Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

attended dinner dances, however, at the Clonrickarde Arms Hotel with another bank employee, a woman with a bull fringe who on these occasions wore a lamp-black dress with a fishtail train or a rose-blue robe-de-style with a corsage of fritillaries.
    The English players couldn’t come to Ireland during the War so an amateur drama society was formed in the town and their first production was Death’s Jest-Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose mother was from County Longford, about the Duke of Munsterberg in Silesia who was stabbed to death by his court fool. Éanna Geraghty played Isbrand the fool in Arabian slippers.
    Phoebe Rabbitte cycled to performances in cavalry-cord trousers on a high nelly.
Life’s a single pilgrim
Fighting, unarmed among a thousand soldiers.

    For his holidays Éanna Geraghty would go to Bachelor’s Walk in Dalkey. There was a swimming hole nearby where, before the War, he met a man from Plymouth whose only sport, because of spinal trouble, was swimming, who would swim out to Sorrento Point. When he was a boy Irish time and English time were different and when he got back to England from Irish visits, he told Éanna, he’d set his watch to Irish time because he loved swimming in the swimming hole in Dalkey so much.
    In the evenings of his holidays, when V-2 rockets were falling on England, Éanna Geraghty would go to a hotel with mouldings of dolphins outside where a man in a grasshopper-green dickie bow, by a grand piano, incessantly played and crooned Jessie Matthews’ ‘Over My Shoulder Goes One Care, Over My Shoulder Goes Two Cares.’
    At the end of the War he got a senior post in Aer Teoranta at Shannon Airport and when that closed in 1949 he went to Paris where he lived in an apartment block smelling of ammonia in the Faubourg outskirts and he’d attend rugby matches when the Irish team was playing and some of the Irish rugby players, young men with forelocks, came to his flat with a picture of Theobald Wolfe Tone’s wife, Martha Witherington, in a sugarloaf cap on the wall and, on a bamboo-motif chair, by a Bauhaus lamp, he’d offer them Disque Bleu cigarettes and tell them how in Corfe Castle, Dorset, during the Middle Ages a football was accepted instead of a marriage shilling, by the local lord, from the most recently married young man, carried ceremoniously to him with a pound of pepper; how rugby was started at Rugby School in 1823 when a pupil, William Webb Ellis, picked up a ball and ran with it and in 1839 the Dowager Queen Adelaide, wife of William IV, visited the school to see the new game; how the Connaught Rangers marched through Alexandria at the beginning of the Dardanelles Campaign in July 1915 in khaki drill, playing ‘Brian Boru,’ ‘Killaloe’ and ‘Brian O’Lynn,’ led by the tallest of the company, an international rugby player who carried the Jingling Johnny with its red and black horse-hair plumes; of the scrummage in the winter of 1934 when there was yellow jelly algae on fallen logs in the mental hospital grounds, the ram’s head push between other men’s buttocks.
Queenie, Queenie, who kicked the ball,
Was he fat or was he small?

    Queenie Waithmandle was a Protestant woman with Blanc de Madame de Courbet roses outside her house.
    She always attended Sunday rugby games, in a trilby hat and a beaver-fur dickie front, or a jacket trimmed with monkey fur, or a pinstripe flannel jacket with boxy shoulders, stilettos with louis-type heels or monk-fronted shoes.
    In the summer she’d go with relatives from Galway to North Connemara to catch up on the legations of ragged robin by the ocean and perhaps be awed by the dream of a nobby—a boat with red sail.
    When she was in her early fifties she became pregnant and went to England to live with relatives and have her baby. ‘Mind yourself in this town as they say,’ she bid me before getting the Dublin bus, as a man in a black shirt with puff sleeves in a marquee tent, in a performance of The Duchess of Malfi by the travelling players, which Queenie and I attended the same night, advised the audience to be ‘mindful of thy safety.’
    In Webster’s day the Shoemaker’s Guild in Chester would present the Draper’s Guild with the handful of a football on Shrove Tuesday. One year at a presentation a battle broke out between the two guilds which became known as the Battle of Chester.
    My father was a draper.
    In the eighteenth century in the East of Ireland football players wore white linen