Ashes In the Wind (28 page)

James is happiest at Killowen, especially when his mother is at home. He rides out every morning with the other lads in the yard, and his father makes sure he gets his fair share of the difficult horses.

‘You’ll learn nothing if all you ride are the patent-safeties,’ says John. ‘You’re strong enough for the job. Most of our lads want to ride at ten stone seven, and you can be fourteen pounds heavier in point-to-points.’

Boarding school is a kind of limbo to be endured, where James is neither happy nor unhappy, where he has no enemies but also no friends close enough to ask back to Killowen.

Years later, Kate asks him whether it was as bad as she had sometimes imagined. ‘I felt guilty about sending you away to school, especially when you were only eight,’ says Kate. ‘But not guilty enough to keep you at home.’

‘My prep-school memories are an odd jumble of Latin, ration books and Waverley pens. “They came as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, the Owl, and the Waverley Pen.” You fitted the little steel pen-nib into a wooden pen-holder. The nibs were bronze-coloured, and they crossed easily, or broke. You had to dip the pen into a white porcelain inkwell that fitted into a hole in your desk. I always had blue-black fingers.’

‘I remember you were ravenous when you came home from the North of Ireland.’

‘You had no rationing in the Republic. We had ration books with different-coloured detachable tickets for eggs, butter, meat, sugar, milk. And sweets. The food was terrible.’

‘I’m ashamed we never came to see you. Perhaps I thought if I saw you there I’d have taken you away. I never met the headmaster. Some friend of John’s recommended the school.’

‘The headmaster used to take the scholarship class, six of us, for extra Latin in his bedroom after supper and before lights-out on Thursdays. We were in pyjamas sitting on his bed. I suppose he was gay – queer, we would have called it then if we’d known the word – but nothing like that happened, at least not to me. And I can still remember some of the lines from the
Aeneid:
“
Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.
”
It describes, and sounds like, the noise horses’ hooves make on the dusty plain. I learned it years ago, and it’s still stuck in some strange corner of my brain.’

Kate laughs and puts her arms around James. ‘Some people would regard that as a complete justification for sending you there. I’m not convinced, but it’s done now, and you don’t seem badly scarred.’

‘I remember at Winchester they tried to call me Paddy, to get me to speak in an Irish accent, to show them my shillelagh. It was pretty good-humoured, and I refused to answer to a nickname. They soon moved on to more rewarding targets.’

When he was fifteen James asked his father, ‘Dad, what are we? English, Irish, or what?’

‘We’re the Formerlies,’ John replied. ‘Look at us in the
Irish Landed Gentry
.’

He pulled down a heavy red volume from the bookshelf and leafed through its pages. ‘“Burke formerly of Derriquin, Eyre formerly of Eyre Court, Kirkwood formerly of Woodbrook, Persse formerly of Roxborough, now Box 462, Aptos, California.” Formerlies all.’

He poured himself a generous whiskey and a little water.

‘We don’t belong in England or in Ireland. We’re upper class in Ireland, middle class in England if we’re lucky. We stand up for “God Save the Queen”, we know the words of “The Soldier’s Song”, but not in Gaelic, we want the Irish rugby team to beat the English and the English to beat everyone else. We send our sons to Trinity College Dublin, not Trinity College Cambridge. We talk about World War Two, but it was the Emergency in Ireland. We’re happy when the Irish economy booms, we’re even happier when it busts. We dislike comic stories about the Irish unless we tell them ourselves. And on the back of Swift and Burke and Sheridan and Yeats we give ourselves intellectual airs.’

John got up to refill his glass. ‘Brendan Behan was close to the mark: “An Anglo-Irishman only works at riding horses, drinking whiskey and reading double-meaning books in Irish at Trinity College.”
I’ve known a few like that, your cousin Rut Uprichard, for instance. Won the Conyngham Cup at Punchestown when it was still over banks and stone walls, finished fourth in the Grand National, and drank himself to death at the age of forty-two. Though he never read a book – too busy with the women.’

‘So we’re Anglo-Irish then?’

‘Both and neither. That’ll have to do. That’s what we are.’

As his father finished, James looked up to see his mother standing by the door. She smiled, walked over and ruffled James’s hair. She didn’t comment on the conversation until the following morning, when she and James were sitting in the kitchen having breakfast. John was out in the yard with the horses.

‘Fifteen years in this country has washed the rose-tint off my glasses. This is a priest-ridden country; you can’t buy a copy of
Ulysses
in Ireland thanks to our extended version of the Index. And now, God help us, the bishop of Galway has banned mixed bathing. Anyone who can raise a flicker of sexual excitement once they’re up to their waist in the Irish Sea deserves a medal. The Anglo-Irish and the Irish live in parallel historical universes, they use the past to make the present halfway bearable. They’ve been fighting each other for seven hundred years. When the war was over in 1921, the real Irish straightaway started another between themselves. The Anglo-Irish just gave up.’

‘Dad hasn’t given up.’

‘No, he hasn’t. Surprising, given what he went through. Your father entered the Anglo-Irish world just as it began to disintegrate. His mother was executed, Derriquin burned, and he had to leave the country. God knows why he came back – except he does think, in spite of everything, that he belongs here.’

‘I think that too,’ said James.

The yard continues to prosper, and John, while James is away at school, begins to wonder again about Grania’s daughter. He has left it too late to talk to Kate about her, and he is still unsure whether the girl is his. Would Grania tell him the truth? Has she told her daughter? And what would he do if he was the father? By now she would be a young woman, perhaps a graduate, perhaps married, perhaps a mother.

So John does nothing – until, on a rare visit to Dublin, he goes to the Periodical Library, gets a reader’s ticket and asks for the copies of the
Irish Independent
for January and February 1925. In the Births column for 7th February he finds the entry he is looking for. ‘To Eamonn and Grania McCann, of Cloonagh, Harpur’s Lane, Maryborough, the precious gift of a daughter, Cathleen Mary. Deo Gratias.’

John copies out the entry with an unsteady hand. This new certainty gives him a disturbing combination of pleasure and pain. One barrier to action has been removed; all the others remain. Back at Killowen he puts the copied entry into an envelope that contains his Military Cross, Henry Burke’s wedding ring and his will, and locks the envelope away on the top shelf of the safe.

John continues to think about going over to Maryborough, telephones Grania McCann twice, but hangs up without speaking. Instead he goes back to County Kerry to see Josephine for what may be the last time. She is still living in the same house in Drimnamore. She gives him a cup of tea and some soda bread in her front room.

‘Baked it myself, so I did. Go on, try it, the blackberry jam’s homemade too,’ she says to John. ‘I gave up teaching five years ago, so I’ve little to do now save bake bread and make jam. They kept me on well beyond retiring age, although I’m not sure they knew how old I was, and I wasn’t about to tell them. They’ve a twenty-five-year-old girleen from Dublin with a teaching certificate and barely a word of Gaelic.’ She sniffs her disapproval of certificates.

‘Ambrose O’Halloran is long dead. I’d not know many in Drimnamore now.’

‘There are less of us born here, plenty of Dubliners with holiday homes. And a few rich Germans who say that Kerry is the safest place from nuclear fallout if the Russians invade, much good may it do them. They all seem to need high walls and iron gates to feel really safe.’

‘I drove past Askive on the way in. It looks like Kilmainham Jail.’

There is a pause, then Josephine, looking worried, says, ‘I’ve a confession to make to you. I’ve converted.’

‘You’ve become a Plym, like my grandfather?’

‘I’ve gone the other way, I’ve become an RC, a Papist. I was never happy in St Peter’s after your mother died, although it took me a long time to realize it. You’re not angry?’

‘Of course not, of course not.’

‘Father Michael’s still here, and I’m one of his flock now. He’d be glad to see you; he’ll be at the match this afternoon.’

John goes to the football pitch on the outskirts of Drimnamore after lunch, arriving in time to see the last few minutes of a needle match against Tralee. There are only twenty or so spectators on the Drimnamore side of the field; a friendly neighbour explains the scoring to John while an injured Tralee player is being attended to.

‘One point over the bar and between the posts. Three points for a goal in the net. And we’re two points down. Come on, boys, come on,’ he shouts as play starts up again.

John finds it hard to follow; in the dying moments of the match, one of the Drimnamore players gets the ball close to the touchline, takes it forward, bouncing it after every fourth step, rounds two Tralee men who fail to take the ball away, looks up and sees the goalkeeper a few yards out of his ground, and gives the ball an almighty kick. It soars, hangs in the air for a moment, then comes down behind the back-pedalling goalie and into the net.

‘Three points, great kick,’ says John’s neighbour, hugging him with joy. ‘That’s Mikey Sullivan. He’ll go far, that boy.’

After the match is over, John goes over to Father Michael, who is pleased with the result.

‘We’re now clear at the top of the Munster League,’ he says. ‘Michael over there is our star player, best full forward I’ve ever seen.’

Michael Sullivan leaves his celebrating team-mates, and comes over to Father Michael, who slaps him on the back.

‘I thought they’d marked you out of the game. That was a great last goal. This is John Burke, used to live at Derriquin.’

Michael shakes John’s hand; he is nearly as tall as the two men, strongly built for his age. He has his father’s dark red, curly hair; his knees are muddy and there is a purple bruise on his cheek.

‘Good to meet you,’ he says politely, and goes to rejoin the team.

‘You remember his father Tomas? He didn’t come back from the Spanish Civil War, God rest his soul.’

‘Tomas and I were both taught by Josephine,’ says John. ‘We were good friends when we were boys.’

He remembers Tomas’s last words to him, ‘One to the heart, one to the head,’ and is on the verge of saying more when Father Michael continues,‘You should call on Annie Sullivan; she’d be glad to see you, doesn’t get many visitors.’

John makes a non-committal reply. He returns to Killowen without going up to Ardsheelan.

O
N
HIS
RETURN
to Ireland from National Service, James spends two weeks with his father and mother in County Kildare; there are now forty horses in the yard.

‘Though we could do with ten more – it’s easy to get the no-hopers, but they don’t do the yard any good in the long run, even if they cheer the bank manager up for a moment,’ says his father.

They go to church on Sunday; John makes a point of asking James to come.

‘Dad, since when have you become a churchgoer?’

John looks embarrassed. ‘I started going again a year ago. I suppose it’s a sign I’m getting closer to meeting my Maker, if he exists. And I’m beginning to think he might.’

James’s mother laughs. ‘He believes for the pair of us. I go along for the words and the music – there’s a decent organist in St Mark’s. It would be nice if you came too.’

In church, where his father reads the lesson and takes the collection plate round the sparse congregation, James notices John during prayers, kneeling upright next to him, hands clasped in front of his face, lips moving, eyes closed. He thinks how little he knows about his father, who looks much older than when James had left for the army.

The next day he and his mother are in the kitchen while John is out on the gallops. Kate looks at James as they talk; he’s tall, still sunburned from Malaya, leaner than the Winchester schoolboy who’d gone off to Catterick Camp two years earlier. He’s not as handsome as his father, he’s got the Lowell nose, but he’ll do, she tells herself. And, feeling time suddenly accelerating, he’s a man now.

‘We’re all getting older, even you,’ says Kate. ‘Your father is sixty, you know. I’m not sure he should ride out any more at six in the morning, but he won’t ever stop. He’s had a hard life, first The Troubles, then Spain, then North Africa and Normandy.’

‘He had a good war, didn’t he?’

‘A good war is one that you survive. He certainly did that – survived the North Africa campaign and Normandy. Finished up as a major with an MC, like his father, but lived to tell the tale. Not that he does. Most men in Ireland cling to their ranks, give themselves a promotion every ten years or so, like Colonel Kavanagh down the road, who left the British Army as an acting captain. Your father has been Mr Burke since the day he was demobbed in 1946.’

‘What did Dad get the MC for?’

‘Don’t bother to ask him. He’ll tell you they were handed out with the rum and rations. I had to get the citation to find out. He was in charge of the reconnaissance troop in Normandy, they were ambushed by a platoon of SS in a little village, and he held them off while the troop withdrew. When they went back the next day, and I remember the exact words, “There were nineteen dead Germans, all killed by Captain Burke with his Sten gun.”’

‘Golly. Nineteen Germans.’

‘That’s what they mean by a good war. Not so good for the nineteen. You know he went to Spain in 1936 as part of the International Brigade, so he was fighting for almost ten years. And Spain, which is where we met, was far worse than North Africa and Normandy. Something strange and violent happened there, in Teruel. Says it’s all in the past and best forgotten. Not a typical attitude to history among the Irish, I have to say.’