Lark's Eggs (34 page)

‘When I was a boy there were rocks there and seaweed grew on them and people would gather the seaweed and sell it. Then they took the rocks away,' the storyteller said. The previous evening there'd been an old man on the bench in the old lady's shop. ‘In Cromwell's time they were building a bank by the Shannon here. So they didn't drive us to Connaught. They left us here to complete the job.'

When I was a child the workhouse which saved lives during the Famine burned down. In the morning I saw Billy Burgoyne, the barber, cycle by the British Legion hut, past the oak trees which had not been cut down yet, to see the smoking ruin. I don't know why I remembered that. 

‘Then he up with the story and told me …' There was a boy from Eton College called Daniel who came to the area, cherry outbreaks in his cheeks, keg of blond curls on his
forehead
, worked as a farm hand and swam the horses at Gort Pier, in a denim jacket blue as a coast cornflower, and he told her the story of Daniel and Susanna, how Susanna was falsely accused by the two elders of making love under a tree to a young man while bathing in the garden with soap and olive oil, and was being stoned to death when Daniel appeared, separated the two elders and asked them under what tree she was making love. One said a clove tree. The other a yew tree. So they were found out in their lie and Susanna's life was saved …

Oonagh Cade got married to Cian Colleran, who was in the
FCA
in Duncannon, and the reception was held in a hotel in Gallog on a day the gilia blue of medieval skies, when the Himalayan balsam was in blossom along the Shannon.

The waiters were Lithuanian boys. They went to Norway in July to pick strawberries, in September to sow strawberries. In late autumn they came to work in this hotel. One of them, with a chin tuft, talked about Lithuania. ‘My grandfather who is ninety says things were best in days of Stalin.'

The women, many with Venetian red hair that would warrant a
fire brigade, field-rose white skin, wore boleros, Far West leather cowboy trousers, prune and plum harem trousers, sunray pleated skirts; toques with veils, turbans with brooches; hoop earrings; stilettos with rosettes, stilettos with low vamps.

The men, many with the fiery red hair of the fox in autumn or the red berries of the lords and ladies fern, wore Palm Beach suits, suits the pink of the magnolia, drainpipe trousers; shoes with
winkle-picker
toes; Christopher Marlowe earrings; had their hair slicked back, with half-column locks, Regency locks.

Some of the small boys were blond porcupines.

Phyllis Griffenhagen, an English Gypsy with kipper-coloured hair, who had three royal photographs in her caravan—the amorous Edward
VII
and Queen Alexandra, George
VI
and Elizabeth
Bowes-Lyon
, Edward
VIII
and Wallis Warfield Simpson—wore a cocktail hat trimmed with feathers, a black dress with chiffon yoke, high heels with diamanté-studded T-straps. A Traveller woman, thin as an eel—pewter-coloured hair in a brindle on either side of her head—face veined like the outer leaf of a cabbage, sharp-featured as an axe, wore a floral-printed glazed cotton skirt and bootees with
elasticated
sides. Manus Culligan, who had been converted by the Jehovah's Witnesses and baptized his children in Kildimo Lake where men walk greyhounds in tartan surcoats, wore a tiger shirt.

Cian, rose-auburn hair, foggy green eyes with persimmon blazes in them, wore alligator shoes and a bootlace tie. On his ring was a Canadian coin.

Oonagh, Grecian nose, dark crock of gold curls, wore an Ottoman wedding dress, and, like an Arcadian bride, a headdress with silk roses and lillies of the valley with a silk-tulle veil.

In Amsterdam, where he'd lived with some Traveller boys from Limerick on Daniel Stalpertstraat, Cian had drunk too much in an Irish pub with the sign of the dolphin over the door beside it.

Outside the pub one night, beside a scarlet pavement post with gold stars on it, because he looked so forlorn, some Dutch boys from the provinces approached him and urinated around him as a sign of disgust.

In the mirror he looked like a self-portrait of the Dutch artist Jan Mankes, who died young, which he saw on a postcard.

Tubercular eyes, poppy lips, cheekbones like Jewish peoth.

He sat by himself one June day in St Francis Xavier Church on Singel. A woman and a little boy lit a candle in front of a statue of a gold Virgin with rubric undersleeves and a child with a gold bracelet on his wrist and gold apple in his hand.

He took a train the colour of a peeled apricot to Zandfoort aan Zee. On a windowsill was a statuette of an old Chinese woman kissing the nude breast of a young Chinese woman. Inside a house he saw a table with a small bible at each place.

On the beach were shells, saffron and white. Suddenly, when there was no home and no country, as if out of nowhere, against the sunset, a man in a Zouave cap went by in a sulky, an Irish Traveller in Amsterdam maybe. For a moment he pulled up and declaimed to his horse; what was his language—Dutch or Gammon? He pulled off his cap, the sides of his head were shorn, the top a mouse's nest, his nose was large, a patriarch's nose. His lips were slashed peach, the upper lip razor sharp. Then he tugged at the reins and continued, vanishing into the dark of the beach. That night Cian decided to go home to Ireland.  

He joined the
FCA
in the cliff-side barracks in Duncannon in County Wexford. As the sea was coming in closer in the South-East the soldiers had the job of building dams of rocks on the beaches in the summer to ward off the sea, so much of the sand beaches had disappeared.  

Recently the father of one of the soldiers in Duncannon had died and they'd brought him to his island in Connemara to bury him, the soldiers in uniform carrying the coffin over the sand at low tide. They carried the coffin past the cottage from which there were twelve brothers who were a football team in New York, a cottage in which there'd been a man who, when his wife was successively
pregnant
, a woman would come carrying a sack of potatoes and make love to him.  

Cian's friend had told him of the father—he was a widower—and son on this island who were lovers. They were both winter swimmers, cycling to a small beach, having a summary swim each evening.  

Complaining they have
meas madra
—respect for a dog—for you in Connemara, the boy, who had duck-egg-blue eyes and a cuckoo's
egg expression, dark hair with blond lightings in it, went to New York, where he'd pick up fellow exiles from Connemara at last mass in St Patrick's Cathedral on Sunday mornings. ‘Get any Connemara boy drunk,' he'd enjoin, ‘and you'll get his trousers down.'

Sometimes in winter in Duncannon the soldiers had to swim in the sea as part of a survival course. Before he decided to marry Cian went to Cyprus alone and swam for fourteen hours to the next resort.

‘Did you know that a badger always makes its own bed, brings out its feathers and straw in the mornings to air?' Oonagh's father would say to them on Gort Pier, where the heron snatched up frogs from the riverbank, when they were children, ‘Did you know how a fox gets rid of flies? Takes a stick in its mouth and the flies go on to it. Backs into the water, and drops the stick.'

But it was of birds their father, whom they called Gearoidh, knew most. The crested titmouse. The woodpecker. The dunlin. The sand martin. The screech owl. The Pied flycatcher. The stonechat. The twite. The mistle thrush. The laughing goose.

In their French four-wheeler with a stove and a generator, under a picture of John F. Kennedy in a baby-blue tie, on winter nights, he told them that the heron had a powder down on the sides of his breast which he uses as a cosmetic. That when one starling of a nesting pair perishes the survivor immediately secures a mate and this mate is often of the same sex. That curlews used settle on ships bringing immigrants home, four or five hundred miles out of New York, flying alongside the ship by day, resting on it at night, until the Irish coast was sighted. That the woodcock stamps on the ground to bring worms to the surface.

That the male tern or sea swallow offers an eel to the female tern he's courting. That the herring gull decorates the edge of its nest with hyacinths. That coots have boxing matches in water. That a coal-titmouse makes its nest in a squirrel's drey.

That a blackbird will spend hours looking at its own reflection in a window. That the corncrake, who survives around St Ciaran's Monastery of Clonmacnoise and on the Aran Islands, when trapped pretends to be dead and at first opportunity flies away.

That a white cygnet is known as a Polish swan.

When Oonagh was a child there was a Protestant woman who
lived in a manor in the countryside near a Methodist church, a countryside of castellated walls where coal-tits flitted among the montbretia in summer, who had fallen into destitution. From the settlement around that church Methodists had gone to America and introduced the Methodist faith. But despite destitution the woman always arrived at the Protestant church in town on Sundays in her Bentley Continental, valiantly dressed. The Traveller girls, in their dresses with Peter Pan collars, would watch her as she stepped out, very erect and gaunt like an old poodle, her face the quavering,
beak-like
face of the magpie who came with the seventeenth century to Ireland. The Protestant lady was sometimes chaperoned by a girl with a Dutch cut, in a feather-threaded beret, knee-length boots with high heels. She herself in pink herringbone suits, blue tweed suits, cerulean hopsack jackets with crêpe-de-chine blouses; tocques with bird of paradise feathers; stilettos with almond toes.

In the countryside near the Protestant woman's house were a few surviving Methodists who, having fled here originally from the wars of Louis
XIV
in the Palatine, would gather in the church when the berries were blood-diamond around it, to commemorate Philip Embury, Barbara Heck, Robert Strawbridge, who introduced
Methodism
from Ireland to the United States; women with roll fringes, clubbed hair, men with long grizzled beards.

When she was a child she used to go with her father to a horse fair on the first Thursday of every three months in a town with braided facades, a topless Maid of Erin on the hotel facade, and it was there on the first Thursday of a February, when otters were mating at O'Rahilly's Pier and herons doing ballets for their spouses, she met Cian, on leave from the army, in the mimosa and green of Kerry. He'd proposed to her at the gannet colony at Loop Head.

A boy with porter-cake brown hair and a chaff of freckles, in a Capri-blue shirt and trousers with slash pockets, chosen to play junior soccer for Farm Hill in Dublin, says: ‘I went to the sea once and I got lost in the crowd and I just walked and walked and I wanted to be at Paddy's Hole on the Blackwater where there are just a few lads.'

‘Did you ever see an eagle?' asks a boy with a unicorn quiff, in a batik T-shirt with moon explorers.

 ‘Them were the days,' says Gearoidh, in black frock jacket and ascot tie, under the voice of Philomena Begley singing ‘Blanket on the Ground', ‘We used go up the country to the dances. Roseland Moate. Fairyland Roscommon. Dreamland Mullingar.
Edgeworth-stown
. Pontoon. Tureen. There was Bunny Joyce's band and Michael Cummin's band.'

In his teens he used go with the boys in February to fish for mackerel off Barra where the grey goose lives year round and where you hear the song of the Hebridean song thrush. Cross from Larne to Stranraer when there was still snow on the
Highlands
. But they'd journey to Uig in violet rain.

On Barra there was a sense of Conquistadorial Catholicism. Christs with ichor on them in churches and the boarding house they stayed in had flaming colours in the carpets, in the lampshades, as if in sympathy with the churches.

Then he worked in England for a few years.

‘Worked on the buildings in Croydon and Walthamstow when I first came to England. Standing out there at three in the morning like meat waiting to be picked up. Couldn't work so much in winter. For a while worked with Norfolk McAlpines.'

He gave this up, returned to Ireland, and dealt in scrap, driving as far as Donegal, often taking one of his young sons with him, stopping to look at the rabbit-fur nest of a wheatear in a stone wall or the nest of a chaffinch in an old shoe, stopping to have a nosh of Tayto crisps in the shelter over Tulan Beach in Bundoran, and, maybe as some soldiers walked back to quarters after a training session in the sand dunes, telling his son the story of Charles Stuart he'd learnt on Barra; there was a woman in town who with a hammer would break off bits of pink candy curled around a string that hung from
the ceiling of her shop, who had his statue advertising whiskey, beside a man in Dutch trousers advertising rum—royal lychee
features
, snowdrop white tie wig, the Stuart white cockade in his bonnet, the blue ribbon of the Star and Garter on his chest, kilt with gold lace trimming, pale blue pilgrim flask at his side; a party was being held as his mother, a Polish princess, gave birth in Rome; there was a Hellfire Club in their town in those days where wealthy young men from all over Ireland used come and have orgies, kissing like ravens; the tzar of Russia sent the gift of a garment to the newborn prince; his mother was mourned with thousands of candles when she died shortly afterwards; from France he sailed to the Hebrides; carrying a blue and gold oriflamme he lead the Highlanders across the River Isk, in torrent, in winter, into England, two thousand men holding one another's collars and no one was drowned; in flight he was dressed as Betty Burke, an Irish maidservant; he wanted to carry a pistol and when Flora MacDonald, who used carry him on her back to boats so his feet wouldn't get wet, said they might discover it there he said, if they searched, they might find something else there; he looked like a very big woman on Skye, adjusting his
bonnets
; he hid in caves and got back to France; he returned to England, dressed as a monk, his turf-auburn hair blackened, a patch on his eye and was converted to the Church of England; in France he used bawl outside older women's houses at night and he had to flee back to Italy; his young wife, whom he used savagely beat, took refuge in a convent but first had an affair with a playwright; in the end he had weeping sores on his legs from war wounds and he was received back into the Catholic Church.