Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

left England I visited a man in Bath who’d been a student in the school during the Second World War when a song the Belle sang, ‘Maisie is a Daisy,’ was revived and sung on radio by Maidie Andrews alongside Gracie Fields’ ‘So I’m Sending a Letter to Santa Claus to Bring Daddy Safely Home to Me.’
    A Palladian square of the Adam style, façade breaking into towers.
    A man with a Noah beard in the green, brown and off-white of the Epicurean Graigian sect on it.
    A room with lyres, garlands, acanthus on the walls.
    A man with mud-green eyes, hirsute brows, in a lap robe, reflected in a photograph of a Beau Brummell of the Irish midlands in a striped beach jacket and cricket shirt.
    Christmas 1943, shortly after Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met in Teheran, he played Fifi, in Salvation Army fatigues, in The Belle of New York at the school, having played Prudence in The Quaker Girl the year before and Countess Angela in The Count of Luxembourg .
    The production was directed by a priest who’d seen the new pope, Eugenio Pacelli, being hailed with the Nazi salute by German boy scouts, summer 1939. He’d caught a swim in the shock-cerulean Mediterranean in Portovenere, where Byron used to swim, on the day the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed.
    As Fifi, the man I visited had to sing ‘Teach me How to Kiss, Dear,’ a song that became popular in the rugby changing rooms.
    The priest-director commented that he was an annual reminder that the Emporer Nero had married a boy.
    Each night when Blinky Bill—who had a slight goat’s moustache and was fond of quoting ‘Tragedy is true Guise. Comedy lies,’ from his schoolteacher father in Creggs, County Galway, where Parnell made his last rain-soaked speech—sang ‘She is the Belle of New York,’ the ghost of the Belle could be seen in the wings in a harem-scarem skirt—a skirt with cuffed and buttoned ankles like Turkish pantaloons—summer sombrero, music-hall, droplet earrings under shingled hair.

Little Friends

    Recently I came across a red Silvine exercise book with a sentence of Eugène Delacroix’s I jotted down when I was sixteen: ‘To finish demands a heart of steel . . .’
He has gone to the place
Where naught can delight him.
He may sit now and tell of the sights he has seen of,
While forlorn he does mourn on the Isle of St Helena.

    Ailve Ó Cóileáin came from a place not far from where Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, was born, where leviathans could regularly be sighted.
    In the late-eighteenth century his family defied the Penal Laws, sending their children to school in France, building handsome houses from lime and cows’ blood, storing the beeves in autumn for winter and feasting far from London, from the nucleus of an Empire that had hastily broken the terms of the Treaty of Limerick and, in response to the War of the Spanish Succession, which brought the aged Louis XIV to the gates of Amsterdam, intensified the Penal Laws. Priests in the instinct-red vestments of the eighteenth century had continued to say Mass through the Penal Laws here where the common puffin, the red puffin, the seal lived and iodine was exported from here to Seville where Murillo had painted the pelota players and the water-sellers when his wife died after twenty years of marriage.
    Ailve’s family owned a Swiss castle-hotel with a bar to the side with an advertisement outside for Turf Virginia Cigarettes with a picture of a centaur on the packet.
    Two of the customers in blue serge suits sent from the United States would join their foreheads as they sang a song together about Napoleon.
    Framed in the bar was a cartoon from the Empire News of a local butcher-businessman from whom Buckingham Palace had ordered pork just after the Second World War and who had the pigs killed on the mail boat in the middle of the Irish Sea so they’d be fresh for the royal feast.
    St Gobnait, patron saint of bees, and in County Kerry usurping St Brigid as patron saint of blacksmiths, had lived near here. She had the power to carry live coals in her apron. Once she went to the forge for coals. Idlers were hanging around the forge. She put the coals in her apron, lifting her skirts to miniskirt level. ‘Nice pair of legs,’ a lecher declared. She was thrilled with the compliment and immediately the coals burned through her apron and she lost the power forever.
    Starlings came from all over the British Isles here for the winter and had rallies. They were great