“Mike Donleavy, how’s your hammer hanging.”
This expression used by house painters to refer to one of the tools of trade, I at the time assumed, with mild embarrassment, to refer to something hanging upon one’s person elsewhere. But back upon this misty day in the cottage at Kilcoole, cleaning up, I heard whistling approaching down the lane. And it was Behan whom I confronted shuffling toward me through the wet, long grass on the lawn. And wearing, as it happened, a pair of my black patent leather dancing pumps with a bow, which, now thoroughly soaked, muddy and stretched out of shape, Behan criticized for their lack of waterproofing. Tucked under Behan’s arm were my golfing shoes with rubber studs on the soles and tassels swinging loose from the laces which he referred to as being far superior footwear. Then with a total matter-of-fact unconcern, Behan explained about the twenty pairs of my pairs of shoes remaining missing.
“Now, Mike, I hate the country. And I hate the country people who live in it. A more mean and stingy miserable bunch of peasants than you’d ever want to have the displeasure of meeting in any decent reincarnation. I am only out here paying you a little friendly visit because the IRA have recently sentenced me to death in my absence, which I am happier to have done in that manner than have it be done in my presence. And in your absence I am sorry to be out here taking advantage of your hospitality, which I had to do without invitation. Now knowing, as the IRA do, my hatred of the countryside and country people, this is the last place in the world they would come looking for me. But next to hating the country and the people living in it, I hate getting my feet wet. So I borrowed your shoes I found in an old leather suitcase and brought them with me to keep me feet dry going up to the pub and wore a pair every few yards till they got wet. You’ll find them flung over the fence into the field. I’m sorry if the cattle chewed a few of them. I kept these dancing yokes on my feet till last, as they wouldn’t keep a flea’s feet dry jumping over a bit of wet in a saucer. But now I’m ready for a swim and I would inquire if the water in the sea down there is deep enough.”
Behan, although eschewing getting his feet wet, would, whenever any large body of water appeared, make for it, instantly remove his clothes and jump in. And now upon this day was intent upon a frolic in what I knew already was the bitterly cold water of the Irish Sea. Requesting my company, Behan set off for his swim with me in tow. His lack of country awareness was demonstrated halfway across a field when a horse whose nose he reached to pet nearly bit off his hand, and would have done if he hadn’t tripped first into a bog hole. And then as we passed old Mr. and Mrs. Smiths’ cottage, they stayed in behind their gate, polite enough at introduction, but terrified of their lives of Behan, whose opinions and irreverent language crossing the fields preceded him.
“Now, Mike, what did I tell you, these country people, frightened they are of their lives.”
One did not volunteer to tell Behan that the Smiths were dyed-in-the-wool Dubliners like himself. And as I waited on the beach, ready to be summoned by a drowning man, a naked Behan plunged and disappeared into the waves. I expected him to jump out screaming from the cold, but Behan, padded in blubber like a walrus, romped the minutes away in the surf swimming and diving. That is, until spying the train approaching up from Wicklow town and on its way to Dublin. With a roar, he emerged from the waves and rushing up the beach ascended a sandy hillock near the tracks from the summit of which he wagged and waved his prick at the passing train’s windows, with little regard for me, his host, being easily recognized with the only beard in Ireland. When chastened with this, Behan, as he always did, had a ready answer.
“Now, who, Mike, for the love of Jesus, would be bothered looking out and identifying you when they would be having the chance and the delight of their lives to have a brief view of a fine prick and a great pair of jangling balls just as nature made them to hang on a broth of a boy like meself.”
On our return across the fields, the Smiths were nowhere to be seen, and their gate was locked and curtains drawn over their windows. Back in the cottage, Behan, with a ferocious appetite, asked for the large mixing bowl he saw and to be let attend to himself. Whereupon from the corner of my eye I watched him fill the huge piece of crockery with cornflakes, a tin of peaches, half a jar of tomato chutney, squares of cooking chocolate, pieces of bread, flour, a tin of sardines, milk, sugar, salt, spoonfuls of sugar, ketchup, baking soda, pieces of blood pudding, chopped bacon rinds and a sample of everything within reach or in sight. On top of this concoction, as if it were a blessing, he poured my only bottle of stout. Mixing the lot with a wooden spoon and with a final pouring of milk to turn the concoction further liquid, Behan then put the bowl to his lips and in several massive mouthfuls downed it. With the bowl finally empty, he smacked and wiped his lips and turned around to see me watching with openmouthed wonder.
“Ah, you know, Mike, I always like to look after my health.”
Which
Would leave me
That little bit
Better than
Being
Unhealthy
8
THE NEXT THREE DAYS in Behan’s company became an odyssey. Automotively I had graduated up from my unreliable small red van, which one raged over, kicked and often had to abandon in a ditch with sparks jumping across wires hanging out from behind the dashboard and then proceed on foot. As I would tramp forward cross-country in the mud, often in darkness, I swore to never own an automobile again.
But from my automotive engineers in Greystones, I was suddenly able to acquire a sedate sedan once the property of the Protestant Bishop of Meath. This dignified vehicle with its blue leather coach work started merely by pressing a small ebony button and could then accelerate to roll along at a steady forty or even fifty miles an hour. The smudged, crumpled and stained manuscript of Borstal Boy sticking out of his jacket side pocket, Behan seemed to revel upon his enthronement on the front seat, issuing imperatives as to where we might go from the options presented. The first selected being to pay a visit to Ernest Gebler’s estate, Lake Park, an idyllic lodge nestled in its grove of pines above in the Wicklow Mountains.
From Kilcoole, we drove westward to Newtown Mount Kennedy, a village at the foot of a steep lane which rose to heights called Kilmurray. As happened on any journey with Behan, the need soon arose to visit a pub. Indeed, in open countryside, a good excuse was always required to pass one by without paying one’s respects. And it had to be admitted that once inside this frequently dimmer and darker austere world, one was often relieved and glad to escape into where beer would temporarily brighten the spirit. It was where too, Behan would give his best performance as not only a brilliant mimic but in his ability to quote ad lib British laws and legal statutes, reciting chapter and verse and declaiming the more famed decisions handed down by British judges in the English courts. He could similarly quote from the Bible and even reduce to astonished tears those poor Protestants who would attempt to match skills with him and who did not possess, as he did, a photographic, encyclopedic knowledge, which even the most fanatically erudite Presbyterian in the world would envy. Behan now making his desire known to visit a pub by mimicking and declaiming as a clergyman might in giving a sermon from his pulpit.
“Verily I say to thee my dear brethren in the name of Jesus, who was unfairly tacked up crooked on the cross, that it behooves us to partake of immediate liquid refreshment or be beaten within an inch of our lives with bound copies of that God-fearing newspaper The Catholic Herald.”
In walking and roaming the streets and his voice carrying near and far, Behan had the quality of a pied piper. And he took much pleasure in his biblical indulgence, especially as there was nothing quite as lonely and doleful as being a Protestant holding as they did their prayer meetings on a bleak Dublin evening and to which not a single passing pedestrian ever paid any attention. And Behan, at every opportunity, made references to religious convictions they espoused and sung out to Dublin’s unlistening ears, his most oft repeated favorite being,
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“I know that my redeemer liveth.”
And these words now recited as we entered just inside the door of the pub in Newtown Mount Kennedy. Behan delivering his vowels in the most heartfelt of heartfelt manner, bending his knee in genuflection and striking it with his fist. And as he did so, an old man, clearly at the end of his life, emerged out of the shadows. It was as if he sensed Behan, who continued his religious declamation to the empty air, to be some strange oracle or faith healer who could cure the sick. And upon this early afternoon as we drank our pints of stout in the pub’s semidarkness, the old man described to Behan his recent operation, which produced his presently unpleasant smell from a bag he carried under his clothing. But the infirm gentleman did not offer to buy Behan a drink, as would be regarded as normal with any Irishman joining another at any bar the world over. In Behan’s eyes, to neglect to do such was heinous in the extreme, Behan turning his back to the old man, and as we left the pub he was scathing.
“The dirty, filthy, disgusting old eegit. Miserly salted away money all his life and now is afraid of dying and of leaving the money behind that’s clinking in his pocket that you couldn’t prize out of him with a crowbar. Wanting sympathy on the edge of the grave and wouldn’t offer to buy you a drink.”
Back in the car, we drove up the steep hill to the tableland a thousand or so feet higher, Behan referring to his professional calling as a house painter and that it was unhealthy work. We proceeded over the bridge crossing the Corporation of Dublin reservoir and into which Behan, for the sake, he said, of maintaining its beneficial properties, insisted we stop and he take a pee. Ceremonially describing, as he pissed, the minerals he was wholesomely adding to Dublin’s water supply. But I was, and am to this day, still taken aback by Behan’s vehemence concerning the sick old man. Although not that much later, I was soon to learn myself on another fateful occasion that the greatest sin any man could commit in Behan’s eyes was that of not buying a drink when his turn came while a man had the money in his pocket to do so. But on this day, we had reached Roundwood. From this village it was less than two miles along a winding narrow road to Ernest Gebler’s estate of Lake Park. This commodious once shooting lodge in its wooded setting stood hauntingly on the side of a hill sloping down to and overlooking the shiny black waters of Lough Dan.
Now, in any house with female staff, Behan’s first act as a guest was to make familiar, first in conversation and then in activities. Although at times extremely shy himself, he would always make an overture to embrace those he regarded as his working-class brethren. If they demurred, they were then immediately disdained and gently goosed with at least one of his noticeably stubby fingers. If this produced no appropriate reaction, a long discourse would follow as Behan would assume membership of the Salvation Army and pronounce his surname in a double-barreled manner:
“I Brendan Bee-Hawn stand against the devil’s evil traits. The Lord shall root out all deceitful lips and the tongue that speaketh proud things shall here and now cover you with licks and kisses.”
Behan achieving a momentary complacency in his victim with his oratory would then make an outright grab. Which he did for Gebler’s stoutly built cook, Bridget, who was about to marry Gebler’s gardener, Micko. Bridget tolerantly and good-naturedly giggling uproariously but then screaming as an encouraged Behan attempted familiarities beyond playfulness and chased her up and down the stairs and through the halls. Meanwhile, Gebler, a reticently serious gentleman, took a poor view of his help being interfered with and was anxious that Behan either behave or be gone.
Gebler, too, had been reared in the slums of Dublin and knew Behan as a little, bare-arsed, belligerent boy swimming in the city’s Grand Canal. But unlike most would-be writers in Ireland, Gebler had by dint of implacable application already become what any of them would term an international best-selling author. And was now exhibiting the fruits of what only an ambitious and dedicated writer could accomplish. His second book called The Plymouth Adventure, concerning the story of the Mayflower, was about to become a Hollywood movie, and money poured in from this best-selling work. Gebler too had recently become married to an American girl, Lea, also of Hollywood and who had been raised there, the daughter of Leatrice Joy of the Ziegfeld Follies and John Gilbert of the silent screen. This attractive lady took no such staid attitude as her husband did to Behan and was not at all alarmed by his antics. Indeed, with her stunning singing voice, she and Behan sang duets together. In fact, things, as they became musical, were going altogether well. However, although I was eagerly welcomed by Gebler, his wife maintaining I put him in a good mood, Behan in my company soon made the pair of us personae non gratae.
Behan, upon once seeing the lough below in the valley, was soon off in search of a swim. Taking with him as an entourage the entirety of the female staff of Lake Park to witness him undressing and jumping into the black ice-cold waters. And in Behan’s normal naturist manner, all this seemed innocuous enough. But what became soon more conspicuous was the reinforced echoing sound of Behan’s profane and obscene language which, shouted out, was now bouncing hillside to hillside from glen to glen and to the ears of Gebler’s devout neighbors. As Behan, standing naked up to his arse in the ice-cold water pounded his chest in the manner of Tarzan and declaiming the more mild of his blasphemies,
“Will you give me another sup now of the almighty fruit of the juice of Joseph and the eternal spit of the horn most high.”
Behan, now having well and truly worn out both our welcomes at Lake Park, huffily presented his own suggestion of another nearby destination. And so, motoring through the coconut-scented air of the golden gorse in bloom, we went on our way to the next port of call. While heading out the long Lake Park drive, Behan spoke in his sometimes shy, stammering and apologetic way.
“You know, Mike, I’d like to say a few things in respect of the bit I’ve now read of that writing you’ve got back below there in Kilcoole. I see you got me mentioned and I am proud to be there in your book, described as I am down in the Catacombs, where I often was when Dickie Wyman was the original proprietor of the place. I remember he once gave Valerie a bouquet of snowdrops with the words, Ah, my dear, I give these to you as they are scarcely suitable for me as a symbol of purity. Now in the same way I’d be paying you a compliment over your book. It’s altogether a great book and one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever read and the words on those pages will go around the world. And I took the liberty of making a few suggestions in the margins. Now I’ll tell you one thing that you’re doing that’s very wise. Not a soul of them fucking jealous bastards in Dublin knows you’re writing it. Not that I’ve come across anyway. You’re a good man to keep a secret. And I remember when I came to buy the guns from your rooms in Trinity, that you never let on that the guns were stored there.”
Behan was recalling a time when he and another appeared one afternoon in my rooms at 38 Trinity College, where they came to examine and negotiate over the guns, which for some time had been kept in brown paper parcels on top of my bedroom wardrobe. Behan, however, was wrong in assuming I knew such packages held firearms, and for the weeks that they remained stacked in my bedroom I had no idea of the contents. Being then far too busy with wine, women and song. And if Noctor, my servant, knew, he chose not to make mention of it. But one day following a game of tennis, I returned to number 38 having lent my key to this charming Divinity student whose packages had now long-resided in my bedroom. And there is no doubt that I was apprehensive upon seeing laid out across my sitting-room table an array of lethal submachine guns, pistols, rifles and automatic weapons alongside their appropriate boxes of ammunition. Such having been brought south on the train from Belfast to Dublin by this undergraduate friend reading Divinity. A steely-nerved son of a minor baronet, who’d been much battle-hardened in the Second World War in the African desert and landing on beachheads and fighting across Europe. And at the end of hostilities, he had collected numerous weapons and memorabilia, which, upon being demobed, he
shipped home to his father’s estate in the north of Ireland. Sounding out the possibilities of selling these, he discovered through Behan the interest of the IRA.
“Now, Mike, all those great guns you had there in your room. When did you know we were going to steal instead of pay for them.”
Now Behan also thought I was ultrashrewd as an arms dealer because he and his accomplice, having struck a bargain with the steely-nerved baronet’s son and having said they would come back in forty-eight hours with the money, planned instead to meanwhile steal the weapons. But they didn’t reckon with the prescience of my steely-eyed friend, who was far ahead of them and had the weapons that very afternoon the deal was agreed, taken away to another safe place, where they were later sold to a group of Orangemen who had their money ready and by the sound of them were not averse to being up to their knees in Catholic blood and up to their knees in slaughter.