After the Wake (14 page)

We came up, swinging our togs and towels, and they smiled a welcome and made room for us nearer the speaker, as much as to say, ‘Come right in, you’re welcome, glad to see you taking an interest.’

The old man spoke about the history of the area and the meaning and origin of the place-names and when he was finished he spoke to Harry and me and he seemed delighted to know that Harry’s mother was an O’ this and his granny a Mac the other.

He talked about Dublin to me and asked me how I liked Co. Down. I said I liked it well and for the want of something to say remarked on the way the little ruin was looked after. There was a fence in good repair around it and a notice to tell you where to find
the caretaker.

‘But of course,’ he smiled, ‘it’s well looked after. It’s a national monument.’

‘You mean
you
recognise it as a national …’

The smile faded sadly from his face.

‘I mean the Northern … I mean the government …’

I mean that I wished the ground would open and swallow me like the Tuatha de Danaan* or the Firbolgs* or whoever
we
chased out of it.

‘Yes,’ he said wistfully, ‘I suppose it’s a fair question. I’m a Planter by origin and a Unionist by politics. So I think are all of us here.’ He smiled again.

‘Well, I suppose, we had better be getting along for lunch. Goodbye, boys.’

His company suited its pace to his old man’s walk but he was gone over the hill before I remembered that my great-great-great grandfather, who came from the North quays to work on the new Royal Canal, was named Banks, Tom Banks. He was a lock-keeper between Binn’s Bridge and Cross Guns and got his son into the Four Courts, a place you wouldn’t find many Milesians* those times, even running messages for the doormen.

‘Well, here we are at Banbridge,’ said my Killough friend.

We went in and had a couple to ease the parting and I went over to examine the memorial while I waited for the bus. The stone man at the bus stop had hard earned his bit of respect.

For some reason a friend of mine wanted to ship turnips from a Six Counties’ port. He wanted to ship anything from a Six Counties’ port because he wanted to sail into a British port with a British Customs manifest, or whatever Mac Lir would call it.

Our little ship was about the size of the Terenure bus. It was eighty-six tons in weight or capacity, gross or net. Again I leave it to the experts.

We sailed with a mixed crew. Some had been on a boat before, and more hadn’t. I was betwixt and between. I did many’s the trip on the
Larssen
and the
Royal
Iris*
as a bona-fide traveller, but had never actually rounded the Horn, or stifled me mainbrace or anything of that nature.

The real sailors were the Skipper, the mate, and the fireman. The rest of the company were merchant adventurers along with the owner, and I was a merchant adventurer’s labourer, so to speak.

The real sailors slept forrad and we had accommodation aft, where, as Sammy Nixon said, villainy could be plotted in peace.

Sammy came aboard wearing rather tasty pinstriped kid gloves and a Windsor knot of some dimensions. His hat he wore on the Kildare side,
even in bed, for he had not a rib between him and heaven.

He had come straight from a pub in Belgravia, flown to Collinstown*, and after a stop for refreshments in Grafton Street, or thereabouts, had come down by taxi to the North Wall, where he had her tied up.

Sammy had never been on a boat of any description before, and till he had heard from Eddie, thought they’d been done away with like the trams.

Muscles Morgan, his china, was due on a later plane, and what old Muscles would say when he saw this lot Sammy did not know.

Muscles when he arrived dressed in the same uniform as Sammy, all eight stone of him, said: ‘Corsalawk, e’n it? Lookah er, Namber One, cock,’ which he repeated many times during our subsequent voyages, and Eddie, Sammy, Muscles, and I retired aft to drink rum, like sailors.

The sailors we left forrad, brewing their tea, darning their socks, winding the dockwatch and – with infinite skill – putting little ships into bottles. There would be no shortage of bottles. Before we thought of calling the Skipper we already had a couple of empties for the little ships to be put into them.

The Skipper fell to our level through drinking, gambling and sniffing. Just common sniffing. I am not unacquainted with the national catarrh but he was a most hangdog-looking man, with a sad puppy’s face pleading for a friendship or, at least tolerance, and his shape and make was that of a Charles Atlas in reverse. And the whole world of ineffectual weakness was in that sniff.

Eddie picked him up in the West End and brought him over with the boat.

He sniffed nervously to me that he had never been in Ireland before though his family had a house in Mount Street and, if I possibly thought, if it would not, sniff, be too much, sniff, trouble, could I, would I not, presuming on our short acquaintance, tell him how to get there? His father was born in it.

Better than that. I would bring him to it. And did, after a couple of stops at other points of interest on the way. And he cried and sniffed and when I stood him with his back to Holles Street Hospital he looked up along Fitzwilliam Square and Fitzwilliam Place, lit by the sun on the mountains behind the long range of golden Georgian brick, and wept again and said there was not the like of it anywhere else.

So I got Eddie to call him down, and he sat in a corner and apologetically lowered an imperial pint of rum and hot orange. I think he took a subsidiary couple of rozziners to make up for the orange.

For if it’s a thing I go in for in a human being it’s weakness. I’m a divil for it. I thought of the Katherine Mansfield short story, where the daughters of the late colonel are afraid of the old chap, two days after his funeral, leaping out of the linen press on top of them, and one of them cries: ‘Let’s be weak, oh, please, let us be weak.’

He even sniffed an apology to Muscles and Sammy for their sea-sickness the first two days out while they lay in their death agonies and shuddered from the cup of rum he would minister unto them.

He lowered it himself and weakly took himself up on deck to look for the Saltees. We had a reason for going to France before the Six-Counties manifest
would be of use to us.

When we came back for our turnips, the final arrangements had to be made with what I will call the Turnip Board, and we marched up the main street of a northern port on Armistice Day.

Eddie went into a shop and came out with two big poppies. I shook my head.

‘No bottle?’ said I, in his native language.

‘None of this old mallarkey,’ said he, ‘there’s a reason why I must get a cargo of turnips off these geezers.’

‘That’s not what I mean. They won’t fancy poppies.’

‘This is “Northern Ireland”, ’nt it? They’re for the King and Queen and all that lark, ’nt they?’

‘Not here. This is “
southern
Northern Ireland”.’

Eddie sighed. ‘Only a nicker wasted,’ and dropped his two ten-shilling poppies in the gutter. ‘I get on. Mostly R.Cs. here, eh?’

We met the chairman of the Turnip Board in a hotel and Eddie shook him by the hand.

‘I think it’s an ’orrible shame the way these Protestants treat you ’ere, Mr. MacConvery.’

Mr. MacConvery’s plum face turned blue and his stomach went in and out at a hell of a lick.

‘The cheek of you,’ he croaked; ‘my old friend,’ he indicated a little man like an undertaker’s clerk sitting nearby, ‘Mr. Macanaspie, respected member of the Presbyterian community, vice-chairman of the Turnip Board, we have it one year, they the next, chair and vice, turn an’ turn about … I…’

His indignation collapsed for the want of breath and I got a chance to explain that it was a joke and it gave Eddie a chance to tell how he’d taken a prize in
the Band of Hope himself.

And in the heel of the hunt we got the turnips and some months later in the bar of the Latin Quarter, as us old sea-dogs hove to in there, Eddie remarked that Partition was strategically useful.

Myself and Winston Churchill were once upon a time in the same organisation; he as an Elder Brother of Trinity House and I as a painter for the Irish Lights. His position is more decorative than functional. I painted striped lighthouses, banded lighthouses and spotted lighthouses.

On the way down from Laganbank Road to Donaghadee, a schoolboy sitting beside me in the bus pointed out Stormont on one side of the road and remarked that Purdysburn Mental Hospital was further down on the opposite side.

I laughed in my rich southern brogue, low but musical, and an acid-faced lady in the seat in front called the schoolboy to order. When the seat beside her was vacant she called your man over to it and, glaring at me, breathed fiercely in his ear and he answered, ‘Yes, auntie,’ and ‘No, auntie,’ and sat staring straight in front of him for the rest of the journey.

It appeared that she didn’t like ‘Southerners’. I had not encountered this kind of carry-on before and it made me feel important and tragic, like the dust-jacket of a Peadar O’Donnell novel in the big block letters of the ’thirties.

By the same token, I wondered how Ireland lost
one of the cardinal points of the compass. We have songs, sneers, jeers and cheers for the Men of the West, the gallant South, the North Began and the North Held On, God Bless the Northern Land, and all to that effect, but damn the ha’porth about the East, except where Micheál Óg Ó Longáin gives us old Orientals a leg-up in a song about Ninety-Eight:

Máire MacEntee has a blood-rising translation of it but even at that it’s in praise of the province – not a mention of our geographical direction nor a line for the Men of the East.

When someone calls me a ‘Southerner’ I feel like Old Black Joe.

‘What part of the South do you come from, Rastus?’

‘Ah sho’ don’ know, massah. It was dark when Ah left.’

When I heard her speak to the boy at the end of the journey I was surprised to notice that she had an American accent. In the bar that night I remarked on this to the fishermen I was with.

‘Och aye,’ says Old Andy, ‘that’ll be Miss Mackenzie. She’s from Toronto, and she’s in some Ulster Society over there to save us from yous. She can’t bear the sight of a southern man and it’s very dacent of her seein’ as she was never in the country before in her life.’ And to cheer me up, ‘Of course, yous have a crowd in America too that goes round blackguarding us?’

In the morning I had to rewrite the notice on the lighthouse: ‘Permission to view this lighthouse must be obtained from the Secretary, Commissioners for
Irish Lights, Westmoreland Street, Dublin.’

Only a portion of the old sign showed through the fresh paint but enough to let Miss MacKenzie know that an Ulster lighthouse had some connection with the rebels.

She was amongst a crowd of holiday-makers out for an after-breakfast stroll and breathed fury as I rewrote the sign on a surface previously coated with raw linseed oil: ‘Permission to view this lighthouse must be obtained from Éamon de Valera, Leinster House, Dublin.’

I thought Miss Mackenzie would explode. She fulminated in the crowd but the people that go to Donaghadee in the summer have a deal to bother them, fishing young Sammy out of the harbour and trying to save Wee Bella from death by ice-creamitis. They gazed with mild interest after her as she dashed up to the Harbour Office.

By the time she got back, of course, I had the board rubbed dry and the official legend rewritten. She put her hand to her head and searched, distracted, for the offending words.

The harbour official looked at her and muttered something about the heat and ould ones going round in their bare heads. With innocent diligence I went on with my work.