Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

convent of nuns who swam in winter in black togs and black caps.
    I was spending a few days now in Dublin with my father. The previous summer I’d gone by myself to stay with an aunt and uncle in County Limerick for my holidays.
    I arrived at Limerick bus station, a land beside it of Ireland’s Own , where I read of the Limerick tenor Joseph O’Mara and of the stigmatic Marie Julie Jaheny, and of Russian cakes—almond essence, sugar syrup, chocolate.
    In my aunt and uncle’s village there was a Pompeian red cinema called the Melody. Outside it a picture of Steve Reeves in his bathing togs, standing in hubris, his chest mushrooming from his waist. In the film, which I saw while there, a prostrate Sylva Koscina, with a frizzed top, a racoon tail of hair by her face, clutches Steve Reeve’s foot, who, as Hercules, is about to leave on an inexorable journey. The audience stamped its feet while reels were being changed. Boys, some of whom were reputed to have been in Cork Jail, on the steps outside during the day, spoke with Montana accents like Steve Reeves.
    My uncle was a garda sergeant and wore a hat big as a canopy. In the kitchen at night, a bunch of nettles behind a picture of St Brigid of Sweden to keep off flies, he’d tell ghost stories. Of boys who were drowned in the river and who came back. ‘The river always takes someone,’ he said.
    On ‘Céilidhe House’ on radio one night we heard a girl sing:
And when King James was on the run
I packed my bags and took to sea
And around the world I’ll beg my bread
Go dtiocfaidh mavourneen slán .

    My uncle told us of the Wild Geese who sailed to Europe after the Treaty of Limerick in autumn 1691 on the nearby estuary, and of how at the beginning of that century Red Hugh O’Donnell had ended O’Donnell’s overlordship of Donegal by casting O’Donnell pearls into a lake on Arranmore Island.
    On one of my first days there I was driven to a lake by a castle where about a dozen people with easels were painting pictures of the castle.
    At the end of my holiday I was taken to a seaside resort on the mouth of the Shannon.
    My uncle wore sports shoes and sports socks for the occasion. My aunt a cameo brooch that showed a poodle jumping into an Edwardian lady’s arms. My two older girl cousins, who’d covered the walls of my room with Beryl the Peril pictures, saddle shoes—black with white on top and then a little black again at the tip. My youngest cousin, who’d recently made her First Holy Communion, wore her Communion dress so she was a flood of Limerick lace. My aunt recalled being taken by car with my mother to the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin when Cardinal Lauri granted a partial indulgence to all who attended the big mass.
    On the way we stopped at a house where a poet had lived, a mighty cedar of Lebanon on the sloping hill beside it. I’d had to learn by heart one of his poems at school, ‘The Year of Sorrow—1849.’
Take back, O Earth, into thy breast,
The children whom thou wilt not feed.

    The poem was taught by a teacher who’d told us about the boy who ferried the Eucharist in his mouth in Ancient Rome and, John McCormack’s ‘My Rosary’ frequently played to us on a gramophone, how when Count John McCormack returned to give a concert by the Shannon in his native Athlone no one had turned up.
    On arrival in the resort, in a soda fountain bar on the main street, we had coffee milkshakes and banana boats.
    On the wall was a photograph, cut out of Movie Story or Film Pictorial , of the Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weismuller in his Tarzan costume.
    Johnny Cash sang ‘Forty Shades of Green’ on a public loudspeaker in the town.
    ‘It’s a lovely song, “The Forty Shades of Green”,’ my uncle said, ‘Johnny Cash wrote it. Went around Ireland in a helicopter. The song tells you about all the counties. He saw them from a helicopter.’
    Near the beach, on a windowsill, was a swan with a shell on its back, an Armada ship with sails of shells.
    Women with their toes painted tulip red sat on camp stools on the beach. Young men wore ruched bathing togs. Little boys like bantam hens marched on the sea and afterwards some of them stood in naked, even priapic defiance.
    ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a nun’s backside through a convent railing,’ my uncle said after a few hours so we left.
    There was a bachelor festival in the town and ten bachelors from different counties were lined up on a podium. They wore black, box,