Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

rifle practice.
    Remembering nineteen-year-old IRA volunteer Thomas Williams hanged by the Northern Ireland government during the Second World War, despite the pleas of the lord mayor of Dublin, the Dublin Fire Brigade and the people of Achill Island, County Mayo.
    Christmas 1955, Fergal inscribed in an autograph book a Horace epigram massively popular with the British Empire during the Boer War:
    ‘Sweet and appropriate thing to die for one’s country.’
    Christmas 1956, wrote in his diary:
    ‘Keep cool and pray. A good conscience is a continual Christmas.’
    The song about him is about an IRA Bildungsroman —a young person’s education.
    He’d been a member of the IRA for two years before volunteering for column work. It was a secret in Monaghan town that he was in the IRA.
    At parochial-hall dances he led girls to Teresa Brayton’s ‘The Old Bog Road.’
    On his death a number of Monaghan-town girls left to be nuns in the Dominican Convent, Portstewart, County Derry, and with the Sisters of St Francis Xavier in Omagh, County Tyrone.
    Seán South’s home, 47 Henry Street, had been a synagogue when it was the home of a draper, Louis Goldberg, a blond Lithuanian who escaped conscription into the Russian army by taking a timber ship to Ireland where, after obtaining a pedlar’s licence for ten shillings, he began by selling pictures of saints and popes.
    Limerick Jews, mainly from the village of Akmijan, province of Kovna Gubernia, Lithuania, were a familiar sight, eating ginger butter cakes, poppyseed butter cakes, sugar pretzels under the walnut blossom, the kanzan cherry blossom, the ornamental red hawthorn, the sweet chestnut trees in Pery Square park.
    Shortly after Chanukkah, feast of lights, early 1904, year of the canonization of Gerard Majella, a Jewish wedding for which the bride had a bouquet of white carnations and maidenhair fern, the bridesmaids’ satin capes trimmed with swan’s down, green marzipan and candied orange slices served at the feast, inspired the wrath of Father John Creagh, in a city where the lice of the poor were so large they caused Father Creagh’s Redemptorists to vomit.
    Father John Creagh—biretta, incised Limerick mouth, arched brows, melancholy dreaming eyes.
    As director of the Archconfraternity of the Holy Family, from the pulpit Father Creagh accused the Jews of deicide.
    April of the subsequent boycott, Jewish businesses were collapsing. Sophia Weinronk, out to get food, was attacked on Bowman Street, off Colooney Street—Jewish street of transoms and railings—her head beaten against the wall.
    A poor herdsman’s daughter in the hills of Shanagolden declared that only for Jews she would have no clothes or covering.
    The parish priest of Kilcolman and Coolcappa made her return two blankets she’d just bought from a travelling Jewish draper, also from Henry Street.
    Back in Limerick, Father Creagh claimed a Jew had tried to sell him a music-hall broadsheet with ‘Squeeze Her Gently’ on it.
    Boherbuoy Brass and Reed Band led the superior general of Redemptorists from the station in July.
    Confraternity salute was raised, right hand.
    Papal blessing was given in three instalments—Monday, Tuesday to men, Wednesday to boys.
    The pleas of Rabbi Elias Bere Levin from Tels, Lithuania, reached deaf ears.
    Eighty Jews were driven from Limerick. Forty left.
    Ginsbergs left. Jaffes left. Weinronks followed Greenfields to South Africa.
    The Hebrew headstones survived in Kilmurry Cemetery, near Castleconnell.
    ‘Why shouldst thou be as a stranger in the land and as a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night?’
    In Seán South’s room in 47 Henry Street were bottles of Indian ink, paintbrushes, pens.
    In the bookcase works by Charles Kickham, Canon Sheehan, Henry Rider Haggard, Biggles books, The Little Prince by the French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, with Sainte-Exupéry’s drawing of the little prince in a jumpsuit with flared trousers and bow tie on the jacket.
    A statue of the Sacred Heart wrapped in cellophane on top of it.
    The Messenger of the Sacred Heart , Irish School Weekly .
    A postcard of The Race of the Gael by Seán Keating—who’d painted a portrait of Bishop Edward Thomas O’Dwyer who settled a pork butcher’s strike, a Mass said for him each year attended by pork butchers—two men staring with determination over a stone wall.
    Gramophone records, Pat Roche’s Harp and Shamrock Orchestra, The Pride of Erin Orchestra, ‘O