‘That’d be small trouble to you. But what architects are you talking about?’
‘Those fellows going around the place doing the hard chaw, keeping everybody awake. You, like all the tourists –’
I choked with indignation and my fellow-travellers, an American textile foreman, a Scots honeymoon couple and two London schoolmasters, gazed at her with disgust. The foul word that had just left her lips stamped her in all our eyes as a cad or a caddess. It’s not a word used in polite society along the boulevards unless you are speaking of somebody else, of course.
She went on relentlessly.
‘You people think it’s all very romantic but those little architectural students, as soon as they qualify, buy a nice suit, grow a moustache, and refer to this period as the time they were sowing their wild oats.
‘I wouldn’t mind but I’ve got to get up and go over to Neuilly and be at the church of Saint Pierre in the morning.’
‘Tomorrow is not Sunday,’ said Donal. ‘Is it a holy day over here?’
‘Maybe it’s a wedding you’re going to,’ said I. ‘Have another citronade on the head of it.’
‘No, thanks. I’m for bed. It’s not a wedding I’m going to. I’m going to work. Some people do, you know. I leave my tools here on my way from the school and Madame is just gone to collect them. Ah, here she is.’
She beamed back at the fat old patronne whose face for the first time since I’d seen her was split in a smile as she handed over the counter what looked like a kit of tools belonging to a bricklayer.
‘Merci, madame.’
The old one smiled again. That’s twice in the one twenty-four hours.
‘Service, Mademoiselle Murfee.’
Mile. Murphy said good night to us too and went off up the rue Dauphine, a trim slip of a girl, as they say at home, but swinging her hammers and chisels with an air.
The church of Saint Pierre is the parish church of Neuilly in south-west Paris. It is about the size of the Dublin Pro-Cathedral and is nearly a hundred years old, no older than the University Church on Dublin’s Green, and as beautiful in a different style.
Like Chartres, Bruges, towering and mighty, since the age of Faith, this modest and middle-age suburban church was decorated by a group of sculptors, unpaid, and giving themselves, mind and muscle, for God’s sake.
The parish priest of Saint Pierre had about enough money to keep the church in repair, to pay a couple of charwomen and a verger. He had nothing over for ornamentation, for the lovely stone that practically shouted for a chisel.
God’s help, they say in Irish, is never further than the door; in this case, the door of the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Someone in the school heard of all this lovely stone going unadorned and the next thing a squad of students are out, fighting to divide the church up amongst them.
Kathleen Murphy, of Ballymore Eustace, comes away with three pillars and with hammer upraised, poises her slim self to strike a blow do chum glóire Dé agus onóra na hÉireann.*
These pillars represent in their tortuous Celtic way the struggle of Christian France against the Huns, the Creation and the Deluge. Standing there, in the quiet of the Avenue de Roule, in the Church of Saint Pierre, the noise of the traffic round the Etoile and on the Champs Elysées dim in the distance, I noted lovingly the twisted features of each cantankerous countenance, thought of Raphoe, Cashel, Clonmacnoise, and heard the waves of the Atlantic break on the Aran shore and the praising voice of the holy Irish, long since dead, soft in the gathering dusk.
A Turn for a Neighbour
One Christmas Eve, though not this one nor the one before, there was a man coming in from Cloghran, County Dublin, on a horse and cart to do his Christmas business, selling and buying.
When he got as far as Santry, County Dublin, he remembered that there was an old neighbour dead in a house, so he went in to pay his respects and, after saying that he was sorry for their trouble and all to that effect, he enquired whether he could offer any assistance of a practical nature.
‘Well, if it’s a thing you wouldn’t mind, collecting the coffin; it’s ready-measured and made and all; it would be a great help to us.’
‘I do not indeed mind carrying the coffin back for you, though I won’t be home till a bit late, having to do her shopping. I’ve a list as long as your arm, of sweets for children, snuff for her old one, rich cake, a jar of malt, two bottles of port wine, snuff for my old one, a collar for the dog, a big red candle to put in the window, a jockey of tobacco for myself, a firkin of porter, two dolls that’ll say Ma-Ma, one railway train, a jack-in-the-box and a monkey-on-a-stick, two holy pictures, rashers, and black and white pudding and various other combustibles too numerous to mention.
‘But I’ll stick the coffin up amongst the rest of them and take the height of good care of it and it’ll be me Christmas box and hansel for me poor old neighbour and a good turn for myself because I’ll have luck with it.’
So off he went at a jog-trot into the city down from Santry, County Dublin, past Ellenfield and Larkhill, through the big high trees, and the sun just beginning on a feeble attempt to come out, and then having a look at the weather it was in, losing heart, and going back in again, till your man came to Whitehall tram terminus, where they were just getting ready to take the seven o’clock into town.
‘Morra, Mick,’ shouts a tram fellow, with his mouth full of steam, ‘and how’s the form?’
‘If it was any better,’ shouts Mick off the cart, ‘I couldn’t stick it.’
‘More of that to you,’ shouts the tram fellow, ‘and a happy Christmas, what’s more.’
‘You, too, and many more along with that,’ shouts Mick, and along with him down the Drumcondra Road.
So away he goes into the city, over Binn’s Bridge, and into the markets. Before dinner-time he had his selling done and was on to the buying.
He had a good few places to visit, meeting this one and that, but with an odd adjournment he had everything bought and the coffin collected and on the back of the cart with the rest of the stuff by evening-time. It was dark and cold and the snow starting to come down the back of his neck, but he tightened the collar well round him, and having plenty of the right stuff inside him began a bar of a song for himself, to the tune of Haste to the Wedding:
‘’Twas beyond at Mick Reddin’s, at Owen Doyle’s weddin,
The lads got the pair of us out for a reel,
Says I, “Boys, excuse us,” says they, “don’t refuse us,”
“I’ll play nice and aisy,” said Larry O’Neill.
Then up we got leppin’ it, kickin’ and steppin’ it,
Herself and myself on the back of the door,
Till Molly, God bless her, fell into the dresser,
And I tumbled over a child on the floor.
‘Says herself to myself, “You’re as good as the rest,”
Says myself to herself, “Sure you’re better nor gold.”
Says herself to myself, “We’re as good as the best of them,”
“Girl,” says I, “sure we’re time enough old.”’
So, with a bit of a song and a mutter of encouragement to the old horse, Mick shortened the way for himself, through snow and dark, till he came to Santry, County Dublin, once again.
There was light and smoke and the sound of glasses and some fellow singing the song of The Bould Tenant Farmer and Mick, being only human, decided to make one last call and pay his respects to the publican.
But getting in was a bit easier than getting out, with drinks coming up from a crowd that was over from the other side of the county, all Doyles, from the hill of Kilmashogue, the Drummer Doyle, the Dandy Doyle, Jowls Doyle, Woodener Doyle, the Dancer Doyle, Elbow Doyle, Altarboy Doyle, the Hatchet Doyle, Coddle Doyle, the Rebel Doyle, Uncle Doyle, the Shepherd Doyle, Hurrah Doyle and Porternose Doyle.
There was singing and wound opening, and citizens dying for their country on all sides, and who shot the nigger on the Naas Road, and I’m the
first man that stuck a monkey in a dustbin and came out without a scratch and there’s a man there will prove it, that the lie may choke me, and me country’s up and me blood is in me knuckles. ‘I don’t care a curse now for you, or your queen, but I’ll stand by my colour, the harp and the green.’
Till by the time he got on the road again Mick was maith go leor,* as the man said, but everything went well till he was getting near Cloghran and he had a look round, and there he noticed – the coffin was gone! Gone like Lord Norbury with the divil, as the man said.
Ah, what could he do at all, at all? He sat on the cart for a minute and wondered how he’d face your man if he had to go and tell him that he’d let him down not doing the turn for a family with enough of trouble this Christmas Eve.
Still, looking at it never fattened the pig, so he got off and went back along the road in the direction of the city, and was moseying round in the snow when an R.I.C.* man came up from Santry Barracks.
‘Come on you, now, and what are you doing walking round this hour of the night?’
‘I’m after losing a coffin, Constable,’ says Mick.
‘They sells desperate bad stuff this time of the year,’ sighs the policeman, taking Mick by the arm. ‘Come on, my good man, you’ll have to come down the road with me now till we instigate investigations into your moves.’
Poor Mick was too disheartened even to resist him, and, sad and sober, he trudged through the snow till they came to the barracks. They went into the dayroom and the constable said to the sergeant, ‘I’ve a fellow here, wandering abroad, and says he’s after losing a coffin.’
‘He may well have,’ says the sergeant, ‘because we’re after finding one. There it is, standing up behind the door.’
They looked round and Mick’s face lit up with joy and relief. ‘Praise Him,’ said he, running over and throwing his arms round it, ‘there it is, me lovely coffin.’
He explained all about it and they let him go off carrying it back to the cart.
‘Take better care of it, now,’ says the constable and the sergeant from the door.
‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ says Mick, ‘only this coffin is not my own. Good night and a happy Christmas to you, and to everyone.’
We Crossed the Border
My mother had two husbands – not at the one time of course. She married the first a little time before Easter Week, 1916, and spent her honeymoon carrying messages for her husband, brother, brothers-in-law, and generally running round with my aunts and her sisters in misfortune shifting one another’s dumps and minding one another’s babies for a long time afterwards.
The peaceful Quaker man that founded the business would be very surprised that, with the Post Office where Uncle Joe was, and Marrowbone Lane where Uncle Mick was, his biscuit factory was to my childhood a blazing defiance of Mausers, uncles and my step-brothers’ father, against
‘… odds of ten to one,
And through our lines they could not pass
For all their heavy guns,
They’d cannon and they’d cavalry,
Machine-guns in galore,
Still, it wasn’t our fault that e’er a one
Got back to England’s shore …’
Give over, before I hit a polisman!
Belfast figures as the refuge in cosy remoteness and peace, after the battle had ended and the hunt left behind, because it was there my mother had her first home and her husband had his first job after the Rising.*
It was there that she began her married life and, after the guns and the bombs and the executions, began a stock of more homely domestic anecdotes, like the time she tried him with a curried stew and he ran to the tap after tasting it wondering why she was trying to poison him.
They weren’t the only refugees either. A former Captain of the Guard at Leinster House is remembered with indignation for coming in amongst the twenty or thirty people assembled in close formation for the Sunday night scoraíocht* and remarking through the haze of Irish tobacco smoke that the place was like an oven.
And after Rory was christened Roger Casement in the church, my Uncle Peadar, a sort of walking battery of Fenianism, held him in his arms on Cave Hill and, with the baby’s father acting as sponsor, swore him into the I.R.B.*
The little house in the Mount became a clearing house for the Dublin crowd to and from Liverpool and Glasgow.
And to this day, my mother remembers the kindness of the neighbours. Their great interest was the baby Fenian though, being respectable and polite, they never referred to his politics nor to the comings and goings and up-country accents of the young men visiting the house at all hours of the day and night.
There might be a satisfied remark about the larruping the Germans were getting on the Somme, but when the Peelers came nosing round the quarter, it was the widow of a Worshipful Master came up with the wind of the word.
‘There was polis round here this morning, ma’m, enquiring about some people might be hiding from the military in Dublin. Rebels, if you please. Round here!
‘Sure as we all said it’s an insult to a loyal street to think the like, Rebels, Sinn Féiners,* hiding round here. And how’s our wee man the day? Did you do what I said about the …’
My first visit to the North or for the matter of that to any part of Ireland outside Dublin took me to Newry with a train-load of soccer players, accordionists, corkscrew operatives, the entire production under the masterly direction of my Uncle Richie.
He was a non-military uncle and, indeed, had been accused of only remembering the significance of Easter Monday, 1916, by reference to a gold watch, his possession of which dated from that time.
Another souvenir of the six days was a pair of fur-lined boots which were worn out by my time, though they still hung in their old age under the picture of Robert Emmet and ‘Greetings for Christmas and a Prosperous 1912’ card from ‘Dan Lehan, the Patriotic Sand Dancer and Irish National Coon. Performed Soft Shoe before the Crowned Heads of Europe, also Annual Concerts, Mountjoy and the Deaf and Dumb Institution.’
When Uncle Richie had a sup up, he’d fondle the old fur boots and looking from Robert Emmet to the Irish National Coon remark, ‘By God, there was men in Ireland them times.’
When the other Jacobs’ and G.P.O. uncles were hard at it, remembering the sudden death of a comrade, Uncle Richie shook his head with the rest.
‘When you think of what they did to poor Brian, poor pig. Cut the two legs of the man. Them Danes.’
Gritting his teeth and controlling his temper, looking round the room, and a good job for the Danes there weren’t any of them knocking around our way.
He wasn’t really my uncle at all but a far out relative in another branch of our family, one of our family from around north and east Dublin.
Mostly he didn’t bother much about the cause or old Ireland or any of that carrying on. When he was bent in thought it wasn’t the declining Gaeltacht was knotting his brow nor the lost green field, but we respected it just the same.
He sat in the corner and looked the same way as our uncle remembering the time they met John Devoy or killed one another during the Civil War. But we knew that this deep cogitation meant that Uncle Richie was thinking up a stroke.
His final stroke brought me to Newry. He hired an excursion train for a deposit of thirty shillings and our team went up to play a team representing the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
In consideration of his putting up a set of solid silver medals for the contest Uncle Richie’s nominee was allowed to take half the gate, and he collected the ticket money from the people on the understanding that he would bring it to the G.N.R.* on Monday morning and receive a small percentage for his trouble.
The whole street saved up for a while and the train was packed with old ones, young ones, singers and dancers, on the way up.
Uncle Richie got the team in a corner and swore that by this and that they had to win those medals and he seemed very serious about it.
Someone aske
d who were the Ancient Order of Hibernians and was told they were a crowd that carried pikes and someone else said they’d lodge an objection that you wouldn’t see the like of that with Merville and Bendigo in the Fifteen Acres.
The Ancient Order of Hibernians had no pikes but, before half-time, they could have done with them. They were all over our crowd in everything except dirt. The double tap, the hack, the trip, the one-two and every manner of lowness, but to no avail. The A.O.H. won 2-nil.
Uncle Richie had to hand over the set of medals and, though he wasn’t a mean man, you could see he felt it.
He muttered to Chuckles Malone to get us down to the station quickly and lock the doors. He wouldn’t be long after us.
Neither he wasn’t, as the man said. But came running down towards us with half the town after him and they shouting and cursing about the medals. Someone said they weren’t bad medals considering they were made out of the tops of milk bottles.
The crowd were in full cry after Uncle Richie, but gaining little. We shouted encouragement to him, ‘Come on, Uncle Richie, come on, ye boy ye,’ till at last he fell against the gate of the Residency and we hauled him on in the nick of time from the berserk natives.
Carrie Swaine, a Plymouth Sister from Ballybough, called out in triumph, ‘Go ’long, yous Orange --s,’ which for some reason drove the Ancient Order of Hibernians A.F.C. to a very dervish dance of fury.
Past Clontarf Station Carrie smelt the Sloblands and, from an excess of emotion, shouting ‘Law-villy Dublin,’ put her head through the window without taking the trouble to lower it and nearly decapitated herself.
Uncle Richie gave a big night in the club and was seen off by the whole street to the Liverpool boat. He expressed no bitterness against the town of Newry or the inhabitants except to remark that the medals were waterproof.
I don’t know what he told the railway company.
Orange was Green