Lark's Eggs (37 page)

Kerrin Sanger was a little English Gypsy boy with a Romeo quiff, wheel-azure eyes, who used ride around,
usually
at a jogtrot, on a Shetland pony, in a Western shirt with enlarge check or a shirt with Hawaiian girls with camellias in their hair, jeans with turn-ups, black socks with planets on them, mauve-carmine shoes. He had a fracture of very small brothers with cream-blond hair who'd suddenly jump up from behind a gorse bush as I was passing on my bicycle.

Kerrin would get me to babysit the Shetland pony occasionally as it fed on a grassy bank and then he'd cycle to Rathkeale to visit friends who lived in a Spanish Colonial Revival house, leaving me there for hours.

The Cafferkey boys, Goll and Taoscán who had spider-silk hair crops, called him ‘an English bastard', often from within balaclavas.

The Sangers lived in a Vickers trailer with chrome beading
outside
in a roadside meadow near Gort Pier. The interior walls were formica. In the Sangers' caravan was red stoneware Liverpool crockery with twisted dragons and contorted phoenixes, purchased on Scotland Road in Liverpool; lustre jugs; a tea-kettle; a delft Queen Victoria in a polka—an outing jacket; a framed photograph of the young Princess Margaret with a baluster hairstyle; an accordion set of postcards of Corby, Northamptonshire, which was given a
charter by Elizabeth 1 to hold a fair in gratitude for her rescue in a fog in the Royal Deer Forest of Rockingham by Corby people; a snapshot of a Gypsy boy with a cockscomb, wing collars seated in a pub which had barley-sugar pillars in Weymouth; a snapshot of a Christmas celebration in the Vale of Evesham, streamers with paper bells interlinking trailers. Outside was a nanny goat purchased in Mulhuddart near Dublin.

The Sangers wintered in Wilstead in Bedfordshire near where John Bunyan was born. The Bunyans had been menders of kettles and pans for generations in that area.

In May the Sangers attended the fair in Stow-on-the-Wold, which was the highest town in the Cotswolds, where the last battle of the Civil War was fought.

In early June the Epsom Derby.

From there they went north to the Appleby Fair in
Westmoreland
where Gypsy boys, in nothing but mid-thigh Union Jack shorts, swam their horses in the River Eden.

On the way they laid wreathes of red carnations, sometimes in the shape of bow-top wagons, at grandparents' graves in Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire.

From Appleby they went to Wisbech in Cambridgeshire for the last of the strawberry picking. Since he was three Kerrin was given a basket to pick strawberries at Wisbech.

Then beginning the first Monday in September the fair in Chipping Barnet, Hertfordshire, ‘chipping' being the Anglo-Saxon word for bargain.

At these Gypsy men with greased quiffs still wore Teddyboy clothes; drape jackets with velveteen collars and floral cuffs; brocade waistcoats, suede Gibson shoes with thick crêpe soles or Eton Clubman chukka boots, shrimp-pink or canary ankle socks.

After the Barnet fair the Sangers crossed to Ireland and spent the rest of September and the month of October near Gort Pier.

Kerrin's grandfather Abiezer had spent the Second World War years in the meadow near Gort Pier to avoid conscription. He and his wife Iris lived in a ledge caravan which had no windows. On the wall was a newspaper photograph of the English soccer team saluting the Führer in 1936.

 Just before the War the police had arrived in Bedford
Twenty-Five-Seater
buses at Epsom to prevent Gypsies gathering for the Derby.

The Travellers said of the Sangers that they were like the wren that builds its nest over other birds' nests—the mud saucer of a swallow, the spotted flycatcher's domed house.

Giraldus Cambrensis wrote that the woods of Ireland were full of wild peacocks and it was into the woods by the Round Weir Abiezer Sanger would go with a catapult seeking pheasants,
woodcocks
, grouse, finches.

Abiezer Sanger mended old china and umbrellas.

He mended a Quaker Pegg Derby set, with patterns of tulip trees, passion flowers, cranesbill, lady thistles, for the Taskers in
Limerick
who had been officers in the Royal Munster Fusiliers and Cyclist Company.

There was an aerodrome in Foynes then, on the Limerick side of the estuary, and refugees were borne there from Europe.

Abiezer mended the rayon umbrella with Japanese laquered handle of a woman who arrived, still in cosmopolite outfit—
porkpie
hat, silver fox windcheater, glacé kid pumps—before a turf boat took her across the estuary to Kilrush.

Whereas the Traveller women wore box-accordion pleated skirts or navy skirts with patterns of flora, Iris Sanger wore dresses such as a coral white dress with beetroot roses at the hem, a dress with a pattern of peacock's eye which had a shawl collar, a black dress with breast cups.

When she had sold paper flowers she'd made herself at people's doorways she'd take an eighteenth-century bow, like a drake in courtship.

Iris also went to the Nenagh Fair or the Races at Limerick Junction to sell her flowers.

At the St Patrick's Night concert in 1945, when the American armies crossed the Rhine at Remagen, in a dress with pale
coffee-coloured
roses, magpie pumps—white and black—she sang two songs: ‘Three Little Fishes and the Mother Fishey Too' and a song with vocables like—‘Maesy Doats and Doesy Doats and Little Lambsy Ivy'.

Goll and Taoscán's grandfather Conán joined the British Army
during the Baedecker Air Raids on Plymouth, Coventry, Exeter in 1942, when lights crisscrossed in the sky in England at night.

The Cafferkeys used camp at Brews Bridge on the Clare side of the estuary and the Connaught Rangers, in forage caps, would come there from Renmore Barracks to recruit. Some of them had bulldogs on leashes. There was a bear ward with a pet bear who used
sometimes
do a dance.

In the snow near Robrovo in Serbia, Christmas 1915, the Clare Traveller soldiers met a Bulgarian who wanted to join the
Connaught
Rangers and fight against the Bulgarians because he hated his countrymen so much,

In December 1921, just two weeks before the Treaty was ratified by the Dáil, a Traveller boy from Ardrahan in County Galway enlisted in the Connaught Rangers.

Conán was allowed to travel to Ireland during the War because he was in the Army. He'd change into a suit at Holyhead, douse
himself
with lavender cologne, then travel on an unlighted boat, a lifebuoy around him.

He returned from the War in a jacket that had a supernumerary button and crab-coloured, gardenia-patterned lining, which he'd worn, before leaving London, to the London Hippodrome.

At the end of that summer a Christian Brother in Kilkee told him of Beau Brummell whom George
IV
used watch don his
cambric
and muslin cravat before they fell out. Beau Brummell ending up in France with only one trousers, having to stay in bed while it was sent out for repair.

The Christian Brothers used come from Tipperary, Galway, Ennis and line up in the nude on the rocks in Kilkee.

Farmers would go there and hire them for work in the fields because they were great workers.

Sometimes, shortly before he returned to England, when I came to swim at Gort Pier in the evenings, I'd find Kerrin there, on his Shetland pony, observing the flight of a smew or a red-backed shrike over the water.

It occurred to me that the reason the Sangers returned to
Ireland
every autumn was because there was an unresolved question about the Sangers' sojourn here during the War.

 There was an unresolved question about the country, about provenance.

It was as if both Kerrin and I were soldering a broken pattern.

The Sangers attended the Ballinasloe Horse Fair in October 1944, to which Catherine the Great used send representitives, when the Warsaw Rising was finally suppressed.

A few nights before he returned to England Kerrin drew up at my caravan, tethering his pony outside, when I was telling Goll and Taoscán about Catherine the Great; how Sophia-Augusta, a
fifteen-year-old
German princess from the House of Anhalt-Zerbst, was invited to Russia by the childless Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great; on her conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith she was given the name Catherine and became engaged to her second cousin who was chosen by Elizabeth as her successor, the future Peter
III
; in 1762, backed by guards, Catherine brought an end to the six months' reign of her husband and acceded to the throne herself.

Kerrin looked around my caravan as if it were a foreign country.

I offered him coconut snowballs I'd just put on a plate but he declined.

He took down my postcard album which was open on a nude Hélène Fourment—the girl Rubens married late in life after his first wife died—on her tiered, golden-syrup body, whom Goll and Taoscán admired for her ‘powerhouse', and leafed through it, stopping at Gerrit van Honthorst's
Childhood of Christ
; Christ as a pubescent boy, in a wine robe, holding a candle as St Joseph works with a chisel, his lips suggesting he might be an early smoker, St Joseph with a
fountain
of a beard, the lines of his forehead illuminated, two girl Angels behind exchanging comments on the scene.

Then Kerrin asked: ‘Do you have a story about Queen Victoria?'

And I told him how when Prince Albert died she said: ‘Now there's no one left to call me Victoria.' 

My father and I were looking at Veronese's
Saints Philip and James the Less
in the National Gallery in Dublin one summer's day when the curator approached us in a gameplumage tweed jacket and started explaining it to us.

The curator was from a part of the Shannon estuary where learned-looking goats ran wild and where bogland printed itself on sand. He'd been an officer in the Royal Field Artillary during the First World War, had twice been wounded at the Battle of the Somme in which men who gathered by the Lazy Wall in the Square in our town had fought.

The curator was renowned for his clothes.

Women would go to a church in Dublin to see him walking to Holy Communion in glen tweed suits, houndstooth cheviot jackets, rosewood flannel trousers, enlarge check trousers, Edelweiss jerseys, Boivin, batiste, taffeta shirts, black and tan shoes, button Oxford shoes.

A seated St Philip in a pearl-grey robe, sandals with diamond open-work, clutched a book as if he was afraid the contents might vanish, another book at his feet. St James the Less in a prawn pink robe, a melon cloak tucked into his belt, had a pepper-and-salt beard, carried a cross, and was talking to an angel with spun gold hair descending upon them both, perhaps asking the angel to help
them save the contents of the books.

My father told the curator how I'd won first prize in a national art competition that spring.

I'd won it for a painting inspired by an episode of ‘Lives of the Caesars' on radio that showed Julius Caesar, during a night battle off Alexandria, fireballs in the air, having jumped off a rowboat, swimming to the Caesarean ship, documents in his raised left hand, burgundy cloak clenched in his teeth to keep this trophy from the Egyptians.

I'd been presented the prize in a Dublin hotel by a minister's wife with a pitchfork beehive, a tawny fur on her shoulders that looked like bob-cat fur.

The hotel, I later learned, was one where young rugby players from the country spent weekends because the chambermaids had a loose reputation and they had hopes of sleeping with them.

My mother, usually silent, on the train back west, in a
wisteria-blue
turban hat with two flared wings at the back she'd had on for the day, spoke of the weeks after my birth when it snowed heavily and she used to walk me, past the gaunt workhouse, to the Ash Tree. A beloved sister died and the Christmas cakes were wrapped up and not eaten until the Galway Races at the end of July when they were found to have retained their freshness.

After we left the gallery my father and I took the bus, past
swan-neck
lamp posts, to the sea.

In a little shop my father bought American hardgums for
himself
and jelly crocodiles for me.

We walked past houses covered in Australian vine, with pineapple broom hedges, to the sea at the Forty Foot.

In winter, when I was off school, sometimes I accompanied my father on his half day to Galway. We'd have tea and fancies in Lydon's Tea House with its lozenge floor mosaic at the door and afterwards go to Salthill where we'd watch a whole convent of nuns who swam in winter in black togs and black caps.

I was spending a few days now in Dublin with my father. The previous summer I'd gone by myself to stay with an aunt and uncle in County Limerick for my holidays.

I arrived at Limerick bus station, a stand beside it of
Ireland's 
Own
, where I read of the Limerick tenor Joseph O'Mara and of the stigmatic Marie Julie Jaheny, and of Russian cakes—almond essence, sugar syrup, chocolate.

In my aunt and uncle's village there was a Pompeian red cinema called the Melody. Outside it a picture of Steve Reeves in his bathing togs, standing in hubris, his chest mushrooming from his waist. In the film, which I saw while there, a prostrate Sylva Koscina, with a frizzed top, a racoon top, a racoon tail of hair by her face, clutches Steve Reeve's foot, who, as Hercules, is about to leave on an inexorable journey. The audience stamped its feet while reels were being changed. Boys, some of whom were reputed to have been in Cork Jail, on the steps outside during the day, spoke with Montana accents like Steve Reeves.

My uncle was a garda sergeant and wore a hat big as a canopy. In the kitchen at night, a bunch of nettles behind a picture of St Brigid of Sweden to keep off flies, he'd tell ghost stories. Of boys who were drowned in the river and who came back. ‘The river always takes someone,' he said.

On ‘Céilidhe House' on radio one night we heard a girl sing:

My uncle told us of the Wild Geese who sailed to Europe after the Treaty of Limerick in autumn 1691 on the nearby estuary, and of how at the beginning of that century Red Hugh O'Donnell had ended O'Donnell's overlordship of Donegal by casting O'Donnell pearls into a lake on Arranmore Island.

On one of my first days there I was driven to a lake by a castle where about a dozen people with easels were painting pictures of the castle.

At the end of my holiday I was taken to a seaside resort on the mouth of the Shannon.

My uncle wore sports shoes and sports socks for the occasion. My aunt a cameo brooch that showed a poodle jumping into an Edwardian lady's arms. My two older girl cousins, who'd covered the
walls of my room with Beryl the Peril pictures, saddle shoes—black with white on top and then a little black again at the tip. My youngest cousin, who'd recently made her First Holy Communion, wore her Communion dress so she was a flood of Limerick lace. My aunt recalled being taken by car with my mother to the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin when Cardinal Lauri granted a partial
indulgence
to all who attended the big mass.

On the way we stopped at a house where a poet had lived, a mighty cedar of Lebanon on the sloping hill beside it. I'd had to learn by heart one of his poems at school, ‘The Year of Sorrow—1849'.

The poem was taught by a teacher who'd told us about the boy who ferried the Eucharist in his mouth in Ancient Rome and, John McCormack's ‘My Rosary' frequently played to us on a gramophone, how when Count John McCormack returned to give a concert by the Shannon in his native Athlone no one had turned up.

On arrival in the resort, in a soda fountain bar on the main street, we had coffee milkshakes and banana boats.

On the wall was a photograph, cut out of
Movie Story or Film
Pictorial
, of the Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weismuller in his Tarzan costume.

Johnny Cash sang ‘Forty Shades of Green' on a public
loudspeaker
in the town.

‘It's a lovely song, “The Forty Shades of Green”,'my uncle said, ‘Johnny Cash wrote it. Went around Ireland in a helicopter. The song tells you about all the counties. He saw them from a helicopter.'

Near the beach, on a windowsill, was a swan with a shell on its back, an Armada ship with sails of shells.

Women with their toes painted tulip red sat on camp stools on the beach. Young men wore ruched bathing togs. Little boys like bantam hens marched on the sea and afterwards some of them stood in naked, even priapic defiance.

‘I'm so hungry I could eat a nun's backside through a convent railing,' my uncle said after a few hours so we left.

There was a bachelor festival in the town and ten bachelors from
different counties were lined up on a podium. They wore black, box, knee-length jackets with velvet-lined pockets, Roman-short jackets, banner-striped shirts, cowboy Slim Jim ties, crêpe-soled
betel-crusher
shoes. Some had slicked-back Romeo hair, some
Silver-Dollar
crewcuts. We were told about one of the bachelors, that he'd been a barber in County Longford, his business motto being ‘Very little waiting,' that he'd recently migrated to one of the north-eastern counties but he was missed in Longford. He had a flint quiff, flint cheekbones, an uncompromising chin like Steve Reeves. John Glenn sang ‘Boys of County Armagh' on the loudspeaker.

A man with the marcel waves of another era, who had been studying the bachelors, declaimed:

‘I worked hard all my life. Training greyhounds. Can't sleep at night thinking about how hard I worked. Met a girl once. She liked going to dances and all that kind of thing. I liked greyhounds and greyhound races. So we stopped seeing one another. But it was a wonderful thing making love.'

On the way back my aunt sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer' as she used to as a girl at ginger-ale parties in a room in my
grandparents
' house with a picture of a Victorian girl with the word ‘Solitaria' underneath it.

The fields of County Limerick were covered with yellow
agrimony
which was said to cure skin rashes and external wounds and yarrow which was said to cure the innards it looked like. Traveller boys called at the door selling dulse that they'd picked on the coast and dried themselves, popular with young guards because it was good for the physique.

Before I left my aunt and uncle gave me a large biscuit which was a walnut on a biscuit base buried under marshmallow sealed with twisted and peaked chocolate, and I clutched the canary's leg in a cage.

At Limerick bus station, where I wore a sleeveless jersey with a Shetland homespun pattern and mid-calf socks, a woman in a Basque beret said to me:

 ‘Margaret Mitchell was a very small woman but she wrote a very big book.'

The Irish Sea was Persian blue.

My father and I had a swim and afterwards a man with a malacca cane, in a linen Mark Twain suit and a Manila straw hat, who had been watching us, told us the history of the Forty Foot.

Two boys listened intently to the lesson, one with a sluttish Jean Harlow face, the other with a Neptune belly and ant legs.

The Forty Foot was called after the Forty Foot Regiment
stationed
in the Martello tower built during the Napoleonic Wars. Twenty Men. Forty Feet.

At the beginning of the century Oliver St John Gogarty used to frequently swim between the Forty Foot and Bullock Harbour in Dalkey where monks had lived in the Middle Ages.

Oliver St John Gogarty had fox-blond hair then with an
impertinent
crescendo wave, eyebrows askance, shoulders poised for riposte, Galwegian lips.

He was Arthur Griffith's white boy.

Arthur Griffith had founded the non-violent Sinn Féin
movement
in 1905 in order to set up an Irish republic. He had a brush moustache, wore wire glasses, a stand-up collar, neckcloth.

One day, in his tailored swimming costume, he decided to swim to Bullock Harbour with Oliver St John Gogarty. He expired a few yards out at sea.

A few years after that visit to the Forty Foot, when my father bought me a set of art books, there was a reproduction of Titian's
Flaying of Marsyas
in one of them in which Titian depicted the death of self.

The Flute Player Marsyas is flayed alive, upside down, to the accompaniment of violin music, watched by a little Maltese dog and by King Midas, with ass's ears, who is Titian himself who'd recently given the prize of gold chain to and publicly in Venice embraced Veronese, lavish with red lake like himself, as his successor. Titian—his arms still muscular in the painting, his honeyed and diamanté chest strung with a salmon-vermilion cloak—painted it with his fingers.

I thought of the story of Arthur Griffith when I got the books,
that it must have been the death of some part of Arthur Griffith's self that day.

Gogarty, who'd rescued a suicide in the Liffey by knocking him out, brought the leader to shore.

In the evening my father and I stopped at a fish and chip shop near the Forty Foot. On a cyclamen, jay blue and lemon jukebox the Everley Brothers sang ‘Lonely Street'. A boy, in a blue shirt with white, sovereign polka dots, stood eating chips. On his wrist was a tattoo; the name of a place—army barracks or jail—and a date.

In the fish and chip shop I thought of a story my uncle told me as he brought me to Limerick bus station the previous year.

‘They get baked jam roll and baked custard in Cork Jail. Better than they get from their mothers. One fellow was given a month and said to the judge, “That's great. I get baked jam roll and baked
custard
there that I don't get from my mother.” “All right,” said the judge, “I'll give you three.”'

Later, in a room in a house in North Dublin where there was a false pigment art deco light shade with tassels, a picture of St
Dymphna
, patron saint of people with nervous disorders, my father spoke, as he was laying out a handkerchief of robin's-egg blue and rose squares as he might have laid out a Chicago tie once after a date with a Protestant girl in a tango-orange dress from whose house Joseph Schmidt could often be heard on the street singing in Italian, about cycling with other young men, some with aviator hairstyles, when General O'Duffy was president of the National Athletic and Cycling Association, to swim in the Suck at Ballygar.