the village of Straffan, called Barberstown Castle, part of which dates back to the thirteenth century. I immediately fell in love with it, possibly because the first night we were there, I got blotto without parting with a penny. I literally stood at the bar and drank all night and never saw any money change hands. I thought to myself, “This is heaven,” and I rang Roger the next day and told him, “You’ve got to come and see this. You won’t believe it.” A few weeks later we came out together and stayed the night and had the best time, getting pissed with the locals, all of whom, through our rose-tinted spectacles, seemed to be incredible characters and great singers. It had the same effect on Roger as it had on me, and we made the decision between the two of us to buy it.
Over the next few years we got some good use out of it, and a lot of very funny and sometimes strange stuff would go on there, usually in the bar. The restaurant was the actual earning part of the business, and the bar was where the locals and myself would get completely legless every night. At the end of a good night, it would look like a hurricane had swept through the room, with broken glass and furniture everywhere, bodies half hidden under carpets, and me unconscious behind the bar. In the morning the cleaning girls would come in, and within ten minutes the place would look as good as new, ready for a lunchtime session. When, eventually, I became sober, it was decided that we should sell it. By then I hardly went there, and in fact it would have been a reasonably dangerous place to go. But I have extremely fond memories of my times there, in the company of wonderful characters, like Breda, our manager, and her erstwhile boyfriend Joe Kilduff, my drinking buddy. They were great days.
In the spring of 1976, after a year of living in the Bahamas and touring Australia, America, and Japan, I eventually returned to England, where, for a while, Nell and I enjoyed a period of real domestic bliss. Hurtwood was in a terrible state back then. It hadn’t had a lick of paint or much care of any kind, because Alice and I had ignored and neglected it from the day that Monster started to restore it. It was borderline squalid. When we had a couple of dogs living there—Jeep, a weimaraner, my first dog since childhood, and Sunshine, a golden retriever—we would let them crap in the house because we were too stoned to clear it up. The curtains and upholstery were beginning to rot. Nell immediately threw herself into trying to make the house nice again, starting with putting an Aga stove in the kitchen. She was a very social lady and wanted to make the place ready to receive visitors. Like me, Nell enjoyed a drink, though it may not have been to the same extent, and so drinking became an accepted part of our life, and our activities branched off from that. The heroin culture, which I had been immersed in with Alice, had consisted mostly of watching TV or movies when we were not actually pursuing the drug itself. What now followed on from that was a much more pub-oriented lifestyle, starting with the Windmill, the pub at the top of the drive, and extending