Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Sole Mio’ by Enrico Caruso.
    Seán South was a member of numerous organizations.
    He founded a Limerick branch of Maria Duce in 1949, an organization with an anti-Semitic past—originated in the 1940s by the Very Reverend Dr Denis Fahey of the Holy Ghost Fathers, now targeting Hollywood actors inclined towards communism.
    Member of the Gaelic League—Friends of the Irish Language—campaigned to have Irish spoken again on the streets of Limerick.
    Member of Pacemakers of Freedom—a nationalist organization.
    Of An Réalt—the star—an organization dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
    One of his drawings is of Mary of Perpetual Help. In the words of St Ambrose, Mary, the Temple of God.
    Pope Pius IX had sent an ikon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help to the Limerick Redemptorists in 1866, when the first Redemptorists in Ireland were being brought to court for burning Protestant Bibles.
    Seán South vehemently campaigned against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, one out of four having lost their lives in the Germany of the Third Reich; through constant litigation in the USA causing the Fourth Amendment to be more clearly defined, thus safeguarding the rights of all.
    He studied drawing by doing an English art-school postal course—‘Which is the best way of demolishing a bridge?’—his last cartoon shows a beefcake IRA man guarding a classroom, an RUC man batoning the B-Special pupil beside him, another pupil in scanty mid-thigh shorts.
    The drawings Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did to accompany The Little Prince , written in a rented house in New York in 1943, helped Seán South to develop his drawing style, such as Saint-Exupéry’s one of the conceited man with auguste’s nose.
    At fifteen, in the year The Little Prince was written, Seán South enlisted in the Auxiliary Army Force, which supplemented the Irish army during the Second World War, having darker-than-ordinary uniforms.
    Two-hour FCA session per week.
    Became a sergeant in the FCA proper April 1946 and became skilful in archery.
    Out of the FCA, IRA full-time in April 1955 just after the premiere of East of Eden in which, against Californian clapboard, James Dean wears a sleeveless jersey with collegiate diamond pattern, his hair brushed up, the still of which quickly reached Limerick.
    But Seán South’s favourite organization was Servants of Freedom—boys with their first patina of body hair, between ten and fourteen.
    The boys would have iced buns with hundreds and thousands—sugar strands—on them, kitsch queen cakes with thick pink icing, viridian jellies buried in the icing or tiny stars on it or, at Christmas, glittering studs, and tea from rose-patterned cups in a room with chocolate-indulgence-patterned wallpaper and a picture of Romulus and Remus, two putti who founded Rome, being borne on a wolf’s back, in gilt frame with beaded edge.
    Football, hurling, handball.
    Recitations such as Sigerson Clifford’s ‘The Ballad of the Tinker’s Daughter.’
    Cartoon strips by Seán South for them in their magazine— The Servant —featuring Conor Mac Neasa and Cúchullain with cross-gartered legs.
    Cromwell’s second-in-command, Ireton, came to Limerick in 1651.
    A children’s rhyme from the English Civil War:
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows . . .
If the mamas sold their babies
To the Gypsies for half a crown . . .
Derry down, down, hey derry down.

    Seán South brought his boys on an outing to identify estuarine reeds near the castle of Gerald, Earl of Desmond, who survived on horseflesh with sixty gallowglasses (Scottish mercenaries) during the Munster Rebellion in Elizabethan days until they tracked him down and beheaded him in a Kerry wood—the yellow bittern ( an bonnán buí ) of Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna’s poem.
    Ordinarily like a hen but it can make itself reed-like, by pointing its bill and body upward, as camouflage.
    Voice of a cow who has lost her calf.
    Dearg - ghráin .
    Seán South told his boys that the favourite meal of Henry VIII of England was the innocent yellow bittern.
    Seán South was renowned in Limerick for driving snogging couples from cinemas.
    When One Million BC with a fur-clad Victor Mature was showing at Grand Central.
    Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah at the Lyric with Hedy Lamarr’s bellybutton inspiring epidemic snogging.
    Demetrius and the Gladiators at the Savoy with Susan Hayward in peplum.
    Athena with Dick DuBois in pristine white swimming trunks on the deck of a ship at the Thomond