Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

bonfires at night or under the ornamental crab-apple tree or the weeping-pear tree in the garden she could hear the soldiers sing songs from the music halls: ‘On Monday I Walked Out with a Soldier,’ ‘The Girl the Soldiers Always Leave Behind Them,’ ‘All Through Sticking to a Soldier,’ ‘Aurelia was Always Fond of Soldiers,’ ‘Soldiers of the Queen,’ but especially, ‘Soldiers in the Park,’ which was where they were, burning leaves.
    When the Black and Tans raced up and down Sackville Street in vans covered in wire and there was a curfew, she was one of Dublin’s few theatre-goers, taking the tram from a house in Dalkey to Harcourt Street Station, which replaced summer bivouacs in Morrison’s Hotel in Dawson Street, in a taffeta hobble skirt tied near the ankle with sash lace, so that the horrible hobble of British taste made her less likely to be a target.
    It was commonplace in those days to see Countess Markievicz, the minister for labour in the revolutionary government, cycling around Dublin on a battered bicycle, in a beehive bonnet from which cherries dangled. Her sister, Eva Gore Booth, had devoted part of her life in England to the rights of women music-hall artistes.
    The need to perform overcame her because she sang ‘Goo-Goo’ from The Earl and the Girl at a concert in the Theatre Royal, Limerick, spring 1922, in aid of those made homeless by the War of Independence. She was photographed on that occasion outside Joseph O’Mara’s house, Hartstonge House—Eton-crop hair now, pumps with Byzantine, diamanté buckles.
    The Belle and Bracebridge were in St Nicholas’s Cathedral in Gal-way in early summer 1922, to see the colours of the Connaught Rangers, the harp and crown on yellow, which dated back to 1793, being removed, on the first stage of their Journey to Windsor Castle.
    At the beginning of 1923, during the Civil War, the Belle started out two days early, defying derailed trains and broken bridges, joining hordes from his native Athlone to hear John McCormack singing ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in a black cloak lined with ruby silk, at a home-visit concert.
    Near the Forty Steps that spring, with its bloody cranesbill and its blue cranesbill, she found an abandoned blackbird’s nest, covered in moss.
    There were ladybird roundabouts in the Fair Green when she and Bracebridge left, childless, to live in a Queen Anne revival lodge near the red-brick Victorian Gothic church of St Chad’s in Birmingham, but not before she was received into the Roman Catholic Church, under a portrait of Cardinal Wiseman in garnet red, in the local church, joining the faith of a London music-hall Belle who claimed to be related to Father Prout the poet, a Cork priest who penned ‘The Bells of Shandon,’ rowed with his native city, was an associate of Charles Dickens and W.M. Thackeray, mixed his priestly duties with the bohemian life, travelled as far as Hungary and Asia Minor, with his Latin translations of the songs of Thomas Moore was a leading attraction at Mrs Jameson’s Sunday evening parties in Rome and ended up with his rosary and psalm book in a mezzanine in Paris.
    The manor was sold to priests; there were people cycling on the Suck that winter it was so cold, and the priests came and taught Thucydides.
    One of the inculabula that survived the transaction, which instilled fear in the boys, especially at Lent, was one with an illustration of Caroline of Brunswick in a celestial blue dress, with matching jacket edged in swan’s down, and a high-crowned Elizabethan gentleman’s hat, banging on the doors of Westminster Cathedral during the coronation of George IV in 1820, demanding to be allowed in as the Queen of England, the doors barred against her.
    It joined the books that the priests favoured, which were books with illustrations by Arthur Rackham so that boys going to the school got a vision of life with boys in bathing costumes and girls in dresses with sailor’s trim by the tide’s edge; New York streets crowded with pigs in derby hats or cloche hats; women in mob caps cherishing their babies in clapboard New England towns; couples enshrined in four-poster beds with rose-motif curtains; bare-footed girls carrying bundles wrapped in peacock-eye patterned cloth through fox-coloured forests; ancient Irish heroes in togas doing marathon runs; small boys in glove-fitting short trousers stomping on plethoric daisies; bare-breasted Rhine maidens in Heimkunst rites.
    Just before I