Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Linfield Football Club, who wore emerald green.
    ‘Lillibulero’ was sung by the Apprentice Boys after the Siege of Derry in 1689.
    It was sung by the victors after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
    In London, ladies had the tune printed on their fans.
    It was still occasionally sung after soccer matches at Windsor Park, as it had been on the Cregagh estate, Belfast, where George Best, whose grandfather was a Protestant hurler in the Glens of Antrim, once kicked a plastic Frido ball, in a Davy Crockett cap.
    ‘Lillibutero bullenala’
    Near Cregagh estate Crimthann purchased fish and chips wrapped in the Shankill Mirror , a wall painting to the side of the fish-and-chip shop with King Billy in a Quaker collar, on a Hanoverian cream horse.
    Crimthann’s father had been a George Best lookalike when young.
    George Best, taken from his home at fifteen to join a team that originated in Newton Heath, an Irish Catholic area of Manchester.
    First, Irish Catholic players had to change half a mile from the soccer pitch in the Three Crowns public house.
    George Best used to score with his head.
    Would meet his Irish Catholic colleagues, Nobby Stiles and Paddy Crerand, outside a Roman Catholic church in Manchester on Sunday mornings.
    Announced his retirement at twenty-six.
    Sent off at Southampton a few years after his retirement for foul and abusive language.
    Awarded a red card for obstreperousness.
    Like Jack Doyle, he toured English provincial theatres, in his case telling soccer stories.
    Crimthann’s father had told Crimthann this soccer story: when Norman Whiteside, the Shankill Road skinhead, the youngest-ever player in the World Cup, kissed Kevin Moran, former Dublin Gaelic champion, after Manchester United’s victory against Everton in the FA finals in 1985, his ikon was universally taken down on the Shankill Road.
    Crimthann took a Goldliner bus to Dublin, a Lonsdale bag slung over his shoulder.
    A poster of Coventry City’s six-foot-one Gary Breen with Minnie Mouse side-hair was brought back from England.
    Crimthann had seen a picture of Gary Breen in a McNicholls’ hut in Thornton Heath, a postcard of Lifford, County Donegal, beside it, where Shay Given was from, who now played in Newcastle magpie.
    Gary Breen’s father was from County Kerry. Mother from southwest Clare where gannets make white flame against the sea.
    Grandfather, Des, won an All-Ireland Gaelic football medal in 1913.
    Himself a child of Kentish Town.
    As a boy Gary Breen played centre forward for Westwood Boys in Camden Town.
    Some boys from Camden Town used to make a pilgrimage to Walsingbam at the beginning of June each year in soccer shorts and Puma football boots, passing through Horsham St Faith where St Robert Southwell was from and after the pilgrimage play soccer on the beach by Wells-next-the-Sea.
    Generations of Irish immigrants had knelt in despair before the image of Our Lady of Walsingbam in her pomegranate dress and three-pronged crown curled at the end like Arabian slippers.
    Camden Town boys in their soccer shorts would present bunches of Spanish bluebells or red camplon or shining cranesbill or marsh orchids, picked along the way, to her.
    As a Westwood Boys centre forward Gary Breen got a tumour in his lower spine. It was cut away in hospital. He was unable to walk properly for a year and had difficulty sleeping. The doctors told his parents he’d never play football again but within a few years he’d signed on with Gillingham.
    His grandmother in Clare lit candles from Lourdes and candles blessed on St Brigid’s Day when he was playing.
    A week before the Second World War broke out, when men emigrated from Ireland with their belongings wrapped in brown paper under their arms, an IRA bomb killed five people in Coventry.
    In February 1940, James McCormick and Peter Barnes were hanged in Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, for a bombing it was subsequently proved they didn’t do.
Plow the land with the horn of a lamb
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
Then sow some seeds from north of the dam
And then he’ll be a true love of mine.

    Crimthann’s twenty-first birthday was the following summer.
    Earlier in the summer, on Lapp’s Quay, he and his friends witnessed a pod of orca whales—the Demon Dolphin, Wolf of the Sea, black, grey saddle—bull, cow, female, which had come as far as City Hall, doing spy-hops and tail-slaps there.
    There was a ricepaper photograph in the middle of Crimthann’s cake of Crimthann in