After the Wake (13 page)

There was light and smoke and the sound of glasses and some fellow singing the song of
The
Bould
Tenant
Farmer
and Mick, being only human, decided to make one last call and pay his respects to the publican.

But getting in was a bit easier than getting out, with drinks coming up from a crowd that was over from the other side of the county, all Doyles, from the hill of Kilmashogue, the Drummer Doyle, the Dandy Doyle, Jowls Doyle, Woodener Doyle, the Dancer Doyle, Elbow Doyle, Altarboy Doyle, the Hatchet Doyle, Coddle Doyle, the Rebel Doyle, Uncle Doyle, the Shepherd Doyle, Hurrah Doyle and Porternose
Doyle.

There was singing and wound opening, and citizens dying for their country on all sides, and who shot the nigger on the Naas Road, and I’m the first man that stuck a monkey in a dustbin and came out without a scratch and there’s a man there will prove it, that the lie may choke me, and me country’s up and me blood is in me knuckles. ‘I don’t care a curse now for you, or your queen, but I’ll stand by my colour, the harp and the green.’

Till by the time he got on the road again Mick was
maith
go
leor
,* as the man said, but everything went well till he was getting near Cloghran and he had a look round, and there he noticed – the coffin was gone! Gone like Lord Norbury with the divil, as the man said.

Ah, what could he do at all, at all? He sat on the cart for a minute and wondered how he’d face your man if he had to go and tell him that he’d let him down not doing the turn for a family with enough of trouble this Christmas Eve.

Still, looking at it never fattened the pig, so he got off and went back along the road in the direction of the city, and was moseying round in the snow when an R.I.C.* man came up from Santry Barracks.

‘Come on you, now, and what are you doing walking round this hour of the night?’

‘I’m after losing a coffin, Constable,’ says Mick.

‘They sells desperate bad stuff this time of the year,’ sighs the policeman, taking Mick by the arm. ‘Come on, my good man, you’ll have to come down the road with me now till we instigate investigations into your moves.’

Poor Mick was too disheartened even to resist
him, and, sad and sober, he trudged through the snow till they came to the barracks. They went into the dayroom and the constable said to the sergeant, ‘I’ve a fellow here, wandering abroad, and says he’s after losing a coffin.’

‘He may well have,’ says the sergeant, ‘because we’re after finding one. There it is, standing up behind the door.’

They looked round and Mick’s face lit up with joy and relief. ‘Praise Him,’ said he, running over and throwing his arms round it, ‘there it is, me lovely coffin.’

He explained all about it and they let him go off carrying it back to the cart.

‘Take better care of it, now,’ says the constable and the sergeant from the door.

‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ says Mick, ‘only this coffin is not my own. Good night and a happy Christmas to you, and to everyone.’

My mother had two husbands – not at the one time of course. She married the first a little time before Easter Week, 1916, and spent her honeymoon carrying messages for her husband, brother, brothers-in-law, and generally running round with my aunts and her sisters in misfortune shifting one another’s dumps and minding one another’s babies for a long time afterwards.

The peaceful Quaker man that founded the business would be very surprised that, with the Post Office where Uncle Joe was, and Marrowbone Lane where
Uncle Mick was, his biscuit factory was to my childhood a blazing defiance of Mausers, uncles and my step-brothers’ father, against

Give over, before I hit a polisman!

Belfast figures as the refuge in cosy remoteness and peace, after the battle had ended and the hunt left behind, because it was there my mother had her first home and her husband had his first job after the Rising.*

It was there that she began her married life and, after the guns and the bombs and the executions, began a stock of more homely domestic anecdotes, like the time she tried him with a curried stew and he ran to the tap after tasting it wondering why she was trying to poison him.

They weren’t the only refugees either. A former Captain of the Guard at Leinster House is remembered with indignation for coming in amongst the twenty or thirty people assembled in close formation for the Sunday night
scoraíocht
* and remarking through the haze of Irish tobacco smoke that the place was like an oven.

And after Rory was christened Roger Casement in the church, my Uncle Peadar, a sort of walking battery of Fenianism, held him in his arms on Cave Hill and, with the baby’s father acting as sponsor, swore him into the I.R.B.*

The little house in the Mount became a clearing house for the Dublin crowd to and from Liverpool and Glasgow.

And to this day, my mother remembers the kindness of the neighbours. Their great interest was the baby Fenian though, being respectable and polite, they never referred to his politics nor to the comings and goings and up-country accents of the young men visiting the house at all hours of the day and night.

There might be a satisfied remark about the larruping the Germans were getting on the Somme, but when the Peelers came nosing round the quarter, it was the widow of a Worshipful Master came up with the wind of the word.

‘There was polis round here this morning, ma’m, enquiring about some people might be hiding from the military in Dublin. Rebels, if you please. Round here!

‘Sure as we all said it’s an insult to a loyal street to think the like, Rebels, Sinn Féiners,* hiding round here. And how’s our wee man the day? Did you do what I said about the …’

My first visit to the North or for the matter of that to any part of Ireland outside Dublin took me to Newry with a train-load of soccer players, accordionists, corkscrew operatives, the entire production under the masterly direction of my Uncle Richie.

He was a non-military uncle and, indeed, had been accused of only remembering the significance of Easter Monday, 1916, by reference to a gold watch, his possession of which dated from that time.

Another souvenir of the six days was a pair of fur-lined boots which were worn out by my time, though
they still hung in their old age under the picture of Robert Emmet and ‘Greetings for Christmas and a Prosperous 1912’ card from ‘Dan Lehan, the Patriotic Sand Dancer and Irish National Coon. Performed Soft Shoe before the Crowned Heads of Europe, also Annual Concerts, Mountjoy and the Deaf and Dumb Institution.’

When Uncle Richie had a sup up, he’d fondle the old fur boots and looking from Robert Emmet to the Irish National Coon remark, ‘By God, there was men in Ireland them times.’

When the other Jacobs’ and G.P.O. uncles were hard at it, remembering the sudden death of a comrade, Uncle Richie shook his head with the rest.

‘When you think of what they did to poor Brian, poor pig. Cut the two legs of the man. Them Danes.’

Gritting his teeth and controlling his temper, looking round the room, and a good job for the Danes there weren’t any of them knocking around our way.

He wasn’t really my uncle at all but a far out relative in another branch of our family, one of our family from around north and east Dublin.

Mostly he didn’t bother much about the cause or old Ireland or any of that carrying on. When he was bent in thought it wasn’t the declining Gaeltacht was knotting his brow nor the lost green field, but we respected it just the same.

He sat in the corner and looked the same way as our uncle remembering the time they met John Devoy or killed one another during the Civil War. But we knew that this deep cogitation meant that Uncle Richie was thinking up a stroke.

His final stroke brought me to Newry. He hired an
excursion train for a deposit of thirty shillings and our team went up to play a team representing the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

In consideration of his putting up a set of solid silver medals for the contest Uncle Richie’s nominee was allowed to take half the gate, and he collected the ticket money from the people on the understanding that he would bring it to the G.N.R.* on Monday morning and receive a small percentage for his trouble.

The whole street saved up for a while and the train was packed with old ones, young ones, singers and dancers, on the way up.

Uncle Richie got the team in a corner and swore that by this and that they had to win those medals and he seemed very serious about it.

Someone asked who were the Ancient Order of Hibernians and was told they were a crowd that carried pikes and someone else said they’d lodge an objection that you wouldn’t see the like of that with Merville and Bendigo in the Fifteen Acres.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians had no pikes but, before half-time, they could have done with them. They were all over our crowd in everything except dirt. The double tap, the hack, the trip, the one-two and every manner of lowness, but to no avail. The A.O.H. won 2-nil.

Uncle Richie had to hand over the set of medals and, though he wasn’t a mean man, you could see he felt it.

He muttered to Chuckles Malone to get us down to the station quickly and lock the doors. He wouldn’t be long after us.

Neither he wasn’t, as the man said. But came
running down towards us with half the town after him and they shouting and cursing about the medals. Someone said they weren’t bad medals considering they were made out of the tops of milk bottles.

The crowd were in full cry after Uncle Richie, but gaining little. We shouted encouragement to him, ‘Come on, Uncle Richie, come on, ye boy ye,’ till at last he fell against the gate of the Residency and we hauled him on in the nick of time from the berserk natives.

Carrie Swaine, a Plymouth Sister from Ballybough, called out in triumph, ‘Go ’long, yous Orange --s,’ which for some reason drove the Ancient Order of Hibernians A.F.C. to a very dervish dance of fury.

Past Clontarf Station Carrie smelt the Sloblands and, from an excess of emotion, shouting ‘Law-villy Dublin,’ put her head through the window without taking the trouble to lower it and nearly decapitated herself.

Uncle Richie gave a big night in the club and was seen off by the whole street to the Liverpool boat. He expressed no bitterness against the town of Newry or the inhabitants except to remark that the medals were waterproof.

I don’t know what he told the railway company.

It’s a source of chronic surprise to me that when you come to the actual Border there is no white line. My childhood idea persists that it should be marked out like a football pitch, even after I’ve seen a couple of
real
borders. I mean borders
between
countries, not
across
them.

It’s the custom of the Automobile Association to mark the county boundaries in Irish and English in the Twenty-six Counties, but in English only in the Six.

The sign on the boundary of Armagh and Louth announces ‘Co. Armagh’ on the Louth side and ‘Co. Lughbhaidh’ on the Six-county side of the sign. The Dungiven committee must be asleep on the job.
Séimhiús
and
síneadh
fadas
* looking in at them all along the Border.

Once inside it, the most interesting thing to an old southern gentleman like myself is the sight of a band of punters inside an office, just as you’d see in any bookie’s shop in Summerhill or the Coombe. Sharp-featured men with
The
Sporting
Chron
well creased and a fair idea of what’s in Jarvis’s mind to-day.

Elderly females with shopping bags and the usual old man, there’s a great supply of them, scrooging his way with muttered imprecations to examine the racing sheet through an enormous eye-glass that looks like it fell out of a searchlight.

I feel sure that an examiner could have tested their knowledge of the Catechism with a shouted question, ‘What is Brother Cliff for Sir Gordon today at Haydock Park?’* and he confident of the answer, reverently intoned, ‘An efficient deputy’ and perhaps, a whispered ‘we hope’ from a weaker vessel let down for a three cross double the day before that.

I travelled to Banbridge with a man from the Co. Down coast. He was from Killough direction. I remembered Saint John’s Point and the little ruined church and how I discovered that Unionists have feelings.

Along the coast were the survivors of the old stock, in little houses and on bits of rocky land stretching all the way to Slieve Donard.

Harry Loughrey, turned twenty and just off a trip to the River Plate, swam with me every day off the rocks and we roaring like sea-lions in the water. He was teaching me
The
Wedding
Samba
in Spanish in return for my Uncle Peadar’s
Fenian
Men
in Irish:

We went down the road and saw a crowd round the old chapel of Saint John. They were a historical or archaeological society out for the day. They stood round in their tweed costumes and linen jackets while a gentle-looking old man in knickerbockers talked about the district and the old chapel being the oldest place of Christian worship in Ireland.