After the Wake (10 page)

The old fellow danced a bit more with temper and
his red face but they waved their bottles at him and he went off.

‘Me poor child, you’d want something after that old fellow frightening the little heart out of you. Open another bottle, Lizzie, and give him a bit of ham to take with it.’

We sat on in the setting sun eating and drinking and my grandmother and Lizzie MacKay making remarks about the way the fellows going past were either walking in front of or behind their girls.

‘Look at that fellow, Lizzie, swinging his stick, a mile behind the poor one.’

The young man looked over at them, and hurried on to get out of earshot.

‘You’d think the poor girl had a contagious disease.’

The man and the girl took one fearful look over at them and fled up the road.

When we got home that night from the country the people asked us where we’d spent the day and my grandmother said we’d been on the Belfast road.

All I had ever heard of Ireland and her green fields and rakes up in rafters and women of three cows
a
grá
, was for me situated in north county Dublin and the Belfast road was the golden way to Samarkand.

I learned early on that it was a bit up the road from us that Setanta beat a hurling ball into a dog’s mouth and became Cuchulainn.

Out on that road lay Gormanston where my father was locked up and where he saw me for the first time when I was six months old. Seán T.* was in with him and I thought that made Seán T. a fairly important man too.

My cousin who learned more about cattle on the
North Circular Road than many a one reared in the Argentine had charge of a big house for some time out Swords direction.

It was a big mansion with an estate and hay barns and cow barns and statues in the gardens. There were about fifty rooms in the main building and a lodge, as Chuckles Malone said, the size of the Bridewell.

People round our way couldn’t see anyone lost for a bit of company in a big place like that.

I was brought out for the air and was followed by my father’s aunt who wasn’t too well. Some of the neighbours brought out a couple more invalids and our team, N.C.R.A.F.C., were in the final of the Conway Cup that year, and they thought it would be a good place to get a bit of training, and with the sick people looking out the windows at the footballers and screaming advice and abuse to young Coughlin to be not so mangy* with the ball, and telling Johnny Foy that he got his head for something else besides keeping his hat on, my cousin said the place was a cross between the Pigeon House Sanatorium and the Fifteen Acres.* There was the best of gas and the life of Reilly to be had by one and all.

And in the summer nights I’d lie in bed and over the noise of the fellows and girls down in the big hall dancing round the coats of armour to the gramophone playing
On
Mother
Kelly
’s
Doorstep
I’d hear the cars going past and sometimes sneak to the window and follow the noise and the red tail-light till it grew faint and dim going on to the end of the Belfast road through green fields and dusky magic.

One of the Michael Dwyer* crowd, whose breed still flourishes round New Street and thereabouts, was back on a visit from the Coombe to the Glen of Imaal, where his grandmother’s sister lay dying.

After she was washed and made right for the road the priest sat taking a cup of tea and chatting with her. ‘Well, now, and how do you feel, Nan?’

‘I feel right enough, now that you’ve been and settled me; what would be the matter with me? I’ve known that I was going to die this eighty year past.

‘It happened all belonging to me. Though them that does have all the talk about how nice it is in the next world, I don’t see any great hurry on them getting on there.’

‘I suppose you don’t, Nan. But you’ve no regrets for this one. You reared fine men and women, and saw their rearing up here on the mountain.’

‘I have no regret, Father, only the one. I was never in Dublin.’

Sammy Watt in Portrush has the same regret. In his youth there were no paid holidays and now, in ampler times, he’s nervous that the Republicans would recognize him and have him shot, maybe lynch him as he walked along O’Connell Street, or tie him to the Bowl of Light place and, as a special
Tóstal*
attraction, have him beaten to death with bound volumes of the
Ulster
Protestant.

For Sammy was on the other side in the Tan time.

I had never met anyone who boasted of having fought against the rebels, except the commissionaire of a Liverpool cinema who told me he was in the
Black and Tans and took part in a military operation.

This included a raid on a clerical outfitter’s in Dame Street.

Suitably garbed, he and his comrades, who had raided a pub or two earlier on, stood in the lorries and blessed the passers-by with upheld Mills grenades.

But the commissionaire only joined up because his girl friend wouldn’t leave her work in a tripe factory. And, wanting to forget, he had not got the fare to the Foreign Legion and had to make do with the Black and Tans.

Besides, he thought it was more dangerous, the money was better, and he could help his widowed mother, who was an invalid and could do nothing but sit all day in a bathchair embroidering moral notices, suitable for framing, reading:
Beware!

‘Just the one word’, said I, ‘and the same one on all the notices?’

‘Ah. She weren’t much of a speller, my old woman. Nor much of an embroiderer, neither. She weren’t bad though, considering the only training she’d ever ’ad was sewing mailbags when she’d be doing a couple of months up in Walton.

‘She sent her embroidery all over the world with the missions. You could read
Beware
in my old woman’s sewing all over the British Empire. Some places they didn’t know enough English, and ’ad to ’ave it explained to them what it was about.

‘When I was in your country, forgetting this judy what gave me up for a job in a tripe factory, my old woman, she sent me an embroidering, and it ’ung over the canteen counter –
Beware
– in black and red wool, till the Shinners* let off a landmine.

‘It blew the roof in on top of the sergeant-major where ’e was ’avin’ a pint, and when ’e got over ’is nerves and got up and dusted ’imself, ’e said to take that so-and-so notice off the wall or ’e’d go over to Norris Green and slit my old woman’s gizzard, at ’is own expense.’

My commissionaire didn’t count, because he wasn’t much interested in the rights or wrongs of the war so long as it kept his mind off his troubles.

Sammy spoke with the ardour of the pure-souled and dedicated patriot about his services to King and Empire in those strenuous days.

All my life I’ve known the opposite convention, where anyone old enough would mutter darkly about their doings and if they weren’t in the G.P.O. in 1916 it was because they were doing something more important and to which the element of secrecy was so vital that it hasn’t been made public nearly forty years after.

A change is as good as a rest.

‘I’m a man that knows what I’m talking about. I was through the whole lot, so Ah was.’

‘And what, pray, were you through?’ asked his wife, from the far side of the table, ‘barrin’ it’d be a lock of porter barrels?’

‘Och, hould your wheesht, you, Hanna, you knew nawthin’ about it, nor was let know. A right thing, if every gabbin’ ould woman in the County Derry could be knowing the secrets of the organization.’

‘Och, what organization? Filling the wee boy’s head up wi’ your lies and rubbish.’

I signalled hastily to the barman.

‘Port, please, for Mrs. Watt. No, not the Empire, the Portuguese port.’

It’s not every day in these weeks I get called a ‘wee boy’. It might never happen again.

‘And a couple of scoops for myself and Sammy.’

We got settled down to his military reminiscences.

‘Ah was an Intelligence man.’

‘The dear God protect us from the Father of Lies,’ muttered Hanna to herself, putting down her glass.

Sammy did not condescend to hear her. ‘Yes, Ah was an undercover man like –’

‘Dick Barton,’ said Hanna.

‘Ah was a spy, to tell you straight, though you were on the other side; good men on every side and you’re a Fenian; you mind Dave O’Leary?’ All in the one breath, and I had to sort it out as best I could.

Fenian Dave O’Leary?

‘Would it be John O’Leary, Sammy? He was a Fenian, but he was in the one grave with romantic Ireland a long time before I was born.’

‘Och, don’t talk daft. This man was in the grave with no one. He stayed out in Portstewart, five mile out the town, only last summer. Isn’t he the head one in the Free State? Damn it, sure everyone knows Dave O’Leary.’

‘De Valera?’

‘Damn it, isn’t that who I said? Deyve Ah Leery.’

‘Fair enough. What about him?’

‘You mind the time he come in Columb’s Hall in Deny? Well, Ah goes in, carryin’ me life in me hands, among all these Fenians that’s packin’ the hall out to give him a big cheer when he comes out on the stage to prache.’

‘To?’

‘To prache the meeting. Ah’m sitting in the sate minding no one and hoping no one will mind me,
but I’m in me disguise.’

‘What was that,’ asked Hanna, ‘a temperance pin?’

‘I took me hat off, and no one in the place had ever seen the top of me head from the time I got bald, so they didn’t know me.

‘Till, when Dave O’Leary comes out on the stage there’s a big cheer and a roar and the next thing is, the Peelers* is trying to get in the doors and the crowd is baiting them, and Dave O’Leary is away there, up on the stage, and he says that he came to prache, and, begor, he’s going to prache, and damn the one will stop him, and in the middle of it I’ve got down under the seat, and Head Constable Simpson says, “Got you,” and he doesn’t know me with me bald head till he turns me round and recognizes me from me face, and near drops from surprise.

‘“And what and under the dear good God are you doing here, Sammy Watt? D’you think we hadn’t enough trouble with the Fenians?”

‘“Ah’m an Intelligence man,” said I. “A spy.”

‘“Take yourself to hell out of thon, or I’ll spy you, with a kick where it won’t blind you.” There was me thanks.’

‘Ah, sure wasn’t it always the way. Look at Parnell.’

‘Ah wonder would they hould it again me in Dublin if I snaked down for a wee trip on the
Enterprise
?’

‘Couldn’t you disguise yourself? Take off your hat until you get back on the train?’

It was my privilege, at the age of ten years, to march
behind the coffin of the veteran Fenian, James Stritch who, I was told afterwards, gave the signal for the boys to attack the van in the famous Manchester Rescue. I saw the late Joe MacGarrity once and damn near plucked up the courage to ask him what he meant by helping to organise the riots against
The
Playboy
on the famous Abbey tour of forty odd years ago. For it is his name that appears on the list of bail bondsmen for the
Clann
na
nGael
drama critics who went in to wreck the show in Philadelphia.

Joe might have told me to go and chase myself or might have said that they weren’t going to have the country made a jeer of. If he had, I’d have quoted Padraic Pearse’s remarks on censorship to him for Pearse was not of the same mind as Joe MacGarrity on the matter which goes to show that a mutual interest in Irish Independence does not always mean a common taste in literature.

Pearse lifted the censors out of it in a passage, quoted by me in the original Irish, in an article in this newspaper on Saint Patrick’s Day last. I shouldn’t think in this dear land that everyone would have agreed with it. It must be that the censors don’t read Irish or maybe the ones that do don’t read
THE IRISH
PRESS
. Of course, they shouted to Cyril Cusack that they didn’t understand Irish when he was making his curtain speech in the Gaiety the first night of O’Casey’s play.

Be that as it may, I’d have let a few shouts at
The
Playboy
myself, on the first night, only for, (i), I wasn’t present, and (ii), the play is good gas. For the carry-on of the people on the stage and their old chat is so phoney that no corner-boy in the days of my childhood felt that his repertoire was complete
barring he could take off
The
Playboy.
‘Oh, man of the roads with your long arm and your strong arm, be after pulling me a pint of porther,’ and all to that effect.

The speech is not the speech of native speakers trying to speak English, for that is usually done in an American accent and the idiom of the lower orders of the United States is even prevalent in the Irish itself. I have heard a little girl go into a shop and ask for a
paicéad
cáise
agus
punt*
crackers
,
and another child asked me did I fancy
cereal is
bainne*
for my breakfast.

Andrew Marvell in his Horatian Ode congratulating Cromwell on his return from Ireland, says:

It is not so much that, but being conquered by such a dull lot of
cawbogues*
that couldn’t even cook or make good drinks. Now if it had been Napoleon I’d nearly have been in the ‘B’ Specials.*

The real Playboy, an O’Malley from Erris, was described by Tomás Ó Máille as a ‘sturdy, lively young man without being too tall.’ If he had been alive in 1919 he’d have been eighty years of age which means he was born sometime around 1840. His father was a man that had a strong weakness for drink, God forgive him, and your man had to leave home and go to sea at an early age.

The Playboy, as we’ll call him, sent home money to the father to buy a bit of land which would go to him when he came home from the sea because he was the only son and, anyway, it was bought with his money.

He came home in due course, got married, and everything passed off very civil as the man said, till the mother died when lo and behold, the old fellow decides to have another puck off his hurl and get married again himself.