Lark's Eggs

by Desmond Hogan

  Far as the tree does fall, so lyes it ever low.

  A short while before my father stayed there an American in hobo dungarees had stayed in the hotel. He ran out of money and stood in the Square with the spalpeens—roaming men looking for a day’s work. The Lazy Wall was on one side of the Square. The spalpeens gathered on the other. The American was carrying his banjo. When they asked him what he could do he said: ‘All I can do is play the banjo.’

  The English travelling players came to the town every October after the fair when the green in which they pitched their marquee was like a sea, the colours like that of a late autumn blackberry bush penetrated by late afternoon sunshine.

  In the entr’acte of Love’s Labour’s Lost that he attended while staying in the hotel, Phoebe Rabbitte, a Protestant lady, in a hat with a cockatoo feather, offered my father a cigarette from a chased cigarette case. Phoebe Rabbitte’s black Daimler could frequently be seen parked outside the chrome-green Medical Hall, from whose roof snipers used fire with Gatling machine guns during the War of Independence.

  Pancake Ward, in a pearl-white waistcoat, held a party for the players. A man who sold football colours in crêpe paper at matches mimed to ‘Champagne Charlie’, ‘Not for Joseph’, ‘I’ll Send You Some Violets’ on a horn gramophone and one of the players did a Highland dance on a table, lifting his royal tartan kilt to show his bare backside.

  Bran Ahearne, a Jesse boy with a waxed moustache, could be heard telling an English player on a sofa with an antimacassar patterned with mice in friar robes: ‘People on Tay Lane love taking opposite sides, during the Boer War some were Connaught Rangers and went into battle, only a couple coming back. Others were Boers and kissed the Tricolour by firelight on the Transvaal.’

  On the canal side of Tay Lane lived a man with goat-whiskers who used his front garden as a lavatory and grabbed passing Rhode Island chicks as toilet paper.

  Thomasine Solan and her mother, Tay Lane’s courtesans, both in backless dresses, feathered boas and strings of bugle-beads, were present and were seated beside a flowering cactus in an Edward VII and Queen Alexandra coronation mug.

  When she was a girl Thomasine’s mother used accompany the Connaught Rangers to the station in the evenings with a cresset lantern.

  When wings were falling from the sycamore, maple and ash trees outside the Protestant church, my father and Miss Husaline had gone to Dublin to see Douglas Fairbanks in Mark of Zorro at the O’Connell Street Picture House and afterwards they did the foxtrot at Mitchel’s Tea Rooms before getting the train home.

  In Miss Husaline’s house was a soapstone elephant from India on which she put a mouse. Beside it, in an oxidized frame, a photograph of a Protestant orphan, Hyacinth Connmee, with a pudding-bowl haircut, against sea pools with submerged bunches of thrift. Hyacinth Connmee had been sent to a Protestant orphanage in North Connemara. A hotel owner there converted to the Church of Ireland and the Protestant orphans came back from England, from their houses with Margaret Hartness roses outside, and stayed in the hotel.

  Beside the photograph was a postcard, ‘The Lark’s Song’ by Margaret W. Tarrant, Hyacinth had sent from England.

  My father and Miss Husaline had discovered larks’ eggs on the Hill of Down by the Suck, pointed oval, greenish-white, mottled with pale lavender, with markings of rufous.

  Miss Husaline’s father, who wore a cricket shirt winter and summer, had been at a wedding in The Park as a child when there’d been a pyrotechnic display—a golden fuschia tree in blossom, snowdrops in bloom, rose blossoms in violet stars, immense sheafs of wheat downfalling on the East Galway country.

  Miss Husaline always served an aurora borealis of white-iced queen cakes or Boston sponge she made herself on a powder-blue Worcester plate that showed a Ho-Ho bird on a rock.

  The bishop’s palace used to be in the town but it moved to a town where a priest wrote a book which caused a great outcry, and the priest went to live in London where he was photographed in the English papers with women in flapper dresses who wore monocles. There was a doctor in town, who drove an Auto Carrier Aceca Six, who was a champion rugby player and one day, knocked out during a game on the mental hospital grounds, when some Campbeltown Malt Scotch whisky was poured down his throat, he leapt up, shouting: ‘I am a teetotaller!’

  There was rumoured to have been a homosexual orgy in the rugby changing rooms in the mental hospital grounds that winter, men whose genitals smelt of young mushrooms—the blame put on a few bottles of Canada brandy bought by a cross-border team with carp-rugby features who wore cloth caps during the game—and the orgy went down in town lore but all the participants married, except Éanna Geraghty who worked in the London brick-orange bank, rolled his own cigarettes with Wills’ Capstan tobacco, and wore an Inverness cape.

  He had a rendezvous with one of the Northern players, a youth with nougat-coloured hair, sheepdog-fringe, butcher-lie eyes, who wore an old Portoran tie, in Lyon’s Corner House in London just before the War, having sallyslung and coffee with him.

  In his flat opposite the house with an ivy-coloured door where Theobald Wolfe Tone had stayed, where the town makes a parabola and then a glissade towards Galway City, there was a print of Antonio Pollaiuolo’s Battle of Naked Men. He attended dinner dances, however, at the Clonrickarde Arms Hotel with another bank employee, a woman with a bull fringe who on these occasions wore a lamp-black dress with a fishtail train or a rose-blue robe-de-style with a corsage of fritillaries.

  The English players couldn’t come to Ireland during the War so an amateur drama society was formed in the town and their first production was Death’s Jest-Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose mother was from County Longford, about the Duke of Munsterberg in Silesia who was stabbed to death by his court fool. Éanna Geraghty played Isbrand the fool in Arabian slippers.

  Phoebe Rabbitte cycled to performances in cavalry-cord trousers on a high nelly.

  Life’s a single pilgrim

  Fighting, unarmed among a thousand soldiers.

  For his holidays Éanna Geraghty would go to Bachelor’s Walk in Dalkey. There was a swimming hole nearby where, before the War, he met a man from Plymouth whose only sport, because of spinal trouble, was swimming, who would swim out to Sorrento Point. When he was a boy Irish time and English time were different and when he got back to England from Irish visits, he told Éanna, he’d set his watch to Irish time because he loved swimming in the swimming hole in Dalkey so much.

  In the evenings of his holidays, when V-2 rockets were falling on England, Éanna Geraghty would go to a hotel with mouldings of dolphins outside where a man in a grasshopper-green dickie bow, by a grand piano, incessantly played and crooned Jessie Matthews’ ‘Over My Shoulder Goes One Care, Over My Shoulder Goes Two Cares’.

  At the end of the War he got a senior post in Aer Teoranta at Shannon Airport and when that closed in 1949 he went to Paris where he lived in an apartment block smelling of ammonia in the Faubourg outskirts and he’d attend rugby matches when the Irish team was playing and some of the Irish rugby players, young men with forelocks, came to his flat with a picture of Theobald Wolfe Tone’s wife, Martha Witherington, in a sugarloaf cap on the wall and, on a bamboo-motif chair, by a Bauhaus lamp, he’d offer them Disque Bleu cigarettes and tell them how in Corfe Castle, Dorset, during the Middle Ages a football was accepted instead of a marriage shilling, by the local lord, from the most recently married young man, carried ceremoniously to him with a pound of pepper; how rugby was started at Rugby School in 1823 when a pupil, William Webb Ellis, picked up a ball and ran with it and in 1839 the Dowager Queen Adelaide, wife of William IV, visited the school to see the new game; how the Connaught Rangers marched through Alexandria at the beginning of the Dardanelles Campaign in July 1915 in khaki drill, playing ‘Brian Boru’, ‘Killaloe’ and ‘Brian O’Lynn’, led by the tallest of the company, an international rugby player who carried the Jingling Johnny with its red and black horse-hair plumes; of the scrummage in the winter of 1934 whe
n there was yellow jelly algae on fallen logs in the mental hospital grounds, the ram’s head push between other men’s buttocks.

  Queenie, Queenie, who kicked the ball,

  Was he fat or was he small?

  Queenie Waithmandle was a Protestant woman with Blanc de Madame de Courbet roses outside her house.

  She always attended Sunday rugby games, in a trilby hat and a beaver-fur dickie front, or a jacket trimmed with monkey fur, or a pinstripe flannel jacket with boxy shoulders, stilettos with louis-type heels or monk-fronted shoes.

  In the summer she’d go with relatives from Galway to North Connemara to catch up on the legations of ragged robin by the ocean and perhaps be awed by the dream of a nobby—a boat with a red sail.

  When she was in her early fifties she became pregnant and went to England to live with relatives and have her baby. ‘Mind yourself in this town as they say,’ she bid me before getting the Dublin bus, as a man in a black shirt with puff sleeves in a marquee tent, in a performance of The Duchess of Malfi by the travelling players, which Queenie and I attended the same night, advised the audience to be ‘mindful of thy safety’.

  In Webster’s day the Shoemaker’s Guild in Chester would present the Draper’s Guild with the handsel of a football on Shrove Tuesday. One year at a presentation a battle broke out between the two guilds which became known as the Battle of Chester.

  My father was a draper.

  In the eighteenth century in the East of Ireland football players wore white linen shirts.

  A common prize for football winners was Holland linen caps with ribands.

  Shortly after Queenie Waithmandle left, I held my father’s hand at a Sunday rugby game.

  The bulbous vein around the forehead, like a trajectory, the bald head, and yet still—the beauty.

  One of the players that day was a young man with a roach like a duck’s egg who’d been Queenie Waithmandle’s lover.

  When my father was a youth with cherry-auburn hair, field-green eyes, freckles big as birds’ eggs, with a Shakespeare collar, a young British soldier was found shot dead by the River Suck where the otters run, with a picture of Marie Lloyd in his pocket, who once came out on the picket line on behalf of the most lowly of Music Hall workers.

  The British soldiers used play rugby and hack one another—kick one another’s shins—in the mental hospital grounds, in tiger-striped jerseys, the sforzandos from the field heard by the riverbank.

  Fathers and sons, it’s a smell from the genitals, a smell from the earth.

  Sons come from sexuality—homosexual or heterosexual or a mixture. So your sexuality, homosexual or heterosexual, has to be protected. Sometimes there are people who would destroy it. So this means leaving one country for another. Or leaving that country and going back to the other.

  On my return to Ireland, by the River Suck, in the place where the young British soldier was found shot dead, beside a clump of dandelion leaves—dandelion leaves cleansing for the liver and kidneys—I found some larks’ eggs—olive-white, speckled with lavender grey, with markings of umber.

  Acknowledgments

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the following for permission to reproduce:

  ‘Blow-Ball’ and ‘Foils’(The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea [Hamish Hamilton 1979])

  ‘Teddyboys’, ‘The Last Time’, ‘Afternoon’, ‘The Man from Korea’, ‘Embassy’, ‘Jimmy’, ‘The Sojourner’, ‘The Mourning Thief’, ‘Portrait of a Dancer’, ‘Memories of Swinging London’, ‘A Marriage in the Country’, ‘Ties’, ‘Players’, ‘Elysium’, ‘The Vicar’s Wife’, ‘Miles’, ‘Martyrs’, ‘The Airedale’ and ‘Lebanon Lodge’(A Link with the River [Farrar Straus 1989])

  ‘The Hedgehog’(The Honest Ulsterman, ed. Frank Ormsby, 1972)

  ‘Barnacle Geese’(The London Magazine, ed. Sebastian Barker, 2004; and Southword: The Journal of the Munster Literature Centre, ed. Philip McCann, 2004)

  ‘Chintz’ and ‘The Match’(Southword: The Journal of the Munster Literature Centre, ed. Patrick Galvin, 2002)

  ‘The Bon Bon’(The Dubliner, ed. Trevor White, 2005)

  ‘Winter Swimmers’(New Writing II, eds Andrew O’Hagan and Colm Tóibín [Picador, The British Council 2002])

  ‘Caravans’(Southword: The Journal of the Munster Literature Centre, ed. Patrick Cotter, 2003)

  ‘Wedding at Gallog’(Cyphers, eds Leland Bardwell, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Pearse Hutchinson, MacDara Woods, 2004, in which some of the drawings also appeared)

  ‘Rose of Lebanon’(West47 online, Galway Arts Centre, 2003; and American Short Fiction, ed. Rebecca Bengal, 2006)

  ‘Patterns’(West47 online, Galway Arts Centre, 2004; and Cúirt Annual, ed. Mike McCormack, series ed. Maura Kennedy, 2005)

  ‘Victoria’(West47 online, Galway Arts Centre, 2003)

  ‘Pictures’(Element, ‘writing the everyday’, ed. Mari-Aymone Djeribi, Mermaid Turbulence, 2005; and New Dubliners, ed. Oona Frawley[New Island 2005])

  ‘Larks’ Eggs’(The Irish Times, ed. Caroline Walsh, 2005)

  Copyright

  First published 2005 by

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill, Dublin 7, Ireland

  www.lilliputpress.ie

  Text and drawings copyright © Desmond Hogan 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

  A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

  The Lilliput Press receives financial assistance from An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council of Ireland.

  ISBN 978 1 84351 071 0 (print)

  ISBN 9781 8 4351 227 1 (ebook)

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  Set in 11.5pt on 13.5pt Centaur Printed by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall