Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Irish Constabulary used to wear bottle blue to distinguish themselves from the rifle green of their healthy colleagues, sleeping on a triple bedboard.
    He began taking photographs of other garda recruits in woollen-bib swimming costumes with striped trim on the trousers of the trunks on Jameson’s Beach in Howth with a Wollensak camera.
    He was among two hundred and fifty pilgrim gardaí, whose organization had been founded in the Gresham Hotel, Dublin, shortly after the Treaty, who travelled to Rome in the autumn of 1928, met at the umber Rome Central by the staff and students of the Irish College, parading to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, wearing medals with the cradle-blue ribbons of pilgrimage on their uniforms with buckram-stiffened high necks, addressed and lauded by Pius XI whose predecessor Pius X, on the occasion of his jubilee, had been entertained with bagpipes by the son of a County Galway Royal Irish Constabulary Officer, in full kilted uniform, shown the paintings of the Vatican Gallery by a priest from the Irish College; the carmines, the damasks, the loganberries, the coral reds, the cyclamen red, the rose reds of the St Jerome of Francesco Mola , the St Jerome of Girolamo Muziano, the Deposition of Christ by Caravaggio, The Vision of St Helena by Veronese, the Martyrdom of St Erasmus by Poussin.
    But it was the statue of Caesar Augustus with his double forelock and parade armour, which attracted the most attention, who, the priest told them, put a serpent nearly ninety feet long in front of the Domitium and decreed crossroad gods should be crowned twice a year, with spring and summer flowers.
    Back in Galway, stationed in Eglinton Street Barracks, he won his medals, playing in places like Parkmore, Tuam and Cusack Park, Mullingar, wearing a Basque beret on the field.
    The Galway team had a trainer then, who used to cut pictures of Greek gods out of books and frame them, who’d take them to Tuam where they’d stay in Canavan’s Hotel and eat lashings of boiled potatoes.
    He’d have them run for miles as far as Greenfield where they’d jump into Lough Corrib.
    In 1934 Garda Clohessy travelled with the Galway team on the Manhattan to the United States, sighted the petrel known to sailors as Mother Carey’s chicken in the eastern Atlantic, heard Guido Ciccolini who’d sung at Rudolph Valentino’s funeral.
    The former commissioner of the guards, who’d been received by Benito Mussolini and a goose-stepping cohort during the pilgrimage of 1928, relieved of his post earlier that year by Mr de Valera, had become leader of the Irish Fascist Movement in 1933,
    In November 1936 five hundred of the Irish fascists turned up in Galway to sail for Spain and fight for Franco.
    Thirty-four of them had a last-minute change of mind and turned back.
    Two of the Irish fascists were shot on their arrival in Spain by Franco’s men because of their strange uniform.
    When a French actor in a greatcoat, known in Galway for his performance as a French revolutionary murdered in a bath, was giving street performances in Eyre Square in September 1937, Garda Clohessy was promoted to sergeant, given a uniform with chevrons of silver braid on the sleeve, and transferred to Clare.
    Ned Hannaford’s circus was playing on his arrival; an entrée act of a giraffe-necked woman in gold-leaf brassiere and trunks on a Suffolk Punch horse followed by United States cavalrymen; Poodles Hannaford in a leopard-skin loincloth driving six Rosinback horses of flea-bitten hue tandem, standing astride; a brief scene from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream accompanied by Catherine wheels . . .‘kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle’; pigmy African elephants waited upon by baboons in frock coats.
    In Rome Garda Sergeant Clohessy had been told by the priest from the Irish College how Lucius Aemilius Paullus had deserters in the war against Perseus trampled to death by elephants in the Circus Flaminius.
    An English fair used to come to the town, where some of the houses were painted Wallis Warfield Simpson blue, each year before the war and the gaff boys, many with the common features of Venetian-blonde hair—dark mottled with blonde—and dead-white lips, and wearing costume rings, used to swim in the swimming hole.
    It was these that Garda Sergeant Clohessy started his nude photography on, with a Voigtlander Prominent.
    Some of the local boys left with the fair and themselves stood around