Lark's Eggs

by Desmond Hogan

  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.’

  Pictures

  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:

  And when King James was on the run

  I packed my bags and took to sea

  And around the world I’ll beg my bread

  Go dtiocfaidh mavourneen slán.

  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 peop
le 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’.

  Take back, O Earth, into thy breast,

  The children whom thou wilt not feed.

  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.

  Oh! Who would inhabit

  This bleak world alone?

  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.

  Larks’ Eggs

  There was a hotel on Tay Lane at the back of the town between river and canal, run by Pancake Ward, a little m
an in a spec cap with a Connemara weave who wore hobnail boots, where young, middle-class men hid out when their families were in dudgeon with them and my father had to stay there for a few days because of his relationship with a Protestant with bangs, Miss Husaline.

  His hair still smelling from Amami shampoo after a trip to Dublin with Miss Husaline, in a tie with cedar-green and asparagus-green bars, flannel trousers, navy socks with jay-blue stripes; there was a chamber pot with purple peonies, pink anemones, fern under his bed, and by night a young English travelling player, with hair crescendo-curled to one side, who was staying there, would wander around in a Jaeger dressing gown, studying his part aloud:

  For valour, is not Love a Hercules,

  Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

  Subtle as sphinx, as sweet and musical

  As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair;

  And, when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods

  Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.

  In the mornings there was a view of the river, of Teampollín, an ancient church with surround houses where illegitimate and still-born children were buried. The monks who’d lived there wore iron chastity belts. Now there was an erotic air about the grass, the ruins.

  In the summer women would wander on a monk’s pass—a path leading from one monastery to another—by the Suck, collecting bur-marigolds for smallpox, measles, or to rub nipples during breast feeding, wild thyme for menstrual disorders, chest infections and sore throats, plantain—waybread—for dry coughs, haemorrhoids, beestings.

  It was the year 1934. The calves had been slaughtered in Ireland in February of that year because of surplus and the Land Annuities dispute with England, and in August the Tailteann Games, re-enacting funeral games in honour of Queen Tailte of Ireland, had been held in Dublin. In January of the previous year Hitler had become Führer and in June of that year General von Schleicher, his wife and others were dragged from their beds and slaughtered. The carillon of children’s voices could be heard from the Protestant national school, with its Gothic, diamond-pane windows, with a recitation: