After the Wake (9 page)

The only thing I knew him to boast about was his association with a literary magazine called
The
Bat
and his friendship with the associate editor, Ernest Simms.

The editor was a little left wing Republican from an island in the Atlantic ocean off the coast of West Cork. He began writing when he came out of jail in the twenties and Ireland had still a vogue amongst the English writing and reading class, on account of the Black and Tans putting Ireland on the Liberal Conscience.

Like all the other peasant writers, he was an ex-schoolmaster, and wrote lovingly about simple folk of
his native place. I could make neither head nor tail of what any of them wrote and this editor suspected as much. He did not like me for it, nor my bits of short stories would he publish.

A coffee drinker and a hater of liquor, he liked Crippen not at all.

But the associate editor, a big hardy boy that boxed for Trinity College, was one of the gentlest people that I have ever met. He was a Protestant clergyman’s son, and had a mania for backing horses. This was shared by Crippen, who adored him, and every time we met Crippen recalled the memory of his friend.

To finance their respective speculations, Simms removed the postage stamps from the stamped addressed envelopes enclosed for the return of their contributions, if rejected, by intending authors. They also removed International Reply Coupons from mss., for these were also acceptable in the bookies that Crippen ran too.

In this way they had made a half a crown on the nose for the jolly favourite at Epsom or Aintree.

Crippen had a conscientious objection to backing on Irish racing which, he said, was run dishonestly.

‘Well,’ said Crippen, as I knew he would, ‘give us a drink, how is Ernie Simms?’ In the one breath like that.

‘Give the Doctor a pint of stout, Michael, and I’ll have a half of malt for myself. What are you having?’ I asked MacIntaggart.

‘Hard times,’ said he.

‘Give him a pint of stout,’ said I.

‘How is Ernie Simms?’ asked Crippen again.

‘He’s all right,’ said I, ‘he’s over in London working for the B.B.C. He’s on the Third Programme.’

‘Hmm,’ said Crippen, sagaciously, ‘and the same fellow could be on the First, if only he minded himself.’

The phone rang, and Stinking Fish called me.

He was an old gurrier* that got his name from the time it was only legal for people who do business in the markets to drink there in the early morning. Stinking used to have a basket of old fish that had been discarded as unfit for human consumption, and he’d sell it to the people. When a policeman came round and asked them what they were doing in the market, they’d hold up their piece of stinking fish and say, ‘I’m a buyer.’

‘I’ll see if Mr. Brendan Behan is here,’ said Stinking Fish, looking over at me, and shouted alongside the receiver, ‘Is Mr. Behan there?’ I nodded and Stinking said, ‘I think Mr. Behan is here. Yes, he is, and will take a message. Here he is now.’ He handed me the phone, ‘Here you are, Mr. Behan, sir.’

It was Ciarán.

‘Listen, what the hell do you mean by telling my mother that you wouldn’t take money from my father?’

‘Why should I take money from any of you pack of fucking cowboys?’

‘But you
did
take it after insulting the woman.’

‘You’re a fucking liar. I opened the envelope and handed it back to her after I saw what was in it.’

‘After you took the ten pounds out of it.’

‘I did not I handed the envelope back to her, as I got it.’

‘With the ten pounds gone and a piece of notepaper you put in its place.’

‘That’s what she told you. You’re a liar, and she’s a
liar and a thief.’

‘And you’re a rotten fucking bastard, and I was worse ever to have anything to do with you. Fuck you!’

‘You, too, and your friends in America, and your blind aunt in Spiddal!’

He banged down the receiver in a fury, and I went back to the bar.

‘The same again, Michael,’ said I, ‘and a drink for Stinking Fish.’

‘Thanks,’ said Stinking.

I threw down the tenner.

‘A blue one, be Jasus,’ said Crippen.

‘I’ll have three coppers out of it,’ said MacIntaggart. ‘I want to phone my solicitor.’

‘A bit early for him, isn’t it?’ said Cripps.

‘Not for this one,’ said MacIntaggart, ‘he lives in the office.’

‘When are you up?’

‘Oh, it’s a civil action I’m taking against’ – here his face set in indignation – ‘against the Department of Social Security, against the Relief Officer for neglecting my children …’

This is not my first appearance before the Irish public. By no manner of means. Tripping over my musty trusket, or whatever you call it, I made a stand for Ireland at the Mansion House in nineteen thirty-five in a play by the name of
Toirneach
Luimnigh*,
and had a speaking part of three words, and they may be the best rehearsed three words in the duration of
Feis
Átha
Cliath*
on that or any other stage.

For weeks before, in school and out of it, I tried them with every possible shade of intonation. Just the plain: Listen, give over the mallarkey*, and a straight answer to a straight question,
Uisce,
an
ea?*

Then the sinister: Little do you know, so you think you double-cross the greatest bandit in all the Mexico, Leo Carillo, the Ceesco Keed,
Eeescha,
huh,
an
ea?

Or the hurried, efficient violence of Cagney or Edward G. Robinson: C’mon, fishface,’n come across, accompanied by a slap in the puss with one hand, while the left gripped the forelock, and the victim whimpered: Boss, boss, I didn’t did it. Don’t gimme that, mugsy, but before your dawgs goes into this bucket of nice fresh cee-ment, uh, uh, or huh, huh,
Uisce,
an
ea?

It depended what was on at the Plaza, the Drumcondra Grand, the Bohemian or the Phibsboro for the three months of rehearsal how my style of acting varied, as one form of diction seemed good, till you got another fourpence for the pictures and encountered the next.

On my way across Mountjoy Square to the bakery
in Parnell Street for fourteen outside split loaves for my mother, I’d pass Mrs. Schweppes on the corner, where O’Casey wrote
The
Shadow
of
a
Gunman,
and more local loyalties would assert themselves, and I’d return to my naturalistic interpretation of the part: Poor little Mollser, me dollser, and Tommy Owens and Fluther and Captain Boyle, and me bould Jack Clitheroe, yous are toilin’ and moilin’ and gunnin’ and runnin’ and fightin’ and yous wouldn’t help a body out of a hobble and she wriggled in her corporal form be the frightful exertion of an upturned landmine that she sat down on to rest her poor bones to use towards the holy heights of heaven be the force of the explosion unexpected, listen to me yous,
Uisce,
ui-is-ce,
an ea?

At the bakery, I tried them over, and was cursed in the queue for delaying the man.

‘Eh, go-be-the-wall, what’s that you said you wanted?’

‘Uisce,
an
ea?
’

‘I’m after saying fifteen times there’s no turnovers till five o’clock.’

When I’d completed my errand and left the shop with my bag over my shoulder, the crowd looked after me strangely as I muttered my way up Middle Gardiner Street:
Uisce,
an
ea?

But the day before the show, my mind was made up for me at the cheek and impudence counter of Hugh MacCallion’s shop in Dorset Street. It was said that you paid for the pig’s cheek and the impudence was thrown in for choice.

Still, Hugh was a decent old skin in his own way and maybe it was only the uncouth Derry accent that made his utterance so harsh on our refined
Metropolitan ears. No matter what way you looked at it, he was a match for his customers.

This old one asked him for a shilling pig’s cheek, and while he muttered about himself paying more than that for them, and all to that effect, the usual old shopman’s cant, he was rooting in the barrel for something that he could sell for a shilling and still add something to the Hugh Fund out of it.

At last he emerged from the blood-red depths of the briny barrel bearing aloft the three-quarter profile of a pig, very much battered. It seemed that this cheek had been squeezed up against the side of the barrel by the others and his appearance was certainly very odd.

‘There’s a grand cheek now for the money,’ said Hugh.

The old one looked at it, very doubtfully, and in its twisted way, it returned her glance.

‘The Lord between us and all harm, Mr. Hug MacScallion …’

‘Hugh, Hugh, and my neems MacCallion.’

‘Whatever it is, and Hew here or Hew there, that’s a very peculiar looking cheek.’

Hugh swelled up bigger than the barrel, looking from her to the cheek as much as to say that if it went to looks there wasn’t much between them, and roared: ‘An’ what do you axpect for a shillin’ – Micheál Mac Lallimore?’

I’d seen the noblest youth of the
Fianna*
,
and heard MacLiammóir’s high Castilian brogue:
Éist
,
a
chuid
den
tsaol.
Is
iad
na
tonntracha
a
chanfas
amhrán
ár
bpósta
dúinn
anocht
…*

I regretfully decided there would be no excuse accepted for gagging this bit into the Primary Schools
Cup competition, but I could model my interpretation of my part in
Toirneach
Luimnigh
on Diarmuid’s last words:
Uisce,
a
Fhinn,
tabhair
deoch
uisce
chugam
…*

Well, they are not quite the last words. He says at the finish:
Breathnaigh
isteach
sna
súile
orm,
a
Ghráinne
.*

But I didn’t think
Feis
Átha
Cliath*
would wear an interpolation of this nature either, but I’d do the best I could with my head turned sideways till the great moment came.

I was nearly deformed for life, waiting for it. I had to wait, head to one side, like I’d seen your man at the Gate, till the
saighdiúir
eile
É
ireannach*
crouched the far side of me wondered whether there was something offensive about himself or his accoutrements, my head turned away from him for half the play.

A fellow called Pa Bla from that good day to this, though he has since held commissioned rank in the armed forces of this State, comes out in his French uniform, shouting like a Gallic-Gaelic bull:
Parbleu,
cad
is
fiú
botún,
thall
is
abhus
,* the significance of which message is forever lost to me, owing to overdue concentration on my twisted neck, so that I might have presented the starboard side of my face when the time came.

A boy from Summerhill called Pigeon is hit by a cannon ball and falls off Limerick’s Walls, or whichever of them he was on, before being bombarded by the other crowd, and moans,
‘Uisce
. .
uisce.’

Up I leaped in my profile. Into bed or out of barracks …
‘Uisce,
an
ea?
’

‘Sea,’*
mutters poor Pigeon.

I see. Nothing like making sure. I’ll repeat it.

‘Uisce,
an
ea?’

‘Sea,
sea.’

I think I was just a little, er, underdone, that time. Besides you can’t get too much of a good thing.

‘Uisce,
an
ea?’

‘Sea,
sea,
sea!’

All right. No need to take the needle over it. Just answer a civil question. I walked over, head twisted sideways, to get the water, tripped and nearly broke my neck over a Dutch cavalryman in the wings, and the play went on in my absence.

Pigeon recovered from his cannon ball wound and played professional soccer for Brighton and Hove in England long after the Siege of Limerick.

I am reminded of boxing matters by an encounter I had this day with a former opponent of mine, pugilistically speaking. I do not mean that our encounter this day was a pugilistic one, but it was pugilistically speaking we last spoke. And that, at the lane running alongside the railway end of Croke Park.

Our street was a tough street and the last outpost of toughness you’d meet as you left North Dublin for the red brick respectability of Jones’s Road, Fitzroy Avenue, Clonliffe Road, and Drumcondra generally.

Kids from those parts we despised, hated and resented. For the following sins: they lived in houses one to a family which we thought greedy, unnatural
and unsocial; they wore suits all the one colour, both jacket and pants, where we wore a jersey and shorts; they carried leather schoolbags where we either had a strap round our books or else a cheap check cloth bag.

Furthermore, it was suspected that some of them took piano lessons and dancing lessons while we of the North Circular Road took anything we could lay our hands on which was not nailed down.

We brought one of them to our corner and bade him continue his performance and thereafter, any time we caught him, he was brought in bondage to the corner of Russell Street and invited to give a performance of the dance: hornpipe, jig, reel, or slip jig.

This young gent, in addition to being caught red-footed, was by colouring of hair red-headed, and I’ve often heard since that they are an exceedingly bad-tempered class of person which, signs on it, he was no exception. For having escaped from his exercises, by reason of an approaching Civic Guard by name ‘Dirty Lug’, he ran down to the canal bridge which was the border of our territory and used language the like of which was shocking to anyone from Russell Street and guaranteed to turn thousands grey if they hailed from some other part.

However, our vengeance for the insults heaped upon us by this red-headed hornpiper, that thought so bad of giving the people an old step on the corner of the street, was not an empty one.

One day not alone did we catch him but he’d a jam roll under his oxter – steaming hot, crisp and sweet from the bakery – and the shortest way from Summerhill to where he lived was through our street.
He was tired, no doubt, with wearing suits and living in a house with only his own family and carrying that heavy leather schoolbag, not to mind the dancing lessons; no doubt he thought he had a right to be tired and he took the shortest way home with the cake for his ma.

He could see none of our gang but the fact that he didn’t see us didn’t mean we were not there. We were, as a matter of fact, playing ‘the make in’* on Brennan’s Hill down by the Mountjoy Brewery when his approach was signalled by a scout and in short order ‘the make in’ was postponed while we held up the red fellow and investigated his parcel.

We grabbed the booty and were so intent on devouring the jam roll that we let the prisoner go over the bridge and home to plot his vengeance.

He was a hidden villain all right. Long weeks after, myself and Scoil (or Skull, have it any way you fancy) Kane were moseying round Croker,* not minding anything in particular. Kerry was playing Cavan in Hurling or Derry was playing Tyrone in anything but it wasn’t a match of any great import to any save relations and friends, and a dilatory class of a Sunday afternoon was being had by all, when the Scoil (Skull) and myself were surrounded by a gang, if you please, from Jones’s Road, and who but the red-headed dancing master at the head of them.

But we didn’t take them seriously.

‘Sound man, Jam Roll,’ said I, not knowing what else to call him.

‘I’ll give you jam roll in a minute,’ said Jam Roll.

‘You’re a dacent boy,’ said I, ‘and will you wet the tea as you’re at it?’

‘Will you stand out?’ says Jam Roll.

‘I will,’ said I.

‘In the cod or in the real?’

‘The real,’ said I, ‘d’you take me for a hornpiper?’

He said no more but gave me a belt so that I thought the Hogan Stand had fallen on me. One off the ground. The real Bowery Belt.

‘Now,’ says he, when I came to, ‘you won’t call me Jam Roll again.’

‘You were wrong there, Jam Roll.’

If you went up the North Circular as far as the Big Tree Belfast was on the first turn to the right. Straight ahead. I knew that when I was seven. The country lay out there. I visited it with my grandmother one day she and Lizzie MacKay went out for a breath of air.

After dinner on a Sunday, she put on her black coat and hat and a veil with little black diamonds on it and off we went. We went up the canal from Jones’s Road Bridge to Binn’s Bridge (and that was nearly in the country already) and into Leech’s.

There we sat having a couple till it was shutting and time to get the tram into the real country.

Lizzie and she got a dozen of large bottles and the loan of a basket and we got a currant pan and a half-pound of cooked ham in the shop next door and got on the tram for Whitehall.

‘I see yous are well-heeled,’ says the conductor, looking at the basket.

‘Well, the country, sir,’ says my grandmother. ‘You’d eat the side wall of a house after it’

‘You’re going all the way?’

‘To the very end,’ says Lizzie MacKay. ‘All the way to Whitehall.’

‘And I don’t suppose that’ll be the country much longer,’ says the conductor. ‘There’s houses everywhere now. Out beyond Phibsboro church. They’re nearly out to where Lord Norbury disappeared on the way home and the coachman only felt the coach getting lighter on the journey and when he got to the house your man was disappeared and the devil was after claiming him, and good enough for him after the abuse he gave poor Emmet in the dock.’

My grandmother and Lizzie MacKay bowed their heads and muttered, ‘Amen.’

‘They’re nearly out to there,’ said the conductor, ‘and it won’t be long before they’re at Whitehall,’ giving the bell a bang to hurry the driver up before the builders got there.

We found a fine ditch only a few yards from the end of the tram tracks and nice and handy for getting home, and there was grass and trees over it.

I ran into a field and across a big park till an old fellow with a strawbainer hat started chasing me and cursing till I got out again and ran to my granny and Lizzie.

They sat up in their ditch and took the bottles from their mouths and looked over at the old fellow who was shouting with his red face from the gate.

‘Go ’long, you low scruff,’ said Lizzie, ‘myself and this lady here with the right of being buried in Kilbarrack was here before you were let out of wherever you were let out of. Talking about your park, anyone’d think you owned it!’