Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

near Donkey Ford’s Chipper. ‘You’ll end up in a Magdalene Laundry,’ he was heard to say on that occasion to the girl in question, Magdalene Laundries being where unmarried pregnant girls were sent to labour.
    But he brought his Servants of Freedom to Lady and the Tramp at the City Theatre.
    Vegetables were scarce during the war, butter ration reduced, bacon limited.
    The tasks of the volunteer soldiers in their forage caps and uniforms with chromium buttons were cattle-burying, turf-cutting.
    Cut the turf in May with a slean—turf-spade—branch it, spread it.
    In June the first footing. In July the second footing.
    Then to Finner Camp in Donegal.
    Michelangelos of young soldiers in the Atlantic; reddish-brown pubic hair in the showers, like the hare’s coat; ice cream, swimming rings, toffee stands on Bundoran beach; Painted Lady butterflies with white marks on the black tips of the forewings on soldiers’ black boots; tufted sedge, flat sedge, meadow foxtails, fuchsia reflected in young soldiers’ torso tans, face freckles; ladybirds—scarabaeids—on young soldiers’ forearms, in bronze hair.
    Ladybird.
    ( Bóin samhraidh .
    Cow of summer.)
    French children tell the ladybird the Turks are coming to kill their children.
    The Turks were coming then.
    A man broadcast from Germany in Irish, continually reminding the Irish people that Germany had cooperated with the Shannon hydroelectric scheme near Limerick city in the late 1920s, the progress of which was painted by Seán Keating.
    Before the war Glasgow prostitutes used to come to the environs of Finner Camp—thus it was known as the Scotch Fair.
    But without the Glasgow prostitutes there was another kind of longing, like the hare’s cry in the night.
    Early August the volunteer soldiers would bring turf to towns and villages in County Limerick.
    The Donie Collins Band toured County Limerick at harvest time during the war years, playing in dancehalls owned by farmers.
    Packets of tea and cups were brought to them during an interval, in Jacob’s biscuit tins.
    The touring cinemas came then also—marquees in which films were shown—and stayed for a week.
    Three Stooges films were particularly popular.
    Canachán —hare’s purse.
    Working on the turf the volunteer soldiers slept under canvas.
    Where hares grazed, checking the growth of grass, the large blue butterfly thrived—black spots on upper side of forewing—laying its eggs on wild thyme.
    It had other secret, iridescent colours as its wings absorbed all the colours of the spectrum except blue.
    The race of the Gael.
    There were young soldiers’ eyes like that.
    The Arctic hare and the mountain hare of Europe turned white in winter.
    But a young soldier, with bounty of chestnut hair and a metropolis of freckles on his face, from Lough Mask, County Mayo, where Lord Haw Haw, to whom Hitler awarded the War Merit Cross First Class, was from, told Seán South that in Mayo there were albino hares—white year-round.
    The colonization rights of Jupiter . . .
    The IRA campaign of 1956 began in December with a failed attempt to blow up the statue of General Gough on his horse in the Phoenix Park, Dublin.
    Newspapers announced that some IRA men had been arrested at the border and were being detained by gardaí.
    Headquarters was phoned.
    The garda in charge warranted no ammunition had been found on them.
    Whereupon instructions were that the IRA men be released.
    The IRA men refused to be released because they’d abandoned their vehicle.
    The garda in charge immediately ordered taxis and they were brought to Dublin for Christmas.
    A garda in Limerick found a dock labourer from St Ita’s Street in a car on Christmas Eve clasping a stolen plum pudding, value five shillings, and a stolen shoe, value fifteen shillings.
    ‘Pray for me,’ were Seán South’s last words before leaving Limerick, with a bottle of Lourdes water.
    Storyteller. Traveller. Exile.
    In Dublin he attended a pantomime— geamaire —in which Jimmy O’Dea and Harry O’Donovan played the dames.
    In the Monte Carlo Chipper in Monaghan town was a photograph of Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps—after President Eisenhower’s baby-blue golf cap.
    Four Blue Caps, who included Jumpin’ Jack Neal and Wee Willie Williams, in black shirts and white ties; Gene Vincent, who shot swans as a boy in the swamps of Virginia for food, in a letterman jacket.
    Gene Vincent had been fined ten thousand dollars the previous May by Virginia State