The cottage was near a church but despite that fact I soon found that local people were knocking on the back windows at night, cars were driving up outside the house at night and hooting horns.
I’d cycle to the river everyday. There were roads like Roman roads off the road through the hills. ‘Finbarr Slowey bought a house there and brought his wife and children,’ a Traveller man with Indian-ink-black hair and Buddha-boy features who was at the river with his strawberry roan, told me, ‘and they drove up outside his house at night and hooted horns. If they don’t want someone to live in their village they hoot horns outside their houses at night.’
Many sumach trees grew in this area as in the Southern States and I kept thinking of the Southern States. The bunch of antebellum roses; the tartan dickie bow; the hanging tree beside a remote bungalow with a dogtrot. The brother of a friend of mine from a Civil Rights family was killed by the Ku Klux Klan on the Alabama–Georgia border. This area was very similar to the border country of Alabama and Georgia. Great sheaves of corn braided and left out for hurling victors; boys in green and white striped football jerseys dancing with girls at the Shannonside to the music of a platform band; the shadow of a man in a homburg hat at night.
The IRA’s up there,’ said the Traveller boy, ‘And vigilante groups. They tar and feather people.’
At night when I’d be trying to sleep people would stand behind the house and bang sticks. I didn’t think there was any point going to the guards. A guard with black lambchop sidelocks and a small paste-looking moustache came by at about eleven o’ clock one night and asked me if I was working.
I couldn’t sleep at night. I didn’t see the Traveller boy by the river so I sought him out. I always thought his family were settled Travellers but when I enquired in the cottages near the river they said: ‘He lives in a caravan up by the waterpump.’
A long sleek caravan with gilt trimming, occasional vertical gilt lines, flamingo shadows in the cream. Behind it, on the other side of the road, was a flood-lit grotto. His mother was standing by the window—buttermilk blonde hair, mosaic face over a shirt with leg-of-mutton sleeves—above the layette, the celestial cleanliness of aluminium kettles and pots laid out for tasks. She wore a ring with a coin on it. There was a little blonde girl with yellow ducks on her dress and a little boy with cheeks the yellow and red of a cherry and eyes a turquoise that looked as if it had just escaped from a bottle. On the caravan wall was a framed colour photograph of a boxer with a gold girdle and on a cupboard a jar of Vaseline. I remembered an English girl whose father was a miner telling me that miners always put Vaseline in their hair before going down into the mines. The Traveller boy was wearing wellingtons the colour of sard.
‘You’ve no choice,’ said his father, ‘but to buy a caravan and move into it.
The boy’s father got a little caravan for me and I moved into it.
The hazelnuts were on the trees by the river the day I moved into the caravan. In being moved from house to caravan I found out the boy’s name, his father referring to him. Finnian. A hawk had brought St Finnian the hand of an enemy who had tried to slay him the previous day.
A middle-aged single woman who had connections with the Travelling people moved into the cottage in which I’d been living and they started banging on her window at night. She couldn’t sleep. A room was found for her on Maiden Street in Newcastle West. I’d often see Traveller boys with piebald horses on Maiden Street in Newcastle West.
Shortly after I moved into the caravan a little boy with a Neopolitan black cowlick and onyx eyes knocked at the door. ‘I heard you like books. I have murder stories. Will you buy some?’
‘Do you want to buy a mint jacket?’ asked Gobán, a Traveller boy with a sash of down growing on his lips who lived in a caravan near Finnian’s. He was wearing a plenitudinous pair of army fatigue trousers. He went into his caravan and brought it out. It was malachite-cream, double-breasted, almost epaulette shouldered, with a wide lapel.
He and Finnian would often come to my caravan and I’d get them to read poems.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count:
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount …
Both Finnian and Gobán were in identical Kelly-green fleece jerseys. ‘Will I tell you a joke?’ said Gobán as Finnian read. ‘Stand up and be counted or lie down and be mounted.’
Finnian and Gobán and I would have tea, and half-moon cakes and coconut tarts I’d buy in Limerick.
Sometimes when Finnian would be out lamping for rabbits at night he’d knock at the caravan door and request Mikado biscuits.
The boys would come at night and tell stories; of the priest who used go on pilgrimage to Lough Derg and bring a bottle of Bushmills around with him on the days of pilgrimage; of the local woman who dressed in religious blue, spring gentian blue, and broke into the priest’s house one night and put on his clothes; of the single Traveller man with the handlebar moustache who lived in a caravan and had a bottle of Fairy Liquid for ten years; of Traveller ancestors who met up with other Travellers they knew from Ireland on Ellis Island before entering the United States; of a relative of Finnian’s who went to America, joined the American navy and was drowned while swimming in Lough Foyle during the Second World War when his fleet was stationed there.
‘Long ago in West Limerick,’ said Finnian’s father, ‘they had rambling houses—went from house to house telling stories.’
Every year settled Travellers in Ireland—buffers—make a long walk to commemorate the days of travelling. One year it was Dublin to Downpatrick, County Down. Despite the insults, the contumelies heaped against Travelling people, you keep on walking.
On December twenty-first, the winter solstice, Finnian and Gobán and Gobán’s smaller brother Touser brought a candle each and put them in the menorah in my caravan and lit them against the winter emerald of West Limerick. Touser had a fresh honey blond turf cut, a pugilist’s vow of a body.
A rowing boat with a red sail had gone down the river that day.
Patrick—Patricius—had once lit the paschal flame in this country.
When he couldn’t sleep Caesar Augustus would call in the story-tellers and as we had tea and Christmas cake they told stories and jokes and in the middle of stories and jokes came out with lines from Traveller songs—‘I married a woman in Ballinasloe’, ‘I have a lovely horse’—and, the lights of cars flashing in the caravan, it was as though all four of us were walking, were marching through the evening.
The Match
‘Tell us the story of Mary, Queen of Scots,’ Kevin and Will, the two Traveller boys would often say in my caravan. I would tell them the story again, how when Mary Stuart came from France to claim her Scottish kingdom she sent a naked swimmer to shore from each of her two ships, how people tried to make a match for her with many kings and princes but how she fell in love with the young tall bisexual Lord Henry Darnley and married him, how he was strangled on the streets of Edinburgh wearing nothing but his nightgown, how on her flight from Scotland she survived on porridge, how when captive in the English Midlands she would give alms to the poor when she went to bathe in a holy well, how when she returned to the Midlands from another place of captivity she told the beggars she was as poor as they were now, how when the thistles grew in the early summer around the castle where she had been beheaded they were called Queen Mary’s tears.
‘You’ve lived here three years,’ Will said one day, when the bottom of the sky was smoked white with dapples of cerulean in it like the pattern in the breast panel of a medieval costume, ‘and you’ve never gone with a boy. We know a big fellow—he’s about seventeen or eighteen—who sucks langers. We’ll bring him here for you.’
Will had parted glinting copper hair. Kevin had shorn sides with the crest dyed sunflower-yellow. Will wore an open-work choker with a gold medal on it. He had a body with ambition. Kevin had a string of diamanté jewels around his nec
k. Outside the caravan they’d hitched a chocolate and ice-cream horse with gold threads in its mane.
Some evenings later they led a boy dressed entirely in black across the fields.
‘This is Conal,’ Kevin said, ‘but he has another name too, Clement.’
Conal had Spanish ebony hair like a lot of people in this area of Ireland. A year after Mary Stuart’s beheading Philip II of Sapin had sent the Spanish Armada to Ireland and the ships had foundered off the coast of Kerry, many of the survivors settling in Kerry or making their way here to West Limerick.
Conal had the physical fullness and the block features of many boys in this area. His shoulders crouched the way the shoulders of boys crouched in First Holy Communion photographs.
With two names he was like a country with two languages. On one of his fingers he wore a virgin signet ring.
‘Say the poem by Tommy Hardy about the ruined maid,’ ordered Kevin. Both Will and Kevin behaved like matchmakers. They had me stand and recite the poem, making the appropriate music-hall, effeminate gestures. ‘You should be in a concert,’ said Kevin.
Thomas Hardy’s poems were the favourite recitations.
‘Take off your shirt and show your muscles,’ commanded Will.
‘Tell the story of Mary, Queen of Scots,’ Kevin requested.
After I’d done what had been demanded of me I asked if each person in the caravan would tell a story.
First it was Will’s turn and he told how he had his grandfather’s false teeth.
Then Kevin told of a boat on the river with three men in it and how a hole came and one of the men stuffed it with his coat.
Will had another. The rats got into their caravan called Freedom and had baby rats and the caravan had to be burned to the ground. ‘A rat would climb a caravan,’ he said, ‘a rat would climb a hostel.’
‘Our father was in the army,’ Kevin recounted, ‘and he was forced to join the IRA. They told him he’d be kneecapped if he didn’t join. He got out after a year.’
‘Our cousins in Rathkeale swim in their clothes,’ said Will.
‘My father ties a rope around me and drops me in,’ told Kevin.
With the bad summer there’d been few people at the river and I’d seen no swimmers. Flocks of teal skimmed it. The curlew had lived there and a crane and a mallard and the long-tailed silver bird. There’d been the glamorous blue of the watch on the other side.
Sometimes instead of swimming here I’d cycled to a banished beach on the Shannon estuary. ‘No public person goes there,’ the old lady, with hair of cultured pearl, in the nearby store had informed me. She told how the people who’d owned it had taken the sand from it, not wanting it there, but the sand came back of its own accord. You would never meet anyone there. The sea tides came in as they did to the river.
The landscape reminded me of the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumberland, the way it was suddenly surrounded by water—water suddenly impinged on castles in curvaceous ruin.
A few evenings before as I was swimming there wild geese had flown over crying against the shades of peacock’s tail in the sky, heading across the estuary.
On my way back I stopped at the old lady’s shop. Some boys were sitting on a bench, drinking soft drinks. But her two grandsons who had carrot and apricot complexions were away at school now.
The mullet were jumping in the river when I swam on another stop. A heron bade my presence by skimming the water.
Now it was Conal’s turn to tell a story.
‘Des, St Colmkille would sleep on a pillar as a pillow in Donegal. Then he went over to the Island of Iona in Scotland and a crane followed him. St Colmkille said to a monk, “Look out for a crane because he’s going to be very tired when he gets here and look after him.”The crane arrived and the monk fed him and looked after him for three days. Then he went back to Donegal satisfied. St Colmkille saw a poor old woman pick nettles in a churchyard for her dinner. And he said from this day on I’ll eat only nettles. And from that day on St Colmkille ate only nettles. St Colmkille was dying on a Sunday because he said Sunday is a day of rest and the white horse that carried the milk from the dairy to the monastery came up and laid his head on his chest. St Colmkille looked towards Donegal and he blessed it. He blessed the corn. And then he died, aged eighty-seven. And the white horse cried like a human being.’
We walked a little in the night, Conal and I, by the hawthorn bushes and the apple and pear trees, which gave only berried fruit now, in the field where my caravan was. The berries of the hawthorn had been cardinal red in the day’s sunshine. By the estuary now were the raven berries of the blackthorn and the bog bilberry and the red berries of the guelder rose. The estuary was the blue of a blue butterfly these days.
‘Did anyone ever catch you swimming naked in the river?’ he asked.
I told him I swam more in the estuary now where no one could see you. With no one to talk to out there, a glissade of landscape by the ruined castle, I recalled people I’d met in my life.
That afternoon I’d thought of Evert, the little boy with punctured upper lip who sat beside me on the night bus from Johannesburg to Capetown one September, the South African spring, how his cousin, a soldier, with argent gold hair, had been standing at one of the bus stops, how the Christ-thorn had been in blossom in the Ceres mountains as we neared Capetown. Afterwards I sent him a postcard with the amaranth-purple Algerian Coffee Stores in Soho on it.
Streets change. A car started honking at a film-maker on that street who was walking to his favourite café. ‘Hurry up, slow coach.’
He turned. ‘I’m dying, you know.’
In a bar in Dublin once an Irish writer, wearing a cravat like the quiddity of a rugby-playing boy in the 1940s, had recited Paul Verlaine’s poem about Soho to me.
Meetings, moments magical …
When I’d arrived to live in London from Ireland a boy in a café in Soho with eyes the grey-green of orchard lichen had looked into my eyes. No one had ever looked at me like that in Ireland.
In my mind by the Shannon estuary today I sent a postcard to Evert. He’d be about eighteen now, with columnar locks maybe, in a jersey of harebell blue, slacks of royal blue, like a Limerick schoolboy, sitting at a café table in a park in Capetown under the yesterday, today and tomorrow trees in blue, white and mauve blossom.
In the night Conal said to me: ‘I have a Saudi Arabian girlfriend.’ And he took a crumpled letter from his pocket as if in evidence of sexual orthodoxy.
Pearse and Jonathan, two boys nearer Conal’s age, had arrived.
Pearse wore a Foreign Legion beret and a Gypsy sleeper. In his face was the face of a girl I’d known who had boscage blonde curls like the blossom in some lost Arthur Rackham poster.
The blue of his eyes was the wheeling blue of the Mediterranean near Pisa where I walked with that girl once and saw an imaginary little boy. It was the forlorn blue of the sea asters among the rocks by the beach on the Shannon estuary, the urgent blue of the last scabious in the Shannonside fields.
That little boy had never been born but maybe he’d been the people I’d met, bits of people, children who’d leaned their head towards you on a bus in the night.
Pearse was born in the year of the Falklands War. Someone had told me a story about an English soldier who’d gone to battle in the Falklands with Sandy Denny’s songs on his headphones. He’d been killed.
I often thought of her song ‘Traveller by Trade’ here.
Pearse sometimes stood on the town bridge saying ‘This is Elvis singing’ and singing Elvis Presley songs or ‘Dirty Old Town’.
Jonathan wore a bull’s earring and combats—army fatigue trousers. He had a cub muscular body like that of a boy I’d known at school who smelt of walnuts and brine from acne ointment.
His hair was crinkled 1930s style and his eyes had a gaping expression like a walrus in a state of surprise.
Pearse asked for some of my aftershave in a phial. He was going to a wedding. ‘I’m going to w
ear Clarks shoes and a poplin shirt. All the boys will be there with cuff jewels. My little sister is going to be the peach girl.’
I asked Pearse and Jonathan to tell a story. Pearse told how a bullock was lost for days and found up a tree. Jonathan’s was about how he borrowed a friend’s billy goat and the goat ran away to a remote Shannonside ruin and the only way he could catch it was by borrowing a she-goat so the billy goat went towards her.
Sometimes they went to an old hall and sat in old-fashioned style, boys on one side, girls on the other, but danced to music like ‘Sex on the Beach’ or ‘I Was Up at the RDO Glay’. But there were some boys who desired other boys—boys with earrings like the rung on the pier by the river where I swam to which ships used be tied at full tide—and turned up their collars.
But there was sometimes the answer of violence to desire—boys went home with bruised faces. The bruises on the face were a code for days.
Desire was as unanswered as it had been for a boy I knew when I was growing up who dressed entirely in black, had hair of India ink—an ancestor, maybe a survivor from the Spanish Armada—who had killed himself with rat poison.
The blue of that boy’s eyes was found again in the autumn Roman skies, in the Michaelmas daisies old ladies ferried along Roman streets, in the eyes of young pilgrims of desire in the squares at night who were so at peace with their company that there was no need for desire.
‘Do you have any more cakes?’ Jonathan suddenly demanded. The last bun had been thrown across the caravan. As I lit the stove to make more tea Jonathan began blowing out my matches one by one without making any movement of his lips.
‘I’ll have no matches to make coffee for my breakfast,’ I said.
There was no personality in the whites of his eyes. The atmosphere had changed so suddenly there was no connection with what had gone before, Jonathan requesting me to recite Lord Byron’s ‘So we’ll go no more A-Rowing’ and listening to it with the mellifluous expression of a young laird.
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