Lark's Eggs

by Desmond Hogan

  Maybe he’ll join the army in Edward Street in Limerick. Some of the soldiers get an extra ninety pounds a week playing soccer in Markets Field.

  He recounts a story from the Sunday World of a man in his twenties who has been sent to jail in Belfast for having sex with a teenage boy, giving it new material, embellishing it with images from my album, making a jigsaw painting with bits of Damiano Mazza’s The Rape of Ganymede, Gerrit van Honthorst’s Saint Sebastian, Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae, and the way one story becomes another he retells the Children of Lir in the version given to them by the historian, the eagle which emerges from a naked boy’s body in Damiano Mazza’s The Rape of Ganymede, becoming a swan.

  Lir, the King of Clare, bet in the election for High King of Ireland by Dearg, the son of Daghda the Druid, was summoned by Dearg to Lough Derg and told in compensation he could marry Dearg’s foster daughter. Lir had his children sleep in a bed beside him and in the morning he’d get up and lie with them. As swans they returned from Inis Glóra off Belmullet in Mayo to Clare and found Lir’s castle overgrown with nettles. Kemoc linked the children of Lir with a whitesmith’s chain and their feathers fell off and they became old people and died.

  When he finished Scolog picks up a letter which has an address in Donnybrook.

  ‘Who’s Danny Burke?’ he asks in a betrayed voice.

  ‘But when Herod’s birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod.’

  In the Lebanon Scolog’s father had seen the ruins of Chalcis where Salome was queen who’d danced before Herod Antipas and asked for John the Baptist’s head as a reward. In my album Scolog looks at Salome from The Feast of Herod by Fra Filippo Lippi, the friarartist who seduced an Augustinian nun Lucrezia Buti and had a son by her. Salome with crimped auburn hair, auric brows, pout lips, like a Traveller girl, in a cloth of gold dress with bat, fluted oversleeves, lace yoke, stares insolently at us as though she is looking at a camera. ‘You need a bit of talent every now and then,’ Scolog declares.

  In the West Limerick countryside there is a small Methodist church. From the community around that church Methodists went to America and introduced the Methodist faith.

  In Venice Paolo Veronese spent fifteen years painting a small church and in this travail ‘grew wise’.

  Before I leave to live on the coast when the barnacle geese are there and the estuary is pilgrimage-blue Scolog looks at Veronese postcard reproductions in my album; boys with the chestnut, bronze and carrot hair of Irish Traveller boys, auburn underchin growth, curls and twists of hair, Roman noses, orb chins; a patriarch with a vermilion hat forked out in two directions leaning over the Christ child in the temple; an alabaster Christ being laid out in the tomb by a ferociously strong young man in an emerald vest with lopped edge sleeves like an Ancient Irish hero, his copper hair swept back like flying horses’s tails; a harlequin dwarf in apricot tussling with a black boy who has white, gold slashed sleeves; the cherry lips of male puberty, a dog nosing a pattern of pink pansies on Prussian blue; pomegranate stockings.

  Patterns

  It was a day when the river was a smuggled indigo and the great, farthingale willow-herb was jutting out of the pier and the wintergreen was blossoming in the grass and three Traveller boys, two of them with their shirts off, were swimming a mare.

  Connla, who had tangerine-henna hair, tadpole-brown eyes, a choker chain and a smaller chain with a starfish on it.

  Felim who had turtle and hazel hair.

  Small Taedy who had a platinum crest, dark sides, face and neck stabbed with hair.

  ‘Get on her back. Get on her back,’ Felim shouted at me when I was in the water.

  I got on her back and she immediately threw me, giving me a good kick.

  Connla thought I was drowning and jumped in after me. Three months later, a few weeks after I left to live on the coast, in a T-shirt with the words Live Intrusions on it he’d purchased on his American journey earlier that year, Connla was killed in an accident with his van on the way into Limerick.

  Connla was brought up in an aluminium caravan on a Travellers’ site off the Holloway Road in London.

  In their caravan, beside a picture of Blessed Margaret Clitheroe, was a photograph of his grandparents taken in a Weymouth photographer’s studio against a clock which had the face of Elizabeth 1 on it; his grandmother in a blouse with a sweetheart neckline, another blouse under that, Tara brooch on her bosom, with cuff ribbons, fur-rimmed ankle boots, her pigtails with bushends; his grandfather, who had seen the bonfires burn for the Silver Jubilee of George v on the Dorset Downs, in a suit with a long jacket with padded chest, black Mussolini shirt, aviator-hairstyle having used St John’s wort for hairdressing, hands clasping his chest.

  Connla’s grandfather used drive to Ireland to buy holy statues in bulk in Monster House, Kilkenny and sell them to English Catholics. In Connla’s caravan was one of his statues—St Rita of Cascia with a red spot on her forehead.

  Uncle Derry, with eyes the blue of the blue in a willow-pattern plate, who had a brindle greyhound in West Limerick and would wear shamrock in September in West Limerick, would sometimes stay on the site in his caravan. He told Connla and his brothers what George 1, who had Punchinello daubs on his cheeks, used do with his Turkish servants Mohamed and Mustapha.

  Uncle Derry had served with Major-General Sean McKeown’s troops in the Congo, had been involved in the siege of Jadotville, used ride a grey Syrian stallion by the River Congo with its water hyacinths. Members of the army Cumann Luasclas used fend off bats in their sleeping quarters with hurleys. Beside the pale blue Congolese flag with a yellow star in his caravan was a photograph of a great grandfather who’d served with the Young Jocks in the Boer War; in a Sam Browne belt with a frog, leggings, centre-parted pompadour, frisé moustache. He’d come back from the Boer War and found his wife was having an affair with another man, shot him dead with a blunderbuss from which emerged the leg of an ancient pot and was not charged as he’d claimed he’d found the man raping his wife.

  Connla made his First Holy Communion in the Church of Our Lady of Assumption and St Gregory, in a dove-grey suit with black velveteen cuffs, white shirt, white tie, hair cut in a glib—a fringe.

  Each year after they saw the Gerry Cottle Circus on Crown Meadow in Bromley Connla’s family, the Dorans, used make a pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick in County Mayo for July 27. Patterns they called pilgrimages.

  On the way they stopped at the graves of three Traveller children killed in Walsall when squad cars forcibly evicted Travellers from a site, towing caravans away, and who had been buried in Bilston.

  Afterwards they’d have bacon and bubble in Wendy’s Café in Walsall. They’d cross Ireland, stopping in Westport, where Connla’s mother said they always had good cakes, to buy French Fancies, iced cups, pink apple slices, walnut slices, cream slices, custard slices.

  Then they’d go out past Rockfleet Castle in Clew Bay where Grace O’Malley had lived, who’d captained her own ship on her journey to meet Elizabeth 1 to entreat for her imprisoned son, past Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, through the straits of Dover, into the Thames estuary where boys used swim then, borne up by pigs’ udders; she was received in Greenwich Castle from which Elizabeth had expelled the friars, with its view of the Isle of Dogs, by Elizabeth—who wore cabochon earrings and a poisoned diamond ring—in a cloak of myrtle green, a crimson mantle on her head, in bare feet; Elizabeth held her hand high but Grace was the taller of the women and the Queen had to reach up; a cambric and lace handkerchief was handed to Grace and she flung it in the fire after use and when upbraided for this declared they had higher standards of cleanliness in the West of Ireland; when Elizabeth offered to make Grace a countess, Grace said that was impossible because she was already a queen.

  Connla’s mother, who had flaxen and nasturtium hair, always wore a scarf with a pattern of kingfishers for the pilgrimage and cast-off kid pumps.

  From Croagh Patrick they
’d drive to visit a cousin from the Sperrin Mountains in the Northlands who was in the Magilligan Prison for republican involvement and afterwards the boys would have a swim on Benowen beach beside the prison.

  After Connla’s mother had to start getting treatment in St Luke’s, Woodside Avenue, Muswell Hill, the Dorans came to live in West Limerick.

  Early in the year he was killed Connla made an American pattern.

  In the Famine days a group of Travellers from West Limerick were brought in a ship by a doctor to Québec from where those who survived dispersed to the United States. They used to make a pattern of thanksgiving—a pilgrimage—every year in the United States or Canada. The last pattern was to the Passion Play in Hollywood Bowl in 1949.

  Over the decades people with names like Cash, Cade, Colleran, used make pilgrimages to places like the St Katharine Drexel Shrine, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, in Bensalem, Pennsylvania; the Motherhouse Mission bell used to ring out to say goodbye to sisters leaving in carriages to cross the United States to serve black Americans and Native Americans and sisters would gather near the mission bell and wave snowflake-white handkerchiefs.

  The Jesuit Martyrs’ Shrine of Sainte Marie of the Hurons in Midland Ontario. The Jesuits were tortured to death in the 1640s after, having had to burn down their own mission station, their trek, with Huron Indians they’d converted, to Christian Island in Georgian Bay.

  The Shrine of St Thérèse, Queen and Patroness of Alaska, a log church, overlooking Lynn Canal, on Crow Island—where a causeway was cut four hundred feet through wild tides from the coast where the great black-beaked gull feeds on dead calf whales. In Alaska Eskimo sleighs were decorated with the figure of St Thérèse of Lisieux.

  The Shrine of Our Lady of Peace at Niagra Falls. In 1678 the Franciscan Father Louis Hennepin was the first European to sketch the Falls at Niagra. In gratitude for the beauty of this place Father Hennepin nailed a cross to a tree overlooking the Falls and offered mass to a congregation of Seneca Indians. The site was terminal for the railroad which aided the escape of slaves from the Southern States. During the American Civil War, when General Grant issued an order expelling all Jews from Tennessee, Pope Pius IX dedicated Father Hennepin’s site to Our Lady of Peace. It was consecrated during the Civil War by Archbishop Lynch who travelled by steamer from Toronto.

  In New York Connla saw photographs of the pilgrims; women in Breton hats, astrakhan hats, dresses with pagoda shoulders, standing beside priests in priests’ homburg hats and black Ford Model T cars at St Philomena’s Shrine at Cherokee Village Arkansas, Shrine of the Sacré Coeur in Montreal, Shrine of St John Neumann in Philadelphia, Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Milwaukee Wisconsin, Dickeyville Grotto Wisconsin, Shrine of St Jude Thaddeus in Chicago, Church of the Seven Dolors in Minnesota.

  Connla had driven south from New York in a Barracuda, stopping at Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, down through Georgia with its flag with the Cherokee Rose blowing, through Alabama with its flag with goldenrod, stopping at truck stops where he heard Erskine Hawkins sing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ and Bob Willis and his Texas Cowboys, across to California where he visited the San Carlos Borromeo Mission in Carmel Valley. In Southern California he saw the blue heron and in Northern California the black albatross. Then he drove to St George Byzantine Church on the Northwest Pacific coast.

  Before I left for the coast he gave me a postcard of an ikon of Our Lady of Tenderness he’d bought there and he told me a story about how his great grandfather had travelled from Weymouth once to see Joseph O’Mara, who’d been educated in The Crescent, Limerick, and had sung in St Michael’s Church Choir, in Lohengrin by Wagner—in a Prussian helmet with a spike and a demon-red cloak—sitting in the gods.

  Victoria

  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.