Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Markievicz, who’d worn a slouch hat with cock feathers and a green tunic with silver buttons for the Rising, sentenced to death, each morning hearing the shots as her comrades were executed, heard a tap on the prison door.
    The teenage British soldier with Mancunian accent, standing guard outside, unlocked the door, let himself in, offered her a shag cigarette and talked with her through the night.
    He’d seen Liverpool play Burnley at Crystal Palace when King George V, who bathed the golden-haired, pink-skinned Prince Edward himself while Queen Mary looked on in a choker of uncut emeralds, was present.
    He produced a cigarette-box picture from his pocket of Adonis-faced Steve Bloomer, then interned in Ruhleben in Germany, who’d played for Derby, in quartered cap, against a balustrade trussed with tea roses.
    The reprieved Countess Markievicz was haunted by this young soccer fan for the rest of her life and thought to go searching for him, a face, but decided she might get him into trouble if she revealed what he’d done.
    ‘I live in King’s Cross,’ the boxer said, ‘dreadful place. Six-year-olds beat up a woman in a wheelchair.’
    Jack Doyle, the boxer, a stevedore from Cobh, County Cork, home of the Cobh Ramblers, had drawn an audience of 90,000 in White City in the 1930s, starred in two films, married a Mexican film star, Movita, with Remembrance Day-red lips.
    Toured England with her as a double singing act. Remarried her to national headlines in St Andrew’s Church, Westland Row, Dublin.
    She left him to wed Marlon Brando. Later in life Jack Doyle became a tramp with a red carnation in his buttonhole.
    Crimthann’s last days in England were spent sleeping in a shop-front near Victoria Station until 9.30, spending the day in the day centre in Carlisle Street, intermittently going to admire the portrait of Queen Sophia Charlotte, who wore a high white wig, in an outspread gown studded with little bows, in the Queen’s Gallery where the attendant, who wore a waistcoat with gold threaded stripes, coarse velvet knee breeches, buckled pumps, was from Crumlin, Dublin—terraced or semi-detached 1930s house—where Niall Quinn was from.
    Crimthann had been good at art at community college, which was taught through Gaelic.
    There’d been a teacher at community college with a grin like a Cheshire cat who invited some of the boys home and showed them penitentiary pornographic films or naked soccer matches on Copacabana and Ipanema beaches in Brazil.
    When Crimthann had been at community college, Ed O’Brien, a young IRA volunteer from the Irish Republic, accidentally blew himself up aboard a London double-decker bus while ferrying a bomb to its intended target, injuring several passengers.
    Grief-stricken and deeply shamed parents greeted his body as it crossed into the Irish Republic.
    In January 1957, 20,000 people had turned out in Limerick for the funeral of Seán South, a clerk at a Limerick timber firm and founder of a Limerick branch of Maria Duce, a right-wing Roman Catholic association, who was killed during an attack on Brooke-borough RUC Barracks in County Fermanagh, including Crimthann’s family, the Brogans, who watched it from the O’Connell Monument.
    Men with black armlets and men in the olive-green Fianna Éireann uniforms flanked the motor hearse, which had difficulty passing through the streets, the crowds were so dense.
    Lord mayors, county and urban councillors, city corporation members, Roman Catholic dignitaries, had all extended their sympathy to Seán South’s widowed mother and his two brothers.
    In Greenmount in Cork, beside a photograph of Duncan Edwards, was a photograph of Seán South—Maureen O’Hara-red hair, wire glasses like Pope Pius XII.
    Crimthann’s grandfather always burst into the same song at family weddings.
No more he’ll hear a seagull cry o’er the murmuring Shannon tide . . .
A martyr for old Ireland, Seán South of Garryowen.
    ‘Sit in the back and it will be a longer journey,’ said a man in a flat cap on the bus going to Stranraer, ‘Life is not easy. You make plans and there’s a hitch. It never turns out the way you think it will.’
    The bus broke down at Salford but there was a mechanic on board.
    Later there was a pitched battle between some passengers at a transport café.
    Crimthann crossed from Stranraer to Larne. There’d been some boys in the blue of Glasgow Rangers on the boat.
    He’d always wanted to see Windsor Park, home of